It's been a while. I've moved on.

This is the New Shit:

• Tech-econ-geek stuff (not regularly updated): Technagora
• A Hodgepodge of Aimless Observations: Ice Cream Headache
  
• Snippets of Wisdom and Random Crap Exceeding 140 Characters: Tumblr

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Congrats to the Formerly Gunless in DC!

The Supreme Court issued it's ruling on the DC v. Heller case this morning, affirming that the right to own weapons is a constitutional individual right. Well, that about wraps it up for the "militia" argument.

In celebration, I dedicate the following song to all the policy analysts, legal scholars, and political journalists who followed this case. Guys, you don't need to look for a girl with a gun anymore.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nlmmui8iq50

(Sorry, youtube says that "embedding is disabled by request.")


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The Funniest Thing I Saw Today

I'm doing research for my job today, and I just happen to stumble upon this little gem:


Nod to http://publiceconomics.blogspot.com/



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Screw V-Day, I'm having my own good time.

I'm posting something that makes ME happy! And I could care less how many times you've already seen this.





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Growing Up With 2 Mommies

Science scores another point over religion this week, as the Brits have figured out how to make a child out of three parents. Upon hearing the news, I could only think one thing: OMG how friggin' awesome is that?!

Briefly, the procedure involved implanting the nucleus of a fertilized zygote into a donor egg cell. The extra DNA from the 2nd mother can theoretically "overwrite" any inherited "bad" DNA. This technology has the potential to eliminate many genetic birth defects.

Sure, the news will doubtless have some bible-thumping, Huckabee-voting Americans proclaiming that Armageddon is at hand, but for the rest of the non-zealous world, technology has just made yet another giant leap towards improving our lives.
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Vote YES on Global Warming!

These guys might be onto something.


Via Reason.tv


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Social Security's "Trust Fund"

In the 1994 film "Dumb and Dumber," the film's protagonists, Harry and Lloyd (Jeff Daniels and Jim Carrrey), embark on a journey to return a mysterious locked Samsonite to a mysterious red-haired woman. Eventually, the lock on the suitcase breaks, and our heroes discover its contents: CA$H money. When they finally return the suitcase to its original owner (not the woman), the cash has all been spent. "That's as good as money, sir," says Lloyd, as the owner watches several little scraps of paper float to the floor. "Those are IOUs."

Think about this the next time you hear about Social Security's "Trust Fund."

Special thanks to "Icek" for the analogy.

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Cloverfield

J.J. Abrams' much-anticipated film Cloverfield arrived in theaters yesterday. Though I haven't seen any of his work beyond the 1st season of Lost, I appreciate a good viral marketing campaign, so I thought I'd check it out.

SPOILERS: Highlight text or hit CTRL+A to view.

Rather than discuss the entire movie, I'll just mention a few points:

1. Monster Design.
I thought the monster was frightening. I expected to see some kind of Godzilla-like bipedal lizard, but this giant, four-legged, buggy thing with a tail was much more original.

2. Predictable sequence of events.
Nothing is much of a surprise in this film. You know when the movie begins that the characters on camera are dead by the end. You identify the inconsequential characters (read: "monster food") pretty quickly. You can even hear the contrived, flowery dialogue between the leading man and his woman long before their reunion ("You came back for me," *love*).

3. Sci-Fi vs. Monster Movie.
I expected this film to be a science fiction film. I found out that it's a monster movie. It's a good monster movie, and it really pulls you into the survival mentality of the characters, but a viewer who expected answers about what the monster is and where it came from would be left wanting. The ending, while not surprising, is unsatisfying.

4. Hand-held camera perspective.
The first time I'd ever seen a low-budget Handycam film was 1999's The Blair Witch Project. Nine years ago, it was difficult to swallow the idea that a group of hysterical campers would continuously record their entire horrific ordeal (who in their right mind would grab the camera before running and screaming off into the darkness after some unknown entity attacked their tent in the middle of the night?!). However, with Cloverfield, it's not so far-fetched. Extras in the background are seen snapping pictures of the carnage with their iphones. News helicopters fly overhead, beaming the live disaster to 250 million homes. "This is huge. People are gonna want to see this," is all the cameraman says, and in the age of YouTube and Web 2.0, I don't find that so unbelievable at all.

5. Capitalism 101: Product Placement.
I believe in capitalism, so I'm forgiving of product placement in films and TV. A display of Nokia phone batteries, or an Aquafina soda machine, fine. However, there's one scene where the placement couldn't be more glaringly obvious. Yes, the filmmakers tried to downplay it with a dutch-angle shot and intense red lights, but that Mountain Dew logo behind Marlena's head is clear as day and extremely distracting.

I didn't have high expectations for this film, and I wasn't disappointed. While I'm definitely not J.J. Abram's biggest fan, Cloverfield is one hell of an adrenaline rush, and I still recommend it.

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Natural Rights from a different perspective

Have you ever had one of those "golden moments" where something just clicks in your mind, and everything begins making obvious sense for the first time? Last week, I had such a moment. The concept of Natural Rights all came together for me. Throughout college I've been trained to be a scientist, not a philosopher, and I happened to stumble upon a way of understanding and explaining natural rights that made some sense to me. I was thinking about how the laws of physics can be described as "properties of matter," and it dawned on me - could natural rights be thought of as "properties of people?"

In its modern usage, the word "rights" connotes an authoritative relationship between two parties (regardless of the term's original meaning), where one "grants" or at least "recognizes" the rights of the other. This connotation has been the root of my incorrect thinking.

If you take rights to be nothing more than a property of a person (not to be confused with the person's property and property rights), or rather, an "attribute" of a rational, sentient intelligence, then the rest seems to fall into place nicely. Man, being rational, is capable of sustaining his life ("life"), is capable of making choices of how to act and think ("liberty"), and is capable of ownership ("property"). All people have these abilities.

From a computational/object-oriented paradigm:
A man (an object) whom we'll call "Sam" has identity, state, and behavior. His identity is himself, individual, one. His state is rational, sentient, self-aware. His behaviors include taking actions to sustain his life, making rational choices, and acquiring property, in addition to taking actions to defend his rights if they are ever threatened. The invariant of the system is that all men have these rights, which means that infringing on another's rights is nearly impossible to do without invoking that person to exercise and defend their rights. If a second man, "James," were to threaten the Sam's life, Sam is capable of defending himself, either physically or by some other means (firearms, hired thugs). If James were to threaten Sam's property, Sam again is capable of defending his property.

Coercion is the act of infringing upon another's rights to the point where they can no longer defend them, i.e. if James were to subdue and restrain Sam so that he could no longer defend himself, or if James were to shoot Sam in the back. This sucks for Sam and seems good for James in the short run, but in a dynamic system, it's likely that Susan, Joe, and Buck will hear about James' unreasonable and murderous tendencies, and will want to take precautionary measures to isolate the unreasonable (and therefore "inhuman," at least temporarily) James from their community until it appears he will no longer practice coercion.

I know this is very foggy and not at all rigorous - I'm by no means a logician. However, I think the implication of conceptualizing rights this way is important: it is very difficult for somebody to violate your rights without you surrendering them first.

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Good Econ Student, Terrible Granddaughter?

Another Christmas has come and gone, and with it, another round of returns, exchanges, re-gifting, or in some cases, simply tossing our unwanted gifts on the trash heap. Although retailers in recent years have made things easier with the advent of the gift receipt, there still exists a large economic loss after every holiday season.

This crossed my mind the other day as I was wrapping presents. For my grandmother, I had gotten a $10 frame to hang on her wall, with a decorative engraving inside that read "Family Faith Friends" or something like that. Admittedly, it wasn't the most thoughtful gift I'd ever purchased for Grandma, and to be safe, I opted for a gift receipt. When I was wrapping the gift, I was about to get up to find the receipt, but then remembered every unwanted gift I'd ever received, and how many of those came with no option to return or exchange. I sat back down and thought to myself: screw it, let Grandma feel the dead-weight loss of Chrismas this year.

Terrible, I know.

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2 years have passed since my mother, Nancy, died of cancer. We had our differences, and we had a lot of distance between us for most of my life, but her death marked a profound change in my life that I've never really mentioned. My brother and I were there at her bedside many nights in the last few months of her life, talking, or reading, or watching TV together. Slowly, she lost her energy. She eventually would barely wake up, and when she did she couldn't make sense of what was going on around her anymore. People who haven't witnessed slow degenerative death seem to have a misconception that death from illness is peaceful and quiet and quick. It rarely is. Being 21 years old and caring for a parent while they slowly slip away is one of those things that just changes you. It forces you to grow up. Here I am, two short years later, living and working in Washington D.C., breaking out of my former shyness. My life has changed drastically from where I was. I kind of feel like the growing up experience was my mom's "final gift."

Thanks, mom.

Check out my eulogy, here.

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I Won!

Last week, there was an op-ed writing contest for the Cato interns. Long story short, I won! Here's my editorial:

------------------------------------

Twenty years ago, the internet was still called the Information Super Highway, satellite dishes were humongous backyard-eyesores, and cable television only had 36 channels. My, how times have changed.

This week, the FCC will hold a meeting to discuss a recent report that could lead to expanded regulation of cable television. A federal law passed in 1984 determined that if the cable industry ever grew "too dominant" and passed the 70/70 rule - that is, if cable services reached 70% of people and 70% of those people became subscribers - then the FCC would be given new powers to regulate the industry.

The FCC's recent figure of 71.4% cable-subscription rate has been contested by the National Cable and Telecommunications Association. Their estimates place that number at just below 60%. Also, cable providers have been losing subscribers over the years to satellite and phone companies that provide video services, and the industry as a whole has seen stock prices flat-line or decline in recent months.

The aim of the FCC's expanded regulatory powers, should the 71.4% figure be deemed accurate, would be to promote a competitive environment and "diverse information sources." This is roughly translates to ensuring that enough women and minorities get to own or lease cable channels, and requiring cable providers to carry those channels. Let's entertain this idea for a moment: if currently successful cable channels are dropped by broadcasters in order to carry channels that, diversity-friendly or not, previously had no market for them, what exactly is the benefit to the cable TV customers? Additionally, how will this increase competition for the "too-dominant" cable TV industry?

Competition for cable television providers already exists. Direct TV, Dish Network, and Verizon FIOS are the first three competitors that come to mind. The internet is quickly becoming a fierce competitor, too, with peer-to-peer video sites like Joost, and music and video marketplaces like iTunes providing everything that cable companies do, either for free in the case of Joost, or for a small per-download fee. The internet represents an unregulated gold mine for diverse information sources – Google news provides news from over 4,500 sources daily, and Youtube has become a cauldron for user-generated video entertainment.

It's unclear just exactly what cable regulation would accomplish – aside from more red tape. Television media is currently in a transitional stage, as video-on-demand and digital video recorders are giving consumers greater choices about what, when, and how they watch television. The freedom to choose what we watch and how we watch it will not be stopped by bureaucrats who purport to know what we ought to have access to. As consumers, we can be certain of one thing: as technology continues to evolve, our choices will continue to expand.




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If Cars Weren't Required to Have Seatbelts...

Wouldn't somebody go into business selling 3rd-party seatbelts to install in our cars?

A lot of commotion is made by statists about the government's responsibility to ensure our safety through regulations, consumer protections, etc. I consider myself a fairly death-averse person, at least as much as the next guy. I'm pretty sure that if my car didn't come with pre-installed seat belts, I would purchase them separately, even though seatbelts haven't yet saved my life in the nearly 24 years I've been driving or riding in cars.




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The borderline Anarchist.

The more I learn, the more of an anarchist I become. And I don't think I need to qualify that with "-capitalist" or "-socialist," as I think only one is representative of true back-to-nature anarchy.

Anyway, I've been thinking that in the future (post-singularity, when we're all either software entities on an information network or entirely comprised of nanoswarms) government as we know it won't exist. A new form of "market-government" (shout-out to Zhzi for the term) will emerge, where governments/constituencies will not be defined by their physical borders, but by their members. I haven't worked out many of the details, but I would think that being a "citizen" of a country would be much like being a member of a union, or any other club that charges fees in exchange for perks.



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My Formative Years

Taking a break from more serious(ish) topics, here's a list of things that I remember from my formative years (age 10 - 15)

-The State on MTV
-Green Day
-Chuck Taylors
-Beavis and Butthead
-Discovering Nirvana, then learning that Kurt Cobain was dead.
-Alicia Silverstone (my hero back then)
-Kate Libby from Hackers (my other hero)
-Wearing flannel long after it had become uncool
-Ripped, no, SHREDDED jeans
-Gavin Rossdale
-Marilyn Manson
-Trent Reznor
-The Maxx, an animated series on MTV
-The Head, same.
-Ace of Base
-Riding my bike through the muddy backwaters of the MN river
-Rolling Stone magazine
-Hit Parader magazine
-quoting The Simpsons line-for-line
-Ace Ventura: Pet Detective
-GX jeans
-Who sucked more: Backstreet Boys or N'Sync
-The Spice Girls, signaling the beginning of the end for popular music
-Fred Durst is a no-talent hack.
-Categorizing other teenagers by the kind of music they listened to
-WalMart was the best store ever.
-Using christmas lights as year-round bedroom decor
-Loveline w/Adam Carolla and Dr. Drew
-Incense, inflatable furniture
-Late summer nights spent writing poetry and playing the same five songs on guitar
-Hormones, gloominess, and teenaged angst.
-Truth or Dare
-Battling frizzy hair
-Orthodontics
-8th grade history report on Spartacus.
-Believe it or not, I still remember watching a movie in my 8th grade human heritage class about ancient human societies in the middle east, and learning about the story of the Tower of Babel. It moved me almost to the point of tears, I remember, thinking that something so mysterious and magnificent-if it ever existed in the first place-would have been destroyed. I remember that story affected me, it stayed with me for years afterward. Thinking about it again now...I consider it one of the most tragic stories I've ever heard.



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Categorizing Atheists

I had an idea the other day about atheism, and after some thought, I've come up with 4 types of atheists. (This is speculation only; pure mental masturbation).

1. Scientific Atheists - uphold science as the only method of obtaining truths about the world. Believe that the lack of empirical (non-testimonial) evidence is reason enough to not grant assent to the God-claim. Because their disbelief is largely based on the scientific method and statistical reasoning (God isn't impossible, just infinitesimally improbable), their rationale is very difficult to communicate to the religious layman. Richard Dawkins falls into this category.

2. Philosophical Atheists - reason and logic tells them that god is a logical impossibility. Additionally, philosopher-atheists tend to be better at using language than their scientific counterparts. These philosphers can usually make a good case against the religious layman, but when you get them in a room with a philosophical religionist (or apologetic), the conversation quickly spirals into a word game. I consider Bertrand Russell to be a philosophical atheist (although his extensive work in mathematics could place him in the previous category, his ability to use language makes this category more appropriate).

3. Formerly Religious Atheists - strict religious upbringing (Missouri Senate, many Catholics, strong anti-gay churches, etc.), often coupled with antagonistic relations with parents/family causes them to rebel in their adulthood, which takes the form of turning against God. Because their disbelief is just a tool of their angry revolt against their perceived victimizer (God or God through their parents), many of these atheists still feel an internal need for religion, and seem to be the most likely to return to religious belief later in life (as Universal Unitarians). Think Brian Warner (a.k.a. Marilyn Manson), activists, shock-value atheists.

4. Apathetic Atheists - people with no apparent reason for or against disbelief. Atheists of this type seem to have either grown up in atheistic or otherwise non-religious families, or religious belief simply was never able to take root in their minds. Similar to the religious layman, this is the atheistic layman. Frank Zappa is a good example.

Where does your humble author fall in this categorization scheme? I'd say a mix of 1 and 4.



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Guilt and Vegetarianism

There is an inherent guilt that comes along with being a vegetarian. If you visit relatives, they will often either feel awful because they forgot you were a herbivore, or they will make some special, god-awful vegetarian mess and force it upon everybody else in an attempt to please you. Catering is no option, either, as most of the time, the caterer will enforce a minimum number of vegetarian sandwiches to be ordered, even if it's just one non-meateater in the group.


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Mom was right, television rots your mind.

It's interesting that America's health care system wasn't in a state of crisis until Michael Moore said it was.

Eat that, Stephen Colbert.


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Al Gore wins the Nobel Prize

*forehead-desk*

Are they serious?? The Nobel Peace Prize just lost a lot of respect.

Honestly, I don't mean to come off as an ideological hack, but "Global Warming" is about as over-hyped as Britney Spears. Does nobody listen to the leagues of environmental and natural resource economists when they say that there are costs and benefits to be considered before we agree to any UN pacts that will set us back billions and billions of dollars?? (Not to mention years and years in terms of economic and technological progress?)

An example of the "environati's" unwillingness to listen to (or defend against) reasonable arguments: Bjorn Lomborg has admitted on several occasions that global warming is, in fact, happening, although you wouldn't know it by reading any randomly-chosen environmentalist blog.


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Thoughts about DC

I've been living here for about a month, and I have a few observations about Washington DC:

• The weather. It's terribly swampy here. The air feels thick, heavy, almost like your swimming through it. Forget about hair and makeup - it must be a quite a site, actually, to see a city's entire female population arrive at work in the morning with their hair mussed, dampened and pressed against their sweaty, make-up smeared faces. DC's fever finally broke this week, though, and we went from 95F on Monday to about 55F last night.
  
  
• The skyline. There aren't too many tall buildings here. It's actually quite nice, to walk to work in the morning and have a clear view of the Washington monument. It's a large city, but unlike New York or Chicago, you can see the sky from downtown. The tallest buildings are Marriotts.
  
  
• The traffic. Who in the world thought that traffic circles would be an efficient way to direct traffic?! Without a doubt, traffic circles are the worst conception in the entire history of city planning.
  
  
• The kids. Or the complete lack of them. There are a few small children, but I've only seen one teenager in my four weeks here. I think young people are rare enough in the middle of the city that I haven't been carded anywhere I've gone. If you've always wanted to live in a place without punk-teenagers, DC is the place for you.
  
  
• The local economy. Like a good little economist-in-training, I've thought a lot about this. I can't figure out how it works. I have a suspicion that DC's infrastructure - the Metro, the city workers, the free museums - is financed by federal (not local) tax dollars, though I haven't asked anybody. I just can't see how this city could sustain itself. The sales tax rate is lower than in Minnesota.
  
  Additionally, I can't determine what the big industry is here, aside from government, of course. A lecturer I saw my first week here warned that the only thing DC manufactures is power, and that people who are drawn to power tend to flock to this city like moths to a lamp (rather, two lamps - a blue light and a red one). I tend to agree with that. Not often in Minnesota have I overheard a group of people discussing politics in public, but you can't escape it here. I saw a sign in the window of one of the congressional office buildings. It was a stop sign that read "Stop Privatization." Vague, but I'll assume the person meant "-of social security and medicare," although they could have meant "-entirely" for all I know. Is there really a philosophical war going on between the social-engineering paternalistic left and the behavior-policing theocratic right? I miss the real world, the world where people do productive work.
  

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