Saturday, November 17, 2007
xkcd @ wired
A geek with a paper cut does not bleed CH3, and every nerd has a heart lodged in his chest instead of a TI-85. Behind those thick polycarbonate lenses is a man of flesh and blood, a man who deserves to be loved. Don't believe him? He has the graphs to show it.
Wired has a story on xkcd, but really this is just an excuse for me to post one more of his amazing strips:
Thinking about dad
For some reason I'm thinking about my dad this year. He left us when I was about fourteen years old, he'd gone to live with his other wife (although he still hasn't remembered to divorce my mum yet...). He's got other children who are probably grown up themselves now. I don't know, I haven't heard from him in over twenty years.
Read the whole thing here, via Tim Worstall.
The right to have sex with a bike
From BBC News:
A man caught trying to have sex with his bicycle has been sentenced to three years on probation. Robert Stewart, 51, admitted a sexually aggravated breach of the peace by conducting himself in a disorderly manner and simulating sex. Sheriff Colin Miller also placed Stewart on the Sex Offenders Register for three years.
Mr Stewart was caught in the act with his bicycle by cleaners in his bedroom at the Aberley House Hostel in Ayr. Gail Davidson, prosecuting, told Ayr Sheriff Court: "They knocked on the door several times and there was no reply. "They used a master key to unlock the door and they then observed the accused wearing only a white t-shirt, naked from the waist down.
"The accused was holding the bike and moving his hips back and forth as if to simulate sex." Both cleaners, who were "extremely shocked", told the hostel manager who called police.
Sheriff Colin Miller told Stewart: "In almost four decades in the law I thought I had come across every perversion known to mankind, but this is a new one on me. I have never heard of a 'cycle-sexualist'."
I find this case very distrurbing. Since when is it illegal to have sex with an object in the privacy of your own home? Robert Stewart was sentented to three years on probation and put on the the Sex Offenders' Register (a list usually reserved for people raping or sexually harassing someone), when his only crime was masturbating in a way that is not to the taste of some. This is a gross miscarriage of justice, and one that has to be put right.
UPDATE: I am not alone.
Thursday, November 15, 2007
Friday Special 28
U.N. launches poverty monitoring site6 Billion Others - Everybody has a story to tell
Lay back and let us take you back to the sixties
Prisoner buys his own cell
Scientists find oldest living animal, then kill it
Tuesday, November 13, 2007
Why do people hate the market?
Stardom sent me this clip about Seva Cafe, a restaurant operating the Radiohead business model: eat first, then pay whatever you feel like.
Instead of a warm glow, I feel depressed. Why are projects such as Seva Cafe so loved? Why is someone volunteering to do social service more respected than, say, an industrialist that creates tons and tons of consumer surplus? What is wrong with commercialism? Why do people hate prices, money, and the market mechanism itself?
One potential reason behind the markets' bad reputation is their worrying tendency to generate inequality when left unchecked. Most people, however, are not simply against free-market libertarian societies; they are suspicious of markets at the micro level, even when these operate within reach of the redistributionist arm of the state.
My feeling is that people suspect markets because the incentives of the seller are diametrically opposed to those of the buyer: the former wants the price to be high, the latter low (with the opposite going for quality); furthermore, and perhaps more crucially, the parties in the transaction are usually better off concealing information from each other, or communicating outright misleading information (seen any ads recently?). This is not a problem in the textbook model of perfect competition, but real-world markets can generate a lot of ill feeling amongst participants. Information is gold, and it's often hard work. In contrast, in a perfectly altruistic 'giving' economy, the incentives of the giver ('supplier') are fully aligned to the incentives of the receiver ('the buyer'): the former is better off the happier he makes the latter. I'm way more confident in the quality of the food my mom serves me than that of my local chinese. I feel way more comfortable with a friend that 'cares for me' than with an explicitly selfish business associate. I prefer a partner who loves me to paid-for company.
One problem with this is that altruism exists in very small amounts, and it tends to constitute a very unstable equilibrium (a few people deviating is usually enough to bring to whole edifice crumbling down). And even if that wasn't a problem and the objective was to organise an economy of angels, there is no technology that is nearly as good as markets in determining the relative value of goods. An 'altruistic' model can work - often very well - only at the most micro of levels (e.g. in the case of Seva Cafe) where the lack of information can be brushed aside and gross inefficiency can be 'subsidised' from outside the system. But it is no way to run a full-blown economy. Alas, this is not immediately obvious.
The implications of the public's mistrust of markets are profound. Simply put, it's the resource allocation equivalent of having invented the chainsaw and insisting on using your nails to cut down trees. What can be done to change public perceptions of markets?
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