Yesterday the IRS; today the AP; a fiasco a day

Now it turns out the Obama administration has gone after the AP (Associated Press).

http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/ticket/benghazi-irs-tea-party-probe-govt-seized-ap-221531096.html

Exactly ten days ago, President Barack Obama was piously telling reporters who cover him that free speech and an independent press are “essential pillars of our democracy.” On Monday, the Associated Press accused his administration of undermining that very pillar by secretly obtaining two months’ worth of telephone records of AP reporters and editors.

“We regard this action by the Department of Justice as a serious interference with AP’s constitutional rights to gather and report the news,” AP President and Chief Executive Officer Gary Pruitt wrote in a letter to Attorney General Eric Holder.

The latest revelations are sure to pour fuel on the fire of Republican-driven Richard Nixon comparisons. They come in the wake of revelations that the IRS may have improperly scrutinized the tax-exempt status of conservative, tea party-linked groups. 

No explanation yet, but it is hard to imagine what it will be for such a broad intrusion.

It's not unusual for presidents to talk about controlling presidential power before they get into office, and then look to expand presidential power once they get in office, but there's no need to allow this to occur.

Will Congress get its act together enough to put appropriate restraints in place, or not?  

Turns out the Tea Party wasn’t so paranoid after all

There’s an old joke that goes: “You’re not paranoid if they are really out to get you.”

The revelation this week that the IRS has targeted organizations with “Tea Party” and “Patriot” in their names for special scrutiny should concern us all deeply.

Mitch McConnell is entirely right (I can’t believe I’m saying this about Mitch McConnell!) when he calls  “for a government-wide review to ensure such practices were not underway elsewhere.”

The IRS depends heavily on voluntary cooperation, and is supposed to be completely nonpartisan.  Sure, tax policy itself is viciously partisan, but the enforcement of tax policy must be evenhanded in order to help preserve the spirit of voluntary cooperation upon which the system depends.

There are echoes of Nixon’s enemies list here, and I hope all they are just echoes.

Long term perspective on retirement: the end of a golden age?

There are lots of articles on how it is becoming more difficult to retire, how near-retirees haven’t saved enough, how pensions are disappearing.  All of which is true.

But it’s probably good to remember that we are comparing ourselves with one, maybe two generations back. That’s a group that can be seen as a sort of golden age of retirement.

There’s an article on Motley Fool by Morgan House that provides a lot of charts and numbers I’m going to use here.

First, it is true that more men are participating in the labor force after age 65, although the number is still low by historical standards. And it’s worth remembering that fewer jobs not require heavy manual labor, unlike my father’s job (construction pipe fitter), or my grandfathers’ (farmer and printer).

Second, in real terms (correcting for inflation) Social Security benefits have risen (although in recent years some have been subject to taxation).

In part, this was due to an inadvertent clause in the law some decades ago, which tended to provide an overly generous cost of living adjustment.

The bottom line is how many of the elderly are living in poverty. Although there are a lot of difficulties in defining “poverty” at any one time (let along comparing across time), it’s clear the rates are low relative to past years and aren’t spiking up – at least not yet.

Optimism?

All these charts provide a source of optimism, at least as regards to current retirees, who might be described as living through a golden age of retirement in their golden years.

Baby boomers are, of course, just now entering retirement in large numbers. Any lack of saving on their part, any failure to put enough in their 401k’s when that company pension went away, any inability to save in those precious empty-nester years prior to retirement because they got downsized at 58 – all those are future effects, not current effects.

Median net worth, in constant dollars, is no higher in 2010 than it was in 1989, according to FRB longitudinal studies – from which the following graph is taken.  But the average age of the population was substantially higher in 2010 than in 1989, so the age-adjusted net worth is actually lower.

If we look a bit deeper into the age distribution, I have trouble finding a long time series, but the census bureau has one comparing 2005 to 2010.  In these 5 years, there is a definite shift lower in net worth. These numbers are NOT corrected for inflation, so the shift lower would be somewhat greater than what we see here. (The other hidden effect is that retirement accounts such as 401k accounts ARE included here, but pensions are not.) 

Let’s not get too excited about that $100-249k net worth class. With a standard 4% withdrawal rate, this would generate $4000 to $10,000 a year. (and during this time when CD rates are so low, 4% would eat into principal).

So, when we look at a long term perspective, we see that current retirees are still living in a golden age relative to those a few generations back – but it looks like that golden age may be slowly ending for many.

Today’s evidence that occasionally people agree with me

My spouse has occasionally asked whether we'd be better off having a mortgage in order to get a tax deduction.

I have explained that we'd get the deduction, and pay fewer taxes, but be worse off in the end.

In this blog post, Greg Mankiw (author of the most widely used economics textbook in the US) makes this same point in discussing the Obama's finances.

http://gregmankiw.blogspot.com/2013/04/the-president-as-financial-planner.html

with some commentary by Tyler Cowen (author of competing economics textbooks) here:

http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2013/04/what-is-the-implied-liquidity-preference-of-president-obama.html

The original source for this blogosphere activity appears to be this article, “Fixing the Obama’s Finances”, http://www.financial-planning.com/news/Financial-Planning-for-Barack-Obama-and-Michelle-Obama-2684504-1.html?zkPrintable=1&nopagination=1   by Allen S. Roth.

By selling some of those Treasuries and paying off the mortgage, they would effectively be getting five more percentage points on the amount; they would also be about $40,000 better off each year before taxes, not to mention being less exposed to notes that could take a hit from possible rising rates.

The Obamas would pay more in taxes but make much more after taxes -- especially since they aren’t getting the full deduction anyway, due to the AMT. That's more money going to the U.S. Treasury and more money for them; Northern Trust would be the loser.

Lesser Celandine

 

 

I found some of this bright yellow flower in my yard today.  There are a lot of yellow flowers in the yard: dandelions and daffodills now, buttercups and barren strawberries later. These must have been there before because there were too many for it to be brand new, but it wasn't a flower I recognized.

My back neighbor suggested it was the Lesser Celandine, and that seems right. Time to get more information.

The first page I found was less lyrical: http://www.ecosystemgardening.com/most-hated-plants-lesser-celandine.html   It’s an invasive, non-native species that tends to crowd out other plants.  This will mean it will fit nicely in the neglected battleground of our back yard. Note in the picture you can see periwinkle (myrtle) and the start of some daylilies.  This is no place for plants that need pampering.

But there is a poetic balance possible. Here’s a web page that quotes from Wordsworth, a great admirer of the Lesser Celandine. http://laquaker.blogspot.com/2011/03/homage-to-snow-drops-and-other-early.html 

When Wordsworth noticed the plant, he wrote:

I have seen thee, high and low,
Thirty years or more, and yet
Twas a face I did not know.

By coincidence, we’ve lived in this house a bit over 30 years.

Kindly, unassuming Spirii
Careless of thy neighborhood.
Thou dost show thy pleasant face
On the moor, and in the wood.
In the lane—there’s not a place,
Howsoever mean it be,
But ‘tis good enough for thee.

Wordsworth saw the celandine not simply as a ubiquitous presence, but as a “prophet of delight

The Lesser Celandine is safe here in the yard, as I have too many other priorities to want to take it out of it’s spot warring with the periwinkle and daylilies.  I shall look forward to following the process of this literal battle for turf.

Improvements on 101 bike tips

Over at the Bicycle Touring list, Mark G. takes on Bicycling magazine:

 

You may have seen the cover of the May 2013 issue of Bicycling magazine: The 101 Best Maintenance Tips Ever, page 57.Unfortunately, and surprisingly, it is full of misinformation. 101 Maintenance Tips With a 30% Error Rate would be more like it. I felt I should I correct, or at least improve upon, the deficient tips. I wish I had a blog so people could comment, but anyway, here it is.

http://2224.home.comcast.net/MarksBicycleMaintenanceTips.html

Regards,

Mark G

 

 

I didn’t read the original article, but Mark G makes a number of good suggestions in his review that seem very sound to me. It’s worth a look.

 

And, if you are interested in the Bicycle Touring list, it’s on Google Groups here: 

https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups=#!topic/bicycletouring/u66hfYR9Tmk

 

 

Water, water everywhere

Record rainfall in the Chicago area, leading to much flooding. Chicago is a swamp between two large river basins (our house blocks from the divide between the St. Lawrence / Great Lakes basin and the Mississippi basin).

Thursday morning our back yard looked like this. where the pump is (behind the electric wire) it’s almost knee deep; deeper farther back.

By Saturday morning the water had been pumped/drained away. The sump pump ran continually, but did keep the water from rising and causing basement problems (unlike some my less-lucky neighbors).

Riding around today

Today I took a bike ride around to check out the retention ponds next to the West Fork, North Branch, Chicago River.  Usually placid, it has a certain whitewater quality to it in spots. Still, it doesn’t look very big.

There are two large retention areas in the Techny basin that take overflow water from this river. The one in Glenview is 1.25 miles around.  This is usually a big, empty hole but now was nearly full.

 

According to the Village of Glenview website, “the water level in the Techny Basin is measured in feet. When empty, the basin reads 593 feet elevation and when full, it reads 631 feet. When filled to capacity the Techny Basin holds 365 million gallons of water.”  It fills up pretty fast, in a matter of hours. While it may look full in the picture, the village graph indicates it’s 74% full when this picture was taken (and 625 feet, so there’s another 6 feet vertically to go).  These basins fill up passively when the water gets too high. 

On this sunny Sunday afternoon, the water is passively draining out back over the spillway:

 

 

About 3 miles farther north, there’s another (slightly smaller) hole in the ground in Northbrook, also full:

Eventually, these holes are pumped out so they can hold further water, but they aren’t being pumped out yet because the water level downstream is still high. The spillway from the pump house in Northbrook is still dry.

There’s more rain forecast tomorrow and Tuesday – I hope it’s a light rain because the ground is still saturated.

Financial rule of thumb: cars

In an earlier post, I tried to collect a number of personal finance rules of thumb. 

There are some rules of thumb in today’s Chicago Tribune about car loans. The article is by Gregory Karp.

Many personal finance experts suggest the 20-4-10 rule. It means you should have a 20 percent down payment on a car loan, borrow for no more than four years and make sure car payments [and car insurance] are no more than 10 percent of your gross income.

Others express it as keeping payments lower than 20 percent of take-home pay.

I can’t really evaluate these rules, since I’ve paid cash for all my cars, and then replenished savings with a fake car payment to myself. But that’s the exception:

"If you have to go past 48 months — and definitely if you have to go past 60 months — to get a monthly payment you can afford, you're spending too much money on that car," [Mike] Sante [managing editor of Chicago-based Interest.com] said. "It should really tell you something as a consumer."

Consumers clearly aren't heeding that advice. Last year, 89 percent of auto loans exceeded the four-year rule, according to Experian Automotive. And the recent trend is toward longer loans. In 2010, about 9 percent of auto loans extended past six years. Last year, that rose to more than 16 percent.

Update

Gregory Karp has another version of this article a few days later, which provides a little longer version and includes car insurance in the 20-4-10 rule.  It also includes this:

The National Foundation for Credit Counseling advice is more strict — suggesting that no more than 20 percent of take-home pay should go to all non-housing debt, including credit card debt. The idea is that the 20 percent for debt plus the 30 percent that often goes toward housing leaves you half your take-home pay to eat, pay utilities, put gas in the car and pay for the rest of life's necessities

Romance only an English teacher could love

I subscribe to the sesquiotic blog, which has interesting information about word meanings, word origins, and often just word sounds. 

The blog author has a book, Songs of Love and Grammar, available for just $12 on lulu.com and amazon.com. and in order to entice his readers to buy it has provided the following sample:

Unrequoted love

I’m getting letters from my dear,
but I’m not sure that she’s sincere.
I see the way she ends her notes:
the phrase “I love you” is in quotes.
I really don’t know what to do,
for if she’s quoting, quoting who?

Although I know it seems absurd,
her every gift is but a word:
I send you “hugs”, I send you “kisses” –
That’s it? Some kind of present this is!
She writes, I “miss” you, and I see
the missing is mere irony!

Well, I think I know what to do:
I’m writing her, I “miss” you too.
My “love” is such, if you were here,
you’d get “a diamond ring”, my dear.
My “life” shall be at your disposal –
I wait for “yes” to my “proposal”.

She sends mere quotes? I send her same!
She’ll know that two can play this game!

If you enjoyed that, there are five dozen more in Songs of Love and Grammar, available for just $12 on lulu.com and amazon.com.

With both wife and daughter as English teachers, one would think I would rush out and get multiple copies, but I think I’ll wait for their suggestions.

What if we all died at forty?

Tyler Cowen forwarded this question from Akka:

If it was certain that when we sleep on our 40^th birthday, we wouldn’t wake up, how different would the world be? Economically? Culturally? Will it be more peaceful? More left leaning?

Many of the commenters try to draw conclusions to this fantasy by going back to the time when human life expectancy was much lower, but I think there’s a huge difference between having a low life expectancy (but also some chance of living to an old age) and the certainty of dying at 40.

To me, the certainty scenario is more like getting married on Saturday (so a bachelor party on Thursday), or having been accepted at a good college (and so blowing off the second semester of your senior year).

I think the overall reproductive rate would be very low, because one of the reasons to have children is historically to have them take care of you in your old age, when you can’t take care of yourself. If old age isn’t going to come, some of the motivation for having children disappears.

Can we draw a better analogy?

I keep trying to use plants (annuals, biannuals) and animals (17 year cicadas) as analogues, but failing because humans have “choices”.

But maybe this is yet another case in which human “free will” isn’t really the defining difference it seems to be at first.

Plants/animals with defined life cycles tend to be very concerned with reproduction. But I think I am looking So, at first, we might think that if human life were limited to 40, we would be extremely concerned with reproduction.

But maybe this is looking at this from the wrong end. If annual/biannual plants had a defined, relatively short lifetime and weren’t very concerned with reproduction, they would be extinct by now or rare. So perhaps with a shorter, defined lifetime humans would have very low reproductive rates and, if not going extinct, be rare: occupy less of the planet’s resources. Might be a good thing for the overall health of the planet — fewer but more hedonic humans.

But, if course, within a few generations it would only be the offspring of those who were extremely concerned with reproduction who would be around; so perhaps we WOULD evolve in a similar manner to biannual plants and become obsessed with passing along our own genes.

Even analytics professionals don’t understand email lists

Anyone who subscribes to email lists is familiar with those who don’t understand how to get off.  You might expect this from, say, bicycling or junior high alumni lists. But no one is same from the following syndrome:

1. Instead of following the instructions (usually at the bottom of the email), they hit ‘reply all’ and say

Subject: Re: [Analytics-section] Please remove me from your distribution list - Thank You

Please remove me from your distribution list - Thank You

This usually leads to

2. Some kind soul explaining how the list works

On 4/12/2013 1:25 PM, Santosh Stephen wrote:

Please DO NOT spam the whole list if you want to be unsubscribed - you can do it yourself in less time than it takes to send out an email.

To unsubscribe, just click on the "list.informs.org" link at the bottom of the emails and follow instructions.

Have a nice weekend all!

Santosh

3. Others deciding they don’t like the email and similarly desiring to leave the list, but also spamming the entire list.

Please remove me from your distribution list -   Thank You

Best Regards

One expect this from lists that might have a lot of neophyte users, particularly if they were automatically added as a result of membership.

One doesn’t expect this from those who have joined the email list of the Analytics Section of INFORMS, the International society of Operations Research and Management Science – in short, not just the society for professional research nerds, but those nerds who are particularly interested in cutting-edge statistical analysis. Really, people! Is this beyond you? 

4. It was only a matter of time before some member would point out the obvious:

On 4/14/2013 2:51 PM, Alexei wrote:

If you unable to remove yourself from a distribution list and need to spam everybody with your lame requests, then it is obvious that you were here by mistake. Apparently, business analytics is not for you. You should be interested in something simpler … MUCH simpler

Jimmy Carter: equality is more important than the Baptist convention

…my decision to sever my ties with the Southern Baptist Convention, after six decades, was … an unavoidable decision when the convention’s leaders, quoting a few carefully selected Bible verses and claiming that Eve was created second to Adam and was responsible for original sin, ordained that women must be “subservient” to their husbands and prohibited from serving as deacons, pastors or chaplains in the military service.

http://www.womenspress-slo.org/?p=11440

That’s former president Jimmy Carter.  Carter has turned out to be an excellent ex-president (one wishes he could have been a faster learner on the job, but …)

I’m guessing that when Jimmy goes to the great beyond to face God, She will forgive him.

George E.P. Box, 1919-2013

In my forecasting class this week, I’m starting to cover ARIMA models,  also known as Box-Jenkins models.

Last week George Box died. He had been active to the end, and his career covered a very wide variety of statistical science.  Particularly notable is that his work was heavily applied, not just a set of theorems and methods that might or might not have general applicability.

There’s a good remembrance of Box – better than I could do, by far -- by Rob J. Hyndman here: http://robjhyndman.com/hyndsight/gepbox/

Retirement savings and the housing market

"the average retirement account balance for people between 55 and 64 is $291,000, which will only provide about $12,000 a year in inflation-indexed income". http://www.economist.com/blogs/freeexchange/2013/04/saving?fsrc=scn/tw_ec/too_thin_a_cushion

Another good example where the average is completely misleading. The real issue is what the income distribution for, say, 68 year olds looks like now, 10/20 years ago, and in particular 10/20 years in the future. Specifically, it would be good to compare the income distribution for those who turned 68 in 1993 (their income in 1993, adjusted for inflation) and those who turned 68 in 2013.

This isn’t likely to look good. A generation ago (65 years old 20 years ago) the retirement age was declining; now it’s increasing – and early retirement used to be associated with having saved up enough money, not because your job disappeared.

The savings rate is declining (graphs from the same Economist article)

But the situation is really worse than that. The composition of savings is switching.  As the graph shows, a much heavier proportion of savings is now in retirement accounts.  This is understandable, since with fewer pensions (which aren’t retirement accounts) and more 401k plans (which are retirement accounts) people have to save for their own retirement.  But this also means that the decline in the savings rate is greater because people have to use part of that savings to replace things they didn’t have to save for decades ago (e.g. savings to replace income from pensions).  If we could adjust for this “replacement savings” the savings rate would look even lower.

(This graph also reflects the aging of the US population; older people are more likely to have more of their savings in retirement accounts.)

Implications

There are many implications for this, beyond the obvious one we already knew that the baby boomers are going to have a rough financial go in retirement.

I certainly wouldn't be buying any housing stocks. The baby boomers will have to pull their equity out to pay expenses, and the smaller number of households one or two generations later will already be saddled with student loan debt.

This will result in a lot of sellers relative to the number of buyers, with the consequent decline in housing prices. (see "The Great Senior Sell-Off" http://www.chicagotribune.com/classified/realestate/sc-cons-0328-umberger-20130329,0,5436034.column )  Who’s going to be living in all those McMansions from the 2000s? Who knows. Most would be big enough for two families, but weren’t designed to accommodate that (and zoning, at least in my city, would prohibit this).

Fact of the day

“India and China together produce more than 80 percent of the active ingredients of all drugs used in the United States.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/02/business/global/top-court-in-india-rejects-novartis-drug-patent.html?hpw&_r=0 

I’m not reassured by this. I remember the quality control that allowed lead paint to be used on Mattell toys made abroad and other evidence that, when it comes to quality control, the ocean is wide and the corporate office is far away.

On the other hand, it’s the Tylenol plants right here in the US that trashed Johnson and Johnson’s (evidently completely undeserved) reputation for quality. 

The importance of April 2

April 2nd. 4/2.  Doesn’t seem like a particularly important day, particularly in 2013 when it occurs just after the festivities of Easter. But wait!

Just as Ash Wednesday (fasting) is preceded by Fat Tuesday (feasting)

and All Saints Day (Nov 1) is preceded by Halloween (Oct 31),

April 2nd is preceded by April 1, April Fools Day.

4/2, aka 42 when we strip out that excess special character, is "Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, The Universe, and Everything", as Douglas Adams explicated so elegantly in his 5 book trilogy. So, this April 2, think deep thoughts, or at least ponder why 42 = 9 x 6.

April 2 is “the meaning of life” day.

Back and posting

I’ve been on vacation, which is why there haven’t been any posts.  My vacation was a nice bike-and-hike trip to far southern Illinois, where the weather should have been substantially warmer since it’s 350 miles south of Chicago.

Alas, we came within a few miles of a major snowstorm and there’s a late spring down there this year, but we still had a good time.

I’ve posted this at http://www.crazyguyonabike.com/doc/shawnee2013 for those interested in Giant City, Garden of the Gods, Heron Pond, and other sites in Shawnee National Forest or the Tunnel Hill State Trail.

Are Sun Belt cities more energy efficient?

Maybe, says a study by a University of Michigan researcher.

http://www.ns.umich.edu/new/releases/21335-sun-belt-cities-demand-less-energy-than-northern-counterparts 

In a new study comparing climate control in Miami (the warmest large metropolitan area in the U.S.) and Minneapolis (the coldest), Sivak found that heating the Twin Cities area is about three-and-a-half times more energy-demanding than cooling Florida's largest urban area.…

"To the surprise of many, air conditioners are more energy-efficient than furnaces or boilers," he said. "It takes less energy to cool down an interior space by one degree than to heat it up by one degree because it takes less energy to transfer heat (air conditioners) than to generate heat (furnaces and boilers)."

Sivak's study is published in Environmental Research Letters. It can be downloaded at:http://iopscience.iop.org/1748-9326/8/1/014050/article

My derby name

Roller derby participants compete under aliases.  These aliases are often risque, aggressive, humorous or some combination of all 3.

The Chicago team includes Ada Hatelace (after Ada Lovelace, the first computer programmer).  Also on the team is Linear Aggression, possibly a statistician fond of the technique called linear regression.

My daughter’s name is Sweede Ass Pi, and she wears number 3.14. She’s only 1/8 Swedish ancestry (1/2 German, 1/4 Norwegian) but they seem to allow a lot of license.

That same daughter suggests that my derby name would be “Punstoppable”, which given my proclivity for puns seems about right.

Question of the day

Today's favorite question, from a major U.S. university:

 

100 square feet of beer.  If English measurements can include things like the "foot pound" (not to be confused with the "pound foot", which is a different unit of measure, or the foot-poundal, which is .031 foot pounds), then why not square feet of beer?

 

Today’s Dick Tracy isn’t different

We’ve now merged back together: the print/online Tribune edition matches comics.com, except for minor wording differences in the first panel.

I think this bring this blog series to an end. 

No, I don’t know why I cared. 

Dick Tracy differences continue

Sunday February 17, 2013 in the Chicago Tribune:

While on Comics.com:

The differences again seem to be related to showing the girl (Toad) directly in harm’s way.

Two versions of “Dick Tracy” show odd censorship

There are two versions of “Dick Tracy” today.  The first is found in the print and digital Chicago Tribune:

So there’s obviously a threat being made to George, but to understand the nature of that threat we have to remember a couple of days before, that the driver had kidnapped a young girl (although we saw only the lead up to the kidnapping and then a police report of it afterward, not the kidnapping itself).  The version on Comics.com provides a clear reminder:

I’m not going to criticize the Tribune harshly here. It is a comic. Perhaps thee is a policy against showing violence against women / children (or maybe everyone) as an explicit picture – although apparently story lines involving murder and kidnapping are OK (hard to imagine Dick Tracy without them!).

Actually, it’s just surprising that the Tribune still has editors who have time to pay attention to stuff like this; the paper has been improving recently, but it’s still not where it was – how could it be, with all the cost cutting? 

Typo of the day

I HOPE this is a typo!  (From one of my students this semester)

The world needs more trails where walkers play the violin and serenade their dogs.

“The world needs more trails where walkers play the violin and serenade their dogs.”

That’s a friend’s comment about the Beltway trail project in Atlanta, which is off to a great start but has many miles to go.

“Bike paths” tend to turn into linear parks and attract skaters, joggers, power walkers, dog walkers, the odd musher on a wheeled sled and a pack of huskies and a whole variety of people enjoying the outdoors. They have a large diverse constituency even though it’s the bicycling community that tends to be most vocal in pushing them.  (You’re welcome!)

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/15/us/beltline-provides-new-life-to-railroad-tracks-in-atlanta.html?nl=todaysheadlines&emc=edit_th_20130215&_r=0 

Failing Fast is a good thing

 

Ron Kohavi, Alex Deng, Brian Frasca, Roger Longbotham, Toby Walker, and Ya Xu write about experiments conducted on the Bing search engine:

It is of little value to extend experiments
that are statistically significantly negative after a couple of weeks. 
Failing fast and moving on to the next idea is better.

Failing fast is a good thing: resources can be shifted to more promising ideas, instead of wasting more resources on an effort likely never to succeed as currently conceived.

Risk confrontational

Related to this idea is is the idea of being risk confrontational.

In any project, find the roughest problem in that project, the one most likely not to succeed among those that have to succeed for the project to work.  This is the part of the project with the highest risk. That risk should be confronted up front, before the rest of the project details are worked out.

1. Try to solve that problem.

2. If you can’t solve it, try to find someone who can.

3. If steps 1 and 2 fail, give up.

Note this is generally what people and organizations don’t do.  They start with the easy part of the project, often saying “we’ll figure out the rest somehow”.   But big problems don’t tend to solve themselves, and when they are solved sometimes demand that the rest of the project be re-thought in order to allow the big problem to be solved.

Cuts that aren’t really cuts

 

Conservatives do have a point.

Tax increases are real. We pay when taxes are increased.

Budget cuts are often a sham. They end up not being cuts at all.

The latest (unsurprising) evidence from this comes from the Washington Post.

Late on the night of April 8, 2011, Washington’s leaders announced that they’d just done something extraordinary. They had agreed to cut the federal budget — and cut it big….

In the real world, in fact, many of their “cuts” cut nothing at all. The Transportation Department got credit for “cutting” a $280 million tunnel that had been canceled six months earlier. It also “cut” a $375,000 road project that had been created by a legislative typo, on a road that did not exist.

At the Census Bureau, officials got credit for a whopping $6 billion cut, simply for obeying the calendar. They promised not to hold the expensive 2010 census again in 2011.

Today, an examination of 12 of the largest cuts shows that, thanks in part to these gimmicks, federal agencies absorbed $23 billion in reductions without losing a single employee.

“Many of the cuts we put in were smoke and mirrors,” said Rep. Mick Mulvaney (R-S.C.), a hard-line conservative now in his second term. “That’s the lesson from April 2011: that when Washington says it cuts spending, it doesn’t mean the same thing that normal people mean.”

Faced with what seems like a sham, it’s no wonder some of the conservatives are digging in now. It’s all very well to talk about “compromise”, but there has to be follow through on the cut side that’s realistic, not just for show.

Is the purpose of government to maximize revenue?

 

Andrew Gelman gets writefully (pun intended) upset at this statement:

Adam Davidson writes:

So much debate about government policy is based on economic statistics that come out of the market. But the goal of government is not just to maximize revenue.

Maybe Davidson meant it ironically; maybe Davidson has just read far, far too many economics blogs. Maybe he’s writing this too close to deadline. Whatever the reason, he’s setting up a stupid strawman of an argument. But this also provides a good opportunity to look again at the sweeping words of the Preamble to the U.S. Constitution:

We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

These are sweeping words that point us to the legitimate functions of government. They aren’t very specific, or course – a preamble shouldn’t be very specific.  It’s unclear what “promote the general Welfare” might mean in specifics, and “secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity” seems an interesting choice for a society that kept slaves.  But it’s a set of ideals that define a set of broad hopes for our future.

Thought for the Day: “Creativity + Neatness = Art”

http://www.gocomics.com/culdesac/2013/02/10/

I’m not quite sure it’s that simple, but it’s a start.

Dubious achievement award of the day.

Somehow, I don’t think I’m going to put this on my resume.

I really think it’s kind of creepy that on LinkedIn you can see who viewed your profile. In fact, not only CAN you see it, it’s hard NOT to see it.  It’s a mixture of current students (I post the link on the course syllabus in case they are curious), people who are going to try to sell me something and the occasional old business acquaintance seeing whether I’m dead yet.

As to the 5%, remember most of those 200 million users show little/no activity at all on LinkedIn – it’s easy to join and then do nothing on the site, and those relatively inactive users won’t make it through the filters designed to find people who might be hiring (rather than other people also looking for jobs).