Patri's Peripatetic Peregrinations

CA Locals - tour Mercy Ship

Sat, 04 Jul 2009 22:46:45 GMT

Anyone want to go tour a hospital ship that does operations for poor countries with me (warning: website has sound and video)? It is in San Diego, we are looking at afternoon of July 23rd.

Happy Tax Revolt & Secession Day!

Sat, 04 Jul 2009 21:58:31 GMT

The final climactic mega-extravaganza Secession Week post is up. Enjoy!

For the fun sentence

Fri, 03 Jul 2009 21:54:09 GMT

Over at DR, I posted Think tanks and activist organizations are complementary, basically for the fun sentence in this paragraph:

Yes, national reform would be way better. It would also be way better if I shat gold bricks instead of poop and the Miss America Pageant included a category on sexual prowess with me as the judge. The FSP's goal may be far more modest, but at least their goal is not a fantasy and their methods have at least some chance of working.

Barefoot shoe options

Fri, 03 Jul 2009 06:19:57 GMT

Thanks for all the great advice! One thing I realized is that it may just be a toe socks + VFF Classics issue I am having. I got VFF Classics for summer, and I don't think my VFF KSOs hurt my toes even when I started wearing injinji toe socks. proctologiste says he washes his VFFs every week or two. Maybe I just need to wash them weekly. What happened was I didn't wash them for months, the smell got really bad, then it took like 3-4 washings before they stopped smelling. That was when I switched to socks.

I ordered a pair of Onitsuka Tiger™ Tai Chi™ by Asics, they looked really nice and minimal, and came recommended by a friend of terrencechan's.

Several people pointed to the new Feelmax shoes, which look great, but I am leery of ordering shoes from Finland considering how often sizing over the internet fails.

People said good things about the Nike Free (but not its durability), but for some reason I am still skeptical. Same goes with the Terra Plana shoe, and it's also the most expensive one.

So I'm going to try VFFs without socks, washed more often, and see how the Tai Chi shoes are.

When money buys happiness

Fri, 03 Jul 2009 00:24:14 GMT

So, there's a book out that says we spend too much money seeking relative status, rather than on the things that buy happiness. I have some sympathy with this view, but suspect it is overblown. John Tierney did a study of his readers, asking them what things brought them the most happiness, and cost them the most money.

Items appearing often on both lists most often were:

• Houses. Everybody loved their house. A major source of comfort, stability, good family times, aesthetic autonomy.
• Higher education: Most remembered college very fondly as an intellectual and social high point of their lives.
• Travel, especially foreign holidays, family vacations, visits to siblings and friends, living abroad, and sabbaticals.
• Electronics and entertainment media: large-screen HDTVs, DVD/Blu-Ray players, audio equipment, computers, internet.
• Some particular brands and models of cars:

The expensive but not happy items included children, marriage ceremonies (ie the stressfulness of the event, not the state of being married), divorces, taxes, most cars, and boats.

The happy but not expensive items included social eating, alcohol, bicycles, physical activity, pets, hobbies, and media (books, music, etc.).

There turned out to be a pretty good match between expense and happiness. Lots more detail in the post.

Selling shares?

Thu, 02 Jul 2009 18:17:33 GMT

Not sure whether to sell shares of myself in the main event, planning to play Monday.

I don't feel like it for perhaps the same reason terrencechan isn't selling shares - I'm stuck a bunch for the series (0 for 6 in all-in 100-200 PLO pots, although I should count my 1 for 1 in all-in 50-100 NLH pots, so really it is 1 for 7, still no fun), and selling shares will make it harder for me to get even.

jhogan suggests I could sell shares at a discounted rate where the shares don't pay back if I squeak into the money. They could kick in at $50K, say. That would still include much of my EV, since tournament EV is dominated by big cashes, but it would make it easier for me to get unstuck. Or I could just suck it up and not be irrationally loss-averse. Hmm.

But if any of you want to sell shares, let me know.

It's like the joke

Thu, 02 Jul 2009 16:50:05 GMT

The current world's oldest man - 113 days old:

attributes his longevity to "cigarettes, whisky and wild, wild women".

UPDATE: err, that's 113 years old, of course. Guess I had too much whisky before posting that.

Nike Free

Thu, 02 Jul 2009 05:58:15 GMT

Has anyone tried these shoes, or have recommendations for other barefoot-ish shoes? I love the barefoot-ness of FiveFingers, but honestly, the main thing I like about the toes is the attention they get. They are annoying to get into, and my toes often don't like being spread, especially with socks in. (And without socks, the smell is awful). I like the thin sole and flexibility, but the toes are style over substance, at least for my feet.

I know the Nike Free is supposed to be a barefoot-ish shoe, but looking at the pictures on their site, it doesn't look minimal at all, the sole looks enormous.

I guess I could also try moccasins, as Katy has recommended.

Krugman favors starving the world's poor?

Wed, 01 Jul 2009 23:33:38 GMT

My dad:

Paul Krugman, in one of his more inflamatory statements, claimed that congressmen who voted against cap and trade were guilty of "planetary treason."

The bill contains substantial support for biofuels, including a five year moratorium on letting the EPA decide whether, on net, producing ethanol actually reduces carbon dioxide. Converting food crops into fuel drives up the price of food. Driving up the world price of food results in more people in poor countries dying. Krugman is, no doubt, opposed to world hunger in theory. But he has come out passionately in favor of it in practice.

Treason or murder, take your choice.

Ooh, treason! I want treason!

I'm not the only one who believes that politicians are primates too

Wed, 01 Jul 2009 23:29:13 GMT

I defended Sanford's affair, due to the disconnect between human nature and social strictures for monogamy (even for powerful men). Some of you thought this made no sense. Well, I'm not the only one saying this. Here's the NYT's TierneyLab blog:

A young male chimpanzee spends almost every waking hour plotting how to ascend the hierarchy of his society. If he makes it to the top, he has reached a height from which one cannot easily descend: chimps leave the alpha position when deposed and usually killed by their successor. So why take such a risk? For the sex, of course. The alpha male achieves almost half the available paternities, and his allies, through mating opportunities he assigns, score most of the rest.

Chimps are our close evolutionary cousins and we are not so entirely different from them. Political power still means sexual opportunity. The trouble is, many politicians don’t seem fully aware of the subconscious urges that contribute to their drive for power. They spend years climbing the greasy pole, come at last within reach of the juicy fruit that is their ancient primate reward, and then get their hands slapped for touching.
...
Yes, politicians have to obey the same rules as everyone else. But maybe we should be less surprised that some will always be tempted to translate their power into its traditional primate uses.

Again, the point is not to say "cheating is ok". It is to say: "When social rules make it difficult to live according to our nature, some of the blame goes on the rules, not just the individuals. And we should think of better rules."

The public response should be: "A powerful man had an affair? Well, duh! I feel sorry for his wife and kids. Hope it works out as well as it can for everyone involved" Not: "Why?!?!?!"

Just so you know why I am against redistribution

Wed, 01 Jul 2009 20:05:14 GMT

Since I bothered to write this up for an OB comment, I may as well post it:

With a sublinear utility function, society gets richer with redistribution.

With a sublinear utility function, society gets richer in the short-term with efficient redistribution. In practice, a redistributive government will do a shit ton of stuff that makes society poorer and has nothing to do with redistribution to the poor. Like redistributing to farmers via subsidies, to steel producers via tariffs, and in general, redistributing (at a loss) from dispersed interests (all of us) to concentrated ones (special interests). The scale of this activity dwarfs the scale of redistribution to the poor - go look at the federal budget if you don’t believe me.

Un the long run, these types of governments make us all poorer, because their massive waste reduces the exponential growth of wealth (by about 1% in annual GDP growth per 10% in govt spending as a percentage of GDP). OB readers should be able to understand what a difference 3% growth vs. 6% growth makes in everyone’s long-run wealth.

This is not my focus anymore, since I think going meta and just arguing for societal choice is a much more powerful argument with clearer activism implications, than wrangling about the benefits of redistribution. But since arguments about redistribution are so common, it is nice to make it clear what their error is, to a consequentialist.

As you can see, a belief in sublinear utility and a belief that taxation and redistribution are moral does not, in my opinion, empirically support redistribution. There may be a design for an efficient redistributive government, but the evidence so far is that our redistributive democracies retard growth, and in the long run, this leads to massively more poverty than redistribution alleviates. Case closed.

Now, if you value equality (relative wealth) way more than absolute wealth, you might not care. Just be clear that in a century, my world makes the poor millionaires with rocket cars and immortality, while in yours, only the rich have them. That's the price you pay for your equality.

More evidence against the need for a two-parent family

Wed, 01 Jul 2009 16:39:01 GMT

I linked to a post earlier using Judith Harris type arguments to suggest why absent fathers might not cause problems for their children. Here is more evidence, from a Malcolm Gladwell article on Harris (which is also a good summary of Harris' work, including many studies, which might be worth skimming for those of you skeptical of "The Nurture Assumption")

Harris cites another large study--one that compared the behavior of poor inner-city kids from intact families to the behavior of those living only with their mothers. You'd assume that a child is always better off in a two-parent home, but the research doesn't bear that out. "Adolescent males in this sample who lived in single-mother households did not differ from youth living in other family constellations in their alcohol and substance use, delinquency, school dropout, or psychological distress," the study concluded. A child is better off, in other words, living in a troubled family in a good neighborhood than living in a good family in a troubled neighborhood. Peers trump parents.

Other studies have shown that children living without their biological fathers are more likely to drop out of school and, if female, to get pregnant in their teens. But is this because of the absence of a parent, Harris asks, or is it because of some factor that is merely associated with the absence of a parent? Having a stepfather around, for example, doesn't make a kid any less likely to be unemployed, to drop out, or to be a teen-age mother. Nor does having lots of contact with one's biological father after he has left. Nor does having another biological relative--a grandparent, for instance--in the home. Nor does it seem to matter when the father leaves: kids whose parents split up when they were in their early teens are no better off and no worse off than kids whose fathers left when they were infants. And, curiously, children whose fathers die aren't worse off at all. In short, there isn't a lot of evidence that the loss of adult guidance and role models caused by fatherlessness has specific behavioral consequences.

So what is it? One obvious factor is income: single mothers have less money than married mothers, and income has a big effect on the welfare of children. If your parents split up and you move from Riverdale to the South Bronx, you're obviously going to be a lot worse off--although it's not the loss of your father that makes the difference. This brings us to another factor: relocation. Single-parent families move more often than intact families, and, according to one major study, those extra changes of residence could account for more than half the increased risk of dropping out, of teen-age pregnancy, and of unemployment among the children of divorce. The problem with divorce, in short, is not so much that it disrupts kids' relationships with their parents as that it disrupts kids' relationships with other kids. "Moving is rough on kids," Harris writes. "Kids who have been moved around a lot--whether or not they have a father--are more likely to be rejected by their peers; they have more behavioral problems and more academic problems than those who have stayed put."

Primal, diet stuff

Wed, 01 Jul 2009 06:01:57 GMT

I tried going gluten/lactose free briefly, then back to more normal (on the theory of waiting until my tests, and because we were on vacation), but I just felt crappy on a normal diet, so I am back to paleo (or more accurately, Primal, since I am in the middle of The Primal Blueprint). I figure I'll ask the clinic whether a weird diet is an issue for their allergy tests. I am eating lactose, at least. thisisjeff seemed to think the clinic diagnoses everyone as gluten sensitive, so I dunno how meaningful the tests will be.

Anyway, today I did a down day w/ Shannon, and I am having trouble even finishing my dinner!

100 cal bar around noon
50 cal pear at 3pm
230 cal paleo kit at 7:15pm
rock climbing, grocery shopping
Dinner: 5cal pickle, 50 cal peach, 5 slices of turkey (80cal), wedge of Brie (80cal), 3oz blueberries (45cal) + 1 cup yogurt (140cal).

That's it, unless I'm forgetting something. I never thought of myself as particularly carb sensitive, but...I really feel better eating this way. I don't plan to do 100% paleo/primal (don't have the willpower), I think I will mix some IF down days with some occasional cheat/binge days ("refeedings" is the nice term - and some of the diet/fitness experts I read believe that occasional high-carb days are actually good for your metabolism.)

Quitting caffeine, well, let's just say that it's so easy I've done it several times in the past week :). But I am cutting back, subbing in decaf coffee when I just want the warmth and flavor.

My jaw, while quite functional for eating and talking, does ache frequently, probably I am overusing it. Sleep was good a week ago, has not been so good in the last week.

I almost posted another judgmental statement of values this morning about how I value emotional control (some call it repression, but I prefer the Regency / Victorian attitude that it's just good manners), but I had to run off to willmagics to talk about the seastead book, give a dramatic interpretation of a poem his uncle wrote, and watch bits of a movie with PUA themes (Vicky, Christina, Barcelona) - great male bonding!

Good thing, too, as the post would probably have eliminated the few remaining women in my readership, given that the married moms prob. hate me for defending the cheating governor, while the unmarried women hate me for dissing childlessness, and all of 'em will hate me for approving of emotional control. But those few who stay, well, they are the truly awesome, and quality is better than quantity when it comes to people, any day.

(and don't start arguing w/ me about emotional control, there are so many caveats and nuances to my belief that by the time I got through with them there practically wouldn't be a thesis left. I'm just as against the resentment and passive-agressive behavior that stems from emotional repression as I am against outbursts of negative emotions. Perhaps it would be clearer to say I value non-reactivity? Mellowness? I dunno. It really isn't worked out very clearly yet, which is another reason I haven't posted it)

G1 fail?

Tue, 30 Jun 2009 17:24:29 GMT

Shannon is not happy with the sound quality on her G1, specifically the "background static", which is a major problem b/c she uses her cell phone for her coaching business. I don't get the issue myself - I've done lots of interviews on my G1, including on-air radio interviews. There have been some radio stations that insisted I call from a landline for sound quality, even one that insisted I call from a special recording studio (the BBC), but no station or interviewer that was OK w/ cell phones in general has ever not been ok w/ my phone. I've had some issues w/ using a Bluetooth headset, being outdoors in the wind, but never any issues inside using the phone or the wired earbud headset that comes with it.

But, whatever, I don't get the problem but it's her phone & business. Previously she had an old Treo on Verizon, with a 2.5mm headset jack, and a standard headset (headphones with a boom that goes down your jaw and holds a mic by your mouth). So we've tried to find a similar headset for the G1.

The G1 has a single mini-USB port. As far as I can tell, there are no mini-USB headsets other than the earbud+mic on wire type. So I got two adapters: a mini-USB male to USB female (to plug in a standard USB headset), and a mini-USB male to 2.5mm female (to plug in a standard 2.5mm headset).

Neither adapter + headset combination works with the G1 (registers as a headset, has sound in or sound out). It is possible this may be a Cupcake issue. But it sure is annoying. (Of course, we don't even know if a headset would fix the problem). While I don't mind BT headsets, I've always found they have noticeably lower sound quality.

Anyway, hard to believe that a new phone has worse sound quality than a years-old one, I wonder if it's just that most people don't mind the faint background static and so phone design nowadays focuses on optimizing the voice quality and not eliminating the static.

Young Cons

Tue, 30 Jun 2009 02:49:42 GMT

Young Conservative rap song. Political nerdcore - woohoo! Rather too Christian for me, but still cute. "Three things taught me conservative love / Jesus, Ronald Reagan, and Atlas Shrugged". Umm...I like all three of those, but none as the basis for a philosophy. Well, maybe for a 20-year old.

Secession Week Blogging Begins

Mon, 29 Jun 2009 19:59:14 GMT

Intro / Index
Monday: Secession Goes Mainstream, Basics Of Secession

Spread the word, join the fun, send us more links, and plz upvote on the Libertarian Reddit

Kinkade Bubble

Mon, 29 Jun 2009 06:14:23 GMT

A great link from istar:

The stores failed, ultimately, not because Kinkade treated them badly, and not because other stores were undercutting them. The stores failed because Kinkades are a commodity, and anybody wanting to buy one could get a second-hand Kinkade online at a much lower price than that charged at retail. Buyers no longer believed that their paintings would increase in value, so they bought fewer than they used to. And when they did buy, they were likely to buy already-existing Kinkades rather than new ones.

As a general rule, no retailer has ever consistently been able to make money by selling the proposition that his goods are going to increase in value after they’re bought. Kinkade managed it for a few years, but then, inevitably, the bubble burst. And when bubbles burst, people get hurt. It’s not the fault of Thomas Kinkade, it’s simple market dynamics.

This is the sort of thing I was worried about from artists after visiting Wyland's gallery in Laguna Beach, and reading about Kinkade being in 5% of homes. That they limit the supply of their artwork enough to keep prices high and make the art seem exclusive...but then keep pumping them out as fast as they can without driving the price down.

It's optimal for the artist - high volume and high price - but you get a lot of people buying something expensive because they expect it will hold its value because it is limited in quantity...but over the course of years, finding that the market is actually flooded with these "limited" works. When I saw all those "198 of 350" works, I just thought "That is an awful lot of $3,000 signed posters to be trying to sell...is there really that much of a market?"

Anyway, dunno if it is true for other artists, but fascinating that it turns out to be true for Kinkade. And awesome that the internet provided an accurate estimate of resale value via a secondary market, to correct buyers' expectations.

Burning Man vs. Disneyland

Mon, 29 Jun 2009 05:59:37 GMT

Cold rational analysis of the stupidity of the war on drugs

Mon, 29 Jun 2009 03:22:47 GMT

From an interview with Kevin Murphy, an argument I had never seen before, based on drug prices as the mediator of the effects of prohibition:

The way I think about prohibition, why does prohibition on drugs curtail drug consumption? Well, the primary way is it makes drugs more expensive. It raises the street price of drugs from what they would be if people could freely bring them into the country and freely distribute them. It raises the price by making them less available. If I want to get drugs, I can’t just go down to the supermarket or the drugstore and buy my drugs. I’ve got to go to a neighborhood, maybe it’s dangerous. I also have to worry about the strength and quality of the drugs. Am I going to get drugs that are tainted?

All those things make drugs more expensive than they would otherwise be. And what do we know about demand for any commodity, whether it’s drugs or haircuts or strawberries? You make them more expensive, people consume less. So our view of the world is that, basically the way drug policy works in the United States at least, is it tries to make drugs more expensive, less attractive, and cause people to consume less. In economic terms, it pushes us back up the demand curve. And rough estimates say we’ve quadrupled the cost of drugs relative to what they would be in a world without this interdiction.

If you quadruple the price of something, people are going to buy less of it. But, unfortunately, the way we bring about that quadrupling of price is by increasing the cost of supplying drugs. The amount of money people are spending on drugs is actually higher than it would be if the price were lower, because the demand for drugs is not very elastic.

Region: You’ve shifted the supply curve, and moved up the demand curve.

Murphy: Exactly. So think about a simple world where the elasticity of demand is about a half. You quadruple the price of drugs, and the quantity of drugs is cut in half. So you’ve got four times the price, half the quantity. You’ve doubled expenditures. People are spending twice as much and consuming half as much.

Well, where did that added expenditure go? It goes to the drug dealers. It doesn’t go to the government; it doesn’t stay with the consumers. It goes to drug dealers. And that revenue actually finances the supply of drugs and finances the drug lords who supply drugs to the United States. So what we’ve really done in this case is financed the people who are on the other side of the War on Drugs. So, the War on Drugs, in our view, has been kind of doomed by its basic economics. That is, the harder you fight the war, the higher you push up the price. The higher the price, the higher the revenue of suppliers; the higher the price, the greater the incentive to supply drugs to the United States.
Now, what are the costs to the suppliers? Well, they have to avoid detection. They fight over turf for drug territories. They pay people off. They may go to prison. All those costs are pretty much bad things. They use violence to enforce their contracts and the like. Not a good outcome.

But when you put people in prison, you have to consider not only does it cost society in the form of people in prison who could otherwise be gainfully employed, but it also costs us money to put them there. So for every dollar of cost we impose on the drug suppliers, we spend at least a dollar of our own money on top of it to keep them there. If we normalize what we would have spent in a free market on drugs at $100, consumers are now spending $200 on half the quantity of drugs and then spending another $100 on top of that to put all those people in jail. So we’re paying three times as much for half as much output. From an economic point of view, that’s more than a little bit counterproductive.

Usually you think, if I’m going to produce less output at least it should cost me less.

Region: So, rational addiction but irrational ...

Murphy: Irrational policy, right. So, what’s the answer? If you want to reduce consumption, raise the price. What’s the natural way to raise the price of something? Tax it.

Region: That is, something you want to discourage.

Murphy: Something you want to discourage, exactly. We want to discourage smoking, so we tax cigarettes. If we want to discourage greenhouse gases, we’ll tax carbon emissions. Whatever it is, if you want to discourage it, tax it. The advantage of that is, you get the same reduction in output; the cost of production rather than going up, goes down. It costs less to produce half as much output as it does to produce the full amount of output. And the extra money that would have been wasted is now going to the government in the form of tax revenues, which would allow us to reduce other taxes, or do other things.

So, a system where we make drugs legal and tax them makes a lot of economic sense relative to the current system. People say, wait a minute, we can’t make drugs legal. Don’t drugs cause all these horrible problems?

The problem is, most of the things that people point to when they talk about the horrible things generated by drugs are actually the horrible things generated by the War on Drugs. The violence and the corruption we have, and the corruption in foreign governments—that’s because drugs are illegal. If drugs were legal, we wouldn’t have a violence problem. We wouldn’t have tons of people in prison. Those people are there not because drugs did anything but because we made these things illegal. People still wanted them, and when people still want something that’s illegal, we have a black market. And if we imprison people who engage in a black market, we’re going to increase the size of the prison population and make all the associated expenditures.

We see that in the recent War on Drugs. We saw that with prohibition in the 1920s. It’s an old phenomenon. You may enact a prohibition, but it doesn’t get rid of demand. People still want the commodity. You’ve just forced production to occur in the black market, and when demand is inelastic—and that’s what’s key—when people are going to still demand it even as you push the price up, the black market is very inefficient, because you’re raising costs and expenditure at the same time.

I'm not sure whether the argument accounts for costs of illegal drug use besides the street price, like the risk of criminal sanctions. I suppose they could just be modeled as part of the increased price, but unlike the sale price, not a part that goes to the drug dealers, hence, not a part that incentivizes drug production, which weakens part of his argument. But the basic logic still holds - the effect of drug prohibition is to make drugs more expensive, which reduces usage, and we could achieve that same effect without all of the violence and crime just by legalizing them and taxing them to make the cost the same as it is now.

Freakonomic claim of the day

Mon, 29 Jun 2009 03:07:58 GMT

Witchhunts caused by Little Ice Age (PDF)

Ferrofluid art sculpture

Sun, 28 Jun 2009 01:01:59 GMT

It would be so wicked cool to have a moving sculpture made from ferrofluid (and a few electromagnets driven at randomly varying levels).

A Famous Person Has Died (comic)

Sun, 28 Jun 2009 00:56:26 GMT

Art should be consumed, not collected

Sun, 28 Jun 2009 00:36:08 GMT

choiceful & I are in Laguna Beach for our anniversary. It's an artsy California beach town, so being here involves a lot of strolling, shopping for cute unique clothes (which rarely fit us, but at least there is a lot of stuff we like), and art galleries.

First, it is impossible not to notice the commercialization of art here. As a fan of commercialization, I generally approve. Seeing people like Wyland and Thomas Kinkade who make art I like, and have managed to sell massive amounts of it, is pretty cool. Good for them.

But...then my inner anti-IP / economic efficiency gremlin pops up. The idea of people paying huge amounts of money for original paintings makes sense. Limited supply, so if there is demand, hey, the sky is the limit. No problem. But these bigtime artists (incl. my new favorite, V. Kush) sell very few originals - what they sell are huge numbers of "limited, authorized reproductions".

So what you are getting is a painting which:

1) Is a reproduction
2) Is made using a special process, like giclee (the modern alternative to lithography), which offers high-resolution, accurate color reproduction and long lifetimes.
3) Has an artificially restricted supply (usually in the hundreds), which guarantees to you, the buyer, that your art will maintain its value.
4) Is signed and certified by the artist.

It is the artist's right (from my point of view) to limit the number of signed reproductions to increase their profit. But it bothers me to see such high prices ($1,000 and up) charged for reproductions, whose supply is artificially limited specifically in order to drive up their price. (Priced at monopoly levels, rather than where MR = MC) Like any monopoly, there is a deadweight loss. And it seems likely that the deadweight loss for art is very high, because there are a few people willing to spend a lot of money, and marginal costs are very low. So the monopoly quantity provided is way less than the quantity would be in a competitive market.

There's something else weird which is going on here, which is that the art is being priced based on scarcity value instead of consumption value. Let's contrast art pricing with the pricing of another artist creation mainly sold as reproduction - the book. The author of a book has a monopoly, but books get sold with high volume and low prices. Why? Well, one reason is probably substitutability - books sub for each other much more than art, so if one author raises their prices, people will just buy other books. But I suspect another reason is that authors want their books to be read by as many people as possible, while artists want their works to be in a few exclusive places. And readers want to enjoy a book, while art collectors want to feel they own a special, limited thing. Actually, I bet it is the latter which dominates.

Since I seem to be judging other people's utility functions a lot lately, I will say that this art collector mentality is (IMHO) a bad thing. Creating artificially high prices through artificial scarcity is taking value away from the world. If you only like something when no one else has it, your utility function makes other people's utility functions harder to satisfy. In that way, this quality (miserliness?) is much like jealousy/envy (you are unhappy when someone else has something that you don't).

Maybe this seems wLimiting the scope of miserliness in society seems like an important way to maximize common good. Suppose the users of antibiotics had gotten special, unique value from curing their own diseases - but only if others kept on dying of those diseases. Imagine the Captains of Industry viewing antibiotics, not primarily for their ability to cure disease, but for knowing that they had the godlike and unique power to save lives - and paying huge amounts per pill for that feeling. And so the drug makers only did "limited, authorized runs" and produced small numbers of antibiotics, which the wealthy feverishly (ha!) bid for.

It would be a worse world. Obviously the case is more severe for life & death than for having more prettiness in our lives, but I don't see how that difference translates to a difference in kind. A world where art reproductions were viewed as goods to be enjoyed (displayed in your home or office), rather than to be collected and hoarded, would be a much prettier world. Deadweight loss is bad. Miserliness costs us all.

I dunno, this is kinda rambly and not fully logical, and maybe I'm just annoyed that the art I want is expensive even when it's just a reproduction and I'm just rationalizing it, but I think there is something to this. (Hey, I'm a smart guy, my rationalizations are sometimes wrong but they're usually interesting!)

Vladimir Kush

Sun, 28 Jun 2009 00:00:08 GMT

I'm very picky about art, so there are not many artists I like. But today, I discovered one - Vladimir Kush. He reminds me a lot of Magritte, and most of his paintings are based on a Magritte concept: a surreal blending of two thematically related things. The difference is that his focus is narrower (only some of Magritte's work fits into this category), but with many more examples within that category, and I think his paintings are prettier. (I was tempted to say "aesthetically appealing", but why snobbify a simple concept like "pretty").

Here are some of my favorites:

He even has a "dynamic geography" piece, of a house/handbag:

There is a larger painting with an entire landscape of these.

I bought a book, and will (at leisure) ponder whether to buy posters (cheap!), signed limited edition prints ($1500 - $13000) or originals ($40K, $69K, and up...um...I think not!).

Which reminds me, time to rant about artificial limitation of supply and copyright., but I'll do that in a separate post...

Skepticism about Iranian protester sympathy

Sat, 27 Jun 2009 19:25:32 GMT

I think I liked this post of Will's because I'm a hardened old cynic who likes nothing better than to show that some superficially warm-hearted and helpful activism is actually naive, short-sighted, and playing right into the hands of the powers-that-be. We all have our pleasures in life:

Some people were really ticked off by my Twitter avatar post, and I can see why. I guess it’s bad enough to accuse people of empty moral posturing. It’s another thing to accuse people of empty moral posturing that helps the people who worked like crazy to start an unjustified war in Iraq. So let me say that I completely understand the impulse to express solidarity with Iranians who seek freedom. I feel it very strongly myself, but I also don’t trust it. Why not?

Because I realize that I have no idea what I’m talking about. I don’t understand Iranian politics very deeply. I will now proceed to make some mistakes that prove this. For example, I did not know until this episode that Mousavi was Prime Minister of Iran for many years under Khomeni, which pretty much guarantees he’s no angel. I did not understand anything about the internal divisions within the Council of Guardians and the Assembly of Experts. Indeed, I still don’t completely grasp how these various bodies are related to each other. What I gather is that that Khameni and Ahmadinejad are aligned against former Prime Minister Mousavi and former President Rafsanjani (who is now the head of the Assemby of Experts, the body that chooses the Supreme Leader. Thank you Wikipedia). I don’t really grasp whether Mousavi and Rafsanjani are in it together, or are in a “the enemy of my enemy is a friend of mine” sort of thing, or what. As far as I can tell, the ruling axis got worried A’jad might lose the election, botched the vote-rigging, but validated the result anyway. I don’t know who would have won had the vote been counted (I think this remains quite unclear), but in any case, it seems clear enough that Ahmadinejad is staying in power despite a pretty transparent flouting of the rules of an already deeply anti-democratic constitution. This provided a great opportunity for the anti-Khameni/Ahmadinejad faction to encourage a popular uprising, which I am sure is fueled by real discontent with the current regime. And much of this discontent I am sure is surely rooted in an authentic desire for a more liberal and democratic Iran.

Is that what we get if the Mousavi-Rafsanjani axis comes to power? A more liberal and democratic Iran? I honestly don’t know, and I don’t think many people do. I do know that these guys are deeply embedded in the larger status quo power structure, have had power before, and their records don’t look so good. They may well represent improvement, but I don’t honestly know that. As far as I know, the outpouring of desire for change that we see so clearly on YouTube is being exploited by one faction of the Iranian ruling class to depose another.
...
I think it is rather unwise to underestimate the strategic savvy of the opinonmakers at the Weekly Standard and Fox News. It is not “paranoid” to think they are in fact talented at shaping American popular opinion and then bringing it to bear to achieve their political aims. The correct description of the events in Iran continues to elude me. Perhaps I have been ideologically blinded to the obvious. All I can say is that given what little I know, it is not obvious. But it is quite clear to me that the story of a people yearning for freedom and rising up to demand their rights as citizens who are then crushed by an evil authoritarian regime that will do anything to achieve its evil ends… it’s clear to me that this story is useful to a certain faction in the ongoing debates about U.S. policy toward Iran. It may be that this story is the true story. But I don’t honestly know that it is, so I think it is prudent not to assume it is–especially given the fact that this narrative does play into the hands of the most dangerous people in American public life.

A-fucking-men, my brother. As I wrote in the comments, responding to someone who said "If folks want to, in a simplistic way, express "solidarity" with a simple ideal, "free and fair elections" so be it. No big deal."

I disagree. There are short-term and long-term problems with naive activism. In the short-term, their act may lead them to feel they have "done their duty", and to not do things that are more effective. But more importantly, this sort of response just reinforces the behavior of naively channeling one's desire to make the world better into superficial and ineffective strategies. And that is a powerful enemy of achieving real change through strategies that focus on results, not just easy ways to feel good."

As a hedonist, I'm usually in favor of easy ways to feel good. But not when it perpetuates a status quo that I loathe.