Monday Reading

Dave Homcy. Beautiful surf photography.

Mike Rowe, of Dirty Jobs, at TED explaining how he is often wrong.

Coolest riddle ever? An eccentric owner of an apartment building in Manhattan built clues and riddles into an apartment that is taking its newest owners years to solve.

Google's Android free open-source operating system is beginning to find it's way into a new generation of netbooks.

Band Aid-style calorie tracker. Quite possibly the greatest dieting invention ever or the worst thing to ever happen to anorexics.

(I guess I posted this a few days late.)

A Natural Experiment for the Death Tax

In 2010 the death/estate tax is repealed for one year. In my mind this will create a natural experiment. The name is fairly self explanatory.

Anyways here's what the death tax rates are for various years for an individual estate:

2005, 1.5 million, 47%
2006, 2 million, 46%
2007, 2 million, 45%
2008, 2 million, 45%
2009, 3.5 million, 45%
2010, exempt
2011, 1 million, 55%

So for example if someone dies today (2009) with a net worth of 5 million their heirs will pay 45% of 1.5 million - $675,000.

There are many reasons for and against the death tax, not that it matters, but I tend to be in favor of it. The fact that currently you can inherit 3.5 million dollars tax free is pretty insane. Regardless of the political consequences of all this the fact remains that in 2010 there is no death tax.

There may be no effect at all but you have to imagine that at least a few 80 year olds in bad health will be dropping dead at their own hands in late 2010. Maybe? It's possible at least.

Wall Street - Aloof

Disclaimer: This is really more of a rant than proper commentary.

Aloof: detached, having no need, desire, or much (if any) awareness of other people and social relationships.

This piece from the New Yorker is worth the somewhat longer than normal internet read. It's about the workers of Walls Street and why they're pissed about the fact that the rest of America wants to see them get a pay cut.

"He [Obama] knows that you can’t live in New York on $75,000.”

Seriously? You need to realize that you're just a privileged human being who happens to work hard. Do you deserve double or maybe even triple salary because you work 80 hours a week? Maybe more because of the cost of living in NYC? Sure, but $742,000? Seriously, fuck you. Don't tell me that it's your birth right because you went to an Ivy League school and work all hours of the day. There are maybe a dozen living people who deserve the gross domestic product of an African nation as their take home salary. There are people who work just as industriously and take as much risk as you do who make $8 an hour. You are not special.

I understand the need to compensate people for what they contribute to society and our economic system, but no one deserves that much. Especially when you would be jobless if it weren't for the government, or perhaps more properly the tax payer. I even understand why they fight for their viewpoint so endearingly. I get that it brings with it security and a lifestyle that is hard to give up, but wake up. The huge salaries of Wall Street attracted the brightest, hardest working, greediest people in the country. There was fierce competition and innovation and it went unchecked. No one blew any whistles when it got out of hand because no one wanted to lose their high paying job, and don't tell me "we didn't know." I know people who work there. They all knew that what they were doing was unsustainable and had dire consequences. In the mean time you collectively ruined the American and by proxy the world economy.

Picturequote

"Almost any man knows how to earn money, but not one in a million knows how to spend it. If he had known so much as this, he would never have earned it." - Henry Thoreau, journal entry from 1847, age 30

This is the Water Tower and John Hancock buildings in Chicago. I don't use much color film anymore as I can't print with it, but it does have qualities that can't be achieved in any other medium.

Hydroponics Update #2

So remember that lettuce and basil garden I was working on? The lettuce has finally taken off and it's growing pretty fast. I think the basil is a week or two behind. I still have some modifications to do to the whole setup too.

These pictures are taken 25 hours apart:


Notice the new set of leaves on the basil in the upper-left hand corner.


And that's three posts about food in a row...

Salad > Hamburger

For the past few years I've been asking myself this question; why is a salad more expensive than a hamburger? It's illogical. At McDonald's you can buy a salad for about $5.50 or a hamburger for $1.00. You can even buy a fancy big mac or whatever for $2 or $3. How is this possible? A cow requires more feed than do some lettuce and vegetables, vegetables don't need to be slaughtered, sterilized, frozen, cooked, given antibiotics, etcetera. Basically, I'm arguing that it is simpler to make a salad than it is to make a hamburger.

Well, I had some loose ideas why this situation exists, but now I think I fully grasp the variables at play. My explanation comes from the documentary King Corn. Brief rundown of the movie; two guys move to Iowa, rent an acre of farmland, live with a farmer, plant corn, go around learning what happens to corn after it's harvested, find out almost all of it goes to feeding animals, realize their corn isn't edible, harvest said corn, lose money, and get close to breaking even because of government subsidies.

Let me first start with subsidies. An agricultural subsidy is essentially a financial incentive given by the government to farmers in an effort to change the behavior of the farmers. Carrot = subsidy; horse = farmer. Here's what a subsidy does to an agricultural good, in this case corn:


First, farmers grow more corn because they know that they'll get money from the government to do so. In the movie it was $28 dollars an acre. The actual commodity price they received for their 180 bushels of corn was about $300. Anyways, once the supply curve shifts to the right (increases) you can see that price drops from P1 to P2 and quantity increases from Q1 to Q2. The true market equilibrium is disrupted in favor of an artificial one brought about vies a vie a subsidy that produces more corn.

Prior to the 1970's this meant the government paid farmers to leave fields fallow in an effort to keep commodity/food prices high. They still do this in some cases. The whole system is mind bogglingly complex. Then Earl Buntz came along and told farmers to "get big or get out [and] plant hedgerow to hedgerow." In response farms got huge, small and medium sized farms got pushed out (which is fine it's a natural trend within the market), and food got a lot cheaper. So what's the catch?

Corn got crazy cheap, yields skyrocketed, and now it's in absolutely everything. Over 95% of the corn you've ever seen is completely inedible in its raw state. About half goes to livestock feed, a quarter goes to ethanol production, about a fifth is exported, and a mere 4% is used to make high fructose corn syrup. Which is crazy that that percentage is so small because it's in just about every packaged food and is the main ingredient in soft drinks.

So again, half of all corn is used as feed grain. It used to be the case that cows lived on open grass pastures and ate grass. Now cows are raised that way for the first half of their lives then put in confinement so that they fatten up quickly. During this time they're fed a grain (read: mostly corn) diet. This diet would literally kill the cow if it weren't for the fact that they're slaughtered after about 120-140 days after starting this process. This practice leads to beef that is three times higher in fat and contains less omega-3 fat (a hard to get essential fatty acid). So, more saturated fat and less omega-3; not good. There are a number of other reasons farming cows this way is illogical but you get the point. Bad for you, bad for the cow, and as I'm about to show, bad for your wallet.

So why is a salad more expensive than a hamburger? Because the meat industry is huge (read: efficient) and feeding cows is cheap because of subsidized corn and grain. Farmland that could be used to grow other crops that humans can actually consume ends up as acreage for feed corn. Hence, the price of other vegetables is artificially raised because there is less land to produce it on. The end result is a lot of beef that isn't good for you, cheap ubiquitous soft drinks, high vegetable prices, cheap McDonald's meals, and fat Americans. It's also worth mentioning that subsidies imply a certain degree of inefficiency. The reasoning goes that the government gets its money from you, the taxpayer, so in giving the farmers money to grow something that wouldn't otherwise be profitable they are in fact distorting economic signals.

My solution? Simple - slowly end the subsidies. Let the market decide what it wants and at what prices. It would also mean less bureaucracy.

Side note: ending farm subsidies would make agriculture in the US more of a truly "perfect competition" situation which is really exciting... to me.

Sandwiches and Food Research

I recently ran across this site called Scanwiches which I found unique. I'm not sure if it was that inspiration nudging me subconsciously, or just the fact that I found a cheap produce store on my way to and from work.

Here is yesterday's red lettuce, tofu sauteed in garlic and olive oil, tomato, avocado, cucumber, red onion, jalapeno, and hummus sandwich on toasted wheat bread. It ended up at about 3" thick once I put on the top piece of bread and compressed it.


And here is today's romaine lettuce, tomato, cucumber, spinach, onion, red pepper, jalapeno, olive oil, and guacamole on toasted wheat bread.


It may be worth mentioning that lettuce and spinach make a sandwich look much more substantive than they really are - in terms of volume, not nutrition at. Of course this is the point. The mechanisms by which your brain tells you that you are full can be tricked. In this case your eyes are telling your brain there's a lot more calories and volume there than there really is. There's some really great work done by a guy named Brian Wansink on eating behavior. In one of his studies a soup bowl is designed to refill itself via a tube running underneath the table. Participants in his studies would unknowingly eat about 3/4 more soup simply because they could never finish. He has a plethora of elucidating experiments like this.

Among his other tips are to not eat directly out of containers as you tend to not recognize how much you're eating (about 1/3 more). Also, use smaller plates, you'll end up eating less and feel just as full. Here's a great new study he did on family style serving.

Reading Material

Sudhir Venkatesh on loan sharks. From Freakonomics.

If you haven't checked out the blog Stuff White People Like please do. It's hilarious. Here's "taking a year off".

First plug-in hybrid slated to sell in the US in November... at $87,000 it barely counts as it isn't accessible to hardly anyone at that price point. The Aptera 2e seems more sensible at about a third the price and $0.015 per mile in electricity.

I love Daniel Hamermesh. He's a guest poster on Freakonomics and most of his posts are dry and somewhat boring, but sometimes they contain some really great insight or just wry economic critic that I love. This one is on his lack of empathy for those who lost a lot of their retirement funds.

Here's a Q&A with one of the featured scientists from the documentary The Linguists. Decent read, mostly just want to see the documentary. I've read a decent amount about the subject. That is, the number of languages that are going extinct as small cultures die off. Perhaps I'm ignorant but besides the novelty of having thousands of languages to keep up separated from foreign peoples I just don't see the need for such a variety. Lamentable but practical perhaps?

And by far the coolest story goes to an Apollo 14 astronaut who claims that aliens exist and have visited us. Normally I'd be skeptical as usual and explain that while I believe that we are not the only living organisms on the celestial block the whole "government cover up" thing is a bit crazy. But an astronaut? To be an astronaut you basically need to be a genius, have multiple PhD's, be a professional athlete in great shape, serve in the military, be an excellent pilot or scientist... see where this is going? They're quite possibly the only profession more credible and trustworthy than a doctor. Then again they are doctors... who can also do more push ups than you.

What if You Could Live Forever?

In my last post of TED talks I linked to a video by Aubrey de Grey who talks about increasing the lifespan of humans. Here's a very good and long article that features him on MIT Technology Review. According to de Grey we could start seeing extensions in life expectancy in the next 25 years (the theory being that these extensions will keep you alive long enough to reap the fruits of the next breakthrough). So in a theoretical sense it's possible. Regardless of whether or not it is possible to live for a thousand years or indefinitely the question remains. What if you could? How would your behavior change? I've never really thought about that before, but it's a great thought experiment.

I would learn a bunch of languages. If you knew you were going to live to be a thousand years old what's 5 years of learning French, German, Italian, Japanese, etcetera? I'd probably be inclined to get a few PhD's too. Especially in medicine and law. The cost of going to school is high in terms of opportunity cost for such an unknown finite lifespan, but if medical school and residency is only .5% of your life as opposed to 10-15% it becomes much more attractive.

I'd be inclined to avoid cars, dangerous situations, and for that matter probably riding my bike through the city. If I live to be 78 or so (about average for someone my age) my odds of dying in a car crash are roughly 1 in 80 or 1 in 6,500 per year. Hell, I might even wear a light bullet proof vest... that seems extreme though (and it doesn't protect against head shots).

What about marriage and kids? How does that change? What about careers, or your view of global warming? What about jail sentencing, drug use, animal lifespan, or the length of schooling? I'm guessing a lot of our daily habits would change if we could live forever, and the interesting part is that in our lifetimes it's possible and in the long run it's more or less inevitable.

Nothing but TED Talks

I love TED talks. For those of you who don't know what TED is (technology, entertainment, and design) it's a gathering of the world's best and brightest each year in California. Speakers give talks on a range of fascinating subjects generally related to making the world a better place. I started watching a bunch of videos today and here are some of my favorites.

Paul Collier on "the bottom billion". 17 min.

Bonnie Bassler on how bacteria communicate and what that means for next generation antibiotics. 18 min.

This isn't a very good video, but the story is crazy. Fast forward to 50 seconds into this talk about an African boy who built a windmill when he was 14. "How did you [learn to build a windmill]?" "I went to library, and I read a book titled Using Energy and I get information about windmill and I try and I made it." - William Kamkwamba, on building a windmill out of trash as a 14 year old in Africa.

Joseph Lekuton tells a Kenyan parable. 5 min.

Johnathan Haidt on the psychology of liberals and conservatives. This is a must view. 19 min.

Aubrey de Grey on why we age and why we can and should live to be 1000. 23 min.

Jill Bolte is a neuroscientist at Harvard who experienced a stroke and lives to tell you about it. She gets a bit trippy but her insights are stunning. Being a scientist she's very left (rational) hemisphere dominate but this portion of her brain is shut down during her stroke. She then for the first time sees the world from here right hemisphere's perspective. 19 min.

More Cool Art

This is an awesome photographer by the name of Richard Ross. Hat tip: Steve Urich

Here's an art blog called Arrested Motion that has a ton of great artists on it.

This is Mark Wagner. He makes collages out of $1 bills. Here's an interview with him. Awesome stuff.

If This Were a News Blog...

The first 80% of the show would all be about unemployment, the depression we're denying we're in, and in general what went wrong. If you have any desire to read stuff like that then check out this Q&A with Richard Posner on Freakonomics. It's semi-easy to understand and spot on.

I guess number two on the list would be global warming (which should really be retitled global climate change). Here's a TED talk about cleaning the air with an incredibly easy to implement solution involving house plants.

Then probably a story about hybrid cars even though they aren't very viable. This is from GOOD Magazine and outlines cars and technologies you can actually buy now or in the near future.

And then they'd finish it off with a homicide story even though murder rates have been falling since the dawn of man. This is a TED talk by Steven Pinker.