Dear Salon and Dear Volkswagen: this will cost you

This is how my Salon Premium article looks today when viewed with Firefox:



An extremely obnoxious VW ad is covering a chunk of the article. VW, I am very annoyed. You are on my poop list.

Salon, one more time and I drop the Premium subscription.

I am not amused.

Should we preferentially tax premium gasoline? How evil would that be?

What fraction of premium gasoline sales are an evil exploitation of the weak minded?

Here's why the question matters. Most rationalists believe we need a carbon tax to keep our planet's climate within a familiar range, and we know we have a $1.5 trillion dollar infrastructure bill coming due just as we boomers prepare to suck the young dry. So most rationalists would say a carbon tax now, starting with a gasoline tax increase, makes scientific, political and economic sense. On the other hand, many rationalists, due to ethical impulse, a desire to survive, or an aesthetic aversion to starving masses, prefer to avoid exploiting the weak and gullible. If we add up a carbon/gasoline tax, infrastructure repair, and the duty/wisdom of the strong aiding the weak, should we preferentially tax premium gasoline?

The answer depends in part on what percentage of premium gasoline sales are a scam perpetuated on the weak minded:

Fact or Fiction?: Premium Gasoline Delivers Premium Benefits to Your Car: Scientific American

....Most modern cars, however, are designed to employ a specific compression ratio, a measure of how much room is available to the fuel when the piston is at the bottom and the top of the cylinder. This compression ratio—somewhere in the neighborhood of eight to one—tolerates lower octane fuels (such as regular gasoline, good old 87 octane) without knocking. "The compression ratio is fixed by the designer of the engine," Green says. "The regular fuel will burn properly and the premium fuel will burn properly and therefore there is no reason you should pay the extra money." High-performance engines, such as those in some sports cars or older, heavier automobiles, often boast much higher compression ratios. These cars—for example, Shepherd's Subaru WRX—require premium gasoline and will definitely knock without it. "I have to put the 92 octane in," he says. "It has a turbocharger."...

...for standard cars on the road today, purchasing premium gasoline is simply paying a premium for a fuel that delivers no added benefits. "If you think you need it," Green says, "you're being very eccentric.

So collector cars and sports cars (and lawn mowers? motor cycles?) need premium gasoline. These are not requirements for modern economic survival -- they are luxury items. That would favor a preferential gasoline tax on premium gas. On the other hand, we know a significant fraction of premium gas sales are an exploitation of the naive, the gullible, and the weak. That seems to argue against a preferential tax -- but in fact I think it supports a preferential tax. I bet that within days of announcing such a tax, the vast majority of consumers who don't need premium gas will learn that they've been conned, and they'll stop using it. So a preferential tax won't raise all that much money (we have to tax all gasoline), but it will serve a social good anyway. It's worth doing.

Incidentally, there's another question I haven't asked. Would we be wiser to equip our cars with floatation devices and spend our carbon tax money on avoiding war with China, solar energy research, "rationalizing" the tax code, meteor impact prevention, biowar prophylaxis or any of a hundred other worthy causes? Ahh, well, I'll save that one for another day.

Rome burns. Bush fiddles.

We have a 1.5 trillion dollar infrastructure bill to pay.

MPR: Bush cool to federal gas tax increase

Just one week after the deadly I-35W bridge collapse in Minneapolis, President Bush reacted coolly to a plan to raise the federal gas tax.

President Bush said Congress should reprioritize the way it spends highway money instead of raising taxes to pay for future bridge repair.

"Before we raise taxes, which could affect economic growth, I would strongly urge the Congress to examine how they set priorities," said Bush. "If bridges are a priority, let's make sure that we set that priority before we raise taxes."

Bush made the comments one day after Rep. Jim Oberstar, DFL-Minn., announced a plan to increase the federal gas tax from 18 to 23 cents a gallon.

Oberstar, who chairs the House Transportation Committee, says the money would go into a new trust fund for repairing and replacing bridges. He said the plan would raise about $25 billion over three years....

Cut out GOP senator Stevens bridge to nowhere and a few similar boondoggles, and you get maybe $3 billion. We don't need $3 billion. Bush is an idiot.

On the other hand, assume we need to raise $2 trillion over 25 years (cost plus interest), so we need an extra $80 billion a year for the next 25 years. That's more like a 15 cents a gallon price rise in the gas tax. So three times what Oberstar is saying now, but, still, he's at least on the right track.

[rewritten, because I was too sleepy to remember we don't need to raise all the money all at once.]


I think we're going to lose at least a dozen major bridges before we get real.

Ignatieff: I'm so glad I didn't bother ...

Michael Ignatieff, a pseudo-Canadian who emerged from Harvard to bring salvation to the barbarian backwaters of my birthplace, wrote an OpEd article for the NYT a week ago. I tried to read it, but I fell asleep half-way through. It was ponderous, pompous, vacuous, internally inconsistent insofar as it had any meaning, and, by the way, it made no sense. I vaguely wondered about commenting on it, but I don't have the skill to make that kind of commentary funny and I couldn't think of anything useful to say. (Other than, Oh Canada, you don't deserve this.).

Happily, others have done the job. Crooked Timber's "Ignatieff" has some good links and droll commentary, but the first comment links to ...

David Rees: Cormac Ignatieff's "The Road" - Politics on The Huffington Post

Hello everyone! Personal message to all the New Yorkers out there: Did you read Michael Ignatieff's essay in the the NY Times Magazine? If so, contact me ASAP to let me know you're OK. I put your flyer up at Grand Central Station, but have heard no response.

Myself, I'm just making my way out of the debilitating Level-Five Mind Fog that came from reading the thing. Even my "Second Life avatar" has a headache! (Hey young people, did I get that right? Hope so! See you in "Warcraft Worlds!")

The essay is called "Getting Iraq Wrong." And baby, if Michael Ignatieff got Iraq wrong, I don't want him to be right! Because this essay can MAKE LEMONADE IN YOUR MIND...

And so it goes.

Again, we ask, "where is the medium lobster", and what happened to him in July 2006?

The Apple iMovie story: An interesting lesson in modern software evolution

Apple's iMovie was a very good product for editing home videos. Apple decided, however, that they needed to provide a simpler product for managing small video fragments (phone, camera) including editing and organization (iPhoto also organizes video fragments, but even my fellow geeks don't know that.)

Apple decided to kill their original iLife product (iMovie 2006) and replace it with a new 1.0 product called, not coincidentally, iMovie 2008. iMovie 2006 and iMovie 2008 are very different products with some overlapping and some distinct features -- but 2008 is definitely not a superset of 2006. In some ways iMovie 2008 is a significant step backwards from iMovie 2006. If you don't like it, one imagines Jobs saying, you can buy Final Cut Pro and new Mac to run it.

This is arguably a rather arrogant move, but we Apple customers are accustomed to this sort of thing. Those of us who knowingly sold our souls to Mephistophejobs knew there'd be days like this. The iPhone doesn't have, cut and paste, tasks or search capabilities (ok, there's a long list of missing basic PIM functionality), Aperture can't modify image dates and the database is unbelievably slow, iPhoto can't import/merge iPhoto Libraries, etc, etc. Apple's software gets dumber and dumber, but that's what non-geeks want. Geeks just have to suck it in -- for us the pinnacle of software development on any platform was probably the mid-90s.

That's what I thought, until I read this: Buy iLife '08 and get iMovie '06 for free.  This is so unlike Apple I'm a bit stunned. It's almost as though Satan were say "John, I'm really sorry about that eternal hellfire bit, I'll drop the temperature". They're effectively apologizing for the kill/switch move, and providing the old functionality for those who want it. They barely waited for the screaming to start.

So what happened? Is Jobs grip weakening? Is some non-satanic force emerging within Apple?

Wow. Next thing you know they'll build an iPhone I can buy, or maybe even, dare I dream, fix Aperture?

CV is hurting my head again: The anthropic principle and our peculiar relation to the arrow of time ...

Things were odd enough when we seemed to live peculiarly close the mid-life of the universe. But now it seems we live infinitesimally close to the birth of the universe ...

Unusual Features of Our Place In the Universe That Have Obvious Anthropic Explanations | Cosmic Variance

...

Most of the energy in the universe is dark energy. And yet, we are made of matter.

The post-Big-Bang lifespan of the universe is very plausibly infinite. And yet, we find ourselves living within the first few tens of billions of years (a finite interval) after the Bang.

which produced a motley range of comments varying from funny to thoughtful to eccentric. One of them was particularly hard to characterize ...

Jonathan Vos Post on Aug 8th, 2007 at 11:52 am

.... As to the far future, my article on this, which cited Freeman Dyson and others, which first published the idea that we are most likely simulations by a far future dilute electron positron plasma civilization, and which served as the extensively quoted basis (quotation marks accidently omitted) of some Greg Benford novels, is:

“Human Destiny and the End of Time” [Quantum, No.39, Winter 1991/1992, Thrust Publications, 8217 Langport Terrace, Gaithersburg, MD 20877] ISSN 0198-6686

In fairness to Benford, who I think is being criticized here [update 12/7/07: see comment by Vos Post -- this is not a criticism of Benford], science fiction writers have been talking about 'life in a simulation' at least since the early 1980s and I dimly recall Dyson as talking about it eons ago.

For related discussions, see:

• Ten cosmologies and Theory 10
• Life seem absurd? Maybe it is.
• George Bush; Deity of the Computer Simulation?
• http://www.faughnan.com/setifail.html#[9] (Footnote - Are You Living in a Computer Simulation? Nick Bostrom, Department of Philosophy, Oxford University. Philosophical Quarterly (2003), Vol. 53, No. 211, pp. 243-255.)
  
• In Our Time: Common Sense Philosophy: Descartes and Hume try to get out of their heads, and mostly fail to persuade anyone that they're not living in a simulation. Hume in particular seems to have struggled with the impossibility of proving he wasn't a "brain in a bottle", though it's easy to argue that Plato (and probably "Thog") was talking about a similar problem.
  

Inattention taxes: overcharging on checkout

Inattention taxes are the monies earned through overcharges. I'm fairly certain I pay a few hundred dollars of fraudulent or mistaken credit card and checkout transactions every year simply because I can't take the time to validate all my transactions. I just try to catch the thousand-dollar frauds that hit me very ten years or so.

So I pay my "inattention tax" and hope others, like Scott Gruby: fight my battles for me:

Target was issued a violation

I just got a call from the San Diego County Agriculture/Weights & Measures department about my complaint of Target overcharging me. They inspected the items I indicated I was overcharged for and also found that they were overcharged. In addition, they performed a routine inspection of 50 items and were overcharged on 9 of them. If that wasn’t enough, they got cited for not having the required notices about being overcharged.

I’ve never seen a public agency act so quickly on a complaint. While my overcharges were pennies, the inspector said that he was overcharged $5 on an item.

I suspect these overcharges are not planned, they are merely emergent. If an organization focuses limited resources on preventing undercharging, they will necessarily diminish resources that prevent overcharging. So the balance will shift to err on the side of overcharging. Scott's intervention won't make the problem go away, but he's helping keep it in check. If he had a micropayment donation box (soon to come via Amazon) I'd send him a $1 for doing what I can't afford to do ...

Information (and data) Visualization: The future always arrives late and unexpectedly

I've intermittently taught data visualization to grad students. It's been the same old thing for years -- poor quality scans of examples from 20-30 year old experiments. Nothing seemed to make it out of the lab. So I was surprised when a colleague (Andrew) pointed me to an unexpected reference: 

Data Visualization: Modern Approaches

This article gives a nice overview of various visualization technologies that people are experimenting with.  Some seem like eye candy, some seem genuinely useful and could be applicable to clinical applications.  The articles and resources section gives some good links to other resources on the web, such as visual complexity which has hundreds of different ideas for visual representation of topics....

Andrew also pointed me to the interactive Flash based BBC British History Timeline. Lovely, and a very handy reference to use with "In Our Time" podcasts. These kinds of visualizations do make me hope Apple is able to create a decent Flash client for OS X (and thus for the iPhone). (since Adobe can't).

I expect the data visualization post will be widely used by anyone lecturing on information/ knowledge/ data visualization. It's also a golden example of how much power Blogs (Smashing Magazine is really a blog in drag) provide. Once upon a time, this would have had to be a book, with an enormous barrier to publication. Today this unattributed article has "Views: 70392 by 52501 users". As near as I can tell this is the author information:

Smashing Magazine is maintained by Sven Lennartz, the owner of the Dr. Web Magazine and Marketing Tricks and Vitaly Friedman, the creator of The Web Developer’s Handbook - with a little help from Christiane Rosenberger.

Of course I've added SM to my bloglines subscription list. Anyone who can do this must have more to offer in the archives and the future ...

Hedge funds and private equity: a hedge fund manager's perspective

Freakonomics gets some great responses from a hedge fund manager. No respectable senator can claim any longer (though really, they never could) that there's a good reason to exempt hedge fund managers from taxation.

Excerpts below ...

Freakonomics Blog � Your Hedge Fund Questions, Answered

Q: (1) Do you think the Senate proposal [to raise taxes] really could cause a flight of the industry overseas, as Ben Bernanke hinted?

A: First, let me state the obvious: there is no public policy reason for hedge fund and private equity managers to pay a lower tax rate than teachers, doctors, or lawyers. ..

... let’s not kid ourselves — the tax code is a gift to the industry...

... from a fairness perspective, it is a no-brainer. The notion that the most profitable industry in the history of mankind (I hyperbolize, but on a per-person basis, this might in fact be true) requires a lower tax rate to take risk and make investments, simply does not square with logic. I know of no manager who would stop working or stop investing as a result...

Q: I’m curious as to what degree the emergence of hedge funds has changed business strategy....

.... Often, companies go private when activists chase management into the arms of LBO shops willing to put a level of debt on corporate balance sheets that public investors would find imprudent. As the economy slows or credit markets tighten, these companies will have trouble making their debt payments, and — just as the LBO boom in the 1980s burst — lenders and possibly private equity investors will be left holding the bag...

Q: Do you believe that hedge funds provide a social good? ...

.... What specific benefits to society as a whole are provided by hedge funds? I do believe that, starting with the 1980s bull market, we have seen a society-wide reallocation of human resources. And it is unfortunate that the “best and the brightest” no longer seem to want to go into government or medicine or teaching (I did say I’d be generalizing here), and instead seem to gravitate to the best-paying professions. In other eras, I believe that was not the case to the degree it is today. Hedge funds didn’t make this happen — back in the 1980s and 1990s it was the investment banks that siphoned off the talent — but the industry has certainly made matters worse...

I chose the quotes that I found most interesting, but our manager also says that hedge funds, once they become available to retail investors, will be competitive alternatives to conventional mutual funds.

Why didn't more people die when 35W fell?

It is no comfort to the loved ones of the 13 who appear to have died, or to those facing lifelong disability from the fall of the I-35W bridge, but the greatest puzzle of the disaster is that so many survived. What are Minnesotans made of?

How did so many survive?

It's hard to imagine anyone surviving a six-story drop into the Mississippi River.

But it's now apparent that the vast majority of those who were on the Interstate 35W bridge when it collapsed Wednesday escaped with relatively minor injuries.

Although the final death toll is still unknown, doctors and safety experts say that a combination of factors, from physics to shock absorbers, probably helped cushion the blow for those plunging from the bridge in their vehicles.

In general, they say, the cars and the bridge itself helped absorb some of the impact that would have killed someone free-falling from that height.

"I would say over two-thirds of the people walked away," said Dr. Marc Conterato, an emergency room physician at North Memorial Medical Center in Robbinsdale, who was at the site. "Believe me, the human body can absorb a lot of trauma."

As of Saturday, the death toll stood at five, and 24 people remained hospitalized, five in critical condition and four in serious. About 75 others were treated and released. About eight people are missing and presumed drowned.

As tragic as that is, it's a far cry from what some at the scene expected.

"I figured we'd probably have a couple of hundred injured, and 25 or 50 fatalities," said Dr. John Hick, an emergency doctor and disaster coordinator at Hennepin County Medical Center.

Many of those treated at hospitals had broken bones, fractures or back injuries from the vertical fall, according to physicians.

"I've certainly seen many worse injuries in car crashes," said Dr. Jeffrey Chipman, a trauma surgeon at the University of Minnesota Medical Center, Fairview.

In some cases, the vehicles dropped straight down on top of a portion of the bridge as it hit the water. That "would have created some kind of cushion when they landed," Chipman said.

James Kakalios, a physics professor at the University of Minnesota, agreed. "Some of them were able to ride parts of the expressway down," he said. "And that helped distribute the force and save the individual cars, as opposed to a car just falling 50 feet on its own."

Vehicle safety designs probably also played a role, said Lanny Berke, a mechanical engineer and safety specialist in Plymouth who is a frequent expert witness in accident cases.

"Let's start with the school bus," he said, referring to the bus carrying dozens of children. Because of federal safety rules, he said, it had an emergency door at the rear through which they could escape. "So the federally mandated design features for school buses saved those kids' lives," he said. "Because there's no way in hell they could have gotten out the front."

At the same time, he said, seat belts and airbags could have helped some survive, as well.

And the survivors had another thing going for them, the experts agree. "We were lucky," said Conterato. "We were actually in an area that was very well populated. People had relatively easy access to the area. Plus, we were relatively close to two large medical facilities, the university and Hennepin County. So we were able to put people on the scene relatively quickly.

I'm sure the cars were helpful, but the construction workers were standing on the bridge. They lost one person. Did they fly?

I suspect a lot of incidental bystanders took heroic risks to help people, risks that by rights should have killed them as well. Somehow even the rescuers survived. The rush hour group is also probably younger and more vigorous than a random population sample, Minnesotans are relatively healthy by national standards, the river is warm right now, and we obviously have a lot of competent swimmers ...

Fake rabies vaccine

10,000 doses.

China Blacklists 400 Exporters - Forbes.com

... Earlier this week, the official People's Daily reported, police detained a further 17 members of a gang in Heilongjiang province producing counterfeit medicines. In an earlier raid on the gang, authorities seized 10,000 doses of bogus rabies vaccine, 20,250 bottles of a fake version of a medicine used to treat cardiovascular disease and 211 bottles of blood protein. In all, the paper said, police confiscated fake versions of 67 medicines produced by 53 companies...

Maybe I need to reconsider my principled opposition to Hell.

Solving the china import problem; $1 million prize for each recall

Want to solve the China problem?

Why lead-tainted Chinese goods slip through despite U.S. recalls -- chicagotribune.com

...Three decades after the federal government significantly toughened regulations on lead in children's products, American companies have yet to find a way to successfully screen the flood of imported products for the toxic metal.

The federal watchdog charged with ensuring they do so is overwhelmed and often ineffective. And the growing list of lead recalls of children's products underscores how the metal, slathered on with paint or mixed in with other raw materials, is more pervasive than many American consumers ever imagined...

It's not so hard.

Offer a $1 million prize to each person who detects a problem that triggers a product recall. I'll bet most of the prizes are won by Chinese entrepreneurs. Within 3 years the recalls would stop.

Next, I'll bring peace to the middle east.

The Center of it All

The center of it All.

2011 comes early: Ms. Carbon Tax, meet Mr. Bridge

I figured American life would change when gas hit $5/gallon in 2011. I picked that date because I figured we won't get a carbon tax through before 2013. That was before one of my local bridges took a tumble and I started to do the math on 77,000 "deficient" (rating =4) bridges and wonder how much it costs to (re)build a bridge. If we assume an average cost of, say, $30 million each, and we assume we replace/rebuild only 40,000 deficient bridges, that's $1.2 trillion dollars.

Now, perhaps we'll decide that the I-35W collapse was basically in line with expectations. We all understand that bridge ratings are probabilistic -- the yearly risk of catastrophic collapse is not 0% at the highest rating (10) or 100% at the lowest rating (0). Maybe it's something like a 1/100,000 risk at the rating of 4, with a substantially higher risk of non-catastrophic failure. With 77,000 bridges at that rating we should expect one to collapse every few years somewhere in the US and approximately 50 people to die or be injured by bridge collapse every 1-2 years.

That's a risk that a Vulcan would probably find quite reasonable. It's probably significantly less than the risk we assume with current food imports; riding a motorcycle is probably a hundred to a thousand times higher risk. Logically we may decide to just accept that and stick with our current bridge replacement/repair policies.

Humans are not logical. There's a good chance we'll run up a trillion dollar infrastructure repair bill rather than have yearly bridge collapse headlines.

We could simply borrow to build. It's a much better investment than the Iraq war, for example. I have a hunch though that Bush has busted our budget already. So we need to raise a trillion dollars.

We also need to reduce CO2 emissions.

We also need to decrease the load on our old infrastructure.

Gee, I wonder how we could do all of these things ...

$5/gallon by 2009?

PS. If I were in a business related to bridge construction, I'd be hiring today ...

Update 9/17/07: This is looking more likely ...

Update 9/21/07: It occurs to me that this is the cure for the AMT problem. More on that in a f/u post.

Bridges: 77,000 deficient, 750 have I-35W design

At Bridge Site, Search of River Moves Slowly - New York Times

... Dan Dorgan, a state bridge engineer for the Minnesota Department of Transportation, said a “deficient” designation did not mean a bridge needed to be immediately replaced; 77,000 bridges across the country, he said, have a similar designation...

Elsewhere I read that 750 bridges have the same design as our fallen I-35W bridge. I wonder what percentage of those are rated as deficient?

Maybe Google will start attaching design and deficiency rations to Google Earth/Maps. I bet that would be a good way to attract users.

This accident may end up costing billions ...

8/3/07 Update: I thought a bit more about how Google could accelerate the infrastructure review. A "route around risky bridge" option for Google Map directions would concentrate minds wonderfully. One can readily imagine icons for bridges with the I-35W design and risk designation. Did I say "billions"? Sorry, I meant tens to hundreds of billions ...

8/9/07 Update: My wife points out that as much as we may despise Pawlenty, it was the Ventura administration, albeit as part of a GOP initiative that returned a state budget surplus to the taxpayer rather than, say, use it to repair bridges. So Jesse Ventura deserves a chunk of the I-35W bridge for his desk.