Hehehehehe.

Despite the fact that I'm in a shitty mood over what's happening in Mumbai, I stumbled across this video, and it's hilarious.

Well, it's hilarious if you've ever thought that Germans were just inherently funny. Or thought Hitler was funny. (Apart from everything completely unfunny about him.)

I FUCKING HATE THESE PEOPLE.

The Bombay terrorists...21 and 22 year olds most likely, taking dozens and dozens of lives. Stupid, non-understanding, and devoid of anything that makes people worthy human beings who live among us. These people are so lacking in mental capacity that they aren't just irritating and burdensome, but they are actively destructive in their stupidity.

As long as people continue believe to in their own utter rightness, they will shower stupidity, suffering, and terror on the rest of us. The Deccan Mujahideen is just the latest manifestation.

Good Reads: Car Horns

Once again, one of those entertaining little articles about some tiny little detail of our world - filled in, fleshed out, and hit with a dash of color. This time, it's about car horns and honking.

Honk if You Know Why You're Honking

The car horn is beeping useless.

By Dave Johns
Updated Tuesday, Nov. 25, 2008, at 7:06 AM ET

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My mom is not much of a honker. You know what I mean when I say that: If a driver in front of her fails to hit the gas when the light turns, she simply waits. Time passes, and the green light glows. Eventually, the driver notices the signal change, or the cars behind begin to lay on their horns. Traffic proceeds. But no thanks to my mom; she's just not much of a honker.

For years I've been telling my mom that she ought to learn to honk a little more. After all, honking is a venerable automotive tradition. Just over a century ago, Henry Ford's first Model T rolled off the production line. Inside, near the driver's side window, was a grapefruit-sized squeeze bulb affixed to a twice-looped brass trumpet. It was a horn—one of only a few basic amenities that came standard. Thus, the car that "put the world on wheels" also gave the world a way to complain about it: a horn for the great honking masses.

And honk we have. No one keeps official tallies, but with nearly 1 billion cars on the roads, there is no doubt that worldwide honking is on the rise. In dense cities in places like India and China, where hordes of new drivers are now navigating ancient tenement districts, horn-honking is so constant that it is a major noise problem. In July, traffic police in Mumbai launched a "No Honking Movement" led by taxi drivers who took an oath not to toot. Last year, Shanghai banned honking downtown, with the prohibition set to expand to the entire city. Dhaka is a riot of honking. Cairo is the unofficial honking capital of the world. Islamabad, Ho Chi Minh City, Lima, Katmandu, Accra, and New York have issues. Even the virtual world is getting into the act.

In theory, the horn is a safety device; it might rightly be called the world's first "collision-avoidance system." But exactly how many collisions it serves to avoid has never been clear. From its earliest days, some observers wondered whether the horn wasn't actually facilitating certain road mishaps by shifting the burden of evasion from the honker to the honkee. A Londoner argued this case in a 1912 letter to the Times: "Drivers have escaped punishment because they hooted loudly just before killing an aged and deaf colonel, or an elderly woman, deaf, and blind of one eye, or capsizing another car and injuring three or four persons … Ordinary care and precaution would have prevented each of such accidents. Hooting, however, is counted a sufficient set-off against the lack of such care and precaution."

By the 1930s, this judgment was gaining converts. First Paris and then London outlawed horn-honking at night. In 1935, New York Mayor Fiorello La Guardia kicked off a nighttime honking ban with a radio address in which he praised the English anti-horn effort: "The results have been so good that there is no demand from any quarter for their return. Automobile accidents, fatalities, and injuries have been reduced to an appreciable extent merely because the campaign against horns there has caused drivers to drive more carefully." He said deaths were down 17 percent and injuries 7 percent since the ban had taken effect. A New York Times article from the same year documented new horn restrictions in Rome, Stockholm, Vienna, and Berlin, under the headline, "Honking Autoist a World Problem; Every Nation Seeks to Curb Him; Horns Viewed as Contributing Cause of Accidents Rather Than Aid to Safety—Campaign On Here to Curb Drivers Who Depend on Blasts Instead of Brakes."

This assessment of the horn—that it is not in fact an instrument of safety but something else entirely—has not been refuted. Most honking research has examined the relationship between horn use and aggression. People honk more when it's hot than when it's cold, more on weekdays than on weekends, more if they are male than if they are female, more at beaters than at Benzes, more if they feel they can do so anonymously (PDF), and more in the city than in the country. My mother is a classic nonhonker: She is female, suburban, patient, and climate-control-oriented. Still, it would be nice to know whether her anti-honk bias poses a risk to society. A spokesman for the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, Jose Ucles, could not point to any studies on safety and the car horn. "It's sort of like brakes," he said. "Everyone's just always thought it was a good idea."

Jeff Muttart, a traffic-accident reconstructionist, has pored over hundreds of surveillance videos of real-life car crashes and near-crashes. In 2005, he concluded that emergency horn use is not associated with decreased accident involvement. He found that drivers never steered and honked at the same time, and usually they didn't honk at all. About half of emergency honks were meant to chastise and came only after the danger was over. The other half were just preludes to a crash. "It really didn't serve any purpose at all. It was just, Hey, by the way, I'm going to hit you."

Also: We stink at honking. A 2001 survey for the U.K. Institute of Traffic Accident Investigators shows that most people take two to three times as long to honk as they do to brake or steer. Professional drivers, like cabbies, are a bit quicker—they practice. (Now that automakers are getting over the whole tiny-horn-buttons craze, honk times may improve.)

Muttart explains this honking deficiency by the fact that many people view the horn as a tool for scolding rather than safety. So when we want to avoid a crash, we don't think to use it. (You don't look for a phone when you need a fire extinguisher.) It's possible honk speeds are better in India, where no one overlooks the horn, and the honking is more existential than aggressive. Of course, the street noise there can be literally deafening, and India's roads have one of the highest death rates in the world.

Perhaps the world just needs more standardized honking education. Here are some tips from AAA on how to use the horn to warn a child cyclist: "Ideally, you should sound the horn when you're about a half-block away … If you blast the horn at close range, you'll startle the cyclist. He may look over his left shoulder in surprise and steer inadvertently into your path. Worse, he may lose control and fall directly in front of you."

In other words: If you see a kid on a bike and he's at least a half-block away (the block being the standard unit of distance used by AAA's honking scientists), then give a toot. But take care: If you screw up, you may crush his tiny body beneath your wheels. This kind of messaging hardly helps: Instead of teaching us good behavior, it makes us afraid of the horn and takes the joy out of honking.

The truth is, many cities have already ruled out all the lighthearted, benign uses of the horn—rolling up to a girlfriend's house with a cool beep-beep, practicing Morse code in the grocery store parking lot … S-O-S … Saaaaave Ouuuur Shiiiiip! Even honking to celebrate Obama can get you a ticket. All that's left now are the aforementioned and ineffective "emergency" hoots. If that's the case, maybe we should eliminate honking altogether.

In Berlin in 1936, the Nazis put yellow spots on the cars of people who honked unnecessarily. The honking ceased. Memphis in the 1950s was called "the quietest city" thanks to a tough horn law. But horn bans are hard to enforce and maintain. In Cairo, drivers outmaneuvered an ordinance by reverting to squeeze horns. Shanghai's ban last year reportedly inspired one driver to install a custom horn that played a recording: "Please mind the car, we are making a turn." New Yorkers honk unflinchingly in the face of the city's many silly "Don't Honk" signs. Hey, man, free speech!

New weapons are joining the War on Honking. The Automobile Horn Audit System could track honk rate and location and transmit data to a state-run central computer. Australia is deploying "noise cameras." And in a nod to the Nazis, some Manhattanites want to fit cabs with lights to identify deviant honkers. Others say, Let's turn up the honk volume inside cars. The boors among us prefer eggs, or Taliban-style hand dismemberment. A more modest proposal, made by psychologist Charles Spence, is to replace the horn with a sharp spike protruding from the steering wheel. The spike would make driving "feel more dangerous," so people would go slower.

Last summer I was in Colombia on vacation, and one day I visited downtown Medellin. I was sporting sunglasses, short pants, and dirty white flip-flops. Near the Botero sculpture garden, after checking my map, I stepped into the road. A spray of honks ensued. Cars and motorbikes buzzed past. I felt as if I'd been Tased. But I was alive: a well-timed honk had saved my life.

Or maybe it hadn't. It felt like a near-miss, but the driver had seen me several seconds earlier, in time to honk me out of the way. Maybe he didn't even need to honk. Maybe he could have braked instead. That's what my mom would have done. Or what if his car had been equipped with the spike?

Horns don't honk at people. People honk at people. Whatever legislative remedies or gadgeteer fixes we can invent, I'm counting on one fact: We won't give up our horns until they're pried from our cold, dead, honking hands.

Dave Johns is a writer and public-radio producer in New York.

The Laffer Curve.

If you believe in the Laffer Curve, this is Art Laffer, the man behind that theory. So wrong. So humiliatingly public.

Tonight and the Rest of My Life.

I just got back from work. It's 2 am.

But I'm not actually unhappy about it. The work is fascinating, I'm not bored, I'm in the belly of the bailout, and I got to ride home in a sweet shiny black car.

(douchebag. yes.)

Notes From a Life Asian.

First: Heroes

I watched all of the first Season of Heroes over the past week or two. While I wouldn't say that the show was totally awful since I watched the entire season in 5 or 6 sittings, I will say that there are a lot of awful things about the show.

1) The first, which my brother pointed out, is that the entire show requires that all of the characters act like complete morons all of the time in order for the plot to move forward.

2) Ali Larter is terrible. Like...really terrible. Like...really really terrible. Like...really really really terrible.

3) Hiro's off-screen "Yata!" after the encounter with Sylar in Isaac's apartment is awesome.

4) The entire revealed plot was a direct rip-off of Watchmen. What the hell?

5) This show could potentially have been awesome. It wasn't, even if it was interesting enough to continue watching.

6) I just started Season 2. Amnesia is a stupid, lazy device.

7) Peter Petrelli's floppy sidepart is stupid.

8) Mohinder Suresh's faux Indian accent is atrocious because he's attempting to be British. Fail.

9) My brother just gave me 5 seasons of The Wire.

Two: Glass Palace
Ok. Moving onto literature. I just finished Amitav Ghosh's The Glass Palace after trudging my way through for 2 months and I remain thoroughly, entirely, and sadly unimpressed to the end. Don't read it. I can suggest 5 books that do exactly what he is trying to do, but that execute it much much better. (I haven't read Sea of Poppies, which apparently is quite good...but I'm not taking the chance.) If you want to read a mystical magical India novel, read every other one except for this one. Ugh. I don't understand some of the good reviews. Spoiler Alert:

Everyone dies in stupid meaningless ways and you couldn't care less that they're dead...except that it's clear that you're supposed to sit there after each death and ponder mortality and life. But in reality you ponder his suck.

Moving onto Part 3: Speakers.
I just spent 100 dollars on computer speakers. Generally I would assume that means I get a couple of pieces of garbage and I'm forced to listen to Ingrid Michaelson with less than perfect clarity. But nope! Logitech Z-2300 speakers are friggin INCREDIBLE. Now it turns out the subwoofer is enormous, but it produces such clean, warm, sharp and resilient lows that it's totally worth the space. In addition, although those two tiny little speakers don't look all that impressive...they each have are loaded up with independent tweeters to get those really crisp and clean highs. I imagine that the sound of a handful of pins hitting the floor would sound amazing on these things. Plus, the mids are good. I don't know what mids sound like exactly, but they're good. Heh. In any case, I just wanted to say that if you wanted computer speakers and only want to spend about a hundred bucks...this is the way to go. (Oh, they can also get loud as HELL.)

Part 4: Snack Food.
Don't buy snack food. I just managed to eat an entire bag of japanese rice snacks while watching Heroes S2E1. I was puffy the whole next day.

Identify.

"Docta said I need a backiotomy."

Heh. Love this movie.

Daily News Roundup.

Christianity is a religion of forgiveness. South Carolina is a bastion of religious freedom. My hometown's priest ban's communion for Obama supporters.

"Voting for a pro-abortion politician when a plausible pro-life alternative exists constitutes material cooperation with intrinsic evil, and those Catholics who do so place themselves outside of the full communion of Christ's Church and under the judgment of divine law. Persons in this condition should not receive Holy Communion until and unless they are reconciled to God in the Sacrament of Penance, lest they eat and drink their own condemnation." - The Rev. Jay Scott Newman in a letter distributed Sunday to parishioners at St. Mary's Catholic Church in Greenville, SC. (My home.) (Credit: The Bro)

Newt Gingrich wants to End Adolescence: And it's really a very interesting point that I think warrants some serious thought. Read it. It actually is sorta interesting.

Newt Gingrich: Let's End Adolescence

I's time to declare the end of adolescence. As a social institution, it's been a failure. The proof is all around us: 19% of eighth graders, 36% of tenth graders, and 47% of twelfth graders say they have used illegal drugs, according to a study by the National Institute on Drug Abuse and the University of Michigan. One of every four girls has a sexually transmitted disease, suggests a recent study for the Centers for Disease Control. A methamphetamine epidemic among the young is destroying lives, families, and communities. And American students are learning at a frighteningly slower rate than Chinese and Indian students.

The solution is dramatic and unavoidable: We have to end adolescence as a social experiment. We tried it. It failed. It's time to move on. Returning to an earlier, more successful model of children rapidly assuming the roles and responsibilities of adults would yield enormous benefit to society.

Prior to the 19th century, it's fair to say that adolescence did not exist. Instead, there was virtually universal acceptance that puberty marked the transition from childhood to young adulthood. Whether with the Bar Mitzvah and Bat Mitzvah ceremony of the Jewish faith or confirmation in the Catholic Church or any hundreds of rites of passage in societies around the planet, it was understood you were either a child or a young adult.

In the U.S., this principle of direct transition from the world of childhood play to the world of adult work was clearly established at the time of the Revolutionary War. Benjamin Franklin was an example of this kind of young adulthood. At age 13, Franklin finished school in Boston, was apprenticed to his brother, a printer and publisher, and moved immediately into adulthood.

John Quincy Adams attended Leiden University in Holland at 13 and at 14 was employed as secretary and interpreter by the American Ambassador to Russia. At 16 he was secretary to the U.S. delegation during the negotiations with Britain that ended the Revolution.

Daniel Boone got his first rifle at 12, was an expert hunter at 13, and at 15 made a yearlong trek through the wilderness to begin his career as America's most famous explorer. The list goes on and on.

It is true that life expectancy was shorter in those days and the need to get on with being an adult could be argued. Nevertheless, early adulthood, early responsibility, and early achievement were the norm before the institution of adolescence emerged as a system for delaying adulthood and trapping young people into wasting years of their lives. To regain those benefits, we must develop accelerated learning systems that peg the rate of academic progress to the student's pace and ability to absorb the material, making education more efficient.

Adolescence was invented in the 19th century to enable middle-class families to keep their children out of sweatshops. But it has degenerated into a process of enforced boredom and age segregation that has produced one of the most destructive social arrangements in human history: consigning 13-year-old males to learning from 15-year-old males.

UNDERMINING COMMUNITIES

The costs of this social experiment have been horrendous. For the poor who most need to make money, learn seriously, and accumulate resources, adolescence has helped crush their future. By trapping poor people in bad schools, with no work opportunities and no culture of responsibility, we have left them in poverty, in gangs, in drugs, and in irresponsible sexual activity. As a result, we have ruined several generations of poor people who might have made it if we had provided a different model of being young.

And for too many middle-class and wealthier young Americans, adolescence has been an excuse to delay work, family, and achievement—and thus contribute less to their own well-being and that of their communities.

It's time to change this—to shift to serious work, learning, and responsibility at age 13 instead of age 30. In other words, replace adolescence with young adulthood. But hastening that transition requires integrating learning into life and work. Fortunately, innovations in technology and in financial incentives to learn offer hope.

The Information Age makes it possible for young people to learn much faster than our current failed bureaucracies and obsolete curriculums permit. New systems such as Curriki, founded by Sun Microsystems (JAVA) and now an independent nonprofit, allow a community of teachers and learners to collaborate via the Internet to create quality educational materials for free—giving every American access to learning 24 hours a day.

And experiments such as the one my daughter, Jackie Cushman, is running in Atlanta—where poor children are paid the equivalent of working in a fast-food restaurant to study and do their homework—are examples of a more dynamic future.

In math and science learning, which are among the most important indicators of future prosperity and strength, America lags far behind such emerging powers as China and India. Studying to compete with Asian counterparts in the world market is going to keep U.S. teens busier than anyone ever imagined. This will require year-round learning, with mentors available online, rather than our traditional bureaucratic model of education. But we must go further, toward a dynamic, real-world blueprint for learning.

Indeed, going to school should be a money-making profession if you are good at it and work hard. That would revolutionize our poorest neighborhoods and boost our competitiveness.

The fact is, most young people want to be challenged and given real responsibility. They want to be treated like young men and women, not old children. So consider this simple proposal: High school students who can graduate a year early get the 12th year's cost of schooling as an automatic scholarship to any college or technical school they want to attend. If they graduate two years early, they get two years of scholarships. At no added cost to taxpayers, we would give students an incentive to study as hard as they can and maximize the speed at which they learn.

Once we decide to engage young people in real life, doing real work, earning real money, and thereby acquiring real responsibility, we can transform being young in America. And our nation will become more competitive in the process.

This I Believe. (The Non NPR Version)

Edit: Yes, I wrote this at work on a Word Doc.

I am trying to put together a coherent vision of what I believe. Although it will most likely end up as a list of bullet points, I think I am also going to try and put together some things that are slightly (but not much) more comprehensive, less ranty, and hopefully more systematic and lucid than some of my previous posts or fights with RS in the comments. I understand that you few loyal friends out there probably read the blog because you're bored as hell and/or are looking for an occasion to make Chinese jokes…but I don't know where anywhere else I could think out loud like this, so I'm doing it here. I'd like for you to read it, if only to let me know if these things are coherent, striking a chord, whether they seem biased, and whether or not it's interesting, which I hope it is. (These things are certainly fun to write.)

So today's post is a whopper of an issue, and it could be framed in a variety of ways (none of them entirely accurate):

• Deregulation v. Regulation
• Reaganomics v. Clintonomics
• Milton Friedman v. John Maynard Keynes
• Pure Free Market Capitalism v. Slightly-Less-than-Pure Free Market Capitalism
  

So here's a little introduction that I'm going to quickly pound through (that's what she said) off the top of my head, just in case the context of the argument isn't the type of thing you generally give a shit about.

So...by the late 70s, we were embroiled with an existential struggle with Communism around the globe, witnessing devastating effects to societies and economies around the world as totalitarian dictatorships seized the means of production and tried to implement state-run-state-controlled economies. America grappled with stagflation, financial crises, oil crises, and the like. Conservatism had also molded itself into a formidable intellectual movement with respectable principles and people who were clearly neither stupid nor cynical: they were serious and very smart. (I note here that a wonderful article entitled "The Perils of Populist Chic" from the WSJ discusses the current state of that line of conservatives.) Economists like Milton Friedman from the Chicago School made powerful economic arguments about the power of free markets and the burden of government interference. Then ascendancy: Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan were elected in 79 and 80.

Reagan believed that government and regulation were the problem. If you reduced taxes, people would have more money and the economy would grow faster. If you cut down on regulation and bureaucracy, then businesses have less obstacles to flourish and be productive. Get the inefficient and bureaucratic government out of the way of American business, and America would prosper. As a corollary, this is good for everyone because as the rich get richer and richer, the wealth would "trickle down" to the poor. Everyone wins. Basically, free up the markets, allow people to keep their money and freely spend it and invest it, and the American economy would grow faster and all people across the spectrum would be better off as market mechanisms self-correct and distribute the wealth.

The overt goal during the Reagan Administration was thus to deregulate and dismantle as much of the federal government as possible, with the exception of defense and the military. The problems of the world and economy would all be eliminated by eliminating government regulation and lowering taxes. Freedom from the government was the solution. Just to make this point clear, no matter what the subtleties of the philosophy may have been, it became little more than unabashed hostility to the federal government. Notably, this was the explicit governing philosophy of the Bush Administration and continues to be a major force in the debate over the financial crisis ("No Bailouts!"). This philosophy also continues to dominate the conservative movement. Introduction over, this is where my discussion begins.

I would like to start by invoking current events, sort of. One of the weakest invectives from the last election cycle is the invocation of Obama as a Socialist. It didn't stick. The Baby-Boomer-Cold-War-Vietnam-Fear-Mongering failed across the board this year. The generational torch has passed and half of them can put their stupid 1960’s battles in a pipe and smoke it, while the other half can lament and declare war on it. Let me point out that a 3% increase in income taxes for the top 1% of the country is definitely NOT the dividing line between freedom and socialism. Please stop.

More broadly, the ideological battle between capitalism and socialism is no longer relevant. Market capitalism has prevailed. There is no longer a meaningful or useful debate about whether market forces and the creative forces of economic freedom are far superior in creating value and allocating resources efficiently than centrally-planned economies. They are. By fostering market mechanisms, namely preserving profit motive and private decision-making for capital allocation, economies have expanded globally, lifting millions out of poverty in the past 20 years. Even redistributive societies recognize that freer markets are necessary to generate enough wealth growth for tax and redistribution.

But despite their ascendancy and efficacy, the limitations and preconditions of free markets cannot be ignored. Economic models presuppose perfect information – the real world does not provide perfect information. Well-functioning economies require the rule of law: contract laws, property laws, and an independent judiciary to enforce the laws. Market actors do not properly price in negative or positive externalities, resulting in problems like excessive environmental degradation and too little investment in non-industrial pure sciences. Market failures are abound in economic models, ranging from monopoly pricing to poverty traps. The development of human capital does not provide adequate returns to properly educate a society. Infrastructure like roads, railroads, airports, power, water, and communication require public spending and investment, and serve as necessary preconditions to economic growth. In short, well-functioning markets require a well-functioning government: The freedom of free markets cannot be falsely conflated with the pure libertarian freedom espoused by believers in deregulation.

We have spent far too much energy battling this false dichotomy between deregulation and regulation. Instead we should be focusing on how to regulate. Enforceable contracts are good regulation. An independent judiciary is good regulation. Consolidated oversight of financial institutions is good regulation. Capital adequacy standards for banks is good regulation. Telling banks who to lend to is bad regulation. Bailing out zombie industries without a policy goal is bad regulation. Allowing economic power to compound by allowing it to control political power is bad regulation. Property rights are good and necessary regulation.

The false dichotomy of regulation and deregulation has left the arena of legitimate ideas and is now the province of wealthy cynics and the sippers of their Kool-Aid. I can never respect it any more than I respect “intelligent design” (which is actually quite similar because they both begin with "Poof!" and end with “Perfection!”) I can fully engage in discussion about the size of the federal government. We can disagree about the prudence of certain entitlement programs. I can get on board with the idea of decentralizing power to preserve local freedom, e.g., federalism. I can also have an intelligent discussion about the dangerously fragmented financial regulatory system of the U.S., and how the manner of regulation the various agencies practice is misguided and detrimental. We can talk about whether environmental regulators should remain hands off, or set strict guidelines on emission levels, or use judicially enforceable standards, or be implemented by complex science-based regulatory agencies. But for God’s Sakes, can we stop this dogmatic nonsense that the mere existence of regulation and government is the problem?

Moving on to the financial side...

An exceptional op-ed piece entitled "Human frailty caused this crisis" in the Financial Times by Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein further this critique of classical free market theory by pointing out that the classical neoliberal economic model is non-behavioral, in short that it has no role for human nature. Anyone who begins the study of economics immediately stumbles upon the assumption that all people act rationally, wrestles with it uneasily, and then is promptly told to ignore the assumption because it is required for modeling. This non-behavioral strain of economic thinking is also the underlying premise of deregulatory conservatives: If people didn't act the way they did in the economic models, the outcomes wouldn't be as good as the models predict.

The op-ed points out two "human frailties" that render the rational economic actor assumption useless: limited rationality and limited self-control. The first piece, limited rationality, is obvious to anyone who happens to be human: we are limited in our perceptions and capacity to be totally rational. Choosing to brush past this basic fact, ideologues often claim that sophisticated investors will correct the system by making optimal decisions. Even conceding that this is true for simple financial instruments like a single mortgage, it is provably false for modern financial instruments, like synthetic collateralised derivatives many degrees divorced from the mortgages. No one understands these financial instruments. No one can price them. The computer models used to create them turned out to be dead wrong. Greenspan himself, the patriarch of current free market philosophy, admits that the most sophisticated investors in the world did not understand the instruments the markets created.

Question: "Do you feel that your ideology pushed you to make decisions that you wish you had not made?"

Greenspan: "Yes, I've found a flaw. I don't know how significant or permanent it is. But I've been very distressed by that fact. . . . This modern risk-management paradigm held sway for decades…The whole intellectual edifice, however, collapsed in the summer of last year."

The second piece, limited self-control, is also obvious to anyone who happens to be human. We smoke cigarettes, we eat cake, we drink too much, and we desire too much. Sure, greed is an impulse for productivity and hard work, but greed is also the impulse for dropping a month's paycheck in a casino. None of that is rational, and most of it is simply the inability to resist temptation and exert perfect self-control. Temptation and limited self-control lead to irrational investment decisions, in our current situation, most notably in the pile-on that took place in mortgage-backed derivatives, despite the fact that no one knew what they were or how they worked. (They were literally designed by astrophysicists and math whizzes on computers.)

The conclusion? Well-functioning markets are incredibly complex and delicate and require intelligent regulation. Financial regulation and monetary policy cannot be based on classical economics unless it accounts for human limitations. Human frailty will forever be the free radical preventing the system from operating the way it does in a textbook, and to ignore the human side of the equation, or in other words, to ignore the protestations of reality, is nothing less than dogma. It is calling for increased the State economic control in 1989 Russia.

What we need to do is to distill the essence of what makes markets work. It's not simply "freedom," and thus the answer is not simply deregulation. Broad economic freedoms are an absolutely necessary component, but determining which economic freedoms are the most central to functioning markets is the key. I don't think a shifting band of marginal tax rates are a determinative factor (e.g., the US and Germany). On the other hand, I believe that moral hazard and central planning could very well destroy markets. I don't think a reasonable minimum wage will stunt economic growth. On the other hand, I do think excessive labor regulations enforced by a bureaucrat in D.C. can hinder growth. Meaningful and intelligent debate should be furiously taking place over the prudence of mark-to-market accounting v. historical cost accounting, not whether accounting regulations should exist at all. Some types of decisions should be made privately, and some can validly be made publicly. We need to distill the essence of effective free markets, and focus our energy in developing ideas and methods to nurture the right impulses and control the wrong ones.

Unlike Communism, we don't want government making production decisions. But we do want government engaging in broader policy like punishing fraud and creating mechanisms for detection, like disclosure and accounting. And we can do this. There are hundreds of systems around the world from London's light regulation of finance coupled with universal health care to France's heavy regulation of finance coupled with a heavily redistributive system to China's system of government directed market capitalism to North Korea's moronic jackassery. There are hundreds of tax and revenue systems: VATS, sales taxes, income taxes, dual taxes, resource taxes, estate taxes, and tariffs. We have tools with various degrees of coercion and subtlety, and we have the ability to design appropriate institutions.

The broad and sweeping hostility to regulation and government is a relic of the past. Move on. There are harder and far more relevant questions to consider. I'm shuttering Reaganomics away with Stalinomics and Maonomics and moving on.

Note on Libertarianism:
So I do want to note that this does not mean that I don't respect libertarian beliefs, which I believe are different. Conservatives speak of liberty primarily (though not completely) as a means to an end: increased growth and higher standard of living. This is the claim I find specious. Libertarianism values individual liberty as both the means and end. To be free is to be free to succeed as well as to fail. If that is the case, you are forced to acknowledge and fully accept the potentially devastating consequences a libertarian system would produce with respect to issues like poverty and inequality, and the subsequent social fall out. And that is totally respectable, because a moral philosophy predicated on individual liberty is very appealing and justifiable, I get it. If liberty itself is worth more than all of the potential consequences of its free exercise, then I can totally be at peace with your values. I just am making the point that you cannot argue that the negative consequences won't happen because the markets will correct themselves and somehow spit out positive social outcomes. It's a new twist on an old cliché: freedom is not free, so stop pretending that it is.

That's all. That must have sucked to have read all of that.

Melodramatic Post (Suck It.)

"If it were possible for me to get to the United States on my bicycle, I would," - Joseph Ochieng, a 36-year-old carpenter who celebrated in Nairobi's Kibera shantytown, one of Africa's largest slums.

(This post is a little bit much, especially the quotations...but you can suck it. It's rare to feel this excited anymore. I definitely have a variety of concerns about the future, but I'll talk about those later.)

The dialogue that has emerged from the currently election has really re-energized me. I think that I just needed to put one in the Win column, (just one please!) having attained political consciousness during the Bush Era and not knowing anything else except division, bitterness, anger, and a desperate sense of frustration. Instead of tearing out my hair in disbelief over the buying and selling of alienation and division, I love reading stories of Republicans tearing up with pride over the fact that Obama won the election. I love seeing pictures of Kenyans in the streets carrying an Obama poster. I love that people stayed up all around the world to watch our election returns, and cheer and hug ferociously over a foreign politician's victory. I think that no matter where you stand on specific issues of policy, this election is the earning and exemplification of American Exceptionalism – this is the moment where we can be proud that our ideals and our choices are one in the same, and that we have the intelligence and the moral compass to attempt to right our wrongs. Democracy works: When governments, politicians, and policies fail, there must be some accountability. I like that if even for a moment, we are the good guys again. That we are the Shining City on the Hill, and that we will forever work to improve ourselves because our greatness lies in our efforts for progress, not in our DNA. Just as there is no inherently superior race, there are no inherently superior nations.

America will now have a president with half-brothers in Kenya, old schoolmates in Indonesia and a view of the world that seems to be based on respect rather than confrontation.

That matters. Under George Bush America’s international standing has sunk to awful lows. This week Americans voted in record smashing numbers for many reasons, but one of them was an abhorrence of how their shining city’s reputation has been tarnished. Their country will now be easier for its friends to like and harder for its foes to hate. . . .

Like most politicians, Mr Obama will surely fail more than he succeeds. But he is a main of great dignity, superior talents, and high ideals. In choosing him, America has shown once again its unrivalled capacity to renew itself, and to surprise. - The Economist

The last 8 years have truly left me feeling utterly exhausted and sad. Good ideas were discarded for dogma. Science was discarded for religion. The Old Ideas of the 60s dominated the New Ideas. Hatred replaced commonality. Intelligence and education became liabilities, while instincts and dogmas became law. Freedom in every sense except the (wealthy) economic was restrained. And for that matter, increasing the marginal tax rate by three percent on the very wealthiest Americans became the dividing line between Socialism and True Patriotism. Language and ideas were mangled and distorted so that the Clean Air Act loosened pollution controls, the Healthy Forests Initiative increased logging, and our President preached freedom and justice while torturing and detaining foreign citizens without process or rule of law.

"Today, reality in America has superseded fantasy. ... Americans have struck a deadly blow to racism all over the world. Americans have regained themselves and have regained the American dream. The picture of the U.S. that was disfigured by the Republicans in the past eight years fell from the wall today. The picture of the America we had in our minds has taken its place," - Prominent Saudi columnist Dawood al-Shirian.

I’m also thrilled that we’re in for a renewal of politics with ideas. We will have a president who believes in ideas. Who believes in thinking, and debating, and engages in intellectual battle with rigor. He understands the law. He has read and taught the Constitution. He understands the limits of law at the most abstract levels, and has spent time organizing poor communities at the most concrete. This is not someone who has all of the answers. This is a man who will be fighting, searching, and applying a vast intellect and ability to find real solutions for real problems. I’m not going to like a lot of them, I’m sure, but at least I know they will not be pre-packaged and at worst, at least they won’t be stupid or blind.

No matter our policy differences (and there are some), what offers me the most comfort is that Obama and I live in the same world. We see the same world. The same problems, the same force for good and hope for good, the common bonds of citizenship and humanity, the strength in unity and the disaster of disunity. When he speaks, the world he describes is the world I see and want to see. It’s not completely divorced from all sense of reality, morality, and decency that I see and want to see in the world. It makes sense. We see the world from the same place and we see the same goal for our country and the world. And as easy as that should be, it feels utterly miraculous that it has happened.

Consider this hypothetical. It’s November 2008. A young Pakistani Muslim is watching television and sees that this man—Barack Hussein Obama—is the new face of America. In one simple image, America’s soft power has been ratcheted up not a notch, but a logarithm. A brown-skinned man whose father was an African, who grew up in Indonesia and Hawaii, who attended a majority-Muslim school as a boy, is now the alleged enemy. If you wanted the crudest but most effective weapon against the demonization of America that fuels Islamist ideology, Obama’s face gets close. It proves them wrong about what America is in ways no words can. - Andrew Sullivan

(I'm currently trying to work out what I believe in bullet points. Maybe someday I'll post that.)

My Dad on Taiwan's Ex-President.

Remarks on Chen-Shui Bian's arrest:

"It is about time to prosecute this shameless, low life animal."

heh.

Katie Couric Interview.

Because of the possibility that McCain could have won on November 4, I would not watch the Katie Couric interview because I knew that I simply lacked to strength to continue if I watched that interview AND McCain won.

I finally watched it. OMG. OMG OMG!


And if you can watch that and even consider voting for John McCain, I think we need to have a serious discussion. One that most likely begins with "really?" and ends with "really?"



This pretty much sums it up if you don't want to watch the long version.

Hrm.

I definitely made it onto 3 or 4 people's video cameras last night during my Obamania...and now that I'm looking on YouTube, it's entirely likely that I appear in one of these things...looking very very foolish.

Anyway, here's other people's videos from my neighborhood taken last night...(much better than my camera phone shots)







Totally wild and totally awesome.

The Day.

My outfit for the night.


Exceptionalism Earned.


Union Square, New York



Kudos and praise to John McCain for his classy and gentlemanly concession speech. I continue to think that McCain is simply a good man pre- and post-campaign.

On H's Request...

I'm currently watching the Cowboys-Giants game, and I've decided that I totally hate Burger King commercials. Particularly this Simon and Garfunkely one about some mushroom and swiss burger. I hate them. Consider that a sufficient introduction to a virtual tour of my apartment (which is about 85-90% set up).

Edit: Found the video. I hate this shit. Not funny, not interesting, not anything except stupid advertising people not understanding anything.


When you walk into my apartment and glance right, you see my, uh, room. (It's not a family room, because that suggests the existence of other rooms like living rooms, or ) this is what you would see. Um, if you didn't have any peripheral vision whatsoever. You can't tell from this, but there's room for a small desk behind the black couch...and I'm selling this enormous Ikea coffeetable because it's taking up WAY too much space. (should I "decorate" the brick wall or let it remain?)
Here's the reverse view of that room (you can see Perambula hangin on the left. Oh yeah):So from that perspective, if you turned to the left instead, this is what you would see: the bathroom door on the right, the kitchen (not seen off to the right), and then my bedroom. So imagine you just walked straight until you walked past that little pots and pans rack on the left, and then turned to the right. This is what you would see. (Notice the very dangerous collection of magnet supported knives above the sink. And the Wok, you fucking racist.)
Quick break: I just saw another commercial for a KEANU REEVES MOVIE!!!! I have heard that "The Day the Earth Stood Still" was being remade and have also seen random movie posters, but I NEVER EVER thought that Keanu Reeves might be involved. Turns out that I have yet another reason to keep breathing. Here's to hoping it is even half as good as Point Break.
Ok, and we're back. If you were to swivel back to the left, you would look from the kitchen into my bedroom, and see this loveliness. If you can't see any details of the room or the bed...yep...you know exactly who to ask.

Take two steps forward and swivel back and forth...and this is one end of my bedroom with a bookshelf full of cheap VCDs from India...

Ta da! That's all. And all this in the heart of the East Village. Peace bitches.

A Confession.

It is well-known amongst those who have spoken to me for more than 10 minutes that I have very...hmm... particular tastes. Most notably, anyone who has known me in the period from 1998 through 2004 would have been subjected to my violent fanhood of Björk. (The 9 posters remain in my hands but have been reluctantly muzzled into a cardboard cylinder.) Anyone who has paid closer attention has also noticed that my tastes in movies also followed strange patterns encompassing a wide mix of romantic comedies, the movie Angus, and sitcoms.

In short, despite the fact that I do enjoy many works of music and art that are "genuinely" good, I also have a taste for things that tend to be more guilty pleasure-ish and/or less masculine. And I've never really been very embarassed by it.

But now I've been very regularly following and listening to one artist who I have not really discussed openly because it actually seems to cross the acceptability boundary so far that I manage to feel a little weird about it. Her name is Ingrid Michaelson, and she's basically a lone sorta-hippie chick whose rise to fame began with an Old Navy advertisement, and culminated with inclusion into several Grey's Anatomy episodes. I actually got her album when M. sent me a DVD with like 50 folders of her music, and she happened to be one of them.

I think what makes this musical obsession of mine so embarassing is a combination of factors. First, her music has been featured on Grey's Anatomy, One Tree Hill, The Real World, and The House Bunny (I am partially redeemed by the fact that I have seen NONE of these shows.) Second, she looks like this.(Yumm...look at that burger.) Third, and most dangerously and why I love her music the most...is that she is just a girl singing her heart out. She's not wry and she doesn't have a hip sense of irony or detachment. She just sings love songs. Or life songs. Or heartbreak songs. And her lyrics can tend towards the embarassing in print, but in her songs they can break your heart. Her melodies don't veer into experimentation and tend to stay in the major scales. She knows exactly what she's doing, and her songs are simple: almost entirely bullshit free (musically at least). She's the best of chick-folk-pop-rock. And yes, she has a very very pop sensibility.

The reason I thought to comment on her music, as opposed to any others, is that I just saw her in concert two nights in a row. First, I saw her first show of her tour in Staten Island on Thursday (a place I am never going back to), and then immediately went to Boston and saw her again on Friday, where I finally folded and bought a T-shirt with a skull and crossbones with pink hearts for eyes. And because her live performances were sublime, spine-tingling, hilarious, charming, gorgeously performed, and among the most pleasurable concerts I've ever attended in my life...I figured I'd go ahead and confess my fanhood.

In any case...if you are someone who has been pretty much on board with me for all of my embarassing music and movie and book choices...and love them for the same reasons I do...then I suggest you give her a looky-look. If you don't, and generally spend a large part of our conversations asking how my vagine is feeling, and making comments like "stop being such a woman" and/or "you have terrible taste" then, uh...move along.

P.S. I start work tomorrow.

"Main Street Meltdown"

The word "Economy" carved in ice in the Financial District is NOT an impressive or interesting work of art.

Ok, I'

The Financial Crisis - Part 755: Chain Reactions

I feel increasingly like a doomsayer these days. This is not to believe that I think we're doomed. I don't. I think we'll be fine in the long run. People just seem to think that my concerns and fears are overblown. Granted. But I'll say that things look legitimately bad, and despite my penchant for hyperbole, all of the things I fear are well within the realm of possibility and are a distinct path that we could travel down -- even if actuality decides to go another way.

The greatest fears I have about the financial crisis don't involve the banks, analysts, or Wall Street, the "economy," or even the fate of the U.S. From what "experts" have been saying, this recession may hurt pretty badly, but it's not going to last more than two or three years tops. It's probably not a Depression and it's definitely not the end of the world. It's just a steel toe to the balls: vomit, stomachache, and pissing blood.

I'm really afraid of the consequences of the spreading global crisis, specifically the destabilizing effects the crisis could have on the developing world and on the current strains of unrest and instability that were already skating on a razor's edge. If the connection between economic woes and political destabilzation aren't totally clear to you, consider how Germany emerged from the Great Depression. Or, in other words, here's the chain:

Credit markets freeze (we are here) --> Businesses cannot access credit and slow/fail --> Microbreweries fold --> People become frightened by the lack of quality beer and the economic outlook --> People stop spending and push their money into low risk investments like treasuries --> As investment and spending shrink, so does the economy = Global economic recession --> Recession means there's less demand for cheesecake --> Less jobs --> Social unrest --> Political destabilization --> The Office gets cancelled --> Pandemonium

Or this:

Back to emerging markets: One example that warrants some attention is China. As a starting point, the Chinese financial system is a little more insulated than most other financial systems. China has generally rejected the American model for how to run a financial system, they have $2 trillion in currency reserves, and their banks don't appear to hold the same volume of toxic assets. Nevertheless, they cannot escape the economic impact of our crisis, specifically the fact that their entire economic growth model is export-oriented...and...uh, no one's buying anymore (let alone buying arsenic-based teething rings, plutonium headphones, and turpentine toothpaste.) But long story short -- China's stability is entirely premised upon their social contract: As long as we the CCP keep increasing wealth and filling your pockets, You the people will not require freedom or democracy. What happens if the recession is deep and long enough (the way yo mama likes it) to disrupt that growth? I mean, in some respects, China's growth was built on the back of American credit. We borrowed lots and lots of money and bought a bunch of Chinese shit, and the Chinese took the money and grew at incredible rates. Currently the credit markets are frozen and it's clear that excessive debt is our biggest problem -- now what?

And the list goes on. As demand shrinks and oil prices fall, what happens to the oil exporting countries who depend on oil revenues ? What happens to Russia's currently autocratic stability when oil no longer oozes rivers of cash across Moscow? What happens to Hugo Chavez when his Latin Communism is no longer possibly through the generosity of Hummer owners? Iran's budget is 80% funded by oil revenues, what's next? (Actually, my hope is that these three irritating governments take an enormous bitchslap and are forced to stop operating under the curse of oil.) What happens to Saudi Arabia if the House of Saud no longer has the cash to placate the Wahhabis? What happens when radical Islam is finally reinforced by sustained economic discontent (caused, incidentally, by Americans)? Realistically, of course, China and India will continue to drive demand for oil...but the price drop should still have serious effects.

And it's not just the developing countries, what about Europe? Paris's 2005 riots were substantially about high levels of unemployment among the disaffected African and Middle Eastern youth. What happens when unemployment spikes across the board? The UK was even more debt ridden than the US. Since about a week ago, Iceland's economy has basically imploded -- it doesn't exist anymore. Its banking system was like 8 times GDP, and now it doesn't even exist anymore - it was seized by the government and is now desperately seeking funds for a bailout. Iceland is on the verge of default, which will have a definite impact on the quality of life for Bjork for years to come. In short, Iceland will be Argentina. And, since fantastic news doesn't travel alone, it appears that similar rumblings are taking place in Hungary, Ukraine, the Balkans, Romania, Turkey, and Pakistan (oh dear god). Although I'm getting a little out of my depth at this point, it even seems like the whole Euro and EU experiment are facing extraordinary stresses and are conceivably at risk. (I can't argue too in-depth about this one, but I think you can just try and imagine handing this bailout under a complicated version of the Articles of Confederation.) Europe is an experiment in globalism and multiculturalism to much greater extent than the US, or at least with a mix of far more volatile populations. What happens when a good economy can no longer placate the populations?

Yes, I'm totally seeing the worst case, and I hope that none of this stuff comes to pass. But it looks like even if the most calamitous moment of financial crisis has passed, we are far from done. Hedge funds are beginning to unravel under the pressure of investors pulling out funds, and that appears to be the next sector to be hit. It just doesn't seem like the unwinding is complete yet...which means that the recession that has set in is not getting any better anytime soon. So yes, I suppose I am a hyperbolic doomsayer...but I know enough to know a little fear. That's all. (This financial ranting may end once I get lulled back into a TV coma by my cable box which arrives on Wednesday.)

(h: Are you seeing the effects of the crisis showing up in you or your classmates interviews for jobs? I know that anecdotally there are offers being rescinded and stuff, and that some of my old classmates can't find jobs...but are you seeing it happen down south?)

Lobster Sticks to Magnet

One of you will know this for sure. If you recognize, you win. If you don't, you definitely will wonder why I would post this and question my choice of YouTube posts from here on after.