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

———————————-

—————————————–

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

————————————–

“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.”

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

—————————————–

———————————————

“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.

———————————————-

“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?“

• 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.

—————————

—————————————–

“Avoid News: Towards a Healthy News Diet.”

Via Art Carden.

—————————————–

-Prospero, “The undead will live forever.”

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

—————————————

“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?“

————————————–

“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.

—————————————

Via Mark Perry.

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

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

———————————–

————————————

Via Razib Khan.

————————————-

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

1. On the left, I hear about how all ridiculous this is, because race is just a social construct and so it doesn’t mean anything.
2. On the right, I hear people way too eager to agree with The Bell Curve position.

“Clowns to the left of me, Jokers to the right…”

Razib Khan has a pretty extensive post on “The Social and Biological Construction of Race,” which is difficult to excerpt, but I’ll give it a shot.

Generating a phylogeny of human populations and individuals within those populations is trivial. You don’t need many markers, depending on the grain of your phylogeny (e.g., to differentiate West Africans vs. Northern Europeans you actually can use one marker!)… [This] proposition I believe is well established. A group such as “black American” has a clear distribution of ancestries in a population genetic sense.

[....]

This broader coexistence of frameworks persists on the implicit level. We don’t usually explicitly flesh out these details. Rather, we take these social constructions as givens. The major problem is when the problems and artificialities of these social constructions begin to bleed over into attempts to understand patterns of biological variation. Because of America’s fixation on the black-white dichotomy rooted in skin color people routinely offer up the fact that the human phylogeny is not well correlated with pigmentation as a refutation of the concept of race. What biology is doing is refuting a peculiar social construction of race. It is not negating the reality of human population substructure. Sociology and culture anthropology are empires of imagination to a much greater extent than human biology.

Race certainly can be thought of in meaningful terms. There is no theoretical reason why there can’t be innate cognitive differences between races, it’s just the case that there isn’t. Of course, even though I just said that there are no innate cognitive difference between races, people will still construe my position as racist, because of the (sorry for the technical jargon) fucked up reasoning they use to think about these issues. What it boils down is that if one group has lower IQ than the other, even if that isn’t innate, it would economically justify the differentials we observe on the labor market, and the starting point is the conclusion that those differentials only exist because of racism. Rather than considering that, it’s much simpler to contort yourself by playing word games about whether something is a “social construct” and pretending that is scholarship.

In any case, the standard position, which is decidedly not the same as The Bell Curve, we can just get from Pinker. “[A]ny biological differences [between races and ethnicities] are minor at most and scientifically uninteresting” (2002: 340). And the “minor at most” is easily explained by culture. It’s the simplest explanation of the facts at hand, and while it is difficult to force into a regression since what we are talking about is the omitted variable, the historical narrative has a lot going for it.

What policy implications does this have? It isn’t an argument against allowing those with low human capital to enter the country so long as you understand the concept of comparative advantage. It is a reminder that our welfare state is burdensome, I suppose. I do think, following Sowell (and Bill Cosby? I guess? I don’t know), that by actively encouraging ethnic groups not to acculturate, that you are hurting their human capital and therefore being an asshole. So there’s that.

Other videos and conference information can be found here.

———————————–

HT Lee Kelly

———————————–

Get the t-shirt here.

————————————

“Friedrich Hayek’s combative monograph The Road to Serfdom had a profound impact on political, economic and social thinking in the decades that followed its publication 60 years ago, serving as an intellectual manifesto against socialist planning and state intervention. But are Hayek’s ideas and arguments of any interest today, after the downfall of communism and the emergence of neo-liberalism as the dominant ideology of contemporary capitalism? I would argue that they remain extremely important.”

-Amartya Sen, via Tyler Cowen.

However, I read this from Bill James today, regarding Pete Rose back when Pete Rose’s suspension was still fresh in the public’s mind.

[Y]ou can reach that conclusion by a slipshod argument which confuses “breaking the rules” with “being a bad person.” This is the argument we hear constantly from sportswriters, that Pete Rose should be in the Hall of Fame because Ty Cobb is there, and he was no saint (as a matter of fact he was barely human), and Babe Ruth is there and he’s no saint, etc.

This has nothing whatsoever to do with the issue. Pete Rose isn’t banned from baseball because he’s a bad person. He’s banned from baseball because he broke the rules. As Tom Heitz says, the problem isn’t with Pete Rose isn’t that he gambled. The problem is that he broke the rule against gambling.

Think of Pete Rose as being in a baseball prison. Suppose that we applied the same slipshod argument to those who broke the rest of our rules. Should we, in order to send anyone to prison, have to prove that everyone who isn’t in prison is a saint? Of course not, but what would happen if, because we could send anyone to prison we would have to show that he was a bad person, that he was a worse person than all of the other people who aren’t in prison? It wouldn’t work, would it? That doesn’t have anything to do with it; you don’t go to prison for being a bad person. You go to prison for breaking the rules.

Ty Cobb was a racist and a thug, but there is no rule against being a racist or a thud. Babe Ruth, who was married, entertained groups of naked women in his hotel room. You may or may not choose to condemn this, but there is no rule against it. For very good reasons, there is a rule against betting on baseball.

In any profession, there are things which are not criminal, but which will get you fired because they are incompatible with that profession. If you’re a priest, you can be fired for having affairs. If you’re a psychiatrist, you can get in deep trouble for gossiping. If you’re a salesman, you can be fired a dozen times for having bad breath.

And in baseball, you get fired for gambling. It has to be that way, because

1. The gambler’s interest in baseball is slightly different from the fan’s interest or the interest of the team, and
2. The gambler’s interest, once it takes root, is so powerful that it will warp the game, pushing the sporting interest aside like a tree root pushing away a sidewalk.

Now, for PEDs, it’s not nearly that extreme. But to whatever extent PEDs create an uneven playing field -or even are perceived to create an uneven playing field- it becomes something that baseball acts on, just as the salesman can get fired for having bad breath.

But why does baseball care about marijuana but not a DUI? Because we are just beginning to shift in cultural norms towards viewing drinking after five beers is worse than smoking weed. When the public demands that a show be made about how bad DUIs are, baseball will begin punishing it. We aren’t there yet.

What the journalists should care about are (1) that the law matches the social harm caused by a DUI and (2) that people recognize the damage caused by DUIs so social shaming is commensurate as well.

This isn’t baseball’s fault. This is what most people want, because either they drive under the influence or they empathize with those who do. It is the sin of Western culture, not of the institution governing baseball.