Censorship

We bought Apples to Apples Kids. I don't reflexively buy the “For Kids” versions of things, but Apples to Apples has enough political and pop culture references that it's not really a game four-year-olds can play. Anyway, the game comes with 216 noun cards. Olivia and I looked through them and threw away eleven cards.

One was Recess. I've got nothing against recess, but the kids have no such thing in their experience. The others were Hot Wheels® Cars, Barbie® Dolls, Ronald McDonald, Rugrats, Disneyland, Dumbo, Teletubbies, Mickey Mouse, Beanie Babies, and Raggedy Ann.

So apparently this is my foible. I am sheltering my kids from intellectual property franchises. Weird, huh. Censorship always is, if you really look at it.

Bribes and rents

Here’s a bit of a twitter conversation I saw this morning:

@ModeledBehavior I prefer a politician who buys support with crooked land deals to one who does so by embracing obviously bad populist policies

@mattyglesias In a non-agricultural society, crooked land deals are probably the optimal form of corruption.

@ModeledBehavior Just transfer of rents right? In general, I'd prefer leaders who bring growth & good policy & skim off the top than populists

@mattyglesias Yeah, most corruption creates new rents. Shady land deals just transfer them.

I don’t know how serious they were. I thought there was a touch of humor there. It was cute.

But it’s worth saying: no, I don’t really think there’s any sense in saying shady land deals “just transfer rents”.

Sometimes you can see how corruption is the simple collection of a monopoly rent that’s inherent in the situation. Suppose I handle liquor licenses for the city. If I'm corrupt, I might ask for “speed money” from applicants to do my job promptly. “This usually takes 6 to 8 weeks, but if you grease the right palms around here your application finds its way to the top of the pile. I can take care of that for you.”

Economically, what's going in here is that my job is to provide a service that’s worth something, say $X, to your business. I’m supposed to do it for free. Instead, I try to extract as much of that $X as possible from you. Bwa ha ha. It's reprehensible, to be sure, but you can see how this is an economic rent. You’re only trapped and helpless because you want that $X and my department wants to give it to you, and nobody else is going to just hand you something worth $X for nothing. And note that even though I am corrupt, I still perform the same service an honest official would. I’m just being paid (out of your profits) to do it. From a certain simplistic economic point of view, what I'm doing is pretty benign.

I might get creative, though, and start carving out new ways to make money by abusing my power. Suppose I start telling restaurant owners if they don’t pay up, I’ll have them investigated for selling alcohol to minors. I’ll scrutinize their application until I find a mistake, and then I’ll reject it. I’ll investigate their employees. I’ll have them audited. Now I’m in the business of manufacturing harm. I’m an economic disaster.

So which is it when Rick Perry buys a plot of land for $300K and sells it back to a partner of the same developer for $1.15M, a profit of $850,000, six years later?

Now, maybe @mattyglesias and @ModeledBehavior were talking about some other “crooked land deal”. I can’t be sure.

But the answer is, “it doesn’t matter”. Three points:

• The fact that it was a “land deal” does not tell you whether this was “just” a transfer of rents, or something worse, or even if there was a quid pro quo at all. How bad it is depends more on what the money bought than how it was delivered.
  
  

  Yglesias apparently sees just the payment in isolation, and calls it relatively harmless, which makes no sense to me. That’s only half of the transaction!
  
  

• Ultimately, calling corrupt rent-collection benign is simplistic. The step from rent-collecting to rent-seeking is often small, so there’s a slippery slope. And in high offices the amount of damage you could do without even bothering to rent-seek is huge.
  
  

• If you’re the governor of Texas, the kind of privileged access I would expect an $850,000 bribe to buy is not best modeled as a transfer of rents. Too many terms are missing from that equation.
  
  

The Blob

Last week, my six-year-old daughter hopped on a bike and took off. Well that was easy.

I’m pretty sure when I learned to ride a bike my dad had to exercise more patience than that. I don’t really remember, but let me just say with absolute confidence: there was blood. Probably some pants had to be thrown out. I don’t think my daughter even skinned a knee. It was ridiculous.

The same week, we all went to a YMCA summer camp site to play. They have something there called the Blob. It’s a huge inflated bag floating in the lake. One person sits on the far end of it. Another person jumps off a fifteen-foot tower onto the near end. When person 2 hits the Blob, person 1 is launched off the end and into the water. Cool idea.

We waited half an hour for it—there was a line, and about one in four kids goes up the tower and stands there, petrified, unable to make themselves jump and unable to give up their spot, for about five minutes. This gives people a lot of time to negotiate who will launch whom. Everybody wants to be launched by the biggest, heaviest guy in the pond. My daughter was the littlest; nobody wanted her to be right after them, so they all voluntarily let her go first. She got sorted to the front of the line way ahead of me.

We waited and waited. The last kid ahead of her finally chickened out.

Up the tower she went.

Will she jump? the guy behind me asked. I didn’t know. She seemed nervous, but it was just nerves, I thought. She wasn’t really afraid. She’s not afraid of this sort of thing. At least I didn’t think she was.

We didn’t have to wait long. She jumped right away. The next kid was maybe an eight-year-old boy. He jumped right away, too.

In hindsight, I should have done the math. My kid weighs about forty-five pounds. The boy said he weighed ninety. E = mgh, right? You can guess the Blob’s efficiency by watching the other jumps. Maybe 20%, 30%. So h₂ = m₁/m₂ × h₁ × 30%? And h₁ is… fifteen feet…

Everyone gasped as she went flying. None of the other launches had been anything like this. Ten feet up she went, turned a slow back somersault in mid-air, and came down with a crash in the water, on the far side of the Blob where we couldn’t see. It was amazing.

I left the line and swam over to pick her up. She had landed on her face, so she cried a little. By the time we got to the beach, she was fine. You can imagine my feelings. I love that little girl.

Appalachians

I've been reading about geology, the most epic of the sciences.

Long ago, the continent of Africa collided with what’s now the east cost of North America. The collision lasted for, oh, eighty million years and left behind... the Appalachian mountains.

The Appalachians you see now are not the originals, though. Those were some serious, Himalayan-scale mountains, but time and water wore them away to level ground. The current Appalachians are made of more of the same rock that was left underground, untouched by erosion, and uplifted quite recently, no more than sixty million years ago.

The Earth is at a rolling boil.

Powerful stuff

Martin Luther King’s I Have a Dream speech is full of poetry, metaphor, and allusion. Twice King quotes Scripture.

Amos 5:21-24 is one of the few places in the whole Bible where God is actually said to hate anything. It is nonetheless my favorite passage in the entire Old Testament, the one that I think comes closest to reconciling fire and brimstone with love and mercy. The verse King quotes comes rather unexpectedly in the middle of an angry prophetic tirade:

I hate, I reject your festivals,
Nor do I delight in your solemn assemblies.

Even though you offer up to me burnt offerings and your grain offerings,
I will not accept them;
And I will not even look at the peace offerings of your fatlings.

Take away from me the noise of your songs;
I will not even listen to the sound of your harps.

But let justice roll down like waters
And righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.

King is never angry, but at this point in his speech he is firm, insistent, even stern, and so his use of this verse at the end echoes Amos slightly. It’s an artful touch and a little brilliant.

There are those who are asking the devotees of civil rights, “When will you be satisfied?” We can never be satisfied as long as our bodies, heavy with the fatigue of travel, cannot gain lodging in the motels of the highways and the hotels of the cities. We cannot be satisfied as long as the Negro’s basic mobility is from a smaller ghetto to a larger one. We can never be satisfied as long as a Negro in Mississippi cannot vote and a Negro in New York believes he has nothing for which to vote. No, no, we are not satisfied, and we will not be satisfied until justice rolls down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream.

Isaiah 40:3-5 says:

The voice of him that crieth in the wilderness, Prepare ye the way of the LORD, make straight in the desert a highway for our God.

Every valley shall be exalted, and every mountain and hill shall be made low: and the crooked shall be made straight, and the rough places plain:

And the glory of the LORD shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together: for the mouth of the LORD hath spoken it.

King adopts this as his ultimate dream.

I have a dream that one day every valley shall be exalted, every hill and mountain shall be made low, the rough places will be made plain, and the crooked places will be made straight, and the glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together.

As King quotes this—there is no sugar-coating this—he teeters on the verge of nonsense. Not only is this prophecy already supposedly fulfilled (in John the Baptist, according to the gospels, all four of which directly quote it), but right after this passage about mountains being leveled, King is about to go into a series of riffs about, well, mountains (“let freedom ring from the prodigious hilltops of New Hampshire” and so on).

It works anyway, because whatever we think of the gospels, it is manifest that some crooked paths remain that want straightening, and rough places, and all the rest. King’s message is that justice will not be denied. Scripture promises the dream will be fulfilled.

Dangerous eggs

Among the dangerous contraband items U.S. border officials look for when they search your car are Kinder Surprise candy eggs. The CBC has an account of one seizure. Punchline:

As trivial as the border seizure may seem, Bird said the U.S. government has sent her a seven-page letter asking her to formally authorize the destruction of her seized Kinder egg.

“I thought it was a joke. I had to read it twice. But they are serious,” she said.

The letter states if Bird wishes to contest the seizure, she’ll have to pay $250 for it to be stored as the two sides wrangle over it.

The overbearing threats, the lawyerly paperwork, the sheer pointlessness of it all—it’s like a portrait in miniature of U.S. law enforcement. It’s so poetic I could cry.

I think my view of government is getting warped. Every senseless indignity is starting to look less like random incompetence and more like a dominance display.

Wikileaks, journalism, and espionage

WOLF: Jeff, can I talk about the Espionage Act because that's really what's at stake now that they've invoked it. I predicted in my book The End of America that sooner or later, journalists would be targeted with the Espionage Act in an effort to close down free speech and (INAUDIBLE) of government. And we have a precedent for that. In 1917, the Espionage Act was invoked to go after people like us who were criticizing the first World War. Publishers, educators, editors. Wait, and people were put in prison. They were beaten. One guy got a 10-year sentence for reading the First Amendment. And that intimidation effectively closed down dissent for a decade in the United States of America.

The Espionage Act has a very dark and dirty history. And when you start to use the Espionage Act, to criminalize what—I'm sure you've handled classified documents in your time as a serious journalist, you know perfectly well that every serious journalist has seen or heard about classified information and repeated it. When you start to use the Espionage Act to say reporting is treachery, reporting is spying, it's espionage, you criminalize journalism. And that's the history that our country has shown.

TOOBIN: I recognize there is that history. And I'm familiar with the red scare, too. America is different now.

WOLF: Oh, it's worse in some ways.

TOOBIN: Well, I would disagree.

SPITZER: I want to ask Jeff a question though, because I want to come back to this Woodward distinction. You would agree with Clay and Naomi, I think, that Julian Assange would be precisely Bob Woodward if he had been the recipient of these documents, is that correct?

TOOBIN: I'd have to know a lot more.

SPITZER: But it might be the case.

TOOBIN: It well might be the case.

SPITZER: OK. So your sort of clear articulation of the beginning that he clearly violated something—maybe not so much.

TOOBIN: I'm not sure. Certainly the attorney general of the United States seems to think criminal—criminal activity was involved here. But I think the wholesale taking of enormous quantities of classified information and putting it on the Internet, even if you don't put all 250,000 documents on, I think that is a meaningful distinction from what Bob Woodward does.

SPITZER: It seems to me that Bob Woodward arguably did something much more egregious. He took real-time decisions about why we were going to war in Afghanistan, the discussions are rationale, where we would go, spoke to the most senior political and military officials in the nation and blasted that out in the book. A clear distinction.

TOOBIN: Well, again, there is a distinction in part because the president of the United States and the vice president are allowed to declassify anything they want at any time for any reason. So if the president declassified—

SPITZER: A lot of people who didn't have that power were sourced in that book. Seemed to be speaking in clear violation. They, in fact, should be subject to criminal investigations.

TOOBIN: I always wondered why—why Woodward gets away with it. It's an interesting question.

(CROSSTALK)

—Naomi Wolf, Jeff Toobin, and Eliot Spitzer, talking on CNN's Parker Spitzer December 23, 2010. (transcript)

(Sidebar: Toobin was either indulging in a little hyperbole, or he was under the impression that all the cables were released unredacted. Not that it makes a huge difference, but this is not what happened. Wikileaks has been working with five newspapers, including the New York Times, to redact the cables before they are released publicly. As of January 10, 2011, Wikileaks has released only 2,028 of the 251,287 cables. They have been releasing a few each day.)

When Dianne Feinstein called for Julian Assange's prosecution under the Espionage Act, she wrote:

Mr. Assange claims to be a journalist and would no doubt rely on the First Amendment to defend his actions. But he is no journalist: He is an agitator intent on damaging our government, whose policies he happens to disagree with, regardless of who gets hurt.

But what exactly is Assange or Wikileaks doing that investigative journalists do not do? Cultivating contacts with privileged access? Obtaining classified documents? Reading them? Publishing them? Refusing to reveal sources? Pushing an agenda? Trying to make a difference? Those are all things journalists do. It is arguably impossible to do the job right without doing those things.

Why does Bob Woodward get away with it?

Why indeed.

Things I learned recently

Handmade paper does not have a grain. The fibers stretch out in random directions. But factory-made paper uses a process where water flows across the surface of the paper as it forms. Take any sheet of printer paper and you'll find that you can curl up the long vertical edge over using less force than the shorter horizontal edge. Even though you're bending more paper the long way, you're bending fewer of the paper's fibers by going with the grain.

According to the Wikipedia article on shmoon, “The word ‘shmoo’ has appeared in nearly 700 science publications since 1974; it is used in labs studying the bread-and beer-making species Saccharomyces cerevisiae.”

The geoid is the shape of the mean sea level of the earth. It is not an ellipsoid. Gravitational forces due to variations in the earth's density subtly distort the geoid. This is why a GPS device can tell you you're 20 meters underwater when you're at the beach: GPS measures your altitude above a reference ellipsoid, not the true geoid. The difference can be much greater in magnitude than the tides.

The Aztec merchants

Trade in the Aztec empire was mostly barter, but I'm surprised to read that a few commodities were plentiful, portable, durable, interchangeable, and stable enough to serve as money. “Cacao seems to have been the most common form of money, and it did, indeed, grow on trees. It was widely accepted as payment for both merchandise and labor.” There were even, this book claims, cacao counterfeiters.

The merchants of the Aztec empire had a guild which set its own laws, enforced them, judged and even had some control over prices. Merchants “entered enemy territory as spies, they could declare and engage in wars, and they could conquer communities.” They became very, very rich.

What struck me about the Aztec merchants, though, was what they ultimately used their wealth for. The vast majority they spent on lavish feasts for other merchants. The guests gorged on tamales of corn and chile, drank chocolate, and ate hallucinogenic mushrooms. Throwing a feast was how you converted riches into an even more valuable currency: social status. “Through this elaborate system of potlatch-like feasts, the merchants were obligated by the guilds to use their accumulated wealth for socially prescribed ends.”

Hmm.

The book is The Aztecs of Central Mexico: An Imperial Society, by Frances F. Berdan.

Easier said than done

Epictetus wrote:

15. Remember, you must behave as you do at a banquet. Something is passed around and comes to you: reach out your hand politely and take some. It goes by: do not hold it back. It has not arrived yet: do not stretch your desire out toward it, but wait until it comes to you. In the same way toward your children, in the same way toward your wife, in the same way toward public office, in the same way toward wealth, and you will be fit to share a banquet with the gods.

I am thinking about friends who are far away and I am not a very good Stoic.

In prose these days, the style is to be plain.

Use common words; be forthright and succinct;

Avoid formality; use active voice:

In short, say what you mean and nothing more.

These rules apply whatever you may write,

To traffic signs and novels just the same.

And in return for hewing to these rules,

The writer gets free rein, a blank white box

In which to dump his brain without a care

For form or structure. Sonnets? Thank you, no,

Though every now and then we condescend

To post a wry haiku on someone's Wall.

We'll count, it's fun and shows how smart we are.

But from restrictions richness sometimes comes,

Or thoughtfulness, or creativity,

Or beauty. Or mere elegance of form,

If all the other virtues of our words

Should come to nothing.

Perhaps we set our words too many tasks?

We have to write so many words each day

Each word must be disposable and cheap,

Like coffee filters (this the most polite

Of several metaphors that spring to mind)?

The style is just a moral cop-out, then,

To make a virtue of our verbal cheapness?

Our age lacks all ambition. When we make

a simple thing, we make it quick and plain,

and if it works, we're pleased. Is that the way?

These explanations miss the mark, I think.

I don't know how it happened. But it's dumb.

Good music isn't formless and austere.

Good writing doesn't have to be that way.

If fail we must then let us fail in ways

No self-respecting writer fails these days

And striving, let us win what gains we might

By doing something hard each time we write.

Problems that are too hard

I am self-conscious about homeschooling. It's not something I would have thought to attempt, if it were just me. I believe teaching, like any skill, improves with practice and study; and I have neither practiced nor studied teaching young children. I think most kids learn more when they spend more time studying; and my six-year-old spends a lot less time “at school” than I did at his age—by a factor of five or more. (On the other hand, when he is at school, he is studying.)

But it has been fun noticing things that I can do as a homeschooling parent that wouldn't work at all in an ordinary school.

My favorite is that I am free to pose problems that are too hard.

The kids have school when I'm at work, but I write out a lot of their schoolwork in advance. One of the problems I recently posed for J. is this: I have a box that does some kind of arithmetic. If I put in 7, out comes 3. Similarly 3↦7, 2↦8, and 1↦9. What if I put in 5? (Of course, anything or nothing might come out, but we can learn that lesson another time.) This turned out to be baffling—but that's OK. It will sit in J.'s binder for days, weeks, or months, until one day he cracks it. I don't think he'll crack it by accident but rather because he tries harder or because he develops a better understanding of how addition and subtraction behave. I think it'll be pretty gratifying, and he'll have earned it.

J. likes puzzles. In that regard, at least, his childhood will be a little like mine. Only without the answers.

Homework

Earlier this year I suddenly remembered being taught in school to answer questions of the form “What is the difference between a delta and a wetland?” by copying the definitions of the two terms out of the book and putting the word while between them. Imagine writing this out in cursive on notebook paper:

A delta is a low triangular area of alluvial deposits where a river divides before entering a larger body of water, while wetlands are lands where saturation with water is the dominant factor determining the nature of soil development and the types of plant and animal communities living in the soil and on its surface.

...times twelve or so.

Looking back on it I have to wonder how on earth this happened. The event cries out for an explanation. What would make someone do this to a roomful of kids? Was it a case of perverse incentives? Incompetence? Or straight-up cruelty?

Another obvious question (if you're in my shoes) is if such a thing could possibly ever happen to a home-schooled kid. Sure it could. Parents can be incompetent too. Or cruel.

I try to be humane—I won't be committing this particular atrocity—but there are several things about homeschooling that give me pause. There are no good ways to measure whether things are going well. Finding out what I could be doing better is hard. As far as I can tell by searching the Web, not many people like me are doing this; or else they are all as strapped for time as I am. Most fundamentally, I don't know what I'm doing.

Near the beginning of The Port-Royal Logic there is a brief and somewhat odd discussion of the Pyrrhonists and the Academics, and I guess Michel de Montaigne:

We may indeed easily say outwardly with the lips that we doubt of all these things, because it is possible for us to lie ; but we cannot say this in our hearts. Thus Pyrrhonism is not a sect composed of men who are persuaded of what they say, but a sect of liars. Hence they often contradict themselves in uttering their opinion, since it is impossible for their hearts to agree with their language. We see this in Montaigne, who attempted to revive this sect in the last century ; for, after having said that the Academics were different from the Pyrrhonists, inasmuch as the Academics maintained that some things were more probable than others, which the Pyrrhonists would not allow, he declares himself on the side of the Pyrrhonists in the following terms : “The opinion,” says he, “of the Pyrrhonists is bolder, and much more probable.” There are, therefore, some things which are more probable than others. Nor was it for the sake of effect that he spoke thus : these are words which escaped him without thinking of them, springing from the depths of nature, which no illusion of opinions can destroy.

Antoine Arnauld, Pierre Nicole, The Port-Royal Logic, 1662, translated by Thomas Spencer Baines, 1861.

I love the last sentence here: “And don't you try to get out of it by claiming a sense of humor, either.” To me it hardly seems probable that Montaigne was not just saying that for effect. It's too perfect.

Questions about net neutrality

(I originally wrote the following in October 2009, but did not publish it because it seemed likely that I just didn't know what I was talking about, and everything was OK. That's still likely, but recent events suggest I could be wrong about that.)

This video starts out great. It's about what makes fertile ground for innovation. After about 2 minutes, it goes off into “I have a right to Internet access” territory, and it never really comes back.

The open Web means a lot to me personally. Everything this video starts out saying is true. The openness of the technology and the current benign behavior of the network owners means people can try stuff on an awesome scale. Life-changing stuff. Funny stuff. Stupid stuff. It's not hard; it's not expensive; anyone who has the hardware, software, network access, experience, and free time can do it. And once you have the first four, it's like magic. All you need is more free time. It's romantic and wonderful, and it's all true. (I know because once I had a lot of free time.)

Mozilla came out in favor of net neutrality last year after a long silence. I still have a lot of unanswered questions.

• Do we really have to invite the FCC to regulate the Internet? The video invokes the threat of censorship. But um, the FCC is the country's foremost censor. This is the agency that mandated the broadcast flag, that fined Clear Channel for carrying Howard Stern, that maintained a three-network TV oligopoly for decades. This is where the Parents Television Council sends letters when someone says something vulgar on network TV. The FCC is the antithesis of the Internet.

  Of course the Internet is protected by the First Amendment in ways broadcast media aren't, and the FCC knows that. The plan is that the FCC will work in the opposite direction, preventing carriers from filtering while resisting political pressures to indulge in unconstitutional censorship of its own. I'm skeptical. Astute observers may have noticed that the First Amendment is not really a guarantee of good behavior.

  (Before you blow me off, read the next point. I really believe the bigger a role we ask the FCC to play in Internet the more it will find itself facing very difficult questions about what content should be allowed.)

(Since I originally wrote this, a court ruled that as it stands, the FCC does not have the authority to enforce its new net neutrality rules. The FCC responded by saying it will “move to partially reclassify broadband as a common-carrier service” and at the same time “try to establish that it will not regulate many areas of broadband”.)

• There are questions of where to draw the line.

  Google has already gotten itself into the awkward spot of having to argue that, while the FCC should impose net neutrality rules on broadband carriers, the rules should not apply to applications Google builds on top of those networks:

  The FCC's open Internet principles apply only to the behavior of broadband carriers -- not the creators of Web-based software applications.

  I think what we want is a neutral infrastructure and vibrant content. Well, is a web browser infrastructure or content? How about a search engine? You need both to use the Internet effectively these days. Google offers products in both those markets. Should they be subject to neutrality rules? AT&T says yes, the FCC should police the entire Internet, but that's just AT&T being evil for effect. Is there a good answer to the question?

• Net neutrality advocates want ISPs to charge by the bit, not by content. Don't actual humans hate being charged by the bit? Do you like being charged by the minute for cell phone service? I always found it kind of annoying.

  I guess humans hate being charged by content too, but honestly I am happy with having to choose basic cable vs. various channel packages and I'm glad I don't have a meter on my TV.

• So I saw this picture on Twitter, and the story it tells is, “Your ISP wants to double your monthly bill for access to the whole Internet. Net neutrality is about saving you money.” Do they really? And is that really what it's about?

  Incidentally, why do I need a picture of a world without net neutrality rules? Am I not already living in that world?

• As I understand it, the U.S. doesn't really have net neutrality regulations yet, and ISPs are not in fact doing any of the things I'm supposed to be worried about. What am I missing?

  I guess Comcast was blocking Bittorrent for a while. I don't know much about that case, but I suspect Comcast just (cluelessly) took Bittorrent as a proxy for “this customer is going to soak up a ton of bandwidth and then get us sued”. Is that wrong?

  Most ISPs don't let you run a Web server or a mail server out of your home, either, and strictly speaking that's a violation of net neutrality, right? Now to the extent that they're just segmenting the market, I don't really care either way. But to the extent that those types of content actually cost more per bit to carry (security risk, legal liability, tech support, etc.), net neutrality would be bad, right?

• I suspect the real issue is that Google, Facebook, and Twitter don't want to pay my ISP for the privilege of sending me ads. I'm sure my ISP would love to be able to charge them for that, and that prospect probably terrifies Google in particular. Am I being too cynical? Would this be a bad thing? Is it right for Google to lobby the federal government to protect their profits?

I realize this probably reads like so much FUD, but it's meant as a collection of honest questions and I really do appreciate any answers you can provide. I still haven't made up my mind about net neutrality. The questions that intuitively seem important to me don't seem to have been part of the discourse.