Monthly Archives: September 2017

mattyciii on Natural Cyclection comes up with an idea concerning unlicensed drivers – make the cars unusable:

In the corporate world it’s increasingly common for people to log onto their computer by placing a smart-chip equipped ID into a card reader and typing in a personal identification number (PIN). This is similar to the way people use an ATM.  This “two-factor identification” provides strong authentication; it’s far more difficult to “crack” than a password, and it’s much harder for a user to share their logon credentials with another person (since two people cannot be using the ID at the same time).

In a society that requires “smart licenses”, starting a car would require these three steps: car keys would be required just like we do today, plus the driver would place their smart-chip license into a card reader and enter their PIN through a keypad or touch screen.  The use and function of car keys would be the same as they are today – they would still represent permission from the owner to use the car.  The other two steps confirm the driver has the government’s permission (i.e., a valid driver’s license) to use public roads.

I’ve been trying to come up with objections to this approach, but beyond obvious, mundane remarks about the development of black markets for circumventing the technology, I can’t really see any downsides.

But I think this may be pessimistic:

Like most every other safety system mandate – seat belts, air bags, tire pressure monitoring – smart card licenses and enforcement would phase in over time.  The average age of cars on American roads is just over 11 years, so even if we implemented smart licenses today it would take a long time before the majority of cars were card-reader equipped.

Given the growing consciousness about pollution, as well as the growing popularity of electric cars, IF the car manufacturers implemented this on their electric cars quickly, we might see the infiltration of this technology into the market somewhat faster than marty anticipates.

I think Steve Benen is being too kind to the GOP:

If given a choice between protections for Dreamers or an opportunity to use Dreamers’ plight for political gain, Democratic leaders en masse prefer the former to the latter. This might give Trump a “win” – if the deal comes to fruition, he’ll take credit for doing something popular and bipartisan – but most Dems don’t care, so long as the young immigrants get the protections they need and deserve.

For Republicans, this dynamic is flipped. The party’s policy goals have largely been replaced with slogans and soundbites, and few in the party care about working on substantive outcomes. For much of today’s GOP, an ideological crusade and a constant search electoral advantage is the driving motivation behind every decision.

Given a choice between working with Dems to achieve a goal and blaming Dems for standing in the way of the goal, most Republican leaders choose the latter, not the former.

It’s the difference between a governing party and a post-policy party. The more Donald Trump is willing to make concessions, the more Pelosi and Schumer will work to advance their agenda.

“Post-policy”? No. We don’t need a new name for an old game. This is what you get when you have a bunch of power-hungry politicians people who care for nothing but power. The Democrats are driving for solutions, in contrast.

Weirdly enough, this reminds of the Lehman Brothers example I ran across a few years ago. The example goes that just days before they collapsed during the Great Recession, the CEO was giving a presentation where it was all about maximizing return on investment – for the shareholders.

Not for the clients.

They put their customers second and concentrated on making money, taking on larger and larger risks while ignoring the global environment, and when it all went to pot, they were the ones who burned up. Now they only exist because unwinding them is exceedingly complicated.

Similarly, all the GOP politicians seem to know is the drive for power and the implementation of some ideological goals not shared by the general public – even their own public. There’s no concept of solving problems and actual governing – and they’ve admitted as much.

And without that realization that it’s about the problem solving and the governing, they’re just left with the marketing and the one innovation, the one really new thing that’s driven them to this: the “Persuaders” approach to campaigning. And it’s turned out to be awful as it lets the incompetent to hide their failures in a cloak of darkness and win elections.

Post-policy FAH! It’s all about incompetency.

Leucism:

Leucism (/ˈljuːkɪzəm/;^[1] or /ˈluːsɪzəm/^[2][3]) is a condition in which there is partial loss of pigmentation in an animal resulting in white, pale, or patchy coloration of the skin, hair, feathers, scales or cuticle, but not the eyes.^[1] Unlike albinism, it is caused by a reduction in multiple types of pigment, not just melanin. [Wikipedia]

Noted in “Elusive snowy white giraffes filmed in Kenya,” Melissa Breyer, Treehugger.com:

Different subspecies of giraffes have different patterns. For example, Masai giraffes have spots that look like oak leaves while Rothschild’s giraffes boast large, brown splotches outlined by thick, pale lines. Kenya’s own reticulated giraffe, has a dark coat with very graphic shapes and well-defined narrow lines. Unless, of course, that reticulated giraffe happens to be white as a ghost.

Incredibly rare with what appears to be only a handful sightings in the wild captured on film, white reticulated giraffes are pale in color thanks to a genetic condition called leucism. Unlike albinism, in leucism skin cells don’t produce pigmentation, but soft tissues, like dark eyes, do.

And a video!

For an example of how not to argue a point, I turn to Mark Anderson on The Daily Kos, who is a union supporter and a little upset:

Over the last couple weeks I have written about unions. While the majority of comments are supportive, there has been a trend of folks using Republican talking points about unions. You know the arguments: they are corrupt, they are not needed, they have idiotic rules, and members of public employee unions get paid too much.

You can always find those exact same comments in every single post about organized labor. So let’s talk about corruption, idiotic rules, and unionized public employees.

And then … he doesn’t. Instead, he highlights bad rules and illegal activities undertaken by businesses. And then, as if this makes any sense, he finishes up with this:

Unions are a human endeavor. As with all things human, they are imperfect. They will make mistakes, have stupid rules, and fall victim to corruption—just as any business will. When you complain about issues with unions, you are not complaining about things that are unique to unions.

Which begs, with hands and knees and chin on the ground, what to do about these problems in unions!

Look, unions and businesses are not institutions that fall into the same general category, they really aren’t. Mark’s implicit argument tact is that if we can find a way to fix them in a business, then the unions can be fixed in the same way.

But we’re not talking about the same structures! Businesses are typically hierarchical boss-employee situations in which employees have little to no say about who will boss them around.

Unions, however, are ideally democratically run institutions in which the leadership of the union, whether it be a single person or a board of some sort, must win a vote of the membership on a periodic basis.

The problems may be the same, but the solutions will be different because the power structures are different. This is the problem of the partisans who cannot bring themselves to suggest solutions to problems on their own side because they’re too busy hating on the “other side.” In Mark’s case, he could have presented possible solutions to these known problems with unions and really presented a winning post.

Instead, he’s just throwing a tantrum.

If you’re wondering about the special elections for state-level positions, such as state Representatives, Senators, Assemblycritters (there are many names), that are going on all the time as people resign or die, and how they’re turning out in the greater context of the Trump Administration, The Daily Kos has some organized record-keeping at this link. For example, they’re reporting that two days ago two Republican seats were flipped into the Democratic column, one each in New Hampshire and Oklahoma, by final voting margins of 11% and 21% points, respectively; in the 2016 Presidential Election, Trump won these districts by margins of 28% and 31% points.

As you might guess, margins like this in Republican districts are exciting The Daily Kos denizens. It makes me wonder, though, if the Republicans are fielding weak candidates, or if they’re fielding strong candidates and the voting Independents aren’t buying, or if the Democratic candidates are just so strong that they’re overwhelming the Republican candidates.

In nominally Republican districts.

It’s like watching blood pressure going up. It means something, and probably something bad, but exactly what remains a puzzle.

Steve Benen, in discussing the DACA (Dreamers’ protection) polka Trump’s engaged in with the Democrats over the last 24 hours, as a side note suggests:

The only certainty here is that Trump seems lost without a map.

I think this is a bit misleading. Most professional politicians have a map, and they’d be lost without it, because the “map” is a plan of action, carefully worked out with specific goals, etc. So it’s not really surprising that Trump is lost without a map. The surprise is that he could prepare these maps and follow them and achieve his goals, reprehensible (or even incomprehensible) as they might be.

It’s his resistance to using maps that is confounding. Maybe he really believes his own rhetoric that he’s smart and doesn’t need them. But the evidence so far is he needs maps so badly they should be tattooed on the inside of his eyelids.

I present a fictional live-blog of Terrordactyl (2016), wherein I record my stream of consciousness – or what should have constituted same – while watching Terrordactyl.

Remember those news reports of the duck keeping up with the boat because it imprinted on the boat owner?
This doesn’t end as well.

OK, it’s dark and it’s a rig pulling into a rest stop – the only flat face in this lot of snouty rigs. Guy stumbles out, Arts Editor calls him a Neanderthal. Seems unfair.  What?  Is he just finishing off that bottle of whiskey? Oh, he just threw it >crash!< and opened a new one, how can he possibly have been driv –

Wow! Something just hit his rig and shattered it. Shitty special effect, though. Ooops, that’s one long snout poking out of the flames. Fire doesn’t seem to bother whatever it is.

It flies!

Mr. Whiskey’s spotted it and sort of running around at random. Hey, dummy, hide under someone else’s truck! You look like a mouse in a maze –

Oooops, and off he goes in the clutches of … yes, I can make it out. It’s clearly that plastic model of a Pteranadon I built from a kit 45 years ago! And it has a G. I. Joe doll in its clutches!  Too bad, Mr. Whiskey.

Hey, it’s light out and there’s a guy doing yard work. Name is Lars. Pro equipment. And another guy with a, ah, shovel with an umbrella taped to it. And he’s sleeping on the job, and the other guy is giving him serious shit. And the bikini lady poolside is teasing both of them. Looks like California. This is a bit painful, not clever, stereotypical. Except for the shovel.

Now a jump to a bar, the yard work boys are tossing them back but Mr. Shovel clearly has problems talking to the ladies, with a badly done stutter just to prove it. That’s a bad special effect, too. That lady bartender falls into the ‘cute’ category. There’s this barfly, he’s a yapper, well, the women in your bed are all in your mind, friend – and why do you look like a cross between Jesse Ventura and Robert deNiro? Sampson, heh. I’ll bet you die early.

But the TV is reporting astronomers are excited by a ‘surprise’ meteor shower, oh, and she (the bartender) knows about meteors – ok, now she’s a bit sexy. Claims they’re worth money, and now Mr. Shovel’s paying attention as he gets his change, grabs his buddy Lars and they scurry out to Lars’ truck to do some meteor hunting. Downed power tower? No problem, we’ll just step carefully over the live high-tension wires!! – these actors should do a PSA after that crap. Well, Lars isn’t so happy, he just wants to sleep and do hard honest work, and up and out in the hinterlands he walks off in a huff and >thud!< lands in a crater. Meteor!

Heading back, meteor in the back, Lars asleep, Mr. Shovel discovers the bartender gave him her ph#, so he calls her up.  Ooops, it’s 7:30 AM, she’s had 4 hours sleep, but she gives him an opening to ask her out. “Can I show you my space rock!?” he shouts. Well, it’s better than etchings, I suppose, but she’s still put out. Gives her address.

And on the way over something buzzes them, then lands on the truck. It’s big, bigger than me. Wings, snout, well, he’s back, apparently. Wants another G. I. Joe? Oh, my, Lars  has a lot of profanity, but nothing particularly shocking. But it does have that Gen-X’ self-absorption thing going on. Which is just a myth. Heck, why does the TV channel even trouble to blank the profanity out? Is this PuritanTV? And why is Lars SO attached to his truck? OK, so your windshield is shattered, but Mr. Shovel finally figured out – gad, he’s slow – to drive like a madman, stomp on the brakes, and then hit the damn thing while it’s down. Think of 9 foot long roadkill, and they aren’t stopping to collect a sample.

Aaaaat Aaaaand they’re at the girl’s apartment now.  Turns out Mr. Shovel is a “wuss” about elevators, so they’re hoofing up ten floors, Mr. Shovel shaking, meteor in hand. Bartender Candice (had to look it up) lets them in, looks at the spacerock, turns out she does a bit of geology too, woo hoo! A couple of good lines, too. But what’s that outside –

Hundreds of flying Snouties? Well, this special effect isn’t quite so bad.

Maybe it’s an attempted blessing.

Oh, and they’re looking in the windows! Definitely that uncomfortable feeling when you catch a stranger staring at you at the mall, so close the shades and… that shadow suggests this is a pushy stranger, perched on the balcony. With wings. And a snout. And a surprise roommate pops out and screams and the window shatters (her scream or his snout?) and in it comes! Oh the roommate is so dead, just so – wait, what’s Mr. Shovel doing with that rubbing alcohol bottle? Really? Lighting it up and tossing it – hold it, that other Mr. Snouty didn’t care about fire, why is this one writhing and saying bad things in a loud voice? And building management’s not going to be happy about this!

Hey, the roommate’s not dead!

And on their way to the elevator there’s the aforementioned management, giving them a bad time.  Enter Mr. Snouty – oh, ouch, that’s gotta sting. Down the elevator they go, out the door, just in time to see poor Lars’ truck get crushed. He’s having a conniption over his truck, while the critters are tearing the city apart – away go people in the clutches of more Mr. Snouties! OK, let’s run over to Candice’s car – we need to head for a good bomb shelter. Flying down the road, good lines for the boys and Candice, roommate’s just a wallflower, while they dodge Snouties and other cars and once a burning jet liner memorably flashes through the pic – nice touch.

This reminds me of spring break in Ft. Lauderdale.

Where are we going? Hey, remember Sampson the bar fly? Bang Bang Bang! Oh, you finally came to share my bed! Wait, a threesome – oh, the yard boys – well, he’s open minded. What do you mean what’s going on? OK, now he’s seen and knows, it’s time for a drink, a check-in with his Marine buddies (they seem to be in the midst of dying bloodily), and now let’s open the Armory. Armory? Oh, yeah, Candice knows how to shoot. She just gets better and better. The other three? Lars isn’t too bad. Mr. Shovel has to have his hand held in this EXCRUCIATING SCENE … it’s like passing an anvil. Crash! Hey, that was an awful segue, did they chop that up for TV? Anyways, there’s a Snouty in the bunker and NOW the roommate’s bought it. There’s a principle here: if you don’t get good lines, you die early. Sampson’s gone, no doubt to be dinner. So much for my principle, he had some weirdly good lines. And he left toothmarks on the scenery.

More Snouties, a firefight, one gets locked in the Armory where it triggers the timer on the bomb. “A parting gift from an old boyfriend” – Sampson. Yeah, I’ll bet she tried to ram it up your ass. Uh oh, everyone out, just in time! Oh, well, what to do ne- ooops, there’s goes Lars, still carrying the meteor (these guys are so into having things), snatched by a Snouty. So much for- wait, why are you running AFTER him? You can’t keep up with these Snouties, they’re FLYING – oh, I see, we need to hear Lars shouting PROFANITIES. That’s important, gotta stay in character, right? Profanities and insistent defiance. Izzat Gen-X like?

Well, I’m sure that tower with all the Snouties flying around it is famous, but I dunno what it is. And, hey, is that – is that where Lars is still screaming profanities? Doesn’t he ever get tired of mouthing off? Oh, here comes the meal, looks like a formal affair with ten or fifteen guests as Lars gets slung INTO the tower through a big gouge in the side. One of them gets into a stare down with Lars, and Lars calls him Barbecue. What? Oh, is that the one Mr. Shovel lit up with the alcohol? Looks like some mild peeling. When’s the munching start?

Meanwhile, the iconic meteor gets added to a pile of them. Baubles of the Snouties, maybe they wear them on their heads after some drinking. Watch out, another guy gets tossed in! His suit’s a mess, call Men’s Wearhouse! Although the big Z wouldn’t sell to this guy, given how he cares for his suit. And hysteria!

Oh, and look at that. The meteor is an egg, and oh the miniature Snouty is so damn cute you just want to hug it. However, our new guest star in the bad suit doesn’t last long as he is fed to the new kid. Lars doesn’t understand the social etiquette of the moment and buries his head in embarrassment.

Meanwhile, Candice and Mr. Shovel are working on a plan to save Lars, which is a bit sentimental of them. Seems to involve a gun, a leaf blower, and some tough talk. But first they have to deal with the ground floor guard detail, who fly about a bit while dying, and the last one is offed most unpleasantly by putting a flagpole through him. Ouch. Oh, and the American flag then unfurled. Would a super-pat cheer, sneer, or pass out from ‘roid-rage? Up the elevator and into the formal dining area, where Lars is menaced by something no larger than his head. Well, OK, and Barbecue. The shooting starts, we have a home made flamethrower (think leaf blower) and the dinner party is chased away, with the last one, probably Barbecue … well, remember Mr. Shovel? This involves an umbrella and, I think, a shovel. My Arts Editor shakes her head in deprecation. It’s the wrong shade of blue.

In no doubt a tasteful display of trophies, we see a number of human heads, including, for the love of something large and scaly, our bar fly Sampson. Remember him? Drunk, tasteless, Ventura-like? Tsk tsk- AUGH, it moved and smiled! He’s alive, but not like in Aliens (thank goodness). How about the rest? Never find out. And what’s that whooshing noise?

Sheeeeeit. That’s one big motherfucking Snouty. I mean, my Arts Editor and I shout simultaneously, It’s a dragon! Turns out, the Snouties are like bees or ants.  It’s the queen, apparently, because it’s come to protect the eggs. Now, let me ask: which one of these little Snouties is going to have the balls – so to speak – to actually have intercourse with this monster?

Maybe it’s like Praying Mantises. One sex experience is all you’re good for.

Anyways. Mr. Shovel, ever inventive (remember that, Candice, since now you’re kissing him), comes up with a bomb made of various vintages of whiskey, bourbon, etc etc. Arts Editor shakes her head and mutters, but on they soldier, eventually luring big old Snouty into sticking her head into the gouge, at which point Sampson rolls the bomb into its mouth, going along for the ride (a little like Hellboy in his fight with one of the Ogdru Jahad – gulp gulp gulp BAM!). No more dragon head, thud goes the body.

And, like a bad ex-spouse, Sampson climbs out of the wreckage and rushes off to do interviews as an expert. Expert something.

Wait, is that another meteor storm?

I wanted to hate it, to loathe it, to refuse to believe such a piece of trash could be released. But I actually thought it was fairly funny, in that way movies that blur genre tropes can be funny. I probably wouldn’t watch it again. But it reminded me of Shaun of the Dead. Which we hated. But we liked this.

Go figure.

The pressure to scrap the JCPOA (aka Iran nuclear deal), legally or not, continues in an Ambassador Haley speech at the United Nations, as noted by J. Dana Stuster on Lawfare. This caught my eye:

The JCPOA was an international agreement only made possible by the participation of a coalition that included Russia and China; that Washington, Moscow, and Beijing could all agree to the terms is still an incredible diplomatic achievement by itself. But those international partners to the agreement got short shrift in Haley’s speech, only coming up in the question and answer portion. “This is about U.S. national security. This is not about European security. This is not about anyone else,” she said, which the New York Times reports left “several European diplomats in the audience fuming.” Haley claimed that the U.S. role is to ask tough questions of its partners. “No one [in Europe] wants to get out of the deal out of holding out hope that the Iranians will do the right thing,” she said. “I think we have to be honest enough to say, ‘But what if they’re not? What if they’re not doing the right thing?’” Haley then suggested that Iran would have a nuclear weapon and start a war as soon as the JCPOA’s limitations begin to expire. “What if we just gave them 10 years and all the money they wanted to do whatever they want to prepare for when that tenth year hits and they start nuclear war?” she asked.

That’s a bit of a breath-taker, isn’t it? Despite being part of a multi-party deal in which there are security guarantees and benefits for all parties, all Ambassador Haley will admit to seeing is the American national security interest – and then without even elucidating it.

And does the Trump Administration really think it has an end-game available if the JCPOA is scrapped without good reason? The United States has treated various allies, such as South Korea, like so much crap. Even if they could persuade Iran to return to the bargaining table, why should Iran or any of the other parties to the agreement think that the United States would stick to a future agreement? The behavior of the Trump Administration has bounced between vacillating and reprehensible; there is very little motivation to believe anything Trump says or or does is worthy of trust.

Some people call it karma. I just say what goes around comes around. They’d better hope that Iran is caught with its hand in the cookie jar with no hope of it being a setup. Hell, we’d all better hope that, given the Trump drive to scrap the JCPOA. Why?

Because without that excuse, we’ll be in a worse place than we were before. No agreement, so Iran can return to enriching plutonium with which to experiment with in pursuit of a bomb. We’ll call for sanctions and we’ll be ignored. Iran will thumb its nose at us.

And, in the second sub-basement, why? Because the GOP cannot stand the idea that Obama’s signature foreign policy achievement was the neutering of Iran’s nuclear weapon ambitions. This pack of third-rater zealots would endanger the United States, in pursuit of repudiating an achievement that experts say is a good, safe, and effective agreement, as Stuster notes, because … why? Because a Democrat did it? Because Iran nationalized the oil industry way back when? Because some GOP idiot claims, for reasons unknown, that the agreement is actually dangerous despite the experts’ opinions, and all the rest of the GOP ambles along behind him without giving it any thought?

I honestly don’t know why the Trump Administration continues to neuter our own nation in the foreign relations area, but that really appears to be his goal.

Professor James Davis surveys the North Korean situation on Lawfare and has some thoughts on situation resolution:

One of the most robust findings in the field of behavioral economics is the difference between what people demand to sell something they already own and the price they would have been willing to pay for it. For example, my wine-loving investor friend might not be willing to bid more than $750 for a desirable bottle of Bordeaux, but when received as a gift wouldn’t sell the same bottle for less than $1000. Somehow the mere fact of owning something makes it seem more valuable. This “endowment effect” runs counter to classical understandings of utility and leads to the expectation that there will be fewer market transactions than standard economic theory predicts. Reinforcing other psychological processes, it contributes to a strong bias toward the maintenance of the status quo.

The bottle of wine is a metaphor for nuclear weapons. Lovely.

The endowment effect can help us understand the international impasse over North Korea’s nuclear weapons program and suggests it will be even more difficult to reach an agreement to end Pyongyang’s nuclear program than is often assumed.

Many commentators point to the international agreement that closed off Iran’s route to developing nuclear weapons as a model for North Korea. In the dispute with Iran, the challenge was to put together a package of sanctions sufficient to convince Tehran to forgo acquiring a nuclear weapon. Initially comprising a ban on the supply of nuclear-related materials and technology, as well as the freezing of foreign assets of individuals and companies involved with Iran’s nuclear program, sanctions subsequently were extended to include a ban on arms sales, the servicing of Iranian ships and aircraft and the freezing of state assets. Taken together, U.N., E.U. and U.S. sanctions were the most severe ever imposed on a single country. Their cumulative effect wreaked havoc on Iran’s economy. And they worked. The price set by the international community for Iran’s acquisition of nuclear weapons was higher than Iran was willing to pay.

Drawing analogies is always a difficult business in International Relations. As I noted earlier, Kim is looking at the past to see the future, and sees the United States as having demonstrated duplicity and dishonesty in the cases of Iraq and Libya, which both aspired to nuclear weapons, then gave up their ambitions for promises – which were broken. He has a reasonable excuse to desire nuclear weapons, purely as a deterrent. Meanwhile, Iran is NOT a country run by a dictator/madman. Rather, it’s a limited (or damaged, if you like) democracy in which power does not reside exclusively with the Supreme Leader, but is distributed and somewhat reassignable, if only to those who are sufficiently Islamic. Their excuse for coveting nuclear weapons, while also including prestige, was to become predominant in their region, which includes nuclear powers Pakistan, Israel, and India – but they don’t need it for survival.

And note this, from the interview by Jeff Baron of Mitsuhiro Mimura on 38 North:

Dr. Mitsuhiro Mimura: North Korea is the poorest advanced economy in the world—but what’s important to understand is that, while it may be poor, it is still an advanced economy. In that respect alone it is unique in the world. And that is an important source for the pride the North Korean people take in what they see as their country’s achievements.

JB: The poorest advanced economy? Can you explain that a little?

MM: By standard economic measurements, given that the North continues to emerge from its past as a feudal society and then Japanese colonial rule between 1910 and 1945, North Korea is a developing economy.

That said, they have built a comprehensive production structure including both labor-intensive and capital-intensive industries. They are able not only to produce capital goods to run their society, like railroad locomotives and carriages, cargo vessels, turbines and generators for power plants, numerically controlled lathes, but they also make most of the things needed for military use, from small arms to ballistic missiles and nuclear weapons, trucks, jeeps, destroyers, and diesel engines.

In other words, they are somewhat self-sufficient. It’s true that their food situation is probably still problematic, but it seems to me that sanctions, no matter how much they hurt both in pragmatic terms as well as blows to the national prestige, will have limited impact on North Korea. Iran, on the other hand, was in serious trouble, as its population is considerably more educated, restive, and sensitive to issues of liberty in its many facets; North Korea has just a small bit of history in terms of independence, as noted earlier here.

Professor Davis suggests this is just an exercise in costs:

But if the question confronting the international community in the Iranian deal was determining the price at which Tehran was no longer willing to pay to acquire nuclear weapons, the problem in North Korea is establishing a price for which Pyongyang would be willing to relinquish an existing nuclear arsenal. And all other things being equal, the price demanded will be higher than North Korea would have accepted to forgo the program in the first place. Because of the endowment effect, North Korea values the weapons it now has more than it did the prospect of acquiring them.

Does this mean that there is no room for a deal? No. As long as the international community, and more particularly the United States, place a higher value on a nuclear free North Korea than Kim Jong Un demands as compensation for ceding his nuclear capabilities, agreement is possible. Given that American leaders view both the risks of a nuclear armed North Korea and the costs of launching a preventive strike against Pyongyang as unacceptably high, there should be a price at which both sides are willing to cut a deal.

But the conditions differ, which Professor Davis is trying to minimize. But I think there’s a big difference between nuclear weapons are key to my survival and nuclear weapons would be good for our national prestige. The latter, while important, is not strictly a necessity, and as Iran, more hooked into the global economy than North Korea, suffered, it could see that.

All of which makes the analogy less workable. As long as Kim sees nuclear weapons as the ultimate key to his regime’s survival, I think he’ll stick with them. Unless Trump’s commanders can come up with some sort of canny military solution that involves minimal casualties, I see this situation going on for a very long time, in the absence of some sort of advanced technology that can actually disable nuclear weapons from a distance.

If you were evaluating house builders by how many houses they built, would you just take those numbers and run them through your calculator? Of course not. You’d look into house sizes, quality, and no doubt a few other factors. Or you’d be a fool.

So when the Republicans claim to be highly productive, don’t let numbers lead you around by the nose. WaPo reports:

The data shows that the House in the 115th Congress passed 321 bills. The next highest of the past five first-term Congresses was the 111th Congress (2009), when 270 bills were passed in the House.

But Tauberer offers a caveat. Counting pages, the House in 2009 tops the House this year, with 9,199 pages compared with 7,243 pages so far this year. Counting pages is an imperfect way of judging the “substance” of a bill, just as simply counting bills is. Obviously, not all bills are created equal. Few would argue that the Affordable Care Act is equal to a bill renaming a U.S. federal building.

In terms of actual bills signed into law, the 115th Congress finds itself in fourth place, with 56 bills, out of the first year of the last five presidents. By contrast, 94 bills were signed into law at this point under George H.W. Bush in 1989, 82 bills signed under Bill Clinton in 1993, and 62 bills signed in 2009 under Barack Obama.

To use a baseball analogy, bills passed in the House are like hits and bills signed into law are like runs. The House Republicans are counting hits, not the runs that win the games. Hits are an interesting statistic, but they do not matter as much as the final score.

And keep in mind the Democrats are in the minority in both chambers of Congress; their ability to interfere at the official level is limited.

In other words, this is a carefully selected statistic to put the performance of the Republican House in the best possible light. Indeed, the House Republican effort appears designed to deflect blame, to the Senate, for the mediocre legislative showing. As Ryan mentioned in the CNN town hall, the House Republican conference has set up a website, didyouknow.gop, designed to highlight all of the legislation that passed the House and awaits action in the Senate.

And, really, this is a red herring. The American polity should not judge the House or Senate on such trivia as bill count, and letting ourselves be distracted by this is a measure of our political naïveté. The performance of the two chambers should be judged on a variety of criteria, certainly not restricted to whether or not they pass bills we happen to like – or are ultimately signed by the President.

Criteria that do come to mind, beyond those bills we like, include how many of these laws are later found unconstitutional by the Judiciary? How many have unintended or unforeseen consequences? How many are so complex or full of impenetrable jargon that they can’t be understood even by specialists? Did the bodies spend all their time passing commemorative bills (i.e., trivia) in order to inflate their numbers? Hardest on both members and polity, did those substantial bills that did pass and become law have their intended affect and have a positive effect on the United States?

Government is not a math problem.

Government is the ultimate human judgment problem, and that’s where WaPo really falls down – it should have taken this opportunity to point out this fundamental error in evaluating government, still provided the breakdown and how the Republicans want you to think they did well.

And ignore the fact that they continue to trumpet how they “promised to get rid of the failing ACA,” when in reality it’s neither failing nor unpopular, and has succeeded in its stated goals of increasing the number of Americans covered by health insurance to the highest percentage ever, and decreased the expected spending on health spending.

These are the sorts of issues on which performance of the chambers of Congress should be judged, not some number that measures nothing more than a metric that is easily manipulated.

If you haven’t heard of electro-swing, Wikipedia describes it:

Electro swing combines the influence of vintage or modern swing and jazz mixed with house, hip hop and EDM. Successful examples of the genre create a modern and dance-floor focused sound that is more readily accessible to the modern ear, but that also retains the energetic excitement of live brass and early swing recordings.

Here’s a sample collection. I think I prefer straight swing, although I haven’t paid attention recently.

Some social experiments are harmless, and some are not. Biting off some more of this fascinating interview with North Korean expert Mitsuhiro Mimura by Jeff Baron of 38 North, this caught my attention:

JB: What’s the trajectory you’ve seen in the North Korean economy since you started going there in 1996?

MM: The first years I was there, the mid-1990s, was a time of great hunger. The people who waited for the government to help them, as it had for the previous 40 years, suffered greatly—and many perished. Those who believed in the government but decided to act independently, to survive through their own efforts—they survived. And some of them are becoming rich now.

Sounds like classic evolution – the weak die off and the strong survive. It just depends on how you define strong and weak. The question in my mind is how this will affect the North Korean culture, all the way up to the leadership and its survival, in the future. And it sounds like the North Korean leadership may be aware of the situation – from another part of the interview:

But between 1980 and 2016, there wasn’t a single Workers’ Party Congress. That coincided with the breakup of the Soviet Union and the end of the East Bloc, the development of capitalism in China. And especially in the terrible food shortages in North Korea in the 1990s and early 2000s, as the people stopped looking to the State for what they needed to survive and instead relied on their own efforts, we saw some erosion of the formal institutions of control.

What we’ve seen from the Seventh Congress of the Korean Workers Party, held in May 2016, is a re-invigoration of the tools of control, to reinforce the importance of the group over the individual, to drill in what’s expected, demanded, of a North Korean citizen, through groups such as the Youth League and women’s groups.

Those groups are the means for the leadership to hammer home propaganda and the continuing education of youth and adults. The leadership wants citizens to identify as members of a group, ultimately, to form a national polity—and not as individuals.

So they’re trying to control or even snuff out the elements of independence that had to be developed in order to survive. While it’s disturbing that they have nuclear weapons through the incompetence of the Bush Administration, possibly the approach of strategic patience taken by Obama may not be a huge mistake. Perhaps North Korea’s leadership will eventually be overturned by the people, who’ve tasted a trifling bit of liberty and are seeing the saddle being cinched tight again.

But who replaces the leadership?

Encountered at the doctor’s office.

Quite lovely.

propinquity:

The law of propinquity states that the greater the physical (or psychological) proximity between people, the greater the chance that they will form friendships or romantic relationships.

The theory was first crafted by psychologists Leon Festinger, Stanley Schachter, and Kurt Back in what came to be called the Westgate studies conducted at MIT.

In the study, the strongest friendships developed between students who lived next to each other on the same floor, or between students who lived on different floors, if one of those students lived near the stairways.

In non-scientific terms, the Westgate Studies found that the frequency of contact between students was a strong indicator of future friendship formation. [copyblogger]

The word itself simply means close proximity.

Noted in this 9 Chickweed Lane comic.

The News & Observer (North Carolina) has an article with the particularly intriguing headling “Two NC Republicans say they accidentally asked the Supreme Court to end gerrymandering.” Accidentally? Are you kidding me? Well, it’s not April 1st, is it?

Two of the three North Carolina lawmakers who had joined with prominent national politicians to oppose gerrymandering have now backtracked, saying they didn’t mean to add their names on an anti-gerrymandering letter sent to the Supreme Court.

Rep. Mark Meadows and Rep. Walter Jones, both Republicans, signed on to the legal brief along with Democratic Rep. David Price.

Meadows blamed an “error” and Jones blamed “miscommunication” for their participation. Meadows also made a point to say he supports the N.C. General Assembly, which is in charge of drawing the state’s lines for its members of Congress.

Both of those guys should just resign right now. Either they’re incompetent fools who can’t manage their positions on one of the more issues of the era properly, or they’ve been told they broke party discipline and they’re scampering back into line, having been reminded that Party orders are more important than their own judgment on this issue. It’s lose-lose, boys, so you might as well just go hide in the underbrush.

It’s good to see this is not purely a Democratic effort.

Republican politicians including Arizona Sen. John McCain, Ohio Gov. John Kasich and former California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger have been among those leading the anti-gerrymandering push, along with Democrats such as former President Barack Obama and former Attorney General Eric Holder and government watchdog groups like Common Cause.

And if you’re still laughing from the Republican blunders, you can have a giggle over the statement proudly issued by the third member of the Congressional delegation to sign on to the anti-gerrymandering cause, Democratic Rep. David Price:

In a press release, Price was also quoted as saying “It is time we put an end to a system where politicians have the ability to cherry pick their voters. My home state of North Carolina has been ground-zero for hyper-partisan gerrymandering, and I am proud to add my voice to this effort.”

Despite that first sentence, that second sentence leaves me wondering if he really is in favor of hyper-partisan gerrymandering. Maybe he’ll split the difference somehow.

As I always hope, politics is entertainment.

Sami Grover on Treehugger.com notes the forces of the socially conscious market may force the socially greedy on to the right path – or at least using the right engine to get on the path:

Uber’s brand has taken a bashing lately, but there’s no doubt that it is a huge influencer in terms of new car sales. So news from the UK that all UberX rides in London will be electric or hybrid by 2020 is a big deal. By 2025, the company wants London rides to be 100% electric or plug-in hybrid. …
Coming alongside news that every major fuel retailer will be required to offer charging, that London’s black cabs are going plug-in, and that a growing number of companies are building big electric fleets, I’m beginning to think that the UK government’s stated goal of no new gas or diesel cars by 2040 is a decidedly conservative target.

That said, rumor has it that China is eyeing a ban on diesel and gas cars too. At what point do oil investors really start jumping ship?

Indeed. Oil has too many uses to go completely out of style, but as demand drops it’ll become less profitable. We’ve discussed selling our oil investments, which are relatively small.

This New York Times article on Scott Pruitt’s response to to Hurricane Harvey’s damage to Texas and Hurricane Irma’s anticipated damage to Florida and the connection to climate change does not dwell on how Pruitt’s babbling incoherency makes Trump look awful:

Scott Pruitt, the administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, says it is insensitive to discuss climate change in the midst of deadly storms. …

“To have any kind of focus on the cause and effect of the storm versus helping people, or actually facing the effect of the storm, is misplaced,” Mr. Pruitt said to CNN in an interview ahead of Hurricane Irma, echoing similar sentiments he made when Hurricane Harvey made landfall in Texas two weeks earlier. “To use time and effort to address it at this point is very, very insensitive to this people in Florida,” he added.

The Times takes the very respectful position of collecting considered opinions from scientists and other politicians who soberly disagree.

I say, just laugh at him for desperately avoiding an issue that is squarely in his bailiwick. If he looks like a fool, or a tool of industry, then bloody well call him that and let the fallout hit Trump. The man is laughable for making such a foolish statement, and it invalidates any credentials he may bring to the job. He just wants to avoid the issue because he doesn’t have any sort of valid rejoinder.

And he makes Trump look bad. Really bad.

There are too many assumptions in this scene.

Nothing But the Night (1973) considers the problem of apparent murders which are not really murders, and apparent survivors who are really dead. Sort of. And the vulnerability of children in a classy orphanage.

Nothing But the Night, besides the nonsensical title, suffers from some choppy editing and unsympathetic characters, but has a story which keeps signaling it’s about to go off the rails and into the swamp, and then swerves right back onto the road at the last moment. Saving its one exempted moment of unbelievability until the very end, the tension builds as the audience wonders at each new challenge the storytellers have given themselves, until we are forced to a conclusion unpalatable and unbelievable. We are relieved of this tragedy by a yet greater unbelievability, though, and we collapse in horror and pity when a gaggle of orphaned children throw themselves off a cliff rather than face the horror of their future.

An emotionally graphic lesson in the Western aversion to death, the movie would have benefited from a deeper exploration of its central motivation, although by doing so it might have relieved some of the building tension, thereby losing momentum. That, and better editing, more imaginative dialog, and some other improvements and this could have been a memorable movie. Instead, it merely merits “Good Try.”

On Take Care Richard Primus addresses the possibility of an early American Presidential election:

The stability of many of our constitutional expectations is a key element in keeping the constitutional system workable.  But it’s also true, and important to remember, that constitutional expectations sometimes change over time.  In the first years of the Republic, before Americans had grown accustomed to a pattern of elections every four years and never more frequently, the idea that presidential elections could occur only in every fourth year wasn’t yet a dominant view.  On the contrary, Congress in 1792 enacted a law providing for early elections in the event that the Presidency and Vice-Presidency became simultaneously vacant.  What’s more, the new President chosen at the early election would serve a full four-year term, rather than simply filling out the remainder of the last President’s term.  So in the contemplation of this early Congress, if a President and Vice-President elected in the year 1800 were killed or removed in 1803, a special election could be held in 1803, and the next regularly scheduled election would be in 1807.

The fact that Congress in 1792 deemed early elections appropriate doesn’t prove that such elections are constitutional.  Maybe Congress passed an unconstitutional law.  (James Madison, then serving in the House, seems to have thought the law was unconstitutional.  Then again, Madison argued that lots of laws Congress passed over his objection in the 1790s were unconstitutional.^[4])  Maybe—not for sure, but maybe—there are good structural arguments against early elections.

But it’s also plausible that Congress in 1792 made a constitutionally valid choice.  As a matter of structure and of democratic theory, it’s not crazy to think that the best way to identify a President is to elect one.  And nothing in the constitutional text clearly precludes, or even cuts heavily against, holding an early election.  As noted before, Article II says that an Acting President serves “until…a President shall be elected,” not “until a president is elected at the next regularly scheduled election.”  And to deepen a point made earlier, no constitutional text prevents a presidential election from being held less than four years after the previous one.

But he warns against such a move as it can lead to unfortunate gamesmanship in a hyper-partisan political environment.

I’d prefer to watch the GOP implode, kick out the extremists, and get back to the restrained compettion wherein we close ranks when an outside threat asserts itself – rather than writing extremely unfortunate letters and whining when the other side does something successful.

Tare:

The tare of a container is its weight when it’s empty, which is important to know when you can’t weigh something without putting it into something else. [Vocabulary.com]

Noted on a recently received arborist bill. I’d never seen such a word before. My Arts Editor says she sees it everywhere. Frankly, its usage didn’t make much sense to me. It was used in a column header:

Rate of Dilution Mixing Tare

I call it the Foxglove!

In a fascinating, short interview with North Korean expert Mitsuhiro Mimura, 38 North‘s Jeff Baron covers territory that sparked a lot of thoughts. In this segment, I couldn’t help but reflect on how this explanation of a change in farming behavior would resonate with a libertarian:

JB: So you’re saying the North Koreans are giving individual workers and farmers incentives to produce more, and that that’s a new thing. How does that work in practice? Is there really any noticeable impact, changes in the way the workers do their work?

MM: Absolutely. Let’s go back to the collective farm, which is now letting workers keep what they grow beyond their quota. Now, there’s no change in the fact that the State owns the rice paddy land, not the farmer. But now, the collective gives a particular paddy to a particular farmer, not just to work for this year, but year after year. In effect, as long as the farmer is managing the land well, he or she can count on getting the same land to work for the next production year too.

And yes, you can see the impact of that.

Traditionally—and traditional farm methods are still used in North Korea, because of the shortages of agricultural chemicals and machinery—farmers in Japan and Korea went to the mountains after harvest to bring back leaves, to spread on the fields as fertilizer.

But that’s a lot of work. And up until a few years ago I never saw farmers on collectives in the North make that effort. They might or might not be working the same land the next year. And they didn’t get any benefit from extra production from the collective.

Now, they know they’ll be working the same land. And that they’ll benefit from the extra production.

In the last few years, when I’m in North Korea after harvest time, it’s common to see those collective farmers going off to the mountains to bring back leaves for their fields.

For a libertarian, giving ownership to the farmer induces the farmer to use sustainable practices out of common sense – in theory. In practice, we may instead see slash & burn techniques, mostly because the libertarian makes false assumptions about the inclination of the farmer to follow legal restrictions, such as invading tropical forest which may yield quick profits, rather than working soil that requires more patience.

In the North Korean setting, ironically, the generally iron hand of the government results in better behavior by the farmer. He (or her) may not own the land, but knowing it’s effectively his apparently leads to a better behavior. But will happen if the government then arbitrarily takes it away?

Andray Abrahamian writes on 38 North about North Korean long term goals and how the Trump Administration appears to be playing into their hands:

Three generations of North Korea’s Kim family have dreamed of getting the United States off the Korean peninsula. Now, the Trump administration appears to be doing everything it can to undermine the US-South Korean alliance that has vexed Pyongyang since the armistice that ceased the Korean War was signed 64 years ago. …

In the past month, Trump has made statements on two fronts that continue to profoundly undermine the US-ROK [South Korea] alliance. The first was his August 8 off-the-cuff “fire and fury” remarks. The second was his more deliberate disdain for the Korea-US Free Trade Agreement (KORUS FTA) that has been in effect for five years. Negotiations began during the Bush administration and the FTA was signed in 2012 during President Obama’s first term. Trump is now threatening to unilaterally pull out of the deal, and soon.

In the meantime, Kim Jong Un is marching along at his own pace in his quest for a credible nuclear deterrent against the United States, as last week’s missile and nuclear tests reemphasize. Pyongyang chooses more or less provocative ways of testing its nukes and missiles, but it has an end game and several overlapping goals in mind. That end game isn’t nuclear war, which would lead to the destruction of North Korea and the end of the Kim dynasty. But driving a wedge between the United States and its allies, especially South Korea, is among the likely aims (or at least hopes). For that to work, however, it would depend on some “cooperation” from politicians in Seoul or Washington.

But now the South Koreans have real doubts about the dependability of the United States. Is Trump’s mercuriality and general immaturity going to break a decades-long alliance and possibly expose South Korea to an existential danger? Keep in mind that South Korea isn’t some small, virtually invisible country who we won’t miss if they disappear into the sea. South Korea is home to Samsung, Hyundai, POSCO, and LG, integral components of the global economy.

But more generally, the inability of two of the great democracies of the world, bridging the East-West gap, to cooperate in mutual defense, would be a propaganda victory of immense proportions for President Kim Jong Un of North Korea. In a world where the various forms of government are in continual competition and the choice of form of government – a problematic yet accurate turn of phrase – is certainly an open question in many countries, it’s very discouraging and even dangerous to give Kim a step up in such a situation, no matter how barbaric we consider his country.

And don’t think that this is only a problem related to Trump. It’d be very easy for Kim to simply point at Trump and say,

Hey, this guy’s totally inappropriate to lead the United States, and yet there he is in the American Presidency. This is the result of democracy.

Now look at me. Under my leadership my tiny little country [25 million, or less than one tenth of the United States] has developed nuclear weapons, our own Internet, and a rockin’ economy.

Making the case for Kim’s little monarchical approach to ruling is easier than you might think. People look for success first, not great sounding principles, especially when they’re in chronic distress.