Comment on Alyssa Rosenberg: Leather & Lace

• Alyssa Rosenberg: Leather & Lace

  tags: no_tag

  • I absolutely agree with you that the super-powers naturally represent empowerment, and give license for a woman to dress however she wants.
    
    I think the issue is how often writers create characters who want to dress in thongs, and incidentally are 6 foot tall, blonde, and improbably proportioned.
    
    Where's the women in giant mechanical robo-suits? Where's the butch, pear-shaped tough grrls? Where, even, are the nudists for whom leather/lycra/latex feels artificial?
    
    Like many such cases, I don't think this is a universal complaint (I'm sure many people can name comic book characters in each of the categories above), as much as an issue of proportion (of current super-heroine population) and evolution of longstanding characters.
    
    I think some characters feel like their (super-)empowerment leads naturally to their liberated sexiness, and others feel like their outfit is dissociated from and enervates their power. Their is a fine line between the postmodern trend of acknowledging the fictional nature of the story and sacrificing the character for fan service. The line seems to be crossed more and more lately.

    January 15, 2010 1:05 PM

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Comment on Betsy Braddock--Porn Star - Ta-Nehisi Coates

• Betsy Braddock--Porn Star - Ta-Nehisi Coates

  tags: no_tag

  • There are threads to this conversation that totally resonate with me: characters you love being re-created as hoochie-mamas is both common and horrible (right up there with characters you love being killed off to prove someone's "edginess"). And, to a large extent, the babes are just gettin' babe-ier, and it's worse than it used to be.

    For me, the issue passed from "it's just the nature of the business" to "wait, this actually feels ooky" when Warbird's suit was drawn so thongy. I mean, she's the first feminist superhero! :)

    But there's another thread that seems to focus on comics, or geekdom, as the source of this upswelling (or swelling up). I think this ignores the broader trend of pornstar-ness becoming the norm in pop culture in general. I saw a woman leaving Target in tights and thigh-high boots the other day.

    TV, movies, fashion; there's a trend of impossible proportions and improbable exposure. Nerd-dom contains many fantasies of the feminine, from Trinity's (and Batwoman's) decidedly un-stiletto boots and narrower silhouette to Olivia Dunham's (and Jessica Jones's) cool strength to Pam Beesly's smile, as well as the fetish-gear cheesecake we've been talking about. Although she wore some pretty provocative costumes, Jennifer Garner won over the fans of (the TV) Alias precisely because of all the ways she ISN'T like Pamela Anderson.

    I'm not saying it's ok. I'm not saying it's less common than you make out. I'm saying the opposite. I'm saying it IS a problem, and it's EVERYWHERE.

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Regarding probability study posted on TheCitizens

Yow. I ignore the comments for weeks, and three or four interesting topics come up.

A) you may be interested in the Iowa Gambling Task experiments, one observation of which is (I'm paraphrasing here, so read some real research if you want to see what the studies really claim) that people can develop a sense of a probability from a smallish sample, _before_ they consciously recognize that they have such a sense. (Paraphrase 2: drawing from a deck of possible rewards/penalties, someone will start reacting negatively to a "bad" deck before they consciously decide it's a "bad" deck.)

B) [not actually chronological] LTG says "I am surprised any mathematician on this blog would expect children to have an intuitive grasp of probability. Adults sure don't...It is well known...that individuals tend...to treat a 99,999 to 1 chance...differently from...a 1 in 100,000 chance..."

This, and I really do not mean to offend, is because you are not a mathematician, particularly not a mathematician who has to teach non-mathematicians.

Mathematicians (especially in education) think about what is and isn't intuitive mathematics a great deal, because what _seems_ intuitive to us is clearly not to our students. And one big idea that's come out of this is the impetus to connect the language and structure of mathematics to the structures and intuition that "normal" people already have, rather than treat math as abstract and foreign.

So we talk about "number sense" and "proportional reasoning" and "intuitive probability" and part of what we mean is a non-linguistic concept of those things. The theory is that people have a sense of probability, both in the cases of extremely rare events and relatively common events, but:
a) your intuition can be misled, and a high-level, abstract argument lacks potency (e.g., because you've heard about miraculous recoveries from coma, your intuition is that is a reasonably likely event, and a doctor telling you it's a one in a million chance doesn't dissuade you.)
b) it is difficult to connect your intuition, in the many cases when it is right, to the abstract claims of probability, if they're couched in examples not relevant to your experience or in language you don't have other intuitive connections with (most people troubled by the Monty Hall problem didn't watch episode after episode of Let's Make a Deal; most people have never thought of what "1 in 100,000" means, in any concrete way, and usually don't have a reason to.)

Thus, while mathematicians cannot help but see that most adults' sense of probability is _solely_ intuitive, and unconnected to any attempts at probabilistic abstraction or language, and (therefore?) usually lacks _nuance_, we cling to the belief (well justified, really) that there is in fact an intuition there.

(I should point out that numbers are themselves language, as I'm using the phrase. I doubt that caused any confusion, but you can never be too careful on the interweb.)

C) I took Pombat's examples to just be illustrations of the way probabilities are bandied about in misleading ways, and not a claim about DNA evidence per se. For more examples of this and other grievous misquantification, John Allen Paulos' Innumeracy (and/or A Mathematician Reads the Newspaper) are excellent reading.

D) RbR's argument (and I know I shouldn't say this, but I just can't help it, so please forgive me) assumes facts not in evidence. A claim about the sensitivity of a forensic test is just that, independent of other factors. If a jury is deciding guilt or innocence, they are (or should be) weighing all the factors RbR suggests (which surely the prosecution would present) in their "reasonable doubt" analysis. But those other factors don't affect the accuracy of the test.

RbR's description also bears some resemblance to an example in Innumeracy, about a case in Los Angeles in 1964. (I'm not saying RbR is guilty of the probabilistic fallacy in that case, just that his description is similar to the set-up for the fallacy, and the story is a fun one, so I'm going to relate it.) Brutally summarized, the argument was: a pair of lawbreakers were seen with several "distinguishing characteristics" (blonde with pony tail with black man with beard in a yellow car). The defendants matched those characteristics. In this case, there was nothing else linking the defendants to the crime, but surely the chances that a couple would match all those characteristics were so small that this must be the couple in question, right?

So it was decided. Until the appeal, in which the defense pointed out that the relevant probability was not whether a couple would have those characteristics, but rather whether, out of the ~2M couples in LA, there was _another_ couple with those characteristics. (The probability that there was one such couple was actually a certainty, since the defendants were living proof.)

It turns out (and no one would suggest that this is intuitive) the likelihood of another such couple (given the prosecution's estimate of the relevant probabilities) is about 8%, which provided reasonable enough doubt for the California supreme court
to overturn the original verdict.

E) If anyone wants to talk more about math, probability, and math education, I'm very keen on it -- you could say it's my job. Email me!

http://socialbrain.rsablogs.org.uk/

http://socialbrain.rsablogs.org.uk/

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Bipartisanship should be an effect, not a cause

Apparently, Congress and pundits favor "bipartisan" legislation, that is, bills you can get members of both parties to sign on to. Rhetorically I ask, but why? Surely we can all dispense with the naïve notion that the best solution, or the one most desired by the people, lies at the mean between the party positions. There are at least three reasons off the top of my head proving the preposterousness of that notion, and you can probably come up with more than me.

Really, bipartisanship is supposed to be a reflection of the value of a bill. The bill's not good because it's bipartisan; rather, the bill's inherently good, so good that people want to publicly support it, even if it's not what their party came up with. A bill might be bipartisan because a priori it's good.

Lack of bipartisanship is generally framed as a negative for the bill's originator: "Obama has failed to deliver on the promise of bipartisanship for his agenda." But there's a perfectly good converse view. If a bill's good, or popular -- the health care public option, for example -- opponents of the bill would be right to fear the lack of bipartisanship. If they're too dumb or stubborn to back what's good, then they're useless to their constituents.

An agenda setter should put good legislation out there, with no compromises solely to garner support from across the aisle. If it's good enough, and popular enough, then all the Congresscritters in vulnerable seats are under pressure to back it. Bipartisanship is an indicator that the bill was good in the first place; but it is only a correlated side-effect, not a necessary (or sufficient) condition for good legislation.

TNC cannot stop talking about slavery

If you read only 200 things Ta-Nehisi Coates writes this year, this should be one of them. Also, you will only have read about a fifth of the great stuff he writes.

Insightful, as always, but I don't think TNC is quite right here. Or perhaps he is overall, but some nuance is in order.


Specifically, I think there's a historical line that goes like TNC says "We tend to think", namely that slavery was kind of this regrettable cruelty that the world in general was tolerant of, until we got civilized and disavowed it.

But there is at least an acknowledgment, in the historical line I was taught, that America (like always) was exceptional. That line says, what with the explosion of cotton (which Eli Whitney's invention contributed to), the economy of the South became completely dependent on slavery as an economic fuel, kind of like we talk about being dependent on oil today. And that dependence shifted the culture, both toward a vigorous defense of the economic interests in slavery and toward dehumanization of slaves on a scale and to a degree beyond whatever the barbaric practices of yesteryear had been.

But that's just my impression from my history classes. I'm not sure there's a shared "American" conventional point of view on this.

Where I feel TNC has it right is that "we have never grappled with this," `this' being that most of the culture of America is formed from the fractious and unresolved shards that remain from centuries of dehumanizing black people, and the struggles both violent and nonviolent to erode and destroy them.

Again, referring to my own education, the mythology of America is the "melting pot" notion of disparate cultures coming together and peacefully sharing the opportunities of a new land. But this, it seems to me, is a gloss, a "and they all lived happily ever after" resolution of the unresolved issue that defines America. We (which of course is not really "we", since we weren't there, but the imagined "we" of this country) invented a new kind of racism, and have never been able to put that dire genie back into the bottle.

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Economicomics

Regarding this:


I worry a little bit that enough research has been done about this:

Storm could irrigate the crops of all the suffering farmers in the midwest and California when the droughts of summer are destroying their crops.

I don't follow X-Men religiously anymore, and they sneak things like Spidey's organic webbing past me, so this may have changed, but historically (i.e., in the 80's-90's) it was explicitly established that Storm moves humidity around, but doesn't create it. If she irrigates the midwest, she does it by exacerbating the drought in California. In fact, she was essentially doing this as a local rain goddess when Prof. X recruited her.

My geeky trivium aside, I think it's weird when people complain about an amusing theoretical like this as being tired, overdone, or silly. Superheroes are cartoons -- superhero economics is a cartoon of economics. Most of us aren't economists, and thinking through simplified illustrations (including their shortcomings) makes key concepts clearer. Also, it's fun.

on Yglesias re future of newspapers

Matthew Yglesias » Is Anyone Reading the News?

I echo the sentiments that local bloggers fill the niche of local reporting pretty well. I pooh-pooh the sentiments that local bloggers mostly have axes to grind and newspapers provide “disinterested” reporting. That’s an overgeneralization — in the cities I’ve lived, the local papers have had axes to grind on most local reporting, sometimes obscured by false disinterest.

I’d also like to echo the value of narrowly read news as providing a record, available for later review when someone realizes they _do_ care about some local issue. Local blogs do this in the short term, but there’s a high risk of blogs eventually dying (due to the interested people moving, for example), and small-scale locally focused blogs are less likely to come up on Google searches, even if they’re most relevant.

People have said the newspapers crib from weeklies — might there not be a business model of collecting/linking/rating local blogs, a sort of “preserving for posterity” spin on the “plagiarizing from the alt-weeklies” concept? You know who might have the skillset and market positioning for something like that? I’m thinking the local newspaper, that’s who.

Lastly, I’d also point out that local reporting from locals (newspapers, blogs, whoever) can raise money from local advertising, which is a more stable revenue model than the world-famous dailies. The new sushi place down the street needs to advertise, but its ad dollar would be wasted on anything more widely distributed than the local paper (or local blog.)

New names for "Soft Power"

In reply to the third in the series of Matt Yglesias talking about the term "soft power":

El Cid's #20 also describes the potential downside to "influence", which otherwise enjoys popularity as being accurate and already used commonly in this context.  Influence contrasts with control: it sounds weaker because it implies you _might_ affect behavior, or you might not.  "Power" suggests a guarantee of the result you want (if you've got enough).

I'm stunned that "non-military power" and "civilian power" have come up but no one's mentioned "peaceful power" or a variation.  Maybe other people think "peace" sounds too weak also, but I think it's got rhetorical weight.  No one calls himself a warmonger; no one says they're against peace.  Opponents could imply "peaceful" means unwilling to use military force, but I don't see that gaining traction. 

I think Matt's second notion -- the "appeal of the brand" -- can be summed up as "Respect".  Respect, like "political capital", can be thought of as an element of peaceful power (look!  it's catching on!).  However, it's a cleric in the Peace Power party: respect doesn't make other nations do what you want directly, but it makes the diplomatic resources, development aid, etc. more effective.  (Curse you, pseudonymous in nc at #24, for planting the RPG analogy seed!)

High salary = high risk = sometimes getting burned

In response to this Yglesias post:

Word to Ted's #25. And weaker than Ted, but still true: if you look back to Matt's post, he isn't referring to CEOs in general, but executives strictly in the finance sector. Maybe that makes a difference to you, maybe it doesn’t.

My pithy rewording of Matt: “The buck stops where the bucks stopped.”

C’mon, you know you love it. It’s pithy! Who doesn’t like pith?

---------------------

I stopped there in the comment, and dragging past the punchline is a mistake, but I CAN'T HELP IT.  I know.  My loquaciousness disgusts even me.

To explicate further, the idiom about "the buck", where it stops and where it is passed, is sometimes used to mean the blame, and rhetoric about credit and blame is what the original post was about.  But, especially in terms of policy and corporate bailouts or whatever, I usually think of "the buck" to mean the responsibility, which is not the same thing.

If I run a company, and some employee mistreats a customer, I might know nothing about it, had no control over it, couldn't've predicted it, etc.  I'm not to blame.  But it's up to me to do something about it.  It's my responsibility, and if I don't want to be responsible for messes I didn't cause, then I shouldn't've taken the "running the company" job.

The topic that came up in the comments thread (that Ted's 25 pointed out was off the topic of the original post) was about CEOs and why they get paid so much.  An analogy to pro athletes came up, which I think is generally appropriate.  As I see it, pro athletes get paid high salaries because there's a small supply of people with their talents, their careers are short (partly because that rare performance level can't be maintained in the face of aging), and there's a high risk that a career might get cut off even sooner due to injury. 

Elite business executives presumably get paid high salaries because there's a small supply of people with their talents, although the requisite skills are extremely hard to measure.  My impression is that CEOs have much longer careers than athletes on average.  Is their income at high risk also?

I think it generally is, and that's as it should be.  Top-level execs of big companies have responsibility for lots of things, including things that they don't have complete control over.  Sometimes things are going to go south on them, and they're going to suffer for it, whether it's really their fault or not.

Ah, there's the rub. 

They don't always seem to suffer for it, do they?

And I really think they should.  Not because they're to blame; sometimes they are, sometimes they aren't, but it doesn't matter.  They're getting paid orders of magnitude more than other employees putatively because they took responsibility.  If they're not willing to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune -- there's _lots_ of people who'll take that job, and greater supply implies lower prices.

Unless the whole thing is a clever scam from the start.  If everyone thinks you've got big responsibilities, then they'll pay you for that risk.  And if in fact you don't take responsibility, then there's no actual risk, and they're paying you for nothing, which is the best kind of work.  But that's crazy talk, right?

uncertainty in voting results

In a comment to this post from the Citizens about the Minnesota senate race:

I'm not a statistician, but "margin of error" refers to the likelihood of a survey not accurately reflecting the population the survey is taken from.

Since the votes are what decide the election (we don't care what the population who doesn't vote thinks), the vote is a census, not a survey, and doesn't have any margin of error in the statistical sense.

But, as Florida 2000 demonstrated, you are right in thinking there will be "a different tally every time they are tallied."  This isn't a mathematical issue, but a practical one.  Out of three million ballots, some are going to be weird, subject to interpretation, of imperfect provenance, etc.

I _think_ the error rate associated with this sort of thing varies a lot based on the exact situation.  Different voting machine types (and different voting machines) will produce ambiguous results at different rates; different jurisdictions will have different judges who consider different proportions of provisional ballots to fall into the category of "subject to legal interpretation."

If, after the error-checking of the recount, the difference is still only a couple hundred, the chances are good that there's enough "fuzziness" in some of the votes that the result will come down to luck -- who has the higher tally when the courts (or the election laws) say "enough".  But not necessarily -- it's possible that even a very small margin is demonstrably genuine in the eyes of the law, if the voting machines are so good they don't produce many ambiguous results.  (This is the point of electronic voting machines, although optical scanning offers a clearer paper trail to check results against.)

I say "in the eyes of the law" because there's no way to determine beyond the shadow of <i>any</i> doubt that every voter's intent has really been accurately captured.  This boils down to the impossibility of absolute certainty -- at some point we draw the line and say "yes, it's possible that this electronic voting machine switched the vote of every 10,000th voter and we didn't happen to catch it with comparison to exit poll data, but that possibility isn't worth pursuing."

In a comment to this Matt Yglesias post:

It's like the song says: you've got to be carefully taught.

Hearing that ("You've Got to be Carefully Taught") from the Wee Kids on the Kid Power album is surely before Matt's time.  (To be fair, I never saw the show on television, since it was a little before _my_ time too.  Still have the album though.)

And that seems like a harsh reminder that progress is won only inch by inch.  The same sentiment that was an indictment of racism in 1949, and bore repeating in 1974, is equally appropriate regarding homophobia in 2008.

The more things change, the more ... we must fight for change.

reply to Citizens' Bell Curve commenting on 538

I think Bell Curve should stop for a second before emailing Nate Silver.

Firstly, there's a statistical principle here. Bell Curve is completely right that the likelihood of any particular outcome is tiny, and not a good way to measure whether the outcome was "likely" or whether the poll is "suspect". But the usual statistical comparison is what is the probability of getting the actual (sample) result or further from the mean. The right thing to look for, then, is the probability that McCain got 74% or more of the sample.

Saying "McCain's result was 74%, so let's look at the probability that the poll (sample) would come up with _70%_ or greater" is unfairly helping your own argument, since you're throwing in the chunk from 70% to 74%. So that part of the argument needs to be refined in any case.

Here's what I looked at. There's bound to be a few flaws in it, but I think it suggests Nate's numbers are closer to the mark.

First, there's the chi-squared goodness-of-fit test, as described here and here. The chi^2=41.04 for a 98-person sample producing an outcome of 73 McCain, 25 Obama, when the population is 41.25% McCain, 56.35% Obama. That's a big chi^2 value; according to the distribution calculator I just downloaded, that corresponds to a level of significance (for a one-sided tail) of about p=2.18*10^(-11). That's pretty close to Nate's odds (which give a probability of 1.83*10^(-11).) Since his numbers are so specific, and I haven't hesitated to round off, I'm thinking Nate has some exact binomial distribution data to get the precise value, and it looks to me like he's counting the tail, not just the chance of that precise outcome.

But far be it from me to just throw yet another approach out there and not produce some apples to compare to your apples. With a name like Bell Curve, you can't fault the guy for going to the Central Limit Theorem. :)

Okay, the binomial random variable Y is the number of young polled people who said they favored McCain, which has n=98 and we posit p=.425. So the expected value is np=41.65 and the variance is np(1-p)=23.94875.

The Central Limit Theorem says that Z=(Y-41.65)/sqrt(23.94875) is approximately N(0,1). The actual result was 73 for Y, or 6.406135493 for Z. The probability of Z being greater than or equal to 6.406135493 is 7.4627*10(-11), which again is more in the ballpark of Nate's result than 1 in 150.

Also, referring to Dr. S's approximations, the sigma for this case was sqrt(23.949)=4.89, pretty close to his 5% estimate, and the jump of 31.35% was 6.4 sigmas, close to his estimate of 6 sigmas or so. Which don't appear on his table, because 6 sigmas means really really unlikely. (Other than fudging p(1-p) in the sigma, which is a low-error fudge, Dr. S _is_ using the CLT, albeit with some roundoff.)

I don't have the facility to replicate Bell Curve's computation of the binomial distribution directly of the probability of getting exactly 73 McCain voters out of 98, so I couldn't say why that number came out at lower odds (=higher probability) than these tests indicate the probability of getting greater than or equal to 73 McCain voters out of 98 should be.

But I'm very suspicious of the 150 to 1 odds Bell Curve ends up with, for the reasons given above.

LTG, it may uninterest you to know that "six sigma" is a business management strategy, (some might say "fad"), that involves co-opting statistical methods for quality management of business processes, or something equally buzzwordy.

Bob Gets Sentimental

Here's Ta-Nehisi Coates, contemplating "Obama's campaign and the values of parenting:"

Obama's mother, a relatively young woman when he was born, will not be here to see him inaugurated, should he win. Whenever, I think of that I just get sad--mostly because she did know the rewards of parenting and threw herself at her kids. There's something unjust in the fact that she won't get to see the results of all her work.

Here's the thing, and I hope it offers Ta-Nehisi some solace -- I disagree. I think she did see the results of all her work. Her son grew up to be a good and mighty man. That we are electing him to be President is just our recognition of what she already knew.

In comment to Ta-Nehisi Coates

A comment to this right here:

I cannot express how excited I would be at the opportunity to be
your white spokesperson. Resume available upon request. Email me!

Either this idea of class-criticism is just strawmanship, or I'm
blind to the intricate folkways of white people. I, frankly, suspect
that it's both.

And, in my opinion, your suspicions are entirely correct. There is
quite a bit of strawmanship going on, as your original citation
evidences. (No one actually ridicules anyone for being a "rube", except
maybe carnies. Otherwise, "rube" is only used in accusations -- "he
thinks you're a rube!")

This purposely confuses _everyone's_ understanding of the intricate
folkways. Matt was right to point out that eating moose isn't white
ghetto-equivalent ("whetto?"), but it's being purposely confused with
shooting and eating squirrel or possum, which is. (Although this
indicator is a stereotype that rarely occurs in the wild.) Snowmobiling
is whetto when it's competing with cross-country skiing, but in the
wider context (competitive snowmobile racing?) it's comparable with
Ski-doos and ATVs, which are on the expensive side to really indicate
whetto (we're getting into nouveau riche tacky territory -- if you're
snooty about ATVs, you're snootifying against how those rich people are
spending their money indulging their whetto tastes, which introduces
new social dynamic twists -- but more on this in a moment.)

"She supports drilling!" and "...where did she go to school?" are
what the author imagines cartoons of ecofascists and bluebloods would
exclaim, and nothing more.

A point worth pointing out, vaguely related to this post by Matt,
is that what actual lower class whites do is only peripherally related
to the classist notion of whetto. Predominantly, the class tension is
between white people who spend their disposable income within some
cultural norm structure, and white people who spend their disposable
income in some other cultural norm structure that the first group
thinks is how dumb poor people would spend their money if they had any.

I'm serious about that spokesperson gig. And I can be more concise
than this -- more words, fewer words, using "trailer trash" instead of
"whetto", whatever you want. I aim to please.

In comment to Paul Krugman

Paul Krugman has a nice description of how the bailout of bad mortgage securities would get paid for. In response, I commented:

In this description, is "the Public" predominantly the Chinese government and sovereign funds I keep hearing about, or is that hyperbolic xenophobia?

I've heard both that the bailout would be paid by the taxpayers (who would be "on the hook" for the assets, in case they have no value), and that the feds could actually make money by buying low and selling high.

Both of these seem to be ignoring that the bailout will be paid for with borrowed (or soon-to-be-borrowed) money, so even if the feds did sell off the toxic paper for more than they bought it for, the net effect might still increase the deficit.

Comment on Alaskan budget

In response to this post at the Citizens:

Just in case you're curious, although I wasn't able to exactly match up the data from RbR's reference and US West's, it certainly seems (within a percentage point or so) that the tax breakdown corresponds to oil revenue this way:

Property tax (1.9%): this corresponds to the $65.6M paid entirely by the oil companies.
Select sales (6.4%): this corresponds to $218M paid (presumably) by consumers.
Corporate Income Tax (23.6%): this corresponds to $771.3M, of which 77% ($594.4M) is paid by oil companies.
Other (68.1%): this corresponds to $2,396.4M, of which 96% ($2,292.3M) is the production tax paid by oil companies.

I
should point out that the percentages don't match the numbers exactly,
and there's a little leftover taxes ($28.2M "Fish Tax", $16M
"Commercial Passenger Vessel Tax") that I didn't know how to
characterize. Together, these are less than 1.3% of Alaska's tax
revenue.

Summing up, that big "Other" chunk of the Alaskan tax
pie is almost entirely oil production tax. The purple Corporate Income
tax is mostly oil company taxes also.

Percentage of tax
revenue paid directly by oil companies is about 84%. Percentage of the
entire Alaskan budget paid directly by oil companies is about 43%, paid
by federal money is about 12%, and paid by interest on investments is
about 31%. About 10% is paid by Alaskan citizens in the form of select
sales taxes, fines, etc. The remaining bit (4%, though this is also
where the rounding error lives) is from other corporate sources, like
mining.

--------------

Palin's big triumph as governor
was getting a new oil and gas tax passed that increased the tax rate on
the oil companies. So, when you hear she "took on the oil companies",
this is what it's about. Strangely, the Republicans never describe it
as "raising taxes on businesses", which I'm pretty sure Fred Thompson
told me was equivalent to raising my taxes. Also, it increases unemployment and stifles the economy, I am led to believe.

If,
as RbR quoted, Palin said she "protected the tax payers", that demands
clarification. The tax payers in Alaska are clearly the oil companies,
and she's raised their taxes. I doubt they think that's protection. :)

What Bob does when he should be working

Feel free to follow along with Bob's websurfing -- it's almost like being there!

As you know, I follow Matt Yglesias (who has a new bloghome), and he posted this reference/comment on university education, in which he notes that Brad DeLong, in this "excellent post on the origins of the large lecture course",

observes that large lectures had a compelling logic in the pre-Gutenberg universe....Modern practice, by contrast, is a bit puzzling.

So I went and read DeLong's whole post, which is deliciously concise, which doesn't make for really effect procrastinating, so I read on and found my ego vicariously mollified in this comment:

Brad, if you are seriously interested in this, you should speak to Carl Wieman....

The comment goes on to summarize Carl's take on university ed, and suggests you can hear it direct from him:

You can hear him discuss what he is on about here:
http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=95882746&s=143441&i=1556149

This link, it turns out, is on iTunes, which I don't have installed, at least on this machine.

The rest of the websurf into the blogshore is less interesting -- Googling "is iTunes evil?" convinced me that it was, but not so much that I shouldn't install it to hear a (presumably free) podcast of Carl. But I'm not currently logged in with privileges enough to install it, and so then I figured I'd blog my experience for you to share.

The "large lecture" issue doesn't come up at my place o'business, but it does at Rebecca's. But the general concern of "is this the way to teach?" is the Pressing Issue of Our Time. Feel free to put your random thoughts or suggestions in the comments, and maybe you will start a voyage of webby discovery for some other slacker!

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Fashion Police

via Mr. Yglesias:
"Flint, Michigan Battles Crack Epidemic" is actually about a new law in Flint specifying how you're not supposed wear your pants. Check it out -- the graphic is fantastic.

Matthew Yglesias describes my own puzzlement as well.

My mostly unhelpful take, which echoes some of the comments on Matt's page (especially mine), is that the counterpoint to the conventional wisdom about Watergate ("it's not the crime that brings you down, it's the coverup"), the unconventional wisdom if you will, is that you can get away with murder if you really stick to the coverup story.

Empirically, Bush &amp; company saw this work with Iran-Contra (which gave birth to "plausible deniability"), and just took that ball and ran with it.

More abstractly, the whole idea of adversarial debate (political parties, litigation, etc.) is that there's some arbiter that'll decide that one side or the other has the better argument, or makes the valid point. In politics, this role might be filled by the rationality of the opponent (who concedes the point), or the media (the journalists report the point with supporting facts), or the elites (the pundits concede the point), or "the people" (the opinion polls convince the politicians to concede the point).

If all those potential arbiters are impugned, indecisive, or unwise, whoever's in power can do whatever they want. Any outcry or opposition can be met with sheer stubbornness, and there's no authority to make you submit to reason or punish your transgressions.

The first and last potential arbiters (the opponent's fair thinking and the public) are pretty idealistic concepts, and have been ignored routinely by politicians throughout history, usually without repercussion. (Note, however, that even though he knew it would be disastrous, Nixon &lt;i&amp;gt;didn't&amp;lt;/i&amp;gt; burn the tapes. Maybe even &lt;i&amp;gt;his&amp;lt;/i&amp;gt; understanding that there &lt;i&amp;gt;was&amp;lt;/i&amp;gt; the rule of law, or at least no justifiable reason not to turn over the tapes, was what led to the truth coming out and the requisite consequences. Have some politicians concluded from this that they need to ignore their reason in the pursuit of power?)

In my opinion, a large part of the "difference" between 1974 and now is due to the failures of the other two arbiters (reporters and pundits). If every news network were running McClatchy's stories, and Broder and his peers were agitating for impeachment...

The failures of the media (reportage and commentary) are ample fodder for the blogosphere, but my notions about &lt;i&amp;gt;why&amp;lt;/i&amp;gt; they're failing so spectacularly &lt;i&amp;gt;now&amp;lt;/i&amp;gt; are ill-formed and naive. Clearly the qualification process for punditry (and journalism) has broken down, and most importantly, wrongheaded thinking and/or meaningless coverage isn't resulting in loss of audience, at least not enough to provide economic pressure to get rid of lousy news &amp; opinion.

But I don't know why that is, or why it hasn't been such a problem until now. Maybe James Watt put stupid juice in the water supply under Reagan, and their brilliant plan has finally come to fruition. (I did say "ill-formed and naive", right?)

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