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Sat Nov 24, 3:48 AM Pacific
In NYC, just 35 people killed by strangers
In a city of 8.1 million people, just 0.0004% were murdered by strangers -- a remarkable statistic.
Fri Nov 23, 9:10 PM Pacific
Pretty cool
My diary, Paul Krugman gets John Edwards, reached the recommended list today on Daily Kos.
Sweet! Hope is not lost. Speaking of that, hillaryattacks.com is just a few days away from being ready.
Fri Nov 23, 9:36 AM Pacific
Cost of birth control pills quadruples on college campuses
It seems big Rx lobbyists really do earn their money:
November 22, 2007 Big Rise in Cost of Birth Control on Campuses By MONICA DAVEYIn health centers at hundreds of colleges and universities around the country, young women are paying sharply higher prices for prescription contraceptives because of a change in federal law.
The increases have meant that some students using popular birth control pills and other products are paying three and four times as much as they did several months ago. The higher prices have also affected about 400 community health centers nationwide used by poor women.
The change is due to a provision in a federal law that ended a practice by which drug manufacturers provided prescription contraception to the health centers at deeply discounted rates. The centers then passed along the savings to students and others.
You'd think the anti-choice people would be up in arms about this.
Fri Nov 23, 12:48 AM Pacific
Paul Krugman gets it
Paul Krugman's latest column on the banking industry is a good read.
November 23, 2007 Op-Ed Columnist Banks Gone Wild By PAUL KRUGMAN“What were they smoking?” asks the cover of the current issue of Fortune magazine. Underneath the headline are photos of recently deposed Wall Street titans, captioned with the staggering sums they managed to lose.
The answer, of course, is that they were high on the usual drug — greed. And they were encouraged to make socially destructive decisions by a system of executive compensation that should have been reformed after the Enron and WorldCom scandals, but wasn’t.
In a direct sense, the carnage on Wall Street is all about the great housing slump.
...
How did things go so wrong?
Part of the answer is that people who should have been alert to the dangers, and taken precautionary measures, instead blithely assured Americans that everything was fine, and even encouraged them to take out risky mortgages. Yes, Alan Greenspan, that means you.
But another part of the answer lies in what hasn’t happened to the men on that Fortune cover — namely, they haven’t been forced to give back any of the huge paychecks they received before the folly of their decisions became apparent.
Around 25 years ago, American business — and the American political system — bought into the idea that greed is good. Executives are lavishly rewarded if the companies they run seem successful: last year the chief executives of Merrill and Citigroup were paid $48 million and $25.6 million, respectively.
But if the success turns out to have been an illusion — well, they still get to keep the money. Heads they win, tails we lose.
Not only is this grossly unfair, it encourages bad risk-taking, and sometimes fraud. If an executive can create the appearance of success, even for a couple of years, he will walk away immensely wealthy. Meanwhile, the subsequent revelation that appearances were deceiving is someone else’s problem.
If all this sounds familiar, it should. The huge rewards executives receive if they can fake success are what led to the great corporate scandals of a few years back. There’s no indication that any laws were broken this time — but the public’s trust was nonetheless betrayed, once again.
The point is that the subprime crisis and the credit crunch are, in an important sense, the result of our failure to effectively reform corporate governance after the last set of scandals.
John Edwards recently came out with a corporate reform plan, but it didn’t receive a lot of attention. Corporate governance still isn’t regarded as a major political issue. But it should be.
Fri Nov 23, 12:34 AM Pacific
As Atrios would say....
....WHEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!
Housing numbers continue free fall9.2% price drop and 49% volume drop?!?!?Prices keep dropping, but sales still sluggish
By HUBBLE SMITH
REVIEW-JOURNALSales of both new and existing homes dropped drastically in October and median prices continue to slide from last year's peak, a local housing analyst reported Wednesday.
Larry Murphy, president of Las Vegas-based SalesTraq, said he talked to a mortgage lender who's processing six or seven loans in one subdivision of the Anthem community in which new home prices were slashed $250,000, or about 30 percent.
"I don't know if it's true or if it's just a rumor, but he said half of them are Realtors and they plan on walking away from their current home, the same home they bought from the same builder last year," Murphy said.
Median new home prices fell 9.2 percent in October to $299,575 while sales plummeted 49 percent to 1,302, compared with the same month a year ago, according to SalesTraq. Nearly all home builders in Las Vegas have reduced prices in new subdivisions around the valley, Murphy noted.
Yeeegads.
It can't help any that on a busy travel day the airport in Vegas looked like this:
Thu Nov 22, 3:30 AM Pacific
Slate's Will Saletan is one of the dumbest men alive
This week, Slate's Will Saletan has decided to grace the world with his incredible lack of intelligence (h/t Atrios):
I Forget Where In the Order He FallsBut Will Saletan, no matter what his genetic code says, has got to be one of the top 10 stupidest fucking guys on the face of the planet. Quoth The Racist Fuckwit:
The lowest black IQ averages in the United States show up in the South, where the rate of genetic blending is lowest.
I really picked the wrong week to stop huffing paint fumes. No link as I have no desire to support a business model centered around the courageous notion that black people are stupid.
I think Atrios has exactly the right idea -- I'm not going to link to Saletan's idiotic three-piece series declaring "prima facie" evidence that genetic differences explain the variations in IQ amongst Asians, whites, and blacks.
I don't know if I've ever read anything by Saletan before, and I don't even know what his racial and ethnic background is, but after reading his article I can assure you that he is in no danger of being held up as an example of genetic superiority by any racial or ethnic group.
At some point in the future, I'm going to write a longer diary on this topic, but it's Thanksgiving eve, and I don't want to spend more of it dwelling on Will Saletan than necessary.
What I will do in the short space below is offer you a few links to recommended reading if you would like to pursue the topic further, and educate yourself on why Saletan may in fact be mentally retarded.
First, in the interests of total fairness, I will give you the most comprehensive academic research supporting Saletan's position (co-authored by a guy who spent four years as a young child living under apartheid in South Africa). Their essay is well-rebutted here and here.
Steven Levitt and Roland Fryer have authored two papers, here and here, both of which find the theories proposed by Saletan to be deficient.
Cosma Shalizi has an incredibly educational take on the topic, focusing on the science and statistics of the issue. You can find his writings on the topic here, and I'll recommend this post and this post as the best places to start. The first post is a very long piece, so I'll quote his conclusion here:
1. The most common formulae used to estimate heritability are wrong, either for trivial mathematical reasons (such as the upward bias in the difference between monozygotic and dizygotic twins' correlations), or for substantive ones (the covariance of monozygotic twins raised apart neglects shared environments other than the family, such as maternal and community effects). 2. The best estimate I can find puts the narrow heritability of IQ at around 0.34 and the broad heritability at 0.48. 3. Even this estimate neglected heteroskedasticity, gene-environment interactions, gene-environment covariance, the existence of shared environment beyond the family, and the possibility that the samples being used are not representative of the broader population. 4. Now that people are finally beginning to model gene-environment interactions, even in very crude ways, they find it matters a lot. Recall that Turkheimer et al. found a heritability which rose monotonically with socioeconomic status, starting around zero at low status and going up to around 0.8 at high status. Even this is probably an over-estimate, since it neglected maternal effects and other shared non-familial environment, correlations between variance components, etc. Under such circumstances, talking about "the" heritability of IQ is nonsense. Actual geneticists have been saying as much since Dobzhansky at least. 5. Applying the usual heritability estimators to traits which are shaped at least in part by cultural transmission, a.k.a. traditions, is very apt to confuse tradition with genetics. The usual twin studies do not solve this problem. Studies which could don't seem to have been done. 6. Heritability is completely irrelevant to malleability or plasticity; every possible combination of high and low heritability, and high and low malleability, is not only logically possible but also observed. 7. Randomized experiments, natural experiments and the Flynn Effect all show what competent regressions also suggest, namely that IQ is, indeed, responsive to purely environmental interventions.
I know that issues about race sometimes take a back seat around here, what with the war raging and the 2008 elections right around the corner. So why should a community focused on Democratic electoral politics care about an issue like this?
Leaving aside the obvious and primary substantive reasons, it's also tremendously important politically, if for no other reason than this:
The fundamental reality is that minorities are an incredibly important part of the Democratic coalition. Indeed, most whites support Republicans:
1. In 2000, 54% of whites voted for Bush
2. In 2004, 58% of whites voted for Bush.
3. In 2006, 51% of whites voted Republican.
My point is simple: issues about race matter, not just on a substantive level, but also political. The more you learn about the growing conservative movement to embrace Saletan's ideas, the more you realize how important it will be in the coming years.
When I first learned about the well-organized efforts to spread the theories Saletan propounds, my reaction was moral outrage. I have since realized that a sober rejection of the idiotic lunacy of the claims is in fact a better response, as proving such a wild claim to be wrong is a source of moral vindication in and of itself.
So I'll let Atrios call him a "racist fuckwit"; he probably is, but I don't really know.
What I do know is that he's wrong, has no idea what he's talking about, and is pretty fucking dumb.
Tue Nov 20, 12:10 PM Pacific
Sweet
Now I know why they always try to change the subject to God, gays, or guns.
Tue Nov 20, 2:15 AM Pacific
Just because YouTube is cool
Mon Nov 19, 7:01 AM Pacific
It's a good time to be super-wealthy
This is your America -- brought to you by George W. Bush and the Republican Party.
Sun Nov 18, 2:51 PM Pacific
Too bad you can't kick infield dirt on them
Major League Baseball's DRM change strikes out with fans
Some hardcore baseball fans have been left stranded on third base by Major League Baseball after it decided to change DRM systems. As a result, game footage purchased under the old DRM scheme are no longer viewable, leaving fans with unwatchable footage—and no refunds.
Sun Nov 18, 2:25 PM Pacific
Stop the War in Iraq
Sun Nov 18, 8:16 AM Pacific
Homeownership and race under George W. Bush
When George W. Bush took office, the national homeownership rate was 67.5% -- 72.4% for white non-Hispanics and 46.3% for blacks. Today, the national homeownership rate is 68.2% - 75.3% for white non-Hispanics and 46.7% for blacks.
Put another way, when Bush took office:
- 32.5% of Americans did not own a home
- 27.6% of white non-Hispanics did not own a home
- 53.7% of blacks did not own a home
Today:
- 31.8% of Americans don't own a home (down 2.2%)
- 24.7% of white non-Hispanics don't own a home (down 10.5%)
- 53.3% of black don't own a home (down 0.7%)
Meanwhile, pricks like Angelo Mozilo - who has "earned" $410 million as CEO of Countrywide - somehow blame minorities for the mortgage crisis.
This is Ronald Reagan's America.
