The Official Unauthorized

Pulling Your Weight

2010-05-31T20:59:00.000-07:00

Today the youngster and I stopped in at the Harbor Freight store. Not for anything in particular, unless I saw a good deal on a bench vise, perhaps, but mainly because I'd never been before. It's an impressive collection of tools they have there, at equally impressive prices. Too bad the quality is not equally impressive. Still, I'd shop there again for things where price was the most important factor. And it's not like it's all horrible crap, most of the stuff is fairly good, and a fairly good deal at the price.

While there, I saw a winch. A hand-cranked winch. A hand-cranked winch with cable for less than twenty bucks. A hand-cranked winch with cable for less than twenty bucks that would be just dandy for a certain Secret Clubhouse application - the retractable ladder. Sold!

Let's see how it looks:

It does the job. I think I need to work on a housing, or it'll be rusted in no time.

The Secret Clubhouse

2010-05-14T02:24:00.000-07:00

First, a disclaimer. The clubhouse is not a secret. Its name is "The Secret Clubhouse."

The youngest member of the family has been clamoring for a clubhouse for a couple of years, at least. The play fort atop the big play structure just wasn't cutting it. I suspect it started with a Berenstain Bears book, No Girls Allowed. The book describes a clubhouse built by the boys with a door and windows and intriguingly, a drawbridge to keep out the girls. Many drawings of clubhouses were made, all with drawbridges and windows. I'd regularly get asked if we could build a clubhouse "right now" and I was always putting the kid off. We had sufficient play areas, after all, but they weren't what he wanted.

Last month, I'm not entirely sure why, I agreed to build a clubhouse. Some of the reason, of course, is the recapitulation of my own childhood in what I see of my child's activities and interests. I wanted to have a clubhouse again, too.

When I was small, my dad built a succession of sandboxes for me and my siblings, but the first ones were mainly for me. There was a tractor tire to start with, and when we moved to Cody, Wyoming, Dad built the first wooden sandbox. We moved back to Boise, and Dad built a bigger sandbox, then later enlarged it. It had several sizes over the years, larger and then smaller again, but at its largest it was easily the biggest sandbox I've ever seen in a private yard, and I've only ever seen one park with a bigger sandbox. Maybe sixteen by twenty feet or thereabouts, big enough for a swingset with lots of room left over. He had the sand delivered by dump truck, taking down a fence so it could back into the back yard and drop several yards of sand in directly. There was a LOT of sand in there. On a couple of the iterations, Dad put up some 4x4 posts, with the intention of building some kind of elevated play space like a clubhouse on top. Our neighborhood was built on former farmland, and there were no mature trees that would make for a good tree house in our yard or for several blocks for that matter, so the posts were actually a pretty reasonable idea. Unfortunately, posts were as for as we got for several years. Those posts were there with nothing atop them, until they rotted at the bottom and got pulled out. Dad finally built us an entirely different sort of playhouse on a telephone pole he had installed in the back yard, which was pretty cool. That's a story for another time.

Remembering the posts, and having some spare ones when I was building the play space in my own back yard, I put up four of them in the corner, spaced about eight feet apart. I thought that corner would make a good sandbox, and I'd put up some sort of roof to keep the sun and the rain at bay. I still think it would make a good sandbox, but I decided to put the posts to another use - a Secret Clubhouse.

The first thing to do was to make a deck. Some might say I should have made a plan before I made a deck, but I figured I'd need a deck regardless, so I started with that. I've got very little experience building decks, but I helped on a couple, and it didn't seem that hard. I cut the corner poles to the same height, about five feet above the level of the wood chips in the play space, hoping to minimize the potential fractures and lawsuits. I put some boards around the outside, put joist hangers on them every 16" and hung the joists, then screwed down a bunch of cedar deck boards on top. Voila, instant deck, pretty close to 8' square.

Next, I needed a design for a clubhouse. Searching online was not especially helpful. Unlike most info on the internet that wants to be free, practically all the interesting playhouse/fort/clubhouse plans were ones that they wanted money for - all you get is a mediocre photo. So I doodled up one of my own. It was really simple, roughly a six-foot square with one corner lopped off where the door would go. Big enough for a father and son campout, basically, with a couple extra feet of deck on two sides for play. I decided on a shed roof, and a sloping height from five feet to about six and a half, so I could stand up in there without whacking my head in part of it, at least. I would frame it with 2x3 studs and use some sheet siding for the exterior. I did a little bit of calculating for the angles, and came up with a framing plan.

Next came some trips to Home Depot. I had a fair number of things on hand, but I needed the siding and the studs. I started by cutting all the siding into the shapes I needed, then cut and screwed the stud framing together for each wall, and then screwed the siding onto the framing. The walls weren't too big, and I figured I could lift each wall onto the deck by myself in a pinch. After getting them put together, I hefted them onto the deck and screwed them down and to each other. It took a few evenings to get them all put together and then installed, probably a couple of days per wall all told. While working on the walls, I got the idea to install a trap door in one corner. I didn't want to cut into the deck, and the joists were fairly close together, so it was in a wall instead of the floor. Thus the Secret Escape Hatch was born.

After getting all the walls up, I worked on the roof next, putting together a frame of 1x3s and using some corrugated plastic, thinking it would be lighter, and possibly let some light inside. That last plan didn't work out; the stuff is surprisingly opaque. On the other hand, it was a lot easier to complete on the ground and lift up on top than a roof of shingles on plywood would have been. Getting it done took a few more days. Look at that, a play house that keeps the weather out. Unless it's really windy.

Next I put up a railing, so it would be safe enough to have kids over. The youngster had taken to jumping off the edge of the deck, so I figured it was time. I put together a rope ladder, but didn't anticipate a problem that it presented. Mr. Secret Clubhouse was very concerned that he be able to keep robbers out, thus he wanted a rope ladder that he could pull up, so the robbers wouldn't be able to get in. Unfortunately, a rope ladder wants to hang toward the center of gravity of whatever it's holding up when the bottom isn't anchored. That meant that as soon as he started climbing it, his feet would swing under the deck until he was mostly hanging from the ladder, and it was almost impossible to actually transition onto the deck. We stuck with using the regular ladder for a while while I considered the problem. I put together the bottom half of a dutch door and installed it next.

At this stage of completion we decided that the Secret Clubhouse was done enough and safe enough to have some friends over for an open house. The eager boy had been enthusiastically describing his new clubhouse and its progress to his classmates for three weeks or so, and now he could show it off. Some had been understandably skeptical. We emailed some invitations for the weekend, and prepared cookies and lemonade. I think we'd invited people to come between 11 and 4, and this turned out to be a bit too long - no one came until around 1:00 in the afternoon, so we were twiddling our thumbs for a while. I used the time to work on the top half of the door and get it installed. More and more kids came with time, and by the time the last one left, I think we'd had ten or more over. It was a big hit.

After the open house, I had an idea for a "drawbridge ladder" to get up to the secret escape hatch. This would satisfy the drawbridge urge and the need to keep baddies at bay in one swell foop. I put together a ladder with some thick hardwood dowels and some spare studs, and was thinking about how to make it liftable by a first-grader when the Exceptionally Competent Mrs. suggested swapping it for the rope ladder instead. This seemed like an excellent idea, so I shortened the ladder by one rung to fit on the deck on the other side. I made up some hinges out of lag bolts with nylon bushings and swapped out the rope ladder for the drawbridge ladder. The rope ladder had another rung added and went around to the secret escape hatch. I still haven't figured out a good way for the kid to lift it, but that will come.

The final addition has been windows. There are sliding windows inside in the back walls, and fixed windows in front by the door. They're all made of acrylic. The sliding ones have finger holes on either side and fit in slots cut in frames above and below the window openings. Having the windows in has cut down the draft a little bit, though there's still an airspace around the roofline. I got the last windows installed yesterday, so the Secret Clubhouse as planned is now complete. It could probably use some paint, but hey, it's a clubhouse.

Some say that kids should build their own clubhouses, treehouses, forts, etcetera, and I don't disagree. That usually comes a bit later, though, when they've mastered swinging a hammer. That time will come. For now, the Secret Clubhouse rules our back yard. Next up, some more garden boxes, like this one I've already finished.

LEGO My List of LEGO

2010-03-16T01:40:00.000-07:00

No, I don't know why there's a big gap here, scroll down a bit...

Number	Theme	Set Name
5613	City	Firefighter
5969	Space Police	Squidman Escape
5971	Space Police	Gold Heist
5972	Space Police	Container Heist
5974	Space Police	Galactic Enforcer
7239	City	Fire Truck
7281	City	T-Junction & Curved Road Plates
7669	Star Wars	Anakin's Jedi Starfighter
7670	Star Wars	Hailfire Droid & Spider Droid
7671	Star Wars	AT-AP Walker
7673	Star Wars	MagnaGuard Starfighter
7674	Star Wars	V-19 Torrent
7675	Star Wars	AT-TE Walker
7676	Star Wars	Republic Attack Gunship
7679	Star Wars	Republic Fighter Tank
7680	Star Wars	The Twilight
7681	Star Wars	Separatist Spider Droid
7723	City	Police Pontoon Plane
7734	City	Cargo Plane
7741	City	Police Helicopter
7743	City	Police Command Centre
7744	City	Police Headquarters
7748	Star Wars	Corporate Alliance Tank Droid
7773	Aqua Raiders	Tiger Shark Attack
8014	Star Wars	Clone Walker Battle Pack
8015	Star Wars	Assassin Droids Battle Pack
8016	Star Wars	Hyena Droid Bomber
8018	Star Wars	Armored Assault Tank (AAT)
8019	Star Wars	Republic Attack Shuttle
8031	Star Wars	V-19 Torrent
8036	Star Wars	Separatists Shuttle
8083	Star Wars	Rebel Trooper Battle Pack
8086	Star Wars	Droid Tri-Fighter
8188	Power Miners	Fire Blaster
8189	Power Miners	Magma Mech
8398	City	BBQ Stand
8708	Power Miners	Cave Crusher
8956	Power Miners	Stone Chopper
8957	Power Miners	Mine Mech
8958	Power Miners	Granite Grinder
8960	Power Miners	Thunder Driller
8961	Power Miners	Crystal Sweeper
8964	Power Miners	Titanium Command Rig

We sure have a lot of LEGO at our house, and we acquire more on a regular basis. Just as a public service to those who might want to get us even more LEGO, I thought I'd post a current list of the LEGO sets that the younger member of the family has.

This list of course does not include the generic buckets of bricks or any of the Duplo sets he has, or any of my own sets still mostly stuck in boxes in storage. They'll come out some day to play, I'm sure.

Family Resemblance

2010-03-07T16:08:00.000-08:00

Just something I noticed while looking at my photos recently. Maybe it's more of an expression resemblance.

Just a Minor Detail

2010-02-26T22:28:00.000-08:00

On his second day sick at home, the younger member of the family remembered his crystal radio set and wanted to listen to it again. I got it down from the shelf in the office and we took it to the dining room and connected it to the ground and antenna wires that were still in place, and he gave it a good listen for a while on his headphones, then said he'd like to hook it up to speakers. I allowed as how the crystal radio set probably didn't have enough power to drive a speaker, so we'd need an amplifier of some kind for that. He asked if we could build an amplifier, and I thought that we could. I went downstairs and got out the old 300-in-one Advanced Electronics set I got in a nostalgic moment at a Radio Shack at least a decade ago, and started thumbing through the index for a suitable amplifier circuit.

Considering that my poor eyes could barely distinguish some of the resistor color code stripes, it took longer to build than the impatient one thought necessary. He also thought I was hogging all the cool assembly parts and he didn't get to help with enough of it either, but then it was finally done and we hooked it up to the outputs of the crystal set and switched it on.

Nothing.

Not that any longtime engineer would expect any different. Of course, one of the wires in the breadboard was in the wrong spot and that took another minute or two to find, but once found, the circuit worked just fine, and we were dancing along to KIXI AM 880 from our amplified speaker.
I think the discrimination in the crystal set is virtually non-existant; we're probably listening to a smear of the AM band about 200KHz wide, so tuning the variable capacitor (the soda can with the paper bit around it) we can often hear two or even three stations at once. Once the amplifier was working, naturally the boy had more requests.

"Can we pause it?"

Hmm. How to explain this to somebody who was born after the advent of the DVR? That's a little beyond the capabilities of the 300-in-one set, I'm afraid, though it would be cool for sure. "We'd need more parts. Lots more." Like a computer, I'm thinking, with a hard-drive recording system, just like in the DVR. For a boy who thinks his dad can build anything, that's just a minor detail.

"We can spend the weekend on it!"

Yep.

Lazy Days and Breakers

2010-02-14T12:17:00.000-08:00

Welcome to sunny Oceanside, California, somewhere midway between Los Angeles and San Diego. We're right at the beach, after a fashion - there's only really any beach below the rocks of the seawall at low tide.

Here's kids playing in the sand and rocks; there's the buglet, his cousins Bryce and Juliet, and a friend who's staying with them for the weekend.

And here's the more sedate adult crowd, enjoying some Adirondack time. You can see our little blue cottage doesn't quite compare to the million-dollar manse next door, but it's more than nice enough for our needs.

We're expecting the folks and more cousins soon, and of course, Legoland and Disneyland. We wandered the Midway aircraft carrier museum yesterday, which was impressive in several ways besides mere size. I think we got through about a third of the audio tour in the nearly three hours we spent there. The Highly Capable Mrs. was found guilty at the Captain's Mast and had to spend some time in the Brig:

Don't worry, the sentence was only long enough for a photo.

With Cherry on Top

2009-12-27T02:20:00.000-08:00

It's one of those projects that's taken years rather than days or weeks to execute, and it's still a long ways from done, but at least one major step was accomplished in the last few days.
When we bought our house with its interesting hexagonal living room, one of the areas that I thought could be improved was the wall with the fireplace. It was divided into two halves, one side brick to the ceiling with the fireplace and hearth, and one side covered with rough cedar planking as a sort of paneling. The most important omission of course, was a mantel, someplace to hang the Christmas stockings from and display a few knick-knacks. I never took any photos of the wall in its original form; you'll have to get this picture from the younger set's second birthday as an approximation.

I thought something more like a Craftsman style would go nicely, something simple and not too ornate, and I drew up a plan that would put some paneling over the brick with an opening around the fireplace and a simple shelf between the wall on one side, and some new cabinetry that would go on the other side, someplace to hold all the DVDs and CDs and stereo bits.
Starting in December of 2005, I went to work on the brick side of things. I drilled some holes in the brick and epoxied in some bolts to hold some plywood in place that would in turn have some paneling and the mantel attached.

I cut some plywood to fit and installed it, then put some thin prefinished cherry veneer ply over the top. I figured a new mantel would be held up by the wall on one side and the cabinets on the other, but put some more bolts sticking out through the plywood in case I thought of a way to float a shelf instead. We didn't actually need a place for the stockings that year, as we spent Christmas in Boise with my family, so the mantel got put off for a bit. A long, long bit. By the next Christmas, we needed something for those stockings, so I hacked together a bit of pine board as a temporary solution. Here's a picture, from our curly-haired offspring's fourth birthday party in 2007. I'd moved the thermostat into the hall, but thermostat bits remained behind for the longest time.

And there the project sat. Until early in 2009, when I decided to tackle the other side of the wall, the one with all the cedar planking. I was curious what was behind it; from what I could see, it looked to be ordinary drywall. I pulled all the planks off, and sure enough, it was drywall, full of holes from the nails that held the planks on, and with about a three inch gap to where the fireplace brick started. Curious. It looked like the chimney had been built after the space had been drywalled. I spackled the holes and wedged a 2x3 into the gap so it would support a bit more drywall, and this picture of a certain someone's sixth birthday party has a bit of the result in the background.

Once my work contract ended a couple of months ago, I figured I would have plenty of time for finishing off the project, but various other tasks, sickness, sleeping way in, more sickness, and a general lack of tuit intervened, until a couple of weeks ago, when I finally got to putting up the drywall bits to cover the gap, which a summer energy audit from the power company had shown to be a major heat escape route. Our gas bills are high enough, thank you very much. I considered repainting, and then thought I'd just run the paneling all the way across. It was intended for the back of the eventual cabinetry anyway. I cut and installed some more cherry veneer plywood, then got to work on the all-important shelf.
In the interim between putting in bolts for the mantel and actually doing something with them, probably sometime in 2007, I'd discovered that IKEA had a floating shelf as part of their LACK line that was very similar to what I wanted. They didn't have one in cherry, but I bought one anyway, thinking that perhaps I could either veneer it or just use the mounting hardware, especially as it was only $30. It didn't fit the space exactly, but it was close, and I could have tried either method. I wound up deciding to build my own shelf over the steel hardware. I had to drill some new holes in the mounting bracket to fit my bolts, but that part worked out very nicely. I made a simple torsion box with some light plywood, like so.

This is the glue step with more of my thin cherry plywood for the top and bottom of the shelf.

And this is what it looked like after I applied some 2" cherry veneer tape to the front and side edges, and applied some corbels I purchased from a woodworking supply store. I think I'd purchased these materials back in 2007 as well, around the time I picked up the shelf from IKEA. I applied some finish so they'd look roughly like they belonged together.

The next day, Christmas Eve, with the assistance of my short helper, we put up the mounting hardware.

Fitting the shelf over it was a little trickier on the wall than in the garage, since the wall was not entirely flat despite my best efforts, and hitting the internal holes in the shelf with the support arms was a bit of a challenge. I wound up sticking some pointed bits of wood in the ends of the support arms to guide them into the holes deep inside the shelf. After more fiddling and trips to the garage for sanding and fitting, the shelf was finally installed and screwed into place, just in time for our guests to arrive. We put up the stockings, ready for a visit from St. Nick that evening. He did not disappoint!

Now there's still a bunch of trim to add, and the whole cabinet plan may or may not happen, but hey, a mantel! And it only took four years (so far)!

Cookie Monster's Favorite Candy Corn

2009-11-18T02:22:00.000-08:00

I've been wanting to make some more pastel cookies for a while, but haven't felt like there was time to complete them - they take rather more work than most sorts of cookies, and they have to chill for quite a while to make the dough stiff enough to work. It's good to pop the dough you're not working with back into the fridge, to keep it chilled, too. I decided it had been long enough and I'd make some cookies even if it kept me up late, and it has. The problem is, pastel cookies are best when made into interesting shapes, and I didn't have a good idea of what to make. I could make something like checkerboard cookies, but that seems kind of dull. Here's a picture of my first idea for something season-appropriate:

As you can see, this idea didn't work out so well, as you might not guess what the cookies are supposed to be if I don't tell you. No, they are not pork chops. These are my attempt at pumpkin pie slices, as seen from the side. Yes, I know. Needs whipped cream.
The Highly Capable Mrs. had a good idea that would work with the dough I'd already colored if I just colored another part of it yellow - Candy Corn! She's brilliant, why didn't I think of that? I put the idea into practice immediately.
Here's a picture of the cookie making in progress. It's a lot like working with Play-Doh, but a heck of a lot tastier.

And here's the finished product. Don't these look yummy?

You should try some. Go on, try some!

Pretzel Logic

2009-11-11T01:48:00.000-08:00

Kids from our son's school had their annual skating outing at Skate King today, and I tagged along to encourage the boy to do more than eye the video games, and possibly actually get out on the floor in skates. I don't think I've been on roller skates in most of a decade, but it was not especially demanding. We did a few loops, slowly, then he wanted a snack. We'd gotten a little fruit punch and popcorn when he noticed another kid had a soft pretzel from the concession counter. I opined aloud, we do not need more snacks, and besides, maybe we could make some of those at home. Naturally, that became a must-do activity according to the younger set, who insisted we get started not long after our return. The Formidable Mrs. found a recipe for giant soft pretzels online, and we got the bread machine started before dinner. An hour and a half later, the dough was ready, so we rolled out long ropes, twisted them into shape, then boiled them for about fifteen seconds in water with baking soda. They looked a bit like this after boiling:

When we had them all boiled and ready to bake, we popped them in the oven for about ten minutes, until they were nicely browned. We hauled them out then brushed them with a little water and sprinkled on some kosher salt, because it's just not a giant pretzel without those big salt crystals. The end result looked something like this:

It was a bit of a mess to clean up afterward for a mere eight pretzels (we remembered to take another picture after eating a couple), but also pretty cool to make our own, and they were quite tasty. I'm still intending to make my own bagels one of these days. It can't be that different.

The Flavor of Childhood

2009-06-26T01:16:00.000-07:00

I like pizza. I don't like all pizza equally well, but the basic idea can be executed in a lot of different ways and still turn out fine. Pizza made with focaccia is pretty good, the sort I remember from San Francisco, probably at Boudin's. Deep dish style stuff is fine. Limp pizza doesn't do as much for me, the sort turned out at Pagliacci or Pizza Schmizza (a favorite with the junior member of our household) or the execrable Chuck E Cheese. But it's still pizza, and I'll eat it unless it's been contaminated with some unpalatable topping or other.

The pizza ideal, though, is tough to come by. My favorite is the pizza I had at Shakey's when I was a child growing up in Boise. My memories of the place are probably faulty, but I remember the door and windows had those multicolored round glass panes like bottle bottoms, and didn't admit a lot of light to the interior. The kitchen where the dough was tossed was behind glass, and there was a raised platform and a rail where we could stand and watch them twirl the pizzas and then brush on the thick sauce with a fat mop brush and sprinkle cheese all over and deal out the toppings like so many cards before sliding them into the giant oven with the peel that had a handle as long as a broomstick. The other entertainment was a movie projector playing Our Gang or Little Rascals shorts on a continuous loop. The pizza parlor was halfway across town, and I don't recall going that often, but I liked it when we did, even if I had to peel off the tomato slices that Mom liked on the Canadian bacon pizza.

The pizza had a crisp, crackery crust, and a sauce so viscous that it was almost solid, like tomato paste, with a hint of spice, in a thin layer under the cheese and toppings. Perfection! Sadly, the Shakey's chain was never especially well run, and I understand they changed hands several times in the Eighties and Nineties, losing lots of franchisees in the process. I discovered one in Bellevue when we'd been living in the area for a couple of years, but not long afterward they changed their pizza recipe to something with a thicker crust and a runnier sauce and not nearly as good, making it no longer worth seeking out in preference to the mediocre Round Table or Pizza Hut stuff. Then they closed, and a Mongolian Barbecue place opened in the building which was worth going to again, but I missed the pizza place.

When we went to vacation at Cannon Beach, Oregon the first time, the hotel we stayed in had a pizza place right next door, Fultano's. Naturally, we tried it, and it was the first time I'd had a pizza comparable to the old Shakey's recipe in quite some time. It became a favorite spot, along with the great beach, and added to the vacation draw of Cannon Beach. We've been back every year or two ever since.

We made some pizza at home a couple of weeks ago, and I made up some sauce based on a couple of recipes I found online, roughly equal parts tomato paste and tomato sauce, with some garlic and oregano and minced onion and salt and pepper, and left to simmer on the stove for a while. I was thinking about the paste-like sauce on Shakey's pizza and wondering how to recreate it. The result was pretty good, if I do say so myself. A while later I thought to see if maybe someone else liked Shakey's style pizza and perhaps had a recipe or two to share online. That's when I discovered that the greater Seattle area was still home to a couple of Shakey's franchises, which I thought had all dried up and blown away at least a decade ago. The nearest one was in Renton, a couple of miles east of Ikea. Not exactly close, but not out of the realm of possibility if traffic wasn't too bad.

Wednesday, the Formidable Mrs. had a dinner event for work, leaving me and the boy to our own devices. I packed him up in the van and we hit the road for Renton.
I'd looked up the location on Google's street view, and had a good idea of what I was looking for. It's your basic hole in the wall strip mall location, not a distinctive building with those multicolored glass panes, but you can't have everything. We got there in about twenty-five minutes in lightening traffic, and ordered up a large pie and some mojo potatoes to go. While they cooked it up we made a quick stop at the golden arches next door for the boy who was not as enamored of the pizza idea as I was, then came back to pick up our finished pizza and hit the road for home. Total time away, door to door, was about an hour and ten minutes. Impatient to try it, I shoveled some in my mouth while driving, which may not have been the most attentive thing to do, but there were no accidents, and it was so worth it. They had the original recipe going again, thin crust, paste-like sauce, and all. I stuffed myself with half of a large pizza, and found the belly distension a little uncomfortable afterward, but my mouth was not complaining.

I'm sure my wife is dreading being dragged for miles down south so that I can relive a little of my childhood in a vinyl and formica strip mall eatery, but it's a lot closer than Oregon. Sadly, there's no beach.

Crimp My Ride

2009-05-31T05:13:00.000-07:00

My dad isn't going to like this post, so I apologize in advance, Dad.

Whenever I am reminded that my dad traded in a '64 Chevy Chevelle Malibu SS

for a '72 Vega Panel wagon (ours was green, but this was the best picture I could find online)

I wonder what the attraction was, other than maybe it would be nice to have a working transmission, and it must have been cheap.

Of course, I wasn't into cars much as a kid (or as an adult, for that matter), and I wouldn't have known what to do with what was later regarded as a minor classic car if I'd had one. I drive a seventeen-year-old Japanese subcompact (like I stole it!), after all. On the other hand, the stories are too rich not to share. The Vega was the original mixed bag for me and my brother and sister; it got us where we wanted to go, but the cost in effort and aggravation was ridiculous. It taught me far more about what goes on under the hood than I really cared to know, and it's been the source of endless tales of automotive misadventure ever since.

I actually like the Vega panel wagon's looks, it was relatively cool for the time and the econo-box class, with styling echoes from the Camaro:

The next year they gave it an ugly grilled nose and it wasn't nearly as pretty. Looks were one thing, but the problems under the hood were quite another.

The Vega's engine sucked so hard that weather maps would have a low pressure system marked on them wherever we drove it. The aluminum block just wasn't hard enough to keep cylinder wear from making the thing burn oil in no time at all. I started driving the beast when I first got my licence in 1978, while I was in high school, and by then it had maybe 60K miles on it, which was considered past the upper limit for most Vega engines of that vintage. I wasn't going to let that stop me, though. It ran on about the same mix of gasoline to motor oil as a lawn mower. If it didn't have enough high-viscosity stuff in it, it'd smoke worse than a bingo nun with a three-pack habit. I kept a case of Valvoline SAE 50 in the back along with a pour spout and ran through the stuff like it was ginger ale.

After a while the 50 weight wasn't enough and I started pouring in STP or Motor Honey. I got a little behind on the oil one time and actually got pulled over by a state trooper who pointed at the blue cloud I'd left rising over the road, as far back as I could see, and he told me to get out and walk the rest of the way unless I could fix it. No ticket, just a warning. I walked across the street to a service station and picked up a two dollar bottle of motor gunk and that did the trick for the next few miles.

Naturally, the spark plugs got fouled in a hurry on that kind of diet, so I was unshipping them and cleaning and regapping them on a regular basis - the socket set slid around in back with the empty motor oil cans. Every once in a while the engine would go from firing on four cylinders to three, and I knew I'd need to fix it when I got home. Once it got down to two cylinders, and I had to pull over and fix it right there, 'cause it couldn't do more than about 25 mph and was rattling like a stepped-on snake.

This was the car that I and at least a couple of my siblings learned to drive in, and it got all the abuse that you'd expect from inexperienced drivers. It had a three-speed stick, and we destroyed the clutch at least twice, including once while I was in rush hour traffic on an arterial and barely managed to coast it from an inside lane over to the side of the road between some passing cars. My sister managed to kill second gear one time, and we drove it like that for a while after, just revving it really high in first then lugging it in third. My brother and I got reasonably adept at fixing it, including unshipping the tranny and replacing bits, but they got harder to come by in the '80s. I snapped the clutch cable on it once on a freeway onramp, which in the days before cell phones meant I needed to hike a ways, but fortunately a cop showed up before I'd gotten a hundred yards. Officer Friendly put in a call to my dad, who came out and in a virtuoso effort managed to drive the thing five miles back home just manhandling the gears, and getting some lucky timing on stoplights.

My brother drove it while I was away at college or driving the other car we inherited, and he managed to get the thing past 100K miles before it gave up the ghost completely. I think it died in a grocery store parking lot, and we hauled it home behind the van with our tow strap, which had seen a bit of use in that capacity by then. I called around to a few yards, and one of them offered us twenty bucks for it over the phone if we had the title. We figured what the hey and towed it over there, and got a bit of an argument when we arrived, from someone who loudly asked his colleagues what idiot made the mistake on the phone and for a while assured us they could offer little more than a plugged nickel, but I managed to talk them out of the twenty, since it probably had half that in gas in the tank anyway. And that was the end of the Vega, but the stories live on.

And the next car my dad got? An '82 Chevette Diesel. Oh, my.

The Propagation of Memes in Cyberspace

2009-02-24T00:59:00.000-08:00

You know those bits where you post a random picture, list your favorite whatever, tag somebody else to do it? Yeah, those. I don't do those. Except sometimes.

Here, for example, is the sixth photo from the sixth folder, sorted back to front; it's the Extremely Capable Mrs. along with our boy on snowshoes last month:

And here's the list of 25 random things about 25 random things I didn't post on Facebook:

1. The random beauty of "25 Random Things"
2. Charles Darwin Tagged You in a Note on Facebook
3. 25 Random Things About 25 Random Things on Facebook
4. Is that '25 Things' meme driving Facebook growth?
5. 25 Random Tips for the Busy Facebook User
6. Ah, Yes, More About Me? Here Are ‘25 Random Things’
7. 25 Things I Didn't Want to Know About You
8. 25 More Things I Didn't Want to Know About You
9. '25 Random Things' Lists Are Last Vestige of American Literacy
10. Have You Heard of This Facebook '25 Things' Thing?
11. We Never Do Random Things. Until We Do.
12. Facebook friends share '25 Things' with the world
13. Millions expose themselves online with '25 random things'
14. 25 Things--The modern day chain letter
15. Facebook fad gets personal
16. 25 Things Articles Arriving as Fast as 25 Things Lists
17. 25 Random Things Meme Is a Boon for Facebook
18. Deconstructing “Random Things About Me”
19. Facebook Mystery: Who Created “25 Random Things About Me”?
20. Facebook members make their innermost thoughts public
21. Facebook users spark craze for 25 Random Things lists
22. 25 things I don't want to know about you
23. Facebook's '25 Things' are life stories in miniature
24. The value in Facebook's new craze
25. 25 random things about Donny & Marie

I'm sure I'd be sorry I asked if I asked if you were sorry you asked. Sorry.

What I Did On My Winter Vacation

2009-01-20T22:25:00.000-08:00

Back in November or so when Sam booked our vacation to the mountains of central Washington for a "snow getaway" we had no idea that we were in for a humongous heaping helping of the stuff right at home. We didn't need a snow break so much anymore, but it was nice to get out of the house and enjoy a trip with our friends the Sathers to a little place in Plain, Washington called the Black Forest Lodge. It was a little over two hours by car, and more than comfortable enough once we arrived. They had snow on the ground, but it had been rained on and was hard as ice, so good for sledding, not so much for snowmen and igloos. But we've done that.

We did a bit of horse-drawn sleigh riding out in the countryside at the Red Tail Ranch,

accompanied by the ranch dog, reportedly part coyote.

We wandered into the big city of Leavenworth (well, compared to Plain, anyway) and did some sledding,

as well as some lunch, where Max showed us how he lost a tooth,

but no fear, the tooth fairy still managed to find us.
We tried out the snowshoes in town,

and watched some fireworks in the afternoon - in the winter, the fireworks can start at six o'clock.

We did a bit more trekking in the snowshoes in a park on our way back home.

Max mainly was interested in the hot chocolate part of snowshoeing.

We got back and things were pretty much just as we'd left them, and the cat greeted us enthusiastically until we fed her. That's what we did on our winter vacation.

Inventing Candy Cane Cookies

2008-12-23T21:07:00.000-08:00

Most things that are invented aren't really completely new things that have never been seen before. Most of them are variations on something someone has already done. Just like my candy cane cookies, here. I remember having something like these once, but the details have completely escaped me, so I decided I'd reinvent them.

I made these last night, since we don't have enough cookies around here already, and it's not like people keep giving us more - oh, wait, we do, and they do. Well, I felt like making more cookies, okay? I started with some recipe for pastel cookies I found in a cookbook, but I altered it pretty thoroughly.

Candy Cane Cookies

1 cup butter
1 1/3 cups fine granulated sugar
1 large egg plus 1 egg yolk
4 tablespoons milk
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
1/4 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon baking powder
3 1/4 cups flour
food coloring
optional: other flavorings, such as peppermint extract, and colored decorators' sugar or crushed peppermint candies.

Cream the butter and the sugar thoroughly. Mix in the eggs and milk. Add the vanilla. Sift the flour, salt, and baking powder together in a bowl, then mix a bit at a time into the wet ingredients.

Take the dough and divide it into two parts. Take one part and mix in some food coloring (red or green look traditional) and optionally some flavoring such as 1/2 teaspoon peppermint extract. Chill dough covered in the refrigerator for two hours.

Take some chilled dough in roughly equal parts of each color, and roll into fat rods of equal length, then stick the rods together and roll out the combined rod to about 3/8" (1cm) diameter. Pinch off about 5-6" (120 - 150cm) and twist (rolling the ends about the center clockwise seems to work well). Roll or dust in colored sugar or crushed candy and form into a candy cane shape or a ring and place on a baking sheet.

Bake at 350° F (175° C) for 10 - 12 minutes. The cookies should not be noticeably browned. Leave the baked cookies on the cookie sheet for a couple of minutes to cool before transferring to a cooling rack - the cookies can be fragile. Makes about four dozen.

Now, I skipped the peppermint part because I'm no fan of mint, and I don't have any extract handy anyway, but other flavorings ought to work just fine. Some of the pastel cookie recipes I've seen online actually incorporate Jell-O or Kool-aid so any old flavoring will probably work. I liked plain vanilla pretty well. Tastes like a sweet butter cookie. Yum.

How We Make an Igloo

2008-12-23T01:30:00.000-08:00

I'm feeling the effects of a cold, with aches and sniffles and occasional sneezing, but that didn't stop us from heading outside this afternoon to try our hand at making some spare shelter.

Ingredients: Snow, shovel, plastic storage bin. Check.

Fill bin with snow, slide out block. Repeat.

Stack up the blocks in the traditional igloo shape.

Check for fit.

Shape blocks as needed to fit the curvature and let them hold each other up. It works!

Enjoy your new igloo!

Snowbound

2008-12-22T13:10:00.000-08:00

So we've had a bit of snow around here - this is what the house looked like after the first day, with 9" of new powder:

And of course, the view from our sunny adirondacks on the deck, before we got another four inches:

Even the new walkway lights look festive with their hats of snow!

But here's the best stuff of all:

This is what Christmas looks like for me and my siblings - sour cream sugar cookies! Made with the traditional buttercreme frosting and sugary decors. I only baked up half a batch this year, since there's only the three of us, and we've already delivered some baked goodies to the friends and neighbors this year. They are still delicious, even if we're a bit tired of being stuck in the house and sharing the same sniffly cold. Santa is going to love eating one of these.

Party in the Hizzouse

2008-11-06T01:04:00.000-08:00

The buglet and friends partied on the day of the dead, and one of their fun games was to see who could be first to get a bite out of a swinging apple. No one actually managed it sans hands, but there was some determined trying. Image courtesy of Gilman, father of the fairy in the picture.

More Financial Editorializing of the TL;DR Variety

2008-10-08T00:01:00.000-07:00

It's been the lead story for weeks, if not months, sometimes knocking the presidential election off the top of the fold. Recently, someone asked, "wasn't it poorly conceived legislation which lead to this whole subprime snafu? What bit(s) of policy exactly was that?" The roots go way deep, but here's one way of looking at it:

First, America has been spending more money than it takes in for a long time, and has been buying more goods from abroad than it sells. In concert, these two facts mean that other countries have been trading the dollars they get for their goods from us for IOUs from our government, as well as other investments, stocks, bonds, what have you. They have a lot of money to invest, and America despite its faults has had a lovely and vibrant market for investing in, with unequalled liquidity and transparency and fairly low overhead. Unlike in America, the burgeoning middle classes of eastern and southern Asia have been socking their money away, and their banks have been searching for ways to put it to good use, and one of the biggest ways has been to invest in American securities, bidding their prices up and their interest rates down. So, we've been awash in cheap capital looking for an outlet.

Second, the explicit policy of American government for the past couple of decades has been to expand homeownership and participation in the securities markets. That was part of the rationale for Fannie Mae and Freddy Mac, and for the rise of the IRA and the 401k plan. Ever more people invested in their homes and in the stock market would lead to greater social stability and community participation, or so went the theory. All of that capital available to lend and government policies toward expanding homeownership led to the gradual decline in the amount of equity required to purchase a house, until for a while it actually could be negative. This flood of money into housing inflated prices, making real estate look like an even better investment. And as prices rose, people refinanced and took out some of their equity and spent it, heating up the economy and the stock markets some more.

Third, we saw the rise of relatively unregulated mortgage companies after the contraction of the thrifts in the last real estate bubble bust twenty years ago. These companies would take investor capital and sell mortgages to people with gradually more lax qualifications as they tried to expand their markets. Then they'd turn around the mortgages and sell them off to Fannie Mae and Freddy Mac, and increasingly, to investment banks. The mortgage companies would then lend the money out again, and the cycle would repeat, keeping the housing market on an expanding tear.

Fourth, the loosely-regulated investment banks would take their piles of mortgages and slice and dice them into new synthetic securities with various aspects that they could sell, chief among them some especially enticing bits that looked like a AAA-rated bond. It was the new fashion craze, everybody had to have some - as long as they could also get some insurance to go with them, to cover their butts if the securities went into default. And where there's demand, someone will supply, in the form of investment bankers and insurance companies willing to take your money in return for a guarantee that they'd relieve you of your defaulted bond at its pre-default value. Best of all, the insurance wasn't called insurance, and it fell outside the regulatory eyes of both insurance commisioners and the SEC. Hooray! Let's buy more!

Fifth, we found the investment bankers were leveraged to their eyeballs, imprudent bankers and insurers had been selling bond insurance to people who didn't even own the bonds, and people were buying houses who had no business doing so even when times were good, with sub-prime mortgages that featured teaser rates and interest-only payments that were guaranteed to get more expensive later. The last sucker was in on the deal.

Then the housing bubble popped, and people started getting in trouble with their mortgages. The investors who were holding the synthetic bonds made out of those mortgages started feeling the hurt, too, and they started a dash for the exits. The insurers of those bonds discovered that insurance only works with risks that are localized, not with risks that can affect everyone at once. With every passing month the revelations about just how big the house of cards the mortgage-derived securities had been holding up got wider, and the worse the holders of those securities were taking it in the shorts. When the market in them finally ground to a bloody halt, holders were in terrible shape, because of accounting rules that forced the securities to be valued on the books at whatever they had last sold for. That meant that the assets of many financial companies that held these now toxic securities were worth less than their obligations, a condition commonly referred to as bankruptcy. Lenders started sitting on their cash, rather than risk handing it over to some firm that might be bankrupted and seized by the government, even if the possibility was remote. Some colossal failures and equally dramatic rescues truly put the fear into people, and the mattress-stuffing began in earnest. We're watching it play out right now.

So, there's policy blame a-plenty to go 'round, but it isn't necessarily the right (or should I say wrong) policies that are getting the bad press. It's policies that have every liberal sentiment going for them that are at least partly responsible for the mess. We want to encourage investment, we want to expand home ownership in the name of community and wealth building, we want to shop the world for the best deals for consumers, and we want to spend now and pay later. We like businesses to have minimal regulation, because it lowers costs and encourages innovation in products and services. We don't like paying taxes. We're all free to take a flyer on any expanding market bubble that comes along. Blaming deregulation for our woes is missing at least ninety percent of the story. Only a couple of clear cases of deregulation, expanding the leverage investment banks can use and ending some of the Glass-Steagal restrictions, have played a real role, and these were not root causes of the situation, just multipliers.

So, how do we fix it? Trillion dollar band-aids? In some ways we've got a crisis in confidence, and that confidence is shaken at least as much as it's reassured by the size of the measures being taken. And I trust the legislatures to deal with the underlying issues appropriately about as much as I trust them to do theoretical physics. I'd rather not think about how my net worth has gone down over the last year, or worse, my retired relatives' net worth. Over the long run, I remain optimistic. I'm still maxing out my retirement funding, directing it into various domestic and foreign index funds; someday this will probably be considered an excellent time to buy. I just wish I felt better about it.

Feeling Moral About Politics

2008-10-02T03:16:00.000-07:00

Funniest political image I've seen all day:

Hmm, I'd like a theremin, too.

I'm guessing that most of my readership, which I suspect can be counted on my fingers with several fingers left over, got an email pointer to a website at catholicvote.com with a video which you can see here. It was described as "cool" and thought-provoking. Go ahead, click the link if you like, I'll wait.

It made me think, too, but probably not what they wanted me to think. It impressed me that what is essentially a single-issue advocacy group, one that explicitly advocates a much harder right-to-life line than you will find from the leadership of your nominal church, has found a way to wrap its message up with the flag, motherhood, and apple pie, and some stirring music.

Just as a for-instance, LDS positions on issues of birth control (up to the parents), abortion (allowed, with caveats, for rape, incest, and certain health issues), and euthanasia (allowing for withdrawal of life support) are of course conservative, but tolerant in ways that the Marianists at the Fidelis Center for Law and Policy, sponsors of CatholicVote.com, are decidedly not. The Church has taken no position on embryonic stem cell research, but that’s practically liberal compared to the Marianist Catholic position.

The single-issue nature of the CatholicVote video plea leaves out vital considerations of a moral nature; questions about whether their preferred policies would have more children raised in poverty and abusive situations and by single parents, about whether they would incarcerate seekers of abortions, about whether they would jail providers or strip them of their medical licenses, leading to a reduction in medical services available for the rest of us, about whether we would find that products used to support our private decisions about reproductive planning are no longer available, or whether we would be forced to remain artificially animated in a cruel parody of life when our bodies would otherwise have long since given out.

They see one issue as outweighing all these things. This strikes me as the antithesis of moral.

Workbench!

2008-09-28T01:49:00.000-07:00

Someone mentioned needing a workbench while I was busy getting ready to mow the lawn, and I thought about it while pushing the mower back and forth over the damp and uncooperative grass. Pretty sure that I had everything that a workbench might require in the garage, I set to work after lunch, and was finished well before dinner. There are three 1x3s, a 2x3 stud, a 2'x4' piece of 3/4 plywood and a 2'x4' pegboard piece in there, plus some scraps made into shelves and cubbies. Tools will come later. My amazingly capable spouse said later that this is the sort of thing that would make a good Christmas present, but it's a bit late for that now.

And if you're wondering, why, yes, there is a lot of random wood in my garage. Isn't there in yours?

On the Theoretical Effects of a Minimum Wage: Brushing up on Econ 102: Microeconomics

2008-09-22T02:53:00.000-07:00

(This is more retro-blogging of some stuff I wrote up a couple of years ago to try to explain how economists think of minimum wages in fairly simple theoretical terms. I'd say enjoy, but that might not be the first feeling that comes to mind when you read it.)

Supply and Demand

In a market in goods and services, sellers usually come in with some
price that they're willing to sell at, and buyers come in with some
price they're willing to pay. Buyers will happily pay less, and
sellers will willingly accept more, and different buyers and sellers
all probably have different prices in mind. When the sellers price
their goods and services, or the buyers post their bids, some buyers
will find things at prices they think are acceptable, and some that
are too dear; some sellers will find buyers willing to pay their
price, and others won't. When everyone who can find a deal has done
so, then the remaining buyers and sellers can either adjust their
price to find another match, or they can go home. When everyone has
done a deal or gone home, we say that the market has cleared.

When the market is large enough for a single good or service that is
essentially identical from all providers, we call it a
commodity. In this market, there are enough sellers and enough
buyers that a single price will emerge, called the market clearing
price, at which every willing buyer and every willing seller will
find a match. Sellers who price their product above this price will
find no takers, because the buyers can find it available elsewhere for
less. Likewise, buyers who are looking for a deal will go away empty
handed, because all the sellers can get a better price from other
buyers.

When the market gets an influx of buyers who want more stuff, or
alternatively the number of things for sale drops, the price of the
goods available will be bid up until the number of buyers willing to
pay matches the number of sellers willing to provide. If for some
reason, there are fewer buyers, or the buyers just don't want that
much of the product, or if more sellers appear with more goods, the
sellers will have to drop their prices to find buyers, since all the
buyers at the old, higher price will be gone, having already done a
deal.

Labor as a Commodity

In general, the service provided by a person as labor is not a
commodity, since each person typically brings unique skills and
productivity levels to bear on the work they perform. Considered
broadly over lots of people with similar skill and productivity
levels, a market will form the outlines of a commodity market in some
particular specialty, but this doesn't really apply to the entire
category of "Labor." One area where it comes close, however, is in the
unskilled or minimum training required labor category. On the seller
side, practically every able-bodied adult can supply this kind of
labor, and most will do so if the price is right. Some will do so even
if the price is minimal. At some price, then, the number of hours of
labor people are willing to supply will equal the quantity demanded,
and the market will clear. Once again, an influx of sellers (laborers)
or a drop in the quantity or labor demanded will tend to push the
price (wage) down, and an influx of buyers (employers) or a rise in
the quantity of labor demanded will tend to push the price up.

Markets with Price Controls

The idea that there should be a minimum or maximum amount that any
particular good or service should cost or that should be made
available doesn't seem intuitively obvious to most people, but when
the service is labor, we bring some other opinions to the table.

In the case of commodity labor, we call a minimum price restriction a
minimum wage. When the minimum wage is less than the market
clearing price, it has little effect. All of the sellers can find a
better deal, that is, a higher wage, and all of the buyers, or
employers, must satisfy their labor demands at the higher price or
leave their jobs unfilled. However, if the minimum wage is higher than
the market clearing price, then more people are willing to sell labor
at that price than employers are willing to buy. As shown in this
diagram, the quantity purchased will be less overall at the higher
price. The difference between this quantity and the quantity that
would be purchased at the market clearing price is the lost employment
opportunity, or the employment gap.

Note that at the higher price, sellers are willing to supply more
labor than at the market clearing price, mostly because more sellers
enter the market. The difference between the number of labor hours
made available and the number purchased is the apparent unemployment,
but this value is larger than the employment gap. One way to interpret
this is that raising the minimum wage above the market clearing price
will artificially inflate unemployment numbers, when the actual effect
on the number of people employed is smaller.

Markets with Supply Controls

The other kind of restrictions that are commonly applied to commodity
labor markets affect supply. Any given seller has only so many hours
of labor available to sell in a week. At a high enough price, some
sellers may be willing to place every waking hour in the market. Once
again new sellers may also enter the market at the high price to sell
a few additional hours of labor.

If a restriction is placed on the number of hours any given seller may
put on the market in a week, then the quantity supplied can only be
increased by adding more suppliers to the market. Sellers lose the
opportunity to sell extra hours at the market price, but an increase
in demand for labor hours will tend to push up the price for the hours
a seller does sell by a small amount, and will bring new sellers some
employment, as the market clearing price for labor hours rises with
the increased demand.

An overtime restriction that allows the supply but increases the price
will have a combination effect. To the extent that marginal cost of
additional labor hours supplied in the labor market is low (in
commodity markets, this cost is typically negligible compared to the
cost of goods) then purchasers will tend to hire more labor from the
less expensive unrestricted market. In the labor market however,
legal, contractual, and physical limits that raise costs to employ a
marginal labor hour are common. These may include a head tax, minimum
employment hour requirements, restriction to hiring from a particular
set of suppliers such as a union, and the costs involved in training
or providing a worker with tools or supplies. These costs are the ones
that can push an employer into purchasing expensive overtime instead
of less expensive regular labor hours.

The Big Fish Market

In a market, pricing power comes about when one party, or group
of parties, comes to the market with the bulk of the supply or the
bulk of the demand. This is when the marginal effect of the remaining
suppliers or purchasers isn't enough to change the price of the bulk
of the goods or services sold. If a seller has pricing power, then to
an extent, that seller may charge more than the net market clearing
price, even if other sellers will sell for less, because even when the
entire amount available at a lower price is purchased, there is still
some significant demand for the remaining amount supplied at the
higher price. In this case, the market may not clear at a single
price; the supplier with pricing power may accept the risk of selling
something less than all the available stuff for sale at the set price.
Other suppliers may go along with the higher pricing and also risk not
selling all of their goods; behavior in this case is mostly determined
by what pricing will maximize profit on the net amount sold.

Similarly, when a buyer has pricing power, other buyers may be willing
to pay more, but only a few suppliers are lucky enough to sell to
them, and the remainder must sell at the lowered offering price of the
buyer with pricing power or not at all, leaving some supply that would
have sold at the net market clearing price. The buyer asserting
pricing power accepts the risk of not getting all the quantity they
wish at the price offered; pricing is generally determined to maximize
the value obtained on the amount purchased.

In a commodity market, goods in one location are interchangeable for
goods in another location; the market may state its price "FOB
Chicago" for instance, and the price between other locations for
buyers and sellers may be adjusted relative to the cost of delivering
the goods elsewhere. Commodity labor tends to be a little less mobile
as well as less interchangeable. For any given person, the cost of
supplying labor hours close to home may be small, but providing it in
the next town or city may be prohibitive.

Pricing Power in Action

Let's consider that in Potterville, adult population 1000, there may
be one employer in town with commodity labor needs, Potter's Mill,
Inc. Being the sole commodity labor buyer gives them some pricing
power relative to all of the potential suppliers of labor hours in
Potterville. Lets say someone with a lot of time on their hands did a
survey, and found all thousand potential workers in Potterville will
provide forty hours of labor a week for ten dollars an hour, but only
five hundred will for five dollars an hour; another hundred people
change their minds for each dollar an hour difference. Now let's say
the mill offers five hundred forty-hour week positions at six dollars
an hour. (Apparently no one at the mill read the survey.) Six hundred
Potterville residents apply, and one hundred are turned away. They
were willing to work, some of them for even less than six dollars an
hour, but the mill only needs so much labor, so they must look
elsewhere.

But what if the mill has six hundred positions, and is only willing to
pay five dollars an hour? Five hundred people from Potterville apply
and all are accepted, and one hundred positions go asking. Potter's
Mill Inc. can raise its offered wage, or do without that labor, but
it's up to the mill. The mill offers 100 positions at six dollars an
hour. One hundred people from Potterville take the jobs. Potter's Mill
has filled its employment needs, and saved five hundred dollars an
hour over what it would have had to pay at a market clearing price for
all six hundred positions, using its pricing power. If the mill needs
more workers, it can go back in the market and pick up another hundred
at seven dollars an hour, another hundred at eight dollars an hour,
and so on. And that's assuming some of the people over in Millerville
don't get wind of this and start applying at lower wages than the
remaining Potterville residents will accept.

Competition and Pricing Power

Let's say another business opens in town - Bailey's Pool Cleaning
Service. It's a small outfit that needs only five workers. If they
offer six dollars an hour, they may get over five hundred applicants
who currently work at the mill for less. They pick five people, and
put them to work. Them mill must fill those positions, and finds that
they must offer a higher wage to do so, but they're still the holders
of substantial pricing power, and they still save a lot of money on
labor.

If forced to compete for the Potterville pool of workers against
enough other employers, Potter's Mill would find it didn't have that
kind of pricing power, and would have to pay the higher market
clearing wage when hiring all its workers. Some workers in that market
would benefit by being paid more than they would have been willing to
work for if they had to. A few employers that would have been willing
to pay more if they needed to, find that they can save their money and
fill their labor needs for less at the market clearing price.

The Minimum Wage Comes to Town

In an effort to curb vagrancy, vandalism, and voyeurism, the town
council in Potterville decides to enact a minimum wage. Some of the
townspeople aren't being paid enough at work to keep up with the rent,
so they wander the streets at night, tagging street signs and looking
in other people's windows. To abate the scourge, they declare a
minimum wage of seven dollars an hour. Currently some six hundred five
people are employed at the town's two businesses, at wages of five or
six dollars an hour. The board of directors at Potter's Mill Inc. goes
over the numbers with management, and determines that they can't
afford to run the business with the extra sixteen hundred dollars an
hour it will cost them given their current workforce level. They
decide to relocate the mill to Millerville. Meanwhile, Bailey's Pool
Cleaning Service could have afforded to give their workers a dollar
raise, except suddenly they don't have any business as all the people
with pools in their back yard are out of work. They reluctantly close
their doors.

Leaving the extreme of Potterville behind, in a larger town with a
more competitive labor market, the effect of a higher minimum wage is
unlikely to create a ghost town. There will be some employers at the
margins whose primary cost of business is commodity labor that will be
in trouble. There will be some few people who are pushed out of the
commodity labor market, unable to command the higher wage when the
number of labor hours purchased falls off. A fair number of people
will be slightly better off, given a raise at the expense of a few
employers whose costs have gone up and whose profit margins have
fallen, or at the expense of the consumers who pay higher prices if
the costs have instead been passed along by those employers.

Conclusion

On net, when the commodity labor market is restricted, just like when
restrictions are placed in any commodity market, the total value of
the exchange possible in that market is cut. We are all worse off in
the aggregate, although for many of us there may have been no effect,
costs may have risen for very few of us, and for another few of us
there was a benefit. Sometimes in some non-economic sense, obtaining
the benefit for a few may outweigh the net negative effect on total
value. It's not easy to say that this is clearly the case for a
minimum wage.

The Intelligent Person's Guide to Derivatives and The Recent Financial Meltdown

2008-09-20T05:40:00.000-07:00

You probably have a reasonable idea of what stocks are. Stock represents a fractional share of ownership of a company. If a company has issued a million shares of stock, and you own one share, then you own one millionth of the company, referred to as your equity. If the company makes a profit, and they distribute it to the owners as a dividend, then you will get one millionth of the amount of profits they distribute. When you own stock, your upside is unlimited, and your downside is, the company can go bankrupt and your shares will be worthless. However, you can't lose more than you invest, which isn't true of some other kinds of investments.

Bonds are pretty simple, too. A bond is a kind of loan note created by a company, saying that if you buy their bond, they will pay you back the face value of the bond on a specified date. This is called the maturity date, or when the bond comes due. Some bonds are sold at face value, but include periodic interest payments, called coupons, in a specified amount. (Once upon a time, bond certificates actually had some paper coupons printed on them that you had to clip off and physically redeem for your interest payment. Nowadays, for the great majority of bonds, you just register your bond and they send you the money.) Other bonds, called zero coupon bonds, or zeroes for short, don't make any periodic interest payment, and instead are sold at a discount to the face value. The interest is paid as the difference between what you bought the bond for and what the company repays you when the bond comes due. US Savings Bonds work like this.

Investing in bonds, like investing in stocks, has a downside limited to what you invest. The upside, however, is limited because when the bond matures, it's worth the face value and nothing more. On the other hand, when a company goes bankrupt, the stockholders have nothing, but the bondholders get first claim on the company's assets. Admittedly, that may not be much consolation.

Stocks and bonds can be bought and sold, and depending on how much people want to pay for them and how much they're willing to sell them for, the price may change with each transaction. When this happens to a share of stock, it represents a change in the market value of the company. When the share price goes up, it's because people think the company is more valuable, and when the share price goes down, people think the company is less valuable. The relationship between what people are willing to pay for a company, and what the assets and profitability of the company are, can be tenuous. Famous investors like Warren Buffett have made their fortunes by buying companies that have good profitability prospects when most people think their stock is a dog and it trades for some relatively small amount compared to its value. Everyone is familiar with the way stock prices go up and down, and it's reported every day on the news.

People are less familiar with the way bond prices fluctuate every day. A bond has a fixed interest rate, but we know that interest rates change all the time, though not quite like stock prices do, A bond that pays 5% when the prevailing interest rate is 10% is not a very good deal, and so its price goes down. In fact, its price goes down about 5% for every year to maturity, until the effective difference between the 10% interest you can get on a new bond and the 5% you get on the old bond is gone. Say you have a $1000 face value bond that matures next year, and it pays 5%. If the current interest rate is 10%, then your bond's price in the marketplace will have fallen to about $955, which is what that $1050 you're due to collect next year in principal and interest is worth as an investment that pays 10%. On the other hand, if the current interest rate is a measly 1%, then your 5% bond is a pretty good deal, and someone would probably pay close to $1040 to take it off your hands. So you see how bond prices change to reflect the current interest rate situation.

The other thing that affects the bond price is a change in the creditworthiness of the company issuing the bond. When you buy a bond from the government, you're going to get paid back barring something like a nuclear war or planet-killing asteroid, in which event you probably don't care much. Companies, on the other hand, have a nasty propensity to go out of business, or lose lots of money, and might not be able to pay you back. How likely a company is to pay back its bondholders is measured by its credit rating. Companies with excellent credit ratings can sell their bonds at relatively low discounts or alternatively, with relatively low interest rates, at or just above the rates on government bonds. Companies that have not-so-good credit have to offer a bigger discount, or higher interest rate, to interest people in their bonds. Crummy credit ratings lead to really high interest rates on bonds, which are usually called junk bonds and represent a real gamble.

So when a company goes from a good credit risk to a mediocre one, suddenly nobody wants to be a bondholder, and the price of its bonds goes down, raising the effective interest rate paid if you buy one at the new, lower price. On the other hand, if you bought a cheap junk bond and the company's prospects suddenly improve, you may be able to sell your bond for much more than you paid, and the effective interest rate on the bond will have gone down proportionately. You could wind up owing capital gains taxes on your bonds, as well as taxes on the interest! I suppose there are worse problems to have.

This is all preamble to the concept of a derivative. In general, a derivative is a kind of security with a value that represents some aspect of some underlying security. For example, a stock option is a kind of derivative. If a stock is currently trading at $100, and you buy an option for a dollar to purchase a share of that stock at $100 in a month, then as the price rises, the value of your option rises right along with it. If the price falls to $100 or below, your option is worthless. At the end of the month, if the price is above $100, you can buy the share for $100 and you pocket the difference in the price, less the dollar you paid for the option, as a profit. If the price is less than $100, your option just expires, worthless. The option is sold by someone who would rather have the dollar you paid for the option than the potential upside on the stock over the next month. If they think the price will be flat or fall a little, this is a way to make some extra money, but they risk losing out on the stock's gains if the price goes up. The option is derived from the price change of the stock, so we can call it a derivative.

Another kind of derivative applies to bonds. One way to trade a coupon bond is to sell the right to collect on the coupon and the right to collect the principal separately. What you've done is split the bond into two separate securities, one that's called a strip that collects the interest, and another that's essentially a zero-coupon bond. Since these two securities are derived from an underlying one, they get called derivatives. They will have values that fluctuate along with interest rates and the fortunes of the underlying company, just like the regular bond, but with different properties which might be more valuable to various purchasers than the original bond. The company that creates the derivatives holds on to the original bond, but forwards the interest payments to the strip holder, and sends the principal due at maturity to the zero holder.

When you split off the interest payment on a bond like that, you can split it in more than one way, creating even more complicated derivatives. For example, you could take a regular coupon bond and sell a lower-interest strip and a higher-discount zero, or vice-versa. These will react in different ways to changes in interest rates compared to the original bond, so if buyers are looking for more volatility, or less, in their bond values, they can get what they are looking for.

Yet another way to create derivatives is to pool some securities together, then sell off new securities that represent some aspect of the underlying securities. For example, you could combine some treasury bills with some junk bonds and effectively create new bonds that are intermediate between the two in interest rate and creditworthiness. You can sell the high volatility and the low volatility aspects separately to parties that are looking for more risk and more upside, and parties that want less risk and will accept a smaller payout.

Now let's say someone has a big pile of mortgages. These all will have various interest rates and the payers will have various credit ratings and payment histories, but we can combine the mortgages into groups, and create new derivative securities that look like bonds out of them. Depending on how we group them, we can get low-interest, high credit rating ones together, or high-interest, lower rated ones, and create new bond-like securities with similar properties. The risk that a few of the mortgages might go into default gets built into the new mortgage-backed security's discount, effectively raising the interest rate. If the group has a lot of mortgages that might default, then the new security is more like a junk bond, and its price should drop and interest rate rise accordingly. The problem with these new securities is that it's hard for someone to tell whether a given instance really ought to be considered AAA or junk without going through all of the underlying mortgages and checking each one. One of them might have started out in good shape, but be composed of mortgages from somewhere that just had a big plant close, and suddenly lots of those houses are on the market for cheap, and how would you know? You rely on the credit rating agencies to stay on top of it, but this level of detail may be beyond them.

So, let's say you have some bond, and you're willing to part with some of the interest on the bond in return for a guarantee that you'll get your principal back, because you're worried about that more than you want a high return. Say someone comes along and says, I will agree to buy your bond from you at par (that is, the present value of the face value of the bond at maturity at the prevailing interest rate) if something happens to it to significantly change its value, such as going into default, and in return, all I ask is that you pay me all the interest your bond pays over and above what a treasury note with the same maturity pays, plus a little extra for my trouble. What you're doing is taking your bond and turning it into something more like a treasury note, because someone else has agreed to take on the default risk in return for a risk premium. This kind of derivative is called a credit default swap, and it's what got AIG into such awful straits.

What happened was, AIG and others were busy minting money by taking on the default risk for mortgage-backed securities, because they figured there was no way to lose - house prices just go up, right? And more and more financial institutions were willing to buy the mortgage-backed securities because companies like AIG were willing to sign up for the default risks, which were hidden inside and not really reflected in the price of the securities. And the mortgage companies that created the mortgage-backed securities and sold them to banks and insurers and brokerages, were busily plowing the money they got from selling them into making ever more mortgages to ever less credit-worthy borrowers, who were busy driving up the price of housing with their borrowed money.

And then the bubble popped.

Gradually, sub-prime borrowers, and a few prime ones, got in trouble as their teaser-rate variable mortgages started getting adjusted upwards, the economy slowed and house prices fell, and they couldn't refinance into something they could afford. More and more mortgages went into default, showing up as these mortgage-backed securities not making their interest payments and going into default even when they'd gotten high ratings from the credit rating firms. Financial institutions started looking into their portfolios and finding these hot potatoes and all started trying to unload them at the same time, and the market evaporated. They had to come up with more cash to cover the lost interest payments they weren't getting anymore on these things, to try and avoid going into default themselves, and cash started getting hard to come by. Firms like AIG that had guaranteed the securities without much of a cash reserve started getting viciously squeezed. Firms that had purchased the securities with borrowed money found that they had no way to get money to pay their lenders, since they couldn't sell them at any price. That's when the excrement really struck the rotational airflow facilitators.

When you buy something, and its price drops, the most you can lose is what you paid for it. When you buy something with borrowed money, and its price drops, you can lose more than you started with and find yourself in a deep debt hole. And if you can't service your debt, then whoever lent you the money feels the pain, too. If you're a major financial player and it's also going on with a bunch of other major players, it can snowball into a general financial meltdown. And so even though the underlying market value for houses has dropped by maybe 20%, and foreclosure rates are still just a small fraction of total mortgages, the number of firms that have had their capital wiped out as a result is impressive. Or perhaps depressive.

Variations on a Theme

2008-07-21T23:38:00.000-07:00

Last Wednesday the Formidable Mrs and I were discussing something to do with decorating, fairly late, and she mentioned wanting to have a headboard for the guest bedroom downstairs.

"Perhaps a padded headboard, some foam over some plywood, covered in duck." I allowed how that was doable. "We could maybe do tufted, with buttons."

I imagined a tufted, padded headboard, and suggested "with really big buttons? Like, dinner-plate sized?"

"Like your mom has in her sewing room?"

"Exactly."

"Where do you get those?"

"Dad made it, on the lathe. Hmm." At this point I'm thinking about what I might need a lathe for, and not much is coming to mind when she interrupts my reverie with "I don't think we need a lathe, lathes are scary."

"Yeah, okay, that's not a good enough reason to get a lathe. You know, to fit the theme of the room, we could do an Adirondack headboard. Just a bunch of vertical boards, rounded on top in a big hump."

"Oh, yes, or like a loveseat, with two humps. That would really go well in there."

Thus was born the Adirondack Headboard project. I went down and measured the bed and frame to get an idea of the dimensions we wanted and doodled up a design on some graph paper, then went looking around the garage, where I found some likely looking 1x6 pine boards I had on hand for the random woodworking needs that seem to come up once in a while. They looked just right. I had a 1x5 and a 1x3 laying about that would make good cross pieces. I set them out to work on the next day.

Did you know that a crescent wrench makes a reasonable compass in a pinch? I drew the arcs for the tops of the boards with a pencil in the jaws and my finger in the hole at the end of the handle of my 8" crescent wrench. After cutting all the boards to length with the chopsaw, I cut the curves with a jigsaw then sanded everything smooth with the random-orbit sander. Easy as pie. I've only ever made pumpkin pie, which is pretty easy, but I imagine some other sorts of pie may be somewhat more challenging. I laid out the cut and sanded parts as seen above. In the evening when we were all home, wife and son helped paint on some shellac to seal the porous, knotty pine boards up for painting.

Another few rounds of sanding, painting with primer, sanding, painting with tinted primer, sanding, painting and sanding a couple more times, then spraying on about five coats of polyurethane varnish, which all told took another three days to complete, and finally adding a bit of hardware so it could attach to the bedframe, and we have something that looks like this.

And with the bed pushed back into place, the finished product looks like this:

The guest bedroom now has a headboard that fits the theme of the room (well, the sort-of theme, we're not counting the treadmill as a theme element), that only took a few days from conception to completion, and looks like it was made to be there. Which it was.

I also doodled up a design for an Adirondack side table; we'll see if that ever happens.

Finishing Touches

2008-06-08T20:42:00.000-07:00

The sun came out again today, after being off vacationing somewhere else for a week, and just in time to finish the big play space project off. With some hefting assistance from PJMcD, we lifted and bolted the final sections of the play structure into place this afternoon.

The chief playtester gave it his squeal of approval.

Afterward, there was some well-earned relaxation time with the uncle.

And here's how it looks all put together.

Now that I've seen how easily the chips get moved around under the swings and at the end of the slide, I'm planning on getting some rubber mats to put underneath the chips at those locations so they don't get dug into all the way to the bottom. Some rough spots in the wood could use some attention, too. And looking around at the edges of the pictures, it's clear I need to start working on the yard some more. Then it's time for the next project! And there are so many to choose from...

How I Spent My Summer Vacation, Day 42

2008-06-07T20:16:00.000-07:00

Today's post is a quick follow-up to yesterday's report on the play space. Since most of the play structure was put together in big assemblies in the garage already, I mostly just had to fit them together and apply fasteners of one sort or another once I got them hauled out to the play space. We set up a work table under our patio umbrella to hold the plans and parts.

Thereafter, it was mostly a case of drill,

screw,

and assemble the various parts together.

My chief assistant did some enthusiastic quality assurance.

Here's where we left off today. The next task is to put together the swing set, which will require more heavy lifting than I can manage on my own, so we'll do that tomorrow.

Play is Serious Business

2008-06-06T23:37:00.000-07:00

For the past month, I've been busily assembling a play structure that we purchased a year ago from Costco and which sat in its very heavy boxes taking up a big chunk of our garage for most of that year. Despite the instructions calling for two people, I managed to put together large sections of it single-handedly in a couple of weeks' worth of evenings, until I'd pretty much run out of things I could assemble in the garage. I needed a place to assemble the final product out of the large sections I'd put together, so it was time to look at the yard. The plan has always been to use the garden space, since our gardening needs do not really require such a huge space. In fact, as you see below, we've done about all our gardening this year, except for some left-over strawberries, in a cedar raised bed. The carrots and sweetpeas are coming along nicely, as our chief gardener demonstrates here.

The garden space had a couple of bushes removed by our disappearing gardener back in January, and so when I began preparations in earnest, it looked something like this.

Next, I found a level line with my framing level and a laser and marked the fence and some stakes I drove in at the rough corners of the play space, so I'd know what I needed to move around, dirt-wise, to have a level space. To avoid some trees, I decided to make the space a skewed rectangle, roughly 24' by 28' in size, and marked the corners with some garden poles we inherited with the house and some mason's line at the rough top of what I thought the play space border would be.

A couple of years ago we had some landscaping cleanup done, and the landscapers had put down a ton of beauty bark in the garden to control the weeds, and I am not speaking figuratively. I scraped off all of the beauty bark in the play space area and a bit beyond, a layer two inches thick in places, because I didn't want that to be part of the dirt I moved around to level the play space - it would be breaking down and compacting forever if I left it in, so I wanted to just be dealing with bare dirt. I had at least a couple of yards of bark when I was done, most of it clean enough for reuse, so I stashed that under our big cedar tree.

Most of the garden space had only a relatively thin layer of topsoil, over some rocky hardpan that wasn't going to respond to a shovel easily. I rented a big tiller from Home Depot and ground away at the high side, shoveling the softened dirt and rocks over onto the low side until I'd reached the approximate level I wanted within the playspace. It looked something like this.

I considered big railroad tie timbers for a border, but decided I'd rather have a box built with pressure-treated lumber around some posts, so I purchased a bunch of lumber and posts and cedar boards for a top rail. It took two trips in the heavily loaded van to get it all home.

I went back to Home Depot and rented a one-man augur with a 6" bit (that's diameter, not length) and got to drilling. Wrestling the augur against the rocks in the holes was a serious chore, and I wound up taking a couple of days completing all the hole drilling, what with stopping to dig out some rocks with my post hole shovel in practically every other hole, not to mention cleaning out all the dirt that remained after pulling out the augur. Once while my main helper was watching, the augur caught on a rock and twisted itself right out of my hands with the throttle on, and we watched it spin itself around for a while, highly entertained, before I grabbed it and shut it off.

Following in my father's footsteps, I decided to stick in an extra post for a possible future treehouse sort of affair in one corner of the play space and leave the posts tall in that corner. The rest of the posts I cut off as I went, bolting them to the lumber and maintaining a level and for the most part square line around the play space as I went. I added a cedar top rail around the edge, and a step area for easy access from the yard.

Once the border was enclosed and everything bolted together, I filled in around the posts, and levelled the dirt inside the playspace, with a slight slope from one side to the other for drainage, and packed down the loose dirt. Then I got some weed barrier and some humongous staples and covered it all up. And that was all I could do myself until I got something to fill the play space with. There had been a long run of nice weather while I busily worked up a sweat every day, but it finally came to an end about the same time I finished.

While it rained, I called around to find out about play chips. There was one company that would blow it in for you, but I didn't like their chips very much - too big. Another place would deliver with a blower truck, but you were supposed to do the actual blowing with the hose yourself. Interesting idea, but I didn't like their play chips, either - too much bark and slivery bits. I went with a slightly more expensive alternative, cedar chips from the Rainbow Play Systems outfit, and paid to have it installed. They came today, about five hours later than originally expected, and filled the play space up. Their chips came in bags on tall pallets, which they dumped out of their truck in our driveway, and hauled around to the backyard in a wheel barrow. My assistant helped with the raking.

Now that there are play chips, I can haul out the parts I've put together in the garage and start working on the final assembly. We should be done this weekend, unless it really, really pours down.

Still Turns Shoes Green, Too

2008-05-05T03:42:00.000-07:00

I don't know what became of our landscaper. Back in December, we arranged for him to do some work in the yard to get it ready for a play structure we bought a year ago, which has been taking up space in large heavy boxes in our garage ever since. He took out some bushes, left behind some tools, and hasn't been seen since. Phone calls have gone unanswered, and his tools rusted where he left them in our yard.

So, figuring I need the exercise and could save a little money, last week I bought a lawnmower and mowed my own lawn for the first time since I have owned a house, for the first time since I was a teenager, probably. I got one of these, a Sunlawn LMM40, on sale for $40 off at the local McLendon's Hardware store. It's nothing at all like the heavy and useless things I remember from childhood. It's actually pretty easy to use, and it's about as environmentally friendly as it's possible for a lawnmower to get. I mowed the lawn twice, once in each direction, to catch all the grass that got pushed over, since it was a little long in spots. It looked mowed when I was done, so I guess that was what I was after. And best of all, I only have to mow two more times, and I've saved money over what I was paying the landscaper. I bought an electric weed whacker while I was at it, so really I'm going to have to mow and whack about four times to pay for it all, but what was I saying about exercise?

This weekend, I suggested to the Formidable Mrs. that she should try the mower, since I figure it's at least as good a workout as the treadmill at the gym, and she gamely gave it a go. Apparently all was well until she ran over a twig that got stuck. She gave her thumb a good half-inch gash trying to reach in to clear it, and of course immediately felt as bad for being dumb with a lawnmower as for being hurt and bleeding. Those blades are quite sharp, and now that they've tasted blood, who knows what trouble they might get into.

Did I mention that my contract is over and I'm "enjoying" some time off, taking care of various projects? Yeah. I'm starting in on the play structure now. So far I've unboxed everything (what an amazing amount of cardboard that was) and sorted out all the parts. Next up, assembly!

The Burial of Blackthumb, Piratical Gardener

2008-04-28T20:31:00.000-07:00

Here lies the body of Blackthumb, ready to push up daisies, or in this instance, sweetpeas and beans and carrots and tomatoes, depending. I haven't got a gardening bone in my body, and I'm no real fan of vegetable-y produce, fresh or otherwise, but here I am, making a raised bed for the growing of the greenery. It's the boy's fault; he wants to grow things. I think it's 'cause of the gardening they do at school, which is all to the good. I'm hard pressed to tell the good stuff from the weeds (they're all weeds to me) but here we are. The raised bed is made with rough cedar 2x4 stock, cut to length and lapped at the corners with a hole for some rebar to hold it all together. It's full of a custom mix of perlite, sphagnum moss, and compost dirt. It should be easy to disassemble should the need arise, or to replace some bit of. Cedar, because the wife didn't like the orange landscape timbers I purchased first (they were oh, so cheap, $1.79 each, bargain city) because who knows what evil might lurk in that powdery orange coating? (I'm pretty sure they are not pressure treated with arsenic and copper compounds, but I wouldn't bet money on it, and thus the landscape timbers were a no-go. "We'll be eating stuff out of there!" she said, and she's right.) Of course, I probably should have just used the cheap dimensional stuff, 'cause even if it rots fairly quickly, it's inexpensive enough to replace without much concern. But the cedar looks good, anyway. We'll see how it holds up. I was getting ready to put it together, shoveling some of the old beauty bark out of the way, when a rabbit came hopping by, checking out the new snack bar location. I chased it off, and discovered those wascally wabbits can scoot through the holes in the chain link fence when sufficiently motivated. Danged varmints!

Just One of Those Things

2008-04-13T02:11:00.000-07:00

I came across some more furniture I'd like to have. Musical coffee tables! It would be especially cool to build something like this, but I don't think I have it in me. Maybe I'll have the funds to get one of these someday. You absolutely have to watch this video.

Doesn't that just look like the most fun time sitting around the living room ever? And if you were playing Pit, you could just slap the table when you get a corner on something...

To Boldly Go Where No Wormy Has Gone Before

2008-03-25T02:31:00.000-07:00

Captain Police Baby Slimey had a birthday yesterday, and a party on Saturday that was a hit with the preschool set up at the Purple Museum. Captain Slimey's spaceship, the Police Enterprise Four, had a starring role as the birthday cake.

It is not especially easy rendering the Enterprise in cake. On the other hand, it's pretty tasty that way. This is a picture of the Enterprise Four in orbit around Planet Jurassica.

After a day, the frosting went from gray to teal. I don't know why. We polished off the last of the cake last night after Baby Slimey's favorite dinner, gyoza and ramen. The gyoza was homemade, and pretty good if I do say so myself. The Formidable Mrs. was first to try her hand at it a few weeks ago, and I made the latest batch, and they all tasted better than the frozen kind from the store. Pretty easy, too, if a little time consuming. We used ground chicken instead of pork, some thinly sliced green onion and cabbage, a little tamari soy sauce and Mirin, and wrappers from the produce section at the grocery store. Since we usually only fry up eight or ten at a time, the rest get frozen for later - the wrappers come in packs of something like 48, which takes about a pound of filling. Now that Lucy v.P. is getting the family recipe book online, we may be able to add recipes like this one fairly easily.

Thanks to the folks for coming to visit for the buglet's birthday, and the sister and bro-in-law for a lovely Easter dinner. We had a great time. Set phasers for stun!

With a Flick of My Wrist

2007-11-18T02:01:00.000-08:00

I got myself a new watch.

I used to go through about one watch a year; apparently I'm a very caustic person and would corrode them until the case was all pitted and the crown would come off. I finally clued in and the last one I got was a stainless steel Seiko which lasted something like seven years, but its crown finally broke off a couple of weeks ago when I tried to adjust it for daylight savings time ending. I tried doing without and just looking at my cell phone like the cool kids are doing these days, but I'm old school and set in my ways, so I checked Amazon for a new one, and got another Seiko.

I like the blue dial.

The Metaverse Manifesto

2007-10-05T01:23:00.000-07:00

When I look at virtual worlds with fixed features at specific virtual locations, which is most of them, I think what this place really needs is more user control. Consider some kind of user-controlled remapping capability. Let's say Starbucks has staked out one corner of every virtual block, but I personally don't care about Starbucks. I don't want to see it there, so I click it and tell the environment to show me a nice grassy park square instead of a Starbucks whenever I run across one. Maybe the Virgin Megastore is three blocks away from Tower Records, and I couldn't care less about anything in the virtual real estate in between. I click on the street in front of one store and drag it over to the street in front of the other, and now the stores are right next to each other and I don't even see what's in the middle. How about user-added mash-up capabilities? Say I've found some third-party service that can put a big colored column in the air over the stores selling something I'm interested in, perhaps with taller columns for lower prices. I can just look around and tell where I want to go shopping. Or maybe I want to hop every virtual bar, so a mash-up app could draw a dashed line on the street for me to follow like Jeffy in Family Circus. Give the user control over appearances. Maybe I want to theme the world, so every building looks like it's ivy-covered University Gothic and the streets are all grassy quads and everyone else's avatar looks like Joe College from the '50s. Make the user's choices persistent and portable. Make it so all my changes are stored in a way that lets me hand a token of some sort to someone else, and they can see the virtual world the way I do, and vice-versa. Give me a dashboard that can show me when my friends are online no matter what service they're using, and send them a ticket via IM so they can teleport right to where I am in the virtual world. Maybe there's a toggle switch on the dashboard that lets me view things with my theme, or see them the way their creators intended, or with all the signs translated into Japanese. Maybe there's a whole scrolling list of possible themes I can pick from, and I can download even more. Let me create the themes, the mash-up services, the virtual remappings, the dashboard applets. These facilities probably need to be built into a virtual world toolkit so developers can make them available to users. Maybe not everyone will want to implement all of them in their virtual worlds, but those that do will probably be popular. I want to be able to pick whether I see flying genitalia avatars or not, whether I see advertising or not, whether random strangers can talk to me or not, and I want my choices to be respected portably across all kinds of virtual worlds. Let me choose whether I wear rose-colored glasses or not. Don't censor the environment for me (at least, beyond some initial setting like Google's SafeSearch default at Moderate), let me do that myself if I want to and how I want to. Give the users control.

Plutocrats Are People Too

2007-09-15T04:33:00.000-07:00

I've been toying with an idea for meaningful campaign finance reform, which to me doesn't actually have anything to do with the ridiculous amounts spent on them, since I don't really care about that. No, what irks me is the risible fiction that candidates are offering no quid pro quo, just their hearty thanks and congratulations on the civic-mindedness of their donors who are giving them money with no thought of personal gain, because that would be wrong.

The gist of my proposal is that Congress disallow any contribution or spending on campaigns for elected office by artificial persons. No corporate body could provide any funds or other valuable consideration whatever to a candidate. That would include businesses, non-profits, unions, corporate organizations of any kind including ones set up for advocacy, as well as any of the usual rent-seeking suspects. Corporations of any sort would have to keep their money away from campaign coffers. Individuals, on the other hand, could contribute all they like. Individuals could provide services in kind, but businesses couldn't. Broadcasters and newspapers, if corporately held, would be required to offer advertising space on equal terms to all comers, at whatever rate they liked, including free if they were so inclined, but editorial content endorsing or supporting one candidate would be allowed only if equal guest editorial space was offered for free to every other candidate. The equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment would be specifically circumscribed by Congress in regards to artificial persons to limit their freedom of speech. Unlike the current laws' limits on individuals' expression, the Supreme Court would likely go along with this restriction.

Suddenly, corporate interests would have to have the support of individuals to get congresscritters attention. Farmers, workers, teachers, business owners, shareholders, and issue advocates would all be pressing their various agendas and writing checks, but that's only to be expected. However, they'd all be doing it one person at a time. No longer could the AARP print up postcards for a mass-mailing effort in favor of a candidate, or the NRA or NEA have giant checks printed up to hand over to candidates on stage. There could still be organizations like that, because individual rights to assemble would remain inviolate, but if incorporated, they would be restricted from favoring - or disfavoring - any candidate for office. Members, on the other hand, could favor and disfavor all they liked.

I'm not sure this idea would cure the various evils of elected officials being corrupted by money, but at least they'd be hearing from lots of real people and not just from deep-pocketed self-interested organizations. Would it work? It's got no protection against plutocracy, but hey, plutocrats are people too.

It's Not as Intuitive as You'd Think

2007-09-09T04:59:00.000-07:00

Boy, if you want to see free markets (and Milton Friedman) get libeled, you couldn’t do better than this. If I were to diss on Milton Friedman, it would be because he invented income tax withholding, not because the Chileans 'disappeared' thousands of people.

Give me some time and I'll write up why unemployment and shuttered factories are often a good thing for society as a whole, and why it would generally be better for everyone if, say, travel and trade in goods were as easy between countries as they are between the US states. Folks get up in arms about a trade imbalance between the US and China, while nobody is concerned about the trade imbalance between Nevada and California. Wonder why?

One thing to remember about free markets is that they don’t exist in a vacuum. A whole lot of social context is required before you can have lots of random people getting together to buy and sell successfully. For instance, being free to make and sell something presupposes a property right which is protected somehow from thievery and thuggery. The buyer needs that same assurance so that he can take his purchase home and make use of it. A buyer is able to shop for the best prices in the market only when there is a common means of exchange, with a reasonably constant value that isn’t subject to radical swings due to it being based on some fickle commodity, or raging hyperinflation. And there needs to be some recourse for fraud and misrepresentation. The social background level of honesty and integrity makes a difference in the emergence of markets. In an ideal market, information spreads about those participants who try to cheat, and lie, and steal, and their transactions get discounted appropriately, if they can make any at all. Real markets suffer from information flow problems, and then everyone pays extra when some bad actors appear. The social costs of creating and enforcing the conditions that allow reasonably free markets to exist must be paid somehow, through fees or taxes, however indirect. Economists are well aware that the free market of microeconomics is a simplification and model of how real markets work, and that the reality is far more complex and nuanced. Kind of like how a physicist might model an internal combustion engine, fully aware that what takes place under the hood of his Toyota is an entirely other kettle of fish. The model is useful and instructive and gives insight into what’s going on, but it’s no substitute for the real thing.

That said, economists are also fully aware of things like environmental side effects and social ill effects. The word used for something that happens indirectly as a result of a market exchange is "externality," which means that someone gets a benefit they haven’t paid for, or faces a cost they haven’t been compensated for, because of that activity.

Let’s say that Ann sells Bob some firewood in the firewood market. Ann cut down some trees on her property to make the firewood. Bob goes and burns it in his fireplace. As a simple exchange, Ann and Bob are both better off, because Ann wanted to trade her trees for some money, and Bob wanted to trade some of his money for firewood. But Ann and Bob are not the only people affected. Charlie lives near Ann and Bob. He used to enjoy the view of Ann’s trees out his window, and now they are gone. And the air is now all smoky because Bob’s badly ventilated chimney sends all that sooty air Charlie’s way. Charlie was previously enjoying a view provided by Ann, but he didn’t pay anything for it, and now it’s gone but no one paid him any compensation. Charlie also had gotten used to some clean air, which he enjoyed for free, but now it’s all smelly and irritating his eyes, and no one has paid him to make up for it. These are externalities with respect to the firewood market.

One way to deal with an externality is to make paying for it part of the cost of a transaction in the relevant market. In the case of the firewood market, for instance, buyers of firewood might have to pay extra, and that money might go to paying for filter masks for people like Charlie, or to a fund for subsidizing clean-burning wood stoves for polluters like Bob. This isn’t something that the participants in the firewood market are necessarily going to come up with on their own; it’s a social cost and usually requires the coercive presence of an enforcer like a government to implement some kind of consensus fix. And the cost of administering the fix is usually high, the fix itself is often less than ideal, and it is usually subject to the vagaries of the political and regulatory process. But with luck, it’s better for Charlie than no fix at all.

Most of the objections of the free market being awful to workers and the environment are either cases of externalities becoming apparent or cases of sharp imbalances in market power. When a market has many players in both the buyer and seller roles, and information on the price of the goods is easily shared, it turns into a commodity market, where no one has pricing power and all must accept the going rate or go home without making a trade. In this case, we call the participants price takers because they take the price set by the market. When there are only a few buyers and lots of sellers, or a few sellers and lots of buyers, or information on pricing is difficult to come by, then those few, or the ones with the information, can be price makers, dictating the price through the quantities they are willing to purchase or provide. Say a town full of people looking for a job with few available skills meets up with a mill that will employ a town's worth of people if they'll work twelve hours a day six days a week for a pittance a day and put up with some awful smog. The mill is a price maker, and the townsfolk can work on those terms or not at all. As long as there are lots of towns full of people who a desperate for jobs, and the mill can pack up and move to whatever town they can employ the cheapest, there will be no change in the terms on offer. It’s not until the folks in each town are already well enough off that they can turn down an offer like that, that you will see any significant change. Since any given worker has very little market power, if they turn down a job they have little recourse when there are few employers. Forming a union will help, but like any cartel, a union faces the problem of defectors, those who find the incentive to take a job at a lower rate personally compelling even if it undermines the chance for everyone in the group to do better. Adopting a local ordinance to set the rates of pay will work as long as the mill can’t pack up and move to another town without such an ordinance. And larger governments have traditionally been very conservative about adopting such measures, basically only doing so when the market realities are already mostly changed to match, and only catching a few laggards out. That’s because politics is generally tied to money rather than votes once the legislature is in session, and returns its attention to votes only once in a while. And voters start caring about, say, the environment more when they have already dealt with more pressing issues of being fed and housed and have a little leisure time to enjoy it in.

Sucking All The Air Out of the Room

2007-09-07T03:19:00.000-07:00

I'm curious what this notion of a free market that doesn't work means to people who say that.

Let me explain the concept of a free market from the perspective of an economist, and explore some of its ramifications for a bit.

The very basics: if there's a market for a good or service, that means there are people who want to purchase it at some price or other and people who are willing to supply it at some price or other, and they can get together to make a deal. If it's a free market, that means the buyers and sellers all get to pick the best deal on offer, at any price they like, in any quantity they like, without being forced to buy or sell if they don't want to. That means that sellers can try for the highest price that someone will pay, and that buyers can buy for the lowest price that someone will sell at. But the buyers are all in competition to get that best deal, so any seller will raise his price to just under the price at which it wouldn't sell at all and can still find a buyer. Yet at the same time, the sellers are all in competition to make that sale, so they must drop their price to match the lowest available price to make any sale. If they are unwilling to sell at the price that these two effects converge on, (known as the equilibrium price) then they take their goods and go home. If a buyer isn't willing to pay that price, she packs up and heads home empty-handed, money still in pocket. Everyone else makes a deal. The buyers that were willing to pay more get what they want out of the market for less than they'd feared, and the sellers who were willing to sell for less find themselves richer than they'd hoped. A free market matches people up and makes them wealthier - everyone who comes and makes an exchange gets more value in return than they bring. Everyone else has what they started with. They all made a free choice and no one was coerced into paying more or selling for less than they were willing.

There, that's the long and the short of a free market. Maybe other people are talking about something else when they use the term.

Well, how do free markets work? We've been talking about the market for healthcare, but that seems fraught with connotations that I don't want to deal with. Instead, for the purposes of illustration, I'm going to discuss a theoretical community that lives on the deep ocean floor, and trades in a market of compressed air bottles. In this case, the buyers all have a strong motivation to find a deal, since their alternatives are to die a painful death of suffocation or a painful death of the bends, the common factor being a painful death. The sellers, however, are limited in their ability to take advantage of this market by whoever among them is willing to sell for the least amount that will sell all her air bottles. They can't sell a single bottle for more until her supply is all gone. If she can supply as many bottles as buyers want at that price, she'll get a de facto private monopoly, until other sellers lower their price to match, or if they can't, get out of the business.

(For the curious, private monopolies, also known as efficiency monopolies, arise in a competitive market when one seller has a cost advantage over all other sellers and can supply the entire market. A statutory or legal monopoly is one where some government fiat prevents other sellers from entering a market, such as when a product is patented or the field is regulated. A natural monopoly is one where the costs to supply a market go down when there are fewer suppliers, as in, say, roadways or sewer lines. Given the way newspapers have tended to go to one per community, they may be a natural monopoly. Natural monopolies are usually persistent and thus are the most likely to be regulated to prevent abuse of market power; private monopolies tend to be temporary and are occasionally brought to task for abuse of market power through antitrust law, but are unlikely to be regulated.)

So what if there is a monopoly on the air bottle supply? Won't a profit maximizing monopolist restrict the supply and jack up the price? Well, sure, if that actually brings in more profit. Those are some ridiculously motivated buyers, after all. However, if raising the price to a certain point will bring some new sellers into the air bottle business, the monopolist is likely to try to stop just short of that price, lest she wind up attracting competitors, selling fewer bottles and losing out on those profits. That price point in turn will be something under the price at which that new seller could make any money, or just about where their costs of producing and selling the air bottles would be exceeded by the price they could get. In other words, a private monopoly will still be limited in what it can get away with charging for very long, as long as there are no barriers (other than startup costs) to new sellers entering the business, even if they never actually do. The monopolist can hold on to that position as long as she has costs lower than any new seller would, and she can supply all the bottles people want to buy at her price.

However, another factor in the pricing equation is, how many more bottles might the monopolist sell if she lowered the price? If the number sold goes up enough that the reduced profit per bottle times the new number sold is bigger than the old profit per bottle times the old number sold, then the monopolist is better off selling for less. When the buyers' quantity demanded is very sensitive to price, this can easily happen. On the other hand, air bottles aren't really that kind of good - the buyers only need so much of it, really, without much use for excess, but the amount they do need is fairly rigid and they're willing to pay quite a bit for it, since the alternative is a painful death.

What if the monopolist can produce more air bottles than people want to buy at the profit-maximizing price? An enterprising monopolist might see that there are some people who can't or won't pay the full price, maybe because they're poor, or getting good at holding their breath, or mooching off neighbors or something. As long as the monopolist could still make some profit selling to the rest of the market at a lower price, there's an incentive to do so, as long as it doesn't undercut the main market. Perhaps she could sell discount air bottles only to people with AARP cards, for instance. Or maybe add a bad smell to the cheaper bottles. The smart seller will try to maximize the value extracted out of what buyers are willing to pay by segmenting the market this way. As long as no senior citizens start up an air bottle reselling business, and most buyers aren't willing to put up with the smell for the discount, things are good for the seller. The seller may continue to find ways to sell air bottles until the price made from selling the cheapest bottle no longer exceeds the cost of producing and selling it. (In economics-speak, that's when marginal revenue equals marginal cost.)

Let's take the other side of the market. Say that after enduring high prices for entirely too long, the community of air bottle users agrees "We're tired of being held over a barrel for our oxygen. Let's form a collective buyer's association and reverse the market power situation." They pool their funds and stop buying the air bottles individually, instead putting out a single bid request saying "We want this number of air bottles, and this is what we will pay. Any takers?" The sellers are now in a position of either supplying at the bid price, or not at all. Some may choose to take their air bottles and go home, but a few may figure it's the only deal in town and they can still make some money, so they'll sell. As long as the buyers' club can get all the bottles they request, all is good. If they can't, they may request a few more bottles offering a higher price, and repeat until they've got all they need. This turns around the market segmentation case for the buyers' benefit. They pay a lower net price for their air bottles because their monopsony power is extracting a bigger share of the value of the exchange from the sellers.

Conventional economics considers a market failure to be the result of inefficiency of some kind, as when a monopolist or monopsonist uses its market power to extract more value from exchange in a way that constrains the amount of surplus value that its trading partners can get from the market. The amount of value gained by the one is less than the value denied to the other, and the difference is known as a deadweight loss. This is the potential value that is lost to market participants in comparison to a market that is at a competitive equilibrium. (Other sources of a deadweight loss and attendant market failure include when a price floor or ceiling is applied to the market, or the quantity supplied is constrained or rationed, or production or purchase is subsidized or taxed, or informational asymmetry is pronounced between buyers and sellers. These subjects involve lots of math and graphs and are beyond the scope of this already way to long exposition.)

By a strict definition then, in the real world, every market is a failure to some extent, because there is always some conglomeration of taxation and subsidy and information asymmetry and uncompensated externality and market distorting transaction cost going on and causing inefficiency, but it's a question of degree. It's like calling an A-minus student a failure for only getting a 95% score. If a market is at an equilibrium that is reasonably close to its theoretical ideal, despite its inherent practical inefficiencies, the costs of market intervention by a government can easily outstrip the potential gains in improved efficiency. If we consider the cost of market intervention as a potential deadweight loss and compare it to the actual deadweight loss of existing market inefficiency, then we can say that any market where the actual loss is less than the potential loss is real-world optimal and (at least on economic grounds) should not be intervened in. On the other hand, when the existing market is likely to have its efficiency improved by more than the cost of intervention, then intervention is economically justified.

Unfortunately, economic justification does not address issues of social justification, which may for instance require constitutional limits on intervention in the service of non-economic ideals of individuals' freedom of action or freedom from coercion. But if we go back to our undersea world of air bottle buyers and sellers, we also see other areas of social concern that our economics do not directly address. That is, what about those poor buyers who can't even afford the AARP rate or the smelly air bottles? You can only hold your breath so long, after all. Really enterprising sellers might extend credit to someone who was temporarily experiencing a cash flow crisis, but probably not to someone who was just plain poor and likely to remain so. For the sellers of air bottles, there's some incentive not to let potential customers die off, but the only incentive regarding those who will never be able to pay is a humanitarian one, not a financial one. Unless they could capture more business by saying "buy from us, we're good people who provide air to the down and out" there's not much profit incentive to give the stuff away. Maybe there's a branch of the Sisters of Jacques Cousteau who solicit donations and supply air toots for free to the indigent, but if there are more in need than they can supply, somebody's looking at a painful death, and soon. Even so, this does not represent a market failure. The free market in air bottles is working just fine, supplying all the air they can breathe to everyone who can pay. That said, if people are dying, there may well be a social policy failure.

But what should social policy be? In some strict calculus of human economic value, it may be best to let the elderly poor turn blue instead of taxing others to purchase air bottles for them or coercing bottle sellers to give them away. Subsidizing that air supply for them would cost more than they could ever again return to society. However, if everyone instead agrees that they are willing to pay now while they can, in return for assistance in the future if and when they become aged and decrepit and penniless, in essence paying in advance, it makes more sense. They have created a social contract, where the cost of care, or rather air, for those in need who cannot pay is socialized. And that's fine.

Whether it's better to purchase the air bottles for the social insurance in the market or to create a captive producer for them is another question, one that I'll leave for another day. Suffice it to say for now that you cannot escape the cost of production, no matter who is doing it.

Will The Real Healthcare Fixer Please Stand Up?

2007-08-27T03:27:00.000-07:00

The Republicans appear to find a laissez-faire economic system odious, since it doesn't give enough protection to the wealthy and powerful business interests that provide the backbone of their funding. The poor and the working classes generally don't vote Republican (or at least, traditionally they didn't), so there's less incentive to attend to their issues. The Republicans are for small government only to the extent that they give lip service to the fact that in the long run, government spending must equal government income, and they are loath to give the government much income. But enough Republican bashing... for now!

The arguments commonly made against subsidizing health care usually boil down to moral hazard, which is to say, people will consume more than they need if it doesn't cost them anything; and a philosophical objection to socialization. I can't address the philosophical objection, because it's a worldview thing. You may see the world through individualist eyes or as a communal place, you may be paternalistic or antiauthoritarian. The moral hazard issue, however, is what's been driving the opposition to universal coverage and winning the day, and it has some serious flaws.

Malcolm Gladwell outlined the issues of moral hazard in health carebetter than I ever could. In summary, it turns out that people don't like to go to the doctor if they're not sick, and even if healthcare is effectively free, overconsumption is unlikely. Underconsumption, on the other hand, is an issue with the present system, because the uninsured tend to miss out on preventative checkups and well-baby care and immunizations and dental hygiene, and that turns into very expensive issues with actual disease and disability that has high social costs.

That's not to say that there's not an issue with the healthcare we actually get in America costing too much. The fraction of the US economy devoted to healthcare has gone up much faster than any other over the last sixty years. Americans spend about one dollar in five on healthcare, Over a fifth of the cost of healthcare is in administration and paperwork, with something like 12% going to insurance company overhead (less than four percent is spent on overhead for Medicare, while Canada spends closer to two percent). However, the bigger issue is that there is little holding down what medical providers charge. If you're insured, then you've probably never thought about how much that visit to the doctor actually cost, over and above perhaps a token co-pay of ten or twenty bucks.

I have nifty insurance that doesn't include any co-pays for any normal preventative or needed care. I do get a statement afterward from the insurance company, though. It turns out an office visit is billed at $140 by my doctor, and the insurance company pays a "negotiated" amount around $90, and I'm covered for the rest. If I had no insurance, the steely ladies at the counter would be after me to pay the whole $140 right then and there. Remember the saying, "never pay retail?" It goes in spades for healthcare, or at least for the sort that your insurance company has a hand in paying for.

And yet, there's a kind of healthcare that my insurance company doesn't pay for at all, and as near as I can tell it's bucking the general trend by becoming both better and cheaper at the same time. Check your newspaper for ads touting "Lasik" treatments for vision correction. The price tag is prominently displayed right there, because you'll be paying it out of pocket. Opthalmologists with fancy equipment are competing for your business, and you're better off as a result.

At the same time, I see ads for where to have your baby. One hospital is touting their cushy "birthing center" and another is all about the quality of their doctors. No mention of the price, though, because delivery is one of those things that's usually covered by insurance. You won't be paying for the luxurious digs with a window with a view, the best trained obstetricians and nurses, or at least not directly, so why compete on price? I don't know, but I'd be willing to guess that these places are actually billing the insurance companies rather more for your enhanced perinatal experience, because they are driven by a profit motive and they're not getting the money from you. Otherwise, you might actually go to the regular hospital delivery room and pay $3000, instead of $5000 for the high-end experience, say, because you're busy while you're there with things that keep your mind off of what's out your window, if you even have one, and the difference isn't worth the money to you as long as your baby has a decent apgar score. Or maybe it is, and you're willing to pay, but how would you know?

I've found two excellent treatises on the issues and possible reforms in healthcare. One is from a well-known progressive economist, and one is from a well-known libertarian economist. I'll let you figure out which is which.

The Healthcare Crisis and What to Do About It by Paul Krugman and Robin Wells.

How to Cure Healthcare by Milton Friedman.

Krugman and Wells appear to have misidentified healthcare advances as the largest factor in the expansion of the fraction of the economy spent on healthcare, and appear to underappreciate the effects of third-party payment on rising costs. Friedman is still a little too attached to moral hazard. Both identify the historical accidents that have given rise to the current system, and how those are playing out. Both advocate an end to tax subsidies for employer-paid healthcare. Both would eliminate virtually the entire medical insurance industry in favor of a government-paid system of some kind.

Friedman proposes universal high deductible catastrophic care insurance provided by the government, and paying out of pocket for the rest of your healthcare needs, with Medicare and Medicaid replaced by a voucher system for the elderly and poor. There would be no moral hazard aspect to care you'd pay for out of pocket. This would also eliminate adverse selection, since all would be covered and all would pay taxes, presumably in the current somewhat progressive way, to pay for it. The poor who qualify for Medicaid would still get subsidized care. There would be no particular incentive for getting preventive care, and those with low incomes but not low enough to qualify for subsidies would probably continue to underconsume it. With this system, there would not be any of the monopsony power over pricing that you can get with a single-payer system for everyday healthcare or prescription drugs, but you would get it for the stuff that really runs up the bills, like heart-bypass operations or cancer care. On the other hand, you'd be more inclined to shop around, and like the Lasik outfits, you could expect to see some competition on price and quality for your business, and Consumer Reports-style ratings of hospitals and doctors would be popular. And in this system, the fraction of the economy devoted to healthcare would vary depending on how much people choose to consume.

Krugman and Wells propose universal coverage for all preventative and medically necessary care provided by the government, and ideally full socialization of the provision of that care as well - hospitals and clinics run by the government, with doctors in government employ, as in the Veterans Administration hospital system. Cosmetic and elective procedures could probably be purchased from the public system or from private providers, as in the British system. Once again adverse selection is eliminated, since all pay for the system through taxes and all are covered. Moral hazard is not a huge issue since it's tough to consume much more preventive and necessary care than you can use anyway, and preventive care and disease management are cost-effective when the provider is also the payer who reaps the benefits of lowered long-term costs. As a result, there would probably not be much underconsumption. Monopsony power, whether providers are private or public, would control pricing at every level and keep costs in line, but might lead to reduced incentives for medical or pharmaceutical research. No telling what choice you might have in medical providers with this system, or what reporting there might be on quality. And in this system, the fraction of the economy devoted to healthcare would basically be by government fiat, which could be too small and lead to delays and rationing a la Britain, or arguably too large as in France, leading to some gold-plating and other economic distortions.

Both systems have plusses and minuses, but both can be reasonably expected to be much less expensive and provide far broader coverage than our current hodge-podge. Think of it - more economical, and more humane! And no candidate is proposing anything remotely like these systems.

Pity.

It Takes One to Know One

2007-08-19T02:11:00.000-07:00

The Delightful Spousal Unit had a party in celebration of her birthday just passed on Saturday, with a turnout of several friends of random connection. It seems everyone had a connection of some kind with someone else there that they might not have known about otherwise. And of course, cake. Good times.

And here's a bit more retroblogging, this time on the subject of IQ, from maybe a year ago:

I've only taken two psychologist-administered IQ tests, the first when I was five. The circumstances are telling: I was referred for testing when I was five because my kindergarten teachers were concerned that I might have a learning disability. I wasn't paying attention in class, was a little disruptive, and had difficulty completing tasks. I remember the test, since I remember my parents being a little apprehensive and telling me not to worry about it, which of course makes five year olds sit up and take notice. I was initially concerned, but found out that the testing was a heck of a lot more interesting than kindergarten; plus they gave me a toy to keep. Of course, no one told me what the test was for or why I was there or how I did until much later. Based on some clues in my school records, I believe it was the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children, and I did pretty well. Roughly 99.9th percentile well. I think my parents were happy that I didn't have a notable learning disability, because it was entirely plausible that I would, since my father is severely dyslexic. The kindergarten teachers had to adopt a new theory. Mostly, I think they just let me be.

My parents had me tested again the summer I turned fifteen on the recommendation of a teacher in a summer school class for "gifted and talented" students. Apparently I was a standout among the standouts, but the score I got on this test (The Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale) wasn't quite so ridiculously high, around the 99.5th percentile, although I was younger than the 16-year-old minimum for the scaling factor, so it may have been understated slightly.

And what did I do with this knowledge of my relatively high intelligence quotient? I kept it to myself. It's too bizarre a thing to relate, really, and I was both obvious nerd and social outcast already, and IQ didn't exactly equal bragging material even in my circle of fellow brainy outcasts. It seemed like being proud of having brown hair. After all, what could you do about it? And as the saying goes, "if you're so smart, why aren't you rich?" My take on it was, it was clear I was good at something, but it wasn't that clear that what I was good at was good for much in the real world.

I just did the Tickle test and got a 142, not out of line with the other scores. I've taken the various unofficial test yourself tests for grins and gotten scores ranging from 130-odd to 178 (woot!) and clearly, the only common thread here is that people who have high IQs are the people who do well on these tests. If you've ever been to a Mensa meeting, you quickly learn that IQ correlates poorly with success in life by many standards, but it does seem to correlate well with idiosyncratic behavior, sci-fi and fantasy convention attendance, SCA membership, weird hobbies, and sadly a certain sort of immaturity in interpersonal relations. I joined in college, went to a couple of meetings, then let my membership lapse. I remain interested in IQ tests and the subject of IQ, of "g" or whatever it's being labeled these days, but not in a very serious way; more akin to how I like to do puzzles. For the fun of it.

Taking the Long View

2007-08-17T04:26:00.000-07:00

If I haven't been to bed yet, it still counts as whatever day it was when I got up, right? (Not counting the times I've taken Provigil and found myself still awake thirty hours later.) So in some sense it's still my lovely wife's birthday. There was cake. Sadly, my present for her has been slightly delayed, but there will be a big party Saturday and hopefully it will be here by then. We will party like it's 2007.

The big hit, though, was the book of things we love about Sam. Here's my contribution:

Those twinkling blue eyes
Cool name
Infectious beaming smile
Loving Mommy
Smarter than she thinks
Tolerant of hubby foibles
Remembers the important things
Likes to snuggle up close
Humility
Blankets in front of fireplaces
Watching the Japanese drama shows
Properly ironic when called for
Ultimate quilt mastery
Always has another idea for a project
Emotionally supportive
Dares to cook new things regularly
Takes the initiative
Got a graduate degree in a year
Stays on top of the little things
Dogged about getting the best school and nanny and experiences for Max
Willing to get dirty in the garden
Bike rides through the greenbelts and around Lake Sammamish
Quick on the uptake
Compatible tastes
A good friend
Gets my obscure cultural references
Likes walks on the beach and kite flying
Never tears anyone down
Expresses displeasure gently
Writes lovely prose
Shares the tough chores
Tactful honesty
Willing to try something new and scary at least once
People just like her right away
Saves the snarky comments for a private moment
Breaks out the steely glare only rarely
Sings along to good tunes
Chooses fun vacation spots
Makes me try to be a better person
The Spiffiest

Evil Mad Scientists have all the fun

2007-08-04T04:40:00.001-07:00

I did this a while back, but it was fun, so I'm reposting it:

I was reading Boing Boing, and it pointed at a post on the Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories website (motto: Making the World a Better Place, One Evil Mad Scientist at a Time) on How To Make an Electric Motor in 30 Seconds.
Materials needed picture from the website:

Time it actually took me to find these materials in my office: about two minutes, the supermagnets were hiding beneath a spindle of DVD-Rs.
My motor materials:

Here's their picture of the assembly, with the motor in action:

And here's me with my instant spinning motor:

Pretty cool, huh?

Scatter my ashes to the wind, but let some land in Idaho

2007-08-03T03:22:00.000-07:00

Here's another post I made elsewhere, that I feel like quoting...

At my grandfather's funeral a couple of years ago this month, I was wandering around the cemetery in the small Idaho town he was born in and would shortly be buried in, and just by looking at the tombstones I could tell I was probably related to about half the people whose names I read. I hadn't been there for a decade, since my grandmother died and was buried there. They were returned to their roots, buried in a town that they were both born and raised in, but hadn't actually lived in since the 1930s. He died a couple of weeks shy of his 94th birthday. He'd been away for over seventy years, but it remained his psychic home, even as they'd lived in far away places like Washington D.C. or Managua, Nicaragua or Bogota, Colombia. In reflecting on that, I realized that I don't share that kind of connection to the place I was born, or the place I was raised. In some ways I'm envious.

I don't expect I will make many trips in my lifetime to visit grave sites. That's not the sort of place that matters to me when it comes to remembering family or friends that are gone. I tend to make trips instead to the places we lived, or the places we visited and had fun together, to have more fun and to enjoy some reminiscences, when my travels take me nearby. Remembering is part of living, and I prefer to do my remembering when it happens and not on some schedule of holidays or anniversaries.

Then again, there are things I wouldn't do for love nor money

2007-08-03T02:46:00.000-07:00

I've been posting elsewhere on occasion, and thought I'd repost some of my more interesting work here. This is from some time back, in response to someone who opined that money was evil, and couldn't we all just get along on love, instead?

Money is one of the greatest inventions in human history, ranking right up there with fire and irrigation and textiles.

Money lets you store value over time in a way that isn't subject to going bad or being consumed like some commodity might.

Money lets you do your bartering half a transaction at a time, and in a fractional way. That is, instead of having to amass enough bread loaves to trade for a whole cow or some such silly thing, you can do just half the barter with one set of people, trading your bread loaves for money, and then later doing another half-barter with some other people, trading your money for just the part of a cow you care about, say, enough to make burgers with. Money is required for there to be a market. In simple terms, without money, there would be no grocery stores.

Money lets you take part in transactions that are far away, without having to worry about schlepping your stuff back and forth. Money makes it so you don't have to keep mental track of an encyclopedia's worth of exchange rates from one kind of good to another.

Money lets you express the amount you value something very precisely, letting you keep the amount of value you might have to round by in a barter exchange in your wallet instead. As a result, money makes you wealthier.

Money lets you engage in complicated transactions that take place over extended periods, like mortgages and bonds, and makes it possible to be a fractional owner of a business and be paid a proportional dividend from the profits. That means lots of people can live in houses while paying for them, instead of trying to come up with some way of amassing enough stuff to trade for a house all at once, and people can join together to make a really big business, say, building ships or skyscrapers or something, that no individuals could pull off by themselves.

Money makes large public works possible, because it's impractical to turn a tax collected in labor or goods into the kinds of labor and goods needed for roads and bridges and canals. Money makes tax collection fairer, since it can be figured in the same terms for everyone.

You may do the work you do for love, and you may love the people you know, but love is a pretty poor substitute for money, especially when most people can't love you because they don't even know you and don't have the time or the emotional wherewithal to care about every person they come in contact with. Love doesn't let you express how what you value compares to what someone else values, whereas money does that perfectly. And when it comes to a material exchange, money is the perfect medium and measure for that comparison of values.

Is that enough material for your essay for class?

This blogging thing: Everybody's doing it, so I figured I'd better join in.

And They're Off

2007-01-27T12:45:00.000-08:00

Sometimes you just have to take a stand. Add a microphone, put up some PowerPoint slides, do a little song and dance number, gladhand the audience afterward, it's all part of the package. Then you get to sit.

If I had any idea what I was doing, it probably wouldn't be this.

2006-02-07T14:57:00.000-08:00

Sometimes I just need to have a plan. Unfortunately, the plans aren't so easy to come up with on the spur of the moment.

The haul, the goods, the orgy of materialistic excess

2004-12-26T03:27:00.000-08:00

There was:
The LGB starter train set
The Complete Far Side
The New Yorker Cartoon Collection
The desktop croquet set
The wireless keyboard and mouse
The Looney Tunes Golden Collection 2 DVD
The Extended Edition Return of the King DVD
Sock, by Penn Jillette
some legos in my sock
candy of various sorts

I'll be home for Christmas

2004-12-21T18:48:00.000-08:00

Or as it's known around here, Even Non-Religious Individuals' Children Are Deserving of Presents, or Enricadop. Merry Enricadop!

It was a Dark and Stormy Night

2004-08-29T02:36:00.000-07:00

Except that it wasn't. An anniversary present arrived early, and now I get to reciprocate...

Just getting started and it's already late

2004-08-23T01:43:00.000-07:00

This is the first post in the Official Unauthorized. With any luck at all, it's not the last. We'll see.