Dispatches from District 48
I was just reading my colonoscopy prep instructions for tomorrow. I have to take four pills of one laxative and 238 grams of another laxative dissolved in liquid. According to the packaging for these two products, this represents 17 days worth of laxative consumption, all to be taken in 60 minutes.
Because this is a topic that will only be interesting to some, and because it has gotten so long that it fills most of the home page, I am putting the article on how I ripped my home movies and created a video streaming system around XBMC below the fold. For those who are not sure if they want to bother clicking through, here are some teaser photos of the media center I ended up with:
By the way, I know that in 10 5 years, this will all likely be superseded by streaming accounts. For the time being, I have fun with this.
I was looking at the searches that brought visitors to Coyote Blog, and in August and early September I had a surge of folks searching Peabody Terrace. This seemed odd. Then I realized that this must be young grad students who have been assigned Peabody Terrace as their housing and want to learn about it. I feel bad that I have to spoil some of their anticipation, but this is what they will find on my site:
And, in case you are one who supports government "redevelopment" and mandates on aesthetics but think that it would all work out fine if architectural experts and committees of academics made the decisions, here is the hideous Peabody Terrace at Harvard University, presumably vetted by the finest architectural academic minds in the country:
These buildings, where Harvard stuck me for a full year, were transported right out of East Berlin, right down to the elevators that only stopped on every third floor for efficiency sake (efficiency of the builder, obviously, not the occupant). The interior walls were bare cast concrete and no amount of heat could warm them in the winter. It was the most depressing place, bar none, I have every lived. But the "experts" loved them, and wished that this vision could have been forced by urban planners on all of America:
Leland Cott, an adjunct professor of urban design at the [Harvard] GSD, calls Peabody Terrace 'a model of design efficiency, economy, and attention to scale.'
Fortunately, someone gets it:
The magazine Architecture Boston has focused attention on the controversial aspects of Sert's work by devoting its July/August 2003 issue to an examination of Peabody Terrace, expressing the essential disagreement about the work in the form of a stark conundrum: "Architects love Peabody Terrace. The public hates it."
In fact, the public's hostility to the structures may be in proportion to its degree of proximity, with the most intense feelings confined to those households on the front lines of the town/gown divide....
Otile McManus, in a companion essay, discusses the reactions of many Cambridge residents, who have described the complex as "monstrous," "cold," "uninviting," "overwhelming," and "hostile," and have compared it to Soviet housing.
Actually, the most intense feeling were by those who lived there, who really, really hated it (though I will admit there were several third world students who loved it -- must have been nostalgic for them). The article goes on to accuse detractors of being anti-modernist. Which is a laugh, since my house is one of the most starkly modern in the area, so modern I could not sell it several years ago. I am not anti-modern. I am anti-bad-design.
Wow! I am kindof amazed at the hostility I still feel fifteen years after the fact. I had started out just to link TJIC's post, and here I am in full-blown rant mode. Sorry.
A blogger once described the Boston City Hall as "a poured concrete Vogon love poem." I wish I had said that about Peabody Terrace.
The other thing excited, young Harvard grad students might find at my site is an excerpt from my novel. This portion is entirely autobiographical (except for not being a girl) and describes my year at Peabody Terrace.
Off for my, uh, purge and then colonoscopy. I will leave you with this Dave Barry article to describe the process. My dad used to say derisively that toilet humor was the cheapest laugh you could get. But all due respect to my dad, that Dave Barry piece is the most laugh-out-loud funny article I can remember ever reading.
1. On the lighter side, a customer came into our establishment in California the other day with a horse. Claimed it was a "therapy animal" and therefore it would be a violation of the ADA to not allow the horse in. Not knowing the law but with some experience with California, my managers rightly let the animal in, then researched it later. It appears that we are safe denying entry to animals that are not licensed service animals, but this is an evolving part of the law, apparently. Since it costs us about $25,000 a pop to get even the craziest suits dismissed in California, we will continue to err on the side of caution.
2. Perhaps even crazier, we recently were forced to institute an HR policy in California that working through lunch is a firing offense. One warning, then you are gone. Why? California has a crazy law that allows employees to collect substantial ex post facto compensation if they claim they were denied a 10 minute break every four hours or a thirty minute unpaid lunch break after five. Suffice it to say we have spent years honestly trying to comply with this law. The 10-minute break portion is less of a compliance hurdle, but the lunch break portion has caused us no end of trouble. Theoretically, under the law, the employee has a choice - work through lunch paid, eating at the job post (e.g. in a gatehouse of a campground) or leave the job post for 30 minutes for an unpaid lunch break. As background, every one of our employees have always begged to have the paid lunch because they are from a poorer area and need the extra 30 minutes of pay.
Unfortunately, it does not matter what preferences the employee expressed on the job site. In the future, the employee can go to the labor department and claim he or she did not get their break, and even if they did not want it at the time, and never complained to the employer about not getting it, the employer always, always, always loses a he-said-she-said disagreement in a California Court or review board. Always. Sure, it takes someone utterly without honor to make this claim in Court, but there seems to be no shortage of those. So, we took a series of approaches to getting people on-paper, on-the-record as having asked to work through lunch. Unfortunately, one court case after another has demolished each safe harbor we thought we had.
A few weeks ago I was advised by a senior case-worker at the California Department of Labor that the only safe harbor left for employers is to FORCE employees to take an unpaid lunch. This means they clock in and back out, this means they have to leave the job site (because if a customer happens to ask them a question, then they are "working"), and this means we have to ruthlessly enforce it. Or we are liable for scads of penalties. So, we find ourselves at the bizarre crossroads of making working through lunch a firing offense, and employees who generally want to work an extra thirty minutes each day to earn more money are not allowed to do so. Yet another example of laws that are supposed to be "empowering" to employees actually ending up limiting their choices.
As I have written before, the problem with Social Security is not a mismatch of taxes and benefits - it's simply that 40 years of Congresses have spent the premiums, and now they no longer exist to pay benefits.
The problem with Medicare is actually more difficult. By these numbers, Medicare taxes are not even a third of what they need to be to pay for actual benefits. There are only two solutions that don't involve running up Federal debt: 1) Triple Medicare taxes. or 2) Cut back benefits and/or eligibility by 2/3.
Interestingly, neither party is suggesting either of these solutions, which makes all the light and noise from the Conventions totally meaningless on this issue. The Left's notion that cost control will close the gap is sheer fantasy -- already Medicare is getting an effective cross-subsidy from non-Medicare customers and price controls have gone about as far as they can. In fact, the cost mismatch above is understated as many Medicare costs (e.g. buildings, revenue collection) are actually not charged to the program but to other agencies. The Right's pitch that small cuts around the edges that Grandma won't notice at all will balance the budget are equally a fantasy.
Believe it or not, I have come around to the solution that we need to raise the Medicare tax. I would like to privatize the whole thing, and in particular see a reintroduction of individual shopping and out-of-pocket expenditure to the system. But in the interim we have to acknowledge that there is no way substantial changes to Medicare benefits or delivery is going to happen. The program remains incredibly popular, though one reason for this is that it is priced wrong. I am sure Aston-Martin sports cars would be staggeringly popular if sold for a third of their true cost. In my mind, there is nothing more dangerous to an economy than an artificially incorrect price, and Medicare prices are WAY off. We need to raise taxes to match the current benefits package, and THEN let's talk about reforming the program.
Generally, I get turned off by education video because I find the information bandwidth is often way too low. I can read it faster, and get 99% of the benefit.
But this is a case where video explains in 60 seconds more than one could in a whole lecture.
Kubrick // One-Point Perspective from kogonada on Vimeo.
Link via Hit and Run
...for the first time that I can remember, this means that I have a personal stake in the election. It's not just that I find one side's policies more congenial in the abstract, but that one policy in particular could have a substantial impact on my life.
You see, I've never really intended to keep blogging until I'm 65. I might, of course. Blogging is a pretty nice job. But I'd really like to have a choice, and without Obamacare I probably won't. That's because I'm normal: I'm in my mid-50s, I have high blood pressure and high cholesterol, a family history of heart trouble, and a variety of other smallish ailments. Nothing serious, but serious enough that it's unlikely any insurance company would ever take me on. So if I decided to quit blogging when I turned 60, I'd be out of luck. I couldn't afford to be entirely without health insurance (the 4x multiplier that hospitals charge the uninsured would doom me all by itself), and no one would sell me an individual policy. I could try navigating the high-risk pool labyrinth, but that's a crapshoot. Maybe it would work, maybe it wouldn't.
But if Obamacare stays on the books, I have all the flexibility in the world. If I want to keep working, I keep working. If I don't, I head off to the exchange and buy a policy that suits me. No muss, no fuss.
So yes, this election matters, and it matters in a very personal way. It does to me, anyway. It's not just about gridlock as far as the eye can see.
I usually have a pretty thick skin for this type of stuff, but this got to me. I wrote:
Great. Those of us who are comfortable actually, you know, working to support ourselves look forward to subsidizing your future indolence.
Sorry, I am not usually that much of a snarky jerk, but really, that is what you are celebrating. You are not celebrating some medical or scientific breakthrough that allows you to stay healthy at a lower cost. You are celebrating a system to force other people to pay for your body's maintenance. All so you don't have to support yourself for over a quarter of your life.If you were to say that, "wow the health dice really rolled against me and I need help," few would begrudge you the help. But this notion of an indolent retirement is radically new. It is a product of our century's and our country's great wealth. Retirement is a luxury good. I have no problem with anyone consuming this luxury good out of their savings, but consuming it out of mine, and then crowing about it to my face, is highly irritating.
If I were a Republican, or if I had one iota of trust in them, I might write that this is what the election is about. Since I don't have such trust, I will instead merely highlight Drum's thoughts as a good representation of modern entitled thinking. For God sakes this guy is not even trying to use my money to escape, say, a coal mine early. He wants my cash to escape blogging early, perhaps the cushiest job there is (as indicated by the fact that many of us do it for no compensation what-so-ever).
A lot of folks are criticizing the FBI for losing about 12 million ipod/iphone/ipad records, many of which included user name and addresses as well as their device's unique identifier.
What I would like to know is how all that ended up on an FBI laptop in the first place. I know there are those who have rooted on Jack Bauer for 6 or 7 seasons who expect that the FBI should have all this data -- but this is not the case. I know of no law that grants the FBI automatic access to all cell phone records or Apple accounts.
So far, I have mainly been concerned about inflationary risks from quantitative easing, which is effectively a fancy term for substituting printed money for government debt (I know there are folks out there that swear up and down that QE does not involve printing (electronically of course) money, but it simply has to. Operation Twist, the more recent Fed action, is different, and does not involve printing money but essentially involves the Fed taking on longer-term debt in exchange for putting more shorter term debt on the market.
Scott Minder in the Financial Times highlights another potential problem:
In 2008, just before the first of two rounds of quantitative easing, the Federal Reserve had $41bn in capital and roughly $872bn in liabilities, resulting in a debt to equity ratio of roughly 21-to-one. The Federal Reserve’s portfolio had $480bn in Treasury securities with an asset duration of about 2.5 years. Therefore, a 100 basis point increase in interest rates would have caused the value of its portfolio to fall by 2.5 per cent, or $12bn. A loss of that magnitude would have been severe but not devastating.
By 2011, the Fed’s portfolio consisted of more than $2.6tn in Treasury and agency securities, mortgage bonds and other fixed income assets, and its debt-to-equity ratio had dramatically increased to 51-to-one. Under Operation Twist, the Fed swapped its short-term securities holdings for longer-term ones, thereby extending the duration of its portfolio to more than eight years. Now, a 100 basis point increase in interest rates would cause the market value of the Federal Reserve’s assets to fall by about 8 per cent, or $200bn, leaving it insolvent, with a capital deficit of about $150bn. Hypothetically, a 5 per cent rise in interest rates could cause a trillion dollar decline in the value of the Federal Reserve’s assets.
As the economy continues to expand, the Federal Reserve will eventually seek to normalise monetary policy, resulting in higher interest rates. In this scenario, the central bank could find that the market value of its portfolio has declined to the point where it no longer has enough sellable assets to adequately reduce the money supply and maintain the purchasing power of the dollar. Given US dependence on foreign capital flows, if the stability of the dollar is drawn into question, the ability of the US to finance its deficits may falter. The Federal Reserve could then find itself the buyer of last resort for Treasury securities. In doing so, the government would become hostage to its printing press, and a currency crisis or runaway inflation could take hold.
George Dorgan observes, on the pages of Zero Hedge, that European countries are taking even large balance sheet risks. The most surprising is the Swiss.
This is from an article in Distro, free publication that Engadget pushes to my iPad. The only version I can find to link to is this pig of a pdf. The article is on 38 Studios, the Curt Shilling video game company that the taxpayers of Rhode Island lost over $50 million funding. This is a justification for a similar tech funding program in Nevada:
“The Catalyst Fund and the NCIC Fund are two of the best things that have happened in Nevada in the time that I’ve been here,” he said. “The biggest challenge facing Nevada is that we have very little in the way of risk capital. Our funding capacity is only a fraction of what our actual funding needs are.”
Meanwhile, most of the limited venture money available in the area tends to be in the hands of investors who lack familiarity with the tech sector, said Colin Loretz, co-founder and CEO of Web-based startup Cloudsnap. Loretz — whose company recently received support from startup accelerator TechStars — ended up going out of state to secure funding from investors in San Antonio and San Francisco.
“What we’ve always found was that there were few funding options in Reno, and most of them didn’t understand what we were doing,” Loretz said. “They were very, very knowledgeable in more traditional areas such as manufacturing, mining and clean energy, but not cloud services.”
This is simply bizarre. Why does every single geographical box we might draw on the map need to be self-sufficient in tech venture capital? What is the big deal about going out-of-state for investment. It can't be hard to do, since the person speaking actually did exactly that himself.
According to Google Maps, Sand Hill Road, the epicenter of tech venture capital, is just 4 hours and 24 minutes from downtown Reno by car. That makes the venture capitalists in Menlo Park closer to Reno than to LA. What is the big freaking deal that makes it so important for Nevada to have in-state tech venture capital, even at the cost of blowing a lot of taxpayer money to get there?
By the way, I thought this was a funny adjunct to that justification:
Meanwhile, Nevada officials said they have learned from the problems experienced by other states and built the necessary protections into their programs. Management of the NCIC fund, for example, will be overseen by a private equity firm, said Nevada State Treasurer Kate Marshall.
We need a state private equity fund because we have no private equity expertise in Nevada. The state fund will be run well because we will put the (supposedly nonexistent) state private equity experts in charge of it. Not to worry. No chance at all that this state money will just be used to back and bail out the private equity managers' investments.
The article is light on details about how the whole Rhode Island debacle went down. I would really like to find a step by step history that shows how debacles like this occur.
I usually don't take notice of this type of story, even when it involves a lot of schadenfreude in seeing problems at Harvard. But how can you not enjoy a story about over a hundred Harvard students cheating on an open-book take-home test in ... get ready for it ... Goverment 1310 – “Introduction to Congress.” Given the subject of the course, I wonder if the ones who did not cheat could be failed for not really understanding the subject matter?
OK, this is an incredibly noob question and you will all lose respect for me. But take this situation:
OK, I am streaming media from the server on the left to the PC on the left running XBMC at my TV. The data rate is slower than I would have thought over all gigabit lines. I know there are a jillion things that could be causing this, from software to drivers to, well, lots of stuff. I have one narrow question.
And this is the embarassingly noob part. I am presuming that all the data does not actually go through the router, that it can just go from server to switch to TV. The router is actually on the other side of the house connected by a long line across the roof of questionable quality. I know the router is involved - I picture small packets of data going to the switch with routing information.
So the question: is there any reason a bad cable from the router to the switch above -- one that still passes data but slower than gigabit speeds -- would slow down streaming from the server to the TV?
Update: Thanks for the help in the comments. I am increasingly suspicious I have a graphics driver problem that is causing stuttering on 1080p playback, and I will test that out this weekend. Turns out there are a lot of XBMC users in the group. I used to be a SageTV guy, and I still think their HD hardware streamers were a great solution. But after Google bought them a couple of years ago they went dark. There is still an active community but I was ready to move on. I have switched to XBMC and have been very happy (I never used the TV/recording functions in Sage so the fact XBMC does not have these was no problem, though the OpenElec variant does have them). I hope to put a post up with my experiences and observations. I have now done XBMC installations on Windows PCs, an Ubuntu box, using OpenElec (a linux variant), and on an old Apple TV2. As it turns out I still have not found the perfect installation, but with the right box I may find it with Openelec.
Why? Alimentary, my dear Watson. I have a dentist appointment at the beginning of the week and a colonoscopy at the end. Awesome. I will say that the colonoscopy seems the perfect way to celebrate two weeks of political conventions. It is a sort of physical analog to how I feel listening to politicians speak.
I just wrote three new articles for the Privatization Blog.
The first looks at which types of public decisions should stay public in a privatization effort
The second looks at implementation issues and learning in privatization
The third acknowledges that privatization efforts can fall into cronyism, but points out that generally in these cases the public alternative falls into the same behaviors. A great example is prisons, where privatization is derided by folks like Think Progress for the lobbying the prison companies do both for contracts and harsher laws, but they never acknowledge that public prison unions have demonstrated the same behaviors and for much longer.
OK, to go along with the bad study in the last chart, I will offer up a terrible chart. From Kevin Drum:
Drum uses this chart to hammer home the point that the current deficit is Bush's, rather than Obama's fault. I have absolutely no problem with blaming Bush for all variety of stupid spending and handing him a share of the blame for the Federal debt. Even using this bad chart (more in a moment), I think Obama gets a lot of the blame, though. The highlighted bars don't really substantially move the debt until 2009 and after, on Obama's watch. His complete lack of any effort to take on the rising debt, to pare back past spending programs (or wars, or whatever) has been unparalleled. In fact, I think it is his absolute indifference to deficit spending and the debt levels that saddles him with a lot of the blame.
Anyway, back to the chart. Notice that these are just a few of the many components of Federal spending, all of which are increasing in this period. Picking out which ones "caused the debt" is not a neutral procedure. Money is fungible. One could just as easily substitute rising Medicare and Social Security costs (or education funding or transportation funding or government employee salaries) for any of the bars above and be just as correct. Even if one wanted to just look at Bush actions, one would reasonably need to include the debt associated with the costs of Medicare part D, something left off this chart presumably because Drum supports that particular spending. All this chart does is demonstrate the biases or preferences of the author, showing us which categories of spending the author most opposes (or which the author feels Obama can't be blamed for, like the down economy).
By the way, the chart's construction actually worse than this, because the chart is only "public debt" rather than total debt (for example debt bought in QE is no longer public debt). If one looks at public debt, the total number should have crossed 100% some time in the last year, rather than the 70% or so in the chart. So there are a lot of other things, presumably that the author likes, that are also causing total debt to rise. But these are hidden, because presumably the Fed only buys debt created by the good spending, and the public buys all the debt created by the bad spending.
Finally, my suspicion is that some of these numbers are just plain wrong. The chart implies Fannie, Freddie, and Tarp are only going to cause a total of 1% of GDP in debt, or about $160 billion. That is WAY below the loss numbers that Fannie and Freddie have already acknowledged, with more to come.
Imagine this study: An academic who is a strong Democrat wants to do a study to discover if Republicans suffer from a psychological tendency to bizarre conspiracy theories. OK, the reasonable mind would already be worried about this. The academic says his methodology will be an online survey of the first 1000 people who reply to him from the comment sections of certain blogs. This is obviously terrible -- a 12-year-old today understands the problems with such online surveys. But the best part is that he advertises the survey only on left-wing sites like the Daily Kos, telling anyone from those heavily Democratic sites that if they self-identify as Republicans, they can take this survey and their survey responses will be published as typical of Republicans. Anyone predict what he would get?
It is hard to believe that even in this post-modern academic world, that such a piece of garbage could get published. But it did. The only difference is that the academic was a strong believer in global warming, he was writing about skeptics, and sought out survey respondents only on strong-believer sites. What makes this story particularly delicious is the juxtaposition of the author's self-appointed role as defender of science with his atrocious scientific methodology. The whole story is simply amazing, and you can read about it at JoNova's site.
In one way, it is appropriate to have this published in a psychology journal, as it is such a great example of the psychological need for confirmation. You can just see those climate alarmists breathing a little easier - "we don't have to listen to those guys, do we?" No need for debate, no need for analysis, no need for thought. Just immediate dismissal of their arguments because they come from, well, bad people. Argumentum ad hominem, indeed.
I got a call today from the National Conference of Mayors. They wanted to send somebody by to talk to me about just how committed these great folks were to small business success.
The call began poorly, as their representative tried to use a tactic I mostly only get from penny-stock boiler rooms - pretending that she and I had talked some time in the past and that I had committed to meeting with her. I suppose this tactic might have worked with a frazzled exec, but it is one sure fire way to immediately get me pissed off in a phone call. After telling her that she and I had no such call and that I did not appreciate the cheap telemarketing tactic, I said that I had absolutely no desire to help the mayors put some fake pro-business patina on their activities that are generally hostile to commerce and free markets. I told them that I did not want a subsidy, handout, any special access, training programs, etc., I just wanted to be left alone. I was not going to participate in some program where I get my picture taken shaking some politicians right hand while he is whacking me with a stick with his left. The representative, to her credit before she hung up, admitted she gets this reaction a lot.
One only has to look at their "plan" (pdf) to see what their vision entails for "helping" small business. Here is a summary of the planks:
As will not be surprising, absolutely nothing in the Mayor's plans dealt with actual issues under their control, such as business, occupational, and occupancy licencing reform. Also not surprisingly, the mayors call for hundreds of billions of dollars in new Federal spending narrowly aimed at urban areas without once explaining why these can't or shouldn't be funded locally. If Los Angeles wants more money for its police, or trains, or schools, and if that spending has real demonstrable value to the city, then why can't they sell the new taxes and spending to their own citizens? Why do they need the money from the Feds (ie from the rest of us)?
But you can just see the corporate state a work. A few companies will cynically climb on board, knowing this is all BS, but also knowing that they will get a nice subsidy or sweetheart project in exchange for letting the majors check their "pro-business" box (pro-business used here as distinct from pro-market).
...you will love this too. Solyndra used cylindrical solar cells nested inside a u-shaped mirror to concentrate sunlight to get more power per square inch of solar cell. The problem is that all that extra shaping and mirrors added cost, and only made sense if solar cells were expensive. After all, if solar cells are cheap, if one wants 20% more output, it's easier to just increase the solar cell area by 20% than to add all the concentrator rigmarole.
Well, dreams die hard, and here is the latest idea -- spherical concentrators. These things have huge spheres and tracking motors, all for a 35% increase in efficiency. Methinks that just adding 35% more PV cell area is going to be cheaper, but this could well be yet another flytrap for Obama Administration officials, who are to sexy-looking new technologies like a degenerate wagerer at the track is to a hot tip.
Apparently the most important issue is not the unsustainability of deficit spending, lack of fiscal responsibility, or the tough problems of balancing expensive bailouts with expensive defaults. It is making sure the timing of a Greek default does not negatively affect Obama's re-election. From the Independent (UK) entitled, "Obama asks eurozone to keep Greece in until after election day"
American officials are understood to be worried that if they decide Greece has not done enough to meet its deficit targets and withhold the money, it would automatically trigger Greece's exit from the eurozone weeks before the Presidential election on 6 November.
They are urging eurozone Governments to hold off from taking any drastic action before then – fearing that the resulting market destabilisation could damage President Obama's re-election prospects. European leaders are thought to be sympathetic to the lobbying fearing that, under pressure from his party lin Congress, Mitt Romney would be a more isolationist president than Mr Obama.
It appears that a scene in the Fountainhead that I thought was a facetious absurdity actually occurred:
Famous architects dress as their buildings:
No Cosmo-Slotnick building
Over the last 50 years, real per capital health care spending has increased substantially. Certainly there are multiple reasons for this, but the most obvious one is seldom ever mentioned -- that the US has seen huge increases in personal wealth over this period, and unsurprisingly people choose to spend a lot of this extra wealth on their own health and life expectancy. In an age where consumerism is often derided as shallow and trivial, what could be more sensible than spending money on more and better life?
Many have pointed to the increased technological intensity of health care to explain rising costs. I suppose this could be true, though in almost every other industry in modern times, increased technological intensity has reduced rather than increased costs.
One issue that does not get enough attention is the prosaic act of shopping. I spend my own money, and I care about price. I spend someone else's money, I don't give a rip. Josh Cothran did a visualization of who is spending health care money. Just look at the 1960 and 2012 charts, and pay particular attention to the orange "out-of-pocket" number. Another way to rewrite these charts is to say consumers care about prices for spending in the orange band only.
Update: Health care cost inflation. Note cosmetic surgery, a field with significant increases in technological intensity over the last few decades, but for which almost all costs are out-of-pocket
The government just sent me a letter informing me that it is time, in the name of creating a race-blind society, to categorize all my employees by race, count them up, and report everyone's color to the government.
As an aside, I found this bit of privacy reassurance to employees to be pretty funny. This is suggested language for an employer to use when asking, "um, by the way, can you tell me what race you are?"**
"The employer is subject to certain governmental recordkeeping and reporting requirements for the administration of civil rights laws and regulations. In order to comply with these laws, the employer invites employees to voluntarily self-identify their race or ethnicity. Submission of this information is voluntary and refusal to provide it will not subject you to any adverse treatment. The information obtained will be kept confidential and may only be used in accordance with the provisions of applicable laws, executive orders, and regulations, including those that require the information to be summarized and reported to the federal government for civil rights enforcement. When reported, data will not identify any specific individual."
So the private data you share will only be used if Congress writes a law, the President issues an executive order, or a bureaucrat writes a rule saying they can use it. And this is comforting? Our President claims the right to assassinate Americans by executive order, for God sakes, and this paragraph makes people feel better about categorizing themselves with the government in ways that, in the past, have been used by numerous governments in a variety of pogroms.
** I do not allow my supervisors to even ask. We just do our best from our knowledge of all the employees. My vision of the relationship I have with my employees does not include inquiring about their race (or religion, or sexual orientation) in an official capacity. It also, does not encompass testing their bodily fluids, which is why I refuse to bid on management contracts that require drug testing of our employees.
Earlier I tried drawing Earth-like planets. I wanted to try a gas giant. Here is the first shot at it:
Most of this is like the last project. The difference is in coming up with the flat map for a banded gas giant rather than for land and oceans. I finally cracked the code at the suggestion of someone online. I wanted to create the bands in great detail, but drawing line after line in different colors seemed tedious. He suggested taking a one pixel wide slice from a picture and then spreading it horizontally to get lines. I used a slice through the red rocks near Sedona, giving me nice Jovian colors. I then blurred the lines and then used Photoshop liquify and a pen tablet to squiggle the lines.
The rest is just a series of overlays to give the colors a bit more variance, and the halo and dark side like the planets before.
The detail is pretty satisfying
... and it was fun to see my charts in it! The lecture is reprinted here (pdf) or here (html). The charts I did are around pages 6-7 of the pdf, the ones showing the projected curve of global warming for various climate sensitivities, and backing into what that should imply for current warming. In short, even if you don't think warming in the surface temperature record is exaggerated, there still has not been anywhere near the amount of warming one would expect for the types of higher sensitivities in the IPCC and other climate models. Warming to date, even if not exaggerated and all attributed to man-made and not natural causes, is consistent with far less catastrophic, and more incremental, future warming numbers.
These charts come right out of the IPCC formula for the relationship between CO2 concentrations and warming, a formula first proposed by Michael Mann. I explained these charts in depth around the 10 minute mark of this video, and returned to them to make the point about past warming around the 62 minute mark. This is a shorter video, just three minutes, that covers the same ground. Watching it again, I am struck by how relevant it is as a critique five years later, and by how depressing it is that this critique still has not penetrated mainstream discussion of climate. In fact, I am going to embed it below:
The older slides Ridley uses, which are cleaner (I went back and forth on the best way to portray this stuff) can be found here.
By the way, Ridley wrote an awesome piece for Wired more generally about catastrophism which is very much worth a read.
