Things have been slow around here lately. But, I assure you, we all have our reasons. So just take a few minutes to absorb this image. No newspaper required in this Japanese bathroom.
And…link.
I like things to be simple. If I have a simple question, I want a simple answer. To me, the simplest of questions is “what’s the weather like?” If you tell me it’s 65 degrees, I instantly know what that means and what I should wear. The same goes if you tell me it’s 55, 45 or 35 degrees. So why can’t there just be a way to very quickly find out this, the simplest of all information?
The weather channel will tell you what it’s like outside. But only if you happen to turn it on at the right moment (on the 8’s, as they like to say). And weather.com? Sure that site will tell you the weather. But it’s an eyesore to look at. See for yourself:
The information contained in that red circle is all I want to know. But they have to fill in the rest of the space with a bunch of useless and annoying pictures and information. I don’t want to watch a video of my local forecast, I don’t want to buy an HP product and I don’t want to click on any of those useless links. I hate it all.
So imagine my joy when I came across this website. (NOTE: Link may not be safe for work.) It tells me all I want to know in the simplest of ways. This website has restored my faith in humanity.
“If the drug effort were failing there would be no violence,” a senior U.S. official said Wednesday. There is violence “because these guys are flailing. We’re taking these guys out. The worst thing you could do is stop now.”
That was in response to statements made by a commission of Latin American leaders on the failures of the U.S. war on drugs. Read all about it here.
Yes, that’s one way to measure success. I’m just not sure the “more dead bodies, the more successful we are” approach is very effective in advertising your cause. What it’s very effective at doing is making it plain and clear that the war on drugs is a complete waste of time, money and people’s lives. I don’t understand how policy makers can believe that it makes any sense to continue trying (and failing) to keep drugs out of this country. No matter what they do, the situation will not change.
It’s simple supply and demand. My guess is that demand for drugs is relatively unchanging since they’re not hard to get and people are going to do what they want despite arcane prohibitive laws. So the price of drugs will be determined by the supply. Every time drug police confiscate a cache of drugs, it decreases the overall supply and thereby raises the price. When the price rises, it makes the drug trade that much more of a lucrative option for people looking to make money. More people enter the business supplying more drugs and things return to the original equilibrium. The same works for killing drug gang members. If a cop kills a supplier, the number of suppliers goes down, increasing the value of suppliers. Then more people want to become suppliers and things return to normal.
And what is the overall outcome? Last year, more than 5,000 people were killed across Mexico in connection with the drug war. Of course most of these people were killed by gang members and not drug police. But that doesn’t change anything. The only reason the drug business is run by gangs in the first place is because it’s illegal. In normal commerce, businesses solve their disputes through the use of contracts and the court system. Since these are not options for the black market drug business, the only recourse is to solve disputes with bullets.
President Obama just announced his appointee for the Office of National Drug Control Policy. If he really wants to change things, this would be a great place to start.
A cyberspace coup has occurred at Midwest Gothic! Your beloved writers have been destroyed. No longer will you, dear readers, be forced to endure their endless and nonsensical diatribes on politics, world events, science fiction television and the stupidity of all human beings. We are your redemption! We are your salvation! And we would like to introduce ourselves:
1. General Veendrill
2. Dirk Charleston, CPA
3. Fat Man
4. Ice Cream Sandwich
5. Beanie Czar
Some professors at Ohio State University conducted a study that examined cooperation among research subjects. Modifying the classic prisoner’s dilemma game, in which participants decide whether to cooperate or defect, the researchers offered varying amounts of money depending on what choice the participants made. So for instance:
If both cooperate, both get $3
If one defects, he gets $5 while the other person gets nothing
If both defect, both get $1
Previous research indicates that people are more likely to cooperate when larger amounts are involved, say, hundreds of dollars as opposed to three. Well, these researchers set out to determine if it was a higher dollar value that led people to cooperate more or if was merely a larger amount of anything. So they compared cooperation rates when the amount earned could be 3 dollars or 300 cents. And, for some reason, they found that people cooperated more when they could earn 300 cents as opposed to 3 dollar bills. They then interpreted this as meaning that people care more about large amounts of things (300 vs 3) as opposed to their value when deciding to cooperate.
I interpret this as people are stupid. First, people are stupid for favoring 300 cents over 3 dollars just because 300 is larger. They have the exact same value and a second grader would recognize that. Second, people are stupid for favoring the larger amount because now they have to carry 300 pennies around with them. As long as people continue to carry around pennies, we’ll never get rid of that damn coin.
There are many U.S. policies to which I am unabashedly opposed. One of these suites of policies is various trade restrictions that lawmakers and presidents place on foreign imports. Trade restrictions do nothing except help a very small constituent of voters while raising prices for all consumers. And among the worst type of trade restrictions are those placed upon imported food. Well, it just so happens that, a couple days before leaving office (former) President Bush sent a clear message to foreign food producers: I am a major A-hole.
In its final days, the Bush administration imposed a 300 percent duty on Roquefort, in effect closing off the U.S. market. Americans, it declared, will no longer get to taste the creamy concoction that, in its authentic, most glorious form, comes with an odor of wet sheep and veins of blue mold that go perfectly with rye bread and coarse red wine.
Cheese with an odor of wet sheep may not appeal to all U.S. consumers, but there are probably many that would like to continue purchasing this product. The same goes for consumers of French truffles, Irish oatmeal, and Italian sparkling water, all of which were included in the tariff bill. Instead, Bush has made it incredibly costly to purchase these products because he felt he wanted to punish European governments for restrictions they have placed on U.S. beef imports. Wah wah.
Let European countries do whatever they want. Their citizens will just pay more for beef. These new tariffs do nothing but increase the prices of these foods (and their U.S. subsititutes) for U.S. consumers. They also hurt the U.S. food importing industry:
”It’s extremely unfortunate from our point of view,” said Eugene Milosh, executive director of the American Association of Exporters and Importers, a leading trade group. ”It puts people out of business.”
They also lead to further retaliations:
Earlier this year, the European Community released a list of American products that would be considered for counter-retaliation. These included honey, walnuts, hybrid corn seed, beet pulp and dried fruit.
These policies are nonsense. They do nothing more than limit consumer choice and purchasing power while creating ineffiencies in the production of food. Some other countries may have enacted such policies first, but Bush has only caused the problem to worsen. Well done Mr. Former President.
