One of These Things is not Like the Others

What's out of place in this picture?

(Photographed in the Cheyenne, WY, Barnes & Noble store yesterday.)

A Super-Delicious Pie

Yesterday was Thanksgiving and I was invited to dinner by my girlfriend and her family.  Since I didn't have anything else to do yesterday (that's one of the things I was thankful for) I decided to bake a pie from scratch.  I googled "best pie ever" and this was like the second or third link:  Sour Cream Apple Pie with Streusel Topping

I decided to make the crust from scratch too, which was a time-consuming decision, but I thought "Why do something half-way?"  Turns out there's a reason that they sell ready-to-use pie crusts - because it takes forever to make a pâte brisée.  Actually, it probably would have taken less time if I owned a food processor like it calls for (an electric mixer is NOT a substitute for a food processor in this recipe... I ended up using two steak knives as a substitute).

Overall, it's worth the effort.  So if you're looking to make a really tasty pie, I definitely recommend this one.

University of Baltimore Adds to I-83's Architectural Corridor

UB has announced the proposed designs for their new law school to be build at the corner of Charles St and Mount Royal Ave.  The Baltimore Sun has a bunch of pictures of the designs that were under consideration and they look pretty awesome.  (For actual facts you're going to have to go to the Baltimore Sun Article I'm only going to talk about how cool the building looks).

Driving south on I-83 in Baltimore is going to be quite the architectural tour once this is completed (in 2013... about the same time they finish bricking the sidewalks along Charles Street).  I'm still a huge fan of the new MICA building, but this could be pretty damn impressive.

Here's the design that won the international competition:

(This picture is blatantly "borrowed" from The Sun - if this is a problem I assume someone at The Sun will contact me and let me know.)

That build is so bright that the three people in the lower left foreground are fully illuminated despite standing in the shade!  You'd think that for $107 million and all the time they spent rendering the building they could have at least photo-shopped people into the picture a little better.

I have to say that it looks like MICA and UB are in a competition to see who can build the coolest modern building (the UB student center at the corner of Mount Royal and Maryland Ave. is pretty sweet too).  Either way, Baltimore wins.

Now that the competition is in full swing I expect JHU to purchase some land adjacent to I-83 and build a gigantic building for no good reason.  I'm sure they'll fill it with labs or something and make grad students ride another shuttle to it, whatever it takes, I just can't see them sitting idly by while MICA and UB grab all the attention.  Of course, I suppose there is the fact that JHMI is a city within the city...

Comment on the Red Line

If you have ever visited a major metropolitan area with great public transit (such as Washington DC, Boston, or New York City) you probably returned to Baltimore thinking "Why can't my city have efficient, convenient mass transit?"  The ridiculous mish-mash of transit modes is a joke to almost anyone who looks at it.  We have heavy rail, light rail, commuter rail, buses, express buses, and commuter buses.  Nothing connects to anything else (unless you count the stunted offshoot of the light rail that takes you to Penn Station, which I don't - see below).

In the next 6-8 years, however, Baltimore will build the Red Line.  It's actually a really good idea.  Basically it's a transit corridor stretching from Woodlawn, down Security Blvd., along the US 40 corridor through West Baltimore, cuts across downtown, Fells Point, and Canton before reaching the JHU Bayview campus.  Along the way it will have legitimate interchanges with the MARC Penn Line (in 2 places!) and the existing light rail.  Finally, Baltimore is going to invest in some transit that will connect areas where people live to area where they work and wish to go for entertainment!  It's a revolutionary concept, but let's give Baltimore the credit it deserves, as the City Paper recently pointed out, "the Red Line is, remarkably, on schedule."

In fact, this is where you, the blog-reading public, come in.  Right now we are in the public comment phase of the AA/DEIS phase of the project.  I forget what DEIS means, but AA = Analysis of Alternatives.  This is where they do a super in-depth study of the alternatives for this transit corridor.  Then they solicit community input.  Then they decide which option they will propose for Federal funding.  So right now (until January 5th, 2009), is your big chance to help campaign for a good choice.

They considered 12 different options, which I have conveniently summarized for you.  The format is "Alternative #: Title = My Interpretation"

Alternative 1:  No Build = No one wants this, but you have to do it as part of the process for getting Federal funding

Alternative 2: TSM = Don't build anything, but time the stop-lights better.

Alternative 3A-F: BRT = Bus Rapid Transit, because what we really need is yet ANOTHER mode of transit in Baltimore.

Alternative 4A-D: LRT = Light Rail; the best option

It is imperative that you go to the Baltimore Red Line website and submit a comment endorsing Light Rail, preferably Option 4C.

Pretty much everyone in their right mind realizes that 4C is the best compromise.  1 and 2 are only included for completeness as part of the Federal funding process.  Alternative 3 is included because, apparently, the Maryland Secretary of Transportation was a big fan of bus rapid transit (source is wikipedia for that).  Let's face it, buses just seem cheaper and crappier than light rail.  I don't think any upwardly mobile urban professionals have ever thought "I like this apartment because it's near a bus stop!"  But how many people do you know who live in a certain part of DC because it's close to a Metro stop?  Light rail is not as cool as a functioning subway network, but it's a hell of a lot better than some funny looking buses.

Here's a list of the organizations that endorse Option 4C:

• The Greater Baltimore Committee (a business consortium)
• The Central Maryland Transportation Alliance
• The University of Maryland, Baltimore
• Johns Hopkins Bayview Medical Center
• Mercy Hospital
• Baltimore City Community College
• Sojourner-Douglas College

It's pretty much the only option that is both reasonably affordable and will actually change the way people travel across the city.  It's not a completely done deal though, there is a lot of concern among community residents about how this transit corridor will work out.  However, in my view, the most important thing is that this transit corridor happens at all.  Sure, construction won't begin until 2013, but there is no way to make something this expensive go any faster.

In case you want to be more informed before you submit an online comment, there are 4 different light rail options:

A - Dedicated Surface

B - Downtown Tunnel and Dedicated Surface

C - Downtown Tunnel and Cooks Lane Tunnel and Dedicated Surface

D - Maximum Tunnel and Dedicated Surface

Here's my take on each of these:

A - Can you imagine if Baltimore and Lombard Streets had light rail tracks like Howard Street?  This is a BAD idea.

B - This is a good idea, unless you have ever been down Cooks Lane in West Baltimore, then you realize that...

C - Is the best option.  Light rail is what you want, it has tunnels to get it past bottlenecks, but is not out-of-this-world expensive.

D - Probably too expensive to get Federal help.

------------

Idiocy of Light Rail Connection to Penn Station

So it is technically possible to get from Penn Station to other places using the light rail, but my question is "Why would you?"  It's impossibly inconvenient.  It is only effective if you are at Penn Station and want to go to one of a few light rail stops along Howard Street.  Otherwise you will have to get off the light rail train you're on and wait for another train that actually goes somewhere useful.  It's design flaws like this that make Baltimore public transit a case study in how NOT to design transit.

------------

This is how the opening message on Mayor Sheila Dixon's Red Line Website:

Baltimore... We Got Next... The Next Generation of Light Rail that is.  The Red Line... OMG!

Generally I think Sheila Dixon's doing an all right job, but I think that's just embarrassing.

Things You See While Running

So I've become something of a distance runner over the last year.  It's a pretty good sport, really clears your mind after a long day at work.  However, if you're going to run over the winter, you're going to have to do some running after dark.  If you're going to do some running after dark in Baltimore, you're going to have to run towards the harbor.

So it's winter, it's probably pretty chilly, so the harbor promenade is essentially deserted.  However, one of the unique experiences of running on the chilly, deserted harbor promenade is that every so often you run through a break-up.  Literally, you'll come up behind a couple walking together.  You're not really paying attention, but when you get close you can feel the tension in the air.  It's pretty clear that you're definitely interrupting.  You probably startle them as you pass, but it's over quickly enough - for you.

This has probably happened a half-dozen times or so for me.  I think it's a damn shame.  On a fall evening the harbor is really quiet, the air is crisp, it's really a nice place for a stroll.  But there's no one out there but me and the occasional couple breaking up.   I guess you see a lot of people walking their dogs too.  But my point is, it's a shame that people that get outside and enjoy the night a little more.  It's not nearly as dangerous as you think (at least down near the harbor).  Don't wait until you're breaking up with your significant other, get outside for a walk!

Bloc Party on the Financial Crisis

This evening I was listening to "Pioneers" from Bloc Party when I realized that this song is actually the script for the Bush administration on the economic crisis.

"If it can be broke then it can be fixed!"

...

"It's all under control.  It's all under control.  It's all under control."

...

"If it can be lost then it can be won!"

...

"All you need is time.  All you need is time.  All you need is.. time."

...

"We promised the world we'd tame it, what were we hoping for?"

I've heard this song so many times, but I never realized that they were talking about the financial crisis.  I guess the sense of deja vu was caused by the way they keep repeating "It's all under control!  It's all under control!" in that tone that tells you that it is anything but under control.

"So here we are reinventing the wheel" (a clear allusion to the seized up credit markets)

"I'm shaking hands with the hurricane" (that's how Bernanke and Fed must feel every day)

"It's a color that I can't describe, it's a language I don't understand" (John McCain on economics)

What is a crime worth reporting?

The Baltimore Sun has a pretty good op-ed explanation on when a crime is considered "serious" enough to be reported by the BPD.  The example they use is the "discharge of a firearm" that occurred recently in Canton but won't show up on any of their crime reports because no one was hit with a bullet.

I agree with the columnist, why can't the BPD publish a map that is updated every 24 hours that has a short blurb about each incident that has occurred, even things as small as property crime and firearm discharging.  It's not a huge technological hurdle and everyone knows that they are tracking this data.  Why not make it public information?

You Heard It Here First

Circle this day in red, as I am now calling this as the right time to start buying some stocks.  Maybe not an absolute market bottom, but I figure we're certainly below prices that you can rationally explain.  Dow well below 9,000?  P/E ratio for a the top 1000 companies in America sitting at 12.75?  (That's a rough estimate based on the P/E ratio calculated for the exchange-traded fund PRF.)  Yeah, I'd say we're pretty much at the bottom.  Stocks haven't been this cheap since 2003!  If you're like me, young and throwing money in a 401(k), count your lucky stars.

We're beyond belief right now.  I bought $1,000 of GE stock the other day at $20.00 per share.  That's at a P/E of 9.4.  That's crazy, they're a profitable, dividend-paying company!  Today they dropped down to $19.01 per share.  Today GE is suddenly worth 5% less than yesterday?  Do you believe that?  It's madness, but if you've got some cash on the side it's awesome.

Paul Krugman put up an obvious blog post about today's sell-off:

"Seriously, I'm sure we'll be hearing all kinds of explanations of today's drop - it's Paulson saying that he'll inject equity, or Obama's rise in the polls (yes, seriously, that's the right-wing line), or some obscure ruling by some government agency.

But you want to remember Robert Shiller's classic real-time study of the 1987 crash.  Basically, the crash had nothing to do with any news item.  Investors sold because - drum roll! - prices were falling."

There's some seriously irrational shit going on out there.  I recommend you make like me and pick up some quality stocks at fire-sale prices!

(Disclaimer:  Don't bet the farm (haha! remember when people had equity in their property), invest savings that you don't need for at least a couple years just in case I'm wrong).

A Great Time to NOT Work in Finance

I've been really busy at work lately, so I haven't been following the financial crisis as much as I normally would.  However, I have to say that it has shaken the very bedrock of my beliefs in economics and what constitutes a good economic policy.  But what I have seen has really made me happy that when I graduated from college I started work as an engineer, not a financial analyst.

It's a sobering time for everyone, The Guardian (a UK newspaper) agrees with me:  The City's Greatest Lie was Convincing Us We Were All Rich.  Replace "The City" with "Wall Street" and you have the American equivalent.  Henry Porter of The Guardian sums up a lot of what I've been feeling lately:

"...[W]e were told we were living through an epic boom many people who were paying attention and did not borrow heavily felt no better off."

When you look at it that way, the lie that we were told is pretty obvious.  Perhaps I'm just too cautious or risk-averse or (as I like to think) I am not easily swayed by marketing; but for whatever reason I've basically managed to not end up exposed to this crisis.  Sure, my 401(k) is hurting a little, but I cut my exposure to MBS to a level that I can live with in mid-March and besides, I'm young.  All I'm doing right now is building a base that will earn for me over the next 30-40 years.  So if stocks drop in value and remain stagnant for awhile it just means that I get more for my money.  I plan to be debt-free in February, which will allow me to amass assets more quickly.  I've kept a fair portion of my savings in cash or CD's because I decided I wanted flexibility with the money, so I haven't lost value there.

The hardest part of personal finance is the ego thing.  I'm not getting a great return on my money and it's very difficult admitting that I'm just not smart enough to figure out how to do that.  Well, I'm probably smart enough, but I don't have the time and dedication to do it.  So I have to accept that.  In my opinion personal finance is way too emotionally charged to be approached rationally.  It feels an awful lot like gambling in the way you react to investment gains or losses, or at least how I react to them.  I'd like to figure out a better way to divorce myself from those feelings, but until I do I have to be very careful about the investment decisions I make.

So that's basically how I've ended up with little direct exposure to the financial crisis.  I don't own a home.  I don't have any variable interest rate debt.  The little debt I do have could be paid off from savings if necessary.  The debt payments I make could be greatly reduced if necessary, but I'd rather just make the payments since the point where I will be debt-free is so near.

This is the lie that we, the American public, were sold.  The financial position that I am in is so crazy that almost no one can relate to it.  Why keep your money in a savings account when you can open a brokerage account?  Don't you know that historical stock market returns are way better than savings account interest?  If not the stock market, buy a house!  Don't you know about the tax deduction?

Those personal finance advisors seem like they know a lot.  They've doctored all sorts of numbers to show how you can expect 8-10% annual returns.  I'm not saying that they are outright lying, they put the assumptions in there, but they are also acutely aware of human psychology and how people fail to properly evaluate the fine print.  Most people haven't read about the different biases associated with lazy measurements of stock market returns.  They don't understand the difference between real increases and nominal increases.  Worst of all, they don't LOOK for them.  For some reason, there seem to be a lot of people that, when presented with a good deal, ask "Where do I sign?" instead of "What are you getting out of this?"

Ask yourself, why does Yahoo! Finance provide you with all those updated stock quotes?  It's not out of the kindness of their hearts, it's because it presents an opportunity for show advertisements.  They write articles on personal finance to promote more individual people investing.  It's not because individual investing is good (statistically proven to be a terrible, terrible idea and probably a destruction of wealth), it's because individual investing is a profit center for some companies.

You have to realize, the information you get is provided by self-interested parties.  All those people telling you that buying a house was a great idea probably had horse in that race.  Did your home-owning friends tell you to go buy something?  Is it possible that some small part of their desire to see you follow in their footsteps was to validate their own decisions?

As far as I can tell, trying to actively manage your personal finances for profit is a loser's game.  A vast number of resources exist solely to convince you otherwise.  Just walk by the personal finance section at Barnes & Noble.  Don't buy the hype.  In the words of Tyler Durden, "You are not a beautiful and unique flower."  You're just as dumb as every other slob who has received sub-par investment returns when guiding his own investments.  Sure, everyone knows a relative or a friend of a friend who got rich directing their own investments, but I'd guess that statistically it doesn't happen.  Statistics are how we tell the difference between things that are true, things that might be true, and things that are definitely false.  It takes quite a compromise of ego to admit that statistics apply to you, but it's true.

Which brings me back to the financial crisis.  A few years ago I bought the analysis that these giant financial institutions had gotten really good at handling risk.  They had very sophisticated models for pricing risk and they were doing a good job of it.  The problem in that statement is that it assumes a number of things that we now know to be false:

1)  The guys making the models are really smart.

2)  Counter-party surveillance works.

3)  People understood what they trading.

#1 is clearly wrong.  Ask any engineer that graduated in the last 10 years.  Up until maybe this year we were kicking ourselves for not getting into finance.  It pays so much better than engineering and all of the classes at school were so easy.  The guys making the models were just smart enough to convince their management that they knew what they were doing.  If the management team didn't come up through that division they probably didn't know enough to really dig into the models.  I would guess that they compensated for this (if they bothered digging deeper at all) by asking a subject-matter expert that they trusted or by comparing themselves to industry standards.  Those are pretty well accepted ways for doing things like that, but I think we can all see the problems with that.  It's a great way to breed group-think and systemic problems.

#2 is wrong because of the sorts of people you have doing this work.  It's pretty clear that the counter-parties weren't keeping a close enough eye on each other.  The problem is, again, that managers are paid to make deals.  I'm sure risk managers are a pain in the ass and generally seen as an obstacle to getting work done.  Besides, how can you judge a company poorly for using the same "best-of-industry practices" that your institution follows?

#3 makes me sad.  It seems obvious that you shouldn't get involved in things that you don't understand, but it sounds like that pretty much happened all the time.  People buying mortgage-backed securities just because of their credit rating?  Seriously?

Maybe I'm crazy, but buying things you don't understand is a terrible, terrible idea.  I can't believe people bought homes without considering what might happen to their payments under a variety of circumstances.  Everyone believed the lie that they were rich and acted like they could afford to lose a lot of money.  We didn't read the fine print and now we're all fucked.  And it's everyone's fault, it was the same problem at the top as at the bottom.  We got too lazy too really do our homework, we got used to a rising tide lifting our boat for us, so we didn't do the work.

There is only one way that wealth is created - produce more value than you consume.  We haven't been doing that for the last few years, so now we really have to tighten our belts and move forward.  Just like any person teetering on the edge of insolvency we have to budget carefully, buy only the essentials, and pay down the debt.

I'm sorry America, we're not as rich as you've been told.  The government is not going to be able to provide all the things you'd like them to.  You're going to have to pay higher taxes to get the things we already get from the government.  You're going to have to stop bitching and start saving.  You're going to have to admit that there's no shortcuts to saving for retirement.  You've got to stop trying to goose results in the short term and start thinking of stocks you purchase as things you'd like to hold for years.

It kind of sucks, but it's what being an adult is all about.  You don't get everything you want and you have to be happy with what you've got.  Because if you don't, you're going to drag us all down.

And if you work in the financial services industry, try to stop contributing to the problem.  Seriously, you guys get paid a shit-load of money, try adding enough value to justify that paycheck.

reddit.com is not worthless

You might say that it's mostly full of stuff you don't care about.  But if I hadn't just checked it out tonight, I would not have seen this video of a gummy bear being placed in molten potassium chlorate.

It's like being a vigilante, but with fewer bloodstains to wash out of your clothing

I've just been made aware of something called Baltimore John Watch and I think it's a great idea.  I'm personally pretty impressed that some people are willing to put themselves out there and identify the johns picking up prostitutes in their neighborhood.  It seems to be quite controversial (apparently the johns hate it, the prostitutes aren't big fans, the drug dealers hate it because the prostitutes have less money, and people who live nearby hate it because it's just causing the prostitutes to relocate).  In my opinion, it's great that someone is posting the license plate numbers and descriptions of people picking up known prostitutes while children are playing nearby.  I don't have a whole lot of pity for men paying $20 for a blow job from an addicted, diseased hooker.  More services for the prostitute themselves would be ideal, but it seems to me that compassion for the prostitutes and hate for the johns are not mutually exclusive.

Homeless Shelters for Muslim Women

This morning WYPR had a really interesting story about homeless shelters in Baltimore for Muslim women.  It sounds like a very under-served population, at least from the fact that they are always full and always have a waiting list.  I wanted to find out some more about the shelter (and the other two small shelters in Baltimore), but it seems like they don't have much of a web-presence.  I suppose that's not surprising considering that they have to sell food on the streets to make the monthly rent on their shelter.

I did find an older Washington Post article that mentions this shelter, an article from something called the Muslim Link from when the shelter opened in 2007, and a blog post that basically calls Muslims big whiners for feeling uncomfortable in Christian-run shelters.  The blog post does raise a valid question about the possible hypocrisy of a Muslim-based shelter.  Basically, the blogger's argument is that if the problem is that Christian-run shelters proselytize too much and make women of other faiths uncomfortable, the solution is not creating a different sort of faith-based shelter.  Well, that's the blogger's argument stated in a less frenzied and rational tone - overall they're very upset that a minority group wants to be treated differently.  Either way, I don't think it is very good criticism.

I would, instead, approach the problem as follows: you have devout Muslim women who feel that the policies and standards of most homeless shelters violate tenets of their faith.  These women have nowhere to go, they may not be legal residents, and there may be children involved.  I think that anyone can agree that the first priority should be to help these women get back on their feet, recover from the emotional trauma they've experienced, and become productive members of society.  Because, and here's the great part, anyone and everyone can become an American.  That's what's great about this place.  America is what you make it, literally.  Every generation we get to reinvent ourselves, every American has just as much right as any other American to contribute to the "American Culture."  

So these women are Americans who need help, I say you have to keep your eye on the ball here - help women get into a stable situation THEN you can worry about "freeing" them from what you judge to be an out-dated belief system and adopt fully "Western" values.  Don't get me wrong, I'm as big on blind religious faith being detrimental to society as the next east coast, liberal-leaning, over-educated blogger, but if these women only feel comfortable going to a shelter that is run by a mosque or Islamic organization, then I think we should encourage that.

Anyway, I'm thinking I might try to find a way to help out these shelters.  Yes, I know that Muslim organizations make a lot of people uncomfortable; worries about radicalization, trouble with integration into Western society, blah, blah, blah.  All the more reason for some mainstream American charities to get involved.  The more integrated into the larger charity structure these organizations are, the more transparent their leadership and financing must become.  Plus, I imagine that knowing that the shelter is supported by the larger society would make these women feel more accepted by society.  Or not.  I would still measure it a success if my donation helped a battered woman get out of an abusive situation.

Shakespeare in a Park

This is one of those "here's a great thing I found in Baltimore and I think they deserve a 'shout-out'" sort of posts:

The Baltimore Shakespeare Festival

Right now they are doing Twelfth Night at "the meadow at Evergreen house."  I'd never even been to Evergreen House, it's conveniently hidden between Loyola College and the College of Notre Dame of Maryland and inexplicably owned by JHU.  You should go catch this play or their next one (The Taming of the Shrew, July 18 - August).  The acting was fantastic and you couldn't ask for a more relaxing environment.  The play starts at 8 pm, as the sun is setting, you're far enough off the road that you can't hear any traffic, there's a small brook at the edge of the meadow, it's just awesome.  

We got there at 7:45 and were about the last people to show up.  Apparently everyone else knew that you're supposed to bring some wine and a picnic dinner... I'm totally doing that next time!  And, in case you forgot your wine or beer, it's available from the concession stand!

This is one definitely falls in the "Pro" category when you're considering living in Baltimore.

Supply Side Economics and the McNugget

The other night my friend and I pulled into a McDonalds' drive-thru at around 11:15 PM.  It was late, we'd just gotten out of ultimate frisbee practice, and we were pretty hungry.  I ask my friend what he wants, he says "Three 4-piece chicken McNuggets."  I think this is a good idea, so I decide to order my own 4-piece box of chicken McNuggets.

We get up to the ordering box:

Box:  "Hello, welcome McDonalds, may I take your order?  We are on our late-night menu."

Me:  "What?"

Box:  "We're on our late-night menu."

Me:  "Do you have Chicken McNuggets?"

Box: "Yeah."

Me:  "Ok, we'll take four 4-piece chicken McNuggets and ..."

Box: "We only have 6 and 10."

Me:  "Huh?"

Box: "We only have 6 and 10."

Me: "..."

My Friend:  "Can you tell them to put 4 McNuggets in a 6 McNugget box?"

Me: "That doesn't make any sense."

Box (helpfully):  "We don't serve anything on our Dollar Menu right now."

Me: "So you can give us a 6- or 10-piece Chicken McNugget box, but not a 4-piece?"

Box: "Yeah."

Me (to my friend):  "What do you want to do?"

My Friend:  "I don't want to pay more for McNuggets."

Me:  "Do you want something else?"

My Friend:  "Can we just go somewhere else?"

So we determined that yes, we could go somewhere else.  So we went to the Burger King across the street.

This just serves to highlight the fact that you should never, ever buy a 6- or 10-piece box of Chicken McNuggets.  What I don't understand is McDonald's insisting on not selling their 4-piece boxes at night.  I mean, it's not like they lock up the 4-piece boxes in a safe every night.  They definitely have McNuggets.  They just don't want you to be able to take advantage of the following (illogical) prices:

4-piece Chicken McNuggets - $1.00

6-piece Chicken McNuggets - $2.59

10-piece Chicken McNuggets - $3.39

20-piece Chicken McNuggets - $6.59

(prices from the McDonalds' in the Southside Shopping Center on Fort Ave.)

These prices imply the following graph of the marginal cost of Chicken McNuggets:

So why do McNuggets 5 and 6 cost so much?  Let's put on our supply-side economist hat.  We must assume that McDonalds has a constant profit margin on McNugget because of the competitive nature of fast-food chicken product market, so price differences in McNuggets must represent the underlying cost of producing those McNuggets.  (You think I'm an idiot for making these assumptions?  Check out this ludicrous discussion of the cost of tomatoes on the vine by an actual economist.)

Another interesting aspect of the Chicken McNugget market is that you can buy in multiple of 4 McNuggets at a constant cost, but if you add two more McNuggets to that box and sell it as a 6-piece box, your costs more than double!  The science of Chicken McNugget production is a bit opaque to me, but this leads me to believe that 4 is some sort of natural unit of McNugget and that it takes a great deal of energy to split this basic McNugget unit for boxing purposes.  I think there is a lot of evidence for this theory, considering that you can not buy an odd number of Chicken McNuggets (it must be prohibitively expensive to further split the McNugget units).

It's also possible that it is much more expensive to produce a 6-pc, 10-pc, or 20-pc box.  In this case, I would propose packing additional McNuggets in the 4-pc box.  Having recently purchased a 4-pc McNugget (during research for this blog post), I can tell you that there seemed to be room for additional McNuggets in the package.

Other theories that I have considered:

1)  McDonalds employees are very bad at counting.  It takes significantly longer to count to 6 than to count to 4.  This is somewhat supported by the fact that McNuggets 11-20 cost more than McNuggets 7-10.  However, McNuggets 7-10 are the cheapest in terms of marginal cost, far cheaper than McNuggets 5 and 6.  Perhaps this supports the theory that the most basic unit of McNuggets is 4; adding multiples of 4 McNuggets costs very little, but adding 2 McNuggets is very expensive.

2)  There are some non-linear properties to McNuggets that make them very hard to cook and transport in multiples of 6.  (This does not explain why three packages of 4-pc McNuggets are cheaper than one 10-piece box).  Perhaps there is some strange effect causes the 5th McNugget to be very difficult to cook, but it dissipates quickly once you reach 6 or more McNuggets in any one location?

None of these simple economic explanations tell me exactly why I couldn't order a 4-pc McNugget late at night.  Perhaps we should be searching for a different explanation.  Perhaps there is a McNugget specialist who has one, and only one, job all day long: the production of 4-pc Chicken McNugget orders.  This explains the extremely low price of 4-pc McNuggets during the day - there is someone very, very efficient is producing them.  The regular McDonalds employees produce the other quantities of McNuggets less efficiently (hence the high price of the 6-pc McNugget), but we do see some economies of scale in the larger orders (as you would expect).

Now why doesn't McDonalds employ the 4-pc specialist at night?  Simple - they only need a few employees at night because there is lower demand for meals at night.  They want to maintain as much variety on the menu as possible, so they are forced to use employees with general fast-food preparation skills.

Well, there you have it, what might otherwise seem like a mystery explained by the application of simple economic principles.  The uneducated might simply assume that McDonalds was making more profit on a 6-pc McNugget order than on a 4-pc McNugget order because of a combination of hard-to-read menus and the assumption that marginal costs always decrease with increasing quantity, but we know better.  We know McDonalds operates in a very competitive market; we know that they do not have monopoly pricing power; so we know that the price of McNuggets reflects the true cost to produce them; therefore we can reasonably surmise the existence of the single-shift 4-pc McNugget Specialist - it's the only possible explanation!

Open Letter to Google

It's been a long time since I made a blog post, but I have a good idea that I want people to listen to.  Specifically, I want Google to pay attention.  Like anyone that uses Gmail, I take it for granted that I will have the entire history of an email exchange on one screen.  But I have a problem.  At work we have a Microsoft Exchange Server and have to use Outlook.  As much as I love have 15 lines of my inbox taken up by one message chain, I would prefer to have it all collapsed down by conversation.  This would be especially key for my email archives I think.  It's a pain in the ass to try to find something in an email from last May from someone you worked a lot with last year.  I've got 1200 email from someone and I need to find one sentence - "Sort by Sender" just doesn't cut it.  At least cut that down to 400 or so conversations; better yet, give me Google search capabilities.

So Google, this is the product I want.  I want something that can read in MS Outlook *.pst archive folders, sort the messages into conversation, and allow me to use Google search on the messages in the archive.  Here's the catch, like many people, I work on very proprietary stuff - my company would NOT be cool with this being advertising-based and sending any sort of information about the emails to a central server.  It would have to be a stand-alone program.  But, I would pay for this program.  I think that if you could offer me this product for $20, I would buy it.  I would even fight my IT department to get a corporate implementation if I had to.

Even if you never really sell this product, could you just create a Beta version that people could download for free?  What I'm really looking for here is to force Microsoft to modernize their email client a little.  There are a few small variations, but MS Outlook's mailbox looks more or less like my AOL mailbox in 1998.

The fine line between preparedness and fear-mongering

From pamphlet "With Your U.S. Passport, the World is Yours!" (provided to you free with you new passport):

Pandemic Influenza
For information about pandemic influenza and how you can protect yourself if there is an outbreak while you are abroad, please visit the official U.S. Government pandemic influenza website at http://www.pandemicflu.gov.

Vermont is Pretty

Over the weekend I drove through Vermont for the first time. I wasn't in any hurry, so I took the scenic route and got a couple pretty great pictures with my camera.

It's not really worth uploading low-res previews (partly because it takes Blogger so long to do it), but check out the full resolution images by clicking on the links (each is >3.5 MB):

Black River in Vermont

Field of Dandelions (near East Wallingford, VT)

Most Important Internet Videos Ever

We can all agree that the internet has revolutionized economics. For one this, it's pretty cheap to do almost anything. Things that used to be very expensive (or at least time consuming) are now very cheap, such as publishing your thoughts to the entire world. What has economic revolution enabled? Loads and loads of pointless crap!

It used to be expensive and difficult to create crap; and when you did create it, you had to maintain it. Not so with the magic of the internet.  Create some crap and it essentially lives on, unmaintained, forever. For example, lolcats.  Sure, in 1988 you could take a picture of a cat, right a humorous caption on it, and show it to your friends.  In 2008 you can take a digital picture of a cat and caption it numerous time and share it with tons of people, some of whom might actually enjoy it!

In this spirit, Bravo has, for some unfathomable reason, brought us Green Porno.  It is absolutely, without a doubt, the most unmotivated, unnecessary production I have ever seen.  You just need to go there and watch it.  It's not porn, it's really an in-depth discussion of sexual reproduction in insects and other creatures.

It's fantastic.  I don't even want to know what sort of crazy logic led them to create this series of videos.  I'm mildly curious how they sold this to the business types who work at Bravo.  "Hey, so we want to make some 2 minute long videos where Isabella Rossellini dresses up as various insects and other creatures and pantomimes their sex lives while giving a very factual overview of what's happening.  Then we'll put it up on the internet for free."

This business plan has Underwear Gnomes written all over it.

Seriously, watch one of these episodes.  While you're doing it, think about how many people died  fighting World War II so that we would have the freedom to watch fake insects copulate!  Think about how we have the technology to beam vast amounts of data into people's homes and we use it to watch videos of people in insect costumes humping each other!  While people in Africa are barely able to eke out a living, you're spending time watching two worms go at it!


PS - A note for those of you that dislike The Hater, I have to say that without Amelie Gillete I would never have learned of this awesome waste of time.  Also, surprisingly, I don't think she hated this.  She did claim that this makes Isabella Rossellini our de facto hero.

Crazy Fun Things to do in Federal Hill

I've lived down here in South Baltimore for 3 years now, so I'd consider myself pretty adjusted to the average Friday/Saturday night in the neighborhood.  Perhaps it's more like a building up a resistance to a drug, for some reason the same ol' hit of Cross Street just doesn't do what it used to.

It was with that in mind that I assumed a Federal Hill scavenger hunt would be just like any other party.  Perhaps a scavenger hunt is going to have the same mean fun level as a normal party but a much higher variance, because I was very, very wrong.  It was probably one of the most fun nights of my life.  Sure, I enjoy drinking as much as the next guy (although, in all honesty, possibly not as much as the next guy in this neighborhood), but this party also combined two of my favorite things to do while drinking:

1. Doing things - especially active, unusual, exciting things
2. Competing at things - especially pointless, fun, team-oriented things

Yeah, scavenger hunt was pretty much the ideal party activity for me.

It also helped that it was superbly planned and organized.  Everyone met up at one house, had a couple drinks, then we scavenged, then post-party at another house.  The lists were even laminated!  There were like 6 or 7 teams of 5 to 7 people, so there were a lot of people running all over Federal Hill looking for viryta or Chartreuse (from my favorite bar - Idlehour) or someone walking two dogs.  The best part was how welcoming everyone was in at all the bars.  By the second half of the hunt, we'd show up in a bar with our laminated list looking to sing karaoke and people would be like "Oh, you're with the scavenger hunt!"

Of course, what really makes or breaks the hunt is list.  The guys did a fantastic job with the Federal Hill Scavenger Hunt List.  Check it out and see what you think.  We had from about 9:20 PM until midnight to gather photographs of as many of those items/actions/places as possible.

My team actually won with 860 points.  It was a little unfair, 6 of the 7 people on our team are at least casual runners - so we used speed to our advantage.  I was definitely in a flat-out sprint to make it to the second house on time after deciding to go for those last 10 points at 11:55 PM.

My favorite picture of the night:

Human pyramid (worth 20 points) and picture with "The J&P guy" (Pete) (worth 10 points) in a single picture.  There's also some random dude spotting us.  And by "spotting" I clearly mean "hoping to get a chance to fondle that girl's ass."

So word from the wise: if you're like me and you enjoy "doing things" and "competing at things" while having a couple drinks - attend the next scavenger hunt you get invited to.

Oh, and wear practical shoes (definitely saw at least one girl in heels for this... that team was unable to compete with our teams' highly appropriate footwear).

Do Something Productive for the Community

No time for any insightful analysis this morning, just wanted to post about an upcoming event:

Friends of Baltimore Parks and Middle Branch Shoreline Day

If you're from the South Baltimore/Federal Hill area, you've seen Middle Branch Park.  It's south across the Hanover Street Bridge from Port Covington.  Anyway, it's actually a very nice park, but has a tendency to get a lot of trash piling up on the shore.  There's a clean-up day schedule for next Sunday, May 3rd.  I wish I could attend, but I'll be out of town that day.  Anyway, just hoping to spread the word and maybe get some people involved.

This is NOT Journalism

Over the past year I've been asking myself a question - Has CNN.com always been this depressingly terrible or is this a recent development?  First off, all of their articles are apparently written for third-graders by middle-school students.  Secondly, entertainment "news" takes up a distressing portion of their "Top Stories."  They have also started the annoying habit of giving you the top three or four "Story Highlights" whenever you click on a story.  Apparently if you don't have the time or reading comprehension skills to finish their three paragraphs (which usually add up to like 8 sentences), you can read the PowerPoint version of the story.

Occasionally, when nothing at the New York Times or the Washington Post catches my eye I may become sickly curious about what drivel CNN is broadcasting.  Today, I feel they have reached a new low with the story Review: John Oliver gets laughs out of 'Terrifying Times'.  It's a review of some stand-up comedy performed by a Daily Show "correspondent."  It is also possibly the most poorly-written review I've ever seen.

It starts with the Story Highlights:

• AP: "Daily Show" correspondent John Oliver's "Terrifying Times" hilarious
• Oliver: Wind-farming a bust - "Wind has been horrifically overfarmed"
• Best way to emotionalize news: Score it to power ballads, says Oliver

Seriously.  Someone read the review, determined that if you took nothing else away from this review, you would want to learn those three things.  Let's deconstruct those bullet points:

1. This is a clutch bullet point here.  Someone's been doing their PowerPoint.  Count the facts that you can learn from that: 1) We didn't do independent journalism, but we subscribe to the AP Wire.  2) This is somehow linked to the "Daily Show," that show is popular and will inspire positive feelings in most people.  3) The subject of this article is John Oliver.  4) He has a show/movie/book called "Terrifying Times."  5) The show/movie/book is funny.
2. Oh shit!  We put every single fact into the first bullet.  How about we just take one of his jokes and make it a bullet?  Now, let's rephrase it to take away the timing and comedic value...
3. Well, we already ruined the best punch line in bullet #2, but there's a 3 bullet minimum... did he say anything else funny?

Now that we're past that insult to our intelligence, let's take a look at why it's so insulting that Frazier Moore has a job writing reviews, much less for a national wire service.  The article is just terrible.  It's so bad, I don't think I've made it all the way through yet.  Why not?  I got to the part where it just devolved into quoting Oliver over and over.  Here's the thing, half of stand-up comedy is delivery and timing - a transcript is unlikely to work as well.  So when Moore starts paraphrasing the jokes you can imagine how that affects the quality of the article.

This is not a review of a stand-up routine, this is a summary, and a shitty one at that.  I mean, I edited my high school newspaper.  If someone had brought me this and told me it was their review, I wouldn't have been that surprised.  We were a really small school, the journalism teacher was too burned out from teaching to care, and we took anyone we could get to write anything for the paper.  I would have had to accept the article, rewrite the entire thing, and publish it under the writer's byline.  I would, however, expect that most high school newspapers are able to produce more analysis in their reviews.

Perhaps Moore thought that by pointing out that Oliver is generally on target with his humor counts as analysis.  Perhaps Moore thought "Hey, people don't want thoughtful analysis, they want to know what the jokes were so that when their co-workers are discussing it tomorrow they won't miss the pop culture reference."  That's probably pretty likely I suppose, the general tone of CNN.com is that there is nothing worse that being mildly out of touch with pop culture (the thinking man's solution to this problem is The Onion AV Club's "The Hater" blog - stay in touch with pop culture by reminding yourself of your superiority to pop culture).

Now it would be pretty easy to look up some more of Frazier Moore's work, according to Wikipedia he has been the AP's TV critic since 1992, but I'm going to admit that I'm too lazy to do that (yes, Frazier Moore has a Wikipedia article - he pretty much must have written that himself, right?  No one's like "Hey, you know what would make a good Wikipedia article?  A short bio of the AP's TV critic!").  Maybe I should give him the benefit of the doubt, everyone phones one in once in awhile.  Perhaps he literally phoned that one in, but he was using a Verizon cell phone and all his insightful analysis was lost when the call was dropped.

Anyway, it just offends me that someone can write that poorly and still be employed as a professional writer.  I suppose being a TV critic is a tough job.  I mean, the man's probably watched a lot of bullshit in the 16 years, perhaps he's started to believe that television has succeeded and America really is that dumb.  Perhaps he's right.  That's probably what scares me more than anything - not that CNN is so terrible, but that they aren't losing money.  Why isn't capitalism working?!?  Someone has to be able to do this better!

Next time on "I Hate CNN" - Lou Dobbs is a Terrible, Terrible, Populist Moron.

An anecdote

The other day I had one of those experiences that makes you say "wow, this is a semi-interesting anecdote that, if spun the right way, really illuminates the modern human experience."  When this happens to a free-lance journalist, the Bat-phone starts ringing at Slate.com.  When this happens to me, I post about it on my blog.

The other day I got a pretty scary voicemail on my cell phone from BGE.  "The account linked to this phone number will be denied service unless payment is made immediately."  Now, I was pretty certain that I hadn't accidentally forgotten to pay the gas and electric bill for the last few months, but that isn't the kind of message you ignore.

So I call the phone number that they mention in the message, enter my account number, and learn that my bill has been paid in full (just as I thought).  Nonetheless, that voicemail was a mystery and I'd rather not have my electricity accidentally turned off and have to explain to my roommates why all their food is rotting in the fridge.

Quick divergence - anyone else hate how hard it is to get ahold of BGE when you want to talk to a person?  First you have to wait until normal business hours, then you have to find the secret number on the BGE website.

Step 1 - Do not visit the page headlined "Contact Us."  That just leads you to one of those web forms that allows BGE to conveniently ignore you.  Seriously, there should be a special kind of purgatory (yes, just purgatory, this isn't that big of a sin) dedicated to companies that don't publish a phone number at all, just a web form for questions.  Have you ever been looking for information, run into one of those web forms and though "Hey!  This will make my life easier!  Instead of finding the information I need right now or talking to someone with that information, I can send a message into a black hole of accountability!"

Step 2 - Click on the "Customer Service" heading instead.

Step 3 - Careful!  You can try the 410-685-0123 number, but when I did it just rang for awhile and then went to someone's voicemail.  Yeah, like someone saying "Hey this is , leave a message and I'll get back to you."  No way to know if that's actually BGE.

Step 4 - Try calling 800-685-0123; after convincing the computer that you didn't accidentally call that number instead of the automated bill-payment-by-phone or balance-inquiry-by-phone number, you can be put on hold and eventually talk to a real person.

Is it me or was that too hard?  Here's my rule of thumb, if a company says that they're dedicated to customer service, but it takes me >5 minutes to get a representative on the line, they're full of shit.  Open challenge to all companies: I want to go from Google to talking to one of your representatives in 5 minutes or less.  This isn't rocket science, it's hiring a bunch of people to answer phones.

Ok, back to the story:  So it turns out that the account that was about to be shut off wasn't mine, but it was linked to my phone number.  Apparently whoever had signed up for the account had done it years ago, before  giving up the phone number that I now have on my cell phone.  This led me to think, what do I really know about this person who used to have my phone number:

• Their name is Wade or Wayne or something that starts with a W (based on the wrong number calls I got for a surprisingly long time.  I think I got a couple within the last six months).
• They have lived in the same location for at least 5.5 years (that's how long I've had this phone number).
• Based on the speech pattern of the people who inadvertently reached me, they are a lower-income, probably African-American, Baltimore native.  This is based on my aggregate impression over many wrong numbers.
• The are about to get their gas and electric shut off for non-payment.
• They aren't going to get a phone call to warn them.

There's an odd asymmetry in this relationship, I know a few things minor details about this guy's life but have no way to contact him.  He knows nothing about me, but can very easily reach me - he knows my phone number after all.

Advances in Medical Science

As any dedicated reader of this blog knows, I often use this blog as a vehicle to promote products that have made a significant contribution to society (see this post for example).  This is such an instance.

Humans have been getting and coping with blisters for literally millions of years, but only recently have I discovered the ultimate blister treatment.  I couldn't have done this without my medical-student roommate (who is like 99% of a doctor; I mean, he's already matched to his residency so it's pretty much just a formality now, right?).  My roommate introduced me to:

Band-Aid brand "Advanced Healing Blister"

Now aside from the deficiencies in product naming ("Advanced Healing Blister" sounds like a blister that is in the final healing stages, not an advanced treatment for healing blisters), this is a fantastic product.  Eureka!  Further, in-depth, research has taught me that these are "Advanced Healing Blister Cushions."  Still not a very good product name... maybe that's why I've never heard of them, I just can't imagine an marketing jingle based on that phrase.

Anyway, let me contrast this treatment with historical blister treatment:

In the past, when you got a blister, you'd pop it, put some Neosporin on it, and put a regular band-aid on it.  After a couple hundred yards of vigorous walking the band-aid comes off and sticks to your sock.  Your foot continues to hurt... a lot if you're wearing the same shoes that caused the blister.

With this product?  You pop the blister, stick one of these bad boys on it, and you're good to go.  I ran 10 miles with one of these cushions over a blister, it not only stayed in place, but the blister didn't hurt or get worse!!  It's this kind of innovation (or, since I don't know who invented these cushions, this kind of large corporate theft of a small company's idea) that made this country great in the first place!  Thank you corporate America for allowing me to run without pain.

These adhesive cushion things cost more than your average Band-Aids, but they work infinitely better.  If you're any sort of athlete or just someone who has uncomfortable shoes, you owe it to yourself to stock up on these "Advanced Healing Blister Cushions" immediately.

Mount Vernon not Tacky Enough? Call MICA!

It's an unfortunate fact that, under normal circumstances, not a day goes by that I don't hear someone remark "I hate that Mount Vernon neighborhood, especially around the Washington Monument, it's just too pleasant!"

Thankfully, MICA has offered us a temporary reprieve from not only the beauty of the Mount Vernon Place but also from the unbearable usefulness of cutting through the park to cross the street!  That's right from March 16 through March 29, project Golden Chain Link Fence is on!

Why would MICA surround the parks around the Washington Monument in cheap chain link fence that they spray painted gold?  For an answer to that, you're going to have to go to http://www.goldchainlinkfence.com, or just continue reading.

The website claims that this fence is "temporarily shifting the way the space is seen and used."  This is absolutely true:

There's only one way into the fenced-in area!  

Also, notice their motto: "An Opportunity to Experience Mount Vernon Place from an Alternative Perspective."  I have two problems with this:

1. That's not a sentence!
2. Instead of "Alternative," I would suggest the words "Ugly," "Godawful," or "Tacky."

-----

I mean, can you imagine the brainstorming session for this art installation?

"We need to do something public!  Something people will notice!"

"We need art in a public places!"

"Hey, what about experiential art?  Something that ordinary people take part in!"

"But how can we do it on our budget?  How will be get people to notice?"

"What if we put something in there way?  Like they have to walk around it?"

"A statue!"

"No!  People are used to walking around things place on pedestals!  We need something that changes the city landscape!"

"Let's close a street!"

"Let's block an intersection!"

"What if we parallel park really poorly so that there's less parking around?"

"Bad parking...how will people notice?"

"We could paint the cars gold!"

"What if we get towed?"

"Let's tear up a sidewalk for unnecessary construction!"

"How will people know it's unnecessary?"

"We could paint it gold!"

"Aren't jackhammers expensive though?"

"Jackhammers are way too phallic anyway!"

"Wait!  I've got it!  We could put up a fence!"

"Where?"

"I don't know, like around some space!  Like it'll totally change the way people use that space!"

"Yeah... I get it!  I mean, normally it's open space, but now it's fenced off!"

"It'll change everyone's understanding of the space!"

"But how will anyone know that it's fenced off to change their understanding and not just because the grass has been reseeded?"

"We could paint it gold!"

-----

What I don't understand is how they sold this dumb-ass plan to the city.  "We can spread goodwill too by using the fence to create messages!"

Styrofoam cups in the fence to spell a word?  Really?  That's the best you can do?  Don't you go to an art school?  This is your plan for life?  You're going to make art that's good enough to be sold for enough money to feed you?  I mean, I know it's an art school, but isn't there someone there who has the job of saying "Hey, I know you mean well and you really want this to work out, but you just don't have any good ideas.  Perhaps you ought to go over to ComputerTraining.com and take their Online Skills Challenge, I hear that Microsoft Certification can guarantee you a good career in IT management."

They probably sold this to the city by not actually letting on how fucking ugly their fences would really be.  Instead, they probably just showed them pictures of the art installation that don't completely suck.  There are some installed pieces that are actually a little cool, so it's not completely a waste.

Plus, as I just learned this evening, they're tearing down the fence tomorrow.  I was up there over the weekend, when it was as ugly as it could be, but by this weekend you'll apparently be free to walk around Mount Vernon Place again.

Nonetheless, it was a dumb, dumb, dumb idea.  "Visitors are encouraged and possibly even forced to 're-see' and 're-consider' Mount Vernon Place from an alternate perspective." Seriously - just because you can make it sound pretentious doesn't mean it's art.

Stars are Awesome Musicians, Fans of The Wire

Last night I checked out the Stars concert at Sonar.  I've been listening to their latest album, In Our Bedroom after the War, and it's fantastic.  Seriously, you should really check out some of this band's music. 

So anyway, the show:  At first, it kind of seemed like they brought their B-game, the female lead kind of sucked on one of my favorite songs (The Night Starts Here) as they opened.  But the crowd really got into it the show and you could tell that the band got into the groove quickly.  It was awesome, but probably my favorite parts were when they gave shout-outs to The Wire, a show that every Baltimorean should watch and everyone who appreciates great television should love.  It's weird that I haven't posted anything about The Wire before... I think that may be the next post.  

Anyway, near the beginning of the show:

Amy Millan (female singer) - "We're really excited to be in Baltimore (a little noise from the crowd), we've never been here before, but we love The Wire (a lot of appreciative noise from the crowd).  We were looking for Bubbles on every street corner on our way in."

At the end of the show:

Torquil Campbell (male singer) - "This is going to be our last song.  I'm tempted to dedicate it to Stringer Bell (lots of cheering) ... [says some things I miss] ... did you know telling your mother you love her is ganster?  It's about the most gangster thing you can do; maybe if Stringer Bell had called his mother and told her he loved her, shit wouldn't have gone down so badly for him."

Other things that are great about Stars:

• They are so obviously Canadian, so absolutely Montreal, it's actually cool.
• They have a bunch of flowers arranged on the stage and periodically throw some of them into the audience.  This would be even awesomer if they were any good at throwing flowers.  Torquil (the male singer) definitely needs to work on his release point.  Still, throwing flowers to the audience was cool.
• The bassist definitely referred to our fair city as "B-more!" at one point.

Things that were not awesome about the show:

• The opening act was some douchebag who didn't even have a real band.  He got some random band to back him up within the week before the show.  Plus he can't write songs that don't sound stupid.  However, when he let the random band do a couple songs, they were much better, so I recommend Pash.

Considering a Gentrifying Something? Read This Essay First

Cold, windy Sunday afternoons are for reading. It seems to me that one of the great tragedies of our times is that few 25-year-old men are willing to say that. Or better yet, not enough parents of any age are willing to explain that to their children and then miss a football game to visit the library (or it's modern, yuppie equivalent - Barnes & Noble).

I spent over 5 awesome hours in Barnes & Noble, I only left because they were closing. I read The Economist, The Atlantic Monthly, flipped through National Geographic, some sort of skeptic magazine, followed by (unintentional irony alert) a magazine called The Believer. I forget why I pulled The Believer off the shelf, but I want to draw your attention to a fantastic essay by Eula Biss: No-Man's-Land.

I highly recommend that you read the essay before continuing. But in case it's not cold and windy, I'll summarize quickly: It's a great essay, comparing the displacement of the Native Americans by white settlers as described by Laura Ingalls Wilder with the gentrification of neighborhoods in American cities. It doesn't make gentrification out to be entirely evil, which is nice, because I don't think I'm all that evil. The essay really hits its stride when it comes to being a "pioneer" of gentrification.

I can relate to having mixed feelings about being a pioneer of gentrification. I would estimate that the immediate area around my house is no more than 75% gentrified. There are still drug deals happening in the vicinity. I'm torn between feelings of guilt about pricing some families out of the neighborhood and desire for some sort of harm to befall drug dealers everywhere. I have a very Jermaine Clement (à la Flight of the Conchords) approach to dealing with drug dealers, I exact my revenge by thinking very mean thoughts about them.

Biss also brings up the fear that you are expected to maintain when you live in an urban area. About how your parents and friends and people you don't even know say "Isn't that kind of a dangerous?" when you talk about walking outside at night or going for bike ride.

For example, take this quote from the essay:

Gangs are real, but they are also conceptual. The word gang is frequently used to avoid using the word black in a way that might be offensive. For instance, by pairing it with a suggestion of fear.

It took me some time living in Baltimore (growing up and growing used to the city) before, as a senior at JHU, I finally started to notice the casual racism that surrounded the campus. That everyone casually used the word "ghetto" until it lost the significance of that word should car (the utter shame we should all feel for allowing such a thing to exist in America). Sure, for most upper-middle-class kids, ALL of Baltimore is a ghetto. It certainly doesn't look like where they grew up. It's all so poor, so crime-ridden, so... black.

Not that these students shouldn't be wary. There are muggings near campus, students can get hurt by crime, and if you have no idea how to tell a questionable neighborhood from a bad neighborhood it's no surprise that you're scared whenever you're out of sight of campus. That does not, however, excuse the remarks and actions that stereotype the vast majority of Baltimore's residents as being untrustworthy, drug-dealing or -using, and dangerous.

There is another passage in the essay that I found particularly striking.

We are afraid, my husband suggests, because we have guilty consciences. We secretly suspect that we might have more than we deserve.

That sentiment is hauntingly familiar to me. I've lived in this city long enough to feel like a real resident, but I still don't feel accepted by the city. Lately I've taken up distance running and as I've started to increase the length of my runs, I've started to push back the boundaries of my intimate exposure to Baltimore. Once I ran back towards south Baltimore from Patterson Park on Gough. Gough is legitimately crosses through what most people consider to be bad neighborhoods. There's even a four- or five-block stretch that passes through a housing project.

I didn't detour around the housing project, I just kept on trucking. For one thing, I was running, I had nothing on me but a key to my front door. I'm a tall man and although I don't think anyone considers me imposing, the world is a much more frightening place for a petite woman. So I ran right through the housing project.

As I ran through, I was struck with the familiar question: "Do you think these people hate me? Do they resent not only that I have so much more in material terms, but is it particularly offensive that I am even bringing my bourgeois hobby of running into their neighborhood?"

I'd like my running through their neighborhood to be interpreted in a positive way. Interpreted that I treat this housing project as just another city street and don't shun it just because it's residents are poor and predominantly (completely?) African-American. I'd like there to be some way to telegraph "I got a lot of what I have through hard work," but instead I'm sure just look like another rich, young asshole who can't wait to make them move further from my expensive coffee shops.

I feel this tremendous desire to help them by giving them good financial or educational advice or even personal advice. Heck, I'd love to explain to the kids why I'm running (Because it feels fucking great! Because it gets you in shape! Because it's about hard work and the sense of achievement that comes from completing something difficult! Because I don't want to end up with type II diabetes!).

There's no way for me to actually achieve any of this. The chasm that divides us socially is too much for me to bridge. I have to face that this sort of interaction is too far outside my comfort zone and if a conversation did happen, I would not be able to effectively communicate.

I run on, and the next thought is, of course, why do I feel I need to try to spread happiness by forcing my middle-class values on poor people? I think this, of course, because I am running and when you are running you have a lot time to try to think about things that aren't how tired you feel or how far you have left to go.

The answer to this question definitely points back to Biss's (the essayist) point about the feeling of "having more than I deserve." I feel guilty for having more than I deserve, but more subtly, I probably feel the desire to pass these values on to people poorer than myself in hopes of justifying my beliefs. If they adopt my values and also find success, then perhaps I am not party to some terrible crime. I'm just a person who has played by the rules, and here's living proof that anyone can succeed with these rules, so clearly the game wasn't necessarily rigged in my favor.

But I can't escape the fact that the game is partly rigged in my favor, even if I don't actively try to take advantage of it, I'm still a white, middle-class man. So I run on. I cross Central Avenue, reach Little Italy. Back on familiar turf, back to a neighborhood where you can take a date and purchase over-priced Italian food, wine, and dessert. Probably not much more than 2 miles to go on this run, I'm almost done!

I guess that's the other reason to run; because you can make visible, evident progress and you're always moving forward.

Biofuels: Still NOT a Good Idea!

I was always kind of vaguely suspicious of biofuels - the argument has essentially been over which politician can lavish more subsidies on their constituents in the name of "green fuels" - and finally we have some better proof that FlexFuel vehicles = bullshit.

From the journal Science:

• Use of U.S. Croplands for Biofuels Increases Greenhouse Gases Through Emissions from Land Use Change

• Land Clearing and the Biofuel Carbon Debt

New York Times summary of the reports:
Biofuels Deemed a Greenhouse Threat

So basically, when you take into account the carbon dioxide emitted when land is cleared for use in biofuel growth (and eventually, because of substitution effects, some land somewhere is going to get cleared), you put yourself in a deep carbon debt that will take a few generations of using biofuels to escape.

Not to mention the fact that the entire life-cycle carbon cost of biofuels is kind of suspicious as it is. I'm supposed to believe that all of the energy it takes to grow the crops, harvest them, transport them to refineries, and refine them into fuel is less than the amount of energy you get out of the fuel? It's not like I'm breaking new ground in this analysis, check out this article from 2005.

So how much longer do you suppose we'll be hearing from politicians about how important it is to expand federal subsidies for biofuels? I wouldn't expect it anytime soon, if it's one thing that both Republicans and Democrats can agree on, it's that we need to transfer massive amounts of wealth to farmers and agri-business ($618 billion dollars, 2008-2017).

NYTimes Sees a Number, Decides Sky Has Fallen

The magical thing about a recession is that you can't tell if one is happening or not until months later. This puts the news media in a delicate situation. There's no way to report on the thing that everyone is curious about. Reporting about recessions also seems to be a little bit like the Wizard of Oz, if you close your eyes, click your heals, and repeat "the economy may be slipping into recession," it just might happen.

Take, for example, an article today in the New York Times: Productivity Slowed in the 4th Quarter

I have several problems with this article.

1. Productivity did not slow. Productivity is not a thing that can slow, it is a measure of goods produced per unit labor input, so it can only increase or decrease. Productivity growth, on the other hand, can accelerate or slow down.
2. You look at that headline and your first reaction is to think "The US economy was less productive in the 4th quarter, the economy's really in the crapper!" Wrong. Productivity stilled increased, just at a slower rate than before.

Ok, so fine, maybe the headline is a little to pessimistic for me. Perhaps the article is objectively written in a thoughtful manner. But you're no fool, you can tell that I'm just setting you up with that statement.

In the body of the article you find nothing but doom and gloom. Productivity growth slowed to a mere 1.8% annualized growth rate in the 4th quarter, from a blazing 6% annualized rate in the 3rd quarter. Sounds disastrous, right? 1.8 is not a big number! It's certainly not as big as 6!

How about some perspective then? From Gregory Clark's "A Farewell to Alms," page 200, there's a table of long-term productivity growth rates. For the United States, from 1960-2000, the average growth rate of output per worker-hour was 1.75%.

To quote the article itself:

For the year, productivity rose by 1.6 percent, a slight rebound from a 1 percent gain in 2006 but both years were well below the average annual increases of 3.2 percent turned in from 2000 through 2004.

Because 4 years constitutes a reasonable amount of time to use to set your expectations. Seems more likely that we're just looking at productivity growth reverting to the long-term mean.

The whole tone of the article is ridiculous. It's basically written from the tone of "Batten down the hatches, it's going to get rough out here!" when all the data in the article says "We're not in a boom, but we may not be in a recession either." The article admits that productivity growth was twice what economists expected and that the cost of labor was lower than expectations, but then quotes an analysts that says everything is going to hell.

So my point is the New York Times has taken something that really means nothing or could mean anything, and decided to interpret it in the gloomiest possible fashion. What's worse, it's not even an individual reporter that we can blame. Apparently this is just a story from the Associated Press. Every news outlet is going to pick this up and people everywhere are going to clamor for an "economic stimulus" (which is synonymous with "increased deficit spending").

So I guess my point is, maybe there's a recession coming, but there's no way to really tell. Also, for most people, a recession is an entirely abstract thing that you can blame unfortunate economic events on. When you're using a home equity loan to finance your consumption, you have to know it's going to catch up with you eventually. When the entire nation is gripped by this mania, why are we surprised that the economy is slow for a bit? I guess that I just wish the news media had enough economic sense to parse the news a little better by themselves, rather than just weighting their stories to whichever camp has more analysts. Or, failing that, be a little more objective about things.

A Well-Kept Secret

So the other day I felt like going to a play. No particular reason, just realized that I haven't seen any live theater in long time. So I fooled a perfectly nice girl into agreeing to see a play with me.

Now, obviously you have to have a date to a play. As a young, urban, male professional there are some fairly hard and fast rules about who you call when you want to go somewhere. For example, it can make sense to go out to dinner with a platonic female friend, but if I sat down in a restaurant with one of my male friends I would probably just feel like we should have ordered take-out and watched a sporting event instead. You may disagree, but this is my soapbox, so I get to interpret socially acceptable behavior.

So anyway, once you've decided to go to a play and acquired a date (or vice versa), you need a play to go to. I turned to the City Paper, because I assume that they'll know about all sorts of arty, not-profitable things. And that is how I found The Audrey Herman Spotlighter's Theater.

I was dubious at first, I've driven down St. Paul Street a couple thousand times and never noticed said theater. I've been to Mt. Vernon a lot, never heard of a theater besides Center Stage. Sure, I'm not really involved in the arts in Baltimore, but I've never heard of this place. It's not easy to find either, you have to walk around the side of an apartment build, to the sort of entrance that is affectionately referred to as "garden level" by landlords.

Once inside, though, you start to suspect this might actually be a well-kept secret. They sell wine, coffee, and candy in the lobby. $1 candy bars! The theater itself it awesome. It's so intimate, I've been in bigger conference rooms. Seats on all four sides of the stage, no more than 80 seats in the whole place. It's a small stage and you're right there, it's great. The actors were pretty fantastic. What more can you ask for in a theater?

It's absolutely a great experience, I can't believe that something this fun has been right here under my nose for so many years. So get out there and support your local theater! I would even be so bold as to suggest that you don't wait until you've got a date, get a friend or two and go check it out!

Excuse me, would you like something disgusting to drink?

Excuse me, I can see you've just finished a vigorous workout. Do you realize that it's really important to replace your carbohydrates and protein as quickly as possible? Here, let me offer you this totally disgusting beverage.



We call it Clif Shot Recovery drink. We claim that this pale orange concoction is "mango-orange" flavored. We certainly did not come up with that after making the interns taste it and then try to name the flavor, we totally intended to create a "mango-orange" flavored drink. Notice the pleasant agave-rubber scent and the chemical aftertaste, I bet you didn't know that your body could get nutrition from something that tastes like this!

Go ahead, finish the drink! Just hold back that gag reflex for a few more gulps and your body will be in the fast-lane headed towards Recoveryville!