EclectEcon

Gubmnt At Work

Some of about 20,000 mobile homes and travel trailers owned by the Federal Emergency Management Agency sit at the Hope Municipal Airport near Hope, Ark., Friday, March 2, 2007. A year and a half after Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, FEMA is auctioning off at fire-sale prices thousands of trailers used by storm victims, raising fears among mobile-home dealers that the government will flood the market and depress prices.

(AP Photo/Danny Johnston); story from AP via Yahoo, via Coyote Blog. The non-market interventionist policies and fiscal mismanagement by the Republicans in the U.S. has been very disappointing.

Langostino: Lobster, Crab, or Other?

Langostino is a shell fish, typically harvested off the coast of Chile. But is it lobster? Is it crab? or is it something related to those two? From Wikipedia:

In the United States, the Food and Drug Administration allows "langostino" as an acceptable market name for two species:



* Cervimunida johni, and

* Pleuroncodes monodon



These two species are both less than three inches long, and weigh about 0.4 lbs or less. They are both very different from the animal traditionally referred to as lobster.



Langostinos should not be confused with langoustes (spiny lobsters).



In March 2006, Long John Silver's garnered controversy by offering buttered lobster bites, advertised with the statement "made with real langostino lobster." The controversy remains due to ambiguity on whether the langostino is a lobster or a crab. Even a Los Angeles Superior Court judge made no decisions in April 2006 on the matter when a class-action lawsuit was brought against Rubio's Restaurants Inc. for selling "lobster burrito" and "lobster taco" that were in fact made with langostino.

My friend, BenS highly recommends Seatech Langostino:

From cold, fresh salads to steaming, creamy bisques, the Chilean Langostino Meat is flavorful, versatile and attractive. This product is prepared from the finest langostinos caught in pristine waters off the coast of Chile. Only the best langostino meat is selected and sold under the Seatech label.



... An update on Surf and Turf could be a 2-4 ounce portion of quick-grilled Langostino Meat served with a lemon-garlic drawn butter and a perfectly broiled steak. A variation on a shrimp salad might be Mesclun topped with cooked Langostino Meat and a light honey-mustard dressing. In South America, Langostino Meat is prepared “pil-pil”; a preparation of shellfish quickly sautéed in hot olive oil, fresh minced garlic, and ground cayenne or crushed red-pepper flakes. “Pil-pil” (peel-peel) can be served as a lone entrée accompanied by a tossed green salad and crusty French bread, or as a topper for pasta or rice.

BenS says,

If you ever see it on a menu, order it.

The Economics of Search, Love, and Marriage

Last weekend, I was asked to give a mini-lecture, or sample of what to expect, for prospective students and their parents. I chose to give a talk about the economics of search, love, marriage, and one-night stands. To hear the talk (without the overhead slides/graphs) click here, but I regret to say the battery died before I got to the part about one-night stands.

Count the Errors: the Dangers of Rapid Internet Publishing

I know that sometimes in a rush to get things posted, I do not proofread my postings as carefully as I should for this blog, and I am grateful for readers' corrections, comments, and suggestions that help improve the postings.



But I am not a big-time publisher like, say, The Financial Post. Last Friday, Brian Ferguson sent me this link for a different reason, and I was appalled by the number of typos and grammatical errors in several of its paragraphs [my questions in brackets]:

TORONTO — Frank Stronach has confirmed that the auto-parts giant he founded, Magna International Inc., is participating in the process which could see Chrysler Group separated from its parent, DaimlerChrysler AG, through a sale process, a published report said on Friday.



DaimlerChrysler on Feb. 14 announced that it was exploring all of its options with respect to Chrysler, and the Financial Post first reported Magna was taking a peek at the division the following week. But this is the first time Mr. Stronach himself has confessed that his company has met with DailmerChrysler’s chairman, Dieter Zetsche.



Chrysler is an [sic] crucial part of Magna’s financial well-being — about US$20-billion of its revenue comes from the company. Magna builds Chrysler vehicles at a plant in Graz, Austria and also works on Jeep Wrangles [Wrangler?] at a paint shop it runs [in?] Toledo, Ohio. It also builds minivans, cars and a slough [slew?] of parts that go into Chrysler vehicles built in North America.



“We have huge contracts with Chrysler, we have thousands of employees involved,” Mr. Stronach told a newspaper [which one?] published on Friday. “It is very important that we have a total understanding of what it is all about.”



Chrysler, which posted a loss of US$1.5-billion in 2006, is estimated to be worth about US$5-billion. Magna, which has about US$663-million in net cash sitting on the balance sheet, had US$7.2-billion in shareholder equity at the end of the last quarter.



Mr. Stronach is known to have a distaste for debt, and said it is too early to say whether Magna will try to takeover [take over?] all of Chrysler, according to the report.



“At this time, on [in?] order to know where everything stands, we naturally have to talk [take?] a look at the facts and the data,” Mr. Stronach told the newspaper. “Where it will go, nobody can predict. Our predicament will be we do not want to compete with our customers.”

I presume this was an early draft that somehow found its way to the internet and has since been edited.

Trust and Palestine

It sure seems difficult to know what to believe about Hamas' views on Israel; one day a spokesperson says one thing, but another day someone else says something different. Actually it isn't hard to figure out: no matter what they might say, they want to get rid of Israel.

Hamas, rebuffing criticism by al-Qaida, reaffirmed its commitment to destroying Israel. "We will not betray promises we made to God to continue the path of Jihad and resistance until the liberation of Palestine, all of Palestine," the governing Palestinian Authority faction said in a statement Monday.



The move, which could complicate Palestinian efforts to lift a Western aid embargo on the West Bank and Gaza Strip, came in reaction to a rare criticism of Hamas by al-Qaida's deputy commander Ayman Zawahri. In a statement Sunday, Zawahri denounced Hamas for agreeing to share power with the more moderate Palestinian faction Fatah, calling this capitulation to Israel and the West.



"Zawahri's recent statements were wrong," the Hamas statement said. "Resistance is our strategy. How and when? This depends on the reality at the time and our corresponding view of things."

Threats of Violence Abrogate Academic Freedom.... Again

I am truly appalled that universities let threats of violence intimidate them into canceling speeches by some people (not surprisingly, pro-Palestinian groups threaten violence if pro-Israeli speakers appear). Here is the latest example from Leeds University:

University of Leeds bows to Muslim protests and at the last minute cancels talk by Dr Matthias Kuentzel on ‘Hitler’s Legacy: Islamic Antisemitism in the Middle East’



This morning, the University of Leeds cancelled a talk, scheduled later for today, and a 2-day workshop series on the topic ‘Hitler’s Legacy: Islamic Antisemitism in the Middle East’ by the German scholar Dr Matthias Kuentzel. The series of events has been well publicised for several weeks. ...



The reason the University gives for the cancellation of the talk and seminars by Dr Kuentzel are security concerns. These concerns are founded on emails received by the Office of the Vice Chancellor. The sudden cancellation is a sell-out of academic freedom, especially freedom of speech, at the University of Leeds.

This situation sounds remarkably and disappointingly similar to what happened at Concordia University in Montreal, Canada, four and a half years ago when violent protesters forced the cancelation of a presentation by Benjamin Netanyahu.



This is wrong. Groups should not be able to threaten violence to keep speakers with whom they disagree from speaking. Appeasing such groups only encourages others to do the same thing. Universities (and local authorities) must stand up to these terrorists and imprison them.



Update: Melanie Phillips also doubts the "threat to security" explanation.

Pigouvian Taxes in the Long Run and Short Run

I have written several times that if the gubmnt is concerned about the burning of carbon-based fuels, then it should "tax the snot" out of them [see here, here, and here]. More formally, and along these same lines, Greg Mankiw has unofficially formed what he terms "The Pigou Club", which includes economists like me who recommend taxing things that generate negative externalities.



Alex Tabarrok recently challenged the Pigouvian approach, arguing that taxes will not reduce pollution much, at least not in the short run if the supply curves are highly inelastic. If so, then taxing the product will reduce the demand, sliding it down along a (nearly) vertical supply curve, and the total amount of the activity, in real terms, will not change much, if at all. Here is a graph that illustrates his position:

As you can see, I'm no wizard with drawing programmes, but the idea is clear. The tax on consumers shifts the demand curve downward from D to D', leading to a drop in the equilibrium price. In the very short run (some people refer to these very-short-run supply curves as "market-period" or "instantaneous" supply curves), when the demand drops, it is very difficult and costly to reduce the quantity supplied in response to a drop in the price. In the oil industry, for example, it is costly to stop and shut down or even cut back the refining process overnight. In that sense, and in similar situations, Alex's point is worthy of consideration.



In the longer run, however, as firms have the opportunity to adjust their capacity, their output, and their techniques and procedures, then the quantity supplied will indeed respond to the drop in price. And when that happens, people will engage in less of the offending activity. This makes sense. Long-run marginal cost curves tend to be flatter than short-run marginal cost curves for most firms; and long-run supply curves tend to be much flatter than short-run supply curves for competitive industries.



Notes:

• The point of this posting is to show that Pigouvian taxes can be [not necessarily will be] effective in reducing negative externalities.
• Pigouvian taxes are more likely to be effective in the long run than in the short run.
• Nobody really has any good or reliable idea as to how big the taxes should be.

Nouriel Roubini: "I Told You So"

Nouriel Roubini writes about the sub-prime mortgage market meltdown and, with considerable justification, points out that he was warning about this problem long ago.

On my modest side last August, when I started to forecast a recession in the US in 2007 by Q2 that would be triggered by the housing bust, I also argued that this housing bust would soon also lead to serious risks and distress in the financial system. I pointed out that such stress and vulnerabilities would first be noticed in the subprime segment of the mortgage market as many (but not all of) of the excesses of the last few years in mortgage finance were concentrated in this market. I pointed out that the housing bubble and the credit bubble associated with it reckless lending practices and with regulator being asleep at the wheel while this unregulated gambling was taking place. I argued that the result would be financial distress and bankruptcy for many lenders and a systemic banking crisis similar to - or most likely worse than - the S&L crisis.

Here is what I wrote on this topic last August. And a year before that, I linked to a statement by Ed Leamer that a recession would follow the bursting of the housing bubble sometime this year.



And here was my own dismal forecast from last October.

I can readily imagine US GDP growth rates of less than an annualized rate of 1% a year from now, and I just hope the Fed has enough foresight and control to keep them from turning negative.

Update:Dave Altig has much more, with some illuminating graphs, about the mortgage markets.

Does Soccer Have a Chance of Ever Becoming a Major Sport in North America?

After spending some time in England last summer, and planning to return this summer, I have spent much more time than I ever imagined watching soccer, both live and on television, during the past year or so. I still do not find it all that gripping, which probably stems from my lack of knowledge and understanding about the game. In fact, the most fun I have had watching soccer so far has been in pubs that do not encourage drunken teenagers (see this) and at small stadia in lesser leagues. The hooting, yelling, singing, chanting, and atmosphere are lots of fun, but the downright deadly stupors of some of the younger crowd at some pubs during the World Cup last summer were very off-putting.



If I am remotely representative of the potential North American audience, does soccer have any chance of ever becoming a major sport in North America? Will it ever be as big, by some measure, as MLB or the NFL? [notice I omit the NHL because soccer probably does have a chance of surpassing hockey by some measures; in terms of participation, it already has.].

1. One big plus for soccer is that its games typically last less than two hours, which is great for the television market. This scheduling (with a half hour studio show between each game) allows us (in Canada, anyway) to watch three UK Premiership soccer matches every Saturday in 7 hours, about the time it takes to see two NFL games. Instead of the NFL double-headers, we could easily have soccer/football triple-headers on weekends and double-headers on Tuesday and/or Wednesday evenings. Also, even if soccer/football games begin to take more time (see below) as has happened with both MLB and the NFL, they are unlikely to become much longer than 2 1/4 or 2 1/2 hours, which would still permit the weekend triple-headers with no difficulty [I know, I know: the NFL has Sunday triple-headers now, but they take for-friggin'-ever].
2. At the same time, to make the product more attractive to potential sponsors, soccer will almost surely start guaranteeing that there will be 10-second or 15-second breaks when the ball goes out of bounds or especially when a team is granted a corner kick or free kick near the goal; mark my words, this will happen in FIFA even if soccer never takes off in North America. Purists will hate this, but purists also hated all the commercial time-outs that have become so prevalent in the NFL and that have added to the time baseball games last. Adding time-outs for commercials is, after all, a minor alteration in the game, and doing so would not unduly lengthen the games, so this is a change I can imagine would be comparatively easy.
3. Lots and lots and zillions and tonnes of kids grow up playing soccer/football in North America these days. So there is some interest in the game at the young participatory level. But that interest does not necessarily translate into yuppie, high-income spectator interest [reductio ad absurdum?: kids like lots of things that do not translate into major adult markets].
4. To capture the young adult, high-income, and corporate-account market segment, soccer/football will have to be more exciting for North American spectators. Some possibilities might include:
   • loud music during every break. MLB seems to think this is a good idea, but I hate it; as one MLB executive once told me, "Doc, your demographic isn't really the one we're targeting..."
   • Scantily clad cheerleaders?
   • More body contact; this change in the NBA over the past fifty years seems to have played a role in the growth of interest in the NBA. At the same time, though, it hasn't helped the NHL, which seems to be trying to reduce the amount of contact to some extent. Maybe the marginal revenue product of body contact in team sports is diminishing as the amount of contact increases, becoming negative at some point. [note: Brian Goff thinks there is already too much body contact in soccer.]
   • Scoring. I'm sure I'm revealing my ethnocentric loutish ignorance, but soccer/football is boring when there are so few goals scored. What a drag! We watch for a couple of hours and maybe there's a goal scored. And maybe it's the result of skill, but some/much of the time, it seems to be the result of randomness (in play, in officiating, in wind currents, in hair length [Peter Crouch's big goal last summer in the World Cup], etc.]. But nobody can agree on what to do to increase the scoring.

Brian Goff made some very interesting suggestions here (be sure to see the string of comments, too). Also, see this by Skip Sauer. And here is something Tyler Cowen wrote on the topic several years ago.



Update: Stumbling and Mumbling has more: see this and this.

The Myths and Data of Global Development

Be sure to watch this video (about 20 minutes long and well worth watching!), [h/t to Cafe Hayek].



I would love to see his techniques applied to some measures of

1. the clarity of property rights definition and delineation,
2. the enforcement and enforceability of legal entitlements, and
3. the incidence of red tape in using the market (e.g. Tim Harford's work for the World Bank)

Guns and Crime in Georgia

For most of my adult life, I favoured gun-control legislation. However, reading John Lott's work raised serious questions in my mind about the advisability of gun-control laws.



Recently a friend who once lived in Atlanta sent me this about gun laws near where she lived:

A while back you were talking about gun laws. I cannot remember the name of the town in the north Metro Atlanta area, but my husband came home telling me of going into a bank there.



On the countertop inside the teller's cage was a gun. It seemed to be 'gun day' in the community, and people could wear their fire arms. He said it was a wierd feeling. When he asked about 'gun day' the girl told him

"Shucks, Honey. Everyone in town owns a gun. You have to, by law."

My husband said the bank manager had one in a holster on his hip. It was a day to polish up your gun and show off what you have.



When moving into the community, you must have a gun or two in your home. The side effect of this is there are very few robberies. You have to admit that only a bone head with a death wish would try to rob the bank or any other business. [emphasis added]

Also, I can readily imagine there would be few, if any, thoughts of committing mass killings in that community.



For more from John Lott, see his comment on this earlier posting.

The Tim Hortons Lottery: Roll up the Rim to Win why no reports of counterfeiting?

Tim Hortons (iconic donut and coffee chain in Canada) is once again running its "Roll Up the Rim to Win" contest. You buy a coffee (or other drink), get a paper cup, roll up the rim at the indicated place, and have a one-in-nine chance of winning a prize. The bulk of the prizes are food or beverages, but there are a some big-screen television sets, some Ipods, and 30 cars to be won.



I did a brief Google search and was unable to find any reports that people have tried to counterfeit winning cups or rims to claim prizes. Nor have I been able to find any reports of steps taken by Tim Hortons to detect and prevent counterfeiting. I guess the expected benefits of counterfeiting a winning rim are less than the expected costs, and it surprises me just a bit. Probably the main problem with counterfeiting rims for the valuable prizes is that you have to know what they look like in order to reproduce them, and there are so few winning cups, and the images of the winning rims are not readily available, effectively reducing the risk to Tim Hortons that there will be any counterfeiting.



For a description of an ambitious art project based on the epistomology inherent in the losing cups from the Tim Hortons lottery, see this.

What Is the Natural Unemployment Rate in Canada?

Back in the late 1980s and early 1990s, most of us in Canada used to talk about the natural unemployment rate as being around 7 - 7.5% when the actual unemployment rates were 8% or higher. Economic conditions have changed since then. The social safety net is lower, reducing optimal search times for job-seekers. But how much has the natural unemployment rate fallen? Could it possibly have fallen to under 6.5%? Canada has been experiencing unemployment rates well under 6.5% for quite some time now (see this for an article about the most recent drop back down to 6.1%).

Job gains have registered the hottest start to the year in a quarter century, with more than 103,000 jobs created in the first two months of 2007, according to National Bank Financial.



February's jobless rate, meantime, unexpectedly fell to 6.1 per cent from 6.2 per cent, Statscan said. [emphasis added]

I know that the natural unemployment rate is pretty much a guess about what would result from job search if people's expectations were in line with reality, and it is still clear that people's expectations are not in line with reality, on average. But what is the reality, and what will it be when people's expectations are in line with reality and they adjust their job search accordingly?



Under today's economic conditions, 6.5% sounds about right to me. But I expect Gabriel Mihalache might not buy into this idea very readily.

Fixing Inequality

Low-income people enjoy much more leisure than do high-income people, no matter how you measure it. Steven Landsburg provides an overview of these data and then says that if we want to fix income inequality, we should also want to fix leisure inequality:

[A] certain class of pundits and politicians are quick to see any increase in income inequality as a problem that needs fixing—usually through some form of redistributive taxation. Applying the same philosophy to leisure, you could conclude that something must be done to reverse the trends of the past 40 years—say, by rounding up all those folks with extra time on their hands and putting them to (unpaid) work in the kitchens of their "less fortunate" neighbors. If you think it's OK to redistribute income but repellent to redistribute leisure, you might want to ask yourself what—if anything—is the fundamental difference.

If blogging is work, I have very little leisure time.

Internet Radio - Screamer

Recently, thanks to a recommendation from Jack, I downloaded Screamer Radio. From the website,

There is little reason to listen to commercial FM radio anymore, it is an old medium that provides little choice of music and is saturated with ads. For the last couple of years there has been an alternative, streaming internet radio. An alternative that has been somewhat complicated to use.



Screamer Radio attempts to remedy this problem by bringing most of the required steps into a single, easy to use, freeware program.

I have used the programme for a few days, now, and I really like it. The presets are thorough, offering lots of easy options for listening to music. Also, the programme seems to cut through all the hocus pocus of each site, making it easy to listen to the various stations.

In a Nutshell: Why Libby Will Probably Be Pardoned.... Sometime

from Melanie Phillips, a succinct summary:

Libby, the former aide to the US Vice President Dick Cheney. The details of this affair are as tortuous as they are arcane. The essence of the story was an apparent hunt by the special prosecutor to find the identity of a ‘mole’ who leaked the identity of Valerie Plame, a CIA agent, allegedly to discredit her husband Joseph C Wilson IV who had been dispatched to Niger to check whether Saddam had tried to buy uranium from that country, and who returned to say he had not done so and that the Bush administration had ‘twisted’ the facts in making the case for war against Iraq. ...



But Libby was not source of the ‘leak’. Strangely, the special prosecutor appears to have known from an early stage that the person who disclosed Ms Plame’s name was Richard Armitage, a former State Department official and who, far from doing the bidding of the White House, was no friend of the administration’s policy in Iraq. No action was ever taken against Armitage. Instead, Libby was hung out to dry for perjury. But the lies he appears to have told on oath concerned merely the identity of the person who had told him about Ms Plame. And the person who told the real whopper was none other than Joseph C Wilson IV himself.

Be sure to read Melanie Phillips' entire posting for a scathing criticism of how the Bush administration handled both the Libby affair and its subtantive content.



Update #1: Frank Rich of the NYTimes ($) thinks Libby's pardon is a done deal.

Update #2: Charles Krauthammer thinks Libby's pardon should be a done deal.

Guess Libby's Pardon Date; Win a T-Shirt

From Alex, a contest sponsored by the Washington Post.

Send your entries -- one date only: month, day and year -- to: [email protected]. Ten people closest to the pardon date will receive a coveted In the Loop T-shirt. You must include your name and telephone numbers to be eligible. Deadline is March 14, assuming Bush doesn't act before then.

But read the speculation in that article before you enter.

Why the Rise in Violent Crime?

The NYtimes is reporting this morning that there has been a rise in violent crimes, especially in mid-sized and mid-western cities.

While overall crime has been declining nationwide, police officials have been warning of a rise in murder, robbery and gun assaults since late 2005, particularly in midsize cities and the Midwest. Now, they say, two years of data indicates that the spike is more than an aberration.



... The research forum surveyed 56 cities and sheriffs’ departments — as small as Appleton Wis., about 100 miles northwest of Milwaukee, and as large as Chicago and Houston. Over all, from 2004 to 2006, homicides increased 10 percent and robberies 12 percent.



Aggravated assault, which is usually accompanied by the use of a weapon or by a means likely to produce severe injury or death, according to an F.B.I. Web site, increased at a relatively modest 3 percent, but aggravated assaults with guns rose 10 percent. And some cities saw far higher spikes.

Let's see.... did abortions suddenly become more expensive or more difficult to receive two decades ago? Is that how Steve Levitt would explain the rise? After all, he asserted that abortion was one reason for the decline in violent crime until recently.



Let's see.... did hand guns become less readily accessible in the past few years? Is that how John Lott would explain the rise? Hasn't he argued that when citizens have the right to carry concealed weapons, that will deter criminals from using guns? I have no idea whether this growth in violent crime has been more pronounced in areas that have stronger gun-control laws.



Neither of these possibilities is mentioned in the NYTimes article. In fact, the article seems to imply that violent crime is on the rise because more guns are more readily accessible.

Local police departments blame several factors: the spread of methamphetamine use in some Midwestern and Western cities, gangs, high poverty and a record number of people being released from prison. But the biggest theme, they say, is easy access to guns and a willingness, even an eagerness, to settle disputes with them, particularly among young people.

Other than a series of hand-wringing non-sequiturs, the article offers no explanation.

Knowledge@Wharton

Recently I have browsed the website Knowledge@Wharton; it is quite informative and always current. There are new items about economics and finance appearing at a steady rate, and most of them are both high quality and interesting.



Here is one set that I found particularly intriguing. Just prior to the stock market dip last week, Professor Jeremy Siegel was interviewed by the site. He was quite bullish about the stock market, arguing that market fundamentals were still strong and that the market averages would continue to rise. See "Jeremy Siegel: Stocks Will Continue Their Upward Trend." But he also cautiously hedged,

I think that we are getting some softness in the indicators. Last week, jobless claims, industrial production, even consumer expectations were on the weak side .... We're going to get, in the next couple weeks, some more indicators, to see whether this slow-down is going to be sustained or move forward.

The day after the dip (and before the rebound), Siegel said this:

This had been a market that had been trending up for many months, which means it attracted a lot of what we call trend followers and momentum players. They ride the trend, and they ride the trend until they see it is broken.



Many trend followers use stop-loss orders to automatically sell stocks when prices fall a pre-determined amount. Thus, a relatively small price decline turns into a plunge when more and more sell orders are triggered. What we saw yesterday, worldwide, was a shakeout of the trend followers. Yes, there was some negative economic news, but certainly nothing justifying a trillion-dollar loss in worldwide markets.



China was the best performing emerging market in 2006…. This [kind of plunge] is very common in markets like this that have been enjoying long-term upturns…. I think ultimately the [pullback] is healthy for the market because it shakes off these trend followers and technical traders, and then the market can trade on fundamentals.

Throughout the entire site, there are careful, current items of interest. When on earth will I have time to read them all???? [h/t to Tracy]



Siegel's views provide an interesting counterpoint to this in The Economist:

AMERICA'S ECONOMY betrayed signs of slower growth. Labour costs rose and factory orders hit a six-year low, with orders for big-ticket items falling. Meanwhile, the government reported that productivity gains slowed, with an increase in the final quarter of 2006 of about half of what economists had previously expected.

It will be interesting to read/see/hear what he and others have to say at the Wharton Economic Summit, April 12-13th.



Addendum #1: Here is what I wrote just before the stock market dip.

Addendum #2: Adrian Tschoegl published a paper 19 years ago on stop orders: "The Source and Consequences of Stop Orders: A Conjecture" which is available via jstor.

Cartoons about Appeasement of Iran

Please click on each one to see it in better resolution and to read the text.

Be sure to click on this one to read the fine print!








For these and many more (and more recent) cartoons about Iran and the mideast, see this site.

Colour Television Sets

Last week, I saw a statistic on TVOntario claiming that in Canada there are 98.8 colour television sets per 100 homes.



This number seems low to me. Think of all the motels, hotels, bars, and businesses that have television sets. Think of all the multiple-tv homes (like ours: we have only six now, having given a few away over the past couple of years).



Ms. Eclectic and I both think the correct number would be closer to 125 or so.

Painful Request from a Socionomology Student

A student approached me after class the other day.

I'm taking a sociology course, and I wonder if you could help me with my term paper.

I'm not at all eagre [Brit spelling, :-)] to respond to questions like this from any students, much less those taking courses in socionomology. But then....

My paper is on aging and deviance, and I wondered if I could interview you.

Also, see this student request via Craig Newmark.

Rockets from Gaza:Where Are the MSM on This?

A Palestinian boasts of using the location of a former synogogue as a launching site for rockets into Israel. He proudly admits it.

• Where is the international outrage at these continuing attacks on Israel?
• Why aren't the mainstream media (MSM) all over this?

The ruins of two large synagogues in evacuated Jewish communities of the Gaza Strip have been transformed into military bases used by Palestinian Arab groups to fire rockets at Israeli cities, according to a senior leader of a Gaza militant group....



Speaking to The New York Sun from Gaza, a spokesman for the Popular Resistance Committees, Abu Abir, said the area in which the synagogues once stood is now used to fire rockets at Israel.



"We are proud to turn these lands, especially these parts that were for long time the symbol of occupation and injustice, like the synagogue, into a military base and source of fire against the Zionists and the Zionist entity," Mr. Abir said.

Archives, and the Re-Interpretation of History

Sir Martin Gilbert is a noted historian, having studied and written extensively, primarily about Sir Winston Churchill but also many other 20th-century events and figures. He says he is always interested in how interpretations and analyses change when archives become available. From a recent interview (the link to the full interview is here),

[H]e stressed that archival sources consistently showed major discrepancies between what is really going on in world affairs and the inaccurate way in which events and personalities are perceived at the time.



"As a historian, I'm very cautious about anyone's claiming to know what any government is doing at the present time," he said. "I study archives as soon as they are open - normally 30 years after an event; sometimes a bit less. What you see when you do this is that the people you imagined had been strong were weak; the people you thought weak were strong; and things you thought couldn't possibly be taking place were taking place."

That was part of an interview in which he said that Lawrence of Arabia was a strong Zionist.



. .



If you can, take the time to read the entire interview; it is very informative.



notes: Sir Martin Gilbert has been visiting The University of Western Ontario off-and-on this academic year. [h/t to Pooh for the link to the full interview].

Chief Louie: Our Ancestors Worked for a Living. So should You.

Clarence Louie is chief and CEO of the Osoyoos Band in British Columbia. He thinks people should accept responsibility for their lives. Here are some excerpts from a column by Roy MacGregor of the Trono Globe & Mail, about a talk Chief Louie gave last fall:

“Blaming government? That time is over.”



“The biggest employer,” he says, “shouldn't be the band office.”



“If your life sucks, it's because you suck.”



“Quit your sniffling.”



“Join the real world — go to school or get a job.”



“Get off of welfare. Get off your butt.”



Chief Louie is tough. He is as proud of the fact that his band fires its own people as well as hires them.



He also says the time has come to “get over it.” No more whining about 100-year-old failed experiments. No foolishly looking to the Queen to protect rights.



He prides himself on being “a stay-home chief who looks after the potholes in his own backyard” and wastes no time “running around fighting 100-year-old battles.

Betting Pools and Expected Values:Our Picks for The Brier

Last night at our curling club, Ms. Eclectic and I entered the pool to predict who would win the 2007 Tim Hortons Brier. It is a pretty simple pool: everybody puts in $2 and the name of the team they think will win the tournament, and the pot is divided up between all those who correctly picked the winner.



Ms. Eclectic thinks it will be a toss-up between Glenn Howard (Ontario) and Kevin Martin (Alberta). Deep in my heart, though, I predict Glenn Howard will win.



Who did we pick in the club pool? Not Glenn Howard; and our choices were reasonable because of how the pool works.



Given that we curl in Ontario, and (as a result) given that we expect most of our fellow club members would pick Howard to win the Brier, we realized that if we also picked Howard, and Howard won, then the size of the prize (split among everyone who picked Howard to win) would be pretty small.



So, even though I think there's a somewhat higher chance Howard will win, I picked Brad Gushue (NF/L) to win in the pool, and Ms. Eclectic very reasonably picked Kevin Martin.



Algebraically, for each bettor, E(W) = p(S/N), where

• E(W) is each bettor's probablistic, expected dollar winnings,
  
  
• p represents that bettor's subjectives guess as to the probability that his/her selection will win the Brier;
  
  
• S is the size of the pot that is to be divided between all those who correctly pick the winner; and
  
  
• N is the number of people each bettor thinks will have selected the same winner s/he did.

For Howard, p might be high, but N is expected to be high, too, offsetting the high value of p. For Martin and Gushue, we expect that N will be much lower so that if we do pick the winner, we will win more money.



Note: this strategy assumes risk neutrality on our part. It also assumes that nobody else (or not many others) in the club have the same betting strategy.

Radical Muslim Terrorists Against the Rest of the World

[The recent] bombings in Thailand remind us that this is not a struggle between Islamism and the West. It's a struggle between Islamism and everybody. Thailand, India, Russia, China--all these countries face terrorism from radical Muslims. This is evidence that it is not U.S. foreign policy or Western imperialism that is at the root of Islamism. Certainly, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and Guantanamo Bay help deliver recruits to the Islamist cause. But Islamism as an ideology goes far beyond grievances with George W. Bush. [emphasis added]

That's from Jordan Smith, writing at The Western Standard. The apologist-appeasers and critics of the West need to keep this point in mind.

Getting CurlTV and MLB Full Screen on a HDTV

Techno-babble from a techno-ignorant sports fan:



Ms. Eclectic and I have full internet subscriptions to both CurlTV and to the Major League Baseball Premium broadband telecasts. In part, so we could view the events on a larger screen than my laptop's 13" screen, we bought a 32" Samsung HDTV a couple of months ago. We hooked it up to the "monitor-out" connection from the laptop and saw..... no action. We could get the screen from the computer, but where there was supposed to be action, the screen was just black.



After many more hours than most of you would need, here is the solution we found.

1. The problem lies with something in Windows Media Player. Open WMP.
2. Click on Tools.
3. Click on Options.
4. Click on Performance.
5. Near the bottom of that screen, adjust the accelerator slide. For our tv, we just had to slide it back to the medium position.

It works well for both CurlTV and MLB Premium.

Lost Your Virginity? Consider "Secondary Virginity"

Given that most virginity pledgers lie about pretty much every aspect of their sexual history—and that many abstinence programs ply pledgers with “false, misleading, or distorted information”—it’s no surprise that the entire abstinence movement has now formally adopted dishonesty as its touchstone. Say hello to secondary virginity — virtual virginity for those committed Christians who just couldn’t wait...

From Disinterested Party.

The Visits of the Magi

[No, this is not a Christmas story about the three wise men.]



A friend from near here went out west to visit a relative, but was going to drop in and surprise them.



Meanwhile, the relative was paying a surprise visit to other relatives back here in Ontario.



Sounds like O. Henry's famous tale, The Gift of the Magi.



Another reason to agree with the old Holiday Inn ad campaign,

The best surprise is no surprises.