Browsing Catharsis – 05.22.13

“But sometimes, everyone is tired enough of the same old games they’ve played a hundred times over together to give Mario Party another try. I figure it’s one of those exercises people do when they need to remind themselves why they should feel a certain way. Oh, and sure, alcohol is probably involved. Mario Party, in my friends circle at least, requires a lapse of judgment.”

-Patricia Hernandez, “Mario Party, A Game For People Who Want To Watch The World Burn.” She makes Mario Party sound like Taco Bell.

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A worthwhile ytmnd.

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A website that converts feet to Altuves, a unit of measurement defined in terms of the Houston Astros diminutive second baseman.

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The caption is “hey u kids wanna buy some drugs”

Via Ben Briggs.

Browsing Catharsis – 05.21.13

“What player in baseball do you think has the most ANT — Announcer Nonsense Talk — spoken about them? By ANT, I’m not just referring to stuff announcers say. I’m referring to a sort of universal praise that does not tie to logic or anything tangible but instead to a sort of whimsical hope and powerful narratives … You know ANT when you hear or read it — it is when people start speaking in broad generalities about a player (‘This guy just wants it more’) or when they start over-crediting a player for dubious achievements (pitcher wins and RBIs tend to be the sweet nectar of Announcer Nonsense Talk) or when they start to turn sports achievement into life achievement (‘That was just a courageous pitch!’). And like I say, it’s not only announcers who do this — far from it. You see it everywhere.”

-Joe Posnanski, “Jeff Francoeur and ANT,” via Craig Calcaterra.

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“In response to the Great Recession, the availability of unemployment insurance (UI) benefits was extended to an unprecedented 99 weeks in many U.S. states in the 2009-2012 period. We use matched monthly data from the CPS to exploit variation in the timing and size of the UI benefit extensions across states to estimate the overall impact of these extensions on individual exit from unemployment, and we compare the estimated impact with that for the prior extension of benefits during the much milder downturn in the early 2000s. In both periods, we find a small but statistically significant reduction in the unemployment exit rate and a small increase in the expected duration of unemployment. The effects on exits and duration are primarily due to a reduction in exits from the labor force rather than to a decrease in exits to employment (the job finding rate). Although the overall effect of UI extensions on exit from unemployment is small, it implies a substantial effect of extended benefits on the steady-state share of unemployment in the cross-section that is long-term.”

-Henry S. Farber and Robert G. Valletta, “Do Extended Unemployment Benefits Lengthen Unemployment Spells? Evidence from Recent Cycles in the U.S. Labor Market.”

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Browsing Catharsis – 05.20.13

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Via whakatikatika.

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“El martes pasado Ryan Murphy defendió su tesis doctoral en Suffolk University. Su tesis consistió en tres ensayos de temas relacionados al behavioral economics y problemas de anarquía y economia politica. Ryan escribio tres papers, el primero sobre conflictos en situación de anarquía, el segundo sobre la irracionalidad racional de Caplan y el tercero sobre el rol de los psicópatas en el public choice.”

-Nicolas Cachanosky, “Anarquia y Behavioral Economics,” a summary of my dissertation in Spanish. Thanks, Nicolas!

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Created by some terrifying site known as Pokemon Fusion.

Browsing Catharsis – 05.19.13

“AOL, of all companies, has seen its stock soar from $26 a share in May 2012 to more than $37 today—almost the exact inverse of how Facebook’s shares have performed. Its fellow dinosaur Yahoo has done even better, leaping from around $15 last year to over $26 today. If you had the foresight (or orneriness) to buy shares in those two companies instead of Facebook a year ago, congratulations: You’ve earned the right to party like it’s 1999.”

-Will Oremus, ”The Hottest Internet Companies of the Past Year Were Yahoo and AOL.”

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-Hugo Gye, “Map shows world’s ‘most racist’ countries (and the answers may surprise you),” HT T.W.

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“Which brings me back to my mother’s question: If I could pick just one stock for someone to buy, what would it be? I would now suggest something like the Vanguard Total World Stock exchange-traded fund, which started trading in 2008. In one package, you can get low cost and maximal diversification. It may not be as exciting as trying to pick the next Apple or Google, but you’ll sleep better at night.”

-Greg Mankiw, “What Stock to Buy? Hey, Mom, Don’t Ask Me.”

Browsing Catharsis – 05.17.13

“Listen, we’re with you: Muttonchops, fedora hats and not-so-occasional references to obscure pickled foods are all rather obnoxious. But are these life choices so offensive that they should be penalized? The answer to that question is yes, according to more than one-quarter of (unhip) Americans.”

-”Hipster Tax for Being ‘So Annoying’ Backed by 27 Percent of Americans: Poll.”

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“In this Top 100 Draft Flashback, we’ll examine success rates for various draft demographics—spoiler alert: high school draft picks carry more risk of reaching the majors—by looking at both the number of players who reach the big leagues, and the number who become significant contributors to major league success. We’ll touch on a number of draft flops and list all the players, sorted by Baseball-Reference’s wins above replacement (WAR) metric, who qualified for the big league position study by reaching the majors for at least 100 games. For this exercise we’re not counting cup-of-coffee callups as major league graduates. Players are grouped by the position where they were drafted.”

-Matt Eddy, “Top 100 Draft Flashback: Impact Players, Notable Flops.” Very interesting lists.

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“That’s why we’re seeing ‘diet’ on the down-low. Beverage companies have begun to wean their customers off standard soda recipes, in an attempt to satisfy both public health advocates and consumers who otherwise avoid reduced-calorie products. This triangulating trend developed overseas: For the European market, Coca-Cola adulterates its Fanta with acesulfame-K and aspartame, and slips stevia into its cans of Sprite. The secret diet products have one-third fewer calories than they would if made entirely with sugar, but you wouldn’t know it unless you checked the back of the can.”

-Daniel Engber, “Quiet Diet: Are dairy producers trying to sneak artificial sweeteners into our milk?“

Star Trek

Matt Yglesias has a very extensive post on his reaction to marathoning the entirety of the Star Trek cannon. Here are my views on the franchise.

• The Original Series is boring, but only in the same way that anything more than 25 years old is boring. At one point or another, I probably watched every single episode, but probably when I was very young when it was in endless syndication on UHF. Many episodes had quasi-watchable aspects to them, in the same sense that The Twilight Zone still does. It’s not something that makes me want to murder people; I just can’t imagine feeling sufficiently bored to ever have reason to watch it again.
• Tyler Cowen defends the quality of TOS. Spock will continue to have more impact on culture than Data, but that’s entirely the result of path dependency. When Star Trek was originally on, there was nothing else like it to watch, so a critical mass of people watched it. Then they and their children could get the jokes when decades later Trekkies began forcing memes. I don’t think that has anything to do with the quality of the show. The Matrix has more cultural impact than the modern Battlestar Galactica. That isn’t evidence that the script for The Matrix was better.
• TOS films were fine, and I think the received wisdom about which ones were good and which sucked is essentially correct.
• I agree that TNG is the “true” Star Trek series. I don’t think it holds up well today, unfortunately, though that may have something to do with the series being drilled into my head at a formative age. Yglesias says there’s a lot of character development in the series, which to him is good. But to me today it’s a bunch of narm.
• Everything that anyone has ever needed to say about TNG movies has been said by Mr. Plinkett. However, I attribute many of his negative reactions to the TNG movies to romanticizing the TV show. TNG actors and plots were always insipid and stilted and stupid (even if they were a massive improvement on TOS). If you do that theatrically years later, it’s going to look insipid and stilted and stupid.
• And yes, in other words, everything sucks, even things I like. But this is a general principle.
• I liked Star Trek: Insurrection much more than I should have. At the time the “screw the greater good these people have property rights in the planet” theme made me want to start waving the American flag.
• I actually watched all of Deep Space Nine recently. There’s… a lot of narm there too. But I forced myself through it because people kept saying how good the last season is. Well it’s a really good season, but I’m not sure if I could recommend others do that. I wish I had followed the show more carefully when it was on, but I lost interest after the first season or so.
• There’s a brief scene, I don’t remember when, where Quark has a few lines that sound like they could have come straight out of Human Action.
• I watched all of Voyager but only because it was on at convenient times on UHF. It was barely watchable then and it certainly isn’t now.
• I stopped watching Enterprise very early on because there was a scene where the Vulcan woman says she doesn’t eat meat because it is illogical. I’m not kidding.
• The new Star Trek movie is more watchable, whatever its other sins, than anything else here. It’s a stupid action movie, but it doesn’t feel out of place in the Star Trek cannon (except in the obvious way).
• If Yglesias thinks Star Trek is somehow unique in its ability to confirm the biases of progressives via narrative, he needs to broaden his cultural horizons. I’m sure he’ll be moved upon re-watching Murphy Brown.

Browsing Catharsis – 05.16.13

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“Avoid News: Towards a Healthy News Diet.”

Via Art Carden.

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Browsing Catharsis – 05.13.13

“The story is as much about the struggles of a single-parent family (albeit one that survives on human blood rather than state benefits) as it is about the curse of the undead.”

-Prospero, “The undead will live forever.”

 

I only link to this because I don’t know the difference between human blood and state benefits.

 

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“There has an unfortunate outbreak of food-borne illness in my little corner of the country. 21 people have been made ill by the current outbreak. You can read the details here - Warning it might make you sick, not from specifics…the article doesn’t detail the effects of e-coli, campylobacter, or cryptosporidium however the fact that children under age five were fed raw milk and one person continued to drink the milk after being warned of an outbreak may disgust you. Milk has not always been the symbol of purity and wholesomeness that it is today. Despite the fact we were more of a nation of farmers in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, we still were quickly moving into cities. Livestock was no exception, dairy cows lived in symbiosis with the brewing industry. The cows were fed on the spent grains of the brewing process, the milk was distributed along delivery routes. Descriptions of the dairy operations of that time make the Jungle and today’s feed lot operations look like the clean room at the computer chip factory.”

-Saucyman, “When Did Pasteurization Become Bad?“

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“Texting while driving has now replaced drunk driving as the number one cause of teenage deaths on the road in the U.S., new research has found. The study, performed by the Cohen Children’s Medical Center in New York, found that more than 300,000 teens are injured and more than 3,000 die each year as a result of sending SMS messages while behind the wheel.”

-Stuart Miles, “More U.S. Teens Killed Texting While Driving Than Drinking.” My position is more that our public policy should be consistent than anything. I’m also aware that this hardly shows that drinking is safer than texting.

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Via Mark Perry.

Tom Hanks as the Most Trusted American

Per Tyler Cowen, see here.

In my opinion, credit should go to the Tom Hanks Rocket.

Browsing Catharsis – 05.12.13

“I love to play video games and I love to eat. Preferably at the same time. What’s even better is eating the food from the game I’m playing while I’m playing it.”

-Gourmet Gaming, a site devoted to developing recipes based on food from video games.

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Via Razib Khan.

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Last night I resisted the temptation to change my facebook picture to Captain Pollution. Just thought everyone should know.