Marginal Utility

by Tom Bozzo

Sometimes things remind us just what our internet time-wasters are for.

For example, over on Facebook, where many of my formerly blogging friends are busy not blogging, Xtin (who promises to restart the estimable but intermittently-maintained Xtinpore soon) proposes:

terafuckit (n): Proposed SI unit for not giving a shit equal to one trillion "fuck it"s.

As of this writing:


The only problem, such as it is, with going straight for the terafuckit is that it deprives us of the ability to reminisce about the good old days when megafuckits and gigafuckits represented astonishing levels of not giving a shit.

Xtin's neologism just about perfectly captures the reasons for the relative silence of this blog over the last few months. So it's late 2000 and you're pulling up your Gore/Lieberman yard sign, thinking, "Hey, at least with this asshole Republican in office, I'll be crying my way to the bank," and the next thing you know, neoliberal financial capitalism is a smoking ruin! That tends to make ordinarily bloggable matters, say, the courtesy of SUV drivers towards urban cyclists, measurable in only in mega- if not gigafuckits unless serious bodily harm is involved; hence rather than expending the effort to express righteous indignation on the Internets, one instead builds LEGO Star Wars spaceships with one's kids.

(The fuckit, I assume, is like the util in mainstream economics and not interpersonally comparable, so don't worry if you don't agree that initiating a nuclear war in Civilization IV to be a terafuckit-scale activity — or maybe a hundred gigafuckits before building SDI.)

In the morning, I may wish that I'd posted this to the already-R-rated Total Drek, but well...

Labels: Bigger Places Than This on the Intertubes, Meta

by Tom Bozzo

Having opened and done nothing with the Wordpress shadow of Marginal Utility, I'm crashing the sociology party at Scatterplot with their nicely tweaked template to express annoyance at a misuse of Econ 101 reasoning: the Reverse Mary Poppins incentive plan.

Labels: Bigger Places Than This on the Intertubes, Economics

by Tom Bozzo

1. Molly I. at Whiskey Fire, while filleting inside-the-Beltway media pricks:

Gore looks at America and sees the ugly stepsisters in charge, with their greed, selfishness, and shortsightedness, and indeed, who can blame him [for not running for president]? They do seem to rule the roost these days. Like many others, I have referred to Gore as "my president"--every day, the contrast between his decent concern for genuine issues and the criminal cabal determined to bring down not only America, but the planet, is more striking.

2. Maynard at Creative Destruction:

[I]f you believe Romney believes that Jesus and Satan are brothers, then he must be a crazy cultist, because the truth of course is that Satan is a fallen angel while Jesus is the son of God and a virgin girl. How about if I call you all crazy cultists because you believe in angels and devils and pregnant virgins? How about if I say I don't care if you're a crazy cultist one way or the other - just know something about war and taxes and health care and global warming, and you've got my vote.

3. Jon Swift, after reminding me why I can only be thankful that Peter Angelos and Bud Selig beat the love of the game out of me years ago:

There is already a word for people like the baseball players who refuse to take steroids, people who would rather play by the rules than win, people who are so afraid of what journalists might say about them that they aren't willing to take any risks. They are called Democrats.

Labels: Bigger Places Than This on the Intertubes, Random Bullets

by Tom Bozzo

Ritholtz:

How's this for ironic: Citibank has essentially become a sub-prime borrower -- only without the advantages of teaser rates!

Labels: Bigger Places Than This on the Intertubes, High Finance

by Tom Bozzo

• I got my introduction to Facebook's Beacon "feature" by surprise — I saw an update in my feed to the effect that I'd purchased [shoes for the boy] from [shoe-selling site]. "Oh, really?" I thought. The Beacon technology apparently lets Suzanne's online shopping feed to my Facebook profile.
• In one sense, that's not bad for [shoe-selling site] since Suzanne is a lot cooler than I am.
• However, online advertising that works on the principle of, "Hey, that cool Jimbo Jones smokes Laramie Jrs., maybe I should too!" jumps the online advertising shark. Suzanne just thinks it's freaky.
• Part of what makes it acceptable for the Googleborg to read my (home) email is that it isn't very intelligent and doesn't broadcast the results of its distillations to my entire contacts list.
• Meanwhile, Facebook's advertising seems otherwise to be badly under-targeted. Ads asking whether I'm sick of the dating scene are missing a key piece of information in my profile (i.e., "married"). Ditto the "Make $1000/day from home!!1!" ads.
  
• Fortunately, a bunch of my best blog pals are already on, since otherwise some combination of the Facebook-Fogey Taper and Peak Facebook are conspiring to keep the number of people on the site I actually know (or knew) very low. The rate of new registrations is detectable for groups as large as my college graduating class (~3,500) but not for my high school class (~120).
• Making up for the latter deficiency using Teh Google yielded some amusing news not in the alumni newsletter. One former friend sued his law school in part over the amount of text he was able to type in computer-based timed exams. Could the expected value of the remedy be worth the cost of sending the signal?!
  
• It also seems a little fogeyish that Scrabulous is coming across as the killer Facebook app.
• Adding friends who are pseudonymous in blog-world in an environment where use of real names is the norm (if an irregularly enforced norm) provides some new vistas of compromise of personally-identifying information. The question du jour is, what's the etiquette for adding pseudonymous bloggers who are, in some sense, blog-pals but who aren't "out" and whose identities you triangulate from other connections?

Labels: Bigger Places Than This on the Intertubes, social networks

by Ken Houghton

It's the Giving Season, and the Chic Gift of the Year should be One Laptop Per Child.

For T-Mobile subscribers (which apparently doesn't include people in the Madison area), or those who frequent Starbuck's (which probably does), not only can you feel good and get a machine that doesn't result in the BSoD, but you also get one year of free T-Mobile HotSpot access.

Labels: Bigger Places Than This on the Intertubes, charity, LDC, mobiletelephony, technology

by Tom Bozzo

I'm probably the last person to have noticed, but MapMyRide is a pretty cool Google Maps-based tool, in part in that its point-and-click route creation is not much more time consuming than bashing out a text description of a ride in an e-mail.

Here's yesterday's after-work ride with my co-workers.



Not that it's perfect — Google Maps isn't Madison bike path-aware, which limits the usefulness of a street-following feature. But it's free-as-in-beer!

And I'm not sure what crazy person designated N. Sherman and Aberg Avenues on the northeast side as bike routes. (Yet the accordingly deserted Starkweather Creek path has lighting and the heavily trafficked Southwest Path doesn't. Go figure.)

Labels: Bigger Places Than This on the Intertubes, cycling

by Tom Bozzo

1. Nicholas Beaudrot (of), at Ezra Klein's:

[N]number of Republicans voting for the Ledbetter Fair Pay Act: TWO (Chris Shays (R-CT) and Don Young (R-AK)).

I certainly wouldn't have expected all Republican Congresswomen to vote for the bill, but you have to believe that at least some of them had experienced gender bias in their lives... Or, at the very least, that they would fear organized opposition from even the moderate women's groups that support the bill. Or if not women's groups, maybe AARP... Does the Republican party really think it is a good idea to turn "equal pay for equal work" into a partisan issue and come out against it? Have their party strategists simply lost their minds?

That's building a bridge to the 19th Century for you. As to the second question — well, duh!


2. Mithras is very shrill:

There are thousands of bridges in this country that are substandard and in need of repair or replacement. But the funds needed to do so are not available because rightwing politicians would rather watch our interstates collapse than raise the necessary tax revenue. Republicans don't do infrastructure anymore - especially when fixing that infrastructure would involve high-paying jobs for working people.

Officials say "here's no indication of a nexus to terrorism." No? I thought terrorism was the killing of civilians for political ends.

Just remember, future George Mason U. econ faculty members, there is an optimal level of negligence!

Labels: Bigger Places Than This on the Intertubes, infrastructure, Politics

by Tom Bozzo

Elmo is scared. Very, very scared.

Labels: Bigger Places Than This on the Intertubes