Ten Most Harmful Books

Wow... I actually agree that most of these books are bad. I have to admit, though, that I'm only passingly familiar with some of them and can't render an educated opinion on them.

When I got to the honorable mention section, though, I was shocked. On Liberty and The Origin of Species? Actually, they voted "The Origin of the Species" as an honorable mention. Too bad they couldn't get the title right.

Some of these books are perhaps wrong or full of bad information but were probably stepping stones to the right or better answers. Others (Unsafe at Any Speed) are wrong but hardly worthy of being considered one of the 10 most harmful books of the 19th and 20th centuries. For that matter, Unsafe at Any Speed had some positive contributions even if the Corvair wasn't the demon-car that Ralph Nader made it out to be.

How to say, "I'm a lying, cheating bastard."

In spite of what they say, this collection of greeting cards for people who are cheating on their spouses (or significant others) is condoning their behavior.

Even if this little tidbit is true:

Secret Lover, Inc. conducted extensive research and the statistics conclude that 60% of married men and 40% of married women in the United States are involved in or have been involved in an extra marital affair. This data places the numbers in the millions.

Having an extra-marital affair is wrong. If you want to get out of your current relationship and have one with someone else, have the guts to do so. Cheating on your spouse is dishonest. It helps no one. If you are considering an affair with someone who is married and who is planning on cheating on their spouse, consider that they will probably do the same thing to you.

I wonder how other products would do using the same, lame "we don't condone it but it's there and so we'll provide cards for it" excuse:

"We don't condone or judge stalkers, but our line of greeting cards for stalkers allow them to express their feelings."

"We don't condone or judge pedophiles, but our line of greeting cards allow them to express the feelings they have for your children."

"We don't condone or judge rape, but our line of cards allow you to express your feelings for your victim."

"We don't condone or judge cannibalism, but our line of spices happen to go well with human meat."

Etc...

Economics of the Lottery

I haven't read the whole thing, but Economics in One Lesson looks like a good resource for anyone who wants to learn about economics.

It doesn't appear to have anything to help me explain my position on the lottery, though.

One of the basic concepts of economics is "Utility". Utility is an abstract measure of the benefit or satisfaction one gets from consuming a good. Utility is usually measured in relative terms. The following links lead to detailed explanations of utility:

Utility at Investopedia
Utility at Public Domain Content
Utility at the Economist's Economics A-Z

Okay, enough of that.

State run lotteries make money. Therefore, they must pay out less than they take in. So even if one person won every penny from a given lottery, he would still not get as much as was spent on tickets. In most lotteries, multiple winners split the pot. So even if you do win, you're not even gauranteed to win the whole pot.

From a simple expected return analysis, you can easily determine that the lottery is a bad investment.

In general, the odds of winning are so small that the expected value of a ticket (odds of winning x value of the pot) is generally less than the cost of a ticket. Even if the jackpot rolls over and builds up enough that the expected value of a ticket is larger than the cost, you'd have to play for thousands of years before your chance of winning was likely.

But the lottery is not an investment and shouldn't be analyzed like one. This means, though, that anyone who is playing the lottery as an investment is foolish.

The lottery is a game. People "play" the lottery. An investment, like stocks or bonds or commodities, generally has a current price and a range of expected future prices. People buy and sell them, hoping to make money. The lottery is a game that is played at certain intervals. You buy tickets and win or lose at the drawing.

To understand the decision to buy a lottery ticket, you must use utility. The marginal utility of, for example, the last dollar someone earns each month is pretty small. Most people waste a few dollars a week or month on junk food or other relatively worthless purchases. A lot of people lose change adding up to a dollar over the course of weeks or months. In addition, many people enjoy the thrill of gambling on the lottery. Admittedly, the thrill is almost always the thrill of losing, but people enjoy it nonetheless. So even if you lose, you may get some pleasure out of buying the ticket. So buying a lottery ticket to have a small chance of winning millions of dollars is not an irrational decision.

The above analysis only holds true if you are spending an insignificant portion of your income on lottery tickets. Spending enough money that you displace other important purchases is not rational unless you really, really enjoy playing. If you enjoy it that much, though, you probably need help.

For some reason, most economists use a simple expected return analysis and analyze the lottery like an ivnestment, then smugly declare that it's a tax on the bad at math. They seem to forget that purchase decisions should be analyzed on a utility basis, like every other purchase decision.

So don't invest your money in the lottery, but play it a few times a month.

I'm not the only person who realizes this.

The lottery is a form of gambling. Gambling is not a good way to make money. Don't gamble unless you enjoy the process.

The Darth Side

While I'm sure that the Star Wars purist will find all sorts of inconsistencies with the story (the movies have plenty of their own inconsistencies for that matter), Darth Vader's blog is well written and interesting.

It has references to old classic sci-fi, as well.

You Get What You Pay For

Two things I've learned in my years as a managee:

1. You get what you reward
2. You aren't always rewarding what you think you are rewarding

When setting up a project or a company, you need to have goals. These goals can be vague (such as "increase shareholder value" or "customer satisfaction") or specific ("ship all units within 30 days of order"). Regardless of the goals, you will need to set up some way to measure your progress. Generally everyone is measured by something. Perhaps they are measured on hours worked (or billable hours worked) or on how much the project cost or on whether they met all the design requirements. The measurement is then used to determine some sort of reward. The reward may be specific (like $1,000 for each unit that ships early) or vague (like recognition or increased chances of promotion).

The problem is that people will not work to meet the project or company goals, they will work to meet the measurement. A badly constructed system of measurement and reward will encourage whatever behavior maximizes the reward.

I worked at a manufacturing company where the management was graded on how much they shipped in a given month. They would drive us to ship equipment early. Quality and testing would sometimes be compromised. We would work to ship some equipment early one month only to find that we had nothing to ship the next month. Management would just drive us to ship something else that month. It got so bad that we had customers asking us to slow down and hold off on shipping so that we could do extra testing. In the end, the equipment would work, but equipment that was rushed would require more work after the official ship date (which was what the managers were measured on).

I've worked on projects that were one of many, similar projects. In these cases, there are generally economies of scale that can be taken advantage of if you can get multiple projects to use the same equipment. I've worked on teams who were under orders to share engineering with other projects and use common equipment as much as possible. Unfortunately, the project managers were not evaluated on how much common equipment they used, they were evaluated on their speed and cost. So all of the projects ignored the common equipment order and just used whatever was fastest and cheapest. The customer has completely lost out on the possibility of sharing knowledge of equipment, spare parts, and experience among projects because there were no incentives in place to actually reward using common equipment. Instead, the incentives were purely based on speed and cost. They got what they paid for.

When setting up an incentive program, you need to ask the following questions:

1. What is the goal?
2. How can I measure progress and/or achievement?
3. How much/how should I reward for meeting the goals?

Finally, the most important question to be asked at the end:

4. What OTHER behavior will meet the measurements without meeting the goals?

You must ask this last question to make sure that you are not establishing a measurement system that will ultimately lead to counter-productive behavior. People are smart. They will figure out how to work the system. Even good intentioned, honest, hardworking people will be inclined to work for the rewards and not necessarily for the stated goals if they conflict.

Drug War or Big Business?

This is what's wrong with the war on drugs. It's not about stopping drugs or even arresting dealers. It's about collecting money for small-town police stations. Some choice quotes:

No arrest is necessary for forfeitures of more than $5,000, as long as the money can be linked to drug activity, said Agent Bill Grant, a DEA spokesman in Washington.

I wonder what the standard is for establishing a "link"? This means your property can be confiscated even though you have not been convicted of a crime. So you are "innocent until proven guilty except if they think you're involved with drugs then you're only sort of innocent."

"Normally, we try to help local law enforcement wherever we can," Grant said. "Mostly, we try to help them find a drug link to any money they discover."

I'll be they do. And with a strong financial incentive, I'll bet they try very, very hard to establish a link. Any link they can. After all...

Local police are allowed to keep 80 percent of the proceeds, and 20 percent goes to the DEA.

While I don't have a lot of sympathy for drug dealers and drug runners, this isn't exactly how I want the police to operate:

The biggest of the 11 busts in Hogansville occurred in October, when Officer John Starnes saw a pickup with Texas license plates pull off Interstate 85 and into a gas station about 1:30 a.m. He stopped the truck, which had a broken taillight, and officers found $654,000 stuffed into a hidden compartment in the tailgate.

Starnes, an Army National Guardsman, made the bust on his last day on the job before heading to Iraq. No drugs were found, but police took the money and truck, gave the men $500 and dropped them off at the bus station.

So these guys weren't even arrested? No drugs were found? No crime was established in a court of law? Holy shit... forget about law enforcement, how about anyone carrying large amounts of cash is fair game to have their money taken unless they can prove in a court of law that they are innocent.

I'm sure glad all police officers and prosecutors and DEA agents are honest and competent and never make mistakes or are tempted by all the money. Because these laws could be abused in that incredibly unlikely situation.

MSN Irony Alert!

Wow... the MSN Thought Thieves campaign is fraught with irony. Instead of thought thievery, MSN practices a form of thought bullying. It is their contest and they have every right to assign the rights how they want, but to enter their contest on thought thievery, you sign all rights over to MSN.

The campaign seems to be targeted at copyright violation, but the poster focuses on plagiarism. Intellect property theft usually doesn't consist of someone passing off work as their own but of someone making or distributing copies of a work without permission. Generally such "pirating" does not involve claims of authorship.

But then the image of someone stealing your work is a lot more compelling than the image of a corporation not getting paid for a copy that might or might not have been made if it weren't pirated.

Don't get me wrong, I'm firmly in favor of copyright protection for a reasonable time. I am not, however, at all supportive of extremely long duration copyright protection. I'm also not in favor of criminalizing copyright violations or spending a lot of public resources on stopping copyright violation. I'm much more concerned about terrorism, rape, murder, burglary, etc...

John Bolton, UN Ambassador

I can't figure out whether Gary Trudeau is for or against John Bolton as UN Ambassador. Today's strip seems like an endorsement.

No, not that John Bolton.

I don't know why I read Doonesbury.

New Jack Radio

This is my kind of radio. I remember when 106.9 "The Point" started up in Houston. Initially, they had no DJs. None. There was no morning show. It was great.

The "Jack" format sounds great. I want to listen to music in the car, not some moron making stupid sex jokes. Apparently, I'm not alone. I'm sure there will always be morning shows for people who want them. But I'd love for at least one station in Houston to go to a music-only format.

U.S. stations that want to convert to Jack must buy the license for the format from Bohn & Associates in Vancouver. Along with it, they get some rules: Jack stations launch without DJs, with low commercial loads and with few, if any, promotions. After a few months, after the station's playlist has been cycled through several times, the stations typically add back some of those elements.

The last sentence concerns me, though. I'll bet the temptation to revert to morning shows, promotions, etc... will get too strong. If they actually do provide short term benefits, that will override any possible long-term benefit of not having them.

This quote is funny, though:

"It's wonderful to play different songs and stop having this mentality of nothing but the same five songs over and over again. But what makes the station unique?" Halper said. "Take away the elements that make it personal, take away all the liveliness, you get a jukebox."

Some of us want a juke box in our car. That's why people are subscribing to XM Radio or Sirius or listening to iPods. iPods don't have DJs as far as I know (though you can get podcasts, if you want to).

Bicycles v. Cars

The average American adult male weighs about 170 lbs. Bicycles weight anywhere from 15-30 lbs. So a bicycle and rider will weight around 200 lbs. So a person and a person on a bicycle weigh within about 20% of each other.

A professional bicycle racer can get up to 40 mph. A typical bicyclist will have a top speed of 25-30 mph. An olympic sprinter at full speed will achieve a smiliar top speed over a much shorter distance. Typical pedestrians and joggers will move at 1-3 mph.

A typical car will weight over 3,000 lbs. It will be able to accelerate to 60 mph in a matter of 8-12 seconds. It will achieve 30 mph in only a couple of seconds. It can stop very quickly. In addition, the driver is completely enclosed in steel, glass, and plastic with airbags, seatbelts, crush zones, etc...

A bicycle is typically protected by an outer covering of meat.

So... why do we lump bicycles in with cars and require them by law to occupy the same space as cars?

With the exception of residential, neighborhood streets, bicycles have no business mixing with cars. Most automotive traffic on major streets moves at 30-50 mph with rapid changes in speed. The vast majority of traffic is other cars, so drivers are not going to notice bicycles as readily as they do cars. A bicycle riding along on a major street is either crowded over into part of the right lane with cars passing dangerously close or is blocking the right lane and forcing cars to move slowly behind him until they can pass. This creates a hazard as the cars must drive slower than the rest of traffic and must make a lane change into a potentially faster moving lane.

In addition to the disparity in speed, the consequences of a bicycle accident fall heavily on the bicyclist. A fender-bender between two cars will generally result in no injury to the occupants of either car. Even a serious collision between two cars can result in light injuries. On the other hand, a bicycle involved in a collission with a car will not fare so well. The cyclist is unprotected and will be bounced around.

As a commuter with a 17 mile commute and two kids to drop off at school on the way, I can't take a bicycle to work. So I drive my car, which is relatively small and fuel efficient. And I am enraged when some asshole on a bicycle blocks a lane on a major street during rush hour. It's rare, but every once in a while, some idiot decides to exercise or commute down a major road, creating a moving road block and delays for a number of other people. The bicyclist is either oblivious or self-centered. Most major streets are paralleled by residential streets that the bicyclist could take with much lower risk and causing much less of an obstruction.

In Houston, we do have bicycle lanes on some streets. In fact, some roads actually lost a traffic lane when the bicycle lanes were put in. And they don't go everywhere. If they did, we'd lose even more traffic lanes and automotive traffic would be even worse.

I realize that pro-bicycle fanatics will not care about any of this and will just say that we should all stop driving our cars and use bicycles. While that's a nice sentiment, it's not practical and it won't be happening anytime soon. In the meantime, allowing bicycles to block traffic and create hazards isn't the appropriate response.

Get bikes out of traffic and onto the sidewalks with the other pedestrians.

Commencement Speakers

When I graduated from Rice, I think that Jimmy Carter gave the Commencement speech. I slept through most of it. It was hot and boring. When I graduated from UT graduate school, I have no idea if they even had a Commencement speaker as I wasn't even in Austin for graduation.

I would have been happy for a professor to give the speech if it were short and entertaining. I would have been even happier if there hadn't been a speaker. A short speech by a student or students and then the handing out of the diplomas would have been great.

I do have my Commencement on video tape and I plan on watching the speech at some point... eventually.

My Musical Affliction

I've always been musically anti-talented. I can't carry a tune in a bucket and I can't play any instrument (except piano, but that's a lot like typing). I like to listen to music, but my ear is unrefined and unsophisticated.

Right now, I'm listening to Jackyl, Extreme, and Warrant. I like the whole Pornograffitti album by Extreme and most of Jackyl's self-titled album, but I like the song "Cherry Pie" from Warrant's album Cherry Pie.

I have the full range of low to high brow tastes, though. I also like to blast Carmina Burana, bagpipe music, Queen, Beastie Boys, Steve Miller, Meat Puppets, Eric Clapton and Cream, Abba, New Order, Orb, Aerosmith, etc... My tastes are extremely eclectic.

Gary Trudeau's Alternate Reality

Doonesbury is currently running a series on Ray Hightower ("Sandman") and his blog. He is currently stationed in Iraq. I'm not sure what Trudeau is trying to do, but Ray's blog reads like none of the blogs I've read that are actually being written by soldiers in Iraq. And it's not a simple matter of negative vs. positive, though most of the milblogs I've read are relatively positive. Hightower's blog describes an Iraq that doesn't seem to exist and he sounds like a soldier that, if he does exist, is in a distinct minority.

(I put some links to milblogs I read and some random links to milblogs I haven't read. Also, some of the ones I read are by soldiers who have since rotated out of Iraq.)

Creationists Abound

I'm continually amazed at the popularity of the Creationist movement. I'm not going to debate the fine points of evolutionary theory. That's what science is for. Theories are developed and tested and either refined or discarded. In paleontology, the theories can't be tested using experimentation like you can in physics, but they can be tested against the fossil record, DNA evidence, etc... Creationism, on the other hand, isn't a scientific theory. Hundreds of millions of years of fossils are worthy of study. Even if God created everything, studying what he created and how is interesting and enlightening.

The Scrappleface article and the comments just drive home how willfully ignorant we still are, even today, with sophisticated access to information at our fingertips.

Do you need a little Help Man?

Helfman Dodge has billboards with the above slogan. The slogan is catchy and inevitable. I took my car to Helfman for some service and I started thinking it on my own (before I saw the billboards).

Clocks and Watches

I can read the time on an analog wall clock with ease. I like the way the hands give you a feel for the time. However, I have never been very good at reading the time on an analog watch. I'll stare blankly as I try to figure out what the hands are pointing at. If the watch doesn't have all the numbers marked, then I'm hopeless.

So I have a digital watch and analog wall clocks. Of course we also have little digital clocks on every appliance in the house.

Needle Exchange Programs vs. The War on Drugs

I just wrote a long, insightful post on the War on Drugs and Needle Exchange Programs only to lose it when Blogger timed me out. I finished my post and hit "Publish Post" and got dumped to a login screen. Dammit.

I'm not going to write the whole thing again right now, but I will post some links:

• Article on Needle Exchange Programs (full PDF article)
  
• Drug Reform Coordination Network
  
• DRCNet Online Library of Drug Policy (including the Schaffer Library of Drug Policy)
  
• Government Accountability Office (formerly the General Accounting Office)
  
• GAO Reports on the War on Drugs
  
• DEA Web Site or here
  
• DEA Mission Statement (which notably does not include "reduce drug use or the costs of drug use")
  

My basic point is that lawmakers are backwards when they support the War on Drugs and oppose Needle Exchange Programs. Given the general lack of effectiveness and high costs (both monetary, human, and social) of the War on Drugs, we should be supporting programs like the Needle Exchange Programs and opposing the War on Drugs.

The above links contain a wealth of information. None of it supports the contention that the War on Drugs has successfully reduced drug use or the drug trade.