We Should Live - Ben Bateman

So sad:

An Italian woman artist who was hitch-hiking to the Middle East dressed as a bride to promote world peace has been found murdered in Turkey.

The naked body of Giuseppina Pasqualino di Marineo, 33, known as Pippa Bacca, was found in bushes near the northern city of Gebze on Friday.

She had said she wanted to show that she could put her trust in the kindness of local people.

I guess that secular utopian religions have their martyrs, too.  This story reminds me of the Children’s Crusades.  This new victim even followed a similar route.

It’s nearly impossible to predict which technology will most shape our lives in the future, and even more difficult to predict how it will change them.  Here’s one of my top contenders:

Microsoft is developing Big Brother-style software capable of remotely monitoring a worker’s productivity, physical wellbeing and competence.

The Times has seen a patent application filed by the company for a computer system that links workers to their computers via wireless sensors that measure their metabolism. The system would allow managers to monitor employees’ performance by measuring their heart rate, body temperature, movement, facial expression and blood pressure.

Thus begins the predictable drama that surrounds every new technology.  Alternating groups tell us that it will either solve all our problems or destroy life as we know it.  Right now we’re on the pessimistic side with this particular technology:

The Information Commissioner, civil liberties groups and privacy lawyers strongly criticised the potential of the system for “taking the idea of monitoring people at work to a new level”. Hugh Tomlinson, QC, an expert on data protection law at Matrix Chambers, told The Times: “This system involves intrusion into every single aspect of the lives of the employees. It raises very serious privacy issues.”

I seriously doubt that this technology would accomplish much in most workplaces.  Managers can already snoop on their workers in various ways, such as internet usage or video cameras.  The problem with worker supervision isn’t in the technology, but in the labor required to interpret the results.

This technology is more mature than many people realize.  It has already been used extensively in the armed forces, and this article suggests that some pilots, firefighters, and astronauts are already using them.

And as those uses suggest, the real power of these implanted body-monitoring systems is to instantly communicate when your body is in trouble, whether that trouble involves sleepiness, low oxygen, irregular heartbeat, or just about anything else.  If the technology becomes cheap enough, then the elderly could start signing up in droves.  An abstract fear of Big Brother will quickly lose out to the opportunity to get immediate help with much more real and reasonable fears of stroke, heart attack, etc.

From The Telegraph:

A British man who moved to New Zealand has been told by officials that his wife is too fat to join him.

Richie Trezise, 35, a rugby-playing Welshman, lost weight to gain entry to New Zealand after initially being rejected for being overweight and a potential burden on the health care system.

His wife, Rowan, 33, a photographer, has been battling for months to shed the pounds so they can be reunited and live Down Under but has so far been unable to overcome New Zealand’s weight regulations.

Mr Trezise, who moved to Auckland in September after shedding two inches from his waist on a crash diet, said that if his wife was not allowed to come out by Christmas they would abandon the idea of emigrating.

His employer-backed skills visa was initially rejected by immigration officials when they discovered that his body mass index, or BMI, was 42, making him morbidly obese under New Zealand regulations.

BMI measures a person’s weight in relation to their height. Anything over 25 is regarded as overweight, and 30 or above is obese.

Mr Trezise, a submarine cable specialist and a former soldier, said: “My doctor laughed at me. He said he’d never seen anything more ridiculous in his whole life. He said not every overweight person is unhealthy or unfit.

I’m torn on this story.  On the one hand, it’s wonderful that some countries are willing to enforce their immigration laws.On the other hand, Mr. Trezise’s doctor is correct: BMI is ridiculous as a measure of obesity, health, or just about anything else.  It’s simply weight in kilograms divided by the square of height in meters.  Here’s a simple BMI calculator that’ll handle the metric conversion.

To illustrate the complete silliness of BMI, consider that the average pro football player in the NFL is obese according to the BMI.  They’re not merely overweight; they’re classed as obese.

The BMI also classifies as obese all six of the USA Olympic Team wrestlers in the 120kg class, in freestyle and Greco-Roman.  I’m a pretty big guy myself, as you may have inferred, but I’m sure that any of those six could slam me into unconsciousness without breaking a sweat.  So if anybody out there wants to defend BMI as a rational way to identify the obese, I suggest that they be the ones to go break the bad news to the NFL players and the Olympic wrestling team.

The government of Zimbabwean despot Robert Mugabe paid over a million dollars to a woman who claimed that her magic staff could make diesel fuel spurt from the ground:

When Nomatter Tagarira, a spirit medium, claimed that she could conjure refined diesel out of a rock by striking it with her staff, ministers in Robert Mugabe’s Government believed that they might have found the solution to Zimbabwe’s perennial fuel shortage.

After witnessing her apparently miraculous gift they gave her five billion Zimbabwean dollars in cash (worth £1.7 million at the start of the year but now worth one seven-hundredth of that) in return for the fuel. Ms Tagarira was also given a farm, said to have been seized from its white owner during Mr Mugabe’s lawless land grab, as well as food and services that included a round-the-clock armed guard on the rock in the district of Chinhoyi 60 miles (100km) from Harare, the capital.

More than a year later officials realised they had been duped. Ms Tagarira is now in custody, awaiting trial on charges of fraud or, alternatively, of being “a criminal nuisance”. Details from court papers published this week said that over 15 months, until July this year, Ms Tagarira convinced Cabinet ministers, ruling party heavy-weights and top army and police officers that by striking the rock with her staff she could produce enough fuel to supply the country for 100 years.

These two paragraphs convinced me that the reporter really went to Zimbabwe:

“It’s an outlandish story but the people in government who believed this are the same ones who believe that Mugabe’s official policy of printing money will end inflation,” said an economist, who requested anonymity.

After 27 years of economic misrule, what was once one of Africa’s most prosperous countries is in a nightmare of hyperinflation, famine and infra-structural collapse.

American and European liberals have long fawned over third-world thugs like Mugabe, always hoping that this new round of smashing eggs will somehow make that mythical omelette.

It’s strange that a bunch of thugs being fooled by a simple con job would garner attention, while suffering and destruction on a massive scale in Zimbabwe does not.  I guess that’s human nature.

In case you’ve been worrying that a Guantanamo detainee’s free Koran might have been touched by an infidel’s bare hands, here’s a little history lesson for you, to put things into perspective.

Professor Volokh links to a study that finds no effect from abstinence education.  This sparks a predictable argument in his comments section over sexual morality and public education, with both sides assuming that this study “proves” that abstinence education doesn’t work.  It makes me wish that more people had a basic statistics education.

I’m always confused by a study that loudly announces “no difference” as the result of an experiment, as if that were a meaningful result.  In the experimental design class that I had to take to major in Psychology, I learned that the point of an experiment is to disprove the null hypothesis, which assumes that there is no meaningful difference between the groups.

If you disprove the null hypothesis, then you really have something.  You’ve demonstrated that the differences between the groups are probably due to something more than random noise.  But if you fail to disprove the null hypothesis, then you’ve failed to prove anything.  It’s really, really easy to fail to disprove the null hypothesis: Just run a lousy experiment.  If you have a lousy design or a lousy method, then you’re almost guaranteed to fail to reject the null hypothesis.

I saw this firsthand in that Experimental Design class, because it required us to design and conduct our own experiment.  Well over half the class could not disprove the null hypothesis, and it usually wasn’t because there was no difference between the groups.  It was because they allowed too much random noise to seep into their results.

Suppose that you want to determine whether noise A is different from noise B.  So you line up some subjects and have them listen to the noises.  And none of the subjects can tell a difference.  Does that prove that there’s no difference between A and B?  No!  There are plenty of alternative explanations: 1) Your subjects are deaf.  2) You conducted your experiment outside in a windstorm.  3) You unconsciously pressured your subjects not to notice the difference because that’s the result you wanted.

To summarize, as my Psych prof loved to repeat: Failing to disprove the null hypothesis does not prove the null hypothesis.

My stomach hurts right now. It just decides every few months that it will clamp shut and refuse to pass any more food to my small intestine. The trapped food then sours and rots, producing horrible-smelling gas and lots of cramping. It’s quite painful, but not dangerous.

The proper remedy would be ipecac or mustard in water, to produce vomiting. But I hate to vomit. And besides, I find this pain interesting.

Pain makes us ask whether life is worth living. Each of us has some level of pain at which we will answer in the negative and surrender to death. But pain short of that level usually makes us better appreciate life, which is why I’m postponing tonight’s inevitable crawl to the toilet.

Near-death experiences do this even more effectively, or so I’ve heard. People who are exposed to a high risk of imminent death often emerge with a renewed sense of life and clearer priorities for their remaining time on Earth. The rest get PTSD.

I envy those rare people who know exactly what they want from life. I think that most people know what they don’t want — pain, discomfort, embarrassment, etc. — but spend little time pursuing definite goals. In their jobs, for example, most people try to avoid being fired; few actively seek self-improvement and promotion. They may wish for it, of course, but they rarely do anything about it.

It sounds easy in the abstract to pick some goals, write them down, plan out some sub-goals, look in the mirror and do some self-affirmations — and all the other standard motivational-speaker stuff. The trouble is that you can’t just pick a major goal for your life the way that you can pick which shirt to wear. In fact, I think that you don’t really pick a major goal so much as discover it. The goal has to fit with all the facets of your life; it has to meet your needs without exceeding your abilities. So there’s usually only a handful of good answers, and your job is to find one of them. (more…)

This post explored the lone genius fallacy, where a single highly intelligent person is tempted to believe that he can singlehandedly overcome any intellectual challenge. Today let’s consider a closely related problem: long blind alleys.

Wii Tennis

My son is five and a half, and I recently got him a Wii. This is a new gaming console distinguished by its motion-sensitive wireless controller. Where other game consoles focus on pushing buttons, the Wii’s emphasis is on pointing or swinging the controller, which opens up a whole new range of gaming possibilities. The game that comes with every Wii console is Wii Sports, and the best of the five sports in that game is the tennis. In that game, you play by holding and moving the Wii controller exactly as you would the handle of a real tennis racket.

My son doesn’t yet have enough finger dexterity to mash buttons, but waving the controller around is much more natural. Hence the Wii purchase. But of course he has never played tennis, so it wasn’t obvious to him how one would move the handle of a real tennis racket. So instead, he would wave his controller around wildly and with great boyish vigor, so that his controller was always in motion when the ball came near his player, and he would usually hit it. The game is forgiving enough that a solid majority of these random shots would land inside the other half of the court, so at first he was very pleased–and I was surprised–to see that he could actually play the game.

Frantic random swishing did fine for the first week or two, but I am proud to report that my son wanted to practice and improve. And so I had to tell him The Ugly Truth: He wasn’t going to get any better by randomly swishing his controller with even greater ferocity. While his approach had yielded impressive initial results, it had very little long-term potential. The only way for him to advance further in the game was to back up and learn to play it as its authors intended, with carefully timed single strokes. Only then could he control the angle of his shots, land them in the court reliably, and even eventually learn to control where in the court they would land.

This got me to thinking how common this type of problem is. Let’s call is the long blind alley. Faced with a problem, you take a path that yields good initial results but ultimately has limited growth potential.

School

I loved school. In my younger days I wanted to find some way to stay there forever, safe from the cold, cruel, real world. Now that I’m out, I can look back at it with some perspective. School is obviously very important, and much better than the alternatives for most people. But it has some downsides, too. If you mistake school for the real world, then you get a very skewed impression of the real world. And one component of that skew is the relative scarcity of long blind alleys. (more…)

Chris Rock offers a Public Service Message for the African-American community: How Not to Get Your Ass Kicked by the Police.

Via The Pirate’s Blog

Michael Williams scoffs at the parent in this article who allows her teenage daughter to wear a t-shirt bearing a sexually suggestive statement. As Michael sees it:

As I’m learning with dogs and dominance challenges, if you expect to lead the pack then it’s important to win every single time. Parents who aren’t willing to fight and win every battle probably discover soon thereafter that they aren’t able to lead and control their child. I suppose that this dominance role should diminish as the child gets older and takes control of her own life, but I don’t think that transition should be allowed to complete until the child is self-sufficient.

I disagree. The difference between a child and a dog is that you expect the child to grow up into a man or women. I’ve seen pushover parents ruin their children with too much permissiveness, but I’ve also seen parents destroy their children with too much control.

In the minds of these over-controlling parents, growing up is always something that the child will do out in the future sometime, but never right now. Right now the imperative is always to keep the child on a tight rein. Then these parents are astonished to discover that their heavily controlled 18-year-old has the mind and impulse control of a 12-year-old.

If you want your child to grow up, then she needs to be in the habit of making decisions for herself and experiencing the consequences. If you don’t give her a steadily increasing diet of decisionmaking authority over her own life, then of course she’ll go out of control when she gets full authority dumped on her around 18.

What control-oriented parents get wrong is the assumption that the child is a wild animal constantly on the verge of doing something horribly wrong. That assumption makes itself true. Children naturally tend to agree with their parents. So if the parents believe that the child is basically a wild animal, then the child will probably believe it, too. She will believe, as her parents do, that she is incapable of self-control. And she will act accordingly, prompting the parents to exert even more control, and so on.

It doesn’t have to work that way. The amazing gift that children give their parents is an immense store of credibility. The little tykes will believe whatever you tell them—as long as it’s consistent with their reality. Many, perhaps most, parents destroy this wonderful asset by directly contradicting the child’s daily experience, usually by stating wishes as facts, or by making impossible demands, e.g.:

• “Some day I’ll take you to Disneyland.” And then there’s no trip on the child’s very short time horizon.
• “You better stop that or I’ll come over there and . . .” And the parent drifts back into the TV show.
• “That retarded child is really just like everybody else.” Except for all the obvious ways in which he’s totally different.
• “If you’re just friendly with other children, then they’ll be nice to you.” Even that kid who beats you up after school every day.

And to the teenage girl: “You don’t need to be thinking about boys. Just focus on your schoolwork.” Even though her raging hormones are forcing her to think about boys, sex, babies, or marriage several times an hour—including while she’s asleep.

From a very early age, you have a chance to present your child with your worldview, and the child is naturally inclined to accept that worldview—but only if it makes sense in the child’s world. So the real challenge of parenting is a challenge to the parents’ worldview. You get to put on a sales pitch, as it were, trying to convince the child to see the world as you do. And if your vision is incomplete or incoherent, then how can you blame the child for not adopting it?

The linked article provides a dramatic example. Sure, adults cringe when teenage girls wear slutty shirts. But should we force them to wear demure pants and long sleeves every day?

The reality is that those girls are full of estrogen, and at a very deep level they want to make babies. They know that they shouldn’t, and they generally don’t. But the desire, the pressure, is always there. That is their reality. That is their subjective experience morning, noon, and night. Adults who try to chase away the manifestations of that very natural desire seem to think that they can make it go away. But all they accomplish by denying reality is to make the adults’ worldview less appealing to the teens.

It’s stupid to tell a teenage girl that she can’t try to attract the attention of boys until she’s 18—you might as well try to hold back the tide. And it’s reasonable to discourage her from acting on that interest on the basis of the practical dangers involved. But it’s best to say: “Of course you want to attract boys. And that’s great. So let’s talk about how you can do that while being safe and without coming across as a slut.”

When you leave the adult’s reality and speak from within the child’s reality, then you’re making it possible for her to agree with you and share your worldview. But if you stay in the adult’s reality and insist that your little girl not think those dirty thoughts about boys—well, you might as well try to convince her that grass is purple and the sky is green, because you’re directly contradicting a basic fact of her daily life.

You can cling to the adults’ idealistic notion of what a teen’s life ought to be like, or you can view the teen’s life as it really is and influence it. But you can’t do both.

Some Bin Laden humor, via RightWingSparkle:

Little Melissa comes home from first grade and tells her father that they learned about the history of Valentine’s Day.”

“Since Valentine’s Day is for a Christian saint and we’re Jewish,” she asks, “will God get mad at me for giving someone a valentine?”

Melissa’s father thinks a bit, then says “No, I don’t think God would get mad. Who do you want to give a valentine to?”

“Osama Bin Laden,” she says.

“Why Osama Bin Laden,” her father asks in shock.

“Well,” she says, I thought that if a little American Jewish girl could have enough love to give Osama a valentine, he might start to think that maybe we’re not all bad, and maybe start loving people a little bit. And if other kids saw what I did and sent valentines to Osama, he’d love everyone a lot. And then he’d start going all over the place to tell everyone how much he loved them and how he didn’t hate anyone anymore.”

“Her father’s heart swells and he looks at his daughter with newfound pride. “Melissa, that’s the most wonderful thing I’ve ever heard.”

“I know,” Melissa says, “and once that gets him out in the open, the Marines could blow the @#*@ out of him.”

I’ve spent many a night in hotel rooms the past few months, and hotel desk clerks baffle me. I know that they must not be paid much. But is it too much to expect them to know a few things about the world outside the hotel?

How far is your hotel from the airport? How long does that drive take? Where are the nearby restaurants? How long will it take me to get from your airport to the conference / tourist attraction at this time of day? Is there a drug store nearby, and can you give me directions?

These questions frighten and confuse a solid majority of hotel desk clerks. It’s as if neither they nor their superiors had ever considered that many of their hotel guests might be coming from the aiport. Or the interstate. It’s as if they don’t expect that the hotel’s guests will get hungry.

Contrast this with car-rental companies. They probably don’t pay their front-line workers much more than hotels, but they have the map thing all figured out. Car-rental maps are usually the best way to understand a new area’s major streets and highways. Couldn’t the hotel manager sit down on a slow afternoon and hammer out good answers to fairly obvious questions? Couldn’t he whip open Google and print up some maps showing the locations of likely destinations?

Maybe it’s an incentive problem. Even if a hotel does a great job serving its guests, it’s unlikely that that hotel will enjoy much repeat business from that happy guest. The repeat business will instead go to some other hotel in the chain. So it’s the chains that should require their hotels to have useful information on hand about the local area.

Thinking about this further, hotels don’t have the sort of customer-service orientation that you might find in, say, a restaurant. At many restaurants they are eager to please, but hotel check-in proceeds at a dreamlike pace. “A credit card,” the clerk thinks to himself, “Hmm, what was it that I was supposed to do with credit cards?”

With little likelihood of repeat business, the incentives simply don’t line up for customer service. Instead, the way that you make money at the local level with a hotel is by controlling costs. And that’s where hotels excel.  If you study a hotel room, it’s amazing how efficiently they find and use fixtures and furnishings that look fairly nice while being durable and inexpensive.  The key to making money in the hotel business is probably not having too many rooms torn up.

Maybe a good analogy for the hotel business is with taxicabs.  Your cabbie has little incentive to leave you with a particularly warm and fuzzy impression, because that’s irrelevant to the economics.  Whether you will need another cab depends on factors completely beyond the cab company’s control.  A cab company focused on hiring friendly, pleasant drivers, but no success in that area would increase the overall number of people who use cabs, and it’s unlikely that a cab company could keep costs down.  I bet that in the cab business you make money by keeping costs down, which is why the emphasis is on keeping costs down, such as having the driver own his own cab.  Long-haul truck drivers work much the same way.

So I will struggle to forgive the glassy-eyed hotel clerks I’ve met recently who seem thunderstruck by my question about nearby restaurants.  And I’ll try to stay calm as check-in and check-out proceed at their usual dreamlike pace.  It all comes back to that global rule of economics: People are all pretty much the same, but they act very differently depending on their incentives.

Sorry for the light posting lately. I’ve been traveling like crazy, with one more trip tomorrow. I just bought the tickets for a late September trip, and it reminded me of a profound injustice we Texans suffer under: The Wright Amendment.

Jim Wright was a member of the US House of Representatives for 34 years from Fort Worth, Texas. He rose to prominence as a Democrat, and briefly served as Speaker of the House. He was forced out of office in 1989 over some ethics problems.

But the Wright Amendment is what Jim Wright is most remembered for. It amended the International Air Transportation Act of 1979, which was part of an overall federal deregulation of air travel. This amendment focused on the Dallas/Fort Worth Airport (DFW), which is a behemoth located halfway between those two cities. Within Dallas is a smaller facility, Love Field, which was the area’s main airport before they built DFW. Nearly all the airlines left Love Field when they finished building DFW—all except Southwest.

Those of you outside of Texas may not be familiar with Southwest Airlines. It is an aggressively efficient airline that has grown exponentially since its start in the early seventies. The older airlines view air travel as analogous to a cruise ship, with different classes of seats, assigned seating, and lots of perks available for more money. Southwest runs like a bus line: You sit where you want. All the seats cost the same. Snacks and drinks are simple but free; there’s no upselling. Best of all, they do something amazing with training and incentives. Their crew always seems happy. They seem to enjoy what they’re doing, and that makes everything run efficiently.

Back to the Wright Amendment: When Southwest refused to move to DFW with its high fees, the other airlines pressured Congress to restrict Southwest’s growth. They knew that they couldn’t compete in the marketplace with Southwest, so they went to the politicians.

And they succeeded. The Wright Amendment says that planes flying out of Love Field can only fly to states adjoining Texas: New Mexico, Oklahoma, Arkansas, and Louisiana. And that doesn’t just mean that the plane has to touch down in those states. The ticket must stop there, meaning specifically that you must pick up your checked luggage there. It was once possible to bypass the Wright Amendment by carrying everything onto the plane: You could print out all your boarding passes the night before, fly the first leg, get off the plane, and walk to the next flight as if you had just arrived at the airport. It was a pain to set up, because Southwest is forbidden by law from helping you do it. And it was more expensive than what Southwest would charge you if it could sell the through ticket. But it was still a lot cheaper than flying on any other airline. More fun, too.

But the liquid-explosive terrorists have put a stop to all that. It’s difficult to travel without carrying any liquids, which means that you’re pretty much required to check your bags. And checking your bags means that you can’t evade this silly law and save on airline tickets.

Today all this came into focus for me. I have to travel to Jacksonville Florida in September. Southwest can’t sell me that ticket under the Wright Amendment. But if I were in Houston, then I could to Jacksonville and back for $178, plus taxes and fees. But to fly from Amarillo to Jacksonville, which is only slightly longer, costs a minimum of $305, plus taxes and fees. That stupid amendment just cost me over $127 for an inferior service, all for a dirty backroom deal engineered by Jim Wright.

And it’s not just my money. It’s the whole state. We could all be flying on Southwest and getting better service at lower prices. It’s the populist’s fantasy come true: We’re all paying too much and getting lousy service to prop up some inefficient but politically connected airlines that a free market would promptly put out of business. The populist imagines that this arrangement gives huge profits the government backed businesses.

And if that were so, it might not bother me so much. But the trouble with government control of the economy isn’t so much that it picks winners and losers, but that it generates so much economic waste while doing so. Of the extra $127 that I had to pay American Airlines, I bet that they enjoy less than half of it as profit. The rest is simply destroyed through inefficiency. It doesn’t make anyone happy.

If government-favored businesses could generate huge profits, then they wouldn’t need government favors. The government can prevent weak swimmers from drowning, but it can’t make them strong. No one can make them strong. The only way to improve is to let the weak drown, release those resources back into the economy, and let a new crop of businesses sink or swim.

Or think of it this way: If a major airline declares bankruptcy and stops business, it’s not as if all of its planes suddenly disappear. Those planes go up for auction, and then somebody buys them who hopes to use them more efficiently than their previous owner did. Government intervention mandates that the planes must stay in the hands of those who obviously don’t know how to manage them very well. I wish that they would set the planes free, and give me back my $127.

My friend Bruce asks where wealth comes from in a modern economy:

If money was all gold coins, wealth would come from the mines - they control the total amount of coin in circulation.

If money was all dollar bills, wealth would come from the mint.

But nowadays, its all on paper, or in computers. Where does new wealth come from?

We could calculate ‘available wealth’ by taking the net worth of all people and asset-owning entities. But that seems like a zero-sum game; just money shifting around. Where does the new stuff come from?

First let’s distinguish wealth from currency. There’s nothing inherently valuable about gold or small green pieces of paper. You can’t eat them, and you can’t build houses out of them. Currency only has value because people agree to accept it in exchange for goods and services. It’s just social consensus. People could decide one day to stop accepting paper money in exchange for goods or services—and in many countries at various points in history, that’s exactly what they’ve done. People could even stop accepting gold, if, for example, someone found a way to synthesize it, and thereby destabilize its supply and drive its price down.

The real value is not in the currency, but in the goods and services themselves. A cow has value because you can eat it, or milk it, and meat and milk satisfy the human desire to eat. A brick has value because you can build a house out of it, and people prefer living in houses to living out in the wind and rain. A dry-cleaning service is valuable because it cleans your clothes, and people prefer clean clothes to dirty clothes. That’s where the real economy is. Currency is just a way to help people avoid the inefficiencies of bartering.

So the total wealth in the world at any given time is the total value of its goods and services. If you owned all the money in the world, then you still couldn’t buy more good and services than those in existence. If you could go back in time 3000 years and be the richest man alive, then you would still be much poorer than you are today, because all the goods and services in existence 3000 years ago would make you less happy than a teensy fraction of the goods and services available today. 100% of a tiny economy can be worth much more than a trillionth of a huge economy.

There’s more wealth in the world today because there are more and better goods and services to buy, not because there’s more money to buy them with. So the proper answer to Bruce’s question is: Why are there more and better goods and services available today than there were 3000 years ago? It’s because we’re better organized. Wealth increases when people reorganize the world so that it more efficiently meets human desires.

A blank computer CD isn’t worth much. A CD with some data on it might be very valuable. Where did the value come from? It came from a human mind organizing the atoms on the CD in a way that people find desirable.

A book is just paper and ink, both of which are very cheap today. But the two together become much more valuable when someone arranges the ink on the paper to form words in a sequence that people enjoy reading. The configuring of the ink on the page is the creation of wealth.

And this isn’t limited to intellectual property. Once upon a time there were some trees and rocks in the ground, and most of us wouldn’t have found them very useful. But then somebody cut down the trees and made lumber out of them. And somebody else dug the rocks out of the ground and refined them into steel, sheetrock, tile, copper wire, and other mineral products. Then some other people arranged those processed trees and rocks into a house, which was very valuable because it made people happy. The trees and rocks weren’t valuable in their natural state. Human effort and ingenuity made them valuable. That’s where wealth comes from.

Finally, consider services. Imagine a day-laborer pickup area, with a couple dozen men hanging around, waiting for a job. Unless someone employs them, those men will not generate much human happiness. They’ll just stand there, or create small amounts of their own short-term happiness through chit chat or watching TV. But then suppose that a contractor hires several of them, and starts assigning jobs: Worker #1 is told to nail this lumber together this way. Worker #2 is told to mix this cement according to these specifications and pour it over there, and so on. Worker #3 is told to use some earthmoving equipment in a useful way. Just as with the trees and rocks, the men go from being disorganized and not generating much happiness into a configuration that produces lots of happiness. The reorganization of people creates wealth, just as does the reorganization of rocks, trees, ink on a page, or atoms on a CD.

A friend of mine was frustrated with trying to understand his girlfriend. She would occasionally explode at him, and from his perspective these bouts of anger were impossible to predict or avoid.

I assured him that he was mistaken. I’m something of an expert on the subject, having not only been happily married for 16 years, but also having raised my daughter from toddlerhood to womanhood. Women’s moods aren’t all that difficult to predict; the key is to know which variables to watch. Men tend to pick the wrong variables, usually those associated with some theory about how women should act, rather than how they do act.

The bizarre twentieth-century fetish for ignoring all sex differences muddies our thinking in this area. Anyone with the slightest grasp of evolutionary biology should expect men and women to act very different, as they would expect the sexes of nearly any species to act differently. I have much more to say on that, but I’ll reserve it for a later post.
So for all those confused men out there, I offer my theory of predicting your woman’s mood. Here are the variables to watch:

1. Hunger. When two people start arguing, it’s very, very likely that one of them has low blood sugar. It’s very difficult to argue or stay angry on a full stomach.

2. Affirmation or rejection of feelings. Women get hungry on their own, but this is the most effective way to make a woman angry or happy. When a woman tells you how she feels, then you can offer empathy, or you can tell her that she shouldn’t feel that way for reasons X, Y, and Z. Many men enjoy conversations that amount to verbal battles of wits. Very few women enjoy those.

3. Comfort with surroundings. Messy rooms stress most women, as do unpleasant odors, poor personal grooming, and other signs of disorder and uncleanliness. Women vary on the specific aspects of their surroundings that they find pleasant or stressful. Many focus on clutter, but others prefer hygiene, the appearance of wealth, aesthetics, pets, etc. But nearly every woman will become irritable if the important aspect of her environment is not as she wants it. This is much more important for women with significant men in their lives, as it’s basically the expression of the nesting instinct.

4. Social status with other women. Women compete amongst themselves on a plane that’s largely invisible to men, because their methods are usually very subtle. But a snippy comment from a woman will upset your woman far more than you would expect, because the same comment wouldn’t upset you at all.

5. Sickness and internal discomfort. Your woman is virtually guaranteed once-a-month crankiness. Beyond that, she might not have slept well, she might be falling ill, or her feet might hurt from poorly fitting shoes. If she’s in pain, then she won’t be in a good mood.

6. External stresses. There’s no sex difference on this one: Each woman has her own life, with her own goals and frustrations. Her mood will go up or down as she sees herself accomplishing her goals, or failing to accomplish them. She can also just have a bad day, and affirming her fatigue or frustration is a great way to score points.

7. Perception of danger. Young men have trouble with this. Most men like the idea of danger. That’s why we flock to movies in which the hero is continuously on the verge of being killed. Most of us don’t actively seek out danger, but our response once danger has passed is usually one of exhilaration and accomplishment.

Women see danger very differently. To them, there’s no upside. Danger is simply scary and acutely unpleasant. Many women learn to handle danger and cope effectively in dangerous situations. But very few women enjoy the feeling of being in danger, and most detest it. So a perception of the possibility of imminent harm will often drag down a woman’s mood for hours or even days afterwards. This is a particular problem for young men, whose moods often soar to levels of intensity often associated with violence, even though the mood itself may be elation or friendly horseplay.

8. Personal attractiveness. Nearly every woman wants to look good, because her appearance not only helps her secure a man’s affections, but it also plays a big role in her social status with other women. A woman will be unhappy to the extent that she feels that her hair looks bad, her clothes look bad, she doesn’t have her customary makeup, etc. It doesn’t help much to tell a woman that she looks good without those things, even if it’s true, because women usually try to look good more for each other than for their men. And women tend to judge a woman not on her inherent attractiveness, but on whether she has made the most of what nature gave her.

I thought the video of Zarqawi going boom was endlessly entertaining, but this is even better: It’s in the Koran.  It’s the jihadi worldview set to a fun and bouncy melody.  Click one of the Windows Media or Quicktime versions, so that you can read the words.

Many people use these words nearly interchangeably, but there are differences between them, both legal and historical.

‘Company’ has the same root as ‘companion’. The historical usage broadly refers to people you spend a lot of time with, as in “You’ll be known by the company you keep.” It isn’t common today in that broad sense, but appears regularly in a few narrow senses: Having a guest in your home is called having company. In military usage, a company is a group of associated soldiers.

And in business, a company is a group of people who all work together towards a common goal. The old-fashioned usage was “Bob Jones & Company”, meaning literally “Bob Jones and the people who work with him”. It was parallel to “Bob Jones & Associates”, or “Bob Jones and Sons”. Over time, ‘company’ came to refer to the enterprise itself, rather than the workers and their relationship with an owner or principal. The word had no particular legal meaning in most states until the late 1980s with the rise of the limited liability company, or LLC.

‘Partnership’ has an unclear origin. It may come from ‘parcener’, a French word for a joint heir, or from ‘part tener’ meaning partial holder, or from some other ancient word involving sharing or partitioning. Regardless of its precise origin, in the legal or business context it always referred to a joint owner. If two men are equal partners in a venture, then it means that each of them owns an undivided half of each item of property that the partnership owns. The original partnerships in English law probably involved undivided partial ownership of land. Real estate law was already quite well developed before large-scale overseas commerce was possible, so it was convenient to apply the concepts of real estate joint ownership to joint ownership of the many different types of chattels (i.e. non-land property) that a commercial venture might involve.

This idea of partnerships as joint ownership relationships remained in American law into the twentieth century. Even up to the past few decades there have been serious legal questions about whether a partnership can be considered a legal person that can, for example, sue and be sued in its own name. This was called the aggregate vs entity debate, and in most if not all states it has been decisively answered in favor of entity treatment. But that’s a recent development. The word’s history still involves co-ownership of property.

Corporations were always legal persons. ‘Corporation’ comes from the Latin ‘corpus’, meaning ‘body’. Two hundred years ago or more, a corporation could only be formed by a specific act of the legislature or sovereign. Only in the mid to late nineteenth centuries did some legislatures enact laws that allowed the automatic creation of business corporations. Even today there are certain types of quasi-public corporations, such as water districts of hospital districts in Texas, that can only be formed by a specific act of the Legislature.

Legal personhood and its consequent liability protection were always a major point of forming a corporation. Partnerships worked fine for small ventures and low-risk ventures, but partnership law required each partner to be held liable for all of the partnership’s debts to the extent that they could not be paid out of partnership property. This discourages people from investing in high-risk partnership ventures, as they would be risking not only the money they invested, but also face the possibility of personal liability for partnership debts in the event of a business failure.

Corporations were designed to change all that. If you invested in a corporation, then your losses were limited to your investment, which greatly expanded the number of people who were willing to invest, and therefore the amount of available private capital. All those consequences came from the core idea that the corporation was a separate legal body or person that could borrow money and take risks in its own right, independently of its owners.

I’m sorry if that’s more detail that you wanted; this is the kind of stuff that fills my head these days, and is slowly filling my nearly finished book. Here is a simple guide to using these words consistently with their roots:

• A company can be any group of people who work together, share a common purpose, or simply spend time together.
• ‘Partnership’ is best used when there’s some property that’s jointly owned. In American and English law, this is what you form if you and a friend shake hands and verbally agree to pool your money for a business venture. (And doing that without a written agreement is almost always a terrible idea.)
• A corporation does not exist without some sort of government action. If you didn’t pay the fee, then you don’t have a corporation. That’s also true for limited partnerships and limited liability companies. You can’t just decide to make these on your own; only the government can make them for you, because only the government can create legally recognized imaginary people.

In this post I argued that teenagers having sex with adults isn’t as bad for boys as for girls. But after seeing this, and this, and this, I’m completely prepared to admit that such encounters certainly can be damaging for boys. Horribly damaging.

(Warning: Clicking on the links may cause loss of appetite.)

Thomas Sowell is outraged that the District Attorney in the Duke rape case has postponed trial until the spring of 2007. This indicates that the DA doesn’t have any proof, but doesn’t want the embarrassment of dropping the case. So the plan is wait to drop the case until the public has forgotten about it, which Sowell calls “cooling out the mark.”

What an interesting phrase! Google led me to this 1952 article by social scientist Erving Goffman. He starts with the perspective of professional con artists. In their jargon, “cooling the mark” out refers to techniques designed to prevent the mark, or victim, from calling the police or otherwise making his loss public. The cooler (the con man assigned to this task) can use various approaches: He can emphasize the embarrassment involved, he can emphasize the hopelessness of trying to recover the lost money, he can encourage the mark to see the con as a learning experience, and so forth.

From there, Goffman moves to a much broader view of how people deal with their losses, which Goffman sees as primarily a problem of helping people reconcile their internally held identities with inconsistent facts. He sees the same basic dynamics in handling an angry customer, in rejecting a suitor, or in firing an employee.

I majored in psychology, but somehow never heard of Goffman. He must have been out of favor at the time. But he is one of the best analysts and observers of human nature that I’ve read, and a pretty good writer. It’s a long article, but I recommend it.

Some University of Michigan sociologists studied 1733 men, starting at their high-school graduation in 1957 and following them for up to 35 years. They collected and compared all sorts of data, including comparing the prestige of the colleges that the men attended to their income and job prestige later in life.

The result: When they controlled for scholastic achievement and parents’ income, they found no effect from college prestige. The men at the prestigious schools were more successful, but not because they attended more prestigious schools. They were more successful because they were smarter and had wealthier parents.

HT: Joe’s Dartblog

Is anybody else out there disgusted with the animated toenail fungus ads that seem to be blanketing the internet?  Maybe I’m just unlucky, but I seem to get them daily on hotmail.com and comics.com.  It’s a strangely specific problem to advertise with such a non-specific advertising medium, but mostly it nauseates me.  I hope that the web sites carrying those ads have factored a drop in traffic into the price they’re charging.

True.com, on the other hand, is doing internet advertising exactly right: They advertise on sites frequented by lonely young men, and the ads use attractive, scantily-clad young women.  Sure, the business itself is doubtless a complete scam: Few of the women who have signed up with the service look anything like the models in the ads, and they certainly aren’t sitting around in bikinis, waiting for the lonely guys to call.  But at least the ads are easier on the eyes than infected toenails.

Africa is cracking up, and not just in the usual political sense. The easternmost chunk of it—the Horn of Africa–sits on a separate tectonic plate from the rest, and it’s drifting east. We usually think of tectonic plates as smashing together and buckling upward to create mountains. But these plates are drifting apart, and will eventually create a new ocean. It can be quite dramatic nonetheless. From Spiegel:

Geologist Dereje Ayalew and his colleagues from Addis Ababa University were amazed — and frightened. They had only just stepped out of their helicopter onto the desert plains of central Ethiopia when the ground began to shake under their feet. The pilot shouted for the scientists to get back to the helicopter. And then it happened: the Earth split open. Crevices began racing toward the researchers like a zipper opening up. After a few seconds, the ground stopped moving, and after they had recovered from their shock, Ayalew and his colleagues realized they had just witnessed history. For the first time ever, human beings were able to witness the first stages in the birth of an ocean.