July 2008 – rc3.org

Month: July 2008 (page 1 of 3)

A good blog should be self-subverting

I liked this quote from Tyler Cowen:

A good blog should be subversive and help you see the faults in the author’s own positions. Ask whether the blogs you are reading in fact provide that service. Self-subversion ought also, in the long run, to benefit liberty and other important values.

Really big government

July 30, 2008 / Rafe / 1 Comment

Andrew Leonard on the housing bailout bill that President Bush just signed:

Without any hoopla, President Bush signed the 2008 Housing and Economic Recovery Act at 7 a.m. Wednesday. The lack of celebration was understandable. The new bill puts taxpayers at so much potential risk that Congress had to simultaneously authorize raising the statutory ceiling on the national debt by $800 billion just to make sure it will have breathing room to make good on its new promises. The message from the White House: Big government just got a whole lot bigger.

And here, in one paragraph, is why libertarianism will never be a mainstream political movement in the United States:

In other words, it’s the kind of bill that the heirs of Ronald Reagan have been decrying for more than a quarter century. Too bad for them: The new bill is all the proof America needs to show that when push comes to shove, no American administration, even one as willfully stubborn and reality-challenged as the current White House, will keep its faith in letting the free market handle its own problems while all else fails.

Why people grind in games

July 29, 2008 / Rafe / 2 Comments

Clive Thompson explains why people accept and even enjoy the grind in games:

Why? Because there’s something enormously comforting about grinding. It offers a completely straightforward relationship between work and reward. When you log into WoW, you know beyond a shadow of a doubt that if you just plant your ass in that chair for long enough, you’ll level up. It doesn’t require skill. It just requires putting in the time. Play 10 hours, you’ll do better; play 50, you’ll do better yet; and yet more so with 500 hours.

The thing is, almost no arenas of human endeavor work like this. Many are precisely the opposite, in fact. When you go to your job at the office, there’s little or no linkage between effort and achievement: You slave like a madman all year long, only to watch the glad-handing frat guy hired two months ago get promoted above you. And if you’re a really serious nerd, the logic that governs interpersonal relationships — marriage, kids, your parents — is even more abstruse: Things can actually get worse the more time and effort you put into them.

I have often thought that this is the main allure of games. They offer a simple model of real life where the incentives are perfectly clear. It’s a refreshing break from the complexity of human relationships and human endeavor.

Cory Doctorow on the music industry

July 29, 2008 / Rafe / 0 Comments

Cory Doctorow on the deal between ISPs and the music industry to spy on and interfere with music sharers:

This month’s announcement of a back-room deal between ISPs (internet service providers) and the big record companies to spy on suspected copyright infringers and reduce the quality of their internet connections is just the latest paragraph in the record industry’s long, self-pitying suicide note, and it’s left me wishing they’d just pull the trigger already and stop beating their chests and telling us all how unfair it all is.

This paragraph is my favorite:

Will this stop kids from trading infringing files? Kids are time-rich and cash-poor and have an infinite supply of ingenuity and impecuniousness to apply to the job of getting music for free. Last year, my freshman university students in Los Angeles regaled me with stories of “hard-drive parties” where everyone would gather with guitars, beers and whopping great hard drives that cost less than either the guitars or the beers. While the students jammed, sang and danced, they simply synchronised their drives using whatever laptops were lying around, transferring hundreds of gigabytes’ worth of music while composing and recording songs of their own.

Tim Bray on the Apple keyboard

July 22, 2008 / Rafe / 8 Comments

Tim Bray on the current crop of Apple keyboards:

Geeks love misty-eyed reminiscing about the great keyboards of yore, with a rough consensus that the original IBM PC’s clackety high-travel product has never since been surpassed. I sure liked that, but if my tactile memory is right, the latest Apples may be better.

That’s my impression as well, and I couldn’t be more surprised. Before Apple introduced its aluminum keyboards, I thought this was the greatest keyboard ever, but even if Avant made a keyboard with the same mechanism just for the Mac, I wouldn’t trade.

Another nice feature of the new Apple keyboards is that they’re easier to keep clean than just about any keyboard since the Atari 400. It’s a nice change, since the old clear plastic Apple keyboards were impossible to keep clean.

Tom Vanderwell on moral hazard

July 22, 2008 / Rafe / 5 Comments

Paul Kedrosky has a guest post from Tom Vanderwell on moral hazard. Moral hazard describes a situation where parties behave differently because they do not expect to bear the full consequences of their actions. For example, when a guy in a bar acts especially belligerent because he’s got his big, tough friend with him, that’s moral hazard at work.

Free market purists argue that moral hazard distorts the free market, and so firms and investors should not be insulated from risk. In other words, the FDIC should not exist, because then the risk of bank default would force customers to be more informed about the loans their banks make. This would cause banks who make risky loans to lose business, and thus strengthen the banking industry.

Of course, there are reasons why we protect people from the consequences of risk, even if it introduces moral hazard to the equation. Only rarely do only the people taking on unwise risks suffer the consequences when their bets don’t pay off, which leads Vanderwell to this question:

But how can we prevent a total meltdown of the housing and mortgage market (what would happen if Fannie and Freddie actually went under) without absolving some of the participants (for this particular discussion, we’ll limit it to Wall St., the Ratings Agencies, the Mortgage Companies, and the Banks who wrote the loans oh, and the mortgage lenders themselves if they did anything criminal or fraudlent) of at least some of their consequences?

He has some suggestions.

Needless to say, moral hazard is a concept that is of great interest to insurers. Malcolm Gladwell wrote an article in 2005 explaining why moral hazard isn’t really a concern when it comes to health insurance.

Ways the government helps rich people

July 22, 2008 / Rafe / 3 Comments

From Matthew Yglesias:

It seems that a commercial flight pays $2,014 in taxes to fly from New York to Miami, whereas a private jet only pays $236 even though the impact on air traffic control is the same.

Fred Clark on FICO scores

July 21, 2008 / Rafe / 3 Comments

Fred Clark writes about why credit scoring should be more of a political issue:

Lenders and debt merchants are in the same boat as the rest of us. They don’t have access to the extra-constitutional triumvirate’s top-secret proprietary information either. But credit-card banks and mortgage brokers and insurance companies and auto lenders have more time, resources and incentive than consumers do for probing the mysteries of these all-important formulae. They’ve pieced together enough of the puzzle that they’ve gotten quite skilled at manipulating this statistical game to their advantage.

Rugaber notes, for example, that “credit card issuers … have recently cut limits on many cards as financial institutions seek to reduce their credit risks.” Limiting risk is one explanation for this step. An additional explanation is that this step alters borrowers’ “utilization rate,” and the cabalistic scholars of credit scoring at these institutions have determined that higher utilization rates make for lower credit scores, thus providing a quantitative fig-leaf for aggressive increases in fees and interest rates.

Here’s how the scam works. You’ve got a $10,000 limit on a credit card and you’re carrying $2,500 due to a recent dental procedure. The lender, in the name of reducing risk, abruptly reduces the limit on your card to $4,000, announcing this change on page seven of the nano-type in a booklet mailed with your next monthly bill. Now instead of a 25-percent utilization rate, you’ve got a 63-percent utilization rate (they round up, when convenient), lowering your credit score.

That lower credit score means you no longer “qualify” for your previous rate of 9.9 percent and will now be paying 19.1 percent. Oh, and there’s a one-time fee of $35 dollars, conveniently added to your existing balance, for exceeding 50 percent of your available limit.

Update: Oh, and if you’re paying only the minimums on your credit cards, you need to change that.

Free Software Foundation vs iPhone

July 18, 2008 / Rafe / 3 Comments

The Free Software Foundation’s list of reasons why you should avoid the iPhone have gotten plenty of coverage, which is of course the point of making such a list. I assume their tactics are the same as Greenpeace’s criticism of Apple’s environmental practices.

The goal is, of course, to get Apple to change its behavior, but I suspect the primary goal is also to educate consumers about the aims of the groups making the criticism. Apple is more effective than any other company in technology at garnering tons of press coverage, most of it positive. Activist groups target Apple with the knowledge that it’s the best way to advance what I expect is probably their primary goal — publicizing their cause.

The FSF wants consumers to think about their definition of free software, the risks of DRM, and how your software may expose your private information without your knowledge. Criticizing Apple on those grounds is clearly an effective way to get that message out in front of the public.

In the end, Greenpeace was successful in getting Apple to change its practices, but I suspect that was less important than the light they shined on the bad environmental practices that pervade the computer manufacturing industry. I also think it’s more important that more customers will be thinking about whether they will accept DRM and who is allowed to control what software they put on their phone than is any success the FSF might have in provoking change from Apple. That’s probably a good thing, because I think it was easier for Apple to reduce its packaging and do a better job of recycling old parts than it will be for them to give up some of the control they’re exercising over the iPhone platform.

NPR on Mr. Jalopy

July 14, 2008 / Rafe / 2 Comments

NPR has an article today on Mr. Jalopy, one of the most interesting people in the world who you may not have heard of. I think it’s about time for the MacArthur Foundation to hook him up.

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