For example: house prices up is considered good news but inflation is considered bad news. A strong dollar is considered good news but it’s also an unfavorable exchange rate, which is bad news. When facebook shares go down, that’s bad news, but if they automatically go up, that means they were underpriced which doesn’t seem so good either. Pundits are torn between rooting for the euro to fail (which means our team (the U.S.) is better than Europe (their team)) and rooting for it to survive (because a collapse in Europe is bad news for the U.S. economy). China’s economy doing well is bad news—but if their economy slips, that’s bad news too
Welfare recipients are now instructed in how to improve their attitudes and demeanor so as to be more employable. In Michigan, Florida, Georgia, and Utah, they are subject to drug testing as a condition of their benefits. Bills are now before 23 state legislatures that would require testing for people who apply not just for welfare but also in some cases for food stamps, public housing, job training, and even some home heating assistance.
Although few of its left-wing supporters or right-wing detractors know it, our welfare state represents the unity of their cultural values. It is the dream of Republicans, justified by the ideas of a socialist and enacted by armies of progressive do-gooders, of eliminating not just “the other America” but any other America.
— Thaddeus Russell via Scott Sumner
There’s a reason that Bridezillas is a show and there’s nothing called Reasonably Well-Planned Wedding Enjoyed by All. Americans don’t want excellence, and we certainly don’t want long-term sustained excellence. We want our dynasties to come with a side order of drama, controversy, and bad behavior. We want anti-heroes and the occasional impulsive retirement to pursue a baseball career. We want to watch a train wreck and then tut-tut in a smug self-satisfied way about the irresponsibility of the people who caused it. We want to maintain our high ideals, without needing to walk the walk. Nobody can hate the Spurs, so nobody wants to love them. It’s more comfortable for everyone if we can just pretend they don’t exist.
The reason for this is the Nagorno-Karabakh war, a conflict between the two countries which took place immediately after the collapse of the Soviet Union, and which has been at a shaky ceasefire since 1994. While Armenia has on occasion dispensed a few points in the direction of Azerbaijan, the reverse has never occurred, and with good reason. In 2009, it was reported that the 43 Azerbaijanis who texted in votes for Armenia in that year’s contest were summoned to the National Security Ministry to explain their actions.
When Robert Jordan [in For Whom The Bell Tolls] is overcome with love for a woman during the Spanish Civil War, he fears that they will never experience what ordinary people do: “Not time, not happiness, not fun, not children, not a house, not a bathroom, not a clean pair of pajamas, not the morning paper, not to wake up together, not to wake and know she’s there and that you’re not alone. No. None of that.”
As long as Morgan was fighting in the Escambray, there could be no past or future—only the present. “We could never have peace,” Rodríguez says. “From the beginning, I had this terrible feeling that things would not end well.”
In basketball, timeouts are believed to reverse the momentum of a game. However, here we show timeouts have no significant effect on the final outcomes of games. Moreover, we find that the timeout factor only appears to reinforce the game of dominant teams, meaning that only the most successful teams can find any positive benefit. We find no association with team payrolls, suggesting that richer teams are not particularly better at capitalizing on timeouts.
— Can Timeouts Change the Outcome of Basketball Games? - Saavedra et al
via dfdeshom, via abbyjean, via Marginal Revolution
Although, from the comments at MR:
They essentially create a placebo by randomly changing the time of a timeout within a given quarter. So if there were 3 timeouts in a quarter, they compare the actual change in score (from the timeout to either the next timeout or end of quarter) to the fake change in score generated by randomly changing the time of the timeout, but preserving the number of timeouts per quarter.They don’t do any robustness, discuss the pros or cons of their approach. If an undergrad did this, they’d get a B.
If you have to lie to justify being a war criminal, you have to lie thoroughly. And you have to destroy or amend any evidence to the contrary. That’s what Rodriguez has been doing, by destroying the tapes and changing the factual record. It’s called obstruction of justice. It’s also a crime.
But we live in a republic where the CIA is not considered governed by the rule of law - an alarming situation which has been legitimized by president Obama. In that sense, the CIA is a state unto itself.
— The Lies Of Jose Rodriguez - Andrew Sullivan
End the CIA.
all the little bits of complexity, all those cases where indecision caused one option that probably wasn’t even needed in the first place to be replaced by two options, all those bad choices that were never remedied for fear of someone somewhere having to change a line of code…they slowly accreted until it all got out of control, and we got comfortable with systems that were impossible to understand.
We did this. We who claim to value simplicity are the guilty party. See, all those little design decisions actually matter, and there were places where we could have stopped and said “no, don’t do this.” And even if we were lazy and didn’t do the right thing when changes were easy, before there were thousands of users, we still could have gone back and fixed things later. But we didn’t.
