this is almighty...

Can't take it anymore, gotta blog

2009-08-07T21:27:00.000-07:00

A fascinating piece of garbage from Leonhardt. But what else would you expect form a mathematician?

2007-02-24T14:38:00.000-08:00

Wow, I've been wonderfully lazy with posting. A rare bout of apathy it seems. This must be because Iraq has been dominating the political scene. Not that I don't care, but when speaking foreign policy, few people actually rely on hard numbers. Most decisions are arrived at by carefully considering selective and incomplete versions of past history. Real statistical evidence is hard to come by, mostly because each event is so infinitely differentiable in character, it is difficult to compare individual aspects ceteris paribus. End result: I say one or two things about the marginal utility of troops and then I get bored.

Great quote from Mike Huckabee showing how supremely unqualified he is:

"We need to understand that this is, in fact, World War III. Unlike any other world war we've ever fought, this one is one we cannot afford to lose."

Yes, we would have been just fine with a Nazi Europe. I saw him on Meet the Press the other week. He was such an equivocator (more so than most other politicians) that it was painful.

2006-12-11T11:36:00.000-08:00

http://www.theherald.co.uk/politics/76338.html

It looks like the Brits are having a debate over whether they should replace their Trident nuclear missile system or not. I say, for their own sake, just decomission the bastard and don't replace it. If any of them are actually concerned about security, they know they've got more than a few at their disposal across the Atlantic. Furthermore, this sends a positive message to any would-be nuclear states, and eliminates a not-so-small point of hypocrisy in the British non-proliferation stance.

The real question here is whether this move could offer a credible incentive to another country to stay straight on nuclear weapons, a la the Missouri Compromise. I don't know that this measurably helps any other states, but hey, diplomacy doesn't always have to make sense.

2006-12-08T15:40:00.000-08:00

From the New York Times:

“They start from completely different places,” said Dennis Ross, the Middle East negotiator who worked for Mr. Baker years ago and left the State Department early in the Bush administration. “Baker approaches everything with a negotiator’s mindset. That doesn’t mean every negotiation leads to a deal, but you engage your adversaries and use your leverage to change their behavior. This administration has never had a negotiator’s mind-set. It divides the world into friends and foes, and the foes are incorrigible and not redeemable. There has been more of an instinct toward regime change than to changing regime behavior.”

This quote and the Iraq Study Group Report taken as a whole highlight some very important facts regarding the administration's current foreign policy.

Refusing to negotiate with a nation simply because we are at odds with them or in order to leverage a concession out of them does not work. It only serves to isolate the country further, reducing the chance they they will eventually come around. This kind of black and white thinking does not lead to efficient policy outcomes. The dynamic produced by this faulty policy resembles that of a disfunctional relationship or a slip fault; tension builds and builds until it is let out in violent bursts. In almost all forms of policy, continuity is a good thing.

The Unites States can and must make concessions to other nations. There has been a subtle arrogance present in American foreign policy, and in fact, in the American psyche, that has brough out into the open during this administration. Politicians frequently, and with out the the appearance of thought, refer to our country as the greatest in the history of the world. The idea that there is a task that the Americans cannot finish or a foe we cannot defeat is considered blasphemous in most cirlces.

This country does have considerable military and economic power. However, our will to make sacrifice for the global good is rather limited. A report by Joseph Stiglitz, cited in the ISGR, predicted that the total cost of the Iraq war could top $2 trillion. If you work it out, this means each American will spend about 3% of their income on the Iraq war over an expected 5 years. However, given that the supposed benefits of this war would extend over a period more like 15-20 years, this number could equally be 1%. People spend 1% of their income on things like cable! Meanwhile, the human cost has been limited to a tiny fraction of the populace and their families.

At the same time, we are unwilling to make even miniscule concessions to certain nations we consider our enemies. It is thought that this would be a sign of weakness. Furthermore, if we are negotiating with our enemies, there is the danger that they could use "improper" techniques to leverage us, such as the acquision of nuclear technology. However, these things are on the table whether we are at the table or not. Closing our eyes does not make them go away.

Our foreign policy is hopelessly obsessed with very long term equilibrium variables such as strength and resolve. We are afraid to pull out Iraq for fear of it making us look weak or easily swayed; however, the damage has already been done. We already do look weaker. Being stubborn only proves that we are easily bogged down. Perhaps our purported strength was more valuable as a deterrent than as an actual physical tool.

Seeing Baker and Hamilton testify before the Senate was a blast of fresh air. We must see a return of the realists or else we are through.

2006-11-29T14:04:00.000-08:00

Today, the Supreme Court heard arguments on Massachusettes v. EPA, a global warming case. A group of states including Massachusettes and New York are suing the EPA for failing to regulate carbon dioxide as a pollutant, owing to the fact that CO2, through a series of physical proceses, causes atmospheric and oceanic warming, higher ocean water levels, and land loss to the states. They say the EPA's interpretation of the standard giving it authority to regulate is impermissibly inconsistent because other compounds such as methane and certain sulfur compounds are classified as air pollutants, while CO2 is not.

The basic argument of the EPA is that the harm is not caused in the air, but elsewhere. Or perhaps, more to the point, that global warming itself is not literally an "air pollution agent." Scalia retorted that sulfer compounds responsible for acid rain would then fail the same test. However, it seems that there was separate legislation under the Clean Air Act that addressed sulfur. My thought on this is that it at least sheds light on the thinking of congress at the time, that something in the air that indirectly causes harm can still be regulated.

Here's the transcript, it's worth a read:
http://www.supremecourtus.gov/oral_arguments/argument_transcripts/05-1120.pdf

MR. MILKEY (to Scalia): Respectfully, Your Honor, it is not the stratosphere. It's the troposphere.

This is certainly not an example of an obvious case. I'm not going to try and impinge the integrity of any of the justices or say that they have any particular slant in this case, as they all acted in a very principled manner. In fact, whenever I read SC breifs, I always come out very impressed with Scalia's performance (and humor), in spite of what many of my compatriots might say about him.

This issue may ultimately be moot as we have a Democratic congress coming in soon that seems intent on enacting climate change legislation. In fact, this case is really only refereeing the greater political battle going on over climate change. It deals largely with questions of standing, authority, and administrative minutae.

More later on whether I support cap-n-trade or carbon tax.

2006-11-16T12:08:00.000-08:00

A note about US troop deployment. Currently, there are 145,000 US troops deployed in Iraq. Troops levels in Afghanistan seem to be at around 40,000. That is 32,000 NATO troops, of which 12,000 are US, and 8,000 US troops under US command. Iraq and Afghanistan also happen to have similar population sizes at around 29 million.

At first glance, it seems that to achieve an efficient allocation of troops, the marginal utility of moving a troop between the two nations should be zero, that is, the marginal utilities of adding a troop to either one should be equal. This analysis would seem to imply a redeployment in Iraq, to a more defensive position, coupled with the transfer of, say, 20,000 troops from Iraq to Afghanistan.

However, one must account for risk-aversion in national priorities. If we try to divide our forces between two nations, there is a not small probability that we will fail in both. If we focus only on one, then the probability of double failure drops dramatically. I'd imagine many people would prefer one sure thing to a double failure, especially as the situation in Iraq looks increasingly hopeless, while the situation in Afghanistan, though slipping, is within our capability to repair. This logic could justify an even larger troop tranfer.

Barring a large increase NATO troops levels, this could be the last best choice.

2006-11-06T13:20:00.000-08:00

My prediction, and this might be clouded by my preferred outcome:

House: Dems take control. This is kind of a no brainer. I'm not sure by how much, it doesn't really matter.

Senate: We go 50-50. Dems pick up Ohio, Pennsylvania, Montana, Missouri, and Virginia. Republicans hold Rhode Island and Tennessee. The result, King Chaffee.

As the only Republican to vote agains the Iraq war, Chaffee seems like a good independent man. See The Washington Note for lots of info on him. I predict he may even go true Independent once elected. Though, had he done it before the election, he would have been a shoe in. I guess he made the wrong call early on.

I saw Barak Obama speak at a Deval Patrick rally here in Boston the other day. I must say, he's a very charismatic man. He knows how to work, nay milk, a crowd. This rally was mostly young people, and knowing that, he touched upon issues important to us. He worked in his book, The Audacity of Hope, talking about how difficult it is to go into civics, given how easy it is to concentrate only on your own happiness. Much like entrepreneurship, the risk and job insecurity drives most people away. He also discussed energy dependence and the importance of alternative and renewable energy sources. I'm guessing he has picked up on Tom Freidman's hankering for a presidential call-to-arms on renewable energy and deemed it a good idea.

As for an '08 run, I say he could do it. Presidential politics in this country is a strange but simplistic game. He's got the charisma. If he can fend of accusations of being inexperienced, then he should be golden. I think people want a black president and are ready to vote accordingly. Some say his brief congressional record could be a boon. I would say it is at best neutral.

Also, I saw mentioned a theory on a Democratic takeover of Congress. It goes that, if given control, they probably wont make Iraq too much better. They will certainly get the troops out of harms way, but as for what will happen to the Iraqi state and people, it's anyone's guess. The big downside though, is that they will end up having to share responsibility for what happens in Iraq until the '08 election. I doubt this is a good reason for Republicans to actively try to lose Congress, but it is certainly a reason not to be dissapointed if it happens.

Full Steam Ahead. I love that new slogan. It's so idiotically brilliant, I can't take it.

2006-10-16T18:11:00.000-07:00

Election 2006 is really heating up these days. In the Senate, things have shifted from a slight lead for the Republicans to a slight lead for the Democrats. The house has gone from a dead heat to a slight lead for the Democrats. This is, no doubt, the result of fallout from the Foley scandal. Not only that, I suspect that there have been some non-linear effects here as well. In addition to the Abramoff/Cunningham, Bob Ney, and Tom Delay scandals, these have gone from individual events to the revelation of a pattern of corruption in the Republican party, and thus the whole is worse than the sum of its parts.

For election news, electoral-vote.com has fancy maps to look at, along with the most recent projections. Projecting the election outcome from polls is an interesting problem. The guy from the aforementioned site, Andrew Tenenbaum, a notable Linux developer, has chosen a normal average of the last week's polls as the best predictor for the outcome. This seems like a simple approximation to using exponential weighting, which I can only assume would be better. One could certainly do a historical study to find the best decay rate to use for political contests. This of course depends on the non-stationarity of the populace, which may vary by type of election. There could be an incumbancy effect there as well, as in people are more likely to vote for one or the other candidate on election day compared to what they say to pollsters. Also, I believe these polls restrict the tally to those that they deem "likely voters," and are continually updating these selection rules, meaning they should be correct on average.

Also, tradesports.com has a bet going for GOP control of the house and senate. Currently, the predicted probability of GOP senate control is 60.1% (down 9.4% just today). That number is 32.2% for the house. These markets seem to be fairly accurate. I looked at a study of another political betting exchange, somewhere in Iowa, and their numbers were correct on average with low variance. They are most wrong when everyone is surprised by the outcome, indicating they are a public information aggregation mechanism. This is as opposed to the global capital markets where there is enough money at stake (the Iowa exchange had $500 max per person) that people have the incentive to pursue private information. I doubt anyone is commissioning their own polls to make money on tradesports. I did a quick sanity check, where I calculated the probability of GOP control implied by the probabilities given on the individual senate races, and the market passed very well (within 0.5%, I think).

A good question on this topic is whether the opinion of the populace has any sort of momentum. For positive momentum this would mean that changes in poll numbers over time are non-Martingale, so when polls go up one period they tend more often to go up the next period, and the same for the negative side. For negative momentum, the opposite would be true, so polls would be self-corrective. Foley (Peter, not Mark) and I bumped into this in one of out projects, but the results were inconclusive for our data set.

In the context of a market, prices would tend to "overreact" to individual events, taking them as a signal of further movement. In the stock market, I tend to think of people who talk about momentum as idiots, which is probably still true. However, it is possible that the underlying generator of stock market activity (the world) has some kind of non-zero momentum, which may even explain why people often say that the market overreacts to news. In the case of the stock market, we do not have such a clear view of the underling process being reflected in prices as we do in the case of political betting.

Back in the real world, NYT says that the Republicans are focusing mainly on Missouri, Tennesse, and Virginia. They apparently suspect that New Jersey, though tied in the polls, will go Democratic regardless, as they have for the past 30 years. Supposing these are the only races truly up in the air, whoever wins two of three wins control. Should be an exciting month. The recent shakeup in the Reynolds-Davis race motivated me enough to sign up as a Davis volunteer. I'm not in the district, but I'm only a few miles from the border.

Also, I've been thinking about redistricting lately, in terms of geometric constraints that you can place on districts that would reduce bias and also increase the quality of representation, most likely through increased competetiveness. My intial thought was that you could make them be convex, or at least convex at some level of granularity, since the smallest voting subunit, the precinct, is often non-convex. There would be exception for state borders as well. This would of course imply that they are closed, which I find to be a very reasonable constraint. Others have suggested going further and actually making this an optimization problem. They say you should minimize "compactness," not the mathematical kind, but some arbitrary measure of said colloquial idea. One measure I've seen of this is the average distance between two people in the district. This would also be the average value of the two-point correlation function.

This of course requires that I figure out how to use GIS software and make sense of the TIGER files provided by the US Census Bureau. I have to say, I'm a little dismayed at the state of GIS software. It's obviously very complex, but I always come away thinking that there has to be a better way to do it. Maybe if people could just agree on one format. Anyway, some guy has already done some of this for a few states, including California. He find the set of districts with nearly equal population that minmize the afrementioned compactness measure. I forget the website, maybe next post. I would like to do this myselt. I would really like to see what the two point correlation function looks like, and if it differs between Democrats and Republicans.

2006-09-05T11:06:00.000-07:00

' This is a New York Times story, so it’s very long, as many Times stories are, and it’s written in a style in which each successive paragraph is contradicted by the next paragraph. This is called “balanced reporting.” '

-- Dr. David Goodstein

Have been a little slow posting recently. More to come in a bit.

2006-06-01T14:29:00.000-07:00

The US needs to back down from their hypocritical stance on nuclear weapons. Not only is the current situation sub-optimal from a security standpoint, it is undermining their ability to negotiate with countries like Iran and North Korea. Insisting that Iran dismantle its nuclear weapons program while having tens of thousands of nukes in our country, armed and ready, is absurd. I think the best carrot we can offer to Iran and other countries regarding nuclear weapons is that if they agree to curb production, then so will we, not only curbing production, but actually dismantling warheads.

Just today, a Swedish-sponsored United Nations report, introduced by none other than former Iraq weapons inspector Hans Blix, said that the US was seriously undermining the cause of nuclear non-proliferation. It has withdrawn from the 1972 ABM treaty and has not ratified the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty. It has also proven unwilling to reduce the number of warheads it operates. Here's a luminary quote from Blix that I very much agree with:

Weapons of mass destruction cannot be uninvented. But they can be outlawed, as biological and chemical weapons already have been, and their use made unthinkable.

Bravo. This issue doesn't seem to be getting much attention these days. But with the Iran issue up and coming, it may very well.

2006-05-22T12:17:00.000-07:00

Snippet from AP article on whether Bush will see Al Gore's documentary An Inconvenient Truth:

"Doubt it," Bush said coolly Monday.
...
"New technologies will change how we live and how we drive our cars which all will have the beneficial effect of improving the environment," Bush said. "And in my judgment we need to set aside whether or not greenhouse gases have been caused by mankind or because of natural effects and focus on the technologies that will enable us to live better lives and at the same time protect the enviroment."

OK, sure, new technologies will improve the fuel efficiency, but no one will develop these technologies if they have no incentive to, and even if they are developed, consumers will not buy them because they have no reason to. Futhermore, the development of these technologies doesn't mean that consumers can't also reduce their emmissions by driving less and buying smaller and more efficient cars. Again though, they probably wont do it unless they have some incentive to.

The last part of the statement just blows my mind. I don't think there is any question in the scientific community that the massive release of greenhouse gasses by humans over the last 50 years has caused a large increase in the concentration of greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere during the same period. I mean, the statement is almost tautological, but certain people still deny it, even in the face of mountains of supporting data and research.

In other news, here's an objective test of how well our nations colleges are preparing our current generation to ineherit the country. The list of top ten favorite books on facebook.com:

1. The Da Vinci Code
2. Harry Potter
3. The Bible
4. Catcher in the Rye
5. Angels and Demons
6. To Kill a Mockingbird
7. The Great Gatsby
8. 1984
9. Lord of the Rings
10. Pride and Prejudice

Wow, we really are doomed. At least The Great Gatsby made it on the list.

2006-05-09T04:59:00.000-07:00

The election cylce is really heating up again. NYT's going crazy with articles, and I'm enjoying it. Hopefully, I'll be able to get a piece of the action once I graduate. Looks like this is a big opportunity for Democrats, unless we blow it.

There's been a lot of talk about past strategy, how the past 6 years have been too consultant driven, how liberals are convinced that most American's actually don't agree with their worldview, how a liberal's natural tendency to question even his core beliefs has only hindered him. And there is a lot of truth in those statements, but I believe that circumstance may be of help here. The first point may always be the case, we just need the consultants to be right for once and we need a candidate who can take a lot of advice but not go stiff. On point two, I'd say that you can't go into a campaign thinking people don't agree with you. You really have to believe you are right and that it's your job to convince people that they agree with you. Otherwise you're out off the bat. Point three shouldn't be much of a problem coming of perhaps the most stubborn presidency in recent memory.

I think I may have to take of page from Chris Matthews (or every page) and say that the only real campaign strategy that works in America is a Freedom (capital F) strategy. Not only to people love Freedom, they also love the word Freedom. If there's one thing that America stands for, for better or for worse, it's Freedom. So Republicans seem to have a stranglehold on the word these days. There is a way around this. The core difference between the 'liberal' and the 'conservative' interpretations of freedom (and the reason my Milton Freedman's books are so hard to read) is that when conservatives say freedom, they mean freedom of choice, while when liberals say it, they mean 'effective freedom' of choice and freedom to HAVE choices. My canonical example is if you're alone in the middle of the desert, you have the freedom to choose between laying down and dying slowly or walking around a bit to speed the process up.

Economically, this gets back to one's interpretation of the free market and the government's role therein. Republican's are often dead set on ignoring the very idea of externalities and their resulting inefficiencies. The same goes to a lesser extent for failed markets. Socially, things are much simpler, and Democrat's clearly hold the high-ground. Of course there's the question about what to do about guns, gays, and abortion. That's a much tougher question and will take some serious strategic though (later).

I think the best way to summarize my ideal strategy is through a TV spot storyboard. The trick is to stop focusing on getting every little constituent-targeted buzzword in there. If you do that, you end up with a series of unrelated phrases and no central theme. Think Reagan's Morning in America. Forgive me for being a little nerdy:

Central theme: You call this Freedom?

Opening: shot of someone in gridlocked traffic in a smog-filled urban wasteland (you guessed it: Frank Stallone, I mean, LA), jump to shot of 3.00+ gas price sign. Work in some natural disaster footage after that (Katrina, too soon?) to work in the whole global warming catastrophe theme.

Other possible scenes: someone getting an enormous healthcare/college bill, someone getting fired from a blue-collar job, war footage, social security.

Transition: repeat central theme, there's a better way, some really nice catch phrase.

Later part: DOPAMINE - some guy farming, baseball in a cornfield, generals/diplomats/executives shaking hands, happy factory worker showing up for work saying hi to coworkers.

Ending: back to farmer and son watching sunrise from porch, XY is fighting the good fight, repeat dopamine enhancing catch phrase.

God, I should just make that myself. I'd love to go way overboard with that idea.

2006-03-13T17:29:00.000-08:00

At the end of last school year, I got pretty hardcore into the Zacarias Moussaoui (so called '20th hijacker') case researching a paper I was writing for my Supreme Court history class. It's kind of an absurd case and there's rarely a dull moment. For most of it, Moussaoui represented himself. He's a native French speaker, but can speak English pretty well and seems to be pretty intelligent. He really enjoys making a mockery of the courts in his spare time. Early on he entered a request for a fully loaded 747 to Afghanistan (good idea maybe?). He often referred to John Ashcroft as 'World Terrorist Champion' and even referenced the movie Deliverance in one of his briefs (which he always prefaces with 'IN THE NAME OF ALLAH').

Anyway, he's in a bit of a tough position because the main witness he's relying on is Kalheid Shiek Mohammed (completely mispelled) or just KSM, who may be the most high profile terrorist that the government currently has in its custody. As a result, the government is very averse to there being any direct communication between the two; I guess they're afraid KSM will tell Moussaoui something and Moussaoui will secretly encode the message in his legal briefs (which are published online here: http://notablecases.vaed.uscourts.gov/1:01-cr-00455/DocketSheet1.html). This was a huge stumbling block for a lot of the case, and eventually they decided that the government had to provide summaries of transcripts of testimony from KSM. This is a pretty shitty deal for Moussaoui since the government can censor whatever information it finds inconvenient or just not ask KSM any questions pertinent to Moussaoui's defense. Seems like a more interactive process would have been much better, but it's too late now.

I have assumed until now that the government would be using its control over the witness and his testimony to manipulate the case. And just today it came out that the government was improperly coaching witnesses before the trial, which is a violation of a previously set down rule about witnesses. Basically, none of the witnesses are to be given transcripts of the trial before they testify so when they're on the stand they're giving their honest, untainted answers. But the government has been sending FAA and TSA witnesses e-mails that make reference to and directly quote the transcripts from the trial. The particular issue concerned whether the government would have been able to stop the September 11th attacks had Moussaoui told them about the plans to hijack planes and fly them into buildings. The FAA witness seemed to beleive that they wouldn't neccessarily have. I tend to agree with this since the general belief before 9/11 was that if your plane gets hijacked, you just stay calm and eventually they'll land the plane and you'll be alright. A warning from some obscure French guy wouldn't have fixed this, it really had to be shocked into people. Furthermore, the government may have lacked the appropriate resolve to enforce a no box-cutter rule vigorously. The government, in a clear violation of court rules, was trying to convince the witness otherwise before her testimony.

Possible remedies to this include dismissal of the case, exclusion of the witness, special jury instructions, or striking the possibility of using the death penalty as a punishment. The defense supports striking the death penalty, while the government amazingly supports no remedy. We'll see how things play out later this week.

2006-02-20T19:37:00.000-08:00

Well these Danish cartoon protests are really getting out of hand in all respects. Thankfully the Danish government is sticking by it's guns and reaffirming it's committment to freedom of speech. Governments really have no reason to be regulating what people can and cannot say in this realm. The US Surpreme Court states that speech can only be reigned in if it constitutes a "clear and present danger" to national security or if it advocates directly and specificly for violent action. The purpose is to prevent speech that lacks any value and has considerable negative consequences. I tend to agree with this standard. It maximizes the best case scenarios of free speech while minimizing it's worst case scenarios.

Many people seem to be arguing that religion is somehow above criticism and that criticism of religion should be punished while criticism of other beleifs should not be punished. However, it is often hard to establish the difference between a religion and a philosophy or system of beliefs. Certainly, there are many examples that seem to be somewhere inbetween. Generally, religion is just a system of beliefs which makes certain assumptions about what happens before and after life. The cognitive dissonanced produced when taking such elaborate assumptions for granted often leads people to be insecure about their beliefs. So they tend to gather in groups and respond to criticism angrily or even violently.

I could come up with a number of criticisms of the Islamic belief system. By the same token, I could come up with a number of criticisms for all of the organized religions and even most belief systems in general. No logical system (that is, a set of axioms and their results) can be unequivically true, though they can be self-consistent. Godel proved this, though I don't see anyone protesting him. The idea that religion should be above criticism is utterly absurd. Why should these people care what some cartoonist wrote thousands of miles across the globe? Why should they care if they said it right next to them? It doesn't affect them in the slightest. The only explanation for such a violent response is extreme intellectual insecurity. The fact that the US government took such an apologetic stance shows only that they've been intimidated and have put short term security concerns above our most basic freedom.

It's kind of ironic then that down the block in Austria, a man was sentenced to three years in jail simply for stating his beliefs. The fact that he questioned the extent of the Holocaust shouldn't really have factored into the decision. Sure his beliefs were unpopular, and probably plain wrong, but he was doing no harm to the society. I highly doubt he could have caused another surge of facism in Austria of all places. Why the Austrian government is trying to stop facism by stomping on the freedom of speech is beyond me.

2006-02-18T14:23:00.000-08:00

Some friends and I got into talking about bankruptcy law after taking a class on finance. First of all, we were pretty shocked at the way the incentive system works these days. Our prof showed us this binomial model of pricing (ie, businesses have a good year or a bad year) and proved that it was in the shareholders' best interest to maximize risk. That means that smart moves like JetBlue and Southwest hedging their bets with oil futures would have been opposed by shareholders, and in the case of Southwest, the shareholders were actually quite angry that this was done.

The binomial model he presented actually expands out into a more robust model known as Black-Scholes options pricing, and it yields the same results: maximize risk. That means that all of these corporate goliaths are running around teetering on the edge of bankruptcy and loving it. In fact, mayn of them probably want to go bankrupt so they can unload those pesky pension plans (USAir for instance).

In the end, what I take away from this is that bankruptcy laws have a huge effect on how corporations act. And as I see it, there is no obviously or definitively correct way to structure bankruptcy. Currently the system holds that liabilities (pensions, bonds, etc.) are to be paid with the corporations remaining money, and any money owed after that is defaulted on. This leads essentially to a liability black hole. If you look at liability as a good (albeit one with negative value), then what you have here is ill-defined property rights, which results in intrinsic efficiency losses.

One solution I could conceive of is actually going to the shareholders and asking them for the extra money to pay the liabilities, since they own the corporation after all. Naturally, you would make them pay in proportion to the fraction of the company they own. This would actually open the shareholders up to a potentially unbounded loss, but it would certainly make people more weary about what kinds of corporations they invested in. People would be very preferential to stable companies with sound business plans. Not only that, they would love companies that followed the laws and didn't get involved in shady deals.

In general equilibrium, individual investors may end up opting for mutual funds or holding funds in order to sheild them from risk, or they could buy bankruptcy insurance for a particular stock. These mutual funds would have a massive interest in keeping the companies in line, and could certainly be trusted to enforce, since there seem to be ecomies of scale in that area.

And there you have it, the issue of corporate liability is solved. Maybe it's a pipe dream. Maybe someone has to work out a model to see if it'll work. But it sounds real good to me.

"And they call me an assasin. What do you call it when the assasins accuse the assasin? They lie... they lie and we have to be merciful for those who lie."

2006-01-22T04:04:00.000-08:00

This post will get more hypocritical the longer it gets, so I'll keep it short. It concerns me when blogs that purport to be in the business of promoting certain policies for the greater good of humanity end up concentrating more on personally attacking poltical and media figures and peddling some strange belief system where anyone who dissagrees with them must be in the pocket of their ideological opponents. This applies to both sides of the spectrum.

I'll only say this once: I'm in the business of policy, not personality. We need to remember what this is really all about: helping people. Period.

2006-01-14T20:45:00.000-08:00

The Alito hearings have come and gone. I'll say Biden and Schumer came out like knights in shining armor. Kennedy was Kennedy, Specter was Specter, and really, the whole hearing was reminiscent of a broken record.

There is a cabal in Washington who have concocted a highly restrictive and unprincipled set of guidelines for all nominees that come before the Senate. They enforce these rules with an iron fist, and have suffocated any usefulness out of the confirmation process. I'll get into what exactly the guidelines are and why I find such fault in them, but first, I'll reprint a letter that I sent to Chuck Schumer after the second day of the hearings:

Senator Schumer,

I just watched the second day of the nomination hearings for Judge Alito. First of all, I was very impressed with the questions you posed to him and with the determination you showed in seeking his true Constitutional views.

Like you, I was disturbed by the fact that he refused to reveal his current opinion on whether the Constitution protects a woman's right to choose. Clearly, that is a matter of Constitutional philosophy and has no explicit relation to any court case, just as with the right to free speech.

There is hypocracy, or at least logical fallacy, inherent in Judge Alito's statements on this subject. He argues that the question of the existence of a Constitutional right to abortion relies so much on the specifics of the case that the it simply cannot be answered in the general sense. However, he is somehow willing to answer that same question with respect to the existence of a Constitutional right to free speech.

Certainly, I personally believe that a right to free speech exists in the Constitution, as does Judge Alito, but the right to free speech is not absolute under current Supreme Court interpretation. There are many instances in which free speech can be legally abrogated, as relating to obscenity, libel, and the "clear and present danger" test. Yet he is still able to state the existence of a general right to free speech, but not the same for abortion. Clearly, as with abortion, the specifics of the case factor into whether free speech is ultimately protected, but one can still answer in the general case that it is present in the Constitution.

Furthermore, if one is to accept that Judge Alito cannot state his views on the Constitutional right to abortion because cases of that nature may come before if confirmed, then by the same token one must also accept that he cannot state his views on any matter relating to the Constitution no matter how vague or abstract because, conceivably, any issue could come before him on the Supreme Court if confirmed.

In my view, the best way to reveal Judge Alito's true Constitutional views is to take a bottom up approach. Any attempt to grill him on specific cases will fail, but if you start discussing judicial philosophy, slowly building up his views from the ground floor until you reach a nearly inevitable conclusion, you can discern his views on practically any case with a high degree of accuracy. Senator Graham was on the right track when he started off by asking Judge Alito if he was a strict constructionist. Unfortunately, he really didn't want an answer, nor did Judge Alito supply one.

I don't know if you'll read this before the confirmation hearings are over, but I believe that if you propose to Judge Alito and the American people the flaws present in his reasoning you will either force him to reveal his true opinions on the Constitution or else expose his real motivations behind withholding answers, whatever they may be.

Sincerely,
Douglas Hanley

I think that really sums up a lot of my argument on the arbitrary nature of the rules concocted for nominees. As for my recommendations on strategy, they may have proved to be fruitless anyway. Judge Alito proved resistant to basically any reasonable line of questioning, even ones purely on Constitutional philosophy and interpretation. As Chris Matthews noted, and as is apparent from the hearings, Alito gave only definitional answers to any questions posed to him. When asked his opinion any matter of interpretation or the appropriateness of a particular test, he would never actually reveal his true opinion, he would merely state whether that was the direction that the current supreme court is taking. Matthews was also correct in saying that Bork was the last truly honest nominee to come before the Senate, and the price he paid for that was rejection.

Long story short, Alito's going to be confirmed, and he's almost certainly going to be in favor of overturning Roe v. Wade, if not other well established precedents, when on the the court.

2006-01-05T16:01:00.000-08:00

I can't believe the nonsense surround this NSA leak investigation. The admin is saying that the release of this information will hamper future counter-terrorism investigations. Well, I'm pretty sure that any potential terrorists know that the US government will attempt to interecept their communication, and if they're smart, they take counter-measures to hide their tracks. The only conceivable advantage it gives them now is that they know that law-enforcement officials are apparently not even bound by the US constitution anymore. Whoever leaked this information clearly did so because they throught that their agency was committing egregrious violations of law. They're a whistle-blower and they deserve the respect and protection granted to them by law.

The admin claims that the requirement that they acquire a warrant before wiretapping communication in this country is unduly burdensome. Unfortunately for them, it's one of the core principles of the constitution. Not only that, they don't even really have to obtain a warrant to wiretap, at least not immediately. This is something which a lot of people are trying to play down or ignore, but law-enforcement officials can obtain a warrant up to 72 hours, that's 3 days, after the wiretapping begins. To claim that the leader of the free world can not obtain a simple court order from a judge given three full days is absolutely absurd.

Good news for the constitution and bad news for that pesky phrase "enemy combatant": Jose Padilla has been released from military custody and handed over to the Justice Department. After being held, essentially without charge for four years, it's good to see he's getting the fair treatment he deserves as an American citizen. Lucky for him too. A number of the previous charges, notable the dirty-bomb accusations, have mysteriously dissapeared upon his custody transfer. Apparently, military courts require a much less severe burden of proof, another good reason for them to stick to their stated purpose.

And how about that Iran? That baby's gonna go nuclear one of these days, and it's probably not going to be pretty for either side. I guess a CIA led overthrow of the government is out of the question, given our previous experience with that.

2005-12-09T19:00:00.000-08:00

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2005/12/10/wkyoto10.xml&sSheet=/portal/2005/12/10/ixportaltop.html

This is a fucking embarassment. Every civilized country in the world's agreed to what is a very reasonable treaty, and we walk out of it. It's no longer a question of whether global warming is occurring (unless you're a political hack), it's a question of whether we're willing to marginally sacrifice our current way of life for the sake of our future and the future our children. Say what you want about any of the other controversies going on right now, but this is clear cut evidence that this administration is composed of selfish assholes.

2005-12-04T22:17:00.000-08:00

I'm not sure Hillary will ever be able to rub off her azure 'C', but this article seems to imply that she can and has begun to:

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/10313850/site/newsweek/

Her current position seems to be more of a posture than a policy, but that seems to be all that matters in this near non-debate. Good news nonetheless.

2005-12-01T16:11:00.001-08:00

The President's plan for Iraq:
http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2005/11/20051130-2.html

Murtha speaks on Iraq:
rtsp://video.c-span.org/project/iraq/iraq113005_murtha.rm?mode=compact

This really impressed me. Murtha makes a convincing and competent argument: that our insistence on maintaining forward operating bases and the need to resupply those bases puts our troops in unnecessary danger. Many say the greatest lesson of Vietnam was that the only way to adequately secure an area is to start with a few well secured centers and expand your radius of influence outwards if needed. I think a very reasonable strategy is to redeploy and pull our forces into a more secure configuration. That way, we can still attack terrorists if they attempt to establish bases in Iraq, but we wont be around to draw the ire of insurgents, who must ultimately be defeated politically by the Iraqis themselves.

As it stands, there are about 75,000 trained or partially trained security forces in Iraq, of which 25,000 are in battalions that operate independently. In the US, our armed forces comprise about 2.4% of those fit for military service. According to the data released by the president, this number is about 1.4% in Iraq (0.5% if you count only those operating independently). Given this respectable start, I believe this redeployment would not result in a collapse of the security situation, especially since the insurgents seem to target mostly US troops.

That said, I hope people will start listening to Murtha, because he's not as crazy as others are trying to make him out to be. Hillary's already staked out her position, which is not all that dissimilar from Murtha's. People are kind of going crazy on the left accusing her of being hawkish, but I'm not sure how accurate that is. Here's a quote from an e-mail I got from her:

"I believe we are at a critical point with the December 15th elections that should, if successful, allow us to start bringing home our troops in the coming year, while leaving behind a smaller contingent in safer areas with greater intelligence and quick strike capabilities."

Sounds familiar. On the other hand, maybe it's good that they're ostracizing her, it'll actually put her in better standing for the '08 general election.

2005-11-29T03:24:00.000-08:00

And thusly it was spawned... this is almighty.