voluntaryXchange

Dear Barack

It isn't about your church.

It's about you.

People leave churches for all sorts of reasons, including peer pressure.

But, peers are people you know (in principle): potential voters are not your peers.

Who ever heard of someone leaving a church because of non-peer pressure?

I know what sort of person you are now.

Do you?

Technorati Tags: barack,obama,church,leave,resign,pastor

A Liberal Lacking Levity About Bush

Thane Rosenbaum:

This is a difficult issue for me. I didn't vote for President Bush – twice. And as a human-rights law professor, the events at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay, along with various elements of the Patriot Act and the National Security Agency's wiretapping of Americans, are all greatly troubling to me.

...

Everyone on 9/12 and thereafter – here in New York City and in cities across America – was quite certain that the next terrorist strike was imminent. ...

Sarin and anthrax – the nerve gas and poison, respectively – entered our national vocabulary. ...

... Suddenly, living in rural, outlying areas seemed like a sensible lifestyle choice.

We all waited for terrorism's second shoe to drop, and, seven years later . . . nothing has happened.

Other cities around the world became targets: Madrid, Glasgow, London and Bali; the entire nation of Denmark; and, of course, Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. ...

All this time Americans have been safe from suicide bombers, biological warfare and collapsing skyscrapers, while the rest of the world has been on red alert. And yet President Bush is regarded as the worst president in American history? Sorry, I must be missing something here.

... When a professed enemy succeeds as wildly as al Qaeda did on 9/11, and seven years pass without an incident, there are two reasonable conclusions: Either, despite all the trash-talking videos, they have been taking a long, leisurely breather; or, something serious has been done to thwart and disable their operations.  ...

Must be good; Cold Spring Shops liked it too.

Technorati Tags: Bush,terror

The Tradeoff: Driving Slow to Save Money

The EPA says that "each 5 mph you drive over 60 mph is like paying an additional $0.20 per gallon for gas".

I like to do arithmetic around here. It keeps me from being stupid. Here goes.

Suppose you need to drive 780 miles. You can do that two ways:

1. 13 hours @ 60 MPH, or
2. 12 hours @ 65 MPH

Further suppose that you get 20 miles to the gallon at 60 MPH, for a total of 39 gallons used.

The EPA says you are losing 20 cents for each of those gallons, for a total of $7.80 over the course of the trip.

Is an hour of your time worth more than $7.80? If so, you should drive at 65 not 60.

The math here implies that it is $7.80 for each 5 miles per hour over the speed limit. In my case, I make about $60 per hour on my main job. So, I should drive about 120 when other people are driving 60. Autobahn anyone?

I don't drive that fast. I have other reasons - like safety - for this.

But, don't get this wrong: I'm already choosing to save gas from what is optimal for me given the EPA's own metric.

What exactly do you call someone who nags you to do what you're already doing because it is "good".

Puritan, that's what.

Technorati Tags: gas,mileage,speed,savings

That 1940's Temperature Problem

Nature reported this week that the big global temperature drop of the mid-1940's was just a discontinuity brought on by the end of the war: temperature appears to rise more steadily through this period after a correction.

Then they crowed about global warming and something about the sky falling.

What they didn't crow about was that this issue was pointed out by a leading global warming skeptic, Stephen McIntyre. This is ... hmmm ... intriguing, since those skeptics have also pointed out data anomalies going the other way.

There's a red flag here if people who worry about whether the data is correct before they do their analysis, and who actually find errors going in both directions, are labeled as skeptics (or worse).

Via Tim Worstall.

Technorati Tags: anthropogenic,global,warming,bucket,sea,temperature

Gas As a % of Income

Lee Schipper - not a friend of big oil - notes in The Wall Street Journal that gasoline expenditures as a percentage of household spending have skyrocketed over the last 5 years from historic lows up to ... wait for it ... about the level in the muscle car heyday of the mid-60's.

Oh ... the horror.

There is no direct link to the May 27 article entitled "For All the Ecological Concern, Economy Drives Energy Use".

Technorati Tags: gasoline,spending,household,percentage

Quote 13 from "The Other Path"

There is some weirdness on this end with Live Writer, so this is a repost.

From The Other Path::

This is a crucial proposition, for traditional academic thinkers still believe that the causes of development are purely economic achievements—technological progress, accumulation of savings, investment in human capital, reduction of transport costs, economies of scale—when in fact these are not the initial causes. None of these alleged causes explains why, in some countries, people are more innovative, save more, are more productive, and are prepared to run greater economic risks. Are we inhabitants of undeveloped countries genetically or culturally incapable of saving, innovating, taking risks, or running industries? Or are these “causes” of development not the causes at all, but in fact development itself? Is the real cause an official set of legal and administrative institutions which encourage technical progress, specialization, exchanges, and investment? The evidence gathered in this book points in the latter direction. [pg 184]

This drew my attention as a macroeconomist because he's claiming that institutions are the impulse for growth rather than the propagation mechanism.

Technorati Tags: other,path,desoto,institutions,growth,impulse,propagation

A Message from Launchy

Lots of folks recommend Launchy so I went to download it.

This snarky message appeared on their sidebar:

This is where Ads would go, but you've got Javascript turned off - how sneaky of you. Very, very sneaky!

Quite.

FTNItK: Launchy allows you to start programs with keystrokes instead of clicking icons. Pretty useful if you touch-type or use a laptop with one of those mousubstitutes.

Technorati Tags: launchy,javascript,mousubstitutes

Live Writer and XP Security

I got hooked on Live Writer about 2 months ago.

I just got around to installing it at home.

Big problem. My home PC is more secure than the one in my office (because the network it connects to is less secure).

Live Writer wasn't happy because I had ActiveX controls blocked. That's a fairly typical security fix.

Unfortunately, Live Writer doesn't make it clear which ActiveX switch you need to change. So, here it is.

• Live Writer operates under the umbrella of Internet Explorer. So, you need to open Internet Options either through your control panel or IE.
• Then click the security tab. The option you need is under "Internet" (although I had to find that out by trial and error), so make sure that is highlighted.
• Then click the "Custom Level" button.
• The setting you need is called "Run ActiveX Controls and Plug-Ins". Set its radio button to "Enable" if you're lazy, or "Prompt" if you're worried about security. If you do the latter, you'll get the prompt every time you start Live Writer.

P.S. If you've noticed temporary posts up here periodically the last week or so, that's Live Writer failing and me cleaning it up.

Technorati Tags: live,writer,activex,error,message

Real GDP Growth Rate Revision

Not surprisingly (to macroeconomists, at least) the data continues to show the economy not being in a recession.

This morning's release of the revised estimate of real GDP growth for the first quarter of 2008 showed growth of 0.9% rather than the initial estimate of 0.6%.

This is still a D on my preferred grade scale, and a C in the college student grade scale that recent graduate was used to.

Technorati Tags: real,GDP,growth,rate,letter,grade

Quote 12 from "The Other Path"

From DeSoto's The Other Path comes a discussion of how the legal system discourages the use of capital, thus decreasing the marginal productivity of the labor that uses it:

We also know, however, that the costs of informality, including more expensive capital and the absence of facilitating legal instruments, generally result in lowered productivity. The fact that these businesses are more labor intensive than capital intensive reduces their productivity still further, as ILD’s researchers found: they calculated the informals’ productivity as a third of the formals. [pg 173]

Technorati Tags: other,path,desoto,quote,marginal,productivity