The Problems of Top Down Thinking

Some of the security on the Internet is based on "certificates"; different authorities provide trusted certificates to say that A is really A (i.e., http://google.com is really Google).  ComputerWorld has a piece on some hackers who got into a Dutch authority and got the certificates for the CIA and Mossad.  It's a reminder of potential problems in designed and centralized systems: the more security is concentrated in one place, the greater the rewards for a successful hack job.  If I never provide my credit card number on line, it's never at risk.  If I provide it to Amazon, along with 100,000,000 other people, the rewards to a hacker of getting into Amazon's charge card database are enormous.

Buried in this post at edge.org (hat tip Marginal Revolution) is a similar consideration of "smart cars"--the idea is that once all our cars are smart, they can operate much more efficiently than today.  But, as the writer observes, it also means the rare accident could be horrendous.  (Just as railroads increased the possible top-end death toll from one accident by orders of magnitude over stagecoaches.)

Back To School in France and Britain

Dirk Beauregarde comments on how big an occasion back to school day is in France.  Everyone goes back on the same day, the media reports on the day, and the minister of education will speak.  Towards the end he writes:

"in the UK, this was the first day back at the new "Free Schools" - which seen from this side of the Channel appear to be no more than a chance for any nutter to open his or her on school , - I might be a critic of French education, but I'm glad it is a fully comprehensive, state controlled system."

 Sounds as if the charter school movement has reached Britain. 

Why Borrowing Is Not Costless

My contrarian side is active this morning--Brad DeLong and other liberals are arguing for major investments in infrastructure today because we need them and the real cost of borrowing (i.e., Treasury interest rate minus inflation) is zero.

Or maybe it's the bureaucrat in me: the nitty gritty is, if we borrow money today at an effective rate of zero, what is the term for which we're borrowing it? Say 10 years.  So the logic is, we can borrow now and pay back in 10 years and the money didn't cost anything.  However, the bureaucrat says: you're committing to either raising taxes and/or getting enough gain in GDP from the investment for which you're borrowing to be able to pay it back in 10 years.  Otherwise, you're committing yourself to rolling over the debt 10 years from now, at possibly a higher rate of interest.

So my bottom line is: the liberals are spinning. IMHO it's not pure spin.  I can agree that improving our transportation infrastructure would be a productive use of money.  And if you don't fix it now, you're going to spend more down the line and probably face higher borrowing costs to boot.  So overall I think the argument for more infrastructure spending today is valid; it's just the idea of costless borrowing seems to me to be spin.

Friedman Scorned in France

Some conservatives blame Milton Friedman for the rise of big government, given his work in developing the income tax withholding system as a bureaucrat during WWII.  So it's a little surprising to read in Dirk Beauregarde's post,the French, those effete socialist-loving big government types, don't have withholding:

"We don’t have « pay as you earn » in France. The majority of French people pay their tax bills in three seperate installments – February, May and September. The last one is the hardest, because you’ve just blown all your money on the family holiday."

"A Precious Snowflake"?

That's David Roberts describing the sort of liberals who believe in climate change.  He says: "Everyone has their own perfect pony policy solution and disdains all others....You need a left that is greater than the sum of its siloed constituent parts, so that climate is no longer the sole province of “the environmental movement,” gender equality no longer the sole province of “feminism,” worker welfare no longer the sole province of “labor,” etc.—some good old-fashioned solidarity. The left used to have some of that. Why doesn’t it any more? Why does the left seem so much less than the sum of its parts these days?"

His answer: the left used to rely on unions and the liberal mainstream churches, both of which are now shadows of their former selves, and nothing has risen to replace them. 

That rings true enough to me.  I remember Walter Reuther, head of UAW, being big in civil rights issues.  I remember the World Council of Churches, the epitome of establishment religion, also being big in civil rights.  The League of Women Voters was big in political reform, attacking the urban bosses, who were also big, at least through the 1960's.  There aren't those kinds of mass organizations left, just on the right where you have particularly the religious organizations.

Where Do Americans Live

Via Marginal Revolution, here's a map displaying where Americans live, and all those hyphenated Americans: German Americans, African Americans, etc.  It's based on 2000 Census data and people's self-reported ancestry.  The color coding reflects the ethnicity with the largest number reporting in a county. 

Pondering the logic of the respondents is frustrating: I can understand people saying "American" when their ancestors came over 200 years ago, except of course for African Americans who've been here equally as long. But why is so much of the country coded for German-Americans--were the counties so mixed that a 10 percent response was the largest? . The part of the country coded "American" is basically the Scots-Irish area of the country, the Appalachians and the South. Whether or not there was a category for Scots-Irish in the 2000 Census I don't know. I wonder what a similar map for earlier censuses would have shown. 

The map reminds us of our diversity: counties with French, Japanese, Dutch, Finnish, Norwegian pluralities.

12 Percent of Emergency Response Officials Are Idiots

That's my take from this sentence, from a Government Executive post addressing the use of emergency response grants in the wake of 9/11:

And a newly released survey found that a whopping 88 percent of emergency-response officials believe that grants are allocated according to what's best for politicians, not what's best for emergency preparedness.

Perhaps I should be charitable and say 12 percent have a surplus of charity and a deficiency of cynicism.

Conservation Compliance in the New Farm Bill

Chris Clayton has a discussion of farm groups, particularly the Iowa Farm Bureau, and their approach to the new farm bill.  Whether or not to make eligibility for crop insurance dependent on "conservation compliance" is a key issue, which Chris offers thoughts on.  He links to a Des Moines Register blog/report.

Apparently the Iowa FB President wanted the linkage, which presumably would help the passage of the overall bill, but his convention ultimately refused to go along.  The last paragraph of the Register post reads:

"But the delegates clearly were in a mood to revert back to the Farm Bureau’s longstanding opposition to government  involvement in day-to-day agriculture. Earlier in the morning they passed a resolution that would forbid state and federal government agencies from accepting anonymous complaints against individual farmers, and also limit the amount of government reports that could be posted on the internet.

 I'm sorry they feel that way, but as taxpayer I want any reports of possible violation of federal and state law investigated based on the merits, not tossed out because the complainant is anonymous.  That goes whether it's a complaint against a federal bureaucrat or any one else.  I also want more transparency, rather than less.

Kids and Nutritious School Lunches

Petula Dvorack has a column in today's Post on the problems of feeding kids nutritious school lunches.

Bottom line: it's very very difficult.

The Suicide Belt Sounds Like Minutemen to Me

From Freakonomics on suicide(suicide is twice as common as homicide):

The American suicide belt is comprised of about ten western states, this sort of wide longitudinal swath running from Idaho and Montana down to Arizona and New Mexico. … So, yes the inner mountain west is a place that is disproportionately populated by middle-aged and aging white men, single, unattached, often unemployed with access to guns.

Remember the Minutemen from the 1990's?  It seemed as if a high proportion felt they were mistreated by FmHA/FSA.