Coyote Blog

We have all read the scare stories that tell us how many chemicals we are exposed to in X food or Y activity.  No evidence of harm from exposure is given, but the very number of chemicals is used to scare us -- certainly something in there must be bad!

Well, prepare to be really frightened of this common food product:

What they found ...[were] over 4,000 different non-volatile compounds across the different samples, results which he presented today at the 246th National Meeting & Exposition of the American Chemical Society. “It’s very complex,” Collins says of the chemistry.

What is he discussing?  Whiskey.  I will add that it also has a lot of dihydrogen monoxide too.

Janet Yellen may soon be a victim of affirmative action.  I know that sounds odd, but I think it is true.

To preface, I have no preferences in the competition to become the next head of the Federal Reserve, and assume that Janet Yellen and Larry Summers are equally qualified.   I don't think the immense power the Fed has to screw with the economy can be wielded rationally by any individual, so it almost does not matter who sits in the chair.  Perhaps someone with a bit less hubris and a little more self-awareness would be better with such power, which would certainly mitigate against Summers.

But Yellen has a problem.  When this horse race first emerged in the press, many in the media suggested that Yellen would be a great choice because she was a woman, and qualified.  Most of the press coverage centered (probably unfairly given that she does seem to be quite qualified) on her woman-ness.  This leaves Yellen with a problem because many people were left with a first impression that the reason to choose her was primarily due to her having a womb, rather than her economic chops.

This is the downside of affirmative action.

I recently discussed a book that sucks, so here is one that does not suck: Wool.  I am not sure what makes it so compelling, but I had a lost couple of days when I blew off what I was supposed to be doing and read all of the first five books (the first few are short so that all five are only about 500 pages altogether).

Save time and buy the anthology.

I don't know how many of you read it, but for me Wool seems to echo many themes from A Canticle for Leibowitz.  The series are totally different in style and content and story-telling and characters, but none-the-less they both address themes like the recurrence, almost cyclicality, of man's failings and the role of rules (even arbitrary rules) and authority in breaking or reinforcing these cycles.

And speaking of things this novel reminded me of, in the latter parts of the anthology we are introduced in Wool to a sort of instruction manual for the state that is a kind of dark version of Seldon's psycho-history in the Foundation novels.

The whole novel is familiar and highly creative at the same time.  Go buy it.

I just finished reading Dan Brown's new novel Inferno.  Dan Brown novels tend to be love-it-or-hate-it things for me.  They are structured exactly like computer adventure games, with a series of quests and puzzles that lead to the next quest or puzzle which eventually reveal a larger story line and a final confrontation.  Just as this sort of adventure game can be engaging or tedious and repetitive, so too can be Dan Brown books.  The Da Vinci Code is excellent, the others are meh, just overly-convoluted snipe hunts.

So I had expected to either love or hate Inferno.  It turns out it was awful, but for an entirely unexpected reason:  for some insane reason, Dan Brown seems to have come under the spell of Paul Ehrlich doomsters, and has crafted a book with a deep fear of population growth that is right out of the 1970's.

Mild spoilers follow (mild meaning most of this is revealed in the first third of the book)

It is clear from almost the beginning of the book that Brown's hero, Robert Langdon, is on the trail of some sort of mad genius who is convinced that the Earth is headed for a horrible collapse due to human population growth.  This character is enamored of the medieval black death and believes that the best thing for modern man would be some sort of repetition of this kind of plague.

The exhausting part for any rational person trying to read this book is that it is clear that the author Brown mostly agrees with this character.  We know this because all of the arguments characters marshal against the villain are so lame and half-hearted.  In general, the tone of the response to this man is "yes, you are absolutely correct that human population growth will inevitably lead to a complete catastrophe but your idea of a plague is a bad solution."

By the end of the book, everyone formerly opposed to this scientist have come around to reluctantly agreeing with his point of view.  If you ever read Tom Clancy's Rainbow 6, where an environmental group tries to kill off most of the world's population, this is essentially the same plot written, incredibly, by an author that seems to agree with the basic idea.  If you are not convinced that Dan Brown himself agrees with the terrorist, I will also provide one more convincing piece of evidence -- though since it is a much bigger spoiler I will leave it for the end below the fold.  If you have read the book or don't intend to, skip below the fold and then come back.

This idea of catastrophic population growth is idiotic.  Accelerating population growth is a trend that is not a trend.

There is absolutely no trend towards out of control population growth.   In fact, the trends actually run in the opposite direction, with birth rates and population growth rates falling such that most demographers foresee an Earth stabilizing around 9-10 billion people and possibly falling in population after that.  Since Dan Brown uses senior UN officials in the book to agree that population growth will result in disaster, I will use UN figures.  These are from a 2005 UN population report.

First, population growth rates have been falling for decades and will continue to fall.  They are falling in every part of the world.

A cynic might argue that this is due to death and disease, but in fact birth rates are falling everywhere

This data is about 10 years old but Wikipedia summarizes the most recent UN data and shows this trend has continued (TFR is total fertility rate):

People focus on the amount the world population has increased over the last 60 years to produce shock numbers, but the real stunner is the drop in fertility rates -- nearly in half, which is really astounding.  I still have my treasured first edition of Ehrlich's Population Bomb.  It is hilarious reading, all the more so because he gets everything so wrong, yet the media still tends to take him seriously.

The recurring theme in Inferno is that man's greatest problem is that he has successfully tackled many diseases and thus increased life expectancy, and it is this longer life expectancy that will be the roots of mankind's Malthusian downfall.

However, exactly the opposite is true.  There is a ton of scientific work that says that longer life spans lead to lower fertility rates  (the other thing that most contributes to lower fertility rates is economic growth).  Here is a chart right out of the UN study linked above showing a clear inverse correlation between life expectancy and birth rates.   Correlation is not causation, but this is backed by a ton of other empirical evidence to support causation.

Wow.

There is no trend towards accelerating population growth -- the trend is in the opposite direction, to deceleration.  And folks who have underestimated man's ingenuity in feeding larger populations have always turned our to be wrong.  Ehrlich said there was no way --- absolutely no way -- India could feed an additional 200 million people by 1980.  Well, in 2013 it feeds an additional 800 million people to a better standard that the country was fed in Ehrlich's time.  Hell, we could probably feed an additional half billion more just by repealing laws that put a significant amount of America's food production into automotive fuels.

PostScript / Large spoiler and more discussion below the fold 

Continue reading ‘Trend That Is Not A Trend: Dan Brown is an Idiot Edition’ »

This is a pretty amazing statement Justin Gillis in the New York Times.

This month, the world will get a new report from a United Nations panel about the science of climate change. Scientists will soon meet in Stockholm to put the finishing touches on the document, and behind the scenes, two big fights are brewing....

In the second case, we have mainstream science that says if the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere doubles, which is well on its way to happening, the long-term rise in the temperature of the earth will be at least 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit, but more likely above 5 degrees. We have outlier science that says the rise could come in well below 3 degrees.

In this case, the drafters of the report lowered the bottom end in a range of temperatures for how much the earth could warm, treating the outlier science as credible.

The interesting part is that "mainstream science" is based mainly on theory and climate models that over the last 20 years have not made accurate predictions (overestimating warming significantly).  "Outlier science" is in a lot of cases based on actual observations of temperatures along with other variables like infrared radiation returning to space.  The author, through his nomenclature, is essentially disparaging observational data that is petulantly refusing to match up to model predictions.  But of course skeptics are anti-science.

Via Reason on Teach for America (TFA)

The best evidence we had before today was a randomized evaluation conducted by Mathematica Policy Research between 2001 and 2003, which found that TFA teachers bested other teachers at teaching math — with gains for students equal to about a month of additional instruction —  and were not significantly different from them on teaching reading.

A follow-up using the same data showed that that result held for students across the math score distribution, not just the average student. “These results suggest that allowing highly qualified teachers, who in the absence of TFA would not have taught in these disadvantaged neighborhoods, should have a positive influence not just on students at the top of the achievement distribution but across the entire math test score distribution,” the authors concluded.

We sponsor a TFA teacher each year, and have fun doing a few little things for their classroom through the year (we collect school supplies at the beginning of the year, bring presents during the holidays).  Short of the school choice we really need, this is the best way we have found to help K-12 education.

Via the AZ Republic:

The pay gap between the richest 1 percent and the rest of America widened to a record last year.

...

Last year, the incomes of the top 1 percent rose 19.6 percent compared with a 1 percent increase for the remaining 99 percent.

...

But since the recession officially ended in June 2009, the top 1 percent have enjoyed the benefits of rising corporate profits and stock prices: 95 percent of the income gains reported since 2009 have gone to the top 1 percent.

That compares with a 45 percent share for the top 1 percent in the economic expansion of the 1990s and a 65 percent share from the expansion that followed the 2001 recession.

The Federal Reserve is pumping over a half trillion dollars of printed money into inflating a bubble in financial assets (stocks, bonds, real estate, etc).  It should be zero surprise that the rich, who disproportionately get their income and wealth from such financial assets, should benefit the most.   QE is the greatest bit of cronyism the government has yet to invent.

(yes, I understand that there are many reasons for this one-year result, including tax changes that encouraged income to be moved forward into last year and the fact it was a recovery off of a low base.  Never-the-less, despite decades of Progressive derision for "trickle down" economics, this Administration has pursue the theory that creating an asset bubble that makes the rich much richer will in the long term help the economy via the "wealth effect.")

... the first thing you think of with this video is the Wrath of Khan

That is according to our senior Arizona Republic columnist EJ Montini  (via Expresso Pundit)

The U.S. is big enough and strong enough to act on behalf of the innocent victims, including children, who were killed in Syria by the chemical weapons. But those who are against it say this is not our fight. That we shouldn’t go it alone. That the chemical attack wasn’t against Americans. That we can’t be sure what we’d be getting ourselves into. And that there is no clear objective, other than acting in response to an atrocity.

I understand the reasoning.

Given all that, however, I wonder why was so many Americans were furious with former Penn State assistant football coach Mike McQueary.

Remember him?

He was the guy who saw the now imprisoned former coach Jerry Sandusky raping a boy in a Penn State shower.

McQueary was vilified for not acting to stop the attack.

This is an absurd comparison for any number of reasons.  The most obvious is that no one would have been put in danger, and the financial costs were nil, for the Penn State coaches to stop Sandusky's abuse.  Further, Penn State officials had a clear legal obligation for the safety of folks on their property.  Finally, Penn State had the ability to easily stop and prevent the illegal activity.

None of these statements are true for Syria.  The costs in lives and property, both to ourselves and to the citizens of Syria, are potential enormous.  It's not clear it is the US's job to police the area, and in fact history has proven that unilaterally adopting the policeman role, even with the best of intentions, can hurt our country's reputation and relations in the long-term.  Finally, its not at all clear that we could stop Assad from doing whatever he wishes, short of sending in troops to remove him from power, and even then his replacement may likely be just as bad.  Oddly for a liberal in the foregin policy sphere, Montini seems to be making a form of the "might makes right" argument, that the US is obligated just because it is big and strong.

Tellingly, I don't see Montini advocating for use military force to help citizens in any other of the scores of countries where they are being mistreated.  It is more likely that what Montini is really concerned about is the loss of the prestige and credibility of Barack Obama.  A lot of blood has been spilled for thousands of years for the prestige of state leaders.  I for one am happy if this country is finally wising up to this game.

Last time we were in Italy, my wife and I vowed that we would try to learn some Italian before we return (she has some high school French and I have a fair amount of Spanish).   Well, we never did much about it.  I will confess that despite being often skeptical of the paradox of choice, it may actually explain my lack of action.  I could not make up my mind between the various courses.

Then along came my son, who has decided with his roommate that they want to do a semester abroad in Italy next year.  I am not sure why he chose Italy -- I can only assume it had something to do with my euphoric descriptions of finding myself in Milan on Vogue fashion night and being surrounded by Italian models.  You know that language course ad with the guy picking up the Italian course so he can have his one chance at the Italian supermodel?  It's a funny ad, but I fear it may actually hit kind of close to home in my household.

Anyway, my son pushed me over the top to buy a course.  The conflicting online reviews can leave your head spinning, but the general conclusions I came to were:

• Rosetta Stone is all marketing, but not the best course
• Pimsleur got the most positive ratings.

So I went with the Pimsleur course.  It is PC-based, which fits how my family works.  It allows four installations, so each family member got one.  And it allows its lessons to be downloaded to mp3 files so you can listen in the car or on your iPod (though you lose out on the other parts of the lesson which are non-audio).

So far, 20 days into the thing, I have been happy.  I have never thought of myself as good at languages but I have decided to trust the process.  So far, I feel like I am learning and retaining a lot.  My son reports that he thinks it is better than Rosetta Stone, which his roommate is using.

The weird part for me, who learned Spanish from a grammar nazi, is to work with verbs without first learning all the conjugation rules.   In fact, the course seems to work this way -- you learn examples and phrases first, then over time go back and learn the grammar behind what you are doing.  It seems to work, for a few reasons.  One is that a lot of the verbs you need early on to say basic things (is, go, like) have non-standard conjugations anyway, so memorizing them is what you would have had to do with any approach.  A second reason is that it is a hell of a lot more fun to say useful things than to spend what I remember to be years farting around with conjugation and use rules for the subjunctive.  After all, I am not trying to write an academic paper in Italian, I am trying to enjoy my tourist experience.  The third reason this is working for me is that I do remember a lot of my old Spanish verb conjugations, and it turns out Italian conjugates (at least in the present tense) very similarly to Spanish.

Postscript:  To the early joke about learning Italian to meet women, I will say we were all laughing through about the first 7 lessons of Pimsleur.  If you had designed a course solely to pick up people of the opposite sex, I am not sure one bit of the first few lessons would have been different.  Seriously, we were repeating phases like "do you want to have a drink at your place or mine?"

The New York Times has a long article on  Harvard Business School's effort to change its culture around women.  Given that both my wife and I attended, albeit 25 years ago, I have a few thoughts.

• I thought the article was remarkably fair given that it came from the NYT.  Men who are skeptical of the program actually are allowed to voice intelligent objections, rather than just be painted as Neanderthals
• I would have abhorred the forced gender indoctrination program, as much for being boring as for being tangential.  I am fortunate I grew up when I did, before such college group-think sessions were made a part of the process everywhere.  I would presume most of these young folks are now used to such sessions from their undergrad days.   I would not have a problem having an honest and nuanced discussion about these issues with smart people of different backgrounds, but I thought the young man they quoted in the article said it really well -- there is just no payoff to voicing a dissenting opinion in such sessions where it is clear there is a single right answer and huge social and even administrative penalties for saying the wrong thing.
• I went to HBS specifically because I loved the confrontational free-for-all of the classes.   It was tailor-made to my personality and frankly I have never been as successful at anything before or since as I was at HBS.   I say this only to make it clear that I have a bias in favor of the HBS teaching process.   I do think there is an issue that this process does not fit well with certain groups.  These folks who do not thrive in the process are not all women (foreign students can really struggle as well) but they are probably disproportionately women.  So I was happy to see that rather than dumb down the process, they are working to help women be more successful and confident in it.
• It is interesting to see that the school still struggles to get good women professors.  When I was there, the gap between the quality of men and women professors was staggering.  The men were often older guys who had been successful in the business and finance world and now were teaching.  The women were often young and just out of grad school.  The couple of women professors I had my first year were weak, probably the two weakest professors I had.  In one extreme case our female professor got so jumbled up in the numbers that the class demanded I go down and sort it out, which I finally did.  I thought it was fun at the time, but now I realize how humiliating it was.
• To some extent, the school described in the article seems a different place than when I was there.  They describe a school awash in alcohol and dominated by social concerns.  This may be a false impression -- newspapers have a history of exaggerating college bacchanalia.   At the time I was there, Harvard did not admit many students who did not have at least 2 years of work experience, such that the youngest students were 24 and many were in their 30's and 40's.  A number were married and some even had children.   To be there, they not only were paying a lot of money but they were quitting paying jobs.  The school was full of professionals who were there for a purpose.  I had heard that HBS had started to admit more students right out of college -- perhaps that is a mistake.
• The fear by the women running the school that women would show up on Halloween wearing "sexy pirate" costumes represents, in my mind, one of the more insidious aspects of this new feminist paternalism (maternalism?) aimed at fellow women.  Feminism used to be about empowering women to make whatever choices they want for their lives.   Now it is increasingly about requiring women to make only the feminist-approved choices.
• I actually wrote a novel where the protagonist was a confident successful female at HBS.   So I guess I was years ahead of the curve.

Postscript:  Below the fold is an excerpt from my novel.  In it, the protagonist Susan describes how an HBS class works and shares my advice for being successful at HBS.

Continue reading ‘Harvard Business School and Women’ »

We get literally (as they would say on the TV show Archer, literally literally and not figuratively literally) hundreds of paper bills to pay each month in our business.   We can barely keep up just with paying them all, much less vetting every one.  Which is what scam artist marketers count on when they craft fake bills they spam to businesses in hopes that some percentage, in their hustle and bustle, will pay the bills without knowing they are fraudulent.

These letters really, really tick me off.  They are sent by people who apparently cannot sell a product or service on its own merits and so must trick harried business people into accidentally sending them money.  I get these most frequently from companies that send me letters that look just like a government agency requiring yet another fee (the corporate minutes fraud).

So here is the most recent bill my accounts payable person questioned and put on my desk.   It is from a company called US Telecom, and despite the remission address on the letter it is apparently based in California.  You can click to enlarge the letter -- it is in very high resolution, which we will need to find the small print that they use to try to cover their butts.

Does this look like a regular bill to you for some service we have contracted for?  It did to me.  Note the "Due upon Receipt" at the top, the calculation below with previous balance and new balance and "pay this amount."  No reasonable person in this country would say it looks like anything but an invoice for service received.

But this is not a bill.  It is a solicitation for services.  If you send the money, then you are committed.  And by the way, per the terms below, once the agreement is in place, it cannot be terminated or amended (or likely refunded) without a signature from both parties, which means only if they approve it.  If they don't, congrats, you are stuck in this contract.  I have no idea if you actually paid, whether you would receive any services or not.  Since they priced this service without even knowing what assets I have that would be serviced (note no equipment or equipment location is listed in the bill, the first "tell" to me this was a fraud) I am not sure how they would ever provide any service.  (we were really saved by Quickbooks on this one, because my payables person flags any bill from a vendor not set up in our system).

They attempt to cover themselves, in the same way the corporate minutes scamsters do, with the small print in the last two lines at the bottom.   Can't read it?  LOL, I could not read it myself, even full size, without my glasses.  You can click through if you wish to see it on the high rez version.  But it says that it is not a bill, it is a solicitation, and that I am under no obligation to pay unless I accept the offer, which I do by paying.  But by the language, once paid, I have accepted the offer and cannot get out of it without a signature from an authorized officer of their company.  I bet that would be easy to get.

That last fine print may keep them out of jail or even let them sleep at night, but no legitimate business with a valuable product sells its services this way.

Update:  Apparently there is a legitimate US Telecom and they are understandably pissed.  They have set up a page on this billing fraud, and apparently the Attorneys General in a number of states are investigating.

Update #2:  Talk about waddling in late on a story!  These guys' registered corporate name is UST Development, run by a guy named David Bell.  Ken White of Popehat has been on these guys for years.  LOL, I even linked Ken's post a while back.  You sleazy folks out there can f*ck with me all you want but you do not want to mess with Ken White.

Update #3:  Good God, Ken did 14 posts on these guys.  Enjoy.

Atheists in Massachusetts are challenging the Pledge of Allegiance.  I certainly think mention of God in a national standard oath is problematic Constitutionally.

However, there is a bigger problem with the Pledge that no one, even many libertarians, seem to mention:  It is abhorrent for our government to be requiring its citizens to take a loyalty oath.  This is particularly true in that the requirement typically falls on minors who don't have the experience and cognitive ability to parse what they are pledging (there is a reason we don't allow minors to sign legal papers).

There is nothing in our original model of government that requires that citizens be loyal to the country or to its government.  We must observe the rule of law and respect the rights of others, but at some level what does "allegiance" even mean?  I said above that kids can't understand what they are promising to do, but I don't even understand.  When I say those words, what commitment am I making, exactly?

Historically, the requiring of citizen loyalty oaths has certainly not been a marker of a free society.  In general, the more totalitarian the society, the more emphasis is placed on allegiance pledging.  It could be worse -- the most abusive of regimes generally require loyalty oaths directly to the ruler, rather than to the nation itself.  We have not gotten there yet, though some morons seem to be begging for just this sort of personality-cult totalitarianism.

I am working on a couple of euro-style strategy card games at the moment.  The first is a business start-up game, and the second is a space-themed game loosely based on my experiences playing the Traveler role-playing game years ago.   A good stock image account (I use Shutterstock) gets me everything in terms of card images I need for the first game, but royalty-free space images are harder.  However, it is actually possible to start with prosaic industrial and other images and hack them to look futuristic, but it takes some work.

So I have been working on Photoshop skills.  If I could digitally paint, I would paint beautiful concept art, but I cannot.  So my Photoshop training has focused not on painting per se but on hacking images together and overlaying effects.   A LOT of the work is learning to do selections well to mash up images and then overlaying a few effects.   I can make a really good laser beam now, for example.  Take a modern weapon, have a laser beam come out, wala a pretty functional sci fi gun  (Don't believe me?  Look at the Death Star Turrets in the original Star Wars movie and tell me those aren't essentially current-era battleship turrets with green and red light coming out).  I wrote earlier about the lessons I followed in making custom planets.

As an example, here is the lesson I did last night.  It is not production value because it started with a low-res iPhone photo my daughter sent me and as you can tell from the edges and especially the hair, I did not spend much effort getting the edge selection just right.  But my daughter liked being a cyborg:

She has dark brown hair and dark brown eyes, so she is not the ideal model for this because those are hard to colorize well.  Blondes may or may not have more fun, but they are much easier to colorize.  The downsize of the exercise is that she loved the hair and now wants to color it that way for real.

I discuss in a bit more detail at my climate blog why I feel like climate blogging has become boring and repetitious.  To prove it, I predict in advance the stories that skeptics will run about the upcoming IPCC report.

I had a reader write to ask how I could be bored when there were still hilarious stories out there of climate alarmists trying to row through the Arctic and finding to their surprise it is full of ice.  But even this story repeats itself.  There have been such stories almost every year in the past five.

Kevin Drum has a post discussing vote counts on Syrian war in the House, and observing that support is coming from Democrats and opposition from Republicans.  Hilariously, Drum comes to the conclusion that the Republicans are the big hypocrites here and are much worse than Democrats.  I think most of us who are not members of the red or blue team see this conclusion for what it is -- a horribly blinkered partisan view.  Republicans who a decade ago were implying it was close to treason not to blindly support our President in a time of war are clearly hypocrites, but no more so than Democrats who filled the streets with people chanting about the fierce moral urgency to avoid war, with the robust and high-profile anti-war movement virtually disappearing once their guy was leading the wars.

But for those (mainly Democrats of late) who have criticized partisanship and gridlock and lack of bipartisan solutions, we are seeing the one and only advantage of partisanship:  That there are people in Congress who will always have an incentive to oppose anything that comes along, if only for narrow partisan tactical reasons.  Nothing is so good of an idea that it does not deserve challenge and push-back before we implement it (likely forever, since we never repeal anything and wars and their consequences take forever to go away).

The US Congress is like those hoarders you see on reality TV shows.  They have built up a 200+ year accumulation of laws and wars and regulations and other crap, until the very walls strain to hold it all.  And still they are out every day trying to add more.   They need an intervention every time they try to add another item to the hoard -- "Are you sure you really need that?"  Providing that intervention, whether out of good intentions or bad, is the one and only aspect of American team politics I can get behind.

My kids and I were watching Zoolander the other day, and one joke I don't think they fully "got" was the ongoing gag where many of the characters had really tiny cell phones.  The movie, made in 2001, was mocking a trend at the time where people were paying premium prices to get the smallest phone possible.

It is amazing how things change.  If you made that movie today, it would likely be written mocking the opposite effect, with people trying to talk on smart phones the size of salad plates.  Here for example is a new 6.3 inch diagonal phone.  Only NBA players who can palm a basketball need apply.

(image source)

Not to say there is anything illogical about this.  We now read our phone much more than we listen to it.  I am not sure either of my kids has ever made a phone call on their cell phones except to my wife and me.

Some have asked me why I have not updated my climate blog in a while.  Frankly, the climate debate has become like the movie Groundhog Day, with the same handful of scientists releasing the same flawed studies making the same mistakes.  What used to be exciting is frankly boring.  I still blog here on updated climate news, and perhaps the IPCC will give us new things to write about soon, but for now most of my climate work will just be making appearances and presentations  (let me know if you have a large group, I don't charge any sort of fee).

For a while now I have been contemplating a new focus area, perhaps even a new blog.  I call this new focus "trend that is not a trend."  It refers to the tendency I find in the media to cite a trend without any supporting data, sometimes even when the actual trend in the data turns out to have the opposite sign.  Sometimes the reporter is motivated by conventional wisdom, sometimes by passion in advocating for a certain issue, and sometimes they are fooled by their own coverage, mistaking increases in coverage of a phenomenon for increases in the phenomenon itself (for example, this year everyone believes wildfires are up, when in fact this is a very low year).  We get a lot of this type of thing in climate, so it will give me a chance to continue to blog on climate but from a slightly different angle.

The best way to explain the phenomenon is with an example, and the Arizona Republic presented me with a great one today, in the form of an article by Joan Lowy of the Associated Press.  This in an article that reads more like an editorial than a news story.  It is about the Federal requirement for railroads to put safety electronics called Positive Train Control (PTC) on trains by a certain date.  The author has a pretty clear narrative that this is an absolutely critical piece of equipment for the public good, and that railroads are using scheming and lobbying to unfairly delay and dilute this critical mandate (seriously, I am not exaggerating the tone, you can read it for yourself.)

My point, however, is not to challenge the basic premise of the article, but to address this statement in her opening paragraph (emphasis added).

Despite a rash of deadly train crashes, the railroad industry’s allies in Congress are trying to push back the deadline for installing technology to prevent the most catastrophic types of collisions until at least 2020, half a century after accident investigators first called for such safety measures.

The reporter is claiming a "rash of deadly train crashes"  -- in other words, she is saying, or at least implying, that there is an upward trend in deadly train crashes.  So let's ask ourselves if this claimed trend actually exists.  She says it so baldly, right there in the first seven words, that surely it must be true, right?

Here is the only data she cites:

The National Transportation Safety Board has investigated 27 train crashes that took 63 lives, injured nearly 1,200 and caused millions of dollars in damage over the past decade that officials say could have been prevented had the safety system been in place.

Astute readers will note that this is not a trend, it is one data point.   Has the number increased or decreased over the decade?  For comparable decades, are 27 crashes and 63 deaths a lot or a little?  Is it a "rash", or a tapering off?  We have no idea.   As we get further into this series, readers will be surprised at how often the media uses single data points to "prove" a trend.

The only other evidence we get of a "rash" are three examples:

• The July high speed rail accident in Spain, which killed scores of people.  Of course, readers may note that she actually had to go to another country for her first example, an example involving high-speed passenger rail which has very little in common with private railroads in the US.
• A 2008 crash blamed on inattention of a Metrolink driver -- a government employee on a government train, which sort of undermines the basic thrust of the story that this is about evil private railroads using lobbying to endanger the public.  Few readers are likely to consider a 2008 crash to constitute a recent "rash."
• A 2005 crash at a private freight railroad that killed 9 people from a chlorine gas leak.  Fewer readers are likely to consider a 2005 crash to constitute a recent "rash".

So let's go to the data.  It is actually very easy to find, and I would be surprised if Ms. Lowy did not actually have this data in her hands.  It is at the Federal Railway Administration Office of Safety Analysis.  2013 data is only current through June and seems to be set up on an October -September fiscal year.  So I ran the data only for October-June of every year to make sure the results were comparable to 2013.  Each year in the data below is actually 9 months of data.

By the way, when one is looking at railroad fatalities, one needs to understand that railroads do kill a lot of people every year, but the vast, vast majority of these -- 99% or more -- are killed at grade crossings.  People still do not understand that a freight train takes miles to stop.  (see postscript below, but as an aside, I would be willing to make a bet: Since deaths at grade crossings outnumber deaths from collisions by about 100:1, I would be willing to bet any amount of money that I could take the capital the author wants railroads to invest in PTC and save far more lives by investing it in grade crossing protection.  People like Ms. Lowy who advocate for these regulations never, ever seem to consider prioritization and tradeoffs.)

Anyway, looking at the data, here is the data for people killed each year in US railroad accidents (as usual click to enlarge any of the charts):

So, rather than a "rash", we have just the opposite -- the lowest number of deaths in a decade.  One.  I will admit that technically she said rash of "fatal accidents" and this is data on fatalities, but I'm going to make a reasonable assumption that one death means one fatal accident -- which certainly cannot be higher than the number of fatal accidents in previous years and is likely lower.

Most of you will agree that this makes the author's opening statement a joke.  Believe it or not -- and this happens a surprising number of times -- this journalist is claiming a trend that not only does not exist, but is of the opposite sign.  But let's go further with a few other charts.  Maybe we just got lucky and there is a rash of accidents but just not fatal ones:

Not only is there not a "rash" but the number of accidents have actually been cut in half.   But let's give the author one last try at a benefit of the doubt.  She says the technology she is advocating reduces human error caused accidents.  The FRA actually tracks these separately.  I wonder what that trend is?

LOL, if anything it declines more.    The only thing I can possibly find in her favor is that number of train accident injuries spiked in 2013 after 10 years of declining, but since fatalities and accidents went down, the odds are this is a statistical anomaly and not part of any trend.

Postscript:  To my point above, 1 person died from train accidents in the last 9 months or so.  We don't know why or how they died, but let's just say it was preventable by PTC.  The author is therefore castigating railroads for not racing ahead with hundreds of millions to prevent one death, when the railroads know their chief focus for reducing preventable deaths should be on the 588 other people who died on the railroad in the same period, mainly from grade crossing and trespasser/pedestrian accidents.

I am a bit late on this, but like most libertarians I was horrified by this article in the Mail Online about Obama Administration efforts to nudge us all into "good" behavior.  This is the person, Maya Shankar, who wants to substitute her decision-making priorities for your own

If the notion -- that a 20-something person who has apparently never held a job in the productive economy is  telling you she knows better what is good for you -- is not absurd on its face, here are a few other reasons to distrust this plan.

• Proponents first, second, and third argument for doing this kind of thing is that it is all based on "science".  But a lot of the so-called science is total crap.  Medical literature is filled with false panics that are eventually retracted.  And most social science findings are frankly garbage.  If you have some behavior you want to nudge, and you give a university a nice grant, I can guarantee you that you can get a study supporting whatever behavior you want to foster or curtail.  Just look at the number of public universities in corn-growing states that manage to find justifications for ethanol subsidies.  Recycling is a great example, mentioned several times in the article.  Research supports the sensibility of recycling aluminum and steel, but says that recycling glass and plastic and paper are either worthless or cost more in resources than they save.  But nudgers never-the-less push for recycling of all this stuff.  Nudging quickly starts looking more like religion than science.
• The 300 million people in this country have 300 million different sets of priorities and personal circumstances.  It is the worst hubris to think that one can make one decision that is correct for everyone.  Name any supposedly short-sighted behavior -- say, not getting health insurance when one is young -- and I can name numerous circumstances where this is a perfectly valid choice and risk to take.
• The justification for this effort is social science research about how people manage decisions that involve short-term and long-term consequences

Some behavioral scientists believe they can improve people's self-control by understanding the relationship between short term memory, intelligence and delay discounting.

This has mostly been used to counter compulsive gambling and substance abuse, but Shankar's entry into government science circles may indicate that health insurance objectors and lapsed recyclers could soon fall into a similar category

I am sure there is a grain of truth in this -- all of us likely have examples of where we made a decision to avoid short term pain that we regretted.  But it is hilarious to think that government officials will somehow do better.  As I have written before, the discount rate on pain applied by most legislators is infinite.  They will do any crazy ridiculous thing that has horrible implications five or ten years from now if they can just get through today.  Why else do government bodies run massive sustained deficits and give away unsustainable pension and retirement packages except that they take no consideration of future consequences.  And it is these people Maya wants to put in charge of teaching me about delay discounting?

• It probably goes without saying, but nudging quickly becomes politicized.  Is nudging 20-something health men to buy health insurance really in their best interests, or does it help keep an important Obama program from failing?

Postscript:  Here is a great example of just how poorly the government manages delay discounting.  In these cases, municipalities are saddling taxpayers with almost certainly bankrupting future debt to avoid paying any short-term costs.

Texas school districts have made use of another controversial financing technique: capital appreciation bonds. Used to finance construction, these bonds defer interest payments, often for decades. The extension saves the borrower from spending on repayment right now, but it burdens a future generation with significantly higher costs. Some capital appreciation bonds wind up costing a municipality ten times what it originally borrowed. From 2007 through 2011 alone, research by the Texas legislature shows, the state’s municipalities and school districts issued 700 of these bonds, raising $2.3 billion—but with a price tag of $23 billion in future interest payments. To build new schools, one fast-growing school district, Leander, has accumulated $773 million in outstanding debt through capital appreciation bonds.

Capital appreciation bonds have also ignited controversy in California, where school districts facing stagnant tax revenues and higher costs have used them to borrow money without any immediate budget impact. One school district in San Diego County, Poway Unified, won voter approval to borrow $100 million by promising that the move wouldn’t raise local taxes. To live up to that promise, Poway used bonds that postponed interest payments for 20 years. But future Poway residents will be paying off the debt—nearly $1 billion, all told—until 2051. After revelations that a handful of other districts were also using capital appreciation bonds, the California legislature outlawed them earlier this year. Other states, including Texas, are considering similar bans.

Or here is another example, of New York (the state that is home to the mayor who tries to nudge his residents on everything from soft drinks to salt)  using trickery to consume 25 years of revenue in one year.

Other New York deals engineered without voter say-so include a $2.7 billion bond offering in 2003, backed by 25 years’ worth of revenues from the state’s gigantic settlement with tobacco companies. To circumvent borrowing limits, the state created an independent corporation to issue the bonds and then used the money from the bond sale to close a budget deficit—instantly consuming most of the tobacco settlement, which now had to be used to pay off the debt.

By the way, I recommend the whole linked article.  It is a pretty broad survey of how state and local governments are building up so much debt, both on and off the books, and how politicians bend every law just to be able to spend a few more dollars today.

The original purpose of this blog nine (eek!) years ago was to share lessons learned in my foray into entrepreneurship.   I still try to post some things on this topic, though we obviously have moved a bit away from this original concept.  But to this end, I wanted to link Walt Lipski's new small business M&A web site.  I think of Walt as a entrepreneur who happens now to do investment banking.   He was the one who helped me  ten years ago get into this business (the entire business acquisition and start-up process described here), and I still go to him from time to time for advice.  He is as straight forward and as trustworthy as anyone I have met in the M&A business.

I grew up in the 1970's, a time when a lot of Americans post-Vietnam were questioning the value, even the sanity, of war.  Opinions were certainly split on the subject, but one thing I remember is that the concept of "punitive bombing" was widely mocked and disdained.  Which is why I find it amazing to see bipartisan, multi-country support for exactly this tired old idea as applied to Syria.  Has bombing ever done anything but radicalize the bombed civilian population against the bombers?  The reaction to the London Blitz was not to have the English suddenly decide that they had been wrong in supporting Poland.  Nor did Germans or Japanese generally reprimand their leaders for the past policies as as result of our firebombing Tokyo or Dresden.  Or look at drone strikes in Afghanistan -- do you get the sense anyone there is saying, "Boy, have we ever been taught a lesson."

In the comments, readers are welcome to contribute examples of countries who "learned their lesson" from punitive air strikes and changed their behavior.

PS-  Apparently the reason we "must" have at least air strikes is that we have established a policy that we will "do something" if countries use chemical weapons.  And if we don't have air strikes, the world will think we are weak, right?  But the problem is that this logic never ends.  If the country then ignores our air strikes and behaves as before, or perhaps performs an FU of their own by using chemical weapons openly, then what?  Aren't we obligated to do something more drastic, else the world will think we are weak?

From the location of the Yarnell fire deaths:

"We are going to hallowed ground," says Jim Paxon, spokesman for the Arizona Forestry Division, moments before leading reporters and TV crews to the site where 19 members of the Granite Mountain Hotshots were killed in a June 30 wildfire.

"They are almost superhuman," Paxon drawls to reporters gathered on the morning of July 23. "As we go up there, there's a Granite Mountain Hotshots shirt on a cactus. We would ask that you touch the shirt . . . in reverence to the loss."

Darrell Willis, the Granite Mountain Hotshots direct supervisor in the Prescott Fire Department said that their deaths were God's will

"The voice of what actually happened, we'll never know," Willis says. "We're not going to have that information from [the dead men]."

Willis continues, "It was just one of those things that happened. You can call it an accident. I just say that God had a different plan for that crew at this time."

I don't know how much this tragedy gets covered nowadays outside of Arizona, but it still dominates the news here.  I have no problem sending all the sympathy in the world to the young families of these men.  But I am exhausted with the fetishizing as heroic of what looks to be a total screw up.  An experienced crew had absolutely no business being where they were, or in this day and age so badly out of communication.   They either blundered into, or were incompetently led into (the facts are still coming out) an absurdly dangerous position.   At best, they were there to protect a ranch house that had already been evacuated and was likely insured a lot better than the lives of many of the crew members.

From my observations operating for years in the US Forest Service and other wilderness areas, wildland firefighting needs a serious housecleaning.  I thought for sure this tragedy would be a stick driven into that particular anthill, almost guaranteeing scrutiny and accountability might follow.  Now I am not so sure.

A Wall Street Journal article today looks at problems at Sears in their critical appliance business.  I have no problem believing that Sears is in trouble, and at various times over the past decade (full disclosure here) have held small short positions in Sears.  The author argues that the Sears appliance business has had a number of missteps, and is contributing to Sears growing losses, propositions with which I cannot argue, in part because there is no data provided to confirm or deny the connection between problems in the appliance business and Sears' profitability woes.

The other theme of the article is that recent missteps in the appliance business, particularly the 2009 switch from Whirlpool to Samsung and LG to manufacture its in-house Kenmore brand, is hurting its market share in the retail appliance business, and leading the the growth in market share at Home Depot and Loews.   But the author's own data belie this conclusion.  Here is the market share chart she includes:

While Sears may have lost a couple of points of market share since 2008, and 2013 does not look like a particularly good year so far, the vast majority of its market share loss occurred from 2002-2008, long before most of the recent problems profiled in the article.  In fact, its more likely that the loss coincided with Sears reorganization with Kmart a decade ago, events referred to only briefly in the article.

Look, I have no insider knowledge here, just a pet peeve that trends referenced in an article should match trends in the data.  But Sears is a tired old retailer.  Many of its peers from the same era are dying or dead.  People are shifting their shopping away from the malls where Sears is located.  Lowes and Home Depot were both juggernauts during this period.  I would have said that a story could equally well have been written that despite all the confusion in their business, they have done a pretty descent job arresting the decline in their market share over the last five years.  Of course they are likely dead in the long run.

Postscript:  Oddly, I witnessed a similar Sears private label fracas when I worked for Emerson Electric over a decade ago.  For years and years, Emerson (not the folks who make the cheap radios and TVs) manufactured many of the Sears Craftsman hand tools and power tools.  Sears got tough one year, and negotiated a better deal of some sort with someone else, and an entire division of Emerson saw its sales basically going to zero.  So Emerson bought a bunch of orange paint and plastic, went to Home Depot, and cut a deal for a private label tool line at Home Depot (Emerson separately owns the Rigid tool company, so a lot of the items were branded Rigid).  Emerson ended up in potentially better shape (I did not stay long enough to see how it turned out), partnered with a growing rather than a declining franchise.

Today, President Obama sort-of kind-of acknowledged a problem with Federal college student lending:  Federal loans are doing nothing to improve the affordability of colleges, as colleges are just raising tuition in lockstep with increased lending, thus leaving students massively in debt for the same old degree.

His proposed solution is to somehow tie the availability of Federal funds to some type of government scoring system for colleges.  The probability that this will do anything to reign in student debt is exactly zero.  But it will potentially give the Feds another vehicle for control (similar to what Title IX has given them) of even the most mundane university policies.  Why not, for example, give high scores to universities with the restrictive and politically correct speech codes this Administration favors, thus effectively denying money to students of universities that don't have Eric Holder-sanctioned speech policies?

If you think I am exaggerating, look at the recent Washington Monthly college rankings as a prototype for the Obama scoring system.  In their system, colleges are ranked higher if they have a higher percentage of Peace Corps*** graduates, if more of their Federal work-study grant money is used for jobs at non-profits rather than for-profits**, and if their school reports more community service hours.  This latter points to another issue -- a number of schools rank really low on community service hours, effectively all tied with zero.  This is obviously a reporting issue.  The Obama plan just about guarantees that universities will start to game all these metrics -- does no one pay attention to the fraud that has been found in the law school rankings?

They also have a ranking of the schools providing the best value.  The good news, I suppose, is the school my son attends is #1.  The bad news is that my alma mater Princeton is not even on the list.  I found this odd, because while the authors explicitly laud Amherst's generous program that helps fund students through grants rather than loans, Princeton actually was one of a few schools that did this first (update:  Princeton was the first school to eliminate loans from financial aid packages of low income students, and since has eliminated loans altogether from all financial aid packages.  If you can get in, you can graduate debt-free).

It says this of Amherst:

 It chose to tap its sizable $1.6 billion endowment to provide tuition discounts so generous that the annual net cost to students with family incomes below $75,000 is only $843, less than a third of the sticker price of a year at the average community college. Another elite liberal arts college, Williams, also makes our list. But instructively, none of the other prestigious, well-endowed private colleges and universities in America—not Harvard or Yale, Swarthmore or Smith, none of them—can make that claim.

Actually, we don't know if that last sentence is true because the authors left Harvard and Yale off the list entirely.   My impression is that Princeton makes is very inexpensive for families making less than $75,000 as well, so I could not understand the claim -- perhaps even without debt the tuition charges to low-income families are still unreasonably high.  But we will never know, because apparently Princeton is not even on the list -- not because it does not direct a lot of its endowment to need-based scholarships, but because it has only 10% students on Pell grants, and the authors decided that you could not be on the list unless that number was at least 20% "to make sure they aren’t just catering to the affluent."  This just points to how quickly such a system gets politicized.  What does "catering to the affluent" have anything to do with bang for the buck?  If they really trust their methodology, they would have included these schools and if they are really just over-priced rich kids' playgrounds, that should have come through in the ranking.  Instead, the author's have explicitly invented an unrelated criteria to weed Ivy League schools out, a criteria more related to admissions requirements than to financial aid requirements and affordability and value (the ostensible bases for the rankings).

By the way, if you want to get a really good laugh, this is supposed to be a value or "bang for the buck" ranking, but they only rank the costs.  There is absolutely no ranking of "bang".  Bizarre.  It is as if any degree of any type from any institution is equally valuable.  Which, by the way, is part of the problem in the student loan bubble -- just this assumption.

** This is EXACTLY the kind of incentive that will help pay off those future college loans -- lets make sure to encourage every student to work in non-profits rather than for-profits jobs.

*** Why the Peace Corps?  Why not a myriad of other useful and productive occupations?  If you want to have a service metric, why is Peace Corps there and, say, Teach for America not?

Their ugly intimidation playbook.