Screw you, median voter

Now that Alaska Governor, soon to be ex-Governor Sarah Palin is free of her obligations in Anchorage, national Republican leaders including Michael Steele are rolling out the welcome mat for her to campaign nationally for Republican candidates. Quite understandable, given the fervent support she manages among people who put political bumper stickers on their cars and signs in their lawns. But the Associated Press reports that in Virginia and New Jersey the state Republican Parties are "wary" of inviting soon to be ex-Governor Sarah Palin to campaign on their behalves.

The AP leans too far - that the parties aren't actively seeking out Palin when no one yet has a clear idea of what she's really doing hardly means they're wary of her. But at least in Virginia the Republican Party would be wise to maintain some distance. In a state that Democrats have won in both national and state elections, it makes little sense to inject a polarizing figure remembered more for her incoherent interviews than her significant policy ignorance. Or maybe its the other way around.

Palin's rhetoric may resound with voters in states harder hit by the economy. But anyone who thinks that Virginia's median voters are going to vote for someone associated with a losing VP candidate, resigned governor should probably go slay some salmon.

Medicinal marijuana and social media

Aren't social media proponents kind of like medicinal marijuana supporters? How many protesters are really that concerned about providing pot to terminally ill patients? The proscribed use case matters, but I'd venture that for most its just a rationale.

Sometimes all you need is a goddman aspirin. Sometimes another PR blog isn't the answer.

Imagining a fearful future

We make an important error in assuming that we can extrapolate what the future will hold based on past events. Equally we err by assuming what the future will hold based on a vivid imagination.

British risk expert John Adams describes an architectural competition in which entrants are supposed to design a building designed to withstand a specifically described terrorist attack (pdf, 3 pages):

Why is this pernicious? It is a classic example of paranoia. The threat that those entering the competition are required to design against is unprecedented. It is a gross exaggeration, a figment of the anticipator‟s imagination.

Meanwhile, Adams goes on to say, more people were killed in road accidents in one week in Britain than died in the July 7, 2005 suicide bomb attacks in London. But we keep imagining and preparing for new catastrophic scenarios at the expense of tangible, correctable accidents and disasters (see: hurricanes, auto accidents).

We can only infer so much about the future from the past, but by building fictionalized scenarios into our plans we overcompensate. It's generalizing based on fictional evidence.

Campaign finance distortions and the size of Congress - a thought

The cornerstone of economics and the study of supply and demand is that as a good becomes more dear people become willing to pay more for that good. People are quite willing to pay for political favors in many forms because the stakes are high and the seats in Congress dear.

There are, then, two ways to remedy this. One is to tighten the Congressional purse strings. This is the libertarian dream. This won't happen.

The other less effective method might just be increasing - say twofold - the number of seats in Congress. It doesn't change what the House as a whole controls, it doesn't change the sum of the stakes. But it greatly dilutes each seat's power and would, I think, make it more difficult for lobbyists and campaign donors to buy a consolidated voice.

That, or it might lower the price of wrangling a voice and result in fewer but more serious breaches of political finance regulation.

Whatever the notion, we can be sure that the foxes will never legislate themselves out of the hen house.

Is salaried overtime theft?

There's talk in some economic circles now of reducing hours worked in the US in order to create more employment opportunities. I'm not actually going to address that or pretend to understand all of the arguments against and in favor of the lump sum theory of labor. But it's refreshing to think that some people are considering the amount of labor we provide, and what we - individually and a society - get in return.

Just as there is nothing morally good about working in excess, there is nothing morally wrong with working a lot. If that is engaging or important or financially rewarding I don't see anything wrong on its face with working a lot. What we should question is the silly arrangement by which employers pay a fixed rate and can expect free overtime.

This is the arrangement by which the white collar world operates. Let me motivate the ethical question: if you are paid to work full time, by which we assume 40 hours for purposes of example, you are expected to work those 40 hours. If you do not, if you work 20 hours and take pay for 40 hours of work, you are shirking your job. Moreover, you are defrauding from your employer. You have taken pay for twice the work actually performed.

Now when the employer expects additional labor beyond the implicitly contracted labor, this is rewarded by a nice commendation, maybe. If anywhere else the buyer took more of the good purchased without paying more this would be called stealing. I can't go buy a bag of coffee and then say, "thanks, I'm going to add 20% more to this bag and leave without paying."

Something about the takings in this arrangement strikes me as very coercive and incompatible with the ethics of a free market.

Child Poverty by US State

Nathan at the awesome blog Flowing Data posted a call for visualizations of age based poverty rates in the U.S. It's an interesting and challenging way to look at the data - state delineations provide a lot of context for the numbers, but are at the same time arbitrary and heterogeneous (hello heteroskedasticity) bucket o' data.

Does it really make sense to compare the District of Columbia, an urban geography with population of less than 600,000 and 68 square miles, to the state of Texas, with population of 24m and 270,000 square miles? These are our political entities though (except for DC) so there is some reason to working with them. Here are child poverty rates (through 18 years of age) by state.



Here is a comparison of child poverty rate by the median age in each state, ranked in ascending order by state median age.



A county level analysis would probably yield better comparisons, although it'd be much more tedious, and the data is probably not as robust or accessible. Some other dimensions for comparing this data:

• Obesity rates
• Literacy rates
• Population density
• Population distribution (across age groups)
• Religiosity
• Education
• State GDP per capita (high GDP per capita is compatible with high poverty rates)
• State GDP from agriculture
• Immigrant population

Hope to get some additional visualizations up in the next week, given that I can find some of these other data.

Note: apparently Blogger's resizing/linking of uploaded images sucks.

Blog Fail and Social Media as a form of post-modern psychic masturbation

I wrote 66 entries in 2008. I wrote 74 entries in 2007. This says nothing of the quality of these entries. However, I failed in writing more in 2008 than in 2007. My readers thirst for more content! In 2009 I will surpass the entries from 2007.

With that done, on to the part where I said something about masturbation. Post-modern psychic masturbation. Whatever that is.

I style myself a proponent of the technology and leverage-ready paradigm that is social media. But in 2009, the social media pupa has to burst from its isolated cocoon.

Case in point: http://search.twitter.com/search?q=twitter. I'll admit, I've Tweeted about Twitter. Now I'm blogging about Twitter. But if the core users of a ready-to-go communication platform spend all of their time talking about how to use the platform, instead of just making it happen, that's what I call post-modern psychic masturbation.

Don't create a wiki article about how to use wikis for harnessing, synergizing, and leveraging organizational knowledge nuggets. Use a wiki to start doing the things you need it to do.

Remember how Gutenberg is known for having printed that pamphlet on how great printing presses are and the many ways in which they can be used? Of course not. The Holy Roman Emperor probably made post-modern psychic masturbation punishable by death. No, he printed a f*cking poem, and then a Bible. Amazingly, despite the total lack of modern amenities like the Internet and vacuous corporate babble, people were smart enough to understand the value of the printing press.

The lesson: do it well, and do it clearly, and people will get it.