Cox Crow

The girls heard from a friend today who told them, Hannah Montana takes her clothes off and lets people take pictures of her..

They were distraught. The Little Sister gasped, She’d never do that! Would she, Mom?

Thank you, Miley Cyrus. [Expletive]

The third rail on electric railways carries the electrical current. Touching the rail will cause death. By extension, a number of topics in politics have been characterized as the third rail, in that they will cause an immediate political demise. Domestically, one of these subjects is Social Security, a program from which so many people benefit that altering the program would result in an electoral defeat. In foreign policy, this position was previously held by Communism. Now it is Israel. I’m not sure why that is, or what unquestioning support of Israeli policy has to do with American interests.

I opened the paper today, after a week-long hiatus, to find that the disagreement between the Israelis and the Palestinians over who should exist escalated over the weekend. Coincidentally enough, I also read Glenn Greenwald’s column today, in which I learned that 71% of the U.S. population polled favor a neutral position on the above question, in stark contrast to the 99% of the U.S. political establishment which vociferously supports Israeli policy. There are, however, signs that this unanimity is splintering, at least among the chattering classes.

As I pay the last set of bills before the New Year, I also make final charitable contributions. There are some guidelines that I use to select to which charities to give. First, what will I support? I support life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, and so give to charities that enable, encourage, and provide these. Second, what must a charity do to retain my support? They must be effective, they must not misuse funds, and they must not give my name and address to other charities. Charity Navigator is helpful in determining the first two of those criteria. For the latter, I received a bunch of junk mail from environmental charities, and so will be removing one from our list. Is the marginal return from selling my address really worth the lost income?

This year due to the foolish behavior of certain people in the financial services industry, we will also not be making contributions in the “happiness” category. (If someone could recommend a charity that sponsors schadenfreude….) Instead, our focus will be on charities which provide the necessities of life: food, water, and shelter.

We recommend your local food bank, Habitat for Humanity, Heifer International, and Medicins sans Frontieres.

Odd. All of the banking sites I use are slower than molasses in winter. The rest of the Internet is responding fine.

I’m finding this intriguingly strange. I suspect something with my network link, since the sluggishness is impacting all of the computers attached to this network. I’ve not narrowed down any commonality other than banking sites, though it may be issues with HTTP/S. I would be more certain of that if the responses from non-bank sites were as sluggish. I’m curious enough that I might devote some time to isolating this.

via Massengale,

The Marshalls department store has a great advertisement playing now, on the subject of over-production, which I would re-post here for your enjoyment, if it were easily found on-line.

They call it a shopportunity.

Designers can’t sell their clothes, and malls are struggling. … The totally crummy economy is your ‘shopportunity’ at Marshalls.

When supply exceeds demand, prices fall.

Dear Google, where did I read that thing I remember reading a few days ago? Can you find it for me? kthxbye.

Google’s goal is to organize our information. One thing I have trouble with — though I suppose it’s only trouble because I have an obsessive need to cite my sources — is remembering where I read something recently. For example, the other day I read an article asserting that enterprise-grade software is expensive in order to cover the costs of compliance with the requirements of the large companies who would tend to buy that software, rather than to cover the costs of development or because of demand. Where did I read that? Given my continuing experiences with the enterprise-grade shit that we buy here, enterprise-grade is definitely not a synonym for quality.

Can you imagine how improved the lives of students, and even journalists, would be if they could properly cite the results of their casual reading?

The law of large numbers does not invalidate garbage in, garbage out.

It has been some matter of argument in what passes for the blogosphere for some time whether or not full-content feeds are better than partial-content. Some of this discussion was driven by the default behavior of competing publishing tools, but recently it seems to be in context of making money from one’s writings. This whole discussion seems rather pointless to me, mainly because some of those arguing don’t seem to pay attention to their own reading patterns, but pointless discussions are the raison d’être of blogs. Two that I read are abbreviated, containing only partial content, and terminated usually in the middle of a sentence. They are Freakonomics and the Legal History Blog.

Freakonomics often has interesting stuff. However, the cost to me, in time, of clicking through to the full page prevents me from reading it unless the lede grabs me by the throat and drags me over. Once there, navigation between posts is poor, so one must either return to the naggregator or to the top of their site. I usually just leave.

The Legal History Blog always has interesting stuff. What they post, however, are links to recent papers in the field. This falls into the category of “stuff to print and read later.” Because of the truncated posts, it’s difficult to skim through and mark those I’d like to read later. Instead, I ignore it until I have the time. And since I don’t have the time, I may never read it again.

The reduction in force has started. I wish I could see what the pattern is, but we’re kept in the dark.

The Poughkeepsie Journal accidentally delivered Sunday’s comics today. B.C. is so appropriate.

Update: included link to the comic.

I used to follow about 300 or so websites, but pruned that back to about 10 and my friends’ shared items in Google Reader around two years ago. My job responsibilities, and workload, had changed dramatically, and my leisure time shrank to nothing. Things have been letting up a little bit, and I’ve gradually expanded my horizons. I just followed a link from one of those, and noticed that the world has changed.

When I put my head down, nose to the grindstone, Userland still maintained a list of recently updated weblogs, Technorati was still relatively new, and Feedburner was blazing new paths with feed management. (And I cared enough to put links on lots of words in my posts.) Now, I look up, and the world has changed. The horizon is far distant, and the lands around are populated by clusters of strangers, some of whom talk to each other.

I’ve seen several references to this time between the election and the inauguration as an interregnum, and many writers expressing concern that President Bush is still, well, the President until January 20th. The thing is, we don’t have an interregnum because President Bush is still the President. And regardless of one’s wishes, he remains the President until President-elect Obama takes the oath and assumes the office.

One concern is that President Bush will follow tradition and issue a bunch of midnight regulations that will be difficult to overturn. Another is that President Bush, lacking in political authority since he has no more terms in office, will be unable to deal effectively with an emergency of some kind. The example usually given is the present financial tumult. But this is a concern only if one thinks the President some kind of demigod, and the Executive indispensable to daily life — or the orderly functioning of the NYSE.

The machinery of government will function just fine during this transitional period, which is most emphatically not an interregnum.

The Economist reports that the broken windows theory of policing is correct.

I think some theories are controversial only because the people who start the controversy have never maintained a household. Anyone who maintains a system, whether a computer or a household, knows that an ordered system tends toward disorder, and that disorder tends to encourage further disorder.

The acceptable level of disorder varies, but the trends should be obvious.

(Of course, it may be they simply have no ability to recognize the obvious, or prefer to argue against the policy prescriptions derived from the observation, rather than the against the theory itself.)

The Associated Press reported that the Food and Drug Administration has set a standard for the amount of melamine found in infant formula: one part per million.

The development comes days after The Associated Press reported FDA tests found traces of melamine in the infant formula of one major manufacturer [Mead Johnson] and cyanuric acid, a chemical relative, in the formula of a second major maker [Nestle].

This all begs the question, why is melamine in food to begin with?

H. W. Brands, in his biography of F.D.R., Traitor to His Class: The Privileged Life and Radical Presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, writes,

Many of the progressives, judging themselves lovers of peace, had assumed that they would be the wrong sorts of people to run a war. …. But to their surprise, and in some cases to their dismay, the progressives discovered they were the ideal war administrators. The reformist temperament in American life has always hidden a coercive streak: if people won’t shape up voluntarily, they should be encouraged, even compelled, to do so. [emphasis mine] (p. 111)

This captures exactly my disagreement with progressive thought.

I prefer to let people suffer the consequences of their actions.

Malcolm Gladwell has a new book, Outliers, which, good for him, will likely end on the bestseller list and pay his mortgage for a few weeks. In it he seeks to answer the question of why some people succeed, while others don’t. Matthew Yglesias picked up the book to see if it would explain why The Economist thinks he’s an up-and-coming public intellectual.

In response to Gladwell, and to clear the air for Yglesias, let me proffer some trite observations.

• Nothing succeeds like success.
• It helps to be in the right place at the right time.
• It’s not what you know, but who you know.

I think most people can only juggle about 50 or so acquaintances, so when the time comes to think of others, either to fill out a list in The Economist, to help pull a TARP over a pile of shit, or to fill open posts in a new administration, one selects from those 50.

I accidentally clicked “hide” for one of my friends. There’s no easy way to get that friend back in the list, but I’m still seeing his shared items. I want to put him back in the list. Help!

The Somali pirates who have been very active in recent months have been asking for dollars, not gold.

Moneychangers offer wads of new US dollar notes, the only currency that matters in a country that has been in chaos for almost two decades.

The world’s reserve currency indeed.

I think my major problem with Mosler’s theories is that there are two sets of rules. The second set only applies to the the issuer of the fiat currency. It is not applicable to, for example, New York State, or Dutchess County, or the Town of Beekman, or the Arlington Central School District. Because money is not really an issue for the owner of the mint, some policy options are available to the Federal government which are not available to more local governments. More power is available to the Federal government which is not available to local governments. This is a problem if you think, as I do, that certain functions are forbidden the Federal government. This is a problem if you think, as I do, that certain functions are best performed locally.

Suppose, for example, that you are in favor of providing a free education to all citizens. If the town pays for it, then the town will need to float a bond issue, or raise taxes, or otherwise find the funds to provide the education. If the Federal government pays for it, then money’s not an issue.

If the Federal government pays for it, then control is not likely to be local.

It’s simpler if there’s just one set of rules.