Quotulatiousness

March 24, 2013

Maclean’s agrees that Canada doesn’t need the UN’s flattery

Filed under: Cancon, Economics, Education — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 10:44

Canada recently dropped out of the top ten in a UN beauty contest that we once “won” seven years in a row. At the time, Canadian politicians used that accolade as a regular talking point. Now, a bit to my surprise, the media hasn’t been using the “loss” as a stick to incessantly beat the government with. How unexpectedly mature of them:

Canadians with a penchant for lists will recall that in 1994 we began a record stint of seven straight years atop the United Nations Human Development Index. Meant to provide an international comparison of living standards, our dominance on this global leader board was seen as tangible proof Canada was the best country in the world. The annual report regularly garnered substantial media attention and sparked plenty of national braggadocio. Prime minister Jean Chrétien, in particular, made it a frequent talking point.

No longer. We haven’t topped the rankings since 2000. Current leader Norway now boasts more first-place finishes than we do. (Although our Nordic friends haven’t yet won seven in a row.) In fact this year marks the first time Canada has failed to place in the top 10. The most recent edition, released last week, has us at a humbling 11th — a whisker above South Korea. Ireland beat us.

[. . .]

In 1992 the Standard & Poor’s credit rating agency stripped Canada’s federal foreign debt of its coveted AAA rating, thanks to an endless stream of government deficits. In January 1995 the Wall Street Journal measured Canada for a barrel suit, declaring us to be “an honorary member of the Third World” in its now-legendary “Bankrupt Canada” editorial. Our debt-to-GDP ratio hit a peak of 68 per cent that year. The loonie was worth about US$0.72, and would bottom out at US$0.62 before it was done falling.

Since then, of course, Canada’s financial turnaround has become a totem for countries around the world struggling with the after-effects of the Great Recession. Government finances are in better shape than most and our dollar at par. Canada’s reliance on natural resources, once considered a retrograde habit, has played a large role in allowing our economy to weather the storm. Our banking system is an international paragon of virtue; we’re even exporting central bankers. Plus Canada has adopted a more self-confident stance on foreign policy, replacing our old reputation as a meek and mild peacekeeper with a more authoritative voice.

The domestic economy of Cyprus is slowing to a stop

Filed under: Economics, Europe — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:09

In the Telegraph, Colin Freeman looks at how the banking crisis is impacting ordinary Cypriots and retired EU citizens in Cyprus:

Last weekend, the small Mediterranean island was plunged into the epicentre of the eurozone crisis when Brussels finance chiefs, led by Germany, demanded a levy of up to ten per cent of savers’ deposits in return for a 10bn euro bail-out of the country’s ailing banks. The move left many of Cyprus’s 60,000-strong British community facing heavy losses on retirement nest eggs — and as the week rolled on, that looked like being just the least of their worries.

On Thursday, unhappy at the Cypriot parliament’s rejection of the deal, Europe’s Central Bank then threatened to cut financial life support for the island altogether, a move that would have led to its banking sector collapsing, and savers losing not just a percentage of their money, but all of it. It was only thanks to a last-minute agreement hammered out on Friday night, which is expected to restructure the country’s banks and restrict the levy to deposits of more than 100,000 euros, that all-out chaos was averted. For now, anyway.

[. . .]

Since last weekend, when all of Cyprus’s banks were shut to stop a run on withdrawals, work has ground to a halt, as the repair man has been unable to buy in the materials he needs from suppliers, who are all now demanding cash. The job symbolises the malaise of the wider Cypriot economy, built on shaky foundations, and now in a state of paralysis, with thousands of shops, businesses and restaurants unable to operate properly because of the financial uncertainty.

“None of my food and drink suppliers are taking bank payments any more,” said Yiota Vrasida, 43, who owns a café in the winding streets of the capital, Nicosia. “We can keep going until this weekend, but that is about it.”

[. . .]

“Nobody will want to leave so much as 10 euros in any Cypriot bank any more,” said Dino Karambalis, 49, an IT worker, standing at the end of a 30-people-long queue at the Laiki Bank, where he had 90,000 euros in savings. “They say this levy is only for Cyprus, but why should anyone believe that? This is undermining confidence in the euro as a whole, and in the whole EU project itself. I was pro-European before, but not now.”

This weekend, the Cypriot parliament sought to reassure smaller savers, saying those with less than 100,000 euros would face at most a levy of less than one percent. State television also talked of a one-time charge of up to 25 percent on savings of over 100,000 euros held at the Bank of Cyprus. With that in mind, capital controls will be imposed to stop a run on the banks when they reopen next week.

But whatever new measures come in, some damage has already been done by declaring savers’ accounts to be fair game in the first place. Britain’s Business Secretary, Vince Cable, warned on Friday that it could lead Northern Rock-style runs on banks all over the eurozone in future.

Humans are very good at spotting patterns … even when they aren’t really there

Filed under: Environment, Health, Media, USA — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 00:01

In Slate, George Johnson explains why the human ability to detect patterns can sometimes work against us:

Lay a chessboard on a table. Then grab a handful of rice and let the grains fall and scatter where they may. They won’t spread out uniformly with the same number occupying each square. Instead there will be clusters. Now suppose that the chessboard is a map of the United States and the grains are cases of cancer.

Each year about 1.6 million cases of cancer are diagnosed in the United States, and epidemiologists regularly hear from people worried that their town has been plagued with an unusually large visitation. Time after time, the clusters have turned out to be statistical illusions — artifacts of chance.

The Erin Brockovich incident, one of the most famous, is among the many that have been debunked. Hexavalent chromium in the water supply of a small California town was blamed for causing cancer, resulting in a $333 million legal settlement and a movie starring Julia Roberts. But an epidemiological study ultimately showed that the cancer rate was no greater than that of the general population. The rate was actually slightly less.

March 23, 2013

How will the new crown of the helmet rule impact Adrian Peterson?

Filed under: Football — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 10:14

The NFL passed a new rule to penalize hits delivered by ball carriers with the crown of the helmet. Scott Kacsmar at ColdHardFootballFacts.com crunches the numbers from last season to see how much the new rule would have changed Adrian Peterson’s hard-charging ways if it had been in force for that year:

The NFL’s rushing king, Adrian Peterson, is known for his physical running style. If the reigning MVP is going to lose some of his greatness, then that could be a major problem for the league.

Peterson’s recovery story was a big one for the NFL as he is one of the most popular players. You do not hamper your superstars.

That is why we went to the video to study Peterson’s 2011 and 2012 seasons – a total of 556 carries including the playoffs – for just his rushing attempts. Any play is a potential flag, though we wanted to focus on the running game.

At its absolute worst, the Crown Rule would have impacted 1.98 percent of Peterson’s runs the last two years.

Have you breathed a sigh of relief yet? You will after we show you the 11 plays.

[. . .]

Recall how the argument for defenders getting flagged in the same situation was that the offensive player would lower their head, leaving them almost no time to react. No matter which side you play on, it is common for players to get low as they brace for impact.

This could become the trickiest part of enforcing the rule. In several of the Peterson runs, you can see the defender leading with his crown as well. This rule can even the playing field, though how many of these plays will become runs for nothing as offsetting penalties are called?

Again, the Crown Rule should not be a game-changer as long as it is called on only the most blatant of plays. It may take away some fun, physical plays, but it will save the NFL’s ass down the road from lawsuits.

Adrian Peterson is still going to run like a Greek God, though he just may have to spare a mere mortal’s life (like William Gay) the next time he’s in the open field.

“Having it all” versus “being happy”

Filed under: Business, Media — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:32

In the Globe and Mail, Margaret Wente talks about the tension many women feel in trying to lead full lives, both professionally and personally:

Sheryl Sandberg, the billionaire COO of Facebook, is everywhere these days. Her new book, Lean In, is a smart, strategic guide for women who want to succeed. Be more assertive, conquer your fear, manage your guilt, don’t sabotage yourself.

All good advice, in my view. But these days, a lot of smart, highly educated thirtysomething women are having an entirely different conversation. They’re not talking about leaning in. They’re talking about leaning back.

[. . .]

Given the realities of the modern workplace, the mystery isn’t why there aren’t more women at the top but why so many want to get there. “To reject a high-flying career … is not to reject aspiration,” Judith Shulevitz writes in The New Republic. “It is to refuse to succumb to a kind of madness.”

Most women, if they have the choice, are happy to trade long hours and money for flexibility and control. This explains why nearly a quarter of women who have MBAs and children have dropped out of the work force 15 years after graduation, according to a U.S. study. When these findings were released, they produced much hand-wringing about the failed promise of feminism and lingering discrimination in the workplace. But what they really reflect is women’s stronger preference for a balanced life.

High-achieving younger women don’t think this is going to happen to them. It takes them by surprise. They get an MBA or law degree, a demanding job and an equal-opportunity husband. And then they have a baby and – wham. As one young mother in her early 30s puts it, “I had no idea I’d be so crazy about my child.”

I suspect a lot of the frustration young women encounter is that they’ve been lead to expect that they can cope with both a full-time, active, fulfilling career and raising a child simultaneously. The reality is that for most women, it’s a binary choice: you get either the job or the family, but not both. When this realization hits home, it can feel like a betrayal.

Cherie Piper hangs up the skates

Filed under: Cancon, Sports — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 08:56

It might seem a little odd for me to post an item about a hockey player retiring — given the overall lack of hockey coverage you might find on the blog — but we actually have a connection here: Cherie is Elizabeth’s god-daughter.

One of Scarborough’s most decorated Olympians is set to call it a career.

Cherie Piper, an Albert Campbell Collegiate grad who helped Canada win three Olympic gold medals in women’s hockey, announced her retirement from competitive hockey prior to the Canadian Women’s Hockey League (CWHL) regular season finale which her longtime club team, the Brampton Thunder, won 7-0 over the Toronto Furies.

[. . .]

Her tally for the 2010 Vancouver Olympics was 10 points (five goals, five assists) in five games — fifth on the team.

At the 2006 Turin Olympics, her seven goals and eights assists was good enough for second place amongst all point-getters and tied for tops for goals.

She is in the top-10 all-time scorers for the Canadian women’s team.


Photo by Julie Jacobson

Human Achievement Hour 2013

Filed under: Economics, Environment, Liberty, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 00:01

Oh, right. It’s once again time for the Gaia-worshippers to do an hour’s penance for the crime of being alive in an industrialized society. The Competitive Enterprise Institute proposes a different way of using that hour:

On Saturday, March 23 at 8:30pm (local time), some people, businesses and governments around the world will choose to sit in the dark for one hour as a symbolic gesture to take action against climate change. The organizers of Earth Hour say that they [no] longer expect energy use to actually drop during the hour, but instead see it as a way for people to show their commitment to reducing energy use and taking action beyond the hour.

It’s absolutely every person’s right to decide if they want to conserve energy for whatever reason; they are free to sit in the dark as long as they want. However, it should not be their right to impose their beliefs or opinions on others. And that is what is at the heart of the environmentalist movement. While many participants in Earth Hour sincerely want a cleaner environment — a desire most of us share — the environmentalist movement whether implicitly or explicitly seeks to clamp down on human progress by reducing energy consumption whether through regulation and taxation. They want to make fossil fuels, which they see as dirty, more expensive to encourage the use of renewable “greener” energies.

Despite any good intentions, the ultimate result of environmentalist policies is not a healthier, cleaner environment. Instead we will see a population that is sicker and poorer. The only way we achieve technology that is “greener” is by building on older “dirtier” technology. As we make it harder and more expensive for those in the business of creating new technologies, all we do is slow progress and make it that much longer to reach more environmentally friendly solutions.

March 22, 2013

This week in Guild Wars 2

Filed under: Gaming — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 11:53

My weekly Guild Wars 2 community round-up at GuildMag is now online. Lots of anticipation for the big March WvW update, a minor armour aesthetics issue on my mesmer, and the usual assortment of blog posts, videos, podcasts, and fan fiction from around the GW2 community.

Nick Gillespie on Libertarianism

Filed under: Liberty, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:24

Katy Bachelder interviews Reason‘s Nick Gillespie:

What do you see as the primary policy goal of libertarianism?

Things that move us toward decentralization of power. The way I used to talk about it when Windows was still a dominant operating system is that the way a computer operates, what you want is an operating system that allows as many different apps to run at the same time without crashing the system. That’s what classical liberalism really does.

How do you think libertarianism as a third party helps achieve those goals?

I’m not particularly interested in electoral politics. Where I think public choice economics is hugely important is what it asks is not simply what the rhetoric of people is, but what are the outcome of their actions. In that way, it gets to what actually matters as opposed to people sprinkling magic words. It’s amazing how much slack people will give if you say the right words as you’re repressing them.

Libertarianism is a pre-political attitude. It can inform you if you’re in the Republican Party or the Democratic Party or the Libertarian Party. It can express itself in a lot of different ways, like through Jimmy Carter, who is the great deregulator of the American economy, not Ronald Reagan. He deregulated interstate railroads, trucking, airlines. That all happened under Jimmy Carter and he was abetted in it by people like Milton Friedman. Libertarianism is an impulse, not a set of beads on a string.

[. . .]

Hillary Clinton just endorsed gay marriage. What do you think is the future for that issue?

I think gay marriage is over as an issue. When you look at public opinion polls about gay issues, the moral approbation toward the issue has faded. The larger questions are: what is the connection between the state and individual choices? It’s as big of a deal as it is because the state is involved in bestowing certain benefits such as tax incentives. I think what we’re starting to see is that if you want to live in a society that is truly pluralistic and tolerant, and that doesn’t mean everyone agrees every lifestyle is morally valid, but just tolerant, then we have to start shrinking the scope and the size of the state. The state should recognize all people as equal.

QotD: Battening down the (free speech) hatches

Filed under: Britain, Law, Liberty, Media, Quotations — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:42

I have to confess, as an ignorant inhabitant of North America, that I don’t really understand the current press scandal in the U.K., and I was hoping that perhaps someone could enlighten me.

As I understand it, a number of members of the press committed crimes in the course of gathering material for stories — that is, they committed acts that were already illegal, and which already carried substantial penalties.

It would therefore seem that preventing such acts in the future would require nothing more than diligently enforcing existing law.

I’m therefore curious as to what purpose is articulated for ending freedom of expression in the U.K.

Is it claimed that the laws were not being enforced before on the powerful? Then surely the new restrictions on freedom will be selectively enforced as well, with only the weak being stifled. (That is, of course, universal — the powerful never need permission to do anything. Freedom is a protection for the weak, the strong need no protection.)

Is it claimed that performing criminal acts was somehow insufficiently illegal? Is it claimed that the existing laws against criminal conspiracies are not already broad, vague and all-encompassing?

Perry Metzger, “Doubly-illegal acts”, Samizdata, 2013-03-21

Explaining the title of this post:

Daffy Duck: “Batten down the hatches!”
Bugs: “We did batten ’em down!”
Daffy: “Well, batten ’em down again, we’ll teach those hatches!”

The plight of the NDP in their ancestral homeland

Filed under: Cancon, Politics — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 08:44

Colby Cosh looks at the long road back for Saskatchewan’s NDP, which bestrode the province like a Colossus for a political eternity but is now a peripheral player:

These are hard times for the New Democratic Party in Saskatchewan — the party’s ancestral wellspring, the mecca it faces at prayer. Not so long ago, the NDP’s provincial leader was typically, by virtue of his office, the second-most prominent figure in the movement nationwide. Typically, that is, when he wasn’t in first place. And the New Democrats had the kind of sweet corner on Saskatchewan’s legislature that the Liberals had on the Dominion’s. From 1942 to 2009, every leader of the provincial party also served as premier at least once.

But the winner of the Saskatchewan NDP’s March 9 leadership tilt, Cam Broten, takes charge with the benefits and the burdens of low expectations. Broten now commands an Opposition of just nine members to the government’s 49, and Premier Brad Wall’s approval ratings are the envy of Confederation.

Broten, the 35-year-old MLA for Saskatoon-Massey Place, ran on a platform that was light on ideological tub-thumping and heavy on plans for rebuilding the NDP’s political institutions. Like the Progressive Conservatives in Alberta, the New Democrats had grown too dependent on the voters’ total psychological identification of the party with the government, and were perhaps not careful enough to ensure that the former could thrive if detached from the latter. Two years of drama at the Ottawa level of the NDP do not seem to have done Saskatchewan’s New Democrats any favours, and federal Opposition Leader Thomas Mulcair’s views on resources and national unity have been — well, what’s the opposite of a favour?

Cyprus: the state of play on Friday

Filed under: Economics, Europe — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 08:35

In the Telegraph, Thomas Pascoe summarizes the situation in Cyprus as of Friday morning:

As it stands this morning, there is a Plan B on the table after parliament voted down the proposal that every bank deposit in the country be subject to a deduction. The new plan only affects those with deposits over €100,000; however, it will require those depositors to take a loss of up to 40pc. As part of this package, the nation’s two large banks will be saved. However, the structure of the deal requires that one of the pair, Laiki, will be split into “good” and “bad” banks, with large depositors left to chance it in the bad bank.

A word on the thinking behind it. While you and I perceive deposits as secure money (and I have argued that to touch them is an abuse of power), technocrats in Brussels take a different view. They tend to view deposits in the technical sense of being loans to banks. You give the bank your money in exchange for interest, and can call the loan at any time (provided not everyone else is doing the same thing, which is the situation now). The bank loans most of your deposit on again. When countries struggle with too much debt, those who have loaned them money get “haircuts”, or less back than they gave. Following this thinking, the EU’s argument is that if we lend money to failing banks, we too must take a haircut to keep them solvent.

[. . .]

So the compromise deal is an ugly one, involving a precedent (confiscation of deposits) which will cast a pallor over the entire European banking system. But the problems are equally great with any other solution. If the banks are left to fail, depositors lose everything except the scraps recovered by administrators. To argue that they, and the country, must be funded directly by the EU, requires the continued willingness of Germany to act against its own economic interests and support an entire continent on its shoulders, impossible without fiscal and political consolidation which no electorate would assent to at present (not that they are asked, usually).

In my opinion, there is no faster way to destroy confidence in your retail banking sector than stealing the money from depositors with no recourse. I have no idea why the European Union is so hell-bent on crushing the banks, but perhaps they have some looney-tunes notion that they can supplant the existing bank system with something directly operated by the ECB or the EU itself.

March 21, 2013

The choices for Cyprus don’t seem to include saving the banks

Filed under: Economics, Europe — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 11:04

In Forbes, Tim Worstall sums up the real problem facing Cypriots:

There’s a very large portion of the European political elite who believe, take on faith (for there’s certainly no convincing real world evidence about it) that the creation of the euro is part of the inevitable creation of the European State. And as such it is entirely irreversible. It’s not just that people once in the euro shouldn’t leave it: it’s that it is simply inconceivable that anyone ever would leave it. Either wish to leave it or be allowed to leave it.

Wherein lies the danger to said European dreams and it’s tiny Cyprus that poses said danger.

As both Krugman and Yglesias point out, the Cypriot banking system is bust, gone. Even if it needn’t have happened this way having the system closed for at least a week is going to lead to bank runs when they finally reopen. The economy is most certainly going to stutter if not be deeply depressed as a result of that banking system going. Given that a substantial part of the economy is about offshore finance, and that that’s not going to survive the banking system crash, there will also, whatever else happens, be substantial declines in GDP.

It’s most certainly true that leaving the euro will cause all of those things to happen. But if they’re going to happen anyway then why not leave the euro? Why not bring back the Cyprus Pound? That is, do an Iceland?

[. . .]

But here’s the thing: there’s still that religious insistence among the federasts that the euro is irreversible, a part of the future of the politics and economy of the continent. And if Cyprus does leave and does recover without too much paid then what reason for Greece, or Spain, Portugal, to stay in? If going bust and going back to one’s own currency is, as Iceland showed (although they kept, rather than went back to), less painful that the austerity required to stay in the euro then, well, why stay in the euro?

“Henrich had thought he would be adding a small branch to an established tree of knowledge. It turned out he was sawing at the very trunk.”

Filed under: Americas, Economics, Science — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:02

By way of Five Feet of Fury, an interesting story about challenging some very basic assumptions about psychology:

While the setting was fairly typical for an anthropologist, Henrich’s research was not. Rather than practice traditional ethnography, he decided to run a behavioral experiment that had been developed by economists. Henrich used a “game” — along the lines of the famous prisoner’s dilemma — to see whether isolated cultures shared with the West the same basic instinct for fairness. In doing so, Henrich expected to confirm one of the foundational assumptions underlying such experiments, and indeed underpinning the entire fields of economics and psychology: that humans all share the same cognitive machinery — the same evolved rational and psychological hardwiring.

[. . .]

When he began to run the game it became immediately clear that Machiguengan behavior was dramatically different from that of the average North American. To begin with, the offers from the first player were much lower. In addition, when on the receiving end of the game, the Machiguenga rarely refused even the lowest possible amount. “It just seemed ridiculous to the Machiguenga that you would reject an offer of free money,” says Henrich. “They just didn’t understand why anyone would sacrifice money to punish someone who had the good luck of getting to play the other role in the game.”

The potential implications of the unexpected results were quickly apparent to Henrich. He knew that a vast amount of scholarly literature in the social sciences — particularly in economics and psychology — relied on the ultimatum game and similar experiments. At the heart of most of that research was the implicit assumption that the results revealed evolved psychological traits common to all humans, never mind that the test subjects were nearly always from the industrialized West. Henrich realized that if the Machiguenga results stood up, and if similar differences could be measured across other populations, this assumption of universality would have to be challenged.

Henrich had thought he would be adding a small branch to an established tree of knowledge. It turned out he was sawing at the very trunk. He began to wonder: What other certainties about “human nature” in social science research would need to be reconsidered when tested across diverse populations?

A notion that’s popped up several times in the last couple of months is that the easy access to willing test subjects (university students) introduces a strong bias to a lot of the tests, yet until recently the majority of studies disregarded the possibility that their test results were unrepresentative of the general population.

The technological imbalance between security and threats

Filed under: Government, Liberty, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 09:17

Bruce Schneier on the power of technology in a security context:

A core, not side, effect of technology is its ability to magnify power and multiply force — for both attackers and defenders. One side creates ceramic handguns, laser-guided missiles, and new-identity theft techniques, while the other side creates anti-missile defense systems, fingerprint databases, and automatic facial recognition systems.

The problem is that it’s not balanced: Attackers generally benefit from new security technologies before defenders do. They have a first-mover advantage. They’re more nimble and adaptable than defensive institutions like police forces. They’re not limited by bureaucracy, laws, or ethics. They can evolve faster. And entropy is on their side — it’s easier to destroy something than it is to prevent, defend against, or recover from that destruction.

For the most part, though, society still wins. The bad guys simply can’t do enough damage to destroy the underlying social system. The question for us is: can society still maintain security as technology becomes more advanced?

I don’t think it can.

« Newer Posts — Older Posts »

Powered by WordPress