A chicken in every pot and a flat-screen in every precinct house

Assest Forfeiture must have really arrived. There are now "how to" seminars springing up. It's like house flipping for coppers.

Police are advised to focus on flat-screen TVs and cars. Jewelry and computers just aren't worth it.

Why?

Since the cops haven't figured out how to directly use jewelry and computers (really, I am not making this up) like they have cars and TVs, the former are sold at auction and are thus not very remunerative!

Other advice is for police to tell the city attorney what items they really want so the city can make sure the owners don't get those particular pieces back.

More hypocritical racist derp from the WSJ

This time from Bret Stephens:

"For the rest of us, the lesson from Egypt is that democracy is a blessing for people capable of self-government, but it's a curse for those who are not. There is a reason that Egypt has been governed by pharaohs, caliphs, pashas, and strongmen for 6000 years."

As Mungo might say, Sweet Fancy Moses!

Hey Bret: what people were "self-governed" 6000 years ago? How about 1000 years ago? Heck how about 500 years ago?

Follow up question for Bret: When the age of self-governance took off, what did the great self-governing powers do? Oh, that's right, they ran Egypt as their colony.

One last question for Bret: Who allowed Hose-head Mubarak to "rule" Egypt for 30 years and destroy any and all civil institutions and civil society? Don't tell me, let me think, it's right on the tip of my tongue... Oh yeah! IT WAS US. THE GOOD OLD SELF-GOVERNED USA.

The WSJ: where racism, hypocrisy, and derp are not bugs, but rather features.

Harvard students fight back!

At least some of the 100+ accused cheaters are not taking the heat lying down.

Their main excuses seem to be:

1. the class was supposed to be easy

2. plenty of other people cheated in the past.

Not sure who teaches logic at Harvard, but maybe the powers that be should check the syllabus?

Mr. Bad Example

RJ Gordon has written a "new" paper. It's basically The Great Stagnation (with no cite) without the happy bits.

In it, he gives, and Paul Krugman repeats, a very weird example:

A thought experiment helps to illustrate the fundamental importance of the inventions of IR #2 compared to the subset of IR #3 inventions that have occurred since 2002. You are required to make a choice between option A and option B. With option A you are allowed to keep 2002 electronic technology, including your Windows 98 laptop accessing Amazon, and you can keep running water and indoor toilets; but you can’t use anything invented since 2002. Option B is that you get everything invented in the past decade right up to Facebook, Twitter, and the iPad, but you have to give up running water and indoor toilets. You have to haul the water into your dwelling and carry out the waste. Even at 3am on a rainy night, your only toilet option is a wet and perhaps muddy walk to the outhouse. Which option do you choose?

There you have it people. Case closed. We are all doomed because....we have already solved the fundamental problems facing humanity (at least for the top 80% of people in developed countries)??

Really? That's supposed to make me feel bad about the current era? I get the meat & potatoes and the carmel frappacino too?

Boo-hoo!

Just turn this around and you can see how dumb it is. Suppose we had the internet of today but no running water. How long do you think it would take to invent it? An hour? A day? Then we'd get its implementation funded on kickstarter in no time flat.

Our only real snags would be the decades of environmental studies required by the government and the protests of the United Brotherhood of Night Soil Workers.

What Gordon's paper does for me is remind me that we in the rich world should (yes, I said should) be more focussed than we are on our fellow humans who still live without "the great inventions".

Sergio loses even when he wins

Yesterday, Sergio Garcia won his first PGA tour event in 4 years along with $936,000 in prize money. Sergio won with a local guy as his caddie having separated from his regular caddy the week before.

Here, let Jon Wall tell you about it:


Garcia came into the week without a caddie on his bag, after parting ways with Gary Matthews following the PGA Championship. Looking for someone with local course knowledge, Garcia decided to give Faircloth a try for the week. The move turned out to be a blessing in disguise for both player and caddie, as Garcia went on to win his first PGA Tour event in four years, and Faircloth walked away with the flag on the 18th green -- the winning caddie usually takes the flag as a tournament keepsake -- and a once-in-a-lifetime story he'll be able to tell his grandkids one day. Oh, and another thing: a five-figure payday. Garcia earned $960,000 for his win, and considering caddies usually receive 10 percent of the paycheck for a win, the substitute loop could stand to make $96,000 for four days of work. There's a good chance Faircloth couldn't make anywhere close to that much on the local circuit. Ever. While Garcia wouldn't divulge how much he'd get for the win, he did say, "he's not going to get what a normal caddy would get because his job was fairly easy."


Wow. "his job was fairly easy". Dude you haven't won in 4 years. His job was Herculean!

So the cup-spitter finally gets a win and celebrates by stiffing his caddy.

There's a word for that, and I'm pretty sure it's "douchebag"!

The CBO and potential output

Jim Bullard from the St. Louis Fed has been pilloried for his comments about what affects potential output.

Noah Smith accuses him of being a Solow Model denialist (saints preserve us)!

Tim Duy says that can't be right because Bullard is too dense to even realize that Potential GDP is calculated using the Solow model.

People, I'm not here to defend Jim Bullard. But I am here to say that according to the link provided by Duy to the CBO's description of how they calculate potential output, the statistic is a mess. Making sausage is a much cleaner enterprise.

First off, it's based on an accounting identity! God I love the government:

Q_nfb = AL^aK^1-a

(this is my crudely typed version of equation 3 in the CBO document)

Sadly they forgot the third bar in the equal sign. This is an accounting identity! A is TFP which is defined as what's left over in output after we impute the effects of labor and capital (the CBO freely admits this by the way). a is assumed to be 0.30 and constant over time.

So, forecasting potential output means forecasting potential TFP, potential labor, and actual capital (read the document if you doubt me) and plugging those values into the equation.

People, they ain't using the Solow model to accomplish those tasks!

Potential labor and potential TFP are forecasted by piecewise linear regressions where the breakpoints ARE NOT DETERMINED BY ANY SORT OF STATISTICAL CRITERION (again, read the document if you doubt me).

The CBO method is arbitrary and weak. Defending it via appeal to authority by saying "it's based on the Solow model" is pathetic.

First of all, the Solow model stinks! It cannot come close to describing the evolution of the world income distribution since 1950.

Second, the measure of potential output is crucially dependent on all the forecasting assumptions used to produce potential Labor and potential TFP, which are not based on any real economic theory or optimal statistical algorithm.

Finally, the CBO itself says things that are remarkably Bullard-like right in the document Duy links to:

"CBO's framework explicitly models the factors that determine the accumulation of capital, so the projection for the capital stock is fully consistent with CBO's projections for private saving and the federal budget. Specifically, a higher projected rate of saving will lead to faster accumulation of capital and faster growth of potential output. Therefore, a higher projected federal surplus, which generally raises

the rate of national saving, will speed up the growth of the capital stock and potential output in the model. Conversely, a recession or other event that depresses the saving rate will temporarily slow the accumulation of capital and the growth of potential output."

That's right, according to the CBO, federal deficits lower the path of potential output! It must be true, after all, it's based on the Solow model.

Give me a break.

Mars needs women!

ooops, make that "Norway needs butter"!!

Yes, one of the richest countries in the world has "run out of" butter! Just before the holidays!

Oh, the humanity!

The soaring popularity of a fat-rich fad diet has depleted stocks of butter in Norway creating a looming Christmas culinary crisis.

Norwegians have eaten up the country’s entire stockpile of butter, partly as the result of a “low-carb” diet sweeping the Nordic nation which emphasizes a higher intake of fats.

“Sales all of a sudden just soared, 20 per cent in October then 30 per cent in November,” said Lars Galtung, the head of communications at TINE, the country’s biggest farmer-owned cooperative.

A wet summer which reduced the quality of animal feed and cut milk output by 25 million litres had already limited supplies and the shortage has led some pundits to suggest the world’s eighth-largest oil exporter offer some of its plentiful fuel supply in exchange for butter.

Butter is now selling on Norway’s top auction website, with a 250-gram piece starting at around $13, roughly four times its normal price.

Top dairy producer Denmark lies just across a narrow sea channel, but its stores of creamy butter will be kept out of the country by the high import duties of Norway, the only Nordic nation that does not belong to the European Union.

.....and there we have it. Domestic demand surged, domestic supply faltered and IMPORTS ARE FORBIDDEN!

Norway doesn't need butter, they need FREE TRADE!

We often see stories about localized shortages of global commodities and they invariably have bizarre trade restrictions behind them.

Perhaps the poor Norwegian, tragically now unable to eat a stick of butter for Christmas brunch can console themselves by knowing that their domestic butter industry is very profitable.

Stupid Economist tricks

Was reading the Economist, the Aug. 13-19 issue and found two very jarring and wrong statements.

On page 71 in the article "Poor dollar standard":

"The 66 members of the dollar block have a collective GDP of over 9 trillion...the list includes...rebels such as Venezuela, which expresses disdain for American imperialism even as it surrenders its monetary sovereignty to America's central bank".

Wow. That is amazingly incorrect.

According to page 89 of the same issue, Venezuela's inflation rate is around 27% while the America's is under 3%. It's pretty clear that Hugo, for all his faults, hasn't "surrendered" his inalienable right to have an irresponsible national monetary policy.

On page 70 in the "Buttonwood" column:

"The Bretton Woods system had strict capital controls, designed to protect the exchange-rate peg. But these became unnecessary in an era of floating rates."

This is somewhere between naive and wrong. First, the written articles of the IMF from Bretton Woods, mandated full currency convertiblity for trade purposes (which wasn't actually achieved until the early 1960s), but allowed individual countries to decide whether or not to have capital controls. Controls were not part of the system requirements. Further, rather than the end of the Bretton Woods era causing the decline of capital controls, as the article claims, the decline of the effectiveness of controls DURING the Bretton Woods era helped to bring about the demise of the system.

Buttonwood should seriously consider reading Barry Eichengreen's classic "Globalizing Capital".

Economist FAIL.

carts, horses, and asses

Why do media outlets publish op-eds by politicians? This piece by Ed Rendell and Scott Smith is perfect for a Mungowitzian "grand game".

Apparently the US used to be "the world leader in infrastructure"! But sadly now we suck in infrastructure. It seems that the Chinese are eating our lunch in infrastructure.

The authors claim that, because we haven't spend enough on infrastructure, "China is now home to six of the world's 10 busiest ports—while the U.S. isn't home to one."

This is where the first two words of my title come in. I hate to break it to you Ed and Scott, but the US could spend trillions on ports and China would still have 6 of the world's 10 busiest ports and we'd probably still have none.

But that's because China has at least 3 times as many people as we do, China is growing at 8 to 10 percent annually, and China is the export king of the world. They don't have busy ports because just because they spent a lot of money on infrastructure!

If the authors really wanted US ports to be busier (as opposed to just wanting the government to spend more money), they should lobby their colleagues to pass the trade deals with Colombia, South Korea, and Panama.

And of course this masterpiece would not be complete without Ed and Scott making the sacred call for a national infrastructure bank. What politician wouldn't want a $500 billion slush fund to dig into come election time?

What the last word of my post's title refers to is left as an exercise to the reader!

Bad Spam: These Kids Today...

Spammers used to take a little pride in their work. Make up a story, about a war, a widow, and a desperate last chance to make things right. Some romance, some mystery, knamean?

But now, these kids today simply do not take any pride in their work. Look at this spam I got yesterday: Really? If you are going to send a stupid spam phish to a million people, wouldn't you spend more than 20 seconds writing the thing? I understand spammers are busy, but where's the craftsmanship?

Sad, Really

It's a little sad that Will Farrell has to stoop to imitating...well, me.

Rosiland Clancy: Idiotic Scam Artist

Interesting. Apparently some heifer named "Rosiland Clancy" makes random phone calls to people, demanding that they pay the "US Treasury Department," which her "collection agency" represents. It's not real. It's just not. These criminals do this a LOT, it appears. Check this...

Why always use the same name? She asked for a "Mr. Munger," so it did sound like a person, calling me specifically, instead of a robo-call.

Anyway, here's the point: if you get a call from "Rosiland Clancy," and she gives you the number

1-888-310-2006, ext 3626

to call back...just don't do it. It's a scam.

Let's put the future behind us

One day later and confirmation arrives that the economic illiteracy on display at SOTU was not a just a mirage or bad dream.

Here are some money quotes from today:

The president said Wednesday that while China invested in clean energy technologies, "we fell down on the job. We weren't moving as fast as we should have."

"We're going to need to go all in. We're going to need to get serious about winning the future,"

People, this is just plain nuts!

China subsidizing investments in clean energy technology is VERY VERY GOOD for us. If they make a breakthrough, what, they won't sell the product to us? Really?

Is it surprising to anyone that Jeffrey Immelt, Obama's new "jobs czar" runs a company that makes wind turbines?

"We're going to need to get serious about winning the future" is the stupidest thing I've heard a president say since "Too many OB/GYN's aren't able to practice their love with women all across the country."

America is not going to recover its greatness by pissing money away on choo-choos and windmills.

Sticking a Fork in the National Libertarian Party

As some of you people may remember, I was scornful of the LP's choice of Bob Barr as their presidential candidate in 2008.

Now comes the delicious word that Bob (still rockin' a porn stash for the ages) is in Haiti, REPRESENTING BABY DOC DUVALIER!!

Yes that's right, the Libertarian presidential candidate is helping out a notoriously corrupt and brutal ex-dictator.

I do not think that the party will soon recover from the complete and total sellout of libertarian principles that Barr's nomination represented. This is just icing on an ugly, ugly cake.

LP members: Check out this load of crap from your candidate:

Barr "will be representing" Duvalier "in bringing his message of hope to the world," the former Republican congressman's website says.

"I also am reminded of others who have risen from the ashes," Barr told reporters Friday. "The city of Atlanta is the Phoenix city. The people of Haiti, likewise, will rise from the problems created by last year's earthquake and emerge stronger and better than before. That I know is Mr. Duvalier's deep wish and something that he knows in his heart."

1. Baby Doc was a 15 year slow motion earthquake for the people of Haiti.

2. Baby Doc can't know anything in his heart because he does not HAVE a heart

3. If one finds themselves within 10 feet of Baby Doc, the only appropriate course of action would be to try and inflict as much physical damage on him as possible as opposed to the heinous butt kissing of Bob Barr.

when people were shorter and lived by the water

I was browsing through Econlog this morning and found just the most amazing bit of analysis ever. I just had to share it with you all:


I focus a lot of my historical reading on the first World War and on the 1930s. I think that people were really stupid back then. I take the Flynn Effect seriously, which suggests that the average IQ several generations back was what today would be considered to be mentally retarded. In my view, this helps to explain how cheerfully the nations went to war in1914. Yes, the war turned out to be worse than what they expected. But how were their expectations not influenced by the Civil War or the Franco-Prussian war?

--Arnold Kling

OMFG, people. World War I happened because world leaders 100 years or so ago were "mentally retarded"? Really?

REALLY?????

So going back another 50 years or so, Abraham Lincoln must have been the intellectual equivalent of a spider monkey?

Go another 100 years back from that. The founding fathers were the mental equivalents of dung beatles?

Adam Smith had an IQ of 13?

Blogger, please.

Why Bruce Bartlett is hopeless

I'm not sure what to make of this post from Bruce Bartlett, called "Why fixing the budget is hopeless"

He cites a survey where 848 Americans think 25% of the Federal budget is spent on foreign aid and 10% is given as the ideal amount.

He then points out that official bilateral foreign aid in 2009 was less than 1% of the Federal budget.

First, taking everything at face value, I am not sure why this means fixing the budget is hopeless.

Second, there is a hell of a lot more to foreign aid that "bilateral foreign aid". There's US contributions to multilateral aid agencies, then there's NATO, there's our military presence in Japan, South Korea, etc., there's whatever the heck we're still doing in Iraq after a second president has said "mission accomplished". I'm not saying it's 25%, but it's way way way more than 0.6%.

Why take a question where the definition of aid is not given and could easily be construed broadly and match the answer to a very distinct, narrow definition of aid?

Unless of course, you're hopeless!

HP Printer: It doesn't work, he doesn't pay

So, his HP "All in one" printer didn't.

Print, that is. So he asked HP for some assistance. But HP insisted he should have to pay for tech service, even though should still have been under warranty.

So, he went all Mungowitz on its ass!

(Two people sent me this video. Can't imagine why...)

Ignominy, thy name is Ginepri

Squirrel 1, Robby Ginepri 0 !!

Moneyball

Great graph from NY Times on the correlation between payroll and wins in MLB over the last decade. NFL and NBA are capped, but baseball is not (click on the pic for a more glorious image).

Biggest overachievers are Oakland and Minnesota, biggest underachiever (in terms of vertical distance from the regression line is Baltimore.

My two teams are the Tigers and the Cardinals. Pretty big difference in bang for buck between them. Cards are spending just north of $100 million for just north of 90 wins while Tigers are just south of $100 million for just south of 75 wins.

Mets and Cubs are the worst performing big spenders.

My New Favorite Headline

One-legged man escapes Florida deputies on foot.

Article.

(Nod to the blonde, who sent this out after someone explained to her why it was funny)