Results for “department of yikes”
11 found

Department of Yikes

by  Tyler Cowen in

…his German counterpart [finance minister] suggested postponing Greek elections and installing [sic] a new government without political parties.

I do understand the financial motive here, but this is not a good idea!  It is even less of a good idea to say so in public.  Is the goal simply to irritate the Greeks so much that they leave the Eurozone on their own?  Twitter rumors are suggesting that Finland and the Netherlands are raising similar ideas, namely postponing elections and, it seems, simply ruling the country through its budget?  I am not sure how this is supposed to work, or to be received in Greece, or why it should be a good precedent for the European Union.  The FT story is here.

Department of Yikes

by  Alex Tabarrok in

According to USA Today:

Overall, federal workers earned an average salary of $67,691 in 2008 for occupations that exist both in government and the private sector, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics data. The average pay for the same mix of jobs in the private sector was $60,046 in 2008, the most recent data available.

These salary figures do not include the value of health, pension and other benefits, which averaged $40,785 per federal employee in 2008 vs. $9,882 per private worker, according to the Bureau of Economic Analysis.

Thus, if these numbers are to be believed, federal workers on average earn in wages and compensation 50% more than workers in the private sector doing the same job.  Bear in mind that the federal workers are paid by the private sector workers.  We can't all be insiders. 

The figures do seem large to me, however, and they do not correct for a variety of factors such as age or experience so take them with a grain of salt.

Markets in everything: department of yikes

by  Tyler Cowen in

This possibility had never occurred to me:

Racial attacks like the ones behind the
arrest of 32 suspects in Denver are part of a trend spreading across
the country, gang experts said Saturday.

As part of the trend, black gang members videotape the assaults in
trendy tourist districts and sell them on the underground market as
entertainment.

"They knock a young white guy out with one blow to see if his knees
will wobble and surround them and take their money," said the Rev. Leon
Kelly, who runs a Denver gang-prevention program. "It's a joke."

Here is the full story and I thank new reader Mark for the pointer.  By the way, am I wrong in thinking it a bit unusual how the words "black" and "white" are thrown around so casually in this story?

Hegel, or Department of Yikes

by  Tyler Cowen in

Eric, a loyal MR reader, asks:

Could you comment on
Hegel?  What do you make of his argument regarding the desire for
recognition as a fundamental driving force of history.  I have not read
much of Hegel, but this idea was attributed to him in Francis
Fukuyama’s "The End of History."

My competence here is low but who I am to turn down a loyal reader?  I have looked at every page of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit — usually considered his most profound work — but I can hardly claim to have read it.  Maybe the Master-Slave dialectic was profound at the time but, frankly, I considered the book a waste of time and I couldn’t keep on paying attention.  Philosophy of Right and Philosophy of History are more coherent (the writings on aesthetics also) and every now and then Hegel is striking prescient or otherwise brilliant, such as when he is writing about the forthcoming nature of bourgeois commercial society.  But "every now and then" is the operative phrase here.  Mostly you read him because he has been an influential thinker.  A few points:

1. He is more of a classical liberal than most people think.  The correct translation does not in fact have him writing: "The State is the march of God in the world."  And he had a very well-developed theory of property rights.

2. "Thesis-Antithesis-Synthesis" is a very bad representation of what Hegel believed.

3. The whole Hegelian structure becomes more plausible once you see it as motivated by the belief that philosophy had become truly, absolutely stuck after Hume and Kant.  Hegel thought that his "moves" were required to get out of the mess that preceded him.  I prefer the pragmatic turn myself.

4. I very much like Charles Taylor’s book on Hegel.  I do not think it is what "Hegel really meant" but perhaps it is what "Hegel would have had to have really meant, had some smart people like Robin Hanson pinned his back against the wall, lectured him about futarchy, and made him write shorter sentences to boot."

5. I believe that the secondary literature on Hegel is fraught with danger and is highly unreliable.

On the desire for recognition, yes it is a fundamental driving force (ask any blogger) although it was a well-known eighteenth century idea.

Overall I don’t think much people should spend much time with Hegel, although if someone tells me he found it a revelation, I don’t think him crazy.

Department of Yikes

by  Tyler Cowen in

Overall, 74 percent [of men visiting streetwalkers] reported that they always wear a condom (men with stable relationships were less likely to use protection, at least with prostitutes).

It’s not so hard to write down the underlying utility function here, is it?

That is from the September 2007 issue of Atlantic Monthly, citing research by economist Marina della Giusta and others, published in Applied Economics.  The working paper seems to be here.

In another development at Atlantic Monthly, but unrelated to the above factoid, or to the more general idea of yikes, the new Megan McArdle blog is now up and running.  Here is Megan’s post on what old people deserve.

Department of Yikes

by  Tyler Cowen in

Two teams of federal and university scientists announced today that they had resurrected the 1918 influenza virus, the cause of one of history’s most deadly epidemics, and had found that unlike the viruses that caused more recent flu pandemics of 1957 and 1968, the 1918 virus was actually a bird flu that jumped directly to humans.

The work, being published in the journals Nature and Science, involved getting the complete genetic sequence of the 1918 virus, using techniques of molecular biology to synthesize it, and then using it to infect mice and human lung cells in a specially equipped, secure lab at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta.

The findings, the scientists say, reveal a small number of genetic changes that may explain why the virus was so lethal. The work also confirms the legitimacy of worries about the bird flu viruses that are now emerging in Asia.

The new studies find that today’s bird flu viruses share some of the crucial genetic changes that occurred in the 1918 flu. The scientists suspect that with the 1918 flu, changes in just 25 to 30 out of about 4,400 amino acids in the viral proteins turned the virus into a killer. The bird flus, known as H5N1 viruses, have a few, but not all of those changes.

Here is the full story, which contains many other points of interest, including whether the sequencing should have been done in the first place.  In case you forgot, 1918 was the flu pandemic which killed 50 to 100 million people, and don’t think we are so much better protected in 2005.  Today I started writing my piece on what we should do about avian flu.

Department of Uh-Oh, a continuing series

by  Tyler Cowen in

Reading web sites raises my estimate of the benefits of being already married:

Half of all women make their minds up within 30 seconds of meeting a man
about whether he is potential boyfriend material, according to a study
on speed-dating.

The women were on average far quicker at making a decision than the
men [emphasis added] during some 500 speed dates at an event organised as part of
Edinburgh Science Festival.

The scientists behind the research said this showed just how
important chat-up lines were in dating. They found that those who were
"highly skilled in seduction" used chat-up lines that encouraged their
dates to talk about themselves in "an unusual, quirky way".

The top-rated male’s best line was [TC: yikes, and what kind of British abomination is this?] "If you were on Stars In Their
Eyes, who would you be?", while the top-rated female asked bizarrely:
"What’s your favourite pizza topping?"

Failed Casanovas were those who offered up hackneyed comments like "Do
you come here often?", or clumsy attempts to impress, such as "I have a
PhD in computing".

Here is the link, and yes sadly I prefer my pizza plain.  Perhaps some of you must now, over longer periods of time, simply blog your potential conquests into submission.  By the way, the researchers also suggest that "travel" is the best topic of conversation for spurring a connection and future dates.