Word of the Day: Decerebrated

James Fallows has declared jihad against the "boiled frog" anecdote, the idea that if you turn up the heat slowly, a frog sitting in a pot of water on a stove will not jump out.

Turns out the original experiment a couple centuries ago had the frog either decapitated or "decrerebrated", i.e. the brain removed or brain function destroyed.

Now who do we know who seems to have been decerebrated?

The Housing Market Has Recovered?

Back in January 2008 I wrote about the pricing  history of a neighboring townhouse in the context of  the housing bubble.  Early in my blogging days I called the bursting of the bubble in October 2005 based on the prices in my townhouse cluster.  (A pause while I admire my foresight.)

The townhouse is up for sale again.  It went on the market the end of April and is now under contract.  According to Zillow, it's going for $50,000 more than its price in 2009, which in turn was $80,000 above its low in 2008. 

But the bottomline is it's still $50,000 below the peak price.

What Is Productivity in Making Movies?

My wife and I use Netflix a lot.  One of the obvious differences between classic movies and today's movies is the length of the list of credits.  Presumably part of that is giving credit to everyone involved.  But I assume, without any proof, that movies which use computer-generated graphics must employ a lot more people.  And even those which don't use CGI probably have more people per minute of film.

I'm currently drawing a blank on the name of the economist who observed that productivity in the services is much different than in manufacturing or agriculture: an orchestra playing Beethoven's 5th is roughly the same size whether it's 1915 or 2015.  I suppose that modern movies are "better" than the classics, though that's hard to prove.  Certainly they're different, sometimes faster (though watch the Cary Grant/Rosalind Russell "His Girl Friday" and you may doubt that), with different plots and plucking different heart strings.  They're definitely suited to our times and our sensibilities--again see Girl Friday for proof.

I don't know how the economists count the wages paid to the people who make say "A Good Year"--the most recent movie we watched on Netflix. (It's a piece of fluff, but very pleasant fluff set in Provence--obviously the moviemakers should have donated their efforts just to be living in such surroundings.) And how does the revenue from the movie count as well?

In the grand scheme of things, I assume economists used to assume that movies have short lives, with the cost of production and the return at the box office happening in a few months, or maybe a year.  Only the rarity like Gone With the Wind and the Disney flicks could be rereleased in later years.  But the truth now is that movies can live forever.  Maybe the money from their longer lives will diminish to the vanishing point, as piracy and innovation reduces the cost of providing the movie almost to zero, but the gain to the watcher remains significant, although not measured by economists.

MIDAS Customer Relationship Roles and Fraud

I've a Google alert for FSA, which produced this article on a case of fraud by an FSA county employee.

It reminds me of a long-ago case of an ASCS WDC employee, a conservation specialist, who stole some money from ACP, but was caught because he didn't know enough about the IBM Selectric and OCR to use the OCR ball when typing out the CCC sight draft.  (Lots of acronyms there--sorry.)  If he had known, he might have stolen more money over a longer time.

It reminds me of another case where fraud was committed using System/36 software, but there was a transaction log of the changes made to basic farm and producer records which allowed the offender to be successfully prosecuted.  I'm not sure what event triggered suspicions, so that a KCMO systems analyst was asked to read the log.

Finally I note from a recent FSA notice on MIDAS CRM training (more acronyms:-;) that WDC specialists are given some authority to change records.

My point? It's easy to assume that WDC people are good, but you know about "assuming".  I hope the MIDAS system design has safeguards against fraud built all the way through the system.   I'm sure by now that is automatic in system design. 

The Northeast Reforests

Northview Dairy is a blog I follow, good photos, nice writing, and once a window into the modern small dairy farm. I say "once" because they sold off the cows in the recent past, except for two.  Today threecollie (the blogger) records a visit to their pasture to check the fences, and scope out the birds, in passing noting the proliferation of maple seedlings starting to grow because the cows no longer keep them down.  She wonders how long before the pasture is forest again.

My answer: not too long. My last visit to the farm where I grew up showed the sidehill pasture was completely grown to trees, trees probably 30 feet high.

Sometimes Life Is Too Complicated

Between dealing with Medicare/OPM/Kaiser on my wife's coverage, my laptop after installing Toshiba software for the wireless modem, and Google maps, which gave me an image which, though correct, didn't match my mental image/memory, today has been a bit overwhelming.

(What does "whelming" mean--turns out it means "overwhelming"--gotta love the English language)

On Mobility--the Differences Within the Fifths

I seem to be in a conservative mood.

Mobility is often measured by dividing the population into fifths by earnings, then determining the number of people moving from one fifth to another.  For example, probably all of the first round picks in the recent NFL draft are  moving into the top fifth of earnings from a lower fifth, perhaps in many cases the lowest fifth.

I don't know about the rest of the world, but when I read about "fifths" I don't think about differences among the people comprising the "fifth", I think about a stereotype: "top fifth" would be a lawyer or financial type; middle fifth would be a white collar worker, bottom fifth would be manual laborer.  That's not quite right, but I hope it conveys my idea: I'm imagining a lot of people with the same characteristics.  In reality, of course, I should be thinking about pro athletes and entertainers and business owners being in the top fifth.

And in the bottom fifth, I should be thinking about the people within the correctional system, the people on SSDI because of physical or mental disability, the illiterate, and so forth.  In other words, when we talk  about the possibility of people moving up from the bottom fifth, there's a good proportion, perhaps 40 percent, for whom a miracle must happen to be able to move up. 

You Can't Will Yourself to Have Willpower

"You can't will yourself to have willpower" is a thought I had, when thinking about poverty, but it also seems to me to apply to dieting.

My idea is that people have willpower in specific areas, and not in others.  For example, I've little problem in exercising willpower in what I eat, but not in whether I can complete a set of tasks. 

Horatio Hornblower Never Thought of This:

I read C.S.Foresters Hornblower series, and reread them, and reread them, and reread them...

The appeal was the Hornblower character, an early nerd who is introduced to us as having navigated by dead reckoning from Britain, around Cape Horn and up to Central America, reaching his precise destination (supporting a rebellion against Spain).  He's a nerd but also an action figure, heroic but inept with women, as witnessed in his marriage.

Anyway, I don't recall that Hornblower ever used the clever stratagem of the young American captain Barney, as depicted in Boston1775's two posts, when he commanded the Hyder Ally, a ship named after the sultan of Mysore.

The setup
The outcome

$14,000 Per Poor Person?

David Brooks says Robert Samuelson reports that the federal government spends $14,000 per poor person in today's column.

I don't believe it.  A top of the head estimate is we have about 45 million poor people (15 percent times 300,000,000 total population).  So Brooks and Samuelson are saying we spend $600 billion on poor people?  No way.

To be continued.