Precocious

From the Wall Street Journal:

A 23-year-old Russian man accused by U.S. authorities of generating nearly a third of the spam e-mails worldwide is expected to be arraigned Friday in a Milwaukee Court.

The quotation is from the article in the print edition, which goes on to say that he used 509,000 infected computers to send as much as 10 billion spam e-mails a day that sold items including fake Rolex watches and counterfeit Viagra.

I am so impressed that I cannot get too angry, even though his operation has cost me wasted time deleting unwanted e-mail messages. At 23 I was unable to earn a living, so I went to graduate school.

Dirty jobs

Found from a link on a teaching-economics mail list, an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education about life as a professional paper writer:

I've written toward a master's degree in cognitive psychology, a Ph.D. in sociology, and a handful of postgraduate credits in international diplomacy. I've worked on bachelor's degrees in hospitality, business administration, and accounting. I've written for courses in history, cinema, labor relations, pharmacology, theology, sports management, maritime security, airline services, sustainability, municipal budgeting, marketing, philosophy, ethics, Eastern religion, postmodern architecture, anthropology, literature, and public administration. I've attended three dozen online universities. I've completed 12 graduate theses of 50 pages or more. All for someone else.
....
From my experience, three demographic groups seek out my services: the English-as-second-language student; the hopelessly deficient student; and the lazy rich kid.
....
...it's hard to determine which course of study is most infested with cheating. But I'd say education is the worst.

The attitude of the students that he works for, who are not interested in learning but only in being credentialed, is a major reason that I was happy to retire from academia this year. That, and the denial of the problem that was pervasive among the faculty.

Addendum: One of the contributors to the e-mail list on which I found this believes that this article is fiction. He argues that it seems too much designed to cater to the prejudices of the readership of the Chronicle--such as emphasizing writing papers for seminarians about ethics. It certainly is possible that it is fiction. With anonymous sources is that you cannot check them.

Spirituality

From Instapundit:

YOUNG VOTERS WANT SPIRITUALITY, BUT NOT NECESSARILY RELIGION. Well, that’s because religion often tells you to do things you don’t want to do, or to refrain from doing things you want to do, while spirituality is usually more . . . flexible.

Is fairness a social construct?

Economists have used the ultimatum game to discuss fairness. In this game one player splits a sum of money and the other player either accepts or rejects the split. If the second party rejects the split, neither party gets anything. Many people in the role of the second player will reject splits that they consider unfair to punish the first player even though they suffer a loss as a result.

Joseph Henrich in "Does Culture Matter in Economic Behavior? Ultimatum Game Bargaining Among the Machiguenga of the Peruvian Amazon" (American Economic Review, Sept 2000 pp 973-979; pdf here) found that a pre-industrial group in the Amazon basin did not play the game in the same way most groups in the U.S. play the game.

Machiguenga proposers seem to possess little or no sense of obligation to provide an equal share to responders, and responders had little or no expectation of receiving an equal share nor any desire to punish unequal divisions. The modal offer of 15 percent seemed quite “fair” to most Machiguenga.
This evidence generates at least three important questions: (1) Where do people get their rules, expectations, or notions of fairness from? (2) Why do these rules, expectations, and notions seem to vary among groups of people? and (3) How much can these varying rules, expectations, and notions affect real economic behavior? (p 978)

This result raises the question of whether fairness is socially constructed. If it is, why should we pay attention to it?

An IRS horror story

From the Seattle Times:

"I asked the IRS lady straight upfront — 'I don't have anything, why are you auditing me?' " Porcaro recalled. "I said, 'Why me, when I don't own a home, a business, a car?' "
The answer stunned both Porcaro and the private tax specialist her dad had gotten to help her.
"They showed us a spreadsheet of incomes in the Seattle area," says Dante Driver, an accountant at Seattle's G.A. Michael and Co. "The auditor said, 'You made eighteen thousand, and our data show a family of three needs at least thirty-six thousand to get by in Seattle."
"They thought she must have unreported income. That she was hiding something. Basically they were auditing her for not making enough money."
Seriously? An estimated 60,000 people in Seattle live below the poverty line — meaning they make $11,000 or less for an individual or $22,000 for a family of four. Does the IRS red-flag them for scrutiny, simply because they're poor?
....
Driver quickly determined the IRS was wrong in how it was interpreting the tax laws. He sent in the necessary code citations and hoped that would be the end of it.
Instead, the IRS responded by launching an audit of Rachel's parents.
"I was floored," says Rob Porcaro, 59. "I get audited now and then in my business, so I've been through it before. But to have them go after me because of my daughter, well, I've never heard of anything like it."

A big loser

The Wall Street Journal has an article about a man who lost over $100 million in Las Vegas.

During a year-long gambling binge at the Caesars Palace and Rio casinos in 2007, Terrance Watanabe managed to lose nearly $127 million.

Should we feel sorry for him?  Las Vegas exists to separate fools from their money. "The money you bring to Las Vegas stays in Las Vegas."

What do want to be when you grow up?

From Carpe Diem.

Computers and ACORN

From Shannon Love at Chicagoboyz:"

Back when I did computer tech support, we had a rule of thumb for evaluating the significance of reports of unusual and previously unreported failures .

• One report of a failure is a fluke.
• Two reports of a failure is a coincidence. It might just be two users making the same error.
• Three reports indicates a pattern of failure that arises from the hardware or software itself.

She then applies that principle to the ACORN videos.

Aborting the Old

Peter Hitchens says it is only a matter of time until we start killing the old because they are a burden:

These hard cases and emotional scenes are the equivalent of the old argument for abortion, that if you didn’t fully legalise it people would go to dangerous amateurs and die horribly.

....

And as soon as it was replaced by a more liberal law, the present annual massacre began, and continued to grow. The same will happen to the old and unwanted. It will start with a few dozen annual trips to Zurich, urged on by ‘compassionate’ relatives and complaisant doctors. It will end with our hospitals switching on the morphine pump earlier and earlier.

Any one who does not understand that a "right" to die will quickly become an obligation to die has his head in the sand.

The unintended consequences of reform

In all the posting done about Governor Palin's resignation, few have noted the irony that she was a victim of her own ethics reform measure. A post from HotAir makes the point better than I could:

A legal device like Alaska’s drive-thru ethical complaint system will always do more damage in the hands of political operations, than good in the hands of well-meaning individual citizens. Organized groups with agendas to push have abundant time, energy, and discipline to exploit such mechanisms. If the Alaskan system was adopted in the fabulously corrupt political climate of Chicago, the likely result would be the elimination of the last few reasonably honest politicians, who would be buried under a flood of bogus ethics complaints mass-produced at the local union halls. The lovely dream of the lone citizen crusader, using his lunch hour to file a complaint against an untouchable crook in high office, fades into the ugly reality of groups like ACORN, issuing target lists to their foot soldiers.

Sarah Palin supported the ethics reforms that were used to mummify her in legal paperwork. John McCain was hamstrung by the elaborate campaign finance laws he helped design, even as his opponent cheerfully ignored them, disabling minimal security from his campaign donation website to accommodate a flood of shadowy cash.

Inequality

Last week the President took his wife on to a Broadway play, flying three planes from Washington to New York, taking a helicopter to Manhattan, and then shutting down traffic as he traveled by car to the theater. It was the kind of outing that even a very rich person would find it difficult to match.

Many of the Left are deeply concerned by the inequality that a market society generates. They seem to be unconcerned by the inequality that democracy, or any other form of government, generates. However, the inequality generated by the political system is greater than the inequality generated by the market. Bill Gates can do a lot of things that I cannot do. But what can he do that the President cannot do? Or senators and congressmen? A rich person can live luxuriously with a huge house, a private jet plane, and a big yacht. Those with political power can live luxuriously not because they personally own things but because they control publicly-owned resources, as the Obamas' trip to New York demonstrates. The rich can give away vast sums of money, but the amounts of money that those with political power can dispense is far greater. Those with political power can do most of the things that those with great wealth can do, and they can also do a variety of things that no amount of wealth allows. No rich person can tax others, or sentence them to jail or to death, or decree what behavior is permissible and what behavior is impermissible. Wealth requires the voluntary cooperation of others to be effective, whereas political power can rely on force and coercion.

Proposals to limit the inequality of the market almost always increase the role of political power, and thus increase the inequality due to the political structure. I do not understand why those who are so concerned with income or wealth inequality are not equally concerned about the inequality of power that is inherent in the political structure. (I also do not understand why they are not concerned about the inequality due to health, family, and natural ability, which also can dwarf income or wealth inequality.) Maybe it is because the political-caused inequality is not easily measured, whereas measuring and comparing different levels of income and wealth is easy.

Intended but not wanted

A blog post that uses an analogy to reflect on the idea that babies are the natural result of the baby-making act, and the moral implications of that idea for the defense of abortion.

Suppose that my friend and I play this game of American Roulette once a year, on one of our birthdays. Now suppose that my friend's number comes up, and I shoot him through the head. By law, and by the moral philosophy that undergirds the law, I do not get to plead that I did not intend his death. Perhaps I did not want him to die, but I certainly did intend the chance that he would die: I intentionally used a weapon against him, a weapon whose purpose it is to kill, and I used it in a way that would ensure his death, if the right chamber came up. It would be up to judge and jury to assess the correct punishment in my case, but as a matter of fact I am a murderer.

Except in the case of rape, there are no "unintended pregnancies," none. There are plenty of women who do not want to be pregnant, and plenty of men who do not want them to be pregnant, but in all those cases the pregnancies are the results of intentional actions of a sort that have pregnancy as their perfectly natural and perfectly predictable consequence. Contraception does not change the nature of the act itself; indeed, it makes the actors more keenly aware that what they are doing is the sort of thing that makes babies, since otherwise they would not go so far out of their way (donning or inserting into the body uncomfortable devices, or flooding the system with pregnancy-mimicking hormones) to thwart the body's natural functions. The "problem" in the case of Sexual Roulette is not that the body fails, but that it succeeds.

It is from a blog I had not seen before.

Same story?

From The Wall Street Journal:

Scientists have reprogrammed mature skin cells into an embryonic-like state by using proteins instead of genes, a key advance aimed at overcoming safety concerns in one of the hottest areas of biological research.

But because the cell extraction destroys the embryo, the technique has ignited much ethical controversy.

From dbtechno.com:

Scientists in the U.S. have made history as they have found a brand new, safer way to create embryonic stem cells.

There has been a great debate over the years due to safety concerns in regards to the development of embryonic stem cells, seen by many as the future of medicine.

What they have found is that by taking the cells and putting them in this protein solution, they can create their own embryonic stem cells which can be used effectively.

Is there any wonder why the public has no clue as to what the whole stem-cell debate is about?

(The safer issue--the new technique reprograms the cells using four proteins rather than four genes introduced with a virus.)

Update: Here is getreligion.org critiquing the story.

Wrong on many levels

The story here is wrong on many levels--so many I do not know where to begin to unravel it.

Surrogates

What happens if surrogate mothers stop being paid?

If you stop paying your surrogate, she needs to quit and find another job, just like any other worker. But surrogacy isn't like any other job. The only way to quit a pregnancy is to abort it.

If you buy into the pro-choice arguments, why isn't it just like any other work?

"We have declared war on work."

I found a great Mike Rowe video over at The Anchoress, who in turn got it from someone else. It is worth watching the whole 20 minutes. Rowe admits, "I got it wrong about a lot of things."

Mob rule

From Commentary's Contentions, a link to a letter in the New York Times.

Many of the employees have, in the past six months, turned down job offers from more stable employers, based on A.I.G.’s assurances that the contracts would be honored. They are now angry about having been misled by A.I.G.’s promises and are not inclined to return the money as a favor to you.

The only real motivation that anyone at A.I.G.-F.P. now has is fear. Mr. Cuomo has threatened to “name and shame,” and his counterpart in Connecticut, Richard Blumenthal, has made similar threats — even though attorneys general are supposed to stand for due process, to conduct trials in courts and not the press.

Sexual liberation

In the era of sexual liberation, not everything is permitted. The question remains, why are some things OK and others are not? What is the underlying logic of it all?

(I can understand the traditional moral arguments against bestiality. One of the first persons executed in Plymouth Colony was convicted of taking liberties with the livestock, which strikes me as extreme, but I understand the position. However, in the new morality in which it is illegal to discriminate against people based on sexual preference, aren't bestiality laws a form of discrimination against some with a particular sexual preference? Why should the right of a goat to its virginity outweigh the rights of a pervert a person with a "special" sexual orientation or need? I do not understand the logic of the animal rights people, but it seems to me that they are a lot like the Puritans.)

The article also has a funny bit about a state legislator who did not know what animal husbandry was.

Malaria personalized

Iowahawk, who usually has political satire, makes a personal connection between malaria and DDT.

Bank or cracker box?

A few days ago a story hit the wires about someone who found $10000 in a box of crackers. It turned out that an elderly woman had put the money there, and then in a mix up somehow the crackers had been returned to the store and put back on the shelves. The line that struck me was this:

The Lake Forest woman, whose identity was not released, had lost faith in her bank and decided the box would be a safer place for the money.

Everyone knows that a box of crackers is a much safer place to keep money than in a bank, right?

The story reminds me of another incident, but one that did not have a happy ending. In the little town that I called home half a century ago, there was an poor old lady noted for her holiness. After we moved away, she became ill and had to go to the hospital. Her fellow parishioners thought they could do a good deed by cleaning out her tiny house and buying her a new bed, which they did. When she came home, she got very agitated when she saw what they had done. It took a while for the do-gooders to come to the conclusion that the little old lady had put her life savings in the old mattress which they had burned.