As always, follow the money

Academic Choice Theory Hits the NY Times | Mike the Mad Biologist

Why academic economists might not be counted on to be objective.

Not "a market like any other."

The Fear Economy - NYTimes.com

Negotiating a wage is not like negotiating a price. I don't have to buy a new car. I could make do with my old car, or buy a used car, or (if I live in a city) do without a car at all. I certainly don't have to buy an HD TV.

But I do have to have a job. That's why employers imposing their beliefs on employees is so much worse than movie producers advocating their beliefs in a movie-- you don't have to go to that movie, or any movie at all for that matter. So with the civilian labor force participation rate lower than it's been since the Nixon administration (when relatively fewer women were working) your employer can cut your wage, and you're forced to say "Thank you sir, may I have another?"

Krugman doesn't believe there is a "secret cabal" of C.E.O.s plotting to keep the economy weak, but I do. They didn't get where they are by being nice to workers, or caring how the rest of the world is doing. In fact, this is the biggest reason C.E.O.s make such lousy political leaders. They are used to running a zero sum game, not managing an economy to promote the general welfare.

A Government as Employer of Last Resort (PDF) plan takes care of this. Any worker would automatically have somewhere else to go. It might not pay as much as the MBA salary they've bamboozled their boss into paying, but it will keep them alive for a while. In fact, the best effect might be in shrinking the gap in wages between people who produce something and people who have conned their employers into believing they can't be had any cheaper thanks to that expensive piece of paper on the wall.

The government and the press that we deserve

Economist's View: 'Robots and Economic Luddites'

The good bits:

It is amazing how the media have managed to hype the fear of robots taking our jobs at the same time that they have built up fears over huge budget deficits bankrupting the country. You don't see the connection? Maybe you should be an economics reporter for a leading national news outlet.

So they scare us with contradictory narratives: Robots are stealing then jobs, and there are too few workers paying too little in taxes to support all those darned old folks.

Some confused souls may say that the problem may not be an economic one, but rather a fiscal problem. The government can't raise the tax revenue to pay for both the Social Security and Medicare for the elderly and the education of our kids. This is confused because if we are living in the world where the robots are doing all the work then the government really doesn't need to raise tax revenue, it can just print the money it needs to back its payments.

Okay, now everyone is completely appalled. The government is just going to print trillions of dollars? That will send inflation through the roof, right? Not in the world where robots are doing all the work it won't. If we print money it will create more demands for goods and services, which the robots will be happy to supply. As every intro econ graduate knows, inflation is a story of too much money chasing too few goods and services. But in the robots do everything story, the goods and services are quickly generated to meet the demand. Where's the inflation, robots demanding higher wages?

But the bottom line is this: Are we  or are we not in control of our own society? Will we let the servants of the plutocrats in the media scare us away from an equitable distribution of the fruits of a wealthy society?

There can of course be issues of distribution. If the one percent are able to write laws that allow them to claim everything the robots produce then they can make most of us very poor. But this is still a story of society of plenty. We can have all the food, shelter, health care, clean energy, etc. that we need; the robots can do it for us.

"I wonder if he'll remember that he's a duck, and he can fly" (Bugs Bunny)
Daffy duck runs off cliff and falls to the ground)
"Guess not."

We have the government, and the press for that matter, that we, in our ignorance and fear, deserve.

 

Dietary supplements

Spike in Harm to Liver Is Tied to Dietary Aids - NYTimes.com

It can't hurt you, right? I mean it's organic. And it's not poison, or a drug. It comes from a plant. Besides, it's not genetically modified, so it's safe.

It's way, way past time to get rid of the smoke cloud the "dietary supplement" people have erected, via their lobbyists. Even if the substance doesn't actually hurt you, its use might make people think they don;t need legitimate medical help.

There's a word for "alternative medicine" that works, you know. It's "medicine."

Sister clade to the flowering plants

On The Origin of Flowers | The Scientist Magazine®

This is really cool. Amborella trichopoda, a flowering plant which is the only survivor in a line that existed alongside the ancestors of all other flowering plants, has had its genome sequenced.

Angiosperms sometimes duplicate their entire genome, a condition known as polyploidy. This can lead to the rather sudden development of an entirely new species. The new species is able to tinker with the genes in the second copy of the genome, because the original remains intact. (Strictly speaking, what I mean is that a mutation in one of the copies may not be harmful, even though it would have been if there had only been one copy. Even if the original mutation is nonfunctional, a subsequent mutation can create a novel trait.)

It should be no surprise that many of the genes common to Amborella are also found in non-flowering plants. Many genes in eukaryotes had their origin in prokaryotes.

But IMHO they are on shaky ground when they say:

The remaining 1,179 gene families—around a quarter of the total—were new. Some of these help to make flowers, but others are involved in stabilizing the plants’ physiology or responding to environmental cues, including plant-eating animals. “That was a surprise. The production of the flower wasn’t just a result of shifting gene expression, as is often assumed in the evolution of new development,” said dePamphilis. “There was a large amount of real novelty, too.”

Unless a large proportion of the new genes are needed to produce flowers, I don't see much reason to believe that the production of flowers per se is the reason these genes evolved. The duplication in the genome would have given the lineage some freedom to evolve many new genes rapidly, as I explained above. This would allow for fairly rapid development of environmental adaptations not related to flower development.

Now of course it may be the case that my reading of the article  as implying that only a small number of the genes were needed to produce flowers.

Anyway, very very cool stuff.

The worst of all possible worlds

Ryan-Murray budget deal doesn’t show the two parties can compromise, it shows they can’t

When a truly bipartisan idea comes along, you can bet it's a complete disaster. (See No Child's Behind Left Untested)

This was no bipartisan deal, though. It was everything that each party wanted that the other party didn't care about. It's two neighbors agreeing-- "OK, you can eat unclean food on the Sabbath, as long as I can use inorganic fertilizer on my roses," while ignoring the burning tree about to fall on both houses.

"I don't think that word means what you think it means," take gazillion

You have never actually used a Styrofoam cup, plate or takeout box

The more people believe a thing, the more likely it is to be BS.

It's an Epidemic!!! NOT

The Selling of Attention Deficit Disorder - NYTimes.com

Full disclosure: I have what I regard as mild ADD. I'm not "hyperactive," although I can get a bit restless. I have trouble ignoring things, like annoying "music" in the stores. I have trouble finishing a task, because I think of something else in the middle.

As the joke goes: How many people with ADD does it take to --Look! A Squirrel!

When I was working in retail, customers who knew I was also a teacher would ask me why there are so many cases of ADD now when there weren't when we were kids. ("We" means people 40 and up)

My facetious reply was "Hand sanitizer and air fresheners." But the more accurate reply would be "There are profitable drugs to treat it now."

Bipartisan?

How Paul Ryan's Budget Plan Could Bridge The GOP's Divide

This budget deal is "bipartisan" in the sense that it attempts to bridge the gap between the Über wingnut branch of the Republican tree and the Very-Serious-People branch. The "Democrats" who sign on are either trying not to let the Republicans completely destroy the government and the economy (pretty much their stated goal, BTW) or have been so brainwashed by the "Deficit is the number one problem" BS on the "Liberal" news that they are starting to actually embrace that insanity.

Is there a serious misunderstanding here?

Disorder No More | The Scientist Magazine®

So officially, Asperger's syndrome is no more. But I can't help thinking that there is considerable conflation between high functioning autism and a rather different condition because of some gross similarities.

Or, as I often say, I don't have Asperger's but I am very sympathetic to those who do. I just don't "get" the social cues others grasp intuitively. But I have a very good intuitive grasp of scientific concepts.

As Daniel Dennett quipped, they have a name for my (almost) condition, but not it's opposite, because nobody expects "normal" people to be intuitively good at science.

Does genetic analysis trump morphology?

A New Basal Animal | The Scientist Magazine®

I'm certainly not an expert on genetic analysis, but ISTM that there is peril in reading too much into the analysis of genes that are a good fraction of a billion years old.

I need to go back to school and study evo-devo.

Not all biologists come up with crazy ideas

Standing Up for Sex | The Scientist Magazine®

Or at least not seriously.

The biggest reason I want a time machine

Oldest Hominin DNA Ever Sequenced | The Scientist Magazine®

I would dearly love to be able to see a time when there were multiple species (or at least subspecies) of humans.

"Bipartisan" means what it has always meant

The budget deal isn’t good for the economy. It’s less bad for the economy.

As I have said many times before, one side says 2+2=5 and the other says 2+2=8. Somehow, compromise between those positions is viewed as a good thing.

This is not a bipartisan plan. It is a purely Republican plan. The fact that some of the Republicans caucus with Democrats doesn't make them actual Democrats.

Form over function

Windows used to work. There were clear-cut things the computer did when you told it to do them. It was easy to see what version of the operating system you had, easy to move and organize files, easy to deal with various programs.

But in the name of making things easy for people who can't be bothered to figure out how to name files and create folders, Windows has become an opaque mess.

Why does every player in every industry fall over itself to emulate the very worst ideas of its competitors?

We are lost in that nether world between DOS and Commander Data, between a computer that only the cognoscenti can operate, and a computer that operates in ordinary language so seamlessly that it is, for all intents and purposes, conscious.

Wrong about everything

Republican Inflation Paranoia Is Political Suicide - Bloomberg

It's really amazing that so many can literally be wrong about everything. Well, with one exception, which gives me hope.

The unnamed "Republican politicians" who have been whipping up fears of inflation, in the face of inflation rates well below the Fed's too-low target level.

Consumers who, following Faux "Fear-O-Vision" News' constant rants, actually believe that inflation is high.

The idea that a gold standard economy is desirable to anyone at all.

But what gives me hope is this:

The third and biggest risk is that Republicans would eventually gain power and then impose an excessively tight policy. Errors of this sort have in the past proved disastrous - - not only economically but also, for conservatives, politically. Excessive tightness by the Federal Reserve made the New Deal possible in the 1930s.

Yes, we need for the Über Wingnuts to actually get what they want, destroy what's left of the economy, and make it crystal clear what they really want- a feudal society of powerless serfs beholden to them for the very air they choke on.

As long as that happens before democratic governance is completely destroyed, I can hope the people will finally understand that the short-term goals of the richest Americans are not in the best interests of the rest of the country.

Gotta follow this one

Mythbusting 101: Organic Farming > Conventional Agriculture | Science Sushi, Scientific American Blog Network

I actually can't get past the misuse of the actual word "organic." It's one of many words that actually means something, and has come to mean "Smurfy" through persistent misuse.

In chemistry, and organic substance is one in which carbon is covalently bound to hydrogen. In geology and biology, it means that a substance or material came from a living thing.

Neither of these definitions means, or even implies, that these substances are good for you. (Socrates, meat hemlock) The deadliest poisons known are mostly organic, and naturally occurring.

Look, I'm all for being environmentally responsible. But when the word becomes meaningless, it's just another marketing gimmick.

You want to be environmentally responsible? Then advocate policies that will reduce the human birthrate worldwide to fewer than one child per woman on average. The biggest environmental insult facing the world's ecosystems is the simple fact that there are 1000 times too many human beings on the planet.

Little bit o' dis, little bit o' dat

The U.S. economy does better under Democratic presidents — is it just luck?

But what does it really mean?