WARNING! This post is entirely about my personal life. For your Japan fix, go here to see Miss and Mister Tokyo University. Quoth Joe, “Mmm pre-feminist society.” High school reunion antics after “the jump” (in quotes because it sounds lame):
Continue reading Reflections from Somers High School Class of 2000 Reunion
Category: Ranting
Ranting
My new life in Japan
Conversation I had with MF a few weeks ago while we were taking a look at Japanese satellite TV operator SkyPerfecTV’s channel offerings:
MF: you should just quit your job and fly to japan next week
MF: screw the apartment
Adamu: dont tempt me
MF: you can get a job at nova
Adamu: haha
MF: and then go home to your sweet, sweet tv
Adamu: ok now that IS sad
MF: and a big can of kirin
MF: or asahi dry
Adamu: asahi
Adamu: id have to have a good tv
Adamu: maybe i could get those tv goggles
Continue reading My new life in Japan
Two Reasons to Love Washington
(Please forgive the rambling, Schumin-esque post. This is about as exciting as my life gets these days.)
Reason 1: I stop by American University, my alma mater, last weekend to catch up on some research.
Feeling hungry, I decide to stop by the university dining hall to see if it has changed at all. Now, at AU most customers of the dining hall pay using their student IDs, which are connected to their overpriced meal plans. As I stand in line, I remember how annoying it was to be stuck with 30 leftover meals at the end of every semester because I didn’t feel like eating from the same limited menu for breakfast, lunch and dinner.
When my turn comes at the register, I tell the lady I have to pay with a credit card. She is confused — from the looks of things, this may not have happened yet in her career as a dining hall cashier.
But thankfully the “middle class African American college boy” behind me is ready: “I got it,” he says, letting me know “it’s cool” with a cocksure nod of the head.
“Really?”
“Yeah.”
“Wow, thanks,” I say as the register lady swipes his ID.
Free lunch for Adamu!
Continue reading Two Reasons to Love Washington
Down with the airport security overlords!
One of Marmot’s recent posts confirmed that the Transport Security Administration (TSA, also rumored to be an abbreviation for “Thugs Standing Around“) is the biggest waste of money and time since the lawyer was invented. I would make an argument about how none of our airport security procedures would be sufficient to stop a terrorist attack on an airplane, but it’s more fun to point out random gripes from across teh intarweb:
- There are too many of them where they aren’t needed.
- They have a ridiculous no-fly list that appears to be based on Arabic names.
- They piss off foreign government officials who return to their countries determined to undermine American foreign policy.
- They lead to wives taking the fall for their husbands and penises taking the fall for their owners.
- They are cruel to robots and people traveling on a different airline each way (I can confirm this personally).
- They can’t decide whether shoes are optional or not, but they make you take your shoes off anyway.
- Besides nail clippers, they also take away bowling pins and thongs.
- Even though they inexplicably force you to show your boarding pass twice, people can STILL get onto planes without tickets.
- For an agency designed to thwart terrorists, they have a funny way of involving themselves in the War on Drugs.
- And half of these procedures can be avoided completely if you have money.
Oh yes… there’s now a mobile phone game where you win by beating TSA security at every major airport in the US. Fun times.
Granted, they aren’t quite as dastardly as Japanese Customs…
Please, people, get the Alito debate right
The SEPTA strike finally ended early this morning. In a way, losing mass transit was beneficial: with a 90-minute commute on foot, I had some forced spare time to listen to podcasts on my way to and from campus, including Face The Nation and Meet The Press. The episodes two weekends ago, coming in the wake of the Scooter Libby indictment, were most amusing.
But this weekend, it was all about Alito. And I had to hear Democrats on both shows go on about how “he wanted to strip-search a 10-year-old.” The case was Doe v. Groody, 361 F.3d 232 (3d Cir. 2004), text available here. Now, I know these senators must know better—they went to law school, for feck’s sake. So let’s get this straight.
- The searches took place as part of a drug bust. The suspected dealer is referred to as “John Doe.”
- When the police applied for a search warrant, they asked several times to be able to “search all occupants of the residence and their belongings to prevent the removal, concealment, or destruction of any evidence requested in this warrant.” In fact, it says “all occupants” several times, as if to scream “DON’T LET ANYONE GET AWAY!”
- When they got the warrant, the box marked “premises and/or persons to be searched” said “John Doe” and gave some of his personal information. This information filled up the entire box on the form.
- The police conducting the raid knew there were going to be women in the house, and didn’t want the suspected dealer to hide the goods on the women, so they got a female meter maid to go in with them.
- The meter maid took the wife and daughter of the suspect into the bathroom and had them strip down to show they didn’t have anything hidden in their clothes.
- After this happened, the victims sued the police officers individually under Section 1983. The police officers argued that they should get qualified immunity because they didn’t violate “clearly established statutory or constitutional rights of which a reasonable person would have known.”
- The district court rejected this argument and decided the officers should be liable. They appealed. Alito was one of the three-judge panel who got the appeal.
- Two of the judges voted to affirm the district court’s decision, since the warrant only said “John Doe.” Alito dissented on the grounds that the officers clearly intended to get a warrant to search everyone, and had a decent reason to believe they were given the right to do so.
Now, criticizing Alito on this last issue is one thing, but he certainly isn’t in favor of strip-searching children left and right. All he wanted was to keep police officers from being sued when they were doing something they thought they were authorized to do. If you want to go after perverts in the government, go after Scooter.
Where do you draw the line?
[N]o sooner do we depart from sense and instinct to follow the light of a superior principle, to reason, meditate, and reflect on the nature of things, but a thousand scruples spring up in our minds concerning those things which before we seemed fully to comprehend. Prejudices and errors of sense do from all parts discover themselves to our view; and, endeavoring to correct these by reason, we are insensibly drawn into uncouth paradoxes, difficulties, and inconsistencies, which multiply and grow upon us as we advance into speculation, till at length, having wandered through many intricate mazes, we find ourselves just where we were, or, which is worse, sit down in a forlorn Skepticism.
– George Berkeley, The Principles of Human Knowledge
In daily life, we assume as certain many things which, on a closer scrutiny, are found to be so full of apparent contradictions that only a great amount of thought enables us to know what it is that we really may believe. In the search for certainty, it is natural to begin with our present experiences, and in some sense, no doubt, knowledge is to be derived from them. But any statement as to what it is that our immediate experiences make us know is very likely to be wrong.
– Bertrand Russell, The Problems of Philosophy
The passages above describe eloquently an idea that has long lingered troublingly in the back of my mind, but remained unarticulated due to principally to my own laziness in fleshing it out. I don’t expect to exorcize all of my demons on the subject here, but at least it will be a start.
I’ve never perceived myself as being the type to fall easily into one camp or another on things. Consequently, I either find myself taking a position of devil’s advocate in order to participate in a conversation, or find myself sinking into a disappointed indecision. If I’m around conservatives, for example, I usually feel myself inexorably being pulled in the opposite direction. When around liberals, the opposite is true.
In either instance, I am left wondering, “how can this or that person be so sure about himself or herself?” Furthermore, I wonder, “how can I be so unsure of myself?” Granted, I may be objecting to attitudes more than to opinions in the aforementioned examples, but the questions still remain unanswered.
It’s not that I lack the ability to construct a logical argument and follow through on the conclusion. But on what basis are such conclusions ultimately derived?
Consider the following question: Is abortion right?
Now consider the following two answers to this question:
– Life begins at conception.
– The taking of a life is wrong.
– Abortion takes a life.
– Therefore, abortion is wrong.
Fine, but what about this:
– A fetus is part of a woman’s body.
– A woman has a right to do with her body as she pleases.
– Therefore, if she wishes to have an abortion, she is justified.
They are both simplified examples to be sure, and while I’m no logician, they suit my purposes here. There appears to be no problem with the arguments themselves; the rub lies in the assumptions. Then we are forced to ask: which assumption is right? That just leads to another argument, founded on other, more basic assumptions.
But if we keep digging, what eventually remains? I wonder how often people stop to ask themselves this question. It seems possible that one could rely on “sense and instinct” clothed in the type of arguments above without ever considering the soundness of their assumptions. For practicality’s sake we must we draw a mental line somewhere if we are to avoid a slippery slope that leads to relativism or worse. We can’t go around denying the existence of tables all day long. But where and when should that line be drawn?
My moving nightmare — a quiz for my readers in law school
My plans were to be blogging from my new place in Rockville by now, but as you will see below that was not in the cards. The following is a 100% true story of what happened to me yesterday. Names have been changed.
Continue reading My moving nightmare — a quiz for my readers in law school
Asahi has an idea for letting the immigrants in
Page 11 of the Oct 21 Asahi Shimbun carried an editorial signed “H” in its “Keizai Kishodai” (Economic Observatory) Column..
The piece promotes a solution for the predicted work shortage in Japan: If putting women and the elderly to work isn’t enough, and Japan won’t accept foreign workers to take the good jobs, then they should push women into the work force and import CAREGIVERS and MAIDS to take care of the chores while they are away. Hong Kong and Singapore are already doing this apparently, so why not Japan?
Sounds like a plan! I don’t know why I haven’t seen this argument before. This seems like a very realistic proposition. I mean, caring for the elderly may be a pretty sensitive issue (it’s taboo even for a daughter-in-law to take care of her husband’s parents), but babysitters and housekeepers might be a different story.
The only coverage of this I could find on Literati (CORRECTION: TECHNOrati) was a Japanese-Chinese translation blog… Interesting if you’re studying both languages I suppose…
Charging for content
As much as I would like to, I don’t have time right now to go into any deep philosophical musings about cyber-capitalism and online economic opportunity, or how the internet has freed information and charging money for it is against the spirit of blah, blah, blah… So just to be clear from the outset, however much what I’m about to say might or might not reflect my ideological attachments, the real purpose of this post is to let off some steam on a Friday afternoon, and the NYTand Mr. Roubini just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, so to speak. It is emotion talking, not reason, okay?
That said, here it is:
Why did you have to start charging for content!!!!!!!!!!?????????
First, the NYT required registration, which was annoying enough because if you were in a computer lab and just wanted to check one story in a hurry, you had to remember your username and password. If, on the other hand you were always using the same machine, no problem – just have your computer remember your info. That works fine of course, until you go to a computer lab for the first time in ages, or use someone else’s machine to check one story in a hurry and it’s been so long that you have forgotten your username and password (I’ve had mine since around 1996, so this has happened to me a few times.)
Then, all these other journalistic outfits started requiring registration. If you’re a regular reader, this is not such a big problem. But if you follow someone’s blog link to an out of town paper, or one you don’t normally read, then you have to register just to read one lousy article. Well, it’s a good thing that both 12345 and 90210 are actual zip codes, and that most sites will let you in even if you enter your name as “George W. Bush” or “Zamfried Hockenluger.” (And don’t get me started on bastards who want to send your password to the email address you provide before you can sign in.)
Now we have NYT Select. Not that my lone volley of anger is going to hurt something the size of the NYT, but if you think I’m actually going to pay you money to read more M. Dowd or T. Friedman, when I rarely read it for free before you’re crazy. Besides, don’t all those folks make enough money recycling their op-eds in to another book every other year?
As for Mr. Roubini, I loved his blog. It just got better and better. I recommended it to countless people. His onsite reviews are right on the money – “…best economic website in the world.” But $599 a year for a subscription to the Roubini Global Economics Monitor!!!!!
This by no means a personal condemnation of Mr. Roubini. Hell, I would have done the exact same thing. I’ll still read his papers in academic journals or what have you. And I don’t feel guilty for attacking the NYT, because it’s a faceless, evil corporation, bent on destroying all good in the world (I’m kidding, of course). So to redeem myself for my emotional outburst against the spirit of capitalism, I’ll do something that no self-respecting would-be commie would never dream of and just admit the honest truth about my ire: I’m just pissed to have lost access to such a wonderful resource.
Professors fail remedial economics
UpdateI’d like to apologize for forgetting to link to the article yesterday.
The New York Times has an article exploring the issue of whether there may be more important things than a country’s economic development. A worthy topic, but sadly the article references what is possibly the worst academic survey every conducted.
[B]eyond a certain threshold of wealth people appear to redefine happiness, studies suggest, focusing on their relative position in society instead of their material status.
Nothing defines this shift better than a 1998 survey of 257 students, faculty and staff members at the Harvard School of Public Health.
In the study, the researchers, Sara J. Solnick and David Hemenway, gave the subjects a choice of earning $50,000 a year in a world where the average salary was $25,000 or $100,000 a year where the average was $200,000.
About 50 percent of the participants, the researchers found, chose the first option, preferring to be half as prosperous but richer than their neighbors.
I think that’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard. They seem to think that people choosing the $100,000 option are twice as wealthy in absolute terms than the people choosing $50,000, but that is utter bollocks.
If the average salary of the world increases by 8-fold and yours drops by half, than in absolute terms you have only 1/16 of the wealth that you had before. Money is not some kind of nano-gel with the ability to transform into an amount of physical material in proportion to the number of units you have, it’s an abstraction that represents the portion of the economy’s total wealth that one controls. The value of individual money units is a simple proportion based on the total amount of money units in existence, this is why we have things like inflation-a concept that seems to have escaped the Harvard School of Public Health.
If they had said ‘town’ or ‘community’ than it might make some sense, because your currency value is still based on the larger economy and in fact would represent a large share of the world’s wealth, but if you’re talking about the entire WORLD’S average income than people who chose the second scenario, much like the people who designed this survey, just don’t know the most basic of math skills.
Unless they were really were testing for basic logic skills, and the whole ‘values of wealth’ thing was just obfuscation.
Update:
Saru linked to a paper by the two Harvard professors in question, which contains a survey with various questions making the same test in both monetary and non-monetary terms. It contains one question identical to, and one almost identical to the one listed in the NYT article, except it is phrased exactly the way it should be. The raises the question, was this a mistake by the NYT writer or editor, or did the professors give the reporter a dumbed-down explanation that wasn’t as clear as their actual paper?
I see that Andrew Revkin, who wrote the NYT article, is one of their regular science writers, but even science journalists aren’t supposed to be experts, and aren’t even expected to fully understand the science themselves. He should have had the professors check his article before publication, and they should have caught that mistake.
First survey:
In the questions below, there are two states of the world (State A and State B). You are asked to pick which of the two you would prefer to live in. The questions are independent. For each question, circle either A or B, or if undecided, both A and B. “Others” is the average other person in society.
[…]
Note that prices are what they are currently and prices (the purchasing power of money) are the same in States A and B.
A: Your current yearly income is $50,000; others earn $25,000.
B: Your current yearly income is $100,000; others earn $200,000.Second survey:
Note that prices are what they are currently and prices (the purchasing power of money) are the same in States A and B.A: Your current yearly income is $200,000; others earn $100,000.
B: Your current yearly income is $400,000; others earn 800,000.