The vast gap between action and insight - US homeowner edition

The gap between action and insight is a fundamental tenet of anthropology and of sociology. When you ask someone what they do, or why they do what they do, their honest responses are often contradictory or nonsensical. The anthropologist's task is to understand the fundamental cause for behavior and to reconcile that with the stated explanation.

Nowadays economists wrestle with this topic. DeLong provides a delightful example:

Brad DeLong's Website: What Do Homeowners Expect

Its fair to observe (as a commentor did at Matrix) that 'only 10% said their spending had increased with the value of real estate, yet 50% had taken out loans against their equity. Is there a contradiction here?'

That's more than a contradiction; Its the entire underlying premise for why I believe a) Real Estate has been the key driver to the US economy; and 2) why so many people -- professionals included -- do not have a firm grasp on the underlying economy.

If the respondents were self-aware and rational, then at least 50% (more, since spending may increase even if one doesn't take out an equity loan) would have answered that real estate values had increaed their spending. That awareness gap is very human, but also worrisome.

The fate of the vanishing American middle-class

The American middle class is vanishing:

The Big Picture: Top of the Top

To review: The Middle class is getting squeezed by outsourcing, decreasing industrial sector, increasing energy prices, weak personal income gains, non-commodity inflation, the worst savings rate ever, all the while accumulating massive debt, both personal and governmental. The good news is their tax burden has fallen, albeit at 1/10 the rate of the wealthiest Americans....

..."Other data show that among major world economies, the United States in recent years has had the third-greatest disparity in incomes between the very top and everyone else. Only Mexico and Russia, among major economies, have greater disparity."

I've seen other economists refer to the American middle-class as a post-war phenomenon, meaning it was an artifact of WW II rather than a stable feature of the US economy. I don't think, however, that's true in all weathy nations.

So why does anyone but the wealthy vote for George Bush? As near as I can tell about 70% of his base vote for religious reasons, 5% vote because they expect to gain economically, and 25% made a big mistake. That's oddly reassuring, it means that 75% of Bush's base voted rationally (if someone believes Bush is God's messenger, it would be intensely irrational not to vote for him).

How will this all turn out? I think we're too aged a nation to for 1960s style upheaval, but I do think it will be interesting to see how a socialist/green party does in the next election.

Hikers who disappear in the wilderness

Solo hikers going off-trail in the wilderness are vulnerable to disappearing. Some are never found:

NYT: Lost in the Beartooth Mountains

...Hiking in true wilderness on trails with a companion is mildly risky -- probably comparable to bicycle commuting. Hiking off trail with a companion is risky -- maybe more like motorcycle touring or parachuting. Hiking off trail alone in rugged country is very risky -- I'd guess comparable to hang gliding or mountain climbing with companions. That doesn't mean people shouldn't do it, but it's important that they understand and weigh risks appropriately. In Brian's case the decision of the BC government to remove hiker logs from the trailheads made his solo off-trail hike even more risky than he could have planned on

Google socks Microsoft -- a big bet on OpenOffice and open file formats

RED HERRING | Sun and Google announce a seemingly dull agreement to sponsor a portion of each other's products.

Hah.

This is huge. Sun has nothing to offer Google except OpenOffice. This is a huge shot by Google against Microsoft's core business. Google is saying "mess with us and we'll destroy your lifeline". Microsoft needs to feed off the Office trough, Google has now declared that OpenOffice will be a very serious contender -- even in the US marketplace.

The immediate big winner is the OpenOffice file format. I'll be switching my Mac over to a wordprocessor that uses that file format -- NeoOffice/J (but I need to test the file format interoperability first!).

Why I hate science - Bicyles are bad for men

The concerns about bicycles saddles producing nerve damage and male impotence really started in the mid-90s. My grad school biomedical engineering project proposal was for a saddle that measured pressure points. Nonetheless, I hoped the problem would turn out to be overrated.

Not so. Traditional bike seats are bad for many men, and fancy saddles don't necessarily help:

Serious Riders, Your Bicycle Seat May Affect Your Love Life - New York Times
...Dr. Schrader advocates saddles that do not have noses. After finding that traditional saddles reduced the quality of nighttime erections in young policemen who patrol on bicycles, he has persuaded scores of officers in several cities to use noseless seats and is now studying the officers' sexual function over six months.

If Dr. Schrader is seeking funding, I suspect he'd find a lot of donors from the bicycling world. He need only put up an Amazon donation link ...

Quicksand really can trap people

I had the definite impression that Quicksand's treachery was a Hollywood fantasy. Not quite so. True, one does not sink into the pit -- but neither is it at all easy to get out.

The Truth About Quicksand Is Beginning to Sink In - New York Times

... Sand grains in quicksand are usually loosely packed, with the clay acting as a fragile gel holding the grains together.

Hit with sudden force from, say, a hapless victim, the quicksand gel turns to liquid. Then salt causes clay particles to stick to one another instead of the sand grains, with the result that a victim ends up surrounded by densely packed sand.

The force needed to pull out a person immersed in quicksand is about the same needed to lift a car, Dr. Bonn said. The trick for escaping is to slowly wiggle the feet and legs, allowing water to flow in. People float in quicksand so it is also impossible to sink all the way in, but quicksand usually forms at river estuaries, so a captive could drown at high tide.

Now you know how to escape.

Only in the movies

20 Things That Only Happen In Movies - Nostalgia Central: "33. All beds have special L-shaped sheets that reach to armpit level on a woman but only up to the waist of the man lying beside her."

Breeding dogs for longer lifespans

The female offspring of a Poodle cross?

Google Groups : rec.pets.dogs.health

Abramoff and the mystery of the murdered casino owner

Before the inmates took over the asylum, they used to rant about black helicopters ferrying cocaine to Clinton's underground world government headquarters in Arkansas.

Now those same inmates are making this type of conspiracy theory respectable. Abramoff's former business partner, and alleged co-conspirator, has an undeniably suspicious association with the gangland murder of a Florida casino owner:

Talking Points Memo: by Joshua Micah Marshall: September 25, 2005 - October 01, 2005 Archives

Just to refresh everyone's memory about what happened last week, three reputed mob soldiers were arrested in Florida for the February 2001 gangland-style murder of Gus Boulis, founder and one-time owner of Sun Cruz, the Florida casino boat line. Jack Abramoff and Adam Kidan muscled Boulis into selling them Sun Cruz. And it is for fraud in that acquisition that both were indicted last month.

... It's also been a matter of public record for more than four years that around the time of Boulis's murder, for no clear reason, Kidan paid roughly a quarter million dollars to one of those three men now under indictment for the crime.

...That money did not come out of Kidan's pocket. He may have authorized the payments. But those checks came from Sun Cruz itself, the company Kidan and Abramoff then co-owned.

... Abramoff and Kidan were in pretty close and regular contact in how they used Sun Cruz's money for the DC lobbying operations. At a minimum Abramoff might be able to shed some light on whether there is some innocent explanation for the money that went to the guy who's been indicted for Boulis's murder...

Shock -- American government is corrupt

Newsweek notices shocking news - our government is very, very corrupt.

Tom DeLay's House of Shame - Newsweek National News - MSNBC.com

...Thus began what historians will regard as the single most corrupt decade in the long and colorful history of the House of Representatives. Come on, you say. How about all those years when congressmen accepted cash in the House chamber and then staggered onto the floor drunk? Yes, special interests have bought off members of Congress at least since Daniel Webster took his seat while on the payroll of a bank. And yes, Congress over the years has seen dozens of sex scandals and dozens of members brought low by financial improprieties. But never before has the leadership of the House been hijacked by a small band of extremists bent on building a ruthless shakedown machine, lining the pockets of their richest constituents and rolling back popular protections for ordinary people. These folks borrow like banana republics and spend like Tip O'Neill on speed...

I don't know if this the most corrupt decade ever for american government -- the 19th century had some pretty rough spots. I'd be ok with the most corrupt it at least 100 years.

I don't think the Senate is much better, it's just a lot smarter. I have not forgotten that about 8-10 years ago a number of excellent politicians gave up on the House and Senate because they thought it was getting too corrupt.

We need to address such corruption with a reform administration -- something like Teddy Roosevelt's reform movement. I just hope we can dig out of the hole we, the voters, have created. (I personally voted for Gore and Kerry -- of course. I pale when I think how much better our situation would be if either had been President.)

What Creationists cliam - a compendium

This is a formidable piece of work. Mark Isaac has built an ontology (classification really) of the claims of creationists -- organized by headings such as 'ethics', 'argument form authority' etc.

For each argument he provides a concise and devastating refutation (with contributors acknowledged).

I'd no idea that creationists had such a large and diverse set of attacks. Most are so silly that a rationalist would't reallly register them -- but Isaac avoids that trap. He treats each claim seriously -- and dispenses with it.

Thank you Mark Isaac.

Sprawl - the Minnesota version

Twin Cities SE Metro Area: South of 169, East of 35W

Wow. Today our family drove about 30 miles east and south of Saint Paul for an Apple Orchard outing. It's been a few years since we last did that trip; the transformation of the region is stunning.

Where once was rolling farmland and a few small towns, now there's endless mushroom houses being built. "Executive" estates and more "modest" vast homes -- costing 500K to well over 1 million dollars. Hundreds, maybe thousands of them -- across an area that's probably over 500 square miles. There's nothing in the metro area to slow this type of sprawl -- the Twin Cities has no natural boundaries. Maybe one day it will run into the Rocky Mountains.

It looked miserable. We'll miss the orchards -- their days are numbered.

Recently, during a walk through the desolate Atlanta downtown, a particularly persistent panhandler told me that the Twin Cities had more millionaires per capita than any other metro area. I figured he was exagerrating, but these developments give me pause. These are homes for millionaires with rather unremarkable taste -- but evidently there are no lack of such.

One has to assume such a massive concentration of wealth will elect enough politicians to build the highways they'll need* -- but I wonder if the Twin Cities will really cooperate. If not the as yet unbuilt suburban highways will run aground south of the cities -- and the millionaires will be spending hours in their cars. Yech. What a strange way to spend money.

Perhaps the market for personal flying machines will "take off" ...

* The population density isn't all that high in the developments, but they will draw in higher density population in the flatlands. It's the plebian neighbors that will clog the roads.

Update 10/3: A colleague tells me the Savage, Prior Lake, 169 region is among the top five most rapidly developing areas in the nation. So in the peak of a housing craze, this is one of the frothiest bubbles. Thinking more about the traffic problems, all I can figure is either these folks don't have to work or they're combining generational transfers (inheritances) with massive loans to make the initial downpayment, and then paying off the rest in the sweat equity of time spent in traffic. In other words, they're not as wealthy as their homes.

Comparative advantage: a one line summary

Recently I gave a talk on outsourcing clinical content creation (hospital care plans, standardized order sets, etc) to a physician audience. I was able to work in a reference to Wikipedia and comparative advantage and to relate Ricardo's theory of comparative advantage to outsourcing. This basic economics works pretty well with a clinical audience; they especially liked my concise summary of Ricardo:

It's not that you can't do the work better than someone else, it's rather that you have better things to do ..

American torture - a study in camels

The right wing is fond of declaiming slippery slopes and the camel's nose. I happen to think this is one of their better strategies -- I agree with social conservatives that humans are very poor at detecting that they've slid onto the smooth road to hell.

So where's the evangelical right wing when it comes to torture? What would our new Supreme Court Chief Justice say?

Emphases mine. Note the stages of torture acceptance.

WHO DID YOU TORTURE DURING THE WAR, DADDY?

By Ted Rall Thu Sep 29,10:40 AM ET
Or, We Are All Torturers Now

... An army captain and two sergeants from the elite 82nd Airborne Division confirm previous reports that Bagram and other concentration camps in U.S.-occupied Afghanistan are a kind of Torture University where American troops are taught how to abuse prisoners who have neither been charged with nor found guilty of any crime...

... The latest sordid revelations concern Tiger Base on the border with
Syria, and Camp Mercury, near Fallujah, the Iraqi city leveled by U.S. bombs in a campaign that officials claimed would finish off the insurgent movement. After the army told him to shut up over the course of 17 months--tacit proof that the top brass condones torture--a frustrated Captain Ian Fishback wrote to two conservative Republican senators to tell them about the "death threats, beatings, broken bones, murder, exposure to elements, extreme forced physical exertion, hostage-taking, stripping, sleep deprivation and degrading treatment" carried out against Afghans and Iraqis unlucky enough to fall into American hands.

... By 2004 a third of Americans told pollsters that they didn't have a problem with torture.

... By Monday, September 26, the story of torture at Camps Tiger and Mercury to which New York Times editors had granted page one treatment two days earlier had vanished entirely. Only a few papers, such as the Seattle Times and Los Angeles Times, ran follow-ups.

In his 2000 book "Unspeakable Acts, Ordinary People: The Dynamics of Torture" John Conroy presciently describes the surprising means by which democracies are actually more susceptible to becoming "torture societies" than dictatorships ... Conroy goes on to describe the "fairly predictable" stages of governmental response:

First, writes Conroy, comes "absolute and complete denial." Rumsfeld told Congress in 2004 that the U.S. had followed Geneva "to the letter" in Afghanistan and Iraq.

"The second stage," he says, is "to minimize the abuse." Republican mouthpiece Rush Limbaugh compared the murder and mayhem at Abu Ghraib to fraternity hazing rituals.

Next is "to disparage the victims." Bush Administration officials and right-wing pundits call the victims of torture in U.S. custody "terrorists," ...

Dick Cheney called victims of torture at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba (who, under U.S. law, are presumed innocent) "the worst of a very bad lot." Rumsfeld called them "the worst of the worst."

Other government tactics include charging "that those who take up the cause of those tortured are aiding the enemies of the state" (Right-wing bloggers have smeared me as a "terrorist sympathizer" because I argue against torture); denying that torture is still occurring (numerous Bush Administration officials claimed that Abu Ghraib marked the end of the practice); placing "the blame on a few bad apples" (the classic Fox News-Bush trope); and pointing out that "someone else does or has done much worse things" (the beheadings of Western hostages by Iraqi jihadi organizations was used to justify torturing Iraqis who didn't belong to those groups).

Citing the case of widespread and proven torture of arrestees by Chicago cops, Conroy noted: "It wasn't a case of five people...doing nothing or acting slowly, it was a case of millions of people knowing of an emergency and doing nothing. People looked about, saw no great crusade forming, saw protests only from the usual agitators, and assumed there was no cause for alarm. Responsibility was diffused. Citizens offended by torture could easily retreat into the notion that they lived in a just world, that the experts would sort things out.

An old story, oft retold. This is how nations fall.

Krugman and others have commented that Bush has transformed the American economy into something that resembles Argentina. Argentina has also had a history of governmental torture, and of social complicity. Maybe we should study Argentina a bit.

As for myself, I'll have to join a march or something. One day I may have to explain to the children what I was doing when America went over a cliff.

Building a personal voice notes internet service

I wrote about this in my text blog: Gordon's Tech: MaxEmail & GMail = a great way to pass voice messages around. Using web based email to view and manage voice messages from oneself to oneself makes the old dictaphone obsolete ....