"Mon dieu, am I doing the right thing asking Angela to let us spend more? Give me a sign, any sign. Helas. Maybe when we land back in Paris to change planes, you will give me a sign then..."
[Ben H.: 5/15/12 12:17]
"My only recommendation is that next time, you should think of adding a few more syllables..."
[Ben H.: 5/15/12 10:46]
Accountability
Ina's outta there. And she faces a bonus clawback (a nice surprise). Though it sounds like the boss in London bears more direct responsibility than she does, in the end, she's the CIO.
[Ben H.: 5/15/12 08:58]
The guys in that CIO office were notably arrogant pricks, who boasted to everyone in the industry that "what we are really doing is prop trading." So forgive me if I do feel some schadenfreude, or really just straight up freude, because I see nothing shameful about it.
How this is going to inflict any damage on regular folks, Doug, you'll have to explain to me. JPM faces a $2bio loss, which will ding its tangible common equity of $150bio. As our system of capitalism has become more of the crony than naked variety, I do understand why people's first impulse is to assume that any bank losses will end up socialized. In this case, however, it is only the shareholders who will sustain the damage. Sadly, I doubt JPM will have any way of clawing back Bruno Iksil's bonuses, but then JPM management should know better than to let a Frenchmen put on giant trades, supervised by a Greek, the former come from that elite trading house Natixis (!!) and the latter from notorious shitshow Dresdner Kleinwort. That doesn't mean JPM employees, too, won't face accountability. I'm sure every bonus-eligible employee outside the CIO office will hear a tale of woe about this loss when his boss explains why his bonus has come in lower than expected (maybe those bonuses are still too large, but, again, it is only shareholders who suffer). And from the rash of headlines announcing various regulatory bodies launching investigations of the trade -- timely as always, regulators! Heckuva job! -- it is not to be doubted that JPM (its shareholders, again) will pay a few hundred million more in "penalties" ("And this is to punish you for... getting victimized! Hope you learned your lesson!"). Those penalties will go straight to the fisc, alleviating the burden of federal debt owed by average Joes, or maybe funding the discretionary hiring of a few hundred more regulators who can be well paid to miss the next bad trade and swarm the barn after the horse has bolted. Those new regulatory posts are jorrrrrrrbs, so JPM's shareholders have not only been held accountable, but held liable for hiring more accountants, goosing the jobs figures and providing all-important stimulus!
[Ben H.: 5/11/12 16:09]
Schadenfreude
Obviously my schadenfreude is not for anyone at JP Morgan -- there's no Schade there to have Freude about. It's for the pathetic sods outside the New York - London axis of finance, who will once again get steamed up about the unfairness of the system and the lack of accountability, and once again do nothing about it. Suckers!
[Gombrecht the Irrefrugnable: 5/11/12 10:54]
Challenges in Sales
When something like this happens, it challenges even the best salesperson's ability to spin. What can one say?
"Ummm... this doesn't mean your gonna cancel your order, right?"
Or, "Yeah, that crashing thing, we're going to fix that before we go to production, obviously, but otherwise, it's a pretty sweet bird, right, right?"
Since we are talking about a Russian plane and Indonesian customers, I think the salesman's optimal move will prove quite simple, in fact. It involves a slightly thicker, plain, brown envelope...
[Ben H.: 5/9/12 10:50]
On the way to a JFK pick-up yesterday I was surprised to see a space shuttle sitting on top of a jumbo jet in a hangar next to the road. The coolest thing about it was the lettering on the side: "United States" in black-on-white Helvetica.
It has such quiet confidence, that font! This is what you get when you design a space shuttle pre-9/11. Imagine a space shuttle from the W Bush years -- A billowing red, white, and blue flag motif painted across the wings, a soft-focus bald eagle on the tail, external speakers pumping out a Randy Travis anthem in continuous loop ...
[Gombrecht the Irrefrugnable: 5/3/12 07:46]
(I've been haunted by the thought that it's not obvious that the headline below has to be read with the same voice with which Yakov Smirnoff used to say, "But in Soviet Russia, television watch you!")
[Gombrecht the Irrefrugnable: 5/1/12 21:04]
In Republican America, Machine Rage Against You!
Representative Paul D. Ryan strolls the halls of Capitol Hill with the anarchist band Rage Against the Machine pounding through his earbuds. (NYT)
[Gombrecht the Irrefrugnable: 4/30/12 09:18]
A former colleague reports that he and his wife have been trying to emphasize to their daughter the importance of sharing. She has absorbed the lesson, or perhaps it is more accurate to say the rhetoric of the lesson. Now, instead of saying "I want" she says "share, Daddy!"
[Ben H.: 4/19/12 14:56]
Are you reading a Patrick O'Brien novel? I recall a scene in which a doomed ships's surgeon makes the hopeful yet vain pronouncement that his supurating wound exudes a "most laudable pus" (or maybe it was "noble", I forget)
[Ben H.: 4/18/12 19:29]
Here's a foreign policy failure that has spanned the Bush and Obama years: the puzzling coddling of the Kirchner regime in Argentina. They've stiffed American creditors, repeatedly defied a US federal judge (to the point that their lawyers were sanctioned by the court), stolen assets from American companies, just stolen Repsol's (a company based in Spain, our ally) stake in YPF and Gas Natural Ban, and, if economic crimes aren't enough for you, started again rattling the saber over the Falklands. And what do we do? The justice department files a brief in support of Argentina in its fight not to pay its debts and assures Argentina of American "neutrality" over the Falklands. So we favor the scoundrel Argentines over our allies, the Brits and the Spaniards. To borrow a webism, WTF?
[Ben H.: 4/18/12 15:42]
Doug's Parfit test is even more profitably applied to Singer. If a runaway trolley were headed for a group of ten people, I would definitely throw Peter Signer onto the tracks to save them. in fact, I might domthe same, even minus the ten people.
[Ben H.: 4/14/12 14:10]
That's a good one, I'll have to add it to the top ten list of uses that line 6 of form 6251 is being reserved for in 2012, a list I've been composing mentally while not sleeping. Thus:
6. Enter 0.5 times the value from line 6 of your 2013 Form 6251, line 6.
You know that carried interest those evil private equity guys get? It turns out that it can lead to taxes for capital gains you have not yet received. That can be a surprising calculation...
[Ben A.: 4/12/12 21:37]
New Yorker Trope
Like most of its readers, I've become aware of various tools the New Yorker uses to achieve its impression of urbanity. But there's one I can't figure out. There's a distinct category of "Talk of the Town" vignettes where the author hangs out with some hyper-successful person, usually a celebrity, and exchanges some urbane conversation, but doesn't do anything spectacular -- rather he wrings some humor out of the image of some winner, who has taken all, nonetheless going through some mundane process that the rest of us mortals go through. What I haven't figured out is how the authors achieve this chumminess with these people. Maybe if I made a note of the authors' names, I'd discover there are just a few, who have specialized in navigating inconspicuously into celebrities' good graces. Or maybe these vignettes are a way of picking up extra cash that's well known among the friends-of-celebrities set. But I have a new theory now, after reading (p 44 of the April 16 issue) a vignette about high-end psychic Peri Lyons.
On the day of the session, a visitor [the author's referring to herself in the third person is a common component of the archness of these vignettes --Gombrecht], knocking on the door, was greeted by a barefoot blond woman, wearing a translucent blue-and-white smock dress and no bra. This was Courtney Love, one of Lyons's clients and close friends; the reading was happening at her place. "I'm getting Peri dressed for you," she said, gesturing toward one end of her loft, which was immaculate (two housekeepers were wiping down surfaces). A dining table was covered with piles of paper. "Don't sit there!" Love said. "That's a nightmare. That's my taxes." She pointed out a seat across from a Buddhist altar.
The image of the infamous maenad Courtney Love pulling her hair out over a pile of IRS forms is so hilarious that I now assume this article, and maybe many others like it, are just made up.
[Gombrecht the Irrefrugnable: 4/12/12 11:44]
The Labyrinth
Favorite line from an IRS form this year -- from the AMT form 6251 (of course) -- line 6: "Skip this line. It is reserved for future use."
That looks like a very interesting interview, and you can bet that if I ever regain the ability to process chunks of text more than two lines long, I will think through it very carefully.
As it is I mostly just read headlines, such as "Kraftwerk Keeps Catching Up To Its Past". This reminds me of a funny joke I once made. I was talking with someone who used to be an assistant to the producer (or manager or something) of Kraftwerk. She said this guy, aside from being a complete asshole, managed to embezzle all kinds of money from them. My response was the Kraftwerk guys should have been more careful operators of their pocket calculators.
I think I've expressed here my view of Peter Singer. Short version: Singer has done a significant amount as an advocate for increased charity and as a scourge against cruelty to animals. It's unfortunate, therefore, that's he's thought of primarily as a philosopher rather than an advocate, because he's dreadful at philosophy. And this leads him to diminish the intellectual credibility of philosophy and advocate murdering crippled children.*
The two most interseting sections of the interview, in my view:
1. On preference-satisfaction utilitarianism:
Cowen: Let me toss up a classic criticism of Utilitarianism. I'm curious to see what you say. The criticism is this, that neither pain nor pleasure is a homogeneous thing. There are many different kinds of pains and pleasures and they're not strictly commensurable in terms of any natural unit. So when we're comparing pain and pleasure that's a fine thing to do, but in fact we're calling upon other values. So Utilitarianism is in this sense parasitic upon some deeper sense of philosophic pluralism, and we're not pure utilitarians at all. But that being the case, why don't we sometimes just allow an intuitive sense of right or wrong to override what would otherwise be the Utilitarian conclusion, since Utilitarianism itself cannot avoid value judgments?
Singer: I think the form of Utilitarianism that you're describing is Hedonistic Utilitiarianism because you were talking about pleasure and pain and you were sugesting that pleasure is a whole range of different things. The form that I hold is Preference Utilitarianism which looks at people's preferences and tries to asses the importance of the preference for them. Now this is still not an easy thing to know, in fact in some ways you might say it's harder than getting measures of pleasure and pain, but I think it already embraces the pluralism that you're talking about in terms of people's preferences, people's understanding of what it is they're choosing and why. And so I don't think it's up to us to go back and try to pull in other kinds of values that we intuitively hold over the top of people's preferences. We can do it for ourselves, each of us can say "what are my preferences", "I value this", "I value the autonomous life over the happy life, and so that's what I'm going to choose". Of course, when I weigh out your preferences I should say "well here we give weight for the preference for an autonomous life and here we give weight to the preference for the pleasant life" but in making the final judgment, in which we take everyone's preferences into account, it would be wrong for us to just pull out some intuitive values and somehow give them weight in the overall calculation because then we're giving more weight to our preferences than we're giving to those of others.
Cowen: But doesn't preference utilitarianism itself require some means of aggregation? The means we use for weighing different clashing preferences, can require some kind of value judgments above and beyond Utilitarianism?
Singer: I don't quite see why that should be so. While acknowledging the practical differences of actually weighing up and calculating all the preferences, I fail to see why it involves other values apart from the preferences themselves.
2. On eating fish
Cowen: Let me ask you a question about animal welfare. I have been very influenced by a lot of what you've written, but I'm also not a pure vegetarian by any means, and when it comes to morality, for instance, my view is that it's perfectly fine to eat fish. There may be practical reasons, like depleting the oceans, that are an issue, but the mere act of killing and eating a fish I don't find anything wrong with. Do you have a view on this?
Singer: There's certainly, as you say, the environmental aspect, which is getting pretty serious with a lot of fish stocks, but the other thing is there's no humane killing of fish, right? If we buy commercially killed fish they have died pretty horrible deaths. They've suffocated in nets or on the decks of ships, or if they're deep sea fish pulled up by nets they've died of decompression, basically their internal organs exploding as they're pulled up. I would really ... I don't need to eat fish that badly that I need to do that to fish. If I was hungry and nothing else to eat I would, perhaps, do it but not given the choices I have.
Cowen: But now you're being much more the Jewish Moralist and less the Utilitarian. Because the Utilitarian would look at the marginal impact and say "most fish die horrible deaths anyway, of malnutrition or they're eaten or something else terrible happens to them". The marginal impact of us killing them to me seems to be basically zero. I'm not even sure a fish's life is happy, and why not just say "it's fine to eat fish"? Should it matter that we make them suffer? It's a very non-Utilitarian way of thinking about it, a very moralizing approach.
Singer: You would need to convince me that in fact they're going to die just as horrible deaths in nature, and I'm not sure that that's true. Probably many of them would get gobbled up by some other fish, and that's probably a lot quicker than what we are doing to them.
Cowen: You have some good arguments against Malthusianism for human beings in your book. My tendency is to think that fish are ruled by a Malthusian model, and being eaten by another fish has to be painful. Maybe it's over quickly, but having your organs burst as you're pulled up out of the water is probably also pretty quick. I would again think that in marginal terms it doesn't matter, but I'm more struck by the fact that it's not your first instinct to view the question in marginal terms. You view us as active agents and ask "are we behaving in some manner which is moral, and you're imposing a non-Utilitarian theory on our behavior. Is that something you're willing to embrace, or something that was just a mistake?
Singer: Look, I think economists tend to think more in terms of marginal impact than I do and you may be right that is something I may need to think about more.
*If they will be 'replaced' by children who are not crippled. And of course, the real argument is "murder person X if they will be replaced by person Y who will, over his lifetime, have more of his preferences satisfied"
[Ben A.: 4/10/12 16:09]
I think it was Ben A who pointed out the decisive counter-argument to racial determinism: somehow the Vikings, scourge of the planet, turned their culture into the Ikea utopia of today. So you can't plausibly say that the Afghans' chromosomes lock them into savagery forever. But have historians found any time when Afghans were not savages? Has any ethnologist suggested a remotely plausible path by which they might emerge from savagery? It really does seem to me that for a time horizon of 100 years or so, the most realistic attitude towards these folks would not differ in any practical way from a race-deterministic one. I fear that any approach other than leaving them to their hideousness, and maybe lobbing a few cruise missiles at any groups of them who try exporting that hideousness, is doomed to failure.
[Gombrecht the Irrefrugnable: 4/5/12 11:31]
Now, Ben A., is your chance to return my taunt about the Celtics. Because clearly the Yankee pitching staff is in as dire need of an occupational safety expert as the Celts are in need of a cardiologist. Dave Robertson falls down the stairs of his house? Now, Joba dislocates his ankle "playing with his son?" And don't even remind me about Carl Pagano's pratfalls...
[Ben H.: 3/23/12 11:34]
Whit Stillman! Whit Stillman! Whit Stillman!
“I detest Parfit,” said Echikunwoke, with bred-in-the-bone conviction.
“I agree,” Gerwig replied.
“Cut!”
“What is Parfit?” Smith asked. “Some kind of dessert?”
Nobody, including the actors, had any idea what Parfit was. Or to put it properly, who Parfit was, for Parfit was not a dessert but the renowned ethicist and philosopher Derek Parfit, white-haired author of “Reasons and Persons,” whose vogue among academics Stillman found irksome.
Surely, Ben H, a hedge fund consortium could come up with $10M every three years to bankroll a new Stillman production. My plan would be for a Whit Stillman "Flash Gordon"
[Ben A.: 3/19/12 13:06]
I used to joke that the Celtics were one player short of a championship: namely an All-Star caliber cardiologist. But at this point it has gotten fully ridiculous. Erin Brockovich is going to show up with a team of testers to take soil samples from around the TD Garden.
[Ben H.: 3/15/12 12:57]
All the Single Ladies. All the Single Ladies
He spent one-third of the time telling me about the musical he was writing about raccoons, one-third of the time talking about C++, and one-third of the time demonstrating the plot of Othello using the salt and pepper shakers.
Iron Dome has been in the news, and from the sound of it, I figured it was some kind of heavy duty prophylactic. Maybe that's what Sandra Fluke spends three grand a year on? Will the Pope's insurance company pay for it? Does King Peter Chung endorse it?
It turns out to be an Israeli missile defense system. Great idea, poor name. In view of who's launching the weapons, I might have gone with "Seventh Veil" or "Steel Headscarf". If the makers wanted to go more with a boast than a taunt, they might have gone with "Kevlar Kippah".
[Ben H.: 3/11/12 20:01]
The Gombrecht Plan For Easing Economic Inequality
Lucky I googled this and discovered I'd posted it before -- I was about to rewrite it from scratch. My memory has really gone to shit. Let me re-post it here with some minor elaboration; it's timelier now than it was is 2008.
A piece on Slate.com today [10/10/2008] about the coming passage of the phrase "quadrillion dollars" into non-science-fiction usage, not quite interesting enough to link to, did remind me of a monetary plan I had for the U.S., as it moves into realms of greater and greater income disparity. Or maybe it is better called a currency plan. The idea is that, to make wealth and income disparities seem smaller, our currency system should not be linear but logarithmic. As with the Euro changeover, there is fixed day on which everyone converts their old dollars into log-dollars. For sums up to $1000, the conversion is simply one-for-one. Above $1000, the conversion is 1000 times (log10(x) - 2). Note that 1000 old dollars converted by this equation become 1000 times (3 - 2) = 1000 log-dollars, so there is no discontinuity. Then you get the following conversions as the amounts increase:
$10,000 = L$2,000
$100,000 = L$3,000
$1,000,000 = L$4,000
$10,000,000 = L$5,000
$100,000,000 = L$6,000
$1,000,000,000 = L$7,000
etc.
Today you have a billion dollars in the bank, and I only have a thousand, and that peeves me. Occupy! But tommorow you will have L$7,000 to my L$1,000, and that's not such a big difference, is it? I feel better already.
The only the downside of my plan is that you will need a slide rule to go to the supermarket.
Well into Mitt Romney’s tenure as governor of Massachusetts, a state legislator named Jay Kaufman developed a nagging suspicion: the governor had no idea who he was. A committee chairman and a veteran Democrat in the State House of Representatives, Mr. Kaufman routinely waved to Mr. Romney from his capitol office, right above the governor’s parking spot. But when he crossed Mr. Romney’s path in the building’s marble corridors one day, his fears were confirmed. “Hello, Senator,” Mr. Romney called to Mr. Kaufman. Sitting in his office five years later, Mr. Kaufman still seemed wounded by the slight. “No name, wrong title,” he said. “Give me a break.”
... most people can no more imagine the scale of money wasted in our capitol than they can the age of the universe or how big the Milky Way actually is.
Tom Smith tells a good story here. Not that private companies necessarily perform any better. But you can at least stop giving them money at times...
[Ben A.: 3/9/12 17:25]
Apropos of Election Season
Beware the politically obsessed. They are often bright and interesting, but they have something missing in their natures; there is a hole, an empty place, and they use politics to fill it up. It leaves them somehow misshapen.
His signature attack against Obama is that his Treasury department is complicit in debasing our currency. Debasing our currency? He has single-handedly prevented the most abject debasement ever plotted against the dollar! Here is what Obama has spared us:
After making my prototype of a special-relativity-obeying space combat game (which, in a miracle of technological stability, still seems to run in browsers after about a decade), I thought about incorporating gravity, and making it obey general relativity. But I couldn't figure out a way to make time actually elapse more slowly for the user.
This morning I may have hit on the solution, as I thought back to a lecture by M.P., one of my old physics professors in college. The solution is this: as your spaceship enters regions of spacetime where time should pass more slowly, an audio recording of her lectures is turned on.
[Gombrecht the Irrefrugnable: 3/4/12 11:55]
