voluntaryXchange

Apple Store Horror Story*

David Gewirtz of ZDNet maintains the computers of a neighboring elderly couple. He told them to switch to an iPad. And then this:

The first AirPrint printer couldn't be set up without a PC. Period. The Apple store people actually recommended my elderly friends go out and buy a $300 cheap PC just to set up printing on the iPad.

My wife is the most thorough user of an iPad that I’ve met yet. But she still does most of her work on a PC.

Let’s face it; tablets are a whole lot better at pushing information to you, than pulling it in from you: they’re the IT version of network TV.

* I can see it now. Some enterprising person with more time on their hands than me will put together a YouTube video of this to parody American Horror Story.

Technorati Tags: ipad,apple,store,horror,story

Innumeracy and the Wild Card Race: USA Today Edition

USA Today is publishing wild card race standings for MLB that show incorrect GB (games behind).*

Here’s what they currently show:

Here’s a blowup of the top two rows for the AL:

It shouldn’t take a rocket scientist to recognize from the PCT that the Rays are a better team than the Orioles. And GB should show that. It doesn’t. Instead, it shows them as even.

There are a couple of ways to calculate GB, but the way I learned back in the early 70’s is to 1) subtract the bottom team’s wins from the top team’s wins, 2) subtract the top team’s losses from the bottom team’s losses, 3) add up those two figures and divide by 2. In this case you’d get 2 as the GB of the Orioles. This is not what USAToday shows.

The point of GB is to measure the minimum number of games for the bottom team to “catch” the top team. In this case, if the teams play 2 games each, and the Rays lose both, and the Orioles win both, they’ll each have the same record of 68-56.

* I really don’t pay much attention to this, but I noticed it on Monday in the local paper’s reprint, and it’s still there on Tuesday in the USAToday website.

Technorati Tags: baseball,mlb,wild,card,race,gb,games,behind,usatoday

Sunset On Mars: May 19, 2005

Via bookofjoe.

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What You Can Learn In Economics Class

The August 17, 2012 Doonesbury:

In class last year, during the first week, a student who had read something on my blog outside of class came to class the next day and asked what one of the words I used meant.

I gave him some good advice. Open Google, and type the keyword define and the word you don’t know, and it will give you definitions. He didn’t know this, and he was an A student. Here’s what I got when I looked it up in Google.

N.B.: Fungible has been a word on the move the last 2 decades. When I first heard it perhaps 25 years ago, it wasn’t in even in the first dictionary I looked at. Now, it’s such a useful word for an interesting property that there is a Wikipedia page for fungibility. Even though the word “fungibility” is not in Microsoft’s default dictionary for Windows Live Writer (which I use to write these posts).

BTW: If you find dictionary definitions to dry to be useful, you should try Wordnik, where people can post examples of the actual usage for words. It has a page for both fungible and for fungibility.

FWIW: I don’t use dictionaries any more. I packed up all the ones in the house and office about 2 years ago. They’re in storage, but I haven’t gotten them out once.

Cross-posted from SUU Macroblog, which is required reading for my macroeconomics classes.

Technorati Tags: economics,fungible,doonesbury

A Sign of the Times

Math is a skill not a talent.

You get better at it by having self-respect and not making excuses, and by having others not accept your BS.

National governments are not that different from school kids. Don’t believe it when someone says they aren’t.

Chops to Scott Adams for this August 17, 2012 Dilbert.

Cross-posted from SUU Macroblog, which is required reading for my macroeconomics classes.

Technorati Tags: dilbert,country,bad,math

Bar Density

I grew up in that red splotch that runs from Buffalo through Cleveland down to Pittsburgh:

Yes, there really were bars everywhere (even one across from my high school when the drinking age was 18 – although it was a place for old men not teenage boys).

I also lived in New Orleans for a decade … another red splotch.

Rank	Metro	Bars per 10,000 households
1	New Orleans, LA	8.6
2	Milwaukee, WI	8.5
3	Omaha, NE-IA	8.3
4	Pittsburgh, PA	7.9
5	Toledo, OH	7.2
6	Syracuse, NY	7.0
7	Buffalo, NY	6.8
8	San Francisco, CA	6.0
9	Las Vegas, NV	6.0
10	Honolulu, HI	5.9

On the other hand, I lived for 2 years in Tuscaloosa, in the pale orange splotch in central Alabama, and for 12 years now in the white parts of Utah.

I also lived for a year in the orange splotch in northern Utah. But there were no bars in the conventional sense there: you had to join a club.

Strange to go from one extreme to the other … although I think I’m glad I had the opportunity to live in the red areas when I was young.

Via The Atlantic.

This post is sponsored. If you are looking for a short term loan www.cashloans.co.uk can help.

Technorati Tags: bar,tavern,density

You Didn’t Build That? More Like Obama Didn’t See That

Here’s the money quote from Obama’s July 13 speech:

If you've got a business -- you didn't build that. Somebody else made that happen.

Many have criticized this. I offer a new criticism: the statement focuses on what is seen, and misses what is not seen … not once, but twice!

Let’s call what people do with their businesses “Build That”, and what the government does “Make That Happen”.

What Obama’s statement doesn’t say is that a person can also choose “Don’t Build That”, and that government can choose “Make Something Different Happen”.

There are actually 4 possibilities, and Obama is just talking about one of them:

	Make That Happen	Make Something Else Happen
Build That	1	2
Don’t Build That	3	4

Obama’s statement suggests that he sees cell 1.

Yet, even a businessperson who admits there is some merit in Obama’s claim is probably scared of cell 2. They’ve built a business, and perhaps the government did make that happen, but it isn’t at all clear their situation can be improved if the government sets out to make something else happen. The track record of our government just hasn’t been very solid for a couple of generations.

It gets worse in cell 3. If we take Obama’s statement at face value that government policy helped make businesses happen, how on earth do we rectify the behavior of the part of the population who didn’t build anything at all? It’s one thing to give someone help, see them succeed, and ask them to contribute back; it’s quite another to give someone help, have them go blow the cash on hats, and not even think to ask for anything in return.

I do know that Obama gets cell 4: he wants government to do something different to help those who haven’t been able to build anything. Who wouldn’t? Well, maybe someone who’s on the hook to pay for it.

And here’s where the thinking gets really muddy. Obama wants to make those in cell 1 worse off so that his shift to cell 4 turns out better. But what could be better for Obama than a future where more people build businesses that the government helped make happen? In short, his plan is take from cell 1 now to fund cell 4 to make cell 1 bigger off in the future? Huh?

I can’t make this stuff up, so how does Obama? By seeing cells 1 and 4 as the only possibilities. Meanwhile, cells 2 and 3 are always there, but are not seen by Obama.

Technorati Tags: obama,seen,unseen,didn't,build,somebody,else,made,happen

Increased Political Polarization Nonsense

I’ve been pretty vocal with a gut feeling over the last 30 years that people who talk about how bad political polarization is in America just haven’t read their history books.

Now, there’s interesting new research. It seems that people develop more extreme political views and a belief that polarization is a problem, simultaneously rather than independently.

So, people who are middle of the road (more or less like me) don’t see much polarization at all.

This is bothersome, though. It seems to me that the big pushers of the polarization viewpoint are the members of the legacy media. This research suggests they’re likely to hold more extreme views.

A lot of these folks seem to regard disagreement as sign of a problem.

Yet, think about Obamacare. Whether you were for it or against it, it’s clearly a big deal. It’s exactly the sort of thing we should disagree about. How exactly is that a problem?

Via Marginal Revolution.

Technorati Tags: political,polarization

Squid Can Fly

No, really, marine biologists have found squid that can fly.

… "Gliding" is too passive a term to describe what squid do when they leave the ocean for the air: "flight" is more fitting.

"From our observations it seemed like squid engage in behaviors to prolong their flight," Maciá says. "One of our co-authors saw them actually flapping their fins. Some people have seen them jetting water while in flight…”

Flapping qualifies as a whole lot better than what “flying” fish do, IMHO.

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Just Creepy … But If I’d Done This I’d Cherish It Forever

Using a 3-D printer to make an analog of your fetus. You must click through for pictures and video!

Right now I think this is nuts. But, my wife hasn’t been pregnant in 10 years. And I still think the first ultrasound of our first kid is amazing … his profile is still the same. So, if it were me, and the price was a bit lower, I’d probably do this.

Via Carpe Diem.

P.S. I wrote this on Thursday. On Friday I went to my wife’s lab; she needed an extra set of hands to do some prep work. She works in a cadaver lab. And on the shelves are models of fetuses. It’s not my cup of tea, but I’ve no doubt that she’ll be 3-D printing analogs of fetuses in a few years.

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