Bar Economics

Let me tell you about how I spent Valentine's Day 2008. I was at John Harvard's with a smart, platonic friend (I have to say platonic because of the day it was). She designs airplane engines. I design guidance software. We were talking about engineering-type work.

At some point, a guy sitting adjacent from us chimed in and asked if we were engineers. He seemed interesting. He had some opinions on production and running businesses. It turned out he was visiting Harvard from Houston for a conference on energy. We talked a little bit about politics and the upcoming election, then the conversation turned economic in nature. The gentleman we were with was decidedly over 50 years of age, and it seemed like he was interested in our 25 year old opinion. Meanwhile, we were interested in his thoughts. The stimulating exchange of ideas was quite pleasant.

However, after 30-45 minutes, the conversation became uncomfortably ideological and it was clear that his ideology was quite dissimilar to my ideology. One specific question he framed was, "Who do you trust more, government or business?" I thought about it, and the true answer was "neither". I said that both are prone to screw things up, but with further reflection I can say that I trust government more. He argued that businesses were the trustworthy ones and cited the government as having a monopoly within the country. A monopoly that made it impossible for businesses to compete in certain ways... more on that later. He also wasn't happy with the way government spent his tax dollars. I would tend to agree, but I'm at the top of the welfare support system in this country as a beneficiary of 3+ years of software engineering work for various projects sponsored by the national defense budget.

He made one clever point that can be summed up in a tabular format.

	On A Product For Me	For Somebody Else
Spending My Money	Quality is high, Price is low	Quality is low, Price is low
Somebody Else's Money	Quality is high, Price is high	Quality is low, Price is high

Essencially, his distrust in government boiled down to his feeling that they fit into the "Spending somebody else's money on somebody else" camp. He started preaching negatively about government and in particular, income tax. He basically told us public schools are horrible in Texas, and he was griping about having to send his semi-dyslexic fourth grader to a private school because the public schools didn't have programs to get through to the boy. He was upset that every six weeks his maids would quit so that they could go collect unemployment. But yeah, he was really, really ticked off at the IRS. He said that his tax bill was $2.2 M on $400k of earnings. That made him want to leave the country because his view was that the government was wasting all the tax money he was paying. Thusly, I met an upper class slob who is in the market to relocate his under-performing business to Dubai.

His business, by the way, is apparently in the energy industry. You can check them out if you want. It turns out that he is the first guy under the "Leadership" page. So, part of his gripe is that energy (gas and electric) is regulated in a way that makes competition hard for company's in the industry (think Enron). He thinks the regulations stifle innovation in a way that yields power generation inefficiencies that are no higher than they were when Edison opened the world's first power plant in Downtown Manhattan (which he claimed was 30% efficiency). He advocates making use of the heat that is a product of the process to convert energy into a usable format, instead of letting it go to waste. In theory and practice, his logic is sound. But he was upset with the way the industry is structured so that their is no incentive for increases in efficiencies, because of the way the government collects taxes on additional revenue and so it isn't worth it to the industry to work twice as hard for the marginal increase in profits. And he complained about the public monopoly on education. He said there was no incentive for schools in Texas to have a program for his semi-dyslexic son, and they were much happier having him pull the kid out and sending him to a private school that could give him the attention he needed. I think that is more of a statement on Texas schools then the nation as a whole (my local high school certainly had special needs programs).

All-in-all I had a unique and interesting conversation, despite the fact that by the end I wanted nothing more than to get the hell out of there to get away from the lecture that I mostly disagreed with.

2nd Degree Burns

I almost lit my apartment on fire last night. I was prepping for a easy-going night with friends and I was set on making Shrimp Tempura Cocktails... but as I was heating the oil to fry the shrimp with everything went to hell. The smoke alarm went off. The damned pot caught on fire. Then I fucking had to bring the scalding hot pot to burn itself to death outside, and in the process I gave myself a 2nd Degree burn on my right hand.

I called the fire department and when they arrived they threw the burning pot into the snow, which extinguished it. Everything that happened after that is a mixture of awesome and luck. Mwah.

Retrospective

I just wanted to point out that I was right. I wasn't ballsy enough to go out of a limb to predict a NYG victory, but minutes before the game I had said that if the spread had been as small as +6 for the NYG (the Vegas Line was +13), that I would have taken Big Blue in a bet. Unfortunately, hidesight is 20/20 and gambling on the game for real never occurred to me.

The Play-by-Play tells the tale, though. The story that is being told is that the Giants got 5 sacks and knocked Brady down 23 times. The story that isn't being told, one which I think has as much relevance to the outcome of the game, is the injury report (or lack thereof). Going into the game, the only Patriot on New England's injury report was Tom Brady (right shoulder). Granted, this shouldn't be a surprise to anybody because sources point out that he always has this injury. Always.

The real understory that isn't being discussed are the Patriot injuries *during* the game. Cornerbacks Randall Gay and Marvin Harrison felt pain. An article published after the fact points out that linebacker Rosevelt Colvin has been out since November and that cornerback Ellis Hobbs has been playing through pain since November. Late in the game, Right Guard Stephen Neal and Fullback Kevin Faulk were hurt. Neal had to leave the game. Faulk had a noticeable limp. And all of this also ignores that fact of Brady's right ankle injury that he suffered during the AFC Championship game.

Of course, maybe it is silly to criticize a team with injuries for losing. Lord knows they had to give it there all during the regular season. They had to seriously bare down in tough weeks like 8 and 11. Those 45+ point victories make the closer games like week 9 (4 pts), 12 (3 pts), 13 (3 pts), and 17 (3 pts) seem that much tougher. I mean, if they had legitimately rested their sore players... they probably wouldn't have had that perfect regular season.

Or maybe I am over-analyzing it, and the reason for the Patriot collapse was as simple as this.

Late Night Brawl

The first thing I have to ask, why can't CNN cover the news? Why must they insist on doing the minimum? From time to time, they don't even spell-check the Associated Presses articles that they reprint, but that isn't what I am griping about today. Today's complaint is about a specific article.

Conan, Stewart and Colbert's 'feud' erupts

My complaint is that they (through their copy-and-paste of the Associate Press article) are only REPORTING the news, when they could quite simply let me EXPERIENCE it. This is the Internet. A series of Tubes. Not a truck. Information exists everywhere, and there is no reason to simply talk about it. The days of the water-cooler are dead. The Age of the Link to Freely Available Original Content is here!

The following clips are all from Monday, February 4, 2008. They each deal with an escalating turn of events surrounding the question of "Who created Mike Huckabee?" Enjoy!

The Daily Show with Jon Stewart

The Colbert Report

Late Night with Cohen O'Brien

There you have it. After 20 minutes, you get entertainment and you get to EXPERIENCE this news story as if you had been there. Isn't this series of Tubes wonderful?

Zombie Bush

I like reading about our country's flagging economy. It is cathartic. This leads me to click on as many articles about the "Stimulus Plan" (or as I like to call it, "The Great American Bread and Circus Injection") as I can. Thus, I am biased and over-exposed to the topic.

That being said... it seams to me that by repeatedly and without thought asking the Senate to approve the plan that he likes, the President is very much like one of those lame, dumb, mindless Zombies who march slowly through the town square in movies while repeating the same hollow request, "Brains, brains, brains".

You would think that an intelligent human being wouldn't be so pushy about the notion that "his plan" is the best there is (which it is not, because as written, the Senate's plan helps an additional 2.5 Million people).

Then again, maybe Bush WANTS to be known as the thoughtless Zombie President. He does tend to repeat things over-and-over again. He rushes to action without thinking of the implications. And he has demonstrated time and again that he doesn't really understand what is going on (or at the very least, he will say things that are the polar opposite of things that he said days ago... without any admission that he is knowingly expressing a viewpoint that is in stark contrast to his one of his previous viewpoints).

So, yeah, I think I am going to start calling him Zombie Bush. Or maybe even use Z.B. for short.