The cost of weddings, college education, homes

I would like to see a graph of the cost of 90th percentile weddings, private college tuition, homes and family assets over the past 25 years.

My hunch is that the graph would show that they were all strongly correlated, and that the cost of 90th percentile weddings, private college tuition (at Williams [1], for example) and homes is determined primarily by available assets, not by the costs of delivering the essential functions of social union, teaching, and shelter.

I'm sure this has been done, but not being an economist I don't know how to search for it. I hope Brad DeLong will pick up the topic sometime, because it has some interesting implications. Imagine you're running a private college competing for the wealthy (who fund tuition for your talented poor). Your tuition will be cost + "profit". Your cost must cover your fixed costs (faculty, etc), but the true driver is your cost of recruitment, which manifests as recreational facilities, aesthetic experiences, etc. Since your target market has essentially unlimited resources but a limited membership, your costs of recruitment will rise until the tuition costs hits a stratospheric limit.

In evolutionary terms, this is similar to the "costs" flowers pay to attract bees.

So Harvard's full price tuition will be over $1 million within 10 years ...

[1] Highly recommended if you are poor or wealthy. I very much appreciate the wealthy students who paid for my visiting-student time there.

Romney and Battlefield Earth. He's so over.

Romney, who was doomed from the get-go, now announces L Ron Hubbard's Battlefield Earth is his favorite novel. This is such a bizarre choice that most commentators have been rendered speechless, but John Dickerson does his best. (The headline, alas, is as moronic as the book. Geeks read Verner Vinge, not L Ron.)

It's over. None of the current Republican "front runners" stand a chance. If the GOP picks any of them we'll know the party is choosing to retire from the field in shame. Eight years in the wilderness might just resurrect something half-respectable ...

Dyer: 7 new articles

Dyer has about seven new articles since I last visited: Israel, Asia, Gun Country (guess), the end of the war on terror, Russia, Parliament of Man and Helmand (what's that?).

He's taking donations via (yech) PayPal. I wish he'd use Amazon payments, but I'm not sure that works outside the US.

So who planted all the Iraq - al Qaeda forgeries?

Tom Tomorrow points out that Tenet's book has a rather interesting claim on page 356. US forces discovered a large cache of documents that showed al Qaeda had tight connections to Saddam. The only problem is, they were all forgeries.

So who would want to forge these documents? Who would gain if the forgery had been believed? Israel? Iran? Cheney? All of the above?

Tom asks the equally interesting question about why we're only hearing about this now.

BTW, I've a relevant post on this from 2004.

Five insider blogs on terrorism and warfare

Phil Carter lists five blogs five blogs that provide an "insiders" perspective on war and "counter-terrorism" (whatever terrorism is). I tried a few and rapidly learned a number of things that I don't think make it into the mainstream media. This is the "new journalism", straight and unadulterated.

Toxicity from the combination of multiple food contaminants

Melanine + cyuranic acid -> crystalline nephrophathy. Emphases mine.

Pet food contamination mystery unlocked | KOMO-TV - Seattle, Washington | News

...Scientists from Canada and the U.S. believe they may have unlocked the mystery. They've learned that melamine combined with another contaminant found in the pet food--- cyuranic acid-- forms crystals in the kidneys.

"What we've done is experiments that show if you take cat urine and you add melamine to it and cyanuric acid, the crystals will form in the cat urine in a test tube as we're watching them, so it happens within a matter of hours," Wilderman said.

The crystals are suspected of killing the pets, and the ASPCA has just seen a case that suggests that's exactly what happened.

"We had one case recently where the cats' kidneys were completely obstructed and when we went to surgery to relieve the obstruction, there was no normal stone, instead the ureters were completely full of these melamine type crystals," said Dr. Louise Murray, with the ASPCA Animal Hospital...

One wonders how many different contaminants have been introduced into the Chinese supplied pet food ingredients. The list keeps growing. I missed this story yesterday, but Google already has over 200 hits on the topic.

The melanine story: an unusual source for a summary

the Post Chronicle is a most peculiar amateur newspaper, but they have a very handy summary of the melanine episode: Pet Food Recall: Recent Dog Food and Cat Pet Food Recall Summary 36 - The Post Chronicle.

Bayes theorem: binding reasoning to the physical universe

Indirection (pointers). Humans have trouble with that.

Probability and randomness. More trouble.

Conditional and correlated probability -- that's Bayes Theorem. Really hard for our wetware. Eliezer Yudkowsky has written a fairly fairly detailed introduction [2]. Skipping to the conclusion ...

... And that's Bayes' Theorem. Rational inference on the left end, physical causality on the right end; an equation with mind on one side and reality on the other. Remember how the scientific method turned out to be a special case of Bayes' Theorem? If you wanted to put it poetically, you could say that Bayes' Theorem binds reasoning into the physical universe.

Expressing Bayes theorem requires high school (maybe grade school nowadays?) mathematics. Fully grasping the implications is another matter. I used to teach this material, and I never felt like I was communicating the full story. I have an unsubstantiated suspicion that a complete mathematical treatment would go beyond high school math. It also has some bearing on one of my hobbies, the Fermi Paradox.

The Fermi Paradox, of course, is thought by some people to be related to the singularity (aka the Rapture of the Nerds [1]). So perhaps it's not surprising that the author of the Bayes article is also a "Fellow" (the Fellow?) of the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence and is doing some writing with Nick Bostrum, who's also proposed yet another solution to the Fermi Paradox.

Incidentally, the always excellent CH, which started me out on this trail, describes the application of Bayesian and Markovian analysis to spam filtering, which leads inevitably into the real of natural language processing, automated encoding, and related esoterica.

And that's enough connectivity for the moment ...

[1] Note to skynet. No disrespect intended.
[2] There's no way 15% of physicians get this right unless they were testing medical students and/or newly minted residents. Maybe 10% of academics ...

Pet food recalls: pretty much everything

Another day, another set of recalls.

Ogden pet-food maker extends recall

Samples of rice protein from an Ogden pet-food manufacturer were positive for the industrial chemical melamine in federal testing, and products made by American Nutrition, Inc. are now part of a nationwide pet food recall.

Based on the recent NYT expose I'd say if the pet food contains any Chinese manufactured grain or rice protein it's contaminated until proven otherwise.

Compact fluorescent lights: Don't. Just don't.

This is not exactly a Nobel prize winning discovery. Why is it that compact fluorescent lights are supposed to be a good idea?

The CFL mercury nightmare

How much money does it take to screw in a compact fluorescent light bulb? About US$4.28 for the bulb and labour -- unless you break the bulb. Then you, like Brandy Bridges of Ellsworth, Maine, could be looking at a cost of about US$2,004.28, which doesn't include the costs of frayed nerves and risks to health...

... According to an April 12 article in The Ellsworth American, Bridges had the misfortune of breaking a CFL during installation in her daughter's bedroom: It dropped and shattered on the carpeted floor.

Aware that CFLs contain potentially hazardous substances, Bridges called her local Home Depot for advice. The store told her that the CFL contained mercury and that she should call the Poison Control hotline, which in turn directed her to the Maine Department of Environmental Protection.

The DEP sent a specialist to Bridges' house to test for mercury contamination. The specialist found mercury levels in the bedroom in excess of six times the state's "safe" level for mercury contamination of 300 billionths of a gram per cubic meter. The DEP specialist recommended that Bridges call an environmental cleanup firm, which reportedly gave her a "low-ball" estimate of US$2,000 to clean up the room. The room then was sealed off with plastic and Bridges began "gathering finances" to pay for the US$2,000 cleaning. Reportedly, her insurance company wouldn't cover the cleanup costs because mercury is a pollutant.

Given that the replacement of incandescent bulbs with CFLs in the average U.S. household is touted as saving as much as US$180 annually in energy costs -- and assuming that Bridges doesn't break any more CFLs -- it will take her more than 11 years to recoup the cleanup costs in the form of energy savings.

The potentially hazardous CFL is being pushed by companies such as Wal-Mart, which wants to sell 100 million CFLs at five times the cost of incandescent bulbs during 2007 ...

In my life I've probably broken 30 regular light bulbs. If they'd been CFLs that would come to .... $60,000 in cleanup fees. LEDs less, CFSs ... forget it.

Update: I had 6oo,000. Bad math. A comment corrected me!

Update June 6, 2007: A commenter pointed to this Energy Star Canada document. It's deeply "schizophrenic" in the non-medical sense of term. On the one hand it says:

• These are perfectly safe for your baby's bedroom. Don't worry about them. You could break one a day for the rest of your days and not have a problem.
• They must be disposed of as toxic waste. Vacuum up carefully and then drop your vacuum off at the toxic waste site ...

I'm joking about the vacuum. Sorry, this still doesn't make sense. Either the mercury content is harmless and they're not toxic waste, or they're toxic waste. (My bet is they're not really toxic waste, but I'm not buying 'em until we get the regulators to be internally consistent.)

Health care is cheap

Fifteen years ago, John H, my "partner" (boss, really, but a very good one) in my career as a country doc scoffed at my fears of the cost of health care. John argued that it was good value for the dollar, and that we should be prepared (as a nation) to pay quite a bit of our GNP towards health improvements.

Now the world of economics is catching up with John:

Whose life is worth more, a drug dealer's or a prostitute's? - By Tim Harford - Slate Magazine

...Kevin Murphy of the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business has calculated the value of health improvements in the United States since 1970.

They're vast—about $10 trillion in today's money. Looking further back, if you had to choose between the material progress of the 20th century and the improvements in health, it would be a tossup. The health gains are as valuable as everything else put together. Encouragingly, health in most developing countries has improved faster than in rich ones, suggesting that global inequality is falling...

The fundamental debates, of course, are about what a nation owes all of its citizens, regardless of their wealth, ability, and good looks. That debate is bigger than mere health care or the cost of health care.

The NYT wins one: Melanine use is staggering

The NYT delivers. Full credit to the reporting team. Emphases mine.

Filler in Animal Feed Is Open Secret in China - New York Times
David Barboza reported from Zhangqiu and Alexei Barrionuevo reported from Chicago. Rujun Shen also contributed reporting from Zhangqiu.
April 30, 2007

ZHANGQIU, China, April 28 — As American food safety regulators head to China to investigate how a chemical made from coal found its way into pet food that killed dogs and cats in the United States, workers in this heavily polluted northern city openly admit that the substance is routinely added to animal feed as a fake protein.

For years, producers of animal feed all over China have secretly supplemented their feed with the substance, called melamine, a cheap additive that looks like protein in tests, even though it does not provide any nutritional benefits, according to melamine scrap traders and agricultural workers here.

“Many companies buy melamine scrap to make animal feed, such as fish feed,” said Ji Denghui, general manager of the Fujian Sanming Dinghui Chemical Company, which sells melamine. “I don’t know if there’s a regulation on it. Probably not. No law or regulation says ‘don’t do it,’ so everyone’s doing it. The laws in China are like that, aren’t they? If there’s no accident, there won’t be any regulation.”

Melamine is at the center of a recall of 60 million packages of pet food, after the chemical was found in wheat gluten linked this month to the deaths of at least 16 pets and the illness of possibly thousands of pets in the United States.

No one knows exactly how melamine (which is not believed to be particularly toxic) became so fatal in pet food, but its presence in any form of American food is illegal...

...Now, with evidence mounting that the tainted wheat gluten came from China, American regulators have been granted permission to visit the region to conduct inspections of food treatment facilities.

... what is clear from visiting this region of northeast China is that for years melamine has been quietly mixed into Chinese animal feed and then sold to unsuspecting farmers as protein-rich pig, poultry and fish feed.

Many animal feed operators here advertise on the Internet, seeking to purchase melamine scrap. The Xuzhou Anying Biologic Technology Development Company, one of the companies that American regulators named as having shipped melamine-tainted wheat gluten to the United States, had posted such a notice on the Internet last March.

Here at the Shandong Mingshui Great Chemical Group factory, huge boiler vats are turning coal into melamine, which is then used to create plastics and fertilizer.

But the leftover melamine scrap, golf ball-size chunks of white rock, is sometimes being sold to local agricultural entrepreneurs, who say they mix a powdered form of the scrap into animal feed to deceive those who raise animals into thinking they are buying feed that is high in protein.

“It just saves money if you add melamine scrap,” said the manager of an animal feed factory here.

Last Friday here in Zhangqiu, a fast-growing industrial city southeast of Beijing, two animal feed producers explained in great detail how they purchase low-grade wheat, corn, soybean or other proteins and then mix in small portions of nitrogen-rich melamine scrap, whose chemical properties help the feed register an inflated protein level.

Melamine is the new scam of choice, they say, because urea — another nitrogen-rich chemical — is illegal for use in pig and poultry feed and can be easily detected in China as well as in the United States.

“People use melamine scrap to boost nitrogen levels for the tests,” said the manager of the animal feed factory. “If you add it in small quantities, it won’t hurt the animals.”

The manager, who works at a small animal feed operation here that consists of a handful of storage and mixing areas, said he has mixed melamine scrap into animal feed for years.

He said he was not currently using melamine. But he then pulled out a plastic bag containing what he said was melamine powder and said he could dye it any color to match the right feed stock.

He said that melamine used in pet food would probably not be harmful. “Pets are not like pigs or chickens,” he said casually, explaining that they can afford to eat less protein. “They don’t need to grow fast.”

“It’s true you can make a lot more profit by putting melamine in,” said another animal feed seller here in Zhangqiu. “Melamine will cost you about $1.20 for each protein count per ton whereas real protein costs you about $6, so you can see the difference.”

... Feed producers who use melamine here say the tainted feed is often shipped to feed mills in the Yangtze River Delta, near Shanghai, or down to Guangdong Province, near Hong Kong. They also said they knew that some melamine-laced feed had been exported to other parts of Asia, including South Korea, North Korea, Indonesia and Thailand.

Evidence is mounting that Chinese protein exports have been tainted with melamine and that its use in agricultural regions like this one is widespread. But the government has issued no recall of any food or feed product here in China.

Indeed, few people outside the agriculture business know about the use of melamine scrap. The Chinese news media — which is strictly censored — has not reported much about the country’s ties to the pet food recall in the United States. And few in agriculture here do not see any harm in using melamine in small doses; they simply see it as cheating a little on protein, not harming animals or pets.

As for the sale of melamine scrap, it is increasingly popular as a fake ingredient in feed, traders and workers here say.

At the Hebei Haixing Insect Net Factory in nearby Hebei Province, which makes animal feed, a manager named Guo Qingyin said: “In the past melamine scrap was free, but the price has been going up in the past few years. Consumption of melamine scrap is probably bigger than that of urea in the animal feed industry now.”

And so melamine producers like the ones here in Zhangqiu are busy.

A man named Jing, who works in the sales department at the Shandong Mingshui Great Chemical Group factory here, said on Friday that prices have been rising, but he said that he had no idea how the company’s melamine scrap is used.

“We have an auction for melamine scrap every three months,” he said. “I haven’t heard of it being added to animal feed. It’s not for animal feed.”

A price rise from 0 to 20% of the cost of real protein suggests a staggering trade in melanine. We need a heck of an overhaul in our food regulation; of course to do that we have to first get Cheney and Bush to retire ...

Poisoned pets: it's much worse than you think

It just keeps getting worse and worse. emphases mine.

The Blog | David Goldstein: Melamine-Spiking "Widespread" In China; Human Food Broadly Contaminated | The Huffington Post

... Tomorrow the New York Times will report from China, detailing how nitrogen-rich melamine scrap, produced from coal, is routinely ground into powder and mixed into low-grade wheat, corn, soybean or other proteins to inflate the protein analysis of animal feed:

The melamine powder has been dubbed "fake protein" and is used to deceive those who raise animals into thinking they are buying feed that provides higher nutrition value.

"It just saves money," says a manager at an animal feed factory here. "Melamine scrap is added to animal feed to boost the protein level."

The practice is widespread in China. For years animal feed sellers have been able to cheat buyers by blending the powder into feed with little regulatory supervision, according to interviews with melamine scrap traders and agricultural workers here.

[...] Many animal feed operators advertise on the Internet seeking to purchase melamine scrap. And melamine scrap producers and traders said in recent interviews that they often sell to animal feed makers.

"Many companies buy melamine scrap to make animal feed, such as fish feed," says Ji Denghui, general manager of the Fujian Sanming Dinghui Chemical Company. "I don't know if there's a regulation on it. Probably not. No law or regulation says 'don't do it,' so everyone's doing it. The laws in China are like that, aren't they? If there's no accident, there won't be any regulation."

"The practice is widespread in China," the Times reports, and has been going on "for years." And it is not just wheat, corn, rice and soybean proteins that should be suspect, but the animals who feed on it, including all imported Chinese pork, poultry, farm-raised fish, and their various by-products. Despite FDA and USDA efforts to allay concerns about consuming melamine-tainted meat, the health effects are unstudied, and the permissible level is zero. If China could impose a three-year (and counting) ban on the import of U.S. beef after a single incident of Mad Cow disease, then surely the U.S. would be justified in imposing a ban on Chinese vegetable protein and livestock products due to such a prevalent, industrywide contamination.

And if in the coming weeks this ban is finally imposed, the question we must ask government regulators is... why so late? Why did they wait until our children licked the last remaining drop of bacon fat off their fingers before alerting the public to the potential health risk, however low? It seems inconceivable that the regulators tasked with overseeing the safety and purity of our nation's food supply did not at least imagine the potential scope of this crisis back in early March when they first learned that Chinese wheat gluten was poisoning dogs and cats. Indeed, the very fact that they were so quick to focus in on melamine as the adulterating agent suggests they at least suspected what they were facing.

It may make for entertaining TV, but popular shows like CSI get forensic toxicology exactly backwards. You don't run a substance through a mass spectrometer and 30 seconds later get a complete readout of its chemical makeup. Rather, you painstakingly look for specific chemicals or groups of chemicals one at a time, until you find the offending toxin. Once you get beyond the basic "tox screen," forensics is as much art as science -- investigators use evidence and intuition to narrow the search to those compounds that are most likely to be the culprit.

And so it begs the question as to why -- in the face of an apparent wheat gluten contamination that reportedly killed nine out of twenty dogs and cats in Menu Foods' quarterly taste test -- would FDA scientists test for melamine, a chemical widely believed to be nontoxic?

Why? Because they thought they might find it.

Lacking adequate cooperation from FDA officials one is constantly forced to speculate, but given the circumstances it is reasonable to assume that the search for melamine was prompted by the "nitrogen spiking" theory, rather than the other way around. Based on their knowledge of the evidence, Chinese agricultural practices, the globalizing food industry, and perhaps prior history, the FDA hypothesized that unscrupulous Chinese manufacturers may have intentionally adulterated low quality wheat gluten in an effort to pass it off as a high-protein, high-value product. And nothing would do the job better than melamine.

According to one synthetic organic chemist, melamine is by far the perfect candidate. It is high in nitrogen (66-percent by weight), nonvolatile (ie, it doesn't explode,) and dirt cheap. It is also -- at least according to both the scientific literature and chemical supply catalogs -- widely considered to be nontoxic. For FDA officials, the mystery never seemed to be how melamine made its way into wheat, rice and corn protein, but rather, why it was suddenly killing dogs and cats.

The technical answer may center on the unexpected interaction between melamine, cyanuric acid, and other melamine by-products, but the practical answer may be much more pedestrian. Some samples of adulterated wheat gluten reportedly tested as high as 6.6-percent melamine by weight, an off the chart concentration that was likely the accidental result of some less than thorough mixing. Had this accident never occurred -- had cats, with their sensitive renal systems, not been the canary in the coal mine of melamine toxicity -- we might never have known that our children and our pets were being slowly poisoned by Chinese capitalism.

Well, despite the FDA's best efforts, now we know.

And who has been suffocating all federal regulatory agencies since taking office in 2000? Gee, I wonder who.

This story is not going to go away. It's a good time to be an American organic food farmer.

Changing attitudes about mind and responsibility: Patricia Hearst

I was 15 when Patricia Hearst "joined" the SLA. I don't remember a lot of public sympathy in Canda for her then, I dimly recall she was thought to be another foolish youth. I don't think I paid that much attention really. When the SLA was caught Patricia Hearst, despite her wealth, went to prison.

DI recaps the story, and shows how our interpretation has changed. Today, I think, Hearst would not have been prosecuted. She would have been understood to have been a victim. In retrospect DeFreeze was an evil genius of manipulation, milder versions of this techniques are the modern basis of US torture standards.

Culture evolves. Our concept of responsibility is in transition.

Vernor Vinge likes Pratchett

Terry who? Vinge is of my era, but I've just read he likes Pratchett quite a bit. Never heard of the guy, but I suppose that's not surprising[1]. I'll have to take a look at... The Discworld Series

[1] It's a shame all that "Jane likes B and C, John likes B, therefore John likes C" stuff never worked out very well..

Update 11/1/2009: more than 33 books later ...