Morocco

Things I’ve learned about Marrakesh while being here:

1. The climate is very similar to that of Los Angeles. (Specifically Csa, or a Mediterranean climate.) We’ve received some rain, but for the most part the weather has been a very comfortable 70-80° during the day and mostly 50’s at night. It makes the area quite condusive to growing all sorts of produce, as well as flowers.

2. Oranges. They’re everywhere. And by “everywhere” I mean they plant orange trees bearing orange fruit along various boulevards, and I suspect the locals pluck the oranges when they’re ripe to eat.

The quality of the oranges (and other produce) is extremely good, I suspect due to short supply chains: everything is grown relatively local. Oranges are tree-ripe and very sweet.

3. Mint tea is served everywhere. If you start shopping, the shop keeper may greet you with a small glass of mint tea. It’s a cultural norm here to receive mint tea; while I was waiting for some ‘takeaway’ food to finish cooking the cook poured my wife and I some mint tea. (Interestingly, the little corner restaurant where we were buying some food for takeaway had the best mint tea of them all.)

4. I’m not sure what I was expecting with the Adhan, but it has been pretty reliably waking me up at around 5:15am every morning. (I do go back to sleep fairly quickly.) I guess as an American I always associate female voices with public announcements, so I guess I was expecting a female voice to call out for prayer. But that’s why we travel: to learn things. The voices sounding the call are male, deep, and there are a lot of them: it’s almost as if the entire country, about 5 times a day, calls up to God.

5. The trip to Morocco from the European Union is not long; our flight from Lisbon was perhaps an hour and change. And Morocco to the European Union seems like Mexico to the United States: a nearby country to have a long weekend vacation at. Vacationers seem to show up on Friday and return on Monday; Tuesday through Thursday is a little more quiet, though not by much. I gather this is peak tourism season here.

This is what happens when you socialize something: incentives become perverse.

And sometimes those perverse incentives are unironically put on full display by the government itself.

For example: Canada’s government considers its doctors to be a cost source

First, some context: “Queen’s Park stopped talking with Ontario’s doctors back in January and is cutting services to save money… In early February, the provincial government decreed that medical services be cut by an average of 5 per cent. This includes a cut to all doctors’ fees by 3 per cent as well as cuts to primary care and specialist services originally designed to assist complex patients.”

Now the most important quote in the article: “If doctors see more patients than the arbitrary limit the government has set — government will force physicians to pay back any amount over their imposed limit.”

Parse that sentence a moment. If doctors do too much doctoring, they have to pay for it. On its face, this seems ridiculous. Doctors offer a valuable service, and they’re penalized for performing it? What crazy land have we entered?

(Emphasis from original.)

We have never had a free market system for health care in the United States, not really. Not since the 1930’s when the AMA, in an attempt to thwart threats by FDR to socialize medicine in the United States gave us the current employer-provided insurance pays health care model we have today, which has all the disadvantages of socialism (disconnection of the consumer from the cost of care, inability to shop for cost effective quality health care, lack of incentives for health care providers to improve or to find new business models), along with all the disadvantages of privately provided care (lack of access for the poor, variable quality depending on ability to pay).

And while there are those in this country who look at this as defining the need for a single-payer universal health care in this country, that poses its own problems. After all, where do Canadians who need surgery and who can afford it go to get their surgery?

And they do so because:

“In 2014, the average patient in Canada could expect to wait almost 10 weeks for medically necessary treatment after seeing specialist,” said the study’s co-author Bacchus Barua in a media release.

“This wait time is more than three weeks longer than what physicians consider to be clinically reasonable.”

We no longer teach philosophy.

To me, the value of philosophy is learning how to see alternate viewpoints and to construct arguments expressing a different point of view. It is the art of being able to put yourself in someone else’s shoes, and to see new ways of viewing the world.

Philosophy, in other words, is (to an extent) quite practical–or at least it should be, but sadly we no longer teach it as such anymore, and today’s modern philosophical research is not about understanding but about constructing ever more “brilliant” and abstract notions. Thinking about thinking about thinking about thinking about thinking really isn’t all that useful.

But philosophy really only has value if you explore completely different points of view. Just picking up Nietzsche is pointless unless you also pick up Hume and Descartes, at a minimum.

Some history is also worthwhile, because it helps to see if your thinking about how the world works, if there is a God, the nature of morality and the nature of man align with reality. I mean, it’s easy to contemplate a world carried on the back of elephants who circle on top of a turtle–but we can easily see with today’s technology that the world is not flat. And the age-old question “if a blind man can suddenly see, would he be able to see the shapes he used to know by touch” in fact was recently answered: no, he can’t.

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I mention this, because it seems that there are a large number of youths today who could really use a refresher in the history of ideas.

Because they don’t seem to respect anyone elses: “F*ck the law” – CUNY Law students attempt shout-down of conservative law prof

Disruptions of conservative speakers, even at law schools, has become a common tactic. We’ve documented dozens of such incidents.

The tactic, even when it doesn’t prevent the speech completely, is not merely the expression of disagreement. It’s an infringement of the speaker’s right to speak, and the audience’s right to hear that speech.

But it’s more. It’s meant to create a toxic campus atmosphere in which there is a price tag to expressing non-progressive ideas.

It just happened again, to conservative law professor Josh Blackman from Southern Texas College of Law in Houston. Blackman has established himself as a leading legal commenter on a variety of legal issues, and was recipient of the 2018 Joseph Story Award from the Federalist Society, an award “given annually to a young academic (under 40) who has demonstrated excellence in legal scholarship, a commitment to teaching, a concern for students, and who has made a significant public impact in a manner that advances the rule of law in a free society.”

Blackman was invited to speak by the Federalist Society Chapter at the City University of New York (CUNY) Law School. That did not sit well with some progressive law school activists, who tried to shut down and shout-down the event.

Had these students any respect for alternate ideas and ways of viewing the world, they would not be forcefully shutting down talks by another, employing the “heckler’s veto” on the realm of ideas. And while it is easy to view this as a form of speech, it is important to remember that it applies both ways–and the only way to override the veto is through force: either by arresting the protesters, or (as has been seen in the past) putting a bullet through the forehead of the hecklers.

Further, had these students any respect for history, they’d know that shrinking the universe of ideas down to only acceptable concepts (regardless of the reason why) has always in the past led to Fascism, not to Utopia. Making ideas dangerous requires sustained force–and at best all you do is prevent people from sharing those ideas in public.

And the utopia of people who only think ‘goodthink’ is the utopia of Big Brother in 1984.

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Now it’s not to suggest there aren’t ideas and concepts and philosophies which should never be countered.

But “countered” means hearing the ideas–then offering new ideas which attempt to share an alternate idea, an alternate philosophy, than the one the speakers are offering.

That’s in fact what I am doing here.

But I’m not going to a meeting of a bunch of liberal protesters and shouting them down. I’m not going to an Antifa meeting with a bunch of friends armed with baseball bats. I’m not using force to give these otherwise very deserving students a taste of their own medicine.

I’m not, in other words, shrinking the universe to only the “goodthink” I find acceptable, despite the fact that some of the people I oppose think words are violence.

After all, if discomfort was enough to disqualify speech, then there are huge sections of the Louve that needs to be burned to the ground since that is often the goal of modern art.

And I don’t believe those who think “trigger warnings” are necessary when talking about history, that “microaggressions” and “dog whistles” must be stopped with lectures and re-training, must be shouted down or stopped as with their own microagressions and trigger warnings–despite the fact that, from their framework, the very phrase “microagression” is, itself, used as a microagression (or an even larger aggression) against conservatives. Instead, I believe their ideas need to be examined in full, brought to the light of day, examined as an idea like all ideas in the realm of philosophy and dismissed as the idiotic rantings of wannabe Fascists. Fascists who have used these very tools (but by slightly different names) in places like pre-World War II Italy and communist Russia.

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All that it would take to really show the stripes of these young people protesting ideas they find uncomfortable would be to have them stage a good old fashioned book burning.

I think they would do it.

And when they do, I’m sure they’ll toss in Hume, Descartes and Nietzsche into the pile, along with the more contemporary works of philosophy they disagree with.

Doesn’t anyone worry about sun glare?

Los Angeles paints its streets white to battle Climate Change

The weird part here is that if you follow the pronouncements of the IPCC and those who strongly advocate the idea that we are experiencing man-made global warming caused by CO₂ emissions, they strongly discount the idea of the urban heat island effect having any significant impact on global climate change.

Which means Los Angeles–if you believe the advocates–is just wasting a lot of white paint.

Taxes Done!

It’s five o’clock somewhere…

Wouldn’t you think this is an argument for less government, not more?

Reliably left-wing BoingBoing–and even more reliably left-wing Cory Doctorow–posted:

If patrolling US soldiers can avoid shooting civilians, why can’t US cops stop murdering unarmed black men?

So French has a question: how is it that US soldiers stationed in hostile territory — where enemy forces mingle with civilians, where the soldiers and the civilians don’t even share a common language — are able to avoid killing civilians, while US police officers — whose on-the-job mortality is far lower than HVAC repairers and construction workers — shoot unarmed civilians, especially black people, all the goddamned time?

The answer to this, of course, is trivially obvious: the mandates of U.S. soldiers and of U.S. police officers are very different.

The way they operate are very different as well: U.S. soldiers operate under “rules of engagement” which involves very specific and tight controls on how and where they can engage “the enemy”, and U.S. soldiers are not interested in obtaining or building evidence which can stand up in a court of law. (Those few intelligence soldiers interested in obtaining evidence have little interest in building a case for a court of law; they are more interested in obtaining evidence of enemy movement for elimination.) U.S. military engagements do periodically kill the innocent: they are called “collateral damage”, and it happens all the time–but under various rules of engagement, while we are interested in “minimizing” collateral damage, we do not prosecute soldiers who kill the innocent.

Further, to be entirely blunt, the French simply do not have a sizable presence in Iraq, so there isn’t a good data set to claim that in the entirety of the Iraq war, soldiers there only managed to accidentally kill two civilians. The actual number is probably in the tens of thousands.

The police, on the other hand, have an entirely different mission and an entirely different reporting and command structure. Police are, for the most part, autonomous: they also have “rules of engagement” (police policies on the use of force), they also have a command structure. But police officers do not radio in to get explicit permission to stop a civilian they suspect are involved in a crime. They do not make a request up the chain of command to get permission to engage a criminal. For the most part they do not allow criminals to go because it’s not part of the operation.

This means police officers have a substantial burden placed on them to make proper decisions in the field on their own: to know if their actions are legal and within the parameters of police policy. They need to know the appropriate level of force to use when a situation goes pear-shaped. They need to be able to de-escalate a tense situation–and do so without real-time command structure support. (Meaning they need to walk into a volatile domestic situation without receiving instructions on how they may engage the couple through a command structure micro-managing their engagement that that couple.)

They are, in a sense, independent agents.

And sometimes they fuck up.

Sometimes the fuck-ups are stupid, such as the mom who got a ticket from a Montreal police officer for using a carpool lane with her daughter, because the pissed off officer, who didn’t see the daughter while pulling her over, made up a new law on the spot and forced her to sign the ticket, claiming that to count as a carpool passenger the second person must have a drivers license.

Sometimes the fuck-ups are far more problematic.

But as a percentage of total engagements–while any number greater than “zero” is a serious problem–the number of police/civilian engagements which go pear-shaped are extremely low.

Most police officers manage to do their job well. They manage to keep their cool in terrible situations, and continue to keep their cool while their jobs require them to step into terrible situations day after day after day. They manage to follow policy while identifying and helping the innocent and arresting and taking to jail the suspected criminals.

Most of the time, the cops are the good guys–hardened by years of terrible situations, but persisting in order to make things better for the rest of us.

It is undeniable that the number of innocent civilians killed by police officers is unacceptably high. It is also clear that certain policing policies and legal frameworks are just fucked up: the most serious (and a root cause of the situation that resulted in the riots in Ferguson and Baltimore) is Civil Asset Forfeiture abuse, which heavily targets the poor and black communities and which make police officers into enemies who may confiscate the cash in your wallet for no good reason. (In Philadelphia, the average amount of cash seized by the police was $178, which suggests much smaller amounts have been confiscated without legal cause, arguably in violation of the fourth amendment.

(Presumably in Philadelpha, if you look “suspicious”–and in most of the country, being black is sufficiently suspicious–all it takes is to have $40 in your wallet and walking around the “wrong neighborhood” (drug sellers generally operate in poor neighborhoods) for the police to find “sufficient cause” to take your cash away.)

Only a fucking moron would think this pattern of behaviors would not create an atmosphere of distrust as the police seemingly target poor blacks in poor black neighborhoods for abuse.

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The part that makes my head spin, however, is this:

By and large, the liberal left in our country seek more government, more government regulations and more limits on economic interaction of our citizens, in the name of creating a better organized and better crafted government.

Now I have argued that what we need is more intelligent regulation, to reduce regulatory burdens, to limit the power of government (especially at the local level) and for government officials to be able to think deeply on the results of the policies they pass. That includes rethinking “policing for profit”, which generally lands most heavily on the poor and on black communities, and includes everything from civic forfeiture abuse to the use of street parking laws in order to increase fine revenue in poorer neighborhoods with inadequate off-street parking.

(And I would like to see more laws which limit government power or which require government solutions rather than simply abusing individuals: for example, a “no street parking” ordinance should only be permitted in areas where there is adequate off-street parking for the residents and businesses there, and if such off-street parking doesn’t exist, the city must either provide such parking or they cannot pass no street parking laws. Of course this runs head-long into those on the Left who think we need to rely on more mass transit–but limiting parking to force more mass transit puts the cart before the horse.)

I’ve had it argued that of course to live in such an idealistic world we need more intelligent politicians.

And I concede that.

But living in a world where the government increases regulatory burdens on individuals and corporations (and where “de-regulation” is a pejorative) also requires more intelligent politicians.

And in fact, I would argue the left, in asking for more government, needs far more intelligent politicians than a right-wing government which looks to deregulate the economy. That’s because every regulation requires precise and accurate judgement as to if that regulation works as desired–and doesn’t have any undesirable side effects.

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Cory Doctorow and Boing Boing are reliable left-wing advocates for more government.

Which requires more police officers. Which requires more interactions between the police and the public.

Which creates more opportunities for bad shit to happen.

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I’ve noticed, by the way, a very common refrain on the left side of the blogopshere, one reflected in the Boing Boing article, is this:

Why can’t we have better government?

My answer is simple: because we’re human. We’re not perfect. We will never be perfect.

And in the worst case scenario we get a government run by President Donald Trump.

If that is not an argument for less government, I don’t know what is.

Remember…

No matter how low you get or how bad you feel about whatever relationships you have remember that there’s always someone that knows you in a way no one else ever will.

Someone that’ll always be there to listen and hold onto all the things you tell them about.

Mark Zuckerberg.

(Comedian Chris Purchase)

Imperfect competition, imperfect results–why the S/D curve is a nice idea, not a law of physics.

Lessons from “The Profit”

In the perfectly competitive model, price is equal to average cost and firms operate efficiently at minimum cost. Yet, Syverson finds that in the typical US industry a firm at the 90th percentile of the productivity distribution makes almost twice as much output with the same inputs as a firm at the 10th percentile. It’s not easy to measure inputs or outputs, of course, but even firms producing very uniform products show big productivity differences.

How can firms that use inputs so inefficiently survive? In part, competition is imperfect which gives inefficient firms a cushion because they can charge a price higher than cost even as costs are higher than necessary. Another reason is that small firms eat their costs.

A typical firm on The Profit, for example, has decent revenues, sometimes millions of dollars of revenues, but it has costs that are as high or higher. What happened? Often the firm began with a competitive advantage–a product that took off unexpectedly and so for a time the firm was rolling in profits without having to pay much attention to costs. As competition slowly took hold, however, margins started to decline and the firm found itself bailing. But instead, of going out of business, the firm covers its losses with entrepreneurs and family members who work without salary, with loans which grow ever larger, and by an occasional demand shock which generates enough surplus revenue to just keep going.

The rest of the article is very good and worth the read.

But I do want to make the following observation:

The cornerstone theory of microeconomic theory is the Supply and Demand curve. In it, the demand curve (which is how much stuff we want given a price) slopes downwards (as things get more expensive we don’t want as many of them), and the supply curve (as price goes up suppliers want to sell us more)–and where they cross is the point of economic equilibrium. Perturb these curves or put ceilings or floors on prices–and watch the price change, supplies change, and watch as excesses or shortages are created.

And this is an excellent philosophical model for understanding things like long lines around the block as people wait for gas during a gas shortage, or for understanding why price controls in Venezuela have made things go to shit.

Make no mistake, though: the supply-demand curve is not a law of physics: it’s not F=ma or e=mc².

First, the demand slope is demonstrably false for certain types of products. It’s a well known phenomenon that consumers often use price as a signal for quality–and will seek to spend more when buying certain types of products, such as cleaning supplies. Second, the supply curve is not entirely true either: when the cost of mass manufacturing is governed by the equation

Where ‘P’ is the price per product, ‘S’ is the setup charge for setting up the machinery or the capitol cost for buying a factory, and ‘C’ is the per-item material and labor charges for making a single item.

Notice all of this depends on the number of items ‘n’ you make–and as you make more, the cost per item decreases. This is the opposite of what we draw in the Supply/Demand curve.

So the supply curve does not go “zip” upwards, and the demand curve does not go “swoosh” downwards to meet in this neat little point in the center.

But even more importantly than all of this, the fundamental truth of the Supply/Demand curve is that it presumes Homo economicus, the ideal man who ideally understands and perfectly implements his manufacturing plant, who quickly adopts to price demands, and who knows how to find the perfect deal as it ideally suits him.

And it presumes instantaneous perfect knowledge: that the market itself on which these two curves are drawn engage in rapid and quick course corrections–more akin to an auction market than to the quite messy real world.

A real world where companies vary greatly in productivity, struggle to hang on, and periodically rely on handouts to survive.

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Yes, the supply-demand curve is a useful tool in helping us to understand certain economic phenomina.

But do not mistake it for a law of physics. Human beings are messy, disorganized and irrational creatures who are harder to predict than the behavior of subatomic particles as they whirl around a particle accelerator, or the gaseous molecules inside a container being compressed with a measurable amount of force.

Moving the goal posts.

A week ago Tim Cook observed about Facebook a relatively common refrain: that if you’re not the customer buying a service, you’re the product being sold.

Mark Zuckerberg’s response is an excellent example of moving the goalposts:

You know, I find that argument, that if you’re not paying that somehow we can’t care about you, to be extremely glib.

But that wasn’t the argument. Clearly Facebook cares about its users.

As the farmer cares about his pigs: making sure they’re comfortable, well fed, well housed, healthy and cared for–before they’re led to the slaughter.

Well fed and well housed pigs fetch more on the open market.