Stuff Worth Reading

Almost all this stuff comes via Freakonomics.

Fixing bank embezzlement; Frank Abagnale style.

The evolutionary psychology behind elevator rides.

Amazing sulfur mine photos.

I started to write about the backlash against macroeconomists but the stuff I say just isn't that relevant. Alas, someone smarter than me wrote about it.

And finally - a real plug-in hybrid car will hit the market later this year (only 500 of them, but it's a start). And it's a Toyota Prius (50 city/49 highway).

Honda released a new version of it's hybrid car called the Insight (40 city/43 highway). I've been telling people for a while now that hybrids are actually a bad buy. You never recoup in gas savings the money that you originally spent on the more expensive car. Instead you can go out and buy a Corrolla, Focus, Fit, Civic, Etc. for $16,000-$20,000 and get around 35 mpg no problem. Priuses are supposed to cost $22,000, but they're scarce so buyers tend to pay a few grand above sticker price. The Insight is supposed to cost less than $20,000. It also features an eco drive mode and an eco assist which is basically an interactive dashboard that makes hypermiling a game. The testers in the Wired article were able to get over 65 mpg while using both.

And here's a fun video of a smart car ($12,000-$21,000 31 city/41 highway) crashing at over 70 mph into a concrete wall.

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"I do not know with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones." - Albert Einstein in a letter to Harry Truman

I went to the Printer's Row Book Fair yesterday scouring the area for old platinum prints. I found one. This is a 12 inch coastal gun being fired. You can see the round moving just beyond the barrel. I'm not sure where or when it's from, but my guess is that it's Great Britain around one of the world wars.

Obama's Speech in Cairo

Even Wolfowitz approved of Obama's much hyped speech in Cairo.

The whole thing is 55 minutes.

What is Your Life Worth?

Or, different ways of visualizing money.

This gets a little fluffy but stick with me here - sometimes when I'm at work I wonder how quickly whatever we're building would get built if it were just me working. By extension of that idea I sometimes wonder how much I could physically produce in my lifetime, and of course we can assign a monetary value to that work. Here:

Median Income x Career Length = Lifetime Earnings

$28,600 x 40 years = $1,144,000

Or $13.92 an hour assuming 2,000 hour years (40 hours a week x 50 weeks).

The income figures were procured from the US Census Bureau here and represent the median income of anyone over the age of 15 who worked in the US in 2005. I based my 40 year career length on the fact that that is how long most pension plans for the military, police, etcetera require you to work to receive full benefits.

So what does this mean? It simply means that at present value (in 2005 dollars, inflation changes this number over time) the average person produces 1.14 million dollars in their lifetime. Why I like to think like this is because it helps me visualize the true cost of a construction project or political plan. It's easier for me to visualize 100 people working for their entire lives than it is to be told X amount of dollars and try to grasp what that really means.

Examples:

Millennium Park cost $475 million to construct (it was supposed to cost $150 million). Thus, it cost about 415 human lifetimes of work. As opposed to 131, so 284 peoples lives got lost in that one.

What about a trillion dollars? How many lifetimes does it take to accumulate that kind of wealth?

$1,000,000,000,000 / $1,114,000 = 874,126 lifetimes or lives

So next time someone talks about spending a trillion dollars just remember - what they're really talking about is the allocation of almost a millions peoples' lifetime labor.

On a separate note, I remember reading last year that the EPA slightly devalued their estimation of what a human life is worth to $6.9 million from $7.8 million. I'm not going to go into it here too much, but trust me, this number does need to exist so that policy can be drawn up. If a human life is worth a billion dollars imagine what highways and cars would look like. We'd be driving bumper cars at 5 MPH surrounded by bails of hay - at $10,000 we'd look like China. Anyways, why the disconnect between the reality of $1.14 million and our estimation of $6.9 million? Well, my figure is the cold hard monetary value. The EPA's represents all sorts of court cases, what people are willing to pay to extend their life by another month (huge number), etc. The point is that there is this odd disconnect of about 600% between what we're worth monetarily, in the "you're just a number" sort of way, and what we think we're worth.

If only I could somehow get people to project their estimation of the value of human life onto something I could sell...

Hiatus

I've been pretty lazy on here lately. Yeah...

But I have 12 drafts that I'll be publishing as soon as I get home from my travels, so you (who ever the hell that is) have that slightly outdated info to look forward to.

Till then...

At 2:20 no ones organs are damaged and at 3:20 Mancow says water boarding is torture.

Girlfriends' Plan to Save the Economy

Nation's Girlfriends Unveil New Economic Plan: 'Let's Move In Together'

Reading

Left vs. Right on economic policy. Difference... 3.21%.

I haven't thought too much about if this little economic thought exercise works or not, but it's interesting none the less. How to fix the economy.

Here's a good article from the NYT dealing with the economic relationship between the US and China. And here's a slight correction by Paul Krugman.

Interesting photo of the day. (HT: Steve Urich)

Daguerreotype

Anonymous, French, Nude woman with cushion, c. 1855, daguerreotype, 5.9x6.7 cm

I found this in The Art of the Daguerreotype by Stefan Richter (p. 75). What I like about this photograph, other than the fact that it's a daguerreotype, is that candid, frank, and relaxed portraiture didn't really seem common place for another 100 plus years. Still today it's not the norm. I always feel very distanced from people in old photographs because they look so rigid and nothing like the people I encounter on a daily basis, but not so with this portrait.

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This picture was taken (with my phone) at my family's warehouse in Chicago Ridge. My grandfather bought it in the 1964. We're tearing it down in a few weeks and in the mean time we're clearing it out. I'm not taking as many photos as I should, but I found this hanging in the wall of a room that hasn't seen foot traffic in perhaps ten or twenty years.


It's makes more sense if you know that my grandfather was a workaholic. He worked seven days a week well into his late 60's and 70's, and this isn't office work we're talking about. It gave him the kind of physical strength that body builders can only dream about. My dad once told me that he asked his dad if he could start taking Sundays off because he had a wife a kids. His response was something like "what are you queer?" Not very PC, but then again growing up during the Great Depression, fighting the Nazi's, and living through the Cold War might change your mindset a little.

Shopsin's

A few weeks before going to New York I watched a documentary called I Like Killing Flies about a small breakfast and lunch spot in lower Manhattan. It's run by an guy named Kenny Shopsin who has a very unique, almost ineffable personality. The best description I can give of him is that he's just very honest about himself and others - a quality I find lacking in most people. Combine that with the fact that he's very nice yet blunt and you get Kenny Shopsin:



Just before I went back to Chicago I caught an F train to the Essex St.-Delancy stop and ate breakfast at Shopsin's located at 120 Essex Street. They've changed storefronts since the documentary was made. The place had seating for maybe 15 people tops.

I actually met Kenny Shopsin too. He sat about five feet to my left conversing with customers (which seemed more like friends who ate there a lot) the entire time I ate. He was really nice and fun to talk to. Apparently his brother is an architect who teaches at Pratt... which is funny because just hours before I spoke with a friend who told me that he's starting a sort of environmental architecture program at Pratt in the Fall. Crazy stuff. It's only once you start talking to people, anyone really, that you find out how similar we all really are.

Anyways, the menu (1,2) is huge and really original. I had the Iliana which consisted of a egg and cheese omelet, mangoes, guacamole, chips, and refried rice. It was really good.

Scientists Recreate RNA (beginnings of life)

Just read this.

I don't see how it would be possible for these scientists not to win a Nobel Prize, but crazier things have happened.

New York's "Green" Street Vendors

A green street vendor at 84th Street and Park Avenue.

A while ago I read that New York was going to issue another 1,000 street vendor permits, in addition to the already 3,000 that they issue, to "green" carts that would peddle produce exclusively. To be honest I thought it was a bad idea. They were controlling where they could set up shop, the number of permits available, and the good to be sold. I suppose specifying the good to be sold, in this case produce, is fine, but the rest just seemed like a bunch of bureaucratic hassle and piecemeal economic development.

Wow was I wrong. Why doesn't Chicago have these things? I don't care what silly bureaucratic nonsense has to go down. When I was in NY I ate more fruit and less crap because I could pick up two apples and two oranges for $2 right before I hoped on #2 train in Harlem everyday (too many twos?). Harlem - fruit? There have been entire chapters in prominent books devoted to the fact that getting produce to city dwellers is a problem. Especially if they're poor.

Naturally, the grocery stores complained and of course they have a point, but here's mine. I live in a city and when I go grocery shopping I generally have to carry it home. I don't like to go shopping for groceries too often so I buy a limited amount of fruit due to its weight and perishablility. Thus, by placing fruit strategically on my walking routes my diet and well being were improved.