Monthly Archives: January 2014

Why Libertarianism Fails

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Now that legalizing the weed is the new thing, it did not take long for business to jump on the trend. Spirit Airlines is now offering Get Mile High fares to Colorado.

Spirit Airlines is known for jumping into the political debate with it’s irreverent advertising and it certainly wasn’t going to let a golden opportunity like marijuana legalization in Colorado slip by.

“The no smoking sign is off,” an advertisement on the airline’s website reads. “Get Mile High with $10 off your next flight. Fares so low they’re barely legal in some states.”

On the offer’s landing page, Spirit says, “If you want to make a beeline for Colorado right now, we don’t blame you — but we’re up to take you to plenty of chill destinations. … Book today … and be sure to pack some munchies.”

Colorado citizens who are 21 and older are now permitted to purchase recreational marijuana.

Spirit has been known to push the envelope with some of its ads. In 2011, Spirit capitalized on the Anthony Weiner Twitter photo scandal by offering “The Weiner Sale: With Fares Too HARD To Resist.”

In 2012, the airline capitalized on the U.S. Secret Service prostitution scandal by offering “More Bang for your Buck” for flights to Cartagena, Colombia.

This was entirely predictable. Once you legalize weed, there is money to be made in selling weed. There is money in expanding the market for it and that means normalizing the selling and consumption of it. The vast commercial machine used to sell everything from airplanes to pencils will swing into motion to spread the use of marijuana. That is the hidden value of prohibition. It prevents the massive marketing machine that is American commerce from promoting the thing that is actively prohibited.

While you may not care about this, lots of middle class parents do care. They will begin agitating for new rules to end the “marketing of weed to their kids.” A politician, looking for an angle, will propose rules to curb this stuff. No one will dare fight it because no one wants to be seen as in favor of selling weed to kids. Before long, we end up with what we see with cigarettes  or worse. I doubt we see a rollback on the legalization process, but the rules on weed will make the cigarette laws look mild by comparison.

The Deep State?

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I’m not a big believer in the alleged “deep state” that runs the country. I do think the rich and powerful exercise a great deal of influence over government. In fact, it is reasonable to say that the rich run the country and the political class is mostly their servants. That seems obvious. Rich guys parade in and out of the White House every day. The fact that these folks have a commonality of interests also seems obvious. Look at the push by rich people to flood the nation with peasants. Open borders favors the rich.

There’s a long way from that reality to the idea of a deep state, but when you see stories like this you have to wonder. Then only reason any of this is out in the public is the Snowden affair. Big bureaucracies like the NSA start making comical blunders like this when they reach a certain size. Still, it suggests the permanent ruling class is not the life-serving Congressmen and Senators, but the life-serving hacks in the bureaucracy.

The life-servers in the intelligence blob are the kings of the hill because they hold everyone’s secrets. It is not a big leap from that to thinking the rich guys telling Congress what to do also are pulling the strings at the NSA. On the other hand, maybe the security services have enough dirt on the rich to control them as well. Maybe it is just a weird balance of interests that keeps the whole thing running. The one thing that unifies all parties is making sure the public never gets what they want from government.

Coaching While Black

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Charlie Strong, the head football coach at Louisville, will be the next head football coach at University of Texas. The Longhorns are part of college sports royalty, maybe even the top of the list of elite programs. They generate more revenue than any other school. They have the biggest facilities, the biggest fan base and the biggest egos. Other big state schools like Ohio State and Michigan can claim to be the top of the list, but most people consider Texas the NY Yankees of college sports.

Their decision to hire a black guy obviously has cultural meaning, mostly because the mass media is obsessed with race. In fact, the media will care more about the race angle than the fact Strong has a very good resume and is actually qualified for the job. Coaches tend to kick around for 20 years as assistants and head coaches at small programs. Eventually, they get a shot at a major, but not elite, program to show they can compete with the best. If they win, they get a shot to man one of the elite programs.

Strong has done all of those things. The fact that he is black should be an enormous asset to him, but that has not been the case. Instead, he struggled to get his first head coaching job.  The rumor was college presidents fretted over his race, thinking the fans would not embrace a black man as coach. Even after he got the job at Louisville and there were no white riots, the attitude among college presidents persisted. They were sure their racist fans would burn the school down if they dared hire a black to coach the football team.

In fact, that’s been the argument for decades now. There’s no evidence the fans care about the race of the coach. They just want to win. Boosters, who fund a lot of this stuff, would embrace a space alien if he could win games. If Strong was a bisexual, transvestite black Nazi, the Louisville fans would cheer him anyway. It’s fair to say sports are why America has as much racial peace as it does. White sports fans care more about winning than the realities of race, so they overlook it in order to have their sports.

Despite this, white college presidents still think their fans hate blacks. There are a growing number of black athletic directors, who would be eager to hire black coaches, but the number of black coaches remains very low. The fans actually think black coaches are a benefit dealing with black players. Again, the boosters just want to win so that leaves the school presidents as the primary obstacle to hiring clack coaches. That and the fact it is a long apprenticeship and blacks tend to have very high time preference.

These presidents are overwhelmingly white and liberal. They live and work in the least diverse parts of America. Anyone thinking the campus is diverse has never been to a McDonalds in the South. They also live and work in the most radically left-wing parts of America. Yet, they walk around thinking they are the friend of the black man and those others, those rowdies in the stands, black and white, are the bigots. It is a remarkable bit of cognitive dissidence. These people are strangely delusional.

It should also be noted that it is the southern schools that are leading the way with the hiring of black coaches. Here is where winning trumps all else. Vanderbilt is paying their black coach $3 million a year. Mississippi State had a black coach a decade ago. Charlie Strong started in the SEC and then went to Louisville. Miami had a black coach a few years back. The assistant ranks are ghostly white the further north you go, while the sidelines in the South have much more vibrancy.

Of course, the cognitive dissidence is not limited to the lily white leadership of American colleges and universities. When the Left sees all of these black coaches at southern schools, they believe it due to their heroic efforts to fix those bad whites in the south, even though the schools in the north remain ghostly white. It’s a reminder that for bad whites, race is a real issue to be dealt with in a serious way. For good whites, race is entirely about moral posturing in juxtaposition with the bad whites they detest.

Dumb People Who Think They Are Smart

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The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, but wiser people so full of doubts.

–Bertrand Russell

This post by Lion of the Blogosphere brought the above quote to mind. Mediocre minds have a habit of thinking themselves to be very smart, simply because they have internalized the assumptions of the cool crowd. In this case, he has been conditioned by his urban lifestyle to associate religiosity with intelligence. He clearly does not understand the topic, but it is a pose that makes him feel good so he is extra confident in it.

Anyway, it always bugs me when people talk about “believing” in evolution. You believe in things you don’t know or cannot know. One can believe in god, but you cannot prove the existence of god or the absence of god. You either believe or you don’t believe. Evolutionary biology is not a matter of belief. We have data from the fossil record. We have genetic data that is advancing every year. We have theories that explain the data and help in the search for new data. There are no leaps of faith involved.

As with all science, there’s a chance we have it all wrong. There’s no question we have some things wrong, as correction are common. The history of science, after all, is the history of bad ideas that were replaced with less bad ideas. This is especially true when it comes to natural science. People keep working a problem until the problem is solved and the solution joins the stock of axioms that form the foundation of science.

As far as whether accepting evolution is a sign of intelligence or not has always been one of those weird ticks of the Left. Years ago, they use to decorate their cars with Darwin fish, because they thought it tormented religious people. Now it is pretty clear that the Left is lurching into some very primitive thinking with regards to biology, as they embrace nonsense about human sexuality and race denial-ism. It’s pretty clear that the liberal embrace of evolution was always just a pose and nothing about science.

Anyway, the attempt to correlate belief and IQ is the sort of thing a supercilious person does when they want to appear clever. Belief is most certainly a biological human trait that probably co-evolved with language. The fact that all human groups have belief in the supernatural, buttressed with customs and rituals that frame out their culture, is what is generally called a clue. Belief, with religion being a subset, is most certainly something that has been selected for in human religion. We’re born to be true believers.

Of course, many high IQ people believe in very crazy stuff.  Noam Comsky is very smart guy for sure. He also think it is a good idea to murder people who don’t get along with Castro. The Blaize Pascal was a brilliant mathematician and theorist. He also was a fanatical Christian. Many of the physicists who worked on the Manhattan project were communists. Newton was obsessed with alchemy. The highly intelligent tend to be highly curious and prone to believing a lot of very wacky things as a result.

Democracies Always Murder Themselves

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In the 1970’s and into the 1980’s, New York City was a terrible place, mostly due to the Left throwing open the prisons. They also encouraged blacks to run wild, which they were more than happy to do without much encouragement. As a result, the ghettos were ferociously violent. Drugs were rampant. Crime in general was a huge problem, even among the cops. In the early 70’s some radicals were still blowing stuff up.

Ed Koch was mayor and he spent most of his time was explaining away the dysfunction of city government, claiming it was just the new normal. He lasted into the 80′ basically on the claim he prevented the city from going bankrupt. He gave way to David Dinkins, who was a complete failure. By the end of his time in office, New York City had suffered at least thirty years of corrupt and incompetent left-wing mayors.

Giuliani came in after Dinkins and started to clean up the city. He cleaned up the petty crime and rounded up the gangsters. He cleaned up and professionalized the police force using modern techniques like noticing that most crimes are committed by young black males. He did not say it like that, obviously, but what he was doing was clear to everyone, even if they publicly said otherwise. Crime control is about race realism.

The boom in financials certainly made it easier as it gave him a viable tax base. Unlike his lefty predecessors, he did not look at Wall Street as a the enemy. He embraced the new financial class by embracing gentrification of the city’s neighborhoods. Bloomberg, nutty as he is, carried on the polices for another decade. Today, a white person can live in places like Harlem and Queens, without getting mugged every day.

Now ehre we are, after all of that, with another left-wing wacko as mayor, promising to reverse all the polices that cleaned up the city. Bill de Blasio was born too late to be a part of radical stuff in its bombing years, but he was nonetheless educated by them after they moved into the universities. He defended Daniel Ortega in the 80’s and he still thinks Castro got it right. Despite the multi-decade experiment in progressive madness that nearly destroyed New York City, de Blasio is convinced this time it will be different.

“We recognize a city government’s first duties: to keep our neighborhoods safe; to keep our streets clean; to ensure that those who live here – and those who visit – can get where they need to go in all five boroughs. But we know that our mission reaches deeper. We are called to put an end to economic and social inequalities that threaten to unravel the city we love. And so today, we commit to a new progressive direction in New York. And that same progressive impulse has written our city’s history. It’s in our DNA.”

He’s right about the DNA part. True believers like de Blasio are born to join mass movements like cults and extreme religious movement. That’s why democracy always fails. These typesare always with us and they will never quit. They keep working the system until they can impose their brand of lunacy on the rest of us. The fact that everything he advocates has been tried and failed horribly will not deter him or his supporters. They are always armed with the phrase, “this time it will be different.”

The Founding generation dismissed democracy out of hand as the surest path to national suicide. They were smart men who had a realistic understanding of human nature. They were mostly skeptics, at least by the standards of their day. They knew the lower classes would always vote themselves a raise from their neighbor’s wallet. They knew the excessively religious would try to vote in their kind. They knew democracy was a terrible way to run a society, so they tried to build a system to prevent it. yet, here we are.

Happy New Year

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It seems the thing to do with blogs at this time of year is to make some predictions about the coming year. I’ve been reading up on and studying the prediction business for a while now, so let’s see if I can put some of it to work. My interest in the prediction business is mostly for amusement. Go back and read old predictions and they are not only wrong, but hilariously wrong. My bet is people in the futurism racket are mostly interested in attention, so they tend to be willing to make bold claims about the future.

Of course, most predictions about the future are wrong because people tend to predict things they wish come true. Since most of what we wish for never happens, it follows that such predictions will tend not to happen. Then there is the fact no one ever remembers the failed predictions. The finance guys love promoting people who got some even right in the past, but they never mention that the same guy got fifty other things wrong. No one in the prediction business reminds us of how many things they got wrong.

The bigger issue is the the appearance of randomness. A problem with several constants and one variable is easy to solve. Human affairs have many more variables and few constants. Human affairs have millions of variables. The example of the double pendulum is a good one. We can predict the movement of a pendulum easily using basic math. Put a hinge in the middle and the movement appears to become unpredictable. There are videos on YouTube you can look up if you are unfamiliar with this example.

Then there is the issue of time. I know, as a matter of mathematical certainty, that the Fed policy of dumping a trillion new dollars into the system will have to end. The bears think hyper-inflation is right around the corner and the program will crash. They may eventually be right, but it could be next year or five years from now. Right now, the world economy is soaking up these new dollars and stuffing them into assets like stocks. Eventually, that ends, but knowing when is the mystery. A good prediction is mostly about timing.

That said, years ago I got interested in betting sports games. American football betting is really just a game of  figuring out how the crowd is going. If you can find example where the conventional wisdom is out of phase with reality, you can make some money. I came up with a model that allowed me to beat the spread 59% of the time. That sounds good, but 57% is the break even point. Bookmakers charge vigorish. The book maker strives to set the line so that he gets equal money on each team. The losers pay the winners and the bookie takes his cut. If he does his job, he makes 5% of the total money bet on the game.

With that in mind, here are some predictions for 2014 about things I care about a little:

1) Florida State will beat Auburn and it will not be that close.

2) Denver will not make the Super Bowl. Peyton Manning will not join Earl Morrall and Jeff Rutledge as quarterbacks to make it to the Super Bowl on two different teams. The NFL playoffs comes down to defense. Great QB’s running great offense can win a game or two, but eventually, it comes down to defense. If the Patriots had a decent defense, Tom Brady has two more rings and an undefeated season. The Denver defense is one of the worst in the playoffs this year.

3) The US economy will remain in neutral, growing at about 2.5% after all the adjustments and revisions. The great slow down from health care will not appear as predicted. There’s some evidence that the economy was picking up in the last half of 2013, but certainly not booming. Unemployment, however, remains the primary drag and there nothing in the latest numbers to suggest things are changing on that front. ObamaCare will put downward pressure on the labor market. Continued exploitation of existing technology will offset much of this as companies get better at doing more with less, but you still need people with money buying stuff to make an economy grow. We remain at the edge of personal debt limits. That all adds up to more of the same in 2014.

4) Obama will fall below 40% in Gallup and remain there until the summer, but bubble back up into the low to mid 40’s in the summer. Americans want to like him, even if they hate his policies right now. There’s not a huge difference between 44% and 38% but it will be encouraging to the administration and his party. As noted above, people see what they want to see. The liberal media will break into an early version of Obama nostalgia this summer as a last gasp to salvage his second term, but the limits of reality mean he remains in the 40’s for the rest of the year.

5) The stock market will finish ahead of where it is today. Specifically, the DOW will be above 17,000 by year end, but not by much. There’s no question that the market has had a great run, but it has no basis in reality. Facebook, for example, has a P/E of 140. Twitter is worth $40 Billion, despite having no profits and no chance to make a profit in 2014. The P/E of the Russell 2000 is 87. The major indexes are better, the DOW is 19 and the NASDAQ is 21, but those remain high historically. The average P/E is 15 going back 100 years. Still, a trillion in Fed money will counter any pull back in 2014.

6) There will be no legislative changes to the health care law in 2014. Nothing will be passed out of the Senate. Right now, this thing is a gift to both parties. The Democrats scare the Left about how the Right wants to repeal it. The Republicans promise the Right they will repeal it. At some point, repeal becomes the stuff of the fringe and both parties take turns promising to repair it. For 2014, we have the repeal/defend dynamic so nothing changes.

7) The Red Sox will not make the playoffs. They caught lightning in a bottle and will fall back to being an 85-win team. The lost a key player in Ellsbury and the rest of the division got better. Repeating is always hard and the margin for error is small. Losing ten more games knocks them out of the playoffs and that’s certainly seems reasonable.

8) The Republicans will pick a net of nine Senate seats in 2014 and have a working majority. The House will see the GOP gained a dozen seats. The GOP establishment is revved up to prove a point to the right. That point is safe candidates can beat democrats in toss-up states. Put another way, they want to show the Right that wackos are not welcome in their club. I think the result will be a strong effort to field competent alternatives to at-risk Democrats and a solid election for the GOP. The Democrats have a dozen highly vulnerable incumbents and the GOP has none this time.

9) The sale of eBooks will continue to stagnate and people will begin to ask if they will displace hard books after all. Sales have been flat for a year. The novelty of tablet computers is cresting and that will put more pressure on sales. The fact is the reading universe is static. People consume a predictable number of books. Weird innovations in the free money era caused a spike (Mega book stores, Amazon, tablets), but there are no more novelties coming to boost sales. The mega book stores are closing. Amazon is flat. Tablets have been driving novelty interest in eBooks, but that’s coming to an end as the tablet market matures. The eBook may be a solution looking for a problem.

10) Tablet prices will fall significantly. They are on the cusp of becoming a commodity. As penetration peaks, the race to the bottom of the price curve will begin. Korean and Chinese makers will begin to flood the market with cheap Android based tablets. The fact is, these things should be cheap media consumption devises. The first HD TV’s cost $3K and now are a tenth of that in some sizes. Tablet prices will drop as the market for what they do best solidifies. Microsoft’s attempt to make them mini-desktops will fail. There’s no need for an $800 mini-laptop when you can get a real one for the same price.

11) Cheap tablets will begin to erode the smart phone market. The reason the smart phone exists is it give you a portable media consumption devise. A 7″ tablet is just as portable as most phones. Wi-fi is nearly ubiquitous now. A lot of people, particularly business people will begin to opt for a cheap mobile phone on a cheap plan and a cheap tablet for surfing the ‘Net.

12) 2014 will see the beginning of the end to the old mobile phone model. The market is maxed out now. The way for the carriers to compete will be with the plans, instead of the devices. The fact is, most people rarely leave their local area. That means small carriers can begin to chip away at the lower end of the market. That will lead to more lower end choices from the major carriers. It will also mean less bundling.

13) The first glimpses of a la carte pricing in cable and satellite will appear this year. The cost of cable is way out of hand and the alternatives are getting better. I can subscribe to Hulu for $8 a month and get more content than I could ever watch. I can get shows from Netflix and Amazon. Apple is ramping up their video content and Microsoft is unleashing hell with XBox One. Cable will begin to experiment with offer customers the ability to opt out of some channels to save a few bucks.