Results for “age of em” 16883 found
There is always a bull market somewhere
…it's also clear that part of the gun-buying rally is driven by
people like Mr. Chambers who are buying weapons the way others invest
in a hot stock. The buying is pumping up prices. Many popular models of
guns are back-ordered for a year or more. Some manufacturers are
operating plants 24 hours a day. According to the 2009 edition of the
Blue Book of Gun Values, the average price of European-made AK-47s —
the famous Soviet-era military weapon now made in several countries —
doubled from $350 last September to more than $700 by the end of 2008.
Bert Collins, an Atlanta commercial
real-estate manager, recently bought two AR-15 rifles for about $1,600
each. He's keeping one in its box, untouched, with the hope of selling
it at a profit should Congress re-enact the law, which expired in 2004.
"It's certainly a better investment than my 401(k) has performed," Mr.
Collins said.
Bubba Sanders, owner of Bullseye Supply LLC, in Brandon, Miss., said
he has "a number of doctor clients whose financial advisers have told
them to invest in ammunition. Beats the hell out of money markets and
CDs. You can double your investment in ammunition in a year."
I thank John de Palma and James Solier for the pointers.
Markets in everything, or Department of Why Not?
Bouncers, ex-soldiers and former police officers are being brought into schools to provide "crowd control" and cover absent teachers' lessons, a teacher has revealed.
One
school, thought to be in London, employed two permanent cover teachers
through an agency for professional doormen, the National Union of
Teachers annual conference in Cardiff heard today.
Bouncers, who
more usually work nights keeping order in pubs and clubs, are being
employed in schools because they are "stern and loud", said Andrew
Baisley, a teacher at Haverstock school in Camden, north London.
Here is the story.
Why do people like streetcars so much?
Will, a loyal MR reader, asks:
I just ran across an interesting post by a Jess Weiss on a
pro-streetcars-for-DC blog that asks the following question – "In
several places in the U.S., most notably Portland, Oregon that's built
the most extensive streetcar system in the U.S. to date, they report
"people simply like streetcars more than buses", but nobody seems to be
able to really point their finger at hard data why that is.
Why do you think streetcars are better than buses?"
Here in Lisbon the streetcars are full of pick-pockets, overcrowded, and hard to keep your balance in. Yet those same streetcars are beloved by the tourists and common on the postage stamps.
I believe this is a question for Mrs. Cowen, not me. I did ride them in Lisbon — once. I'm still wondering why so many people are reluctant to take cabs for cheap, short rides.
Here is a Megan McArdle post on streetcars. Natasha believes that street car lovers wish to "affiliate themselves with the past." (When I heard this phrasing I realized we are no longer newlyweds.) I believe that streetcars help you avoid that "low class feeling" which all too often comes from riding on the bus. The whole point of a streetcar is to avoid creating an ambience separate from the urban trappings which surround you. Which is precisely why they are charming yet not always so comfortable.
Here is a short article on the popularity of streetcars. Putting aside the social cost-benefit analysis, and focusing only on the individual ridership decision, why do people like streetcars so much?
Are European nations free-riders when it comes to fiscal policy?
I don't think so. I think the truth — hard for some people to digest — is simply that these smart Social Democrats, rightly or wrongly, don't much believe in massive fiscal stimulus. They're used to the idea that their economies have big structural problems that government spending cannot eliminate.
If fiscal policy can work for a large country such as the United States, it should work for the Netherlands (or Portugal) as well, even if it would work with less potency.
The benefits from the first round of spending would be captured almost completely within the Netherlands. If unemployed resources can be well targeted, and without messing up incentives too badly, (big "ifs" in my view), that provides an almost automatic case for extra Dutch government spending.
It is a good question whether the Dutch already have too much government spending. I will say yes but I don't much hear this from fiscal policy advocates. Maybe they think the current Dutch balance is "just right" but again that means at the margin fiscal policy, targeted at unemployed resources, won't wreck the overall balance.
What about the second round of expenditures from the fiscal policy? Well, if a big chunk of those newly employed workers increase their spending on food, shelter, and local transportation, lots of the second round is captured in the Netherlands as well. Even buying a T-shirt from China will likely benefit a Dutch retailer to some extent.
You will hear the common tale that "everyone not crazy thinks fiscal policy is a good idea, but some countries are too selfish, or too cowardly, to do it."
That story is an easy out, but the truth is that not everyone is so enamored of massive fiscal policy stimulus. If they were, they would be doing it. But they're not.
Hong Kong, by the way, is preparing a relatively aggressive stimulus package.
Here is a relevant blog post on Germany.
Illegal immigration and crime
This is from only one county, but I found these numbers (check out the table) instructive:
About 2 percent of the people charged with major violent crimes in
Prince William County last year were illegal immigrants, but they were
arrested for a larger portion of secondary offenses, according to newly
released statistics and a Washington Post analysis that offer the first
comprehensive look at criminal activity since the county implemented
its controversial anti-illegal immigration measures.
The crime of prostitution has the highest percentage of illegal immigrants as arrestees, namely 21.4 percent. If you are wondering, the new county procedure is to check the immigration status of everyone taken into custody. A few points:
1. Immigration has worked much better in northern Virginia than in many other parts of the country, most of all southern California. The number will not be this low in many other locales.
2. I don't have a number for the percentage of illegal immigrants in Prince William County, but I believe there are many, albeit a falling number.
3. I am not convinced by the argument that illegal immigrants will try "especially hard" not to get caught, because they are illegal immigrants and do not wish to be deported. This argument has been used to suggest that two percent is an underestimate.
4. When all is said and done, two percent is a fairly low number.
The fable of the (cell phone) keys
Via the always-excellent www.geekpress.com, I find this report:
At North America's largest cell phone trade show, running this week in
Las Vegas, there were few new phones for the U.S. market that had a
numerical keypad instead of an alphabetic keyboard…
Old-fashioned numeric keypads
still will have a prominent place – but largely overseas. In a twist of
market dynamics, the demand for QWERTY phones is mainly a North
American phenomenon, said Ross Rubin, an analyst at NPD.
It's true QWERTY had a head start from the fact that we all learned it at a young age. Still, there is a starting over of sorts and if some alternative system were better for cell phone texting we might expect it to be evolving now. It isn't.
My favorite things Portugal
1. Singer: Amalia Rodrigues, fado specialist. I am also a fan of Sara Tavares, especially this CD. Carmen Miranda is often thought of as Brazilian, but she was born in Portugal and I believe she grew up there as well. She was good.
2. Popular music: Nelly Furtado has Portuguese ancestry, although I believe most of the demons who inhabit the MR comments section would count her as Canadian.
3. Novelist: Jose Saramago. But I don't like them all. Blindness, The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis, and The Double are the primary ones to read. Baltasar and Blimunda I should try again. The Stone Raft is good. Currently I am reading, and enjoying Antunes's Fado Alexandrino.
4. Philosopher: Can I count Spinoza?
5. Painter: I guess I pick Paula Rego. I can't think of a classic painter here.
6. Poet and essayist: Pessoa. I've been influenced by his work. The Book of Disquiet is his masterpiece.
7. Composer: Manuel Cardoso is the only one I can think of. He's OK.
8. Former colony: Brazil. But there's stiff competition.
9. Economist, one eighth of him: Can you guess? The eighth is from the Madeira Islands with the family name Alfonso.
The bottom line: I am worried by the gaps here, including classical music, cinema, painting, and sculpture. Yet #8 makes up for it all. I suspect that too much royal patronage is the reason why there are so many notable Portuguese explorers and so few recognized composers.
Why was Michael Jordan’s shot so flat?
File this one under: "Questions I still wonder about." I can think of a few options:
1. Michael Jordan wasn't a very good shooter. (True at first, but it is hard to maintain this hypothesis over the course of his career.)
2. Jordan was weak on one dimension of shooting ability, but he compensated along other dimensions. He could have been a better shot, if only he had learned proper arc from Mark (and Brent) Price.
3. Jordan's flat shot was part and parcel of an efficient combination of talents. Perhaps the flat shot gave him a quicker release or different angles at the basket or a greater ability to shoot while moving or all of those. Check out "The Shot" at 2:20 here.
Maybe his flat shot, when combined with his other talents, gave him an advantage. Since few other players have had the complementary talents as Jordan did, they haven't had an incentive to develop or stick with flat jump shots.
Jordan had a good three-point shot under pressure but when he was open his long-range shooting was unreliable. That combination is consistent with this hypothesis. Here is a short Yahoo discussion.
In my heart of hearts, I believe #3 is the answer.
Questions: Can any feature of the U.S. economy be said to be akin to Jordan's flat jumper? Any feature of your personal cognitive profile?
The Ricardian case against YouTube
I love being reminded of the history of economic thought:
It seems safe to assume that YouTube’s traffic will continue to grow,
with no clear ceiling in sight. Since the majority of Google’s costs
for the service are pure variable costs of bandwidth and storage, and
since they’ve already reached the point at which no greater economies
of scale remain, the costs of the business will continue to grow on a
linear basis. Unfortunately, far more user-generated content than
professional content makes its way onto the site, which means that
while costs grow linearly, non-monetizable content is growing
geometrically as compared against the monetizable content that YouTube
really wants and needs to survive. This means less and less of
YouTube’s library will be revenue-contributing, while the costs of
delivering that library will continue to grow.
The article is interesting through and the hat tip goes to Andrew Sullivan.
eBooks help the romance novel
At Fictionwise, the e-book seller recently acquired by Barnes &
Noble, about 50 percent of sales are romance books, said Steve
Pendergrast, chief technology officer. “Romance readers tend to be
voracious readers,” Mr. Pendergrast said. “The ability to instantly
download and start reading is potentially more important to that
audience than any other audience.”
…Many readers are still buying. “I would give up something else if money
was tight,” said Annmarie Anderson, a district manager in Atlanta for a
national retail chain, who said she still spent about $100 on romance
novels each month. “I would give up my manicure and pedicure. I have my
priority list, and books are pretty high on my priority list.”
The story is interesting throughout. Is it because eBooks are impulse, I-want-it-right-now buys? Or does the eBook-owning demographic have a special attachment to romance? Are romance books somehow better in the eBook format?
China book fact countercyclical asset of the day
The People’s Press – the biggest publishing
house for China’s orthodox revolutionary books – reports that Marx’s
anti-capitalism opus "Das Kapital" has been selling about 4,000-5,000
copies nationwide a month since last November. That’s a big jump from
before the economic crisis, when the book sold well under 1,000 copies
per month on average.
The "Selected Works by Mao Zedong," a book
owned by almost every Chinese citizen a few decades ago, is also
witnessing a big jump in sales since late last year, according to Mr.
Pan from the People’s Press circulation department.
Here is the full story and I thank Ryan Tetrick for the pointer.
The War on Drugs: Methamphetamine
Remember when you could walk into a pharmacy and buy a decongestant like Sudafed? The key ingredient was pseudoephedrine, a precursor to methamphetamine. A series of laws made it more and more difficult to buy or manufacture pseudoephedrine (despite it's legality). So what did we get for our loss of liberty? A new paper (AEA) (free here) in the March AER says not much:
In mid-1995, a government effort to reduce the supply of methamphetamine precursors successfully disrupted the methamphetamine market and interrupted a trajectory of increasing usage. The price of methamphetamine tripled and purity declined from 90 percent to 20 percent. Simultaneously, amphetamine related hospital and treatment admissions dropped 50 percent and 35 percent, respectively. Methamphetamine use among arrestees declined 55 percent. Although felony methamphetamine arrests fell 50 percent, there is no evidence of substantial reductions in property or violent crime. The impact was largely temporary. The price returned to its original level within four months; purity, hospital admissions, treatment admissions, and arrests approached preintervention levels within eighteen months.
The authors conclude:
This is quite possibly the DEA’s greatest success in disrupting the supply of a
major illicit substance. The focus on disrupting the supply of inputs rather than of the drug itself proved extremely successful. This success was the result of a highly
concentrated input supply market and consequently may be difficult to replicate for drugs
with less centralized sources of supply, such as cocaine and heroin. That this massive
market disruption resulted in only a temporary reduction in adverse health events and
drug arrests and did not reduce property and violent crimes, is disappointing. (italics added)
FYI, this paper makes its case almost entirely by carefully laying out the data rather than with theory or econometrics–that was nice to see in the AER.
The Dark Side?
Gretchen Rubin interviews Todd Kashdan (of GMU I might add, though I don't know him):
Is there anything you find yourself doing repeatedly that gets in the way of your happiness?
There is a dark side to my desire to become an expert in psychology,
knowledgeable about science and literature, skilled as a parent,
mountain biker, and weightlifter, and attentive as a husband. When I
think I know something, I stop paying attention. It happens far too
often and when it does, opportunities close. I constantly have to
remind myself to let go of my ego, let go of my expectations, and stay
flexible and profoundly aware of what is right in front of my senses.
Here is Todd's new blog. Here is Todd on the Mayan afterlife. Here is Gretchen's version of phony advertising markets in everything.
Here is Todd's home page, with Todd's lists.
Repo markets in everything, Passover edition
This is an example to inspire Jeffrey Williams:
When Jaaber Hussein signs an agreement with Israel's Chief
Rabbis tomorrow, he will be inking the only Arab-Jewish accord sure to
be meticulously observed by both sides. The deal will make him the
owner for one week of all bread, pasta and beer in Israel – well a huge
amount of it anyway. The contract, signed for the past 12 years by the
Muslim hotel food manager, is part of the traditional celebrations
ahead of the Jewish holiday of Passover.
Jews are forbidden by biblical injunction to possess leavened bread,
or chametz, during Passover and ironically an Arab is needed to
properly observe the holiday. The agreement with Mr Hussein offers a
way of complying with religious edicts without having to wastefully
destroy massive quantities of food.
If only our capital markets could run so smoothly:
Tomorrow, Mr Hussein will put down a cash deposit of $4,800
(some 20,000 shekels or £3,245) for the $150m worth of leavened
products he acquires from state companies, the prison service and the
national stock of emergency supplies. The deposit will be returned at
the end of the holiday, unless he decides to come up with the full
value of the products. In that case he could, in theory, keep them all.
At the close of the holiday, the foodstuffs purchased by Mr Hussein
revert back to their original owners, who have given the Chief Rabbis
the power of attorney over their leavened products. "It's a firm,
strong agreement done in the best way," Mr Hussein said.
I thank Michael Webster for the pointer.
Exchange with Brad DeLong over the stimulus
They call the feature "Blog War," although it is friendlier than that. The first installment is here (alternatively Brad's first full post is here and mine here) and there is more to come, some of it already in the can. I cannot promise we will be rational in the Hansonian sense, but I do believe we will get to the bottom of where the disagreement lies.
Addendum: Matt Yglesias comments.