Post Politics

No Inequality In My Backyard

Tuesday, March 28th, 2006

I’ve been meaning to write about the recent larger than expected (very pleasant surprise) anti-anti-immigration rallies and in particular yesterday’s idiotic column from Paul Krugman (which I won’t link to as it is behind NYT’s shortsighted “select” service), but I’ve been very busy and Bryan Caplan has better said what I think in fewer words than I would have used in Half Million Rally Against Anti-Foreign Bias, With Critics of Immigration Like This, Who Needs Advocates? and Are Low-Skilled Americans the Master Race?

The comments on these posts are full of idiots, but the estimable Chris Rasch works in one of my favorite links — the Manifesto for the Abolition of International Apartheid.

However, I cannot restrain myself from picking on Krugman’s “Unconfortable facts about immigration” column. Krugman, with emphasis added:

First, the net benefits to the U.S. economy from immigration, aside from the large gains to the immigrants themselves, are small

This from someone who professes to be concerned about inequality. What better way to decrease inequality than to allow very poor people to drastically increase their incomes, merely by living and working across a river or entirely imaginary border? Why shouldn’t someone born in Mexico have the opportunity to earn the same wages as someone born in the United States with identical skills?

If we substitute “born in [jurisdiction]” to “born with [race or gender]” the answer is obvious.

Basic decency requires that we provide immigrants, once they’re here, with essential health care, education for their children, and more.

Here Krugman lets it slip: on one side of an imaginary border, one is human and must be treated with basic decency, whatever one thinks that entails. On the other side of a border, one is subhuman.

Anyone who professes to care about inequality and does not call for complete freedom to move, live and work across jurisdiction borders is deluded by the fog of jurisdicitonism.

As I was writing this Matt McIntosh posted an excellent followup to Caplan, Privileged By Birthright?:

It’s long past time for cosmopolitans everywhere to mount a serious offense against the premise that location of birth is a morally relevant category.

…

I realized a while ago that one way to tell a true liberal (in the broad philosophical sense, not the narrow North American political sense) from a poseur is whether their moral circle extends to include as much moral consideration to those beyond their border as to those within it.

Indeed!

Posted in Apartheid, Economics, Peeves, Politics | 5 Comments »

Holiday

Saturday, March 25th, 2006

I’m ten days late, but finally, a worthwhile holiday: March 15 is Tyrannicide Day!

There are many holidays around the world that have their origins in revolution, e.g., and the Fouth of July, but these are mainly celebrations of the jurisdictions that followed revolution and their supposed national identities.

Tyrannicide Day does not celebrate successful revolution, nor any specific revolution or jurisdiction, so cannot be easily usurped. Charles Johnson, instigator of Tryannicide Day:

What I want to honor today is tyrannicide not as a political strategy but as a moral fact: putting a diadem on your head and wrapping yourself in the blood-dyed robes of the State confers neither the virtue, the knowledge, nor the right to rule over anyone, any more than you had naked and alone. Tyranny is nothing more and nothing less than organized crime executed with a pompous sense of entitlement and a specious justification; the right to self-defense applies every bit as much against the person of some self-proclaimed sovereign as it does against any other two-bit punk who might attack you on the street. Every victory for human liberation in history — whether against the crowned heads of Europe, the cannibal-empires of modern Fascism and Bolshevism, or the self-perpetuating oligarchies of race and sex — has had this insight at its core: the moral right to deal with the princes and potentates of the world as nothing more and nothing less than fellow human beings, to address them as such, to challenge them as such, and — if necessary — to resist them as such. Thus always to tyrants.

Next year I will celebrate on time and in style!

Posted in Peeves, Politics | 1 Comment »

Who’s harmed by (housing) inflation?

Thursday, March 23rd, 2006

Jason Ruspini writes about a discussion of upcoming housing futures. One of the open questions about this new market is who will buy (buy long that is — use for hedging against price declines is considered obvious). I often see it implied that the only set of people harmed by housing price increases are non-homeowners. Ruspini:

The natural buyers would be prospective home-buyers, trying to ensure that they aren’t priced-out of the market, but the relative wealth of that group is – naturally – very small.

But most homeowners are prospective home-buyers. Though U.S. residents are moving less often (this was a big surprise to me) 1 in 14 homeowners moves each year and the market for second homes is booming. It seems that anyone potentially moving to better, additional, or housing in a more expensive market than their own would be interested in hedging against price increases. Add in parents who want to ensure their children can buy a home nearby, you have a large and very wealthy group.

is quoted making essentially the same mistake in an otherwise excellent article on his work recently published in the NYT Magazine:

Homeowners, he points out, have a strong incentive to stop new development, both because it can be an inconvenience and also because, like any monopolist, stopping supply drives up the price of their own homes. “Lack of affordable housing isn’t a problem to homeowners,” Glaeser says; that’s exactly what they want. “The thing you want most is to make sure that your home is not affordable if you own it. And for that reason, there’s absolutely no reason to think that little suburban communities with no businesses that are run essentially by their homeowners will make the right decisions for the state as a whole, for the business in the area, for the country as a whole.”

Actually I think it is the anti-housing homeowners who are mistaken (or very short-sighted), not Glaeser, who is probably right at least in part about their motivations.

It seems to me that except to the extent one exits the market (by selling vacation homes, trading down, or moving to a less expensive market) rising prices don’t offer homeowners much benefit apart from bragging rights and the ability to obtain larger secondary loans (which have to be paid back).

Consider car owners, or an even more extreme case, food owners. If car or food production was restricted, the price of their assets would increase. However, in a few years, or a few days in the case of food, they would have to pay in some combination of higher prices, lower quality, and lower quantity.

It is pretty clear that everyone benefits from cheaper transportation and food regardless of whether they presently have a car in the garage and bread in the cupboard and that everyone is harmed by more expensive transportation and food. I’d argue housing is much more like cars and food — consumption goods — than most people are ready to admit.

Posted in Economics, Peeves, Politics, Prediction Markets | 2 Comments »

Admit defeat, not error!

Saturday, February 25th, 2006

William F. Buckley admits that the U.S. military adventure in Iraq is a defeat, but willfully fails to learn anything from it.

It is healthier for the disillusioned American to concede that in one theater in the Mideast, the postulates didn’t work. The alternative would be to abandon the postulates.

His two postulates amount to an assumption that wherever the U.S. intervenes people will act in accordance with U.S. politicians’ wishes. Nevermind that this doesn’t even work within the U.S. jurisdiction.

Buckley attributes defeat soley to “Iraqi animosities.” Even if that were the sole cause blame can be pinned firmly on U.S. politicians who were very well aware of Shiite/Sunni/Kurd/Christian/etc. “animosities” as leveraging these was a major component of U.S. policy toward Iraq after the 1991 . However, Buckley ignores economic mismanagement, and doubtless many other idiocies endemic to political management, nevermind military-political management. To do so would be to accept blame and teeter on the edge of admitting error.

If Buckley hopes to fence off his “postulates” (and thus U.S. policy) from criticism by admitting defeat in this one instance I hope he fails miserably, but I fully expect he and other advocates of interventionism will succeed in this subversion of truth. The long history of poor outcomes of U.S. intervention in the Middle East, elsewhere, and within the U.S. jurisdiction (domestically) is forgotten completely and is never learned from.

I have probably suggested too many times that prediction markets could help remind voters that the most likely outcomes are not those predicted by politicians.

On a related note: So what if Iraq splits? A jurisdiction is not a sacred entity.

Via Mike Godwin. You must check out Godwin’s awesome site design. (Don’t worry, I still hate Macs.)

Posted in Economics, Iraq, Peeves, Politics, Prediction Markets | 1 Comment »

Free as in free pollution parking

Saturday, February 25th, 2006

Tyler Cowen cites Donald Shoup’s The High Cost of Free Parking, which claims that “On average [in the U.S.] a new parking space has cost 17 percent more than a new car.” If I were lured by the temptation of urban policy I would certainly read this book.

I gather Shoup’s argument is that if zoning did not require minimum numbers of spaces and if market rates were charged for parking there would not be wasteful spaces built in uncongested areas and it would be possible to find parking in congested areas.

Shoup probably covers this, but one of the baneful effects of free or underpriced (e.g, cheap area parking permits in San Francisco) is opposition to dense development. Additional residents mean more competition for spaces, giving residents all the reason they need to go into mode, leaving a stunted cross between (vile place) and the wonderful Sanhattan it could be. (Of course there’s much more to story. I’d point to some Matt Smith columns and a feature published on the 50th anniversary of the founding of the United Nations in San Francsico in the if its archive search weren’t so broken.)

Certain control freaks now want to swing from requiring a certain number of parking spaces to prohibiting more than a certain number of spaces. How about letting people build or not build however many spaces as they see fit? The problem is not under- or over-provision of private spaces, it is the underpricing of public spaces.

How about auctioning area parking permits — what politician doesn’t love a windfall? Existing permit holders could share in the windfall as power dictates. New residents would pay market prices. I’m sure Shoup has many more and better thought out proposals.

A related urban transport micro-rant: is an atrocity. No faster than buses and far more expensive, dangerous, space-wasting and inflexible, light rail serves only monument-building fantasies. If a real is infeasible just add or upgrade buses.

Addenda:

  • A complement or partial alternative to market prices for parking is to charge for road use as in central .
  • Anti-light rail articles.
  • Politically-controlled underpricing of water (especially for agricultural use, e.g., in California) and energy (primarily in oil exporting jurisdictions) doubtless cause far greater problems worldwide than underpriced parking.

Posted in Books, Economics, Peeves, Politics | 6 Comments »

Supply-side anti-censorship

Friday, February 17th, 2006

Brad Tempelton explains why a censor should want an imperfect filter — it should be good enough to keep verboten information from most users, but easy enough to circumvent to tempt dissidents, so they can be tracked and when desired, put away.

In the second half of the post, Tempelton suggests some anti-censor techniques: ubiquitous and . Fortunately he says these are “far off” and “does not scale”, respectively. To say the least, I’d add.

Cyber-activists have long dreamed that strong encryption would thwart censorship. is an example of a project that uses this as its raison d’être. While I’m a huge fan of ubiquitous encryption and decentralization (please install , now!), these seem like terribly roundabout, means of fighting censorship — the price of obtaining information, which includes the chance of being caught, is lowered. But someone has to seek out or have the information pushed to them in the first place. If information is only available via hidden channels, how many people will encounter it regardless of lower risk?

An alternative, perhaps less sexy because it involves no technology adoption, is supply-side anti-censorship: make verboten information ubiquitous. Anyone upset about google.cn should publish information the Communist Party wants censored (my example is pathetic, need to work on that). This is of course not mutually exclusive with continuing to carp and dream of techno-liberation.

I guess I’m calling for projects. Or one of those chain letters (e.g, “four things”) that plagues the blogosphere.

Posted in Blogs, Economics, Free Speech, Intellectual Protectionism, P2P, Peeves, Politics | 2 Comments »

CodeCon Extra

Monday, February 13th, 2006

A few things I heard about at outside the presentations.

Vesta was presented at CodeCon 2004, the only one I’ve missed. It is an integrated revision control and build system that guarantees build repeatability, in part by ensuring that every file used by the build is under revision control. I can barely keep my head around the few revision control and build systems I occasionally use, but I imagine that if I were starting (or saving) some large mission-critical project that found everyday tools inadequare it would be well worth considering Vesta. About its commercial equivalents, I’ve mostly heard second hand complaining.

Allmydata is where Zooko now works. The currently Windows-only service allows data backup to “grid storage” presumably a as used by . Dedicate 10Gb of local storage to the service, you can back up 1Gb, free. Soon you’ll be able to pay for better ratios, including $30/month for 1Tb of space. I badly want this service. Please make it available, and for Linux! Distributed backup has of course been a dream P2P application forever. Last time I remember the idea getting attention was a Cringely column in 2004.

Some people were debating whether the Petname Tool does anything different from what specify and whether either would make substantially harder. The former is debated in comments on Bruce Schneier’s recent post on petnames, inconclusively AFAICT. The Petname Tool works well and simply for what it does (Firefox only), which is to allow a user to assign a name to a https site if it is using strong encryption. If the user visits the site again and it is using the same certificate, the user will see the assigned name in a green box. Any other site, including one that merely looks like the original (in content or URL), or even has hijacked DNS, appears to be “secure” but uses a different certificate, will appear as “untrusted” in a yellow box. That’s great as far as it goes (see phollow the phlopping phish for a good description of the attack this would save reasonable user from), though the naming seems the least important part — a checkbox to begin trusting a site would be nearly as good. I wonder though how many users have any idea that some pages are secure and others are not. The petname tool doesn’t do anything for non-https pages, so the user becomes inured to seeing it doing nothing, then does not see it. Perhaps it should be invisible when not on a secure site. Indicators like PageRank, Alexa rank (via the Google and Alexa toolbars) and similar, , and whether the visitor has previously visited the site in question before would all help warn the user that any site may not be what they expect — nearly everyone, including me, confers a huge amount of trust on non-https sites, even if I never engage in a financial transaction on such a site. I imagine a four-part security indicator in a prominent place in the browser, with readings of site popularity (rank), danger as measured by the likes of SiteAdvisor, the user’s relationship with the site (petname) and whether the connection is strongly encrypted.

Someone claimed that three letter agencies want to mandate geolocation for every net access device. No doubt some agency types dream of this. Anyway, the person said we should be ready to fight this if it were to become a real push for such a law, because what would happen to anonymity? No doubt such a mandate should be fought tooth and nail, but preserving anonymity seems like exactly the wrong battle cry. How about privacy, or even mere freedom? On that note, someone briefly showed a tiny computer attached to and powered by what could only be called a solar flap. This could be slapped on the side of a bus and would connect to wifi networks whenever possible and route as much traffic as possible.

Posted in Open Source, P2P, Politics, Programming | 3 Comments »

The Law of Below Averages

Friday, February 10th, 2006

I probably only noticed Alex Tabarrok’s post in my feed reader this morning because of the title similarity to Nathan’s the law of averages blog. The former has some amusing stories in comments of student cheaters foiled by their own stupidity. The gist of the post and comments is that it it isn’t worthwhile for a professor to try hard to catch and punish cheaters as cheaters tend to do poorly anyway and being perceived as a hardass obtains lower student evaluations.

I wonder how this applies to the world outside school, where compulsive excuse makers don’t receive grades every several months, aren’t working toward graduation, and negatively impact others — a student cheater at worst has a marginal impact on the grading curve, if a curve is being used — students are striving for individual reward — while a bad worker can damage an entire organization.

What means do people use to allow bad workers to “fail out” in environments where being a hardass is counterproductive or firing is nearly impossible? This applies particularly to government jobs (my only experience is second-hand), but also to a surprising extent in for-profit organizations. For a long time I thought managers were simply afraid or ashamed to wield the axe. Now, I think it is a little more complicated than that — managers have many different fears that prevent them from firing counterproductive workers.

Addendum: Last year I saw in a university bookstore a large banner hung behind the cashiers featuring a screed on the evils of cheating, a pledge to never cheat, and supposedly the signatures of the entire freshman class. Struck me as Orwellian. My guess is the message did not have its intended effect on certain students — those who had some sense that high school was prison-like and harbored some hope that college might be substantially different.

Posted in Blogs, Economics, Politics | No Comments »

@:^#

Friday, February 10th, 2006

That’s the Net Prophet, a new four-character, blasphemous emoticon invented by Sandy Sandfort:

Please note the turban and matted beard. Net Prophet is suitable for e-mail, websites and graffiti. And I think it’s a lot btter symbol for free speech than some stupid ribbon.

Not to mention better than flying the flag of a jurisdiction. The beauty of the Net Prophet is that it is not merely a symbol for free speech, it is free speech (where “free speech” is communication that someone wants to forcefully suppress).

Why “support” free speech when you can engage in it? There may be no other issue where direct action is so easy, so do it!

Posted in Blogs, Free Speech, Intellectual Protectionism, Peeves, Politics | 4 Comments »

Muhammad with camel

Monday, February 6th, 2006

The first thing to note about the is their timidity.

The timidity of the selection turns out to have been pure genius (mine would have aimed for maximum depravity) as it highlights just how bizarre the reaction has been.

Many have expressed disappointment in the tepid support for free speech from many western governments. I am completely unsurprised. The U.S. government and its allies have taken on around as constituents. The government of Denmark has more freedom to do the Wright thing.

As I am on a very minor photo remix kick, here is my contribution to the universe of images of Mohammed:

muhammad licking camel asshole
licking a camel’s asshole under orders from .
Original photo by Saffanna licensed under cc-by-2.0.

I believe this image complies with putative , though some may claim they see him in the camel’s face. (Yes, this is a remix with zero diff.)

How do I know Muhammad and not Jesus is with the lucky camel? Because a camel couldn’t feel an imaginary person‘s licks.

Posted in Blogs, Free Speech, Intellectual Protectionism, Iraq, Peeves, Politics | 75 Comments »

« Older Entries
Newer Entries »