Bandarlog


	The Profile Trap Emails any sane person ought to immediately delete: Dear Sir, My name is Goodluck Abacha, illegitimate son of the former President of Nigeria. My father left an unclaimed bank account with the sum of twenty million US dollars ($20,000,000). I am contacting you because I am told you are a trustworthy and discreet person... Dear Mr. _______, My name is Joshua Goldberg. I am a staff writer for Big Circulation Magazine. I am contacting you because I am writing an article of [your industry/hobby/sexual obsession] and I have heard that you are involved in this area. I would very much like to interview you... People have generally learned to ignore the former, but the latter is as catnip to your average, educated American. As Ben A. points out, journalists as a class have given by their behavior ample evidence of their unfriendly intentions toward interview subjects. Why do people take the risk? What, aside from blameworthy amour propre, is the upside of submitting to an 02138 profile? As a rule, our firm forbids talking on the record to the press. If you want to get your side of a story out, you can always talk at length not for attribution. The only sacrifice is not having your name in print, which from the standpoint of controlling a story is no downside at all. If the journalist refuses a background conversation, you can then claim that he or she was unwilling to hear you out, which undermines his or her appearance of objectivity and makes it look that he or she only had an interest in talking to you if he or she could make you look bad in print. [Ben H.: 4/1/08 19:27]


	Ah, email... the best friend, save the Democratic Party, that the plaintiff's bar has ever had! [Ben H.: 4/1/08 19:21]


	Do the Crime, Serve the Time Hard to see how Merck and Schering end up anything but crucified on the allegation of holding back Vytorin data (2007 sales: $5.1B). You do not want your lead investigator to send emails like this: Is it correct that SP has decided not to present at AHA, but to await the two other, completely unvalidated, endpoints, which analysis is going to take us straight into 2008??!!?? If this is true, SP must have taken this decision without even the semblance of decency to consult me as PI of the study. I can tell you that if this is the case, our collaboration is over…This starts smelling like extending the publication for no other [than] political reasons and I cannot live with that. [Ben A.: 4/1/08 16:12]


	I Will Not Break Bread With You From the “Harvard Virginity” article: Chen and Fredell described the event to me later, when I met them separately for lunch. Chen was a small Asian woman in a miniskirt and stilettos who ate every crumb of everything, including a ginger cake with cream-cheese frosting and raspberry compote. Fredell, when the dessert menu came, paused at the prospect of a “chocolate explosion,” said, “I may as well — I mean, carpe diem, right?” And then reconsidered — she really wasn’t that hungry. So the slutty one eats everything, and the chaste one refuses dessert! Subtle. This section provides more evidence, if any were needed, that no one should ever dine with a journalist. Reporters offer to meet in restaurants for the sole purpose of inserting preconception-supporting color into their story. And then we all have to suffer through prose like the following: “Her mouth flecked with hamburger grease, Samantha Power insists on the morality of humanitarian intervention” “Frum discusses the advantages of welfare reform as he spears a poached pear” Interview subjects cannot win this game. Make reporters host you in their office. [Ben A.: 4/1/08 13:11]


	I missed that article. This instance tempts me to suspend the general principle "despise all Harvard student organizations" -- it's an uphill road for any group so set against the direction of the culture. And I have sympathy with the general project. [Ben A.: 3/31/08 15:06]


	Of course I don't have enough self-mastery to keep from commenting on that NY Times Harvard virgin article, but I have enough to restrict myself to an incidental comment. Quote: "She [the head virgin] said she read in [John Stuart] Mill that women are subordinated in relationships as a result of 'socially constructed norms.'" Damn, I need to re-read my Mill. [Doug: 3/31/08 14:09]


	More Great Moments in Pharmaceutical Advertising Why is Avodart different, you ask? That should clear it up. (seen in the New Yorker...) [Ben A.: 3/30/08 23:22]


	The Perils of Assortive Mating, Continued Deb and I both recently read The Singing Sands, a Josephine Tey mystery in which the mythical Arabian city of Wabar plays a crucial role. This occasioned the following: Me: “What did you think of Wabar (ph. Way-bar) being the Macguffin?” Deb: “Given that it’s Arabic, it’s surely Wabar (ph. wa-bar).” Me: “How can it be that even when the topic is the pronunciation of a fictional city, I can still manage to be wrong?” Where’s our 02138 profile? [Ben A.: 3/30/08 00:49]


	Nussbaum-Sunstein That meeting of minds -- nay, of souls -- is already caput. General rule: All break-ups are sad. Amendment: Unless 02138 profiled your relationship, in which case, as Ben H says, it's on you. [Ben A.: 3/29/08 19:06]


	It Exists to Be Written, Not to Be Read A collateral observation relating to the Scarf-Ladies: how many people do you figure read the Radcliffe Quarterly? Let's define read as, say, to start and finish two articles within it. It seems to me the Scarf Ladies hold pride of place in a certain class of periodicals, mailed to recipients who have never expressed an interest, filled with articles that could not possibly hold the interest of anyone but those mentioned or bylines within it. I'll venture that more people derive employment from the production of the Radcliffe Quarterly than read (by my definition) it in any given quarter. The investing world has a similar phenomenon. Every research department on the street puts out a whole library of periodic research. The Emerging Markets Weekly. The Emerging Markets Monthly. The Latin Quarterly. The Eastern European Annual Review. Some of these can run to 100 pages. And so on. A thought experiment: if I were to try to read every piece of period research that arrives in my mailbox in the course of a week, how long would it take? I'm fairly certain it would be more than a week. UBS's EM monthly runs nearly 200 pages. A package of weekly review research that takes longer than a week to read strikes me as approximately as useful as (to crib from Stephen Wright) being given a road map of the United States -- full scale. We indulge in a half-joking contest on the desk: find the piece of a research with the highest ratio of effort to readership. The current winner is the Vietnam Fortnightly from HSBC, which offers a panoptic overview of the Vietnamese markets twice a month at a length of 60 pages. Few people trade Vietnam; the country has few tradeable instruments; a minute examination of the latest inflation print does not relate to those instruments in a meaningful way; and nobody but nobody trades EM with HSBC. When I related this story to a friend in research, he cleared up my confusion. "They exist," he told me, "to be written, not to be read." [Ben H.: 3/29/08 18:31]


	One who cherishes a relationship would never submit to a couple-profile, especially one as fawning as 02138's. You might as well address a calligraphied invitation to God to rend the bond asunder in a public and embarassing way. The articles sink in the media pond without generating so much as a ripple. Yet they rest at the bottom, waiting to bob up suddenly upon a divorce or a break-up, dissolved except for the self-satisfied musings about their subjects' special secret to connubial bliss. Measuring the smugness of the Nussbaum-Sunstein blurb, I give it about 4 months before Nussbaum announces to the world she's leaving him for.... Homi Baba, maybe? Speaking of Spitz... I hope a get a little credit for refraining from the rhetorical equivalent of an endzone dance! [Ben H.: 3/29/08 18:10]


	"Power Couples" You know that loathsome magazine 02138? Well, they sure can pick 'em... [Ben A.: 3/29/08 01:06]


	The Benefits of Growing Up in a One Party State I grew up in a one-party state. Somerville is the heart of the Tip O’Neil’s 8th Congressional district, one of the most lopsidedly Democratic in the nation. General elections were held for entertainment value, but the Democratic primary settled all major appointments. The town may have gone for Reagan over Mondale, but no Republican has been elected alderman, much less mayor or state rep, in my lifetime. Elections, however, were highly contested, and for a number of years, quite consequential. Beginning in the late 70s reform-minded politicians began to turn around a corrupt political culture. In one landmark election, Sal Albano beat the frankly crooked Vinny Piro in a write in campaign. Piro had been caught on tape by the FBI demanding “walking around money to grease a few guys” as a precondition to providing a liquor license. After Piro took the primary, Albano contested the general with a write-in/sticker campaign and won despite being off the ballot. These hard-fought Democratic civil wars taught a useful lesson. We kids were all Democrats – there was nothing else we could imagine being -- but we knew from an early age that some people in our party were crooks and low-lives, and not to be trusted. The polarization of American national politics obscured this lesson, but acrimonious primaries have been teaching it anew. Paul Krugman’s incompetent jihad against Barack Obama has convinced many Democrats that he may really be just as “shrill” as had been alleged. And if Hillary really does drag the nomination out to the end, a whole generation of liberals may understand what the right found distasteful about the Clintons all those many years ago. Addendum: In the interests of non-partisanship and equal time let me share the lessons the Florida GOP primary taught me: lots of Republican primary voters really don’t like immigrants in a fairly elemental way. Also, radio evangelists: often creepy! No surprises, in other words. [Ben A.: 3/27/08 02:23]


	Scarf Ladies and Tweedy Men There's nothing to say that Doug hasn't said better below, but yes, yes, a thousand times yes. The Harvard Union (janitors, secretaries, etc.) ran a great gimmick on this topic in the mid 90s. For two days they posted a sign with in Harvard Square with some large number -- I don't recall exactly, but it something like 1,734, certainly above a thousand. Then then placed a second sign underneath reading "that's a lot of administrators." Indeed, it is. [Ben A.: 3/26/08 01:12]


	Low Beats High Lost is a better show than The Wire. That is all. [Ben A.: 3/25/08 23:57]


	I am the Change I Have Been Waiting For At least I give a hell of a lot more money to charity than Obama... Is the deal that politicians feel they are underpaid, or are already 'contributing' through not taking lobbying jobs? [Ben A.: 3/25/08 18:33]


	The Scarf Ladies The back cover of the latest Radcliffe Quarterly addressed to Dao prompts the question of why anthropologists have not given more attention to the Scarf Ladies. You could almost call them the Cambridge Ladies, but they're not the people e.e. cummings had in mind when he wrote that poem. Like the most earnest grad students -- another group that rubs me the wrong way -- they love explaining to you why their research on female photographers of the Weimar Republic is so desperately important. Unlike grad students, they need to make time for something other than that research, namely the social functions on which grants and tenure and the occasional non-academic job -- and, through these, the purchase of more scarves -- depend. I hypothesize that the scarves are a sort of guild sign: they let other people in the guild know who needs to be glad-handed and ass-kissed. Maybe the scarves are color-coded by their wearers' rank, like judo belts. I have been fortunate enough to keep far enough away from them to make a test of this hypothesis impossible. But the red scarf of the woman pictured below (in a Radcliffe Institute appeal for money) clearly signifies high status indeed. A word of warning: do not on any account ask this woman about the significance of her brooch. P.S. I've occasionally wondered what happened to that $50 million or so that Larry Summers desperately threw at his critics just before they stripped him of his presidency at Harvard. Why do I get the feeling I'm looking at the answer? [Doug: 3/24/08 09:32]


	Stone-ites in Finance His British equivalents have already made the jump into finance. [Ben H.: 3/24/08 07:51]


	Roger Stone Great article. I mentioned before in connection with some similar link that my uncle plays this role -- but as a lawyer rather than as a pure rake -- for the Michigan GOP. He happens to be swinging by Paris today to see us and his grand-niece, on his way to Dubai (Burj Al Arab). I am eager to hear some interesting stories over dinner at the George V hotel. America definitely has a place for characters like this. They aren't the problem. The problem is that their natural foils -- people driven mainly by conscience -- seem to have unilaterally disarmed over the last 10 years. I would like to think that this presidential election will witness the resurgence of these people. I would like to think that economic trouble will hurt the party in power. But the fact is that when people worry about their money they look around for an old white guy in a suit. It's Pavlov. You can't fight Pavlov any more than you can fight Darwin. P.S. Speaking of people Ben H should put on retainer, Dao's company's lawyer happens also to be Jerome Kerviel's. Jerome seems like a talented guy and I bet you could get his services at a deep, deep discount. [Doug: 3/24/08 04:41]


	Must Read Roger Stone Dark Prince. Comments: 1. If this guy had no role whatsoever in the Emperor's Club V.I.P. story, it would be a surprise 2. Ben H, your firm should put him on retainer 3. His jeans are organized by "jeaniness" 4. I own a black suit, and now feel ashamed [Ben A.: 3/24/08 01:22]


	As I Get Older, I Become More Like My Favorite Authors Our flight out of Maui was canceled, and the airline put us up in a resort hotel. We were unaccountably lodged in a "concierge floor" -- a sort of hotel-within-the-hotel with nicer rooms and free food. To enter, you had to open a wrought iron gate with a key card. A sign posted at the side of the gate read "Napula Towers -- An Exclusive Club." Seeing this, I exploded: "an exclusive club is ten living recipients of the Victoria Cross meeting in a pub; this is just about money." Basically, I am becoming G.K. Chesterton. Hope I can keep the weight off... [Ben A.: 3/22/08 12:08]


	Mark Twain Knew Something About America From Life on the Mississippi, a fictionalized account of pre-fight bragging: Then he jumped up in the air and cracked his heels together again and shouted out-- 'Whoo-oop! I'm the old original iron-jawed, brass-mounted, copper-bellied corpse-maker from the wilds of Arkansaw!--Look at me! I'm the man they call Sudden Death and General Desolation! Sired by a hurricane, dam'd by an earthquake, half-brother to the cholera, nearly related to the small-pox on the mother's side! Look at me! I take nineteen alligators and a bar'l of whiskey for breakfast when I'm in robust health, and a bushel of rattlesnakes and a dead body when I'm ailing! I split the everlasting rocks with my glance, and I squench the thunder when I speak! Whoo-oop! Stand back and give me room according to my strength! Blood's my natural drink, and the wails of the dying is music to my ear! Cast your eye on me, gentlemen!--and lay low and hold your breath, for I'm bout to turn myself loose!' Compare: Rick Flair [Ben A.: 3/22/08 11:16]


	Bear The Chinese may get to keep their heads! CITIC didn't manage to close on their $1bio deal with Bear and they will walk away (or at least try to walk away) from the deal. I think they'll likely succeed and live to squander capital another day. [Ben H.: 3/17/08 17:43]


	Bear Stearns Ben, you said the Chinese govt. bought a chunk of Bear in October. What is that worth now? Actually, the question I'd really like to have answered is what happens to the functionaries who made that deal. Now, presumably the head people at Bear will walk away with slightly fewer gajillions than they'd hoped. (The bold risk-taking of our capitalist system, indeed!) Something tells me the Chinese won't get off as easy. [Doug: 3/17/08 16:07]


	1.57 $/€ Ben H, didn't you say might have to swing through Europe this Spring on business? We very much hope you will visit us because you are one of our few American friends who can still afford to do so. [Doug: 3/17/08 13:55]


	The Gods Smile On Doug Just as my recent freelance web gig is wrapping up, my laptop dies. Without access to The Onion, the NYT, Slate, and Scrabulous, I might actually accomplish something in the remainder of 2008. (Note I'm writing this from Dao's old laptop, which is a huge pain to connect to the Internets.) [Doug: 3/17/08 12:28]


	Best Public Service Ad Ever? Is here. Academic origins here. [Ben A.: 3/16/08 14:57]


	Why Some People Think Public Sector Unions Aren't in the Public Interest 108 Boston city employees make more than the mayor. Any guesses as to occupation? [Ben A.: 3/16/08 12:58]


	Real Estate Crash It's the metaphor that's on everybody's lips, but the phrase has a literal meaning that sometimes applies. I ride in my cab to work past the site of this fatal accident every morning. I won't claim that I foresaw an accident, but I can tell you that I often wondered how the develop got a permit to build such a tall building on a small, non-corner lot. I've also from time to time gotten stuck there as the contractor positions materials in the pre-dawn hours, without benefit of an official street-closing. You can bet that as I stewed in the cab I wished unpleasantness on this developer. Don't mess with me... [Ben H.: 3/15/08 16:45]


	Spitzer Fallout Some illuminating journalism: Take, for example, the CEO of an international airline who was a cocaine freak. Once a month, usually over a weekend, he would check into a suite at the Pierre, call the agency and book a dozen or so girls. He would book the girls for four hours each, staggered over the following two days. According to the girls, all he did was sit half-naked on his bed next to a mountain of cocaine, which he snorted constantly while crying about his divorce and the stress he endured at work. As the hours progressed, he would become increasingly paranoid and irrational. Every so often he would pass the tray of cocaine over to the girl and insist that she take some. So I would only send girls who had long hair, which they used to hide the fact that they were not really snorting the cocaine but rather brushing it aside; and I would make sure the girls were sufficiently tough to handle a guy who would occasionally sidle up to the window, look down and mutter that “they might be coming to get him.” Please, let that be Branson... [Ben A.: 3/15/08 03:51]


	Every credit transaction has two sides. I've maintained in previous posts that in considering the US household indebtedness debacle, we ought to consider the lender side as much, if not more, than the borrower side. After all, your typical household borrower doesn't claim much financial sophistication. You bedazzle him with dancing aliens offering wads of cash and he takes the cash. You surely don't expect him to run a sophisticated intertemporal consumption-smoothing model, do you? With American high school math? Please! The lenders, on the other hand, should possess financial sophistication along with their oodles of money. However, in the last few years, the ultimate creditors have been the central banks of the developing world and Middle East (which i exclude from the developing world, on the grounds that it isn't poor and it isn't developing along any dimension except craziness). These central banks have undertaken a deliberate policy of building enormous reserves. This makes sense up to a point. If a country has huge USD debts and has suffered repeated sudden stops of capital inflows, its central bank has good reason to build up USD assets as a cushion against volatility. To the extent a country has embarked on a campaign of urbanization and industrialization via undervalued currency (see Dooley's "Bretton Woods II" thesis), it will have to build up USD assets. An oil producer facing a tsunami of USD due to a spike in petroleum prices is counseled to treat the windfall as temporary, and to increase savings, which means: building up USD assets. Now, monetary authorities don't specialize in investing, so all that USD liquidity got plowed into the money markets; and financial intermediaries found ways to deploy it that earned those intermediaries fees, carry, and bonuses. That amounted to pushing USD credit to any and all takers. Who will suffer the losses? Your average American has a mostly USD consumption basket and is as likely to have net monetary liabilities as monetary assets. Those central banks that piled up USD assets? Well, they're worth a heck of a lot less in their own currency, or EUR, GBP, JPY, etc. They've lost (if you measure winning and losing as a matter of returns). Investment and commercial banks -- or more precisely, their global shareholders -- have lost. European pension funds and institutions that bought subprime paper have lost. And the sovereign wealth funds that have stepped in to "buy America"? Let's see how they've done: China bought Blackstone stake last June and has lost 53% in USD terms. China bought Bear Stears stake last October and has lost 47% Dubai bought into Och-Ziff in November and has lost 25% Abu Dhabi bought in to AMD and Citi last November and lost 49% and 29% on each, respectively... and so on. The slackjaw? Well, Barney Frank has just tabled a bill to get servicers to grant principal relief, with FHA funding the new lower-balance loan. If Mr. Slackjaw sells his house 5 years down the road at a profit, FHA gets paid back and Slackjaw keeps all the gains, less a mere 3% fee. The SWF shareholders of the banks that held the junior pieces of ABS -- their loss is permanent. America funds its current account deficit by inflicting capital losses on the rest of the world. It's almost a matter of accounting identity. If other countries simply refuse to consume more than they produce, there really is no other way to balance the ledger... [Ben H.: 3/13/08 15:04]


	1.56 $/€ No doubt there are proximate causes for the dollar's collapse that are beyond my understanding -- unwinding carry trades, capacitor flux swaps, and whatnot. But I flatter myself to think that I was basically right in crediting the predictions of Krugman and other popular economists: A massive debt-financed trade deficit can only go on so long before it affects the value of a country's (fiat) money. I'm glad a lot of our assets are in euros but, as usual, kicking myself that so much is in dollars. Of course, I'm looking for a Bush-as-villain angle here, but I am led to the usual conclusion that Bush is just an epiphenomenon of the real syndrome, an American cultural climate in which all citizens, except maybe the most recent immigrants, feel entitled to Hummers and 96-inch Blu-Ray screens and second homes, and are willing to suspend disbelief regarding asset bubbles, loan readjustments, etc., and just live, i.e. spend, in the moment. This attitude predates Bush; the Clinton years had their own bubble, as I recall. But the bubble that's currently popping has a certain purity to it; in the Clinton years you had to at least learn HTML before entertaining the fantasy that you were entitled to riches, whereas in the Bush years you just had to drive around your subdivision guessing which McMansion would double in price first. Bush and "deficits don't matter" Cheney certainly aggravated the syndrome by setting a spend-way-beyond-your-means example for households. But they are not the source of the syndrome. Now that a recession is more or less here, a lot of Democrats are going to say, see, Republicans are bad for the economy. I myself won't do this; the size of the GDP just doesn't matter that much to me, and if the slack-jawed yokels have to make do with fewer hummers, flat-screen TV's, and country homes, so much the better. In fact I would dearly like a recession to be an occasion for a re-thinking of the nation's values -- or rather value, since we've pretty much winnowed them down to money. I'm not holding my breath for a Democratic proposal along these lines. What I expect is more like, "Vote for us, and get even bigger cars and TV's and houses than the Bush years provided you." [Doug: 3/13/08 13:16]


	I Lose ... the battle to understand the jokes of the latest generation of computer nerds. [I guess Jason S. who sent me the site has not given up hope.] [Doug: 3/12/08 17:37]


	Unfortunately, exchange rate quotations are nominal ratios. You'll come home a millionaire only to discover that millionaires can afford to dine... at McDonald's! [Ben H.: 3/12/08 14:38]


	1.55 $/€ I'm going to get a job at McDonald's and come home a millionaire! (Of course, I've promised to do a lot of smart financial things on this blog, with the follow-through that we know.) [Doug: 3/12/08 12:51]


	So, so, so good... Spitzer tied to prostitution ring. It's always the crusaders for virtue, isn't it? [Ben H.: 3/10/08 14:24]


	How about "FARC'd" for a title? No? What about "InFARCtus"? [Doug: 3/7/08 18:10]


	FARC on the ropes! After last weekend's liquidation of FARC number-two "Raul Reyes", the Colombian Army delivered another piece of good news for the coming weekend, killing FARC's number-three Ivan Rios. Now a rumor is making the rounds that Ingrid Betancourt will be released in the next few hours. We heard from a Colombian journalist that the executions were fruit of a intelligence coup. Apparently, US authorities caught a US person supplying satellite phones to FARC. US intelligence kept his apprehension a secret and used him to supply bugged phones to the rebels. Over the past few weeks, with US help the Colombians have been eavesdropping on FARC... [Ben H.: 3/7/08 14:32]


	Crimson Dhimmis Not like I was ever going to give the featherbedding, endowment-hoarding douchebags who administer Harvard any money anyway, but this certainly puts another nail in the coffin. [Ben H.: 3/5/08 08:42]


	Sad News for Geeks and Half-Orcs Everywhere Gary Gygax is dead. His last saving-throw may have come up low, but we won't forget him. [Ben H.: 3/5/08 08:24]


	The Tie-ers Better yet, make sure the shrill harridan wins ugly, at the last minute, after a bruising fight featuring bare-knuckles political brawling and underhanded political dirty tricks. Make sure her "victory" will give the Bush-deranged coastal liberals conniptions, plus a new "stolen election" target for their paranoia to distract them from Republicans! Bonus: Make sure the harridan's base of support comes from non-college educated working class white people, so that the McGovernite coastal left can fully exercise its natural tendency toward condescension... [Ben H.: 3/5/08 08:10]


	The Losers Hey, I got a great idea, let's put up a shrill, unelectable harridan against John McCain! Bonus idea -- John Kerry for VP! The hair, the gravitas ... what's not to like? [Doug: 3/5/08 02:06]


	The Loser Ben H, I recall you listed "The Loser" among the best books you read last year. Watching the stock market tank and rhodium prices not tank, it occurs to me that you might have your copy shipped to me if you're done. It is important to continually expand one's self-knowledge. [Doug: 3/3/08 16:12]


	Leap Day and Productivity An extra day in the month makes no difference to the ratio of work to pay for hourly workers. But what about salaried workers? Can you ever recall having received a 3.5% monthly salary boost in prior Leap februaries? One might argue that the offered salary presupposes a 365.25 day year. But to the extent that the average job tenure falls well short of a period long enough for year-length to average out, there are definitely distributional effects. Moreover, in an economy heavily tilted toward salaried workers, the statistical authorities ought to make a special Leap February adjustment to real wages and productivity. I wonder if BLS does this? In fact, given that I'm robbing my salaried employees of a day's work already, maybe I'll assign one of them to look it up... [Ben H.: 2/29/08 13:25]


	Leap Day The stimulus package I offered the American economy a few weeks ago seems not to have worked (although a mass printout of 100-dollar bills would explain the current exchange rate of 1.52 dollars to the euro). So here's another, better economy-boosting idea. We increase productivity by reducing the time spent on complicated date calculations. Thirty days hath September, not exactly 52 weeks per year, leap days -- if you add up the time individuals spend battling these numerical oddities, plus the complications and bugs that enter computer programs because of them, it's a huge drag on the economy. My plan is to fire enormous rocket engines in a few precisely-timed bursts so as to alter the period of (1) the earth's rotation on its own axis, and (2) its rotation around the sun. If we can slow down days so that there's only 336 per year, we can have twelve months of exactly four weeks each. Plus, I think scientists have found that humans' natural circadian rhythms are, in the absence of sunlight, more than 24 hours long, so this is another boost to productivity. And if all the rocket exhaust makes a lot of CO₂, we just push out the earth's orbit away from the sun by a few percent, and thereby counteract the warming effect. [Doug: 2/29/08 08:52]


	I Am A Loser I can't believe I didn't buy rhodium. Do I chalk it up to my ectomorphy and the tendency toward passivity that goes along with it? I mean, I gave a pretty compelling one-line case for this investment strategy in a Bandarlog post four years ago. "I'm putting all my money into rhodium" I said in that post -- but it was just bluster. Like all ectomorphs I preferred to put my hands in my pockets (if we don't our backs are unsupported and our posture gets even worse) and do nothing. Or maybe I have a laziness that is uncorrelated with ectomorphy. Either way, what's surprising is that I actually went 90% of the way toward doing some commodity trading, putting money into an account with one of the main companies that allows individuals to do it. The money just sat there for a year or two earning 0% interest before I closed the account, tired of getting mail from them. Apparently I had better things to do than put on trades. Although I have difficulty imagining what those things were. Incidentally, I wonder if Paul Morphy had ectomorphy. It seems likely but Wikipedia doesn't give height and weight stats for chess players. [Doug: 2/29/08 07:42]


	Have a great time in Hawaii, Ben, and don't worry about adding new content to the site, since I plan to fill about a page a day about how enormous a loser I am for never buying rhodium. [Doug: 2/28/08 16:28]


	Re: Rhodium DAMN DAMN DAMN DAMN I remember I cleared out space in our hall closet in the East Village to put some of the stuff ... [Doug: 2/28/08 09:18]


	Only In France Something like the following conversation (I don't remember the exact words, which were in French anyway) took place on a sidewalk near our apartment recently, when we ran into a colleague of Dao and his wife, who had given birth to their first child two weeks previously. Dao: So how are you feeling? Colleague's Wife: Not too bad, all things considered! Dao: And the baby, she's doing well? Colleague's Wife: Yup, doing just fine! Dao: Where is she? Colleague's Wife: Upstairs sleeping. Dao: So what are you doing down here? Colleague and Colleague's Wife: Taking a cigarette break. I suppose they should be commended for not smoking in the baby's room, anyway. [Doug: 2/28/08 09:17]


	Doug, You Should Try Trading Commodities You mentioned your foolproof rhodium strategy. Apparently, you aren't the only one looking at the metal. From today's WSJ article on Phibro's Andrew J. Hall: Mr. Hall has sought profits in more unusual commodities, too. Twice in the past decade he has assembled big stockpiles of rhodium, an obscure metal used in catalytic converters. He got out both times at around 10 times his money. [Ben H.: 2/28/08 09:15]


	Aloha Expect minimal posting over the next two weeks, my friends! [Ben A.: 2/27/08 23:39]


	It's A Gift That Keeps Giving White People Like: Threatening to move to Canada Being the Only White Person Around. Priceless picture on the last one... [Ben A.: 2/25/08 10:37]


	When Elitism Was Easy You're spot on, Doug. When you own 90% of the wealth and can deny people access to education and opportunity by fiat, no passwords are necessary. You don't need a special way of eating asparagus then! I can't resist quoting GKC's conclusion: Do you tell me they don't eat asparagus with their fingers now? Do I not know that in some of the best houses they have little tongs for each person, which are charming? Have I not heard that asparagus is now lowered into the open mouth on a string, or shot into the mouth with a small gun, or eaten with the toes, or not eaten at all? No; I do not know, that is what I wish to point out. They have changed the password. [Ben A.: 2/24/08 21:09]


	Chesterton Quotes Those are gems. The one on elitism is especially insightful about modern life. (I don't think it applies so much to older elites like pre-Revolution European nobility or Indian Brahmins.) [Doug: 2/24/08 14:33]


	Earth to Ralph Nader: Die [Doug: 2/24/08 13:56]


	An Evening of Deafening Clamor and Anglo-Catholicism The bad idea was mine -- go see a friend's band at the over-amplified deathtrap which is downstairs at the Cantab Lounge. As could have been predicted, my friend's set was delayed, stranding me for ninety minutes in a deafening, conversation-killing clamor. Fortunately the sorcery of wireless enabled me to read a few essays by Chesterton. There's a man with a knack for the arresting phrase! On the Irksomeness of Finding Oneself in Agreement with a Political Opponnent: It is his business to be wrong, it is his business to be beaten; he is the invisible playmate who sides with the Frenchman and never can win. On the "Gospel of Work" and Valorizing of Industrialists: A great deal of harm has been done by setting up these oily machines as models for mankind. I would not point to these ideal industrious men; I would turn away men's eyes from the painful picture of the Industrious Apprentice; I would veil their faces lest they should be disturbed by the repulsive appearance of the man who Attended These Classes and Is Making Big Money Now On Elitism: The brotherhood of man is a fact which in the long run wears down all other facts. Therefore, a privileged class, if it would avoid sliding naturally back into the body of mankind, must keep up an incessant excitement about new projects, new cultures and new prejudices, new skirts and stockings. It must tell a new tale every day or perish, like the lady of the Arabian Night On Life: Our grounds for gratitude are really far greater than our powers of being grateful [Ben A.: 2/24/08 02:30]


	Is It Safe? Apparently not. If you don't smell a rat here... McCain and the Environment A 2003 op-ed on global warming. I agree that insurance against low-probability catastrophic risks are exactly the types of goods democratic societies tend to under-purchase. [Ben A.: 2/23/08 22:22]


	An Inconvenient Truth Finally saw Al Gore's flick. The fact that I watched it in this new campaign season meant that its spooky climate predictions were outweighed, for me, by the political thoughts it brought on. First among them is the stunned nausea, which has proved as inexhaustible as the wind and the sun, brought on by the thought that my countrymen could have chosen Bush/Cheney over this guy. The second thought is a new one. Whatever the varieties of baseness that induced people vote for Bush in 2004 -- fear, hatred, etc. -- the chief variety that accounted for his 2000 win was probably greed. And one of the chief reasons why nobody does anything about the looming global warming catastrophe is stupidity: The average American cannot locate his own country on a map, much less understand complicated chemistry and physics. The "idiocracy" hypothesis suggests that this latter problem is insoluble. But what if McCain-style greed -- pure-competition, meritocracy greed -- gained the upper hand over Bush-style cronyist greed, and designer-children genetics became a commercial reality? Families might be forced to put all their resources into smartening up the gene pool, lest their kids end up dirt poor. Over a 50 to 100 year time frame, you might see a nation emerge that is smart enough not to commit environmental suicide. Not that that will necessarily be soon enough ... [Doug: 2/23/08 19:28]


	Mixed Metaphor Master It's Tom Friedman. [Ben A.: 2/23/08 10:45]


	Fun Libertarian Quote of the Day "I concede that there is a collective action problem in providing actual public goods, like the military and statues of politicians on horseback" --Megan McCardle [Ben A.: 2/23/08 10:42]


	Metaphor Mixmaster of Teheran The U.S. sanctions against Iran must have kept the latest version of Word, with the F6 metaphor unscramble feature, out of the country. Or, if they do have it, Ahmadinejad's speechwriters haven't yet learned to use it: The world powers established this filthy bacteria, the Zionist regime, which is lashing out at the nations in the region like a wild beast... [Israel] won support [from the other nations] which created it as a scarecrow." [Ben H.: 2/22/08 07:32]


	Doesn't F6 Unmix Metaphors In Microsoft Word? No excuse for David Brooks: McCain was loyal to each camp in a house divided. But the poisons emanating from the rift have spread outward. On the other hand he gets props for coining "hope-amine" the other day, the brain chemical stimulated by Obama speeches. Inventing modern-day humours to explain various behaviors, in the manner of the self-styled neuro-philosophers who so annoy us, is a trick we should have come up with ourselves. [Doug: 2/22/08 04:34]


	How Swift is the Times' Boat One difference between literal Swift Boat campaign against Kerry and the Times' article about McCain is that the one was a paid-for advertisement by an interest group, identified as such. The Times and other mainstream outlets ignored the Swift Boat group for quite a while, until their silence made them look silly. The McCain story comes courtesy of the supposedly neutral Times. Even assuming the story in itself rises to the level of "news fit to print", one would expect the Times to print it as soon as its reporters nailed the story and not to sit on it until McCain clinches the nomination! For myself, I do think the story is worthy of note, if not the innuendo about an possible affair. McCain holds himself out as a paragon of political virtue, fit to dictate to the rest of us how we may participate in the political process lest we somehow create an "appearance of corruption" by our participation. It is entirely relevant that he pals around with lobbyists, flies around on their paymasters' private jets, and intercedes on their behalf before regulatory bodies. [Ben H.: 2/21/08 19:03]


	Weak Stuff That Times "attack" on McCain is pretty weak. The pro-Democratic media need to come up with some juicier lies about McCain, and pay off some of his former associates to go around repeating them on TV, if they intend to win. That such attacks are contemptible doesn't bother me since I already hold the current crop of American voters in contempt. They validated Swift-boating as a tactic in 2004 and it will probably be a generation before the stench of Bush/Cheney leaves the U.S. political atmosphere. Also, speaking of contempt, wasn't McCain Swift-boated by Bush in 2000 in South Carolina, and didn't he come back to stand next to Bush in 2004 with his tail between his legs, hoping he'd still be fit enough in 2008 to get his turn at the nomination? I had respect for McCain until that moment. [Doug: 2/21/08 16:30]


	It Does Seem Like a Waste When an attractive person joins a lobby we all lose. More Billy Tauzins, please! p.s. The timing is remarkable [Ben A.: 2/21/08 00:39]


	The Next Step for Campaign Finance Reform Non-Circumvention It's apparently not enough to to cleanse politics of moneyed interests. We need also to reduce the influence of sexy interests. We must impose strict limits on the hotness of lobbyists! Quite apart from the merits and relevance of the story, I can't help but cock an eyebrow at the timing of the NYT's disclosure! [Ben H.: 2/20/08 23:45]


	There is no Golem At least in the sphere of political debate. In other words, Doug, I agree that there’s nothing more disempowered (and indeed, more depressing) than passionate political blogging. Go out and plant a tree people! The point of my political commentary analogy was that the desire to mold things the world to your will – especially via the political process, but in other ways as well – seems like a basically juvenile enterprise. The true golem is state power, which explains why our founders imposed age requirements on the presidency.* *There’s a movie where 16-year olds get the vote, with the result that a half-Elvis/half-John Lennon pop star is elected president and imposes a hippie totalitarianism. It’s a great favorite of my dad’s. [Ben A.: 2/20/08 22:56]


	Another Sign of the Economic Apocalypse "Sharper Image" has filed for bankruptcy. If a business cannot prosper by selling electric massagers and ionic air-purifiers to browsers at "urban festival markets" and airplane passengers, what hope is there for enterprises with less robust business models? My god, will Brookstone be next? [Ben H.: 2/20/08 13:33]


	Castro Didn't Imprison His Opponents, He Forced Them To Be Free! I hope you noticed that the "tenured clown" who wrote that pro-Castro post was an expert in Rousseau. [Doug: 2/20/08 06:21]


	Serious Response To The Kabbalah Analogy My overall impression of how Americans' political views change is that a lot of the really silly stuff gets filtered out between 20 and 30, when we go to work and get a 401(K) plan. And not only fuzzy liberal ideas, but also the overly clear conservative ideas which make today's economy out to be a pure meritocracy. One is also forced at this stage into appreciating, whether grudgingly or not, the importance of all the different personality types for making the world function; whereas in college, one can hang out exclusively with jocks or computer nerds or singer/songwriters and honestly think -- if only everyone were like me, if only laws were passed to privilege us. I am less sure that we gain political wisdom between 30 and 40. For most of us these are Prime Earning Years, when our ability to do one economically useful task peaks and the rest of our abilities sort of stagnate. Ben H's point about professional commentators is well taken. I would add that it's not just constant immersion in the subject matter that deranges one's thoughts on it; the market itself rewards hewing to one ideology without nuance. (The market mechanism being of course lazy dyads.) You could program a computer to write George Will columns or NY-Times-Columnist columns and millions would still read them for the "Gosh, I am right in my views, aren't I" rush that goes so well with that first cup of coffee. How about those clowns in Congress -- what a bunch of clowns! (You could probably program a computer to write my blog posts too, but let's not go there.) The comment thread of that pro-Castro Crooked Timber post is a perfect example. Castro defeated an unjust capitalist order and brought health care to the masses! Well, yes he did. Castro is a dictator who has imposed unfreedom and uniform poverty for a half-century! Well, that's true too. The reason people will go back and forth for hundreds of comments insisting that these are mutually exclusive is that it gives that fighting-the-good-fight-from-behind-the-keyboard rush. I think that Kabbalah-worthy bloggers would agree that Cuba is just eternally fucked and switch the discussion to how to avoid the same thing happening elsewhere. Chavez wouldn't have emerged in Venezuela if its ruling classes hadn't ignored its dirt-poor classes so totally for so many decades. Now, it's not obvious that the U.S. could have changed that at reasonable cost, but it would be more fruitful to argue that question (and the same one applied to various poor countries today) than to keep up this "Castro's good! -- No he's bad!" for another hundred posts. An answer to that question would be a useful lesson from Cuba. The lesson Ben A draws, while true and possibly useful to other dictators, is a bit skewed as phrased because it suggests that Castro's own anti-US attitude was a pose. My impression is that Castro has always been a true believer and that he's had enough good reasons to dislike the U.S. to shake the charge of opportunism. To get back to the Kabbalah analogy, though, I wondered what the analogous power in the political-debate sphere was supposed to be. A blog is just about the least power-conferring thing I can think of. A syndicated column may confer some power but it seems to me that most people who have them are already over 40. Maybe restricting suffrage to older people would be a good idea, though. It kind of baffles me that 18-year-olds are allowed to vote but not drink. [Doug: 2/20/08 05:15]


	Lessons of Cuba Their health system has signally failed to reduce an appallingly high death rate due to drowning... [Ben H.: 2/19/08 14:27]


	The Lesson of Cuba Do you want to run an illiberal propaganda state, suppress dissent, and reduce a country with one of the most advanced economies in the region to a basket case? Good news! Left wing support for your tyranny can be purchased on the cheap. Just throw some health care at poor people* and strike some anti-US poses, and that will win you emotional support from all sorts of tenured clowns. *And we should of course trust epidemiology data emanating from autocracies. [Ben A.: 2/19/08 12:17]


	Sure, there is. We already have precedent for a country full of Albanians. It's called Albania and it is a good argument against leaving sovereignty in the hands of Albanians!! [Ben H.: 2/19/08 11:05]


	Foreign Policy Idealism Is not strong at Bandarlog central, I gather. Nonetheless, to this optimist/sucker, it seems possible that Kosovo's independence may work out reasonably well. Of course, no knowledge of local conditions encumbers this judgment. Are there reasons to be pessimistic? [Ben A.: 2/19/08 09:36]


	I Just Looked At My Watch ... Isn't it about time for the macacas in the Balkans to start flinging feces at each other again? [Doug: 2/18/08 17:54]


	Kabbalah and Politics While I accept that most people's thinking, including my own, becomes more ordered, nuanced, and complex with age and experience, I wonder if the highly politically engaged tend to fall outside the norm in this regard. It feels to me that a lot of political commentators get more unhinged the more time they spend intensively studying politics. Was the Paul Krugman of Currencies and Crises a less ordered thinker than the Paul Krugman of the NY Times Op-Ed page? It seems to me that commentators who themselves have strong political views must suffer a dispiriting experience. They have a particular view of how the world should be. An infinity of potential deviations from this ideal exist. Therefore, the dominant experience of their professional lives is having thing go other than they would wish. This continuous losing curdles their personalities and disorders their wits... [Ben H.: 2/17/08 16:21]


	Kabbalah And Golems I don't know, I've never bought the idea that by studying Kabbalah one can create cloddish, artificial humanoids of frightful appearance. Of course, whether one can thereby become such a humanoid is another story. [Doug: 2/17/08 13:16]


	The Kabbalah and Political Commentary Rabbinic tradition restricts study of the Kabbalah to the mature -- a student should be forty, married, and have two children. This always made sense to me. A book giving instruction on sacred magic and golem-creation should be kept away from the young, passionate, and ungrounded. You would not entrust powers like these to anyone in their 20s. I do not yet qualify for Kabbalah study. And even so I reflect on my own, relatively staid, youth with amazement at the disorder in my thinking, and at how replete it was with prejudgment and false certainty. Had I had access to the golem-book, who knows what damage I could have done. Readers will anticipate the course of this analogy. Rather than complete it, I will offer a thought experiment. What would be the consequence if Kabbalistic requirements were imposed on the authors of political commentary? Which policies would be emphasized, which beliefs fade in prominence, or would the arguments look much the same? [Ben A.: 2/17/08 00:53]


	Latest Controversy In France President Sarkozy, capping a string of out-of-the-blue policy diktats, has called on each fifth-grader to spend lots of time learning all about a French child victim of the Holocaust. I've even seen the word "sponsor" used, evoking a sort of pen pal from beyond the grave. Basically everyone, even representatives of what passes for the Jewish lobby here, has been critical: the plan would be "creepy", "in poor taste", and potentially "traumatic" for schoolchildren of that age. My view is that the plan would indeed be creepy, but perhaps less so than the recent Japanese one to make all schoolchildren carry a tamagotchi comfort girl. [Doug: 2/16/08 09:34]


	Can't Fight Morphology Last night we went to a Mexican restaurant here in Paris. There aren't a lot of Mexicans here, what with Maximilian, Napoleon III and all that. Back when I hadn't quite gotten over my bitter anti-PC college habit of ironic racist jokes, some Mexicans I saw here prompted me to scratch my head: "What gives, Paco? You can't wade across the Atlantic!" So anyway, Mexican cuisine has few representatives except chains that make the US Chili's/Chi-Chi's chains look good. The place we went last night was good but not nearly good enough, objectively speaking, to merit its prices -- twice what you'd pay for the same thing in New York City, to say nothing of America. Thus most of the patrons were people incapable of objectivity: American expats desperate for a fix. Next to us were an American expat couple, their one-year-old, and the father's brother who was apparently visiting. The father is fit, in his 30's, of medium height, and possessed of a prosperous air that would be detectable even without the Blackberry that he's placed in front of himself like a short pile of poker chips. His brother is portly, jovial, in his 20's, or at any rate somewhere in that post-adolescent, pre-career zone that today's sociologists so love to invent names for. Most of the scraps of conversation I pick up have to do with the brother's lifestyle of leisure, beaches, and beer, or his guesses as to other people's income. I think at one point he questions his brother about his business. And then I distinctly hear him hit his brother up for money -- a loan, a few thousand -- and say things amounting to "I'm totally going to make good this time". At this point I wanted to turn to him and say: Dude, you can't fight biology. Your brother is a mesomorph, he can't help but be successful. And you're an endomorph, it's just your destiny to be the jovial, feckless drinking buddy of the mesomorphs of this world, just as it's the destiny of us ectomorphs to be their quants and coders. However I had only had 0.8 margaritas by this point and so kept quiet. [Doug: 2/16/08 04:13]


	Best Blog Name Ever? Stuff White People Like: #63: Toyota Prius: The Prius might be the most perfect white product ever. It’s expensive, gives the idea that you are helping the environment, and requires no commitment/changes other than money. [Ben A.: 2/15/08 17:51]