Month: September 2009

Well, That Explains all the Bullsh$# When I Was Single

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Someone asks behavioral economist Dan Ariely if she should put out to a guy that she is dating. She “Unsure” is seriously into “George”, and wonders if the rule about making him wait is true.

Well, Dr Arieli says that according to behavior economics research, the rule is true:

The classic experiment here comes from psychologists Leon Festinger and James Carlsmith, who had participants perform a boring task and then paid them either $20 or $1 to convince someone else that the task had been great fun. Everyone then rated the task, with the result that the $1 participants rated the task more positively than did the $20 crew. While the $20 group could explain away the dissonance between their action (“I told someone the task was riveting”) and their belief (“It actually bored me to tears”) via money (“I was paid to promote the task”), the $1 individuals could not because they could not justify misleading others for such a small amount of money– so they changed their initial belief (“I must really like the task, to have promoted it”) and they ended up rating the task more positively.

To give you an example that is closer to our social life, look at fraternities: loyalty to frats increases with the amount of hazing, since pledges tell themselves, “I did a lot of embarrassing stuff for my frat – it must really matter to me.”

So, the advice to, “In other words, make him work, and he will rationalize it by deciding he loves you,” is supported by studies.

It does explain my favoring women who are can sometimes be described as “high maintenance,” though I feel compelled to note that each moment with Sharon,* is unalloyed bliss.

*Love of my life, light of the cosmos, she who must be obeyed, my wife.†
†I know what you are thinking, he’s just writing that because he knows that she could read this on the net. My response is that Sharon* is a deeply passionate woman, and she has knives, and some of them are dull…..Mama did not raise no fools.

Lessons of the 787 and GM’s Opel Division

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Well, the first lesson is that airframers are running away from all composite aircraft, with Mitsubishi going from a composite wing to an aluminum one on its MRJ commuter jet, they say that this will make it easier to make changes to the wing to accommodate for things like stretched model. (See also here)

This is particularly noteworthy because Mitsubishi is already making the all composite wing for Boeing’s 787, so they are very familiar with the structural problems of the 787 (see here, here. and here)

The thing is, that their assessment on this situation is probably more valid than Boeing’s, because they understand the issues involved with composites more than Boeing does.

Boeing’s policy of outsourcing major design and engineering decisions, along with risk, on the 787 has placed it in a situation rather similar to where GM is right now with regard to its suppliers:

Magna’s planned acquisition of Opel is proof that carmakers have lost the upper hand in the industry by outsourcing development work to suppliers and relying on them for technological knowhow, a top GM executive said.

…

“We all had the vision that the OEMs (original equipment manufacturers) should just assemble bits and pieces, do a little bit of marketing, a little bit of design and all the rest would be done by suppliers,” he said.

“That was a nice vision. It sounds very lean, but the profit making opportunity is also shifting to the ones that have the technological knowhow. That is in very many cases now the supplier industry,” the GM Europe president told the dinner.

The situation is not as straightforward with commercial aircraft, because certifying an aircraft is far more difficult than getting regulatory approval on a car, but as we can see, Mitsubishi is already on top of that process with its MRJ, and certifying a 70-100 seat aircraft is not appreciably more difficult from certifying a 400 seat aircraft.

This may be a situation where the political tensions in Airbus, which has limited them farming out technologies and design expertise, may serve them well in the future.

What’s more, unlike an auto manufacturer there is no need to build a dealer network, which is a huge hill to climb.

Boeing’s methods on the 787 may be a suicide pact for its commercial aircraft business.

Sotomayor Challenges the Idea that Corporations are People

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One day, I want to have a WSJ type picture of me published

When Obama nominated her, I figured that she would be a standard Democratic weasel choice, like Ruth Bader Ginsberg, in rock ribbed support of Roe v. Wade, but otherwise, not inclined to rock the boat.

Well, Jess Bravin saw some indications that she may be rather more inclined to change things than I had anticipated:

But Justice Sotomayor suggested the majority might have it all wrong — and that instead the court should reconsider the 19th century rulings that first afforded corporations the same rights flesh-and-blood people have.

Judges “created corporations as persons, gave birth to corporations as persons,” she said. “There could be an argument made that that was the court’s error to start with…[imbuing] a creature of state law with human characteristics.”

In challenging the opinion, or more accurate clerks notes, in Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad, the corporations are legal persons with constitutional rights, she is making a big statement on her position on corporate law, and it is significantly to the left of the court, and IMHO, the right position.

It could be that she feels that extending the idea of corporate civil rights to unlimited political donations crosses a line, but hopefully, it means more than that.

I Do Not Know If This Shows Anti-Semitism, but It Does Show Stupidity

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This is Not a Swastika (Pic from Proud Zionist)

The latest controversy involving Human Rights Watch is the fact that their senior military analyst, Mark Garlasco, is also an avid, and fairly prominent, collector of Nazi military memorabilia, and he has now been suspended from his position.

I think that a lot, though not all, of the issue here is stupidity, whether or not Mr. Garlasco harbors anti-Semitic thoughts or not.

When you are a military analyst who collects such stuff, and you are assigned to look at Israeli military operations, you need to know that it is best to not accept the assignment, and if your boss knows your hobby, he needs to know that he should never give you such an assignment.

They both had to know that it would harm his reputation and that of HRW.

Still, it’s clear that some of the commentary out there is clearly hysterical, such as hyping the picture of him with a German Cross on his hoodie, and NGO Monitor assertion his name on various boards, “Flak88,” is a secret Nazi symbol thing (8=H, so 88=HH=Heil Hitler). His specialty is German anti-aircraft memorabilia, his grandfather was a conscript serving in an anti-aircraft unit, and the Krupp 88mm gun was the best known AA (and anti-tank) gun of the war.

In any case, Mr. Garlasco published a response on Huffpo.

My assessment is that there is no evidence that he is an anti-Semite, nor that sympathizes with the Nazis.

That being said, there is another issue, which is whether Marc Garlasco, and Human Rights Watch are biased against Israel for other reasons, most notably nostalgie de la boue, literally “love of the mud”, which can either refer to the “elites” affecting “peasant” style and the like, or, and this is the definition that I’m using, the idea that those non-western “less advanced” societies are somehow more inherently good because they are less polluted by civilization.

I think that there reasons to be concerned that both Garlasco and HRW watch are guilty of this, and objectively anti-Israel as a result.

Omri Ceren observes that while no one is perfect, that the errors that have been found have always cut against Israel, and so, much like the “errors” in Florida in the 2000 presidential vote recount, show bias, though Mr. Ceren makes it very clear that he lacks any sort of smoking gun.

I do think that there is a smoking gun on the part of Human Rights Watch and Mr Garlasco as to a double standard.

Specifically, Daled Amos digs into the interviews with him, and uncovers two telling quotes.

The first is from 60 minutes:

“I don’t think people really appreciate the gymnastics that the U.S. military goes through in order to make sure that they’re not killing civilians,” Garlasco points out.

“If so much care is being taken why are so many civilians getting killed?” Pelley asks.

“Because the Taliban are violating international law,” says Garlasco, “and because the U.S. just doesn’t have enough troops on the ground. You have the Taliban shielding in people’s homes. And you have this small number of troops on the ground. And sometimes the only thing they can do is drop bombs.”

This is not something you see in reports from Human Rights watch in any report about Israeli military actions until at least page 6, and then only in the most circumspect terms.

And the news broadcast further states:

Garlasco says, before the invasion of Iraq, he recommended 50 air strikes aimed at high-value targets — Iraqi officials.

But he says none of the targets on the list were actually killed. Instead, he says, “a couple of hundred civilians at least” were killed.

Note that “targeted killings” that he advised on is something that Garlasco has specifically said is a war crime when Israel does this.

My thesis is that much of the overwrought nature of the coverage of Israel comes from the fact that the existence of Israel is an indictment of the western industrialized world.

The origins of modern Israel are that Jews in western Europe, particularly as a result of the Dreyfus affair in France, felt a need to have a homeland to flee to, and the events of the following century reinforced this need.

Israel exists because of the moral failure of the west over the past 120 years, and acknowledging that failure does not sit well with a lot of people.

Pathetic, Quote of the Day

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David Axelrod, on healthcare:

“David’s in there — Axelrod — saying we’ve got to try to get ‘something.’ So, the new benchmark is, ‘Well, if we can do something, if we can do anything, then we can say we did healthcare reform,’” [West Virginia Senator David] Rockefeller said.

I know that a lot of Obama fans will be saying that this is just Axelrod, but that sounds a lot like the phrase, “If only the Czar knew.”

Obama will own healthcare, and he owns what his advisors say.

It’s a Start

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One of the well known facts out there is that defamation law in the UK is positively insane and tilted in favor of the plaintiff that the phrase”Libel Tourism,” has been coined.

It places the burden on the defendant to prove that the statement is true, and in the case of web publications, every web page served is treated as a separate publication for the determination of damages.

Well, as one of the few growth industries in the UK, what with investment banking in the toilet, and the fact that this is a useful way for politicians to browbeat the press, there has been little, if any, movement to change these laws.

That being said, it looks like someone has gotten a bit of a clue, and decided that each hit on a web page is like each newspaper delivered, so , but it now appears that some common sense in terms of the internet, where the government is proposing to change the law so that each web page hit is not another incident of defamation:

The Government proposes changing the law so that a ‘single publication’ rule applies. “A possible alternative to the multiple publication rule would be to adopt a single publication rule,” said the consultation. “This would mean that instead of the limitation period running from the time of each publication of the defamatory material, it would run from the date of the first publication, even if copies of the material continued to be made and re-published years later.”

“A single publication rule would provide clarity and prevent the possibility of open-ended liability. It would also remove some of the potential obstacles presented to defendants by the multiple publication rule, such as the possibility of having to mount a defence against an old claim,” it said.

BTW, if you want to know just how f$#@ed up British defamation law is, note the precedent cited in the article, “

The Times newspaper took a case to the European Court of Human Rights arguing that the multiple publication rule was so onerous a burden for newspapers in the internet age that it had a ‘chilling effect’ on their right to free speech, as guaranteed by the European Convention on Human Rights, which the Court enforces.

The Court, though, ruled that a precedent from the 19th century involving a servant of the Duke of Brunswick looking up an article in a library forming the basis of a defamation suit meant that UK law did not breach the Times‘s rights.

Looking up an article in the library is defamation? This is truly whack.

Pelosi Invokes Harvey Milk

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Something you have to understand. When Pelosi warns of eliminationist and extremist rhetoric, and the normally stern lady almost tears up, and her staff clarifies that she is referring to what happened to Harvey Milk, she is being serious. This is not a pose.

There are no politicians who came of age in that cauldron who ever invoke him, because they find it truly alarming event in their life, and Pelosi is a San Francisco politician, even if she is Baltimore born and bred.

She is truly worried that the nut jobs are talking to even bigger nut jobs in their audience, and that this crap has to end, and she is right in those concerns.

All that evil has to do to succeed is to ensure that good does nothing.

Thank You Rod Blagojevich

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Really, I’m serious about this, because Roland Burris knows that he will not get another term, and he knows that his value as a Washington lobbyist is nil, he does not have to kowtow to the insurance lobby, so he has announced that he will not vote for a healthcare bill without a public option.

In creating the lamest of lame ducks, Burris won’t be able to work in DC at all once he is out of office, Blago has created a man who can do the right thing, because he has nothing to lose.

The Whack Job Wing of the Cuban Exile Community has Been Castro’s Greatest Ally

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It looks like the Cuban regime has finally started to relax its grip on the population of this island:

Communist Cuba has begun dismantling a vast system of state gratuities and subsidised goods and services in favour of higher wages, more individual choice and targeted welfare.

The move is part of President Raúl Castro’s drive to modernise an economy in which, he recently admitted, two plus two often equals five in terms of spending and three when it comes to performance.

They are not doing this because they want to, but because they have to.

In the “bad old days”, they could rely on a bellicose United States to unite their population, but unlike his predecessors, Barack Obama has made it clear that he has no interest in listening to the dead-ender extremists who claim to speak for the Cuban community, and with that threat removed, the Cuban government now has to produce results.

Now, if only Barack Obama would treat Congressional Republicans the same way.

Economics Update

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If This Doesn’t Make You Feel Like a Chump, then You are forgetting the “Ownership Economy” Hype
H/t Calculated Risk

Well, it’s Thursday, and that means that it’s new jobless claims day.

We are actually in a place where we can see the seasonally adjusted statistics have meaning, because we are past the auto plant shutdown in the dog days of Summer that actually happened in the spring.

Initial claims were 545,000, down 12,000 from last week’s upwardly revised 557,000, a drop of 12,000, but remember that if we compare initial numbers to initial numbers, we were at 550,000 last week, so the drop is only 5,000, not 12,000…..Anyone see a pattern?

The 4 week moving average, which is a less noisy metric, fell from 8,750 to 563,000, but note that anything at 400K or above is still bad news territory.

Continuing claims rose by 129K to 6.2 million, and that does not account for people who are exhausting their benefits.

As CR notes (link on graph pr0n) the fed has reported that household net worth has fallen $12.2 trillion, or about $40,000.00 for every man woman and child in the United States.

Of course the financial journalist are reporting that household net worth is up for the first time since Q3 of 2007, but this is almost entirely the recent bump in stock prices, which primarily benefits the top decile.

Still, we are seeing good news, with housing starts and the Philadelphia Fed Manufacturing Index both showing improvement.

Of course, part of this has to do with the fact that mortgage rates are way down, because the Federal Reserve is buying mortgage backed securities like they are going out of style, in order to keep those rates low.

I would also note that there just are not that many consumers out there. The UK again being a case in point. Yesterday, I mentioned that their unemployment had spiked, and today we discover that their retail sales fell 0.2%, as opposed to the forecast increase of o.1%.

People without jobs cannot buy stuff.

That’s why the Bank of Japan decided to keep its benchmark rate at essentially 0%, actually 0.1%, but that’s a f%$#ing rounding error.

In energy, oil fell slightly, to 72.47/bbl.

In currency, the dollar took a hit today, falling against both the Euro and yen, and the Canadian dollar rose to an 11 month high.

Rachael Maddow, Geek Goddess

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First we have her robot videos:

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

And then we have her talking with the health reform bill. No seriously. She is talking with the animated bill from schoolhouse rock, you know, this guy:

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

You know, If I hadn’t already found Sharon,* and she did not “bat for the other team,” I’d be sending her some seriously steamy fan mail.

*Love of my life, light of the cosmos, she who must be obeyed, my wife.