Brad DeLong channels Max Sawicky: GWB -- the American Argentinian

How Can I Be Out of Money? I Still Have More Checks: Archive Entry From Brad DeLong's Webjournal

Brad DeLong and Max Sawicky on the GWB deficit. See the article ...

... this fiscal year's (and next fiscal year's) deficit is fine: it's the deficit three, five, ten, twenty years down the pike that is really scary--and really damaging...

... the increase in debt as a share of GDP is bad fiscal policy. A feasible policy would restrict growth to the same rate as GDP, with a bump here and there to deal with recessions. With apologies to generalissimos and caudillos everywhere, George W. Bush is running a fiscal policy fit for a banana republic.

... AND ANOTHER THING: Last week I [DeLong] got a call from a reporter. The drift of her question was, does this defense increase bust the budget? No, not at all. The budget is already FUBAR.

... The astonishing thing is that Bush can so quickly have made the deficit so bad that you find yourself on the "hawk" side. As one prominent Washington figure has said, "It's amazing what this Bush administration has done to the budget. It's like being 8 runs up at the end of the eighth inning, yet finding yourself 12 runs behind in the middle of the ninth."

Inflation, Deflation: A door vs a P4

I've ordered a state of the art Windows machine for our home network. It's replacing an older machine that will be retired to running Windows 98 and children's games -- with no network connection.

The new machine has about as much memory and CPU power as serious mainframes did about 15 years ago. It will cost me about $850 US; you could buy a similar machine from Dell for about $1600 US (admittedly with lots of "extras" that are of little use to me).

My parents are buying a new back door; the old one expired. It will cost about $600 US.

Once upon a time, the door would have been fairly inexpensive, and the computer affordable only to a large corporation.

They need the door more than I need the PC.

So, is this insane deflation, or significant inflation? It all depends on what you need to buy.

In the world of the not-so-far away, it will cost you $15,000 to have your roof shingled, and the PC I just bought will be a children's toy.

Karin Spaink - The Fishman Affidavit: Scientology and its methods

Karin Spaink - The Fishman Affidavit: contents

Spaink is a compulsive communicator. It's a bit of an odd trait, but relatively harmless ;-). Spaink, however, decided to communicate about Scientology. They attempted to silence him through harassment, but it appears he's rather stubborn.

Fortunately he resides in the Netherlands, where speech is pretty well protected (more protected than in the US). He just won his third Dutch court victory. See the Slashdot story and Scientology Watch.

Saudi Arabia: how close to the edge?

TIME.com: Inside the Kingdom -- Sep. 15, 2003

This summer, however, hardly a week has gone by in which the kingdom's newspapers haven't carried sensational headlines about the latest police shoot-out with an al-Qaeda cell or the discovery of an illicit stash of arms and explosives. The streets are blocked by police checkpoints. In an unprecedented step, the Interior Ministry has published the names and photos of al-Qaeda suspects at large, appealing to the public to turn them in. Crown Prince Abdullah, the de facto ruler, has declared his own war on terrorism. The kingdom's highest religious authority has issued a declaration backing him. Saudi spokesmen claim they have fired hundreds of clerics for being too extreme and are re-educating thousands more in the ways of moderation.

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This TIME magazine piece is quite interesting. The struggle in Saudi Arabia may be the most important front in the war on terrorism. It's probably not a coincidence that "Wahhabism" is replacing "Islamic Fundamentalism" in western media commentary. Wahhabism is the state religion of Saudi Arabia ...

Lots of questions ... Is Wahhabism really a more accurate definition of the core problem? I think it may be a better restatement, though doubtless still inaccurate. Can Wahabbism be reformed? I suspect so. Look at the history of Mormonism in the United States, and the transformations that religion has gone through (though also producing extreme Fundamentalist offshoots along the way) -- albeit over about 100 years.

Do we understand Wahhabism and its enemies? I don't think we do. I think Wahhabism is essentially a reaction to secular humanism, and that it shares with many fundamentalist faiths a visceral and powerful reaction to secular life. It is sadly ironic that the the US should be their primary target -- it is the least secular of wealth nations. History is funny that way.

Can Wahabbism be reformed in the next few years, and without a Saudi civil war? Has the way the Bush Administration carried out the Iraq war made it easier or harder to reform Wahhabism?

The last two are the hard questions. Maybe the Republican House shouldn't cut funding for bicycle paths just yet. If there's a Saudi civil war we'll need something besides automobiles.

Support Macintouch: use their Amazon referrer

If you want to support macintouch, a superb web site, use this link (referrer) for Amazon orders:

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/redirect-home/macintoucwebsite

Disposable email services ... Jetable and Mailinator

Jetable: Disposable email, for a single usage

Jetable gives you a relay address that work for 1-6 days. A French web site, it's free for now. Useful for many purposes, but since it expires it's not a great choice for site that wants an email address as a username (NewEgg, for example).

Mailinator needn't expire, but it's public, albeit hard to find. Not a great place to store data you want to keep private (credit card information, etc).

I actually do ok using a Yahoo account for this type of thing, but I think I'll try jetable.

Spamotomy lists a number of similar sites. This is an amazingly active anti-spam site. They list a lot of anti-spam tools, but I think they're emphasizing a failed approach.

A Better Blogger BlogThis! Button?

Blogger is the software I use to create these pages, which are currently hosted on Blogspot. (Two distinct services, both from the same company.)

One of the things that makes Blogger useful is the BlogThis! button. Either as implemented in the Google Toolbar 2.0, or as JavaScript that can be put in a browser bookmark, it is the key to making commentary on web pages very efficient.

Except I don't like the way it works. The window it creates is too small, and it puts quotes around the text one is going to comment on. I'd rather it used <:blockquote> markup.

This version saves me some keystrokes. I wish I could get rid of the quotes though. If anyone knows how to do that, or where people post better "BlogThis" scripts, please let me know.

PS. This has to be all one line to put in a URL:

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javascript:Q='';x=document;y=window;if(x.selection)
{Q=x.selection.createRange().text;}else
if(y.getSelection){Q=y.getSelection();}else
if(x.getSelection){Q=x.getSelection();}
if(Q){Q='<blockquote>'+Q+'</blockquote><hr>';}
void(window.open('http://new.blogger.com/blog_this.pyra?t='+escape(Q)+'&
u='+escape(location.href)+'&n='+escapedocument.title),'bloggerForm',
'scrollbars=no,width=675,height=600,top=175,left=75,status=yes,resizable=yes'));

A semi-useful JavaScript reference -- current to about IE 4

JavaScript Selections: Introduction - Doc JavaScript

JavaScript is a mess, a minor casualty of Microsoft's cruel and complete dismantling of Netscape [1]. It's surprisingly hard to find any useful web references, in part because the web is littered with years of JavaScript debris. Great hunks of abandoned documentation, debris across the battlefield, divert google searches.

This one is dated, but better than many.

[1] Microsoft's usual approach to destroying something is to first emulate it very well, then add extensions that take it in a different direction, then to lose interest and let entropy do its work. WebDav is a recent example of this procedure. If Microsoft were an animal, it would be a particularly calculating and effective feline. The ugly part is watching it play with its prey.

Quotes from the Bush administration: Saddam has weapons of mass destuction.

Molly Ivins - Quoets from the Bush Administration

An impressive list of confidently mistaken quotes. Worth reading.

Yes, Saddam could have hidden all the WMDs in Lebanon's Bekka valley. Seems unlikely, but it's not ruled out by the laws of physics. More likely, however, the Bush administration heard what they wanted to hear and believed what they wanted to believe.

Heck, I thought he had 'em too. I have no clue what was going on in Saddam's head. Even the UN's weapon inspector thought he'd find something.

It looks like we were all wrong, but Bush was wrong with the best data.

22 months of job losses - a structural change?

Defying Forecast, Job Losses Mount for a 22nd Month

The economic recovery in the United States is now in its 22nd month, without reversing constant job losses. The unemployment rate declined to 6.1 percent from 6.2 percent in July, but economists said that was apparently because of a surge in the number of people who, having lost jobs, listed themselves as self-employed rather than unemployed....

"If we don't see some job growth by Thanksgiving, then the spurt in economic activity that we are currently experiencing will fade," said Mark M. Zandi, chief economist at Economy.com, "and we will be right back to where we were early this year, in the economic soup."

The meager recovery, which began in November 2001, has now achieved historical significance. Not since World War II has employment failed to grow for so long after the gross domestic product, which measures the total output of goods and services, began rising again. Just more than a million jobs have disappeared over the last 22 months, on top of the 1.78 million lost in the preceding eight-month recession. All told, the national payroll has shrunk by almost three million jobs since March 2001.

..."We have been sitting on the bench waiting and waiting and waiting for some jobs to appear, and they still are nowhere in sight," Joel L. Naroff, a normally optimistic forecaster, advised subscribers to his newsletter...

What surprises many economists is that the job-shedding has continued despite what they describe as an extraordinary level of economic stimulus. Low interest rates, tax cuts and rebates, a rise in military spending, mortgage refinancings, growing corporate profits, even a long-awaited improvement in business spending on new equipment and software have all contributed to the rise in the economic growth rate.

But jobs are disappearing, and employers continue to resist adding hours for their existing workers. Economists warn that without payroll expansion and rising income from wages, sustaining the economic growth will be difficult once the stimulus weakens....

"If we go into next year without job growth, then the consumer's willingness to keep spending comes into question, and recovery is in danger of unwinding," said James W. Paulsen, chief investment strategist for Wells Capital Management.

..."Whenever you see a spike in self-employment in this kind of economy, you know that is involuntary entrepreneurship," said Jared Bernstein, a senior labor economist at the Economic Policy Institute.

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Bradford DeLong had an extensive discussion on this. Productivity growth is sufficent to fuel our current economy, meaning no rise in employment. Whether it's the technocentric transformation of the "third world" (India, China -- a large fraction of humanity!) or the impact of automation, or both, the effect is the same. I doubt any Bush policy will make much difference.

We have only 1-2 months to turn this around, 3 at the outside. Beyond that we start to have to look at the kind of measures familiar to FDR.

Magical thinking about lie detectors

Government to Give Fewer Lie Detector Tests

Last October, in a report requested and paid for by the Energy Department, a panel convened by an arm of the National Academy of Sciences said polygraph testing was too flawed to use for security screening. The panel said lie detector tests did a poor job of identifying national security risks and were likely to produce accusations against innocent people.

No kidding. Lie detector tests are accepted in many circles, but Los Alamos physicists are a bit smarter than average. Evidently they can read. Being literate, they read that lie detector tests have poor sensitivity and poor specificity, it's a crummy, misleading test.

Maybe functional MRI scans will work better. In the meantime, magical thinking persists in government.

Witnesses aren't worth much ...

In Same Case, DNA Clears Convict and Finds Suspect:

.. in a meeting this morning at a Burger King, Ms. Brobst told Mr. Bloodsworth of the DNA evidence against Mr. Ruffner and apologized for wrongly prosecuting him. Mr. Bloodsworth, who has become an outspoken advocate for reforming federal death penalty laws, said he cried and then hugged Ms. Brobst.

In an interview, the state's attorney for Baltimore County, Sandra A. O'Connor, said that the police and prosecutors had acted responsibly in the case, but that DNA technology did not exist at the time of Mr. Bloodsworth's trial. What did exist were the statements of five witnesses who said they saw him with the girl on the day she was killed.

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Many of the DNA exonerations involved convictions based on witness statements, often many witnesses. Some of the witnesses were suspect (got plea bargains, etc), but many were reputable. Some of the witnesses were victims.

These stories, and a lot of cognitive science research, lead towards one important conclusion. Witnesses are unreliable; human memory simply does not work very well. A lot of what we "remember" is a "simulation" or "recreation" based on mixture of memory and clever invention. In other words, most of us routinely confabulate (there are people with exceptionally good memories who do less confabulation). Many of us are extremely suggestible, we can invent a lot of memory with just a few hints.

We need to deprecate the testimony of witnesses and rely upon them less. (PS. The death penalty is unworkable in the United States. Maybe it would work in Sweden, but they consider it barbaric.)

When people realize unemployment may be here to stay ...

Fear of Bad Employment Reports: Archive Entry From Brad DeLong's Webjournal

What Doug fears [about the unemployment numbers] is that sometime soon households will change their states of mind: they will think that the risk of losing and then being without a job, or being unable to find anything other than a crappy job, is too high; and thus that they need to cut back on their spending significantly in order to build up their buffer stocks of savings as a way of insuring themselves against being ground into mush by the gears of the lousy job market.

If households' states of mind do shift in that direction, then we are in real, real trouble. The Bush Administration is incompetent at countercyclical policy. The Federal Reserve is out of ammunition, and cannot do much more to stimulate spending.

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My wife compares this to the old adage that planes fly only because people believe they can. One day they realize a big heavy metal box can't possibly fly ...

Of course there's a historic solution to unemployment. Start a war that will need a lot of labor. Good think Bush thought about that ...

Schizophrenia and Bipolar disorder both have shared pathophysiology?

BBC NEWS | Health | Mental illnesses share gene flaw

Sabine Bahn, who led the research, published in The Lancet, said: "We believe that our results provide strong evidence for oligodendrocyte and myelin dysfunction in schizophrenia and bipolar disorder.

"The high degree of correlation between the expression changes in schizophrenia and bipolar disorder provide compelling evidence for common pathophysiological pathways that may govern the disease phenotypes of schizophrenia and bipolar disorder."

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Fantastic results if they hold up. We've been so very much in the dark without a pathophysiologic mechanism. This is the kind of work that can lead towards a Nobel.

A Fix for OS X mishandling of SMB shares?

Pudding Time!: A Crashintosh Fix"The problem seems to be related to some hidden level of complexity under the Mac surface. Sure, you can tell it to dismount a network share, but it doesn't seem to ever give up a belief that the server that share came from is out there lurking somewhere. So I created a network location entitled "Nowhere" that handles the job of shutting down all the network interfaces "officially," so the Mac gives up its belief that secretly it's supposed to still be connected to that Samba share somewhere. This beats dismounting shares one by one, because it will handle multiple shares at once, and it seems to be more thorough than a simple "drag to the garbage can."

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I am very much going to test this. OS X 10.2.6 really sucks at handling SMB shares.