1. Australian currency misspells the word “responsibility.”
2. Kirk Hammett slipped and fell on his wah pedal at a rainy outdoor Metallica concert. 🎸 Apparently he wasn’t seriously hurt. 🤟🏻
Ummm- I slipped on my wet wah pedal.— Kirk Hammett (@KirkHammett) May 8, 2019
It rained so much I felt like I was playing guitar in the shower. #MetInMilan @Metallica pic.twitter.com/BbOamgkKhF
"For anything up to 175 quadrillion Zimbabwean dollars the bank will offer $5 in return. After that $1 will be paid for every 35 quadrillion Zimbabwean dollars. Bills printed before 2009 are slightly more valuable and can be exchanged at a rate of $1 to 250 trillion Zimbabwe dollars."
You might not have expected to see the conservative/libertarian Thomas Sowell supporting that idea. But his argument isn't necessarily inconsistent with his ideology:
Any successful engineer, surgeon, or financier would have to take a big pay cut to serve in Congress. A top student from a top law school can get a starting salary that is more than we pay a Supreme Court justice.
No doubt many, if not most, government officials are already paid more than they are worth. But the whole point of higher pay is to get better people to replace them.
We may say that we want people in Congress, the courts or the White House who have some serious knowledge and experience in the real world, not just glib tricksters who know how to pander for votes. But we don't put our money where our mouth is.
Let's face it. You're not likely to get a good suit of clothes at a flea market. And you're not likely to get the cream of the crop to go into the government when they would have to accept a big drop in income to do so. . . .
There will . . . always be some people who are willing to sacrifice their family's economic security and standard of living, in order to get their hands on the levers of power.
These are precisely the kinds of people whom it is dangerous to have holding the levers of power.
Can we afford to pay members of Congress, the President of the United States, and federal judges the kinds of money that would enable us to tap a far wider pool of far more knowledgeable people with successful real world experience? We can't afford not to. . . .
To get some idea of the cost, ask yourself: How much would it cost to pay every member of Congress, the president, and every federal judge a million dollars a year?
There are 535 members of Congress, so a salary of a million dollars a year would cost $535 million, or just over half a billion dollars. There are 188 federal appellate judges and one President of the United States. That's 189 more people, bringing the total number of people to 724, and the total cost to $724 million, at a time when people in Washington are talking trillions.
That is less than one percent of the annual cost of the Department of Agriculture. Put differently, we could pay all of these 724 officials a million dollars a year each -- for an entire century -- for less than it costs to run the Department of Agriculture for one year.
If we limited how long any given individual could hold office in the government -- preferably one term -- we could have highly knowledgeable people with real world experience in charge of taking care of the nation's business, instead of spending their time doing things to get reelected.
They would be a lot harder for special interests to bribe with campaign contributions, when high officials would face no more campaigns after getting elected. We don't need career politicians. . . .
Is all this a realistic prospect in the world today? Of course not! What is the most realistic prospect today is the status quo today.
But the New Deal was not a realistic prospect three years before Franklin D. Roosevelt took office. It was not a realistic prospect in 1775 that the American colonies would become an independent nation a year later. The whole point of discussing new ideas is to get people thinking about them, so that they might become realistic prospects in the future.
2 stories, both from today:
1. Airline makes passengers pay more money to finish flight.
2. Passengers make airline give them more money to leave plane.
The first story reminds me of an episode of The Office where Michael Scott has started his own paper company, and he realizes that he's only been able to make lots of sales because his prices are so low he won't be able to stay in business much longer. We see Michael calling a customer on the phone, saying:
Hi, Jerry. Michael Scott. Well, this is slightly embarrassing. Um, I'm going to have to ask you to pay me a little bit more money for that delivery we dropped off yesterday. [pause] Yeah, we did. We got the check. But we're just going to need a much, much bigger check.
Tim Harford wrote (in an old Slate article):
If people really were altruistic, there would be much less volunteering.For that last point, Harford credits Steven Lansburg, who elaborates on why the idea of "diversifying" doesn't make sense with charity the way it does in other areas:
It would almost always be more effective to volunteer less, work overtime, and give more. A . . . banker can pay for a lot of soup-kitchen chefs and servers with a couple of hours' worth of his salary, but that wouldn't provide the same feel-good buzz as ladling out stew himself, would it?
In fact, the closer you look at charitable giving, the less charitable it appears to be. A recent experiment by John List, an economist at the University of Chicago, and a team of colleagues, showed that donations are less than magnanimous after all. Using controlled trials to compare different methods of door-to-door fund-raising, professor List's team discovered that it was much more effective to raise funds by selling lottery tickets than it was to raise funds by asking for money. This hardly suggests a world populated by altruists seeking to do the maximum good with their charitable cash. . . .
Even the way we choose to dole out cash betrays our true motives. Someone with $100 to give away and a world full of worthy causes should choose the worthiest and write the check. We don't. Instead, we give $5 for a LiveStrong bracelet, pledge $25 to Save the Children, another $25 to AIDS research, and so on. But $25 is not going to find a cure for AIDS. Either it's the best cause and deserves the entire $100, or it's not and some other cause does. The scattershot approach simply proves that we're more interested in feeling good than doing good.
When it comes to managing your personal portfolio, economists will tell you to diversify. When it comes to handling the rest of your life, we give you exactly the same advice. It's a bad idea to spend all your leisure time playing golf; you'll probably be happier if you occasionally watch movies or go sailing or talk to your children.Tyler Cowen gives another reason to donate to relatively few different charities, though he avoids giving the extreme advice to donate to exactly one, in Discover Your Inner Economist (a great little book which I can't recommend highly enough):
So why is charity different? Here's the reason: An investment in Microsoft can make a serious dent in the problem of adding some high-tech stocks to your portfolio; now it's time to move on to other investment goals. Two hours on the golf course makes a serious dent in the problem of getting some exercise; maybe it's time to see what else in life is worthy of attention. But no matter how much you give to CARE, you will never make a serious dent in the problem of starving children. The problem is just too big; behind every starving child is another equally deserving child.
That is not to say that charity is futile. If you save one starving child, you have done a wonderful thing, regardless of how many starving children remain. It is precisely because charity is so effective that we should think seriously about where to target it, and then stay focused once the target is chosen. . . .
If your charitable contributions are small relative to the size of the charities, and if you care only about the recipients (as opposed to caring, say, about how many accolades you receive), then you will bullet all your contributions on a single charity.
Charities make most of their money off what is called a "house file." The house file consists of donors who have been giving loyally for years. A good house file . . . brings in much more than it costs to maintain. . . .A post on Less Wrong argued:
If a mailing brings in thirty cents for every dollar spent, that mailing probably went relatively well by the standards of the sector. A fifty-cent return per dollar spent is a smashing hit.
Why spend a dollar to get thirty or fifty cents? The answer is simple: the charity is investing in developing its house file. . . .
We now have a new way to make the world a better place. Once we have found some good charities, we should tell them not to rent out our name and address to other mailers. Virtually all charities rent out or swap names and addresses to similar groups; what better way is there to find new donors than to look for people who are already giving to related causes?
"Remove the name" requests save charities thousands of dollars on their mailing costs. (193-194)
Imagine you are setting out on a dangerous expedition through the Arctic on a limited budget. The grizzled old prospector at the general store shakes his head sadly: you can't afford everything you need; you'll just have to purchase the bare essentials and hope you get lucky. But what is essential? Should you buy the warmest parka, if it means you can't afford a sleeping bag? Should you bring an extra week's food, just in case, even if it means going without a rifle? Or can you buy the rifle, leave the food, and hunt for your dinner?Last year, David Sedaris wrote about how he was able to get people to donate extra money to him, beyond just paying for his books, even when he was already a fabulously successful author (via):
And how about the field guide to Arctic flowers? You like flowers, and you'd hate to feel like you're failing to appreciate the harsh yet delicate environment around you. And a digital camera, of course - if you make it back alive, you'll have to put the Arctic expedition pics up on Facebook. . . .
[But] when your life is on the line, things like impressing your friends and buying organic pale in comparison. You have one goal - staying alive - and your only problem is how to distribute your resources to keep your chances as high as possible. These sorts of economics concepts are natural enough when faced with a journey through the freezing tundra.
But they are decidedly not natural when facing a decision about charitable giving. Most donors say they want to "help people". If that's true, they should try to distribute their resources to help people as much as possible. Most people don't. In the "Buy A Brushstroke" campaign, eleven thousand British donors gave a total of £550,000 [about $850,000] to keep the famous painting "Blue Rigi" in a UK museum. If they had given that £550,000 to buy better sanitation systems in African villages instead, the latest statistics suggest it would have saved the lives of about one thousand two hundred people from disease. Each individual $50 donation could have given a year of normal life back to a Third Worlder afflicted with a disabling condition like blindness or limb deformity.
Most of those 11,000 donors genuinely wanted to help people by preserving access to the original canvas of a beautiful painting. And most of those 11,000 donors, if you asked, would say that a thousand people's lives are more important than a beautiful painting, original or no. But these people didn't have the proper mental habits to realize that was the choice before them, and so a beautiful painting remains in a British museum and somewhere in the Third World a thousand people are dead.
A couple of books ago, I put a tip jar on my signing table and I made over $4,000 on my tour. The problem was then I started hating people who didn’t tip me. I didn’t say anything to them, but I would just sit there thinking, “You cheap son of a bitch. I just signed four books and you can’t even give me a dollar?” And why should they? But I just got so involved in it. I had to stop doing it.
I told people it was all for me to spend on candy. They were delighted because it’s funny to give money to someone who doesn’t need it. If there had been a beggar outside the bookstore, at the end of the evening, he might have had 75 cents where as at the end of my best evening in Dallas–[I had] $530 in tips.
. . . everything I get in the mail either says, "Dear John, give us money," "Dear John, thank you for your money," "Dear John, we might give you money," or "Dear John, we're not going to give you money."
An Australian Facebook friend of mine said the other day (quoting this), when he was anticipating the news:
We're going to parity like US$20 is $19.99
Here are the top 25.
The most valuable blog is worth almost a quarter billion dollars.
Notably, all of the top 25 blogs "are private companies, as has been true in all four of the earlier lists. None are owned by larger media companies, corporations, consulting firms, or other businesses which do not have the blog or blog network as their primary operation."
There's a whole body of First Amendment law on "commercial speech." This is a weird grey area: the First Amendment isn't irrelevant, but it doesn't confer the full protections you think of when you hear the phrase "freedom of speech." That's why the law can prohibit false advertising and require companies to say certain things, e.g. to put nutrition labels on food.
But isn't "commercial speech" vs. "noncommercial speech" a false dichotomy? Isn't most speech commercial?
My mom, Ann Althouse, embeds a short video clip of Lorrie Moore (who, as another full disclosure, is a family friend) saying:
It's important to get language that isn't commercially mediated, and increasingly, we don't have that. . . .I agree with all that.
I sometimes think: is reading a book itself a value? . . . It doesn't matter what book, as long as you're reading a book? And I go either way on that. . . . It's not valuable because it's a book. It would be better to spend time watching a good movie. . . .
Most language that we encounter is trying to sell us something. And that's really unfortunate, and it degrades the language, and it degrades encounters with language.
Get full access to this premium program: http://FORA.tv/premiumIf you click on that link, you'll see a list of "PREMIUM EVENTS." To the right, there's an explanation in fine print:
FORA.tv Premium Events offer pay-per-view programming from the world's top conferences, universities, and public forums. Now, you can enjoy many of the benefits of these exclusive gatherings without the costs and hassles of travel, and at a fraction of the ticket price. We offer flexible access plans to suit your interests including annual and monthly subscriptions, and full event and single program passes. . . . We invite you to watch Previews of our premium programming to take in a big idea and sample the panel, presentation, or debate.So, when Lorrie Moore said, "Most language we encounter is trying to sell us something," those words were part of a teaser for a website that's trying to sell us more words (including more of her own words). On that same webpage is a list of titles in gold type (with the color gold signaling, "This is worth spending money on").
"I thought looks mattered more in women," says Dr. Helen. "Apparently, not at work."
Here's a summary of the study to which she's referring:
A London Guildhall University survey of 11,000 33-year-olds found that unattractive men earned 15 percent less than those deemed attractive, while plain women earned 11 percent less than their prettier counterparts. In their report "Beauty, Productivity and Discrimination: Lawyers', Looks and Lucre," Hamermesh and Biddle found that the probability of a male attorney attaining early partnership directly correlates with how handsome he is.That's from this list of "7 Ways to Boost Your Pay." That title by CBS is rather misleading, since some of them aren't things you necessarily have any control over: women can't grow mustaches, and people can't change whether they're right-handed or left-handed.
When it comes to height, every inch counts--in fact, in the workplace, each inch above average may be worth $789 more per year, according to a study in the Journal of Applied Psychology (Vol. 89, No. 3).As with attractiveness, though less surprisingly, height matters more for men than for women:
The findings suggest that someone who is 6 feet tall earns, on average, nearly $166,000 more during a 30-year career than someone who is 5 feet 5 inches--even when controlling for gender, age and weight.
The height-salary link was found by psychologist Timothy A. Judge, PhD, of the University of Florida, and researcher Daniel M. Cable, PhD, of the University of North Carolina. They analyzed data from four American and British longitudinal studies that followed about 8,500 participants from adolescence to adulthood and recorded personal characteristics, salaries and occupations. Judge and Cable also performed a meta-analysis of 45 previous studies on the relationship between height and workplace success.
Judge offers a possible explanation for the height bias: Tall people may have greater self-esteem and social confidence than shorter people. In turn, others may view tall people as more leader-like and authoritative.
"The process of literally 'looking down on others' may cause one to be more confident," Judge says. "Similarly, having others 'looking up to us' may instill in tall people more self-confidence."
As such, the biggest correlation between height and salary appeared in sales and management positions--careers in which customer perception has a major impact on success. If customers believe a tall salesperson is more commanding, for example, they may be more likely to follow the salesperson's wishes, Judge says.
Accordingly, height was most predictive of earnings in jobs that require social interaction, which include sales, management, service and technical careers. The height effect also mattered--though to a lesser degree--in other jobs such as crafts and blue-collar and clerical positions, researchers found.
The study also found that shorter men are slightly more likely to encounter height bias in the workplace than are shorter women. . . .Despite CBS's advice to "Walk taller," you don't have much control over how tall you are. You might be able to affect how tall you appear (which is presumably what matters in this context) by choosing your shoes. If you're under 18, you can eat a nutritious diet and not smoke. But your genes are the main factor.
Since men and women tend to differ in height, researchers controlled for gender by using the average height of 5 feet 9 inches for an American man and 5 feet 3 inches for a woman. They also controlled for age because people tend to lose 1 to 3 inches of their height during a lifetime.
Women will take just about any shortcoming in a man, except in the height department, according to Andrea McGinty, who founded the San Diego-based dating service It's Just Lunch.This was an insightful response to an AskMetafilter question about a 5'8" woman who was dating a shorter man and had misgivings about it. The woman who asked the question said she had "a hard time feeling physically attracted to someone shorter than me, largely because of how awkward I feel standing next to them in public . . . . Mostly I feel like a big hulking lump." The response:
McGinty helped ABCNEWS put together an experiment to test just how willing women are to date shorter men. We brought together several short men and asked them to stand next to taller men. We invited groups of women to look at the men and choose a date.
To see if the women would go for short guys who were successful, ABCNEWS' Lynn Sherr created extraordinary resumes for the shorter men. She told the women that the shorter men included a doctor, a best-selling author, a champion skier, a venture capitalist who'd made millions by the age of 25.
Nothing worked. The women always chose the tall men. Sherr asked whether there'd be anything she could say that would make the shortest of the men, who was 5 feet, irresistible. One of the women replied, "Maybe the only thing you could say is that the other four are murderers." Another backed her up, saying that had the taller men had a criminal record she might have been swayed to choose a shorter man. Another said she'd have considered the shorter men, if the taller men had been described as "child molesters."
This really stood out to me. As a fellow tall woman (I've actually got three inches on you!), I can relate to the self-consciousness about being tall, especially because "feminine" is so often coded as petite, small, and cute. I totally get how being taller than a dude can make you feel unsexy, because there's a [lot] of cultural programming that tells us how wonderful it is to be swept up in the embrace of a big, tall man, to be safe in his arms, blah blah blah. It can feel like a strange inversion of feminine and masculine, almost, to be taller than your honey. . . .
It might also be worth thinking about the fact that you're conflating "being attracted to a dude" and "feeling attractive while I'm with a dude." Those two things aren't the same, and a big part of my personal journey of accepting and lovin' my body was rejecting the idea that sexy was something I performed (that is, I felt sexy when other people looked at me like I was sexy), rather than something I felt.
Everyone seems to be texting "HAITI" to 90999 to donate $10 to the American Red Cross (which my mom connects to Jesus). Everyone, that is, except Mickey Kaus, who makes a point of saying he doesn't trust the Red Cross and is donating to Partners in Health.
I don't share Kaus's anti-Red Cross sentiment, but his remark did get me thinking about where I should donate. Then I realized I had already donated to Doctors Without Borders' aid to Haiti without knowing it, since I opted for a fixed amount of my paycheck to go to that organization. "Our immediate response in the first hours following the disaster in Haiti," says the organization, "was only possible because of private unrestricted donations from around the world received before the earthquake struck." You can donate to them through this link.
Doctors Without Borders (a.k.a. Medicins sans Frontieres) is urgently trying to overcome numerous logistical hurdles to offering help. Even just showing up in Port-au-Prince is a huge challenge for all the organizations trying to do so. Meanwhile, the most useful thing for random Americans to do, as former president George W. Bush said (see embedded video at the end of this post), isn't to try to send blankets or water and hope that they get to the people who need them. The best we can do is to send lots of money to the aid workers who are on the ground in Haiti (or at least trying to get there) and who understand the details of what needs to be done. I can't figure out how Doctors Without Borders can get all the necessary supplies, workers, and inflatable hospitals where they need to be; the best I can do is send them some of my money so that they're better equipped to do this hard work. It's easy to get a warm feeling from imagining you're directly giving people food and water and blankets, but do I know how to prioritize the people who need caesarian sections and amputations? Of course not. As much as some people might scoff at "throwing money at a problem," Bush is correct to point out that that's exactly what we need to do now. (It's what often needs to be done -- not just for Haiti or natural disasters but to deal with all sorts of problems -- since money allows trained personnel to apply their expertise to a distinctive, complex set of challenges.)
Doctors Without Borders also notes that donations to them don't just go to the banner-headline disaster in Haiti but also to humanitarian crises that the Western media doesn't pay as much attention to.
Again, you can donate to Doctors Without Borders here.
My mom links to a news story about a Swiss man who received a fine of $290,000 for speeding. The fine was so high because of his extreme wealth: he supposedly has over $22 million to his name. (He was going 35 miles per hour over the speed limit.)
My mom first defends the fine but then challenges us to think about its implications:
[Y]ou can't punish very effectively with a fine unless you take the individual into account. This guy shouldn't be able to casually buy his way into having the rules not apply to him, which is what it would be if he paid the speeding fine that would burden lesser folk but is nothing to him.No, the principle justifying a variable fine in a speeding case doesn't extend to the prison hypothetical.
Now, let's extend this idea. Take a guy who loves solitude and spending time at home reading. Some other guy has lots of companions and loves going out every night and working and playing outdoors. They commit the same felony. Should they get the same prison term?
Instapundit links to some new data on who pays how much in taxes:
Tax Burden of Top 1% Now Exceeds That of Bottom 95%. “Newly released data from the IRS clearly debunks the conventional Beltway rhetoric that the ‘rich’ are not paying their fair share of taxes. Indeed, the IRS data shows that in 2007—the most recent data available—the top 1 percent of taxpayers paid 40.4 percent of the total income taxes collected by the federal government. This is the highest percentage in modern history. By contrast, the top 1 percent paid 24.8 percent of the income tax burden in 1987, the year following the 1986 tax reform act.”The link goes to the blog of an organization called the Tax Foundation, which claims to be "non-partisan." Let's see their non-partisan analysis:
Some in Washington say the tax system is still not progressive enough. However, the recent IRS data bolsters the findings of an OECD study released last year showing that the U.S.—not France or Sweden—has the most progressive income tax system among OECD nations. We rely more heavily on the top 10 percent of taxpayers than does any nation and our poor people have the lowest tax burden of those in any nation.First of all, Instapundit's heading -- "Tax Burden of Top 1% Now Exceeds That of Bottom 95%" -- is incorrect. The report is only about the federal income tax. There are other federal taxes and state taxes, and many of them are regressive. Instapundit and the Tax Foundation are cherry-picking one particular tax, which they presumably know is far more progressive than others. That's not a valid basis on which to draw any conclusions about America's "tax structure" or any particular group's "tax burden."
We are definitely overdue for some honesty in the debate over the progressivity of the nation's tax burden before lawmakers enact any new taxes to pay for expanded health care.
That question on AskMetafilter yielded 100+ answers.
Samples:
Occam's Razor - the simplest explanation is usually correct.Here are mine:
We want the facts to fit the preconceptions. When they don't, it is easier to ignore the facts than to change the preconceptions.
When I realised that the vast majority of other people were too busy worrying about their own appearance/conversation topic/speaking voice to judge mine, and that random waiters, tellers or passers-by would forget me within a few minutes of seeing me, it was wonderfully liberating.
By the time you have paid enough attention to a work of art to know whether it was a waste of time to take seriously, it is already too late for the answer to be useful.
Any seemingly objective statement of the facts is actually slanted by the speaker's bias.
The fact that a lot of people believe something isn't a sufficient reason for you to believe it.
The fact that you live in the country you live in, or have the parents you have, is arbitrary.
Think about what's so taboo that it isn't said even though it's true; those things are especially worth thinking of for yourself, since you probably won't hear them said out loud.
Someone with a confident demeanor is trying to persuade; their demeanor doesn't prove they're correct.
The chances are slim that a whole social movement has gotten everything right.
Money is fungible. [And so are many other things.]
If the easy solution you thought of has never been successfully tried, there's probably a good reason for that.
Ask yourself why an intelligent person would disagree with you.
Continuing the list from last week's blogging of Bertrand Russell's The Conquest of Happiness (1930):
6. What to spend your money on - "[A]ny man who can obviously afford a car but genuinely prefers travel or a good library will in the end be much more respected than if he behaved exactly like every one else." (108)
7. Why extroverts are better than introverts (?) - "The man ... whose attention is turned within finds nothing worthy of his notice, whereas the man whose attention is turned outward can find within, in those rare moments when he examines his soul, the most varied and interesting assortment of ingredients being dissected and recombined into beautiful or instructive patterns." (126-7)
8. Helping people - "If you feed an infant who is already capable of feeding himself, you are putting love of power before the child's welfare, although it seems to you that you are only being kind in saving him trouble. If you make him too vividly aware of dangers, you are probably actuated by a desire to keep him dependent upon you." (157)
1. Dad and his daughter (about 6 years old):
Daughter: What's my maiden name?
Dad: You don't have a maiden name -- you're not married. No, your maiden name is the name you have now. And don't ever change it! Don't take a guy's name. Don't let him trick you into it.
Student (to other student): He told me I need to "invest" my money.
Man (calling out): Invest it in what?
Student: I have no idea!
Man: The best way to invest your money is put it in a coffee can and leave it there. I have a friend who had $7,000 and put it in a coffee container and left it there for 2 years -- best investment he ever made.
Of course, I'm not going to say you shouldn't do what you love! That's why I put "do what you love" in scare quotes — as in, the familiar career advice to "do what you love."
Maybe a lucky few can truly live up to that advice. But Penelope Trunk says that the more realistic (i.e. better) career goals would be...
The New York Times recently published a human-interest story about an Austin family — Aimee and Jeff Harris and their two kids — who are professing to get rid of most of their possessions.
I'm not sure how a family in Texas gets a long article in a New York newspaper devoted to their lifestyle change. But whatever. Let's see what exactly they're doing.
They say on their blog:
We have no need of a 12 piece, breakable set of dishes and will replace them with enamel coated metal dishes, cups, bowls for traveling and camping with. I have no need of high heeled shoes and purses and will replace them with some sturdy Goodwill boots and a back pack. Things of that nature.I certainly can't fault them for giving away so much to charity. But for a family who's pitching themselves as abandoning possessions, they sure sound like they have a lot of shopping to do.
Jason's "money isn't important" attitude was just as limiting as [his girlfriend] Nedra's search for happiness in tangible possessions. Because he refused to participate in the standard cultural job-and-money game, his choices in life were severely limited. He found that he spent more time in making do and making trades than he would have in working at a steady job.I of course wish the Harrises the best — particularly the 1- and 5-year-old children, who, like all children, aren't consenting to be confined by their parents' values. But who's to say that the ultra-austere focus on minimizing possessions won't just lead this family to become all the more fixated on possessions? After all, you need some things to survive, and this project seems to emphasize and even glorify those relatively few (but surely still numerous) possessions.
