Defenestrating Thoughts from the Bivouac

Whenever we look back at history, we always chuckle at the silly things “those stupid people” believed back then: the world was flat, the Earth is in the center of the universe, the moon is made of cheese and so on.

So, unless you believe that we already know everything, some time in the future, we’ll be considered “those stupid people”.

In that spirit, what do you think are the myths of our age?

First of all, it seems likely that one or more of our major religions will be rendered a myth. After all, we refer to the old Greek and Roman religions as “myths”. As far as I can tell, a “religion” becomes a “myth” when no one believes it any more. So it’s not so much an issue of the religion’s intrinsic merit, it’s just a popularity contest. :-P

It also seems like Darwinism will be a something that is either rendered a “myth” or at least, in retrospect, our current day understanding will be considered “very laughable” by future standards.

Does that mean I think Intelligent Design is correct? No, not necessarily. Remember the question isn’t “Evolution or Intelligent Design?” That’s a classic false dilemma. There’s a third option: “None of the above”. And that’s what I’m advocating.

Micro-evolution powered by survival of the fittest and some genetic drift makes sense. We can see and reproduce this in many conditions. But macro-evolution powered by genetic drift and survival of the fittest over large incomprehensible amounts of time? It sort of makes sense, but not really.

Did something as complicated as an eye appear by chance? It probably didn’t appear spontaneously; especially considering you’d need a guy and a girl critter who both spontaneously evolved an eye that could be passed to their kids.

Let’s suppose the eye evolved gradually. Keep in mind that while the eye is developing it’s not useful until you can see something. So for a long period of time, the sightless eye would provide no evolutionary advantage. Sure the eye could still evolve, but it seems very unlikely.

Evolution will tell us it’s a combination of the two; both spontaneous and gradual probabilistic changes over a large amount of time will give us something like the eye. Again, it sort of makes sense, but not really.

Fundamentally, we all think evolution is right because, of the possible explanations that we’ve come up with, it seems the most likely. My hunch is that the correct answer is still forthcoming.

There are probably a lot more things we all passionately believe that will be proved completely incorrect. Sometimes I wish that we could see a history book from the year 2500, but I think that will ruin the fun. :-)

Quick update: I just wanted to add a note, that I did indeed intentionally pick the eye as my example, because it has lots of theory and research behind its evolution. My point again is, while it seems to make sense, it seems very probable that a more compelling theory will be developed in the future.

A friend sent me a link to this commentary about the housing market, the societal and political changes that brought us here, and what to expect moving forward. It is definitely worth reading in its entirety (note: there’s some bad language); here’s a good excerpt:

The lies we’ve been told by government, corporate America, and the media are no worse than the lies we’ve told ourselves. We have tripled the size of our houses, and reduced the sense of community in our nation. Many have perfectly manicured lawns, polished appliances, 12 spotless rooms and dysfunctional, aloof, joyless lives. A McMansion, stainless steel appliances, 6 flat screens, and granite countertops do not guarantee happiness. When all of these items are bought on credit, you have a tragedy. America has degenerated into a materialistic, corrupt, me first, soul-less society. Nobody is right. Nobody is wrong. Everyone deserves to win, even if they made horrible decisions. Unless this changes soon, this country is doomed. By 2020 the United States will essentially be an old aged pension fund with an army.

This just cracks me up:

(Source)

It’s been a while since I wrote about unemployment and so I thought I would revisit it. The Bureau of Labor Statistics’ (BLS) April report came out last week and here are the headline numbers:

• Official unemployment rate: 8.9% (Table A-12, Line U-3)
• Real unemployment rate: 15.8% (includes people who want full time jobs but can only find part time jobs, people who want a job but can’t find one and gave up, and people who aren’t counted because their unemployment benefits ran out. Table A-12, Line U-6)

Back in January, I made the following prediction for 2009: “Unemployment tops 10% with real unemployment over 15%”. We’ve only 4 months into 2009 and we’re well past 15% on real unemployment.

Overall, 539,000 jobs were lost in April. However, since 663,000 jobs were originally reported lost in March, a lot of people are seeing this as a good sign: “Unemployment increases are slowing and since unemployment rates are lagging indicators, it means we’re already in a recovery”.

Unfortunately that’s not the case. This month’s numbers include 72,000 new government jobs. Around 60,000 of these are just temporary workers to conduct the 2010 census (source). Plus, as we’ve gone over before, the government can’t create jobs, it just inefficiently redistributes capital. After all, if a government can create lasting jobs without an adverse affect on the overall economy, why is there unemployment anywhere in the world?

Also, the BLS uses a business “birth/death” model to estimate jobs created or lost in small businesses. Logic tells us that these jobs must be contracting; after all small businesses don’t have capital reserves to weather a storm, and a lot of them are mortgage or real estate related which should be contracting as well.

However, the BLS claims that 226,000 small business jobs were created in April! This is very unlikely. Even the BLS methodology admits that this model is suspect:

The most significant potential drawback to this or any model-based approach is that time series modeling assumes a predictable continuation of historical patterns and relationships and therefore is likely to have some difficulty producing reliable estimates at economic turning points or during periods when there are sudden changes in trend. (Source)

Lastly, the previous two months of reports were vastly underreported and had to be revised:

The change in total nonfarm employment for February was revised from -651,000 to -681,000, and the change for March was revised from -663,000 to -699,000. Monthly revisions result from additional sample reports and the monthly recalculation of seasonal factors. (Source)

Given all of this, I don’t see how one could interpret the unemployment numbers as good news. I think my earlier prediction of 10% (U-3) as the high point in 2009 is too optimistic, we’ll probably see that by the end of the summer.

Here’s a random thought: you know how sonic booms are caused by pressure waves that are forced together, can’t “get out of the way” of each other, and end up merging into a single large shock wave?

Well, what if black holes are formed when something exceeds the speed of light? I know it’s not a very sophisticated theory (and most likely not original), but there does seem to be some small parallel between sound waves that can’t “get out of each other’s way” and “light can’t escape it”.

If so, this would explain why we haven’t been visited by any intelligent species from outer space; they just keep destroying themselves with blackholes. :-P

The Army last month stopped accepting felons and recent drug abusers into its ranks as the nation’s economic downturn helped its recruiting, allowing it to reverse a decline in recruiting standards that had alarmed some officers. (Source)

I guess this is good news…

NEW YORK (AP) – The New York Times is raising its prices for the second time in less than a year to help the newspaper offset a steep drop in advertising revenue.

The newsstand price for the Times’ weekday and Saturday editions will go up to $2 effective June 1, up from $1.50. The 33 percent increase comes just 11 months after the third largest U.S. daily newspaper last raised its prices.

The price for the national edition of the Sunday newspaper will rise to $6, an increase of a dollar. In New York, the Times’ Sunday newspaper will cost $5, also a $1 more.

The company that owns the Times lost $74 million during the first quarter as its advertising revenue plummeted by 27 percent from the same time last year. (Source)

The NY Times is losing money and needs more revenue from customers, so it decides to raise prices on newsstand prices? Seriously?

Basic supply and demand tells us that raising prices will reduce demand. Depending on the slope of the demand curve, perhaps the increased price offsets the lost demand, but that’s doubtful given two factors.

First, with the worsening economy, people are looking to cut back. Is a Sunday paper really worth $6? Probably not.

Second, there isn’t a barrier to entry for the news journalism. I can easily get the same information for cheaper or free.

The logical thing to do in this case is to lower prices and attract new customers. In this case, we’re looking at newstand sales, so it should be very easy to cut the price.

Selling a newspaper at a newsstand has a very low marginal cost; meaning, if you need to provide just one more newspaper to a given newsstand you need to just pay for the paper and ink. All the other expenses (writers, editors, trucks, business contracts, etc) are spread out across all the papers sold. Reducing the price of the newsstand paper should increase demand sufficiently to have a larger profit (sell for less, but at higher volume).

Someone at the NY Times needs to take basic economics. Until then, I think I’ll take any economic and financial opinions of Times editorial staff with an even larger grain of salt.

Recently there has been some buzz about state rights and whether states should secede from the union. Regardless of your thoughts on state rights and secession, I found the reporting of the issue to be fascinating.

Most of the news articles and commentary I read were pretty dismissive of the topic; here are some quotes from the first result that came up on a Google News search:

State wide, just 27 percent think Georgia would be better off independent of the U.S. and a mere 18 percent would approve of secession.

…

In Texas … a Rasmussen poll found just 18 percent of his constituents would vote to secede from the United States were such a ballot ever put forward. (Source)

The words “just” and “mere” are interestingly placed here. Sure, 27% and 18% aren’t big numbers. But secession would be an extremely impactful event; it’s not insignificant like a poll on if you think there will be a new M&M color this year.

The “just 27%” is more than one in four. So one in four people in Georgia think that their state would be better off if is wasn’t part of the United States. That’s a big deal, that’s not “just” some “mere” sentiment; that’s a lot of people.

Likewise in Texas, “just 18%” is one in five people who want their state to leave the union. Those aren’t small numbers.

It’s amazing how much the framing of discourse affects the interpretation. What if the same article had said: “A shockingly high 1 in 4 people believe their state would be better off if it left the United States.” That reads completely different, even though it cites the same data.

Of course, it’s hard to present data and information without any bias, but it would be nice if people just tried a little.

As you know, Crissy and I have been quite the nomads the past few weeks. On Sunday, we got back from about 5 days in California. All this traveling has given me some interesting anecdotes about the theater of the airport and border security.

First of all, it was much, much easier to enter Switzerland than for us to re-enter our own country. In Zurich, the guy just scanned our passports and said “Have a nice visit!” Customs was opt-in; if you had nothing to declare, just walk out of the airport! No forms, no fuss.

Granted, it wasn’t hard to re-enter the US, but it was quite annoying. Fill out this form, stand in this line, answer lots of questions, go stand in this line, answer more questions, and so on.

The fact that it’s easier to enter a foreign nation then your own is pretty frustrating.

Now about that stupid secondary screening. Usually, you only go to secondary screening if there’s a reason, like the TSA saw something weird in your carry-on luggage. Sometimes though, if TSA is staffed for it, they will “randomly” select people for secondary. And, as you may expect, I usually get chosen “randomly”.

It’s especially frustrating now that the Denver airport installed those Millimeter wave scanners. If you’re not familiar with these contraptions, they are basically scanners that produce a “three-dimensional image of the body, with facial features blurred for privacy.” These images are then reviewed by “by a Transportation Security Officer in a remote location.”

In other words, some guy is sitting in a dark room by himself and looking at naked pictures of you.

Fortunately, on my way back from California, I accidentally discovered a way for me to avoid secondary screening: stand in line behind a Sikh man.

Seriously, since the Sikh in front of me was wearing a turban, the TSA guys sent him straight to secondary and swooped in on him. I just walked right through as if as I were, well, white.

And how about that liquids rule? On a earlier trip, as I was departing the security area, I noticed that the flight attendant ahead of me had 2 1-liter bottles of water in her carry-on and had no problems getting through security!

Since we’re not supposed to have liquids (unless they are less than 3 oz), I was a little confused and asked her why the TSA didn’t take her water. It turns out that the airport worker unions raised a huge stink about the rules, so any airport employee is allowed to bring as much liquid as they want past security.

So, if you’re keeping track, I believe it’s: (1) unions are more important than “security”, (2) “security” is more important than liberty, and by the transitive property, (3) unions are more important than liberty. :-P

I came across an interesting article from NASA about how aerosols partly contribute to arctic warming and this passage jumped out at me:

Sulfates, which come primarily from the burning of coal and oil, scatter incoming solar radiation and have a net cooling effect on climate. Over the past three decades, the United States and European countries have passed a series of laws that have reduced sulfate emissions by 50 percent. While improving air quality and aiding public health, the result has been less atmospheric cooling from sulfates.

How weird is that? I guess it just goes to show how important the Law of Unintended Consequences is when we’re trying to control complex systems.

Reminds me of what Henry Hazlitt said about economics (which is pretty applicable to every field):

The art of economics consists in looking not merely at the immediate but at the longer effects of any act or policy; it consists in tracing the consequences of that policy not merely for one group but for all groups.