Quotulatiousness

September 2, 2013

Vikings 2013 practice squad set

Filed under: Football — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 10:43

The “final” roster I posted yesterday didn’t last 24 hours without change … the Vikings claimed former Chicago Bear offensive tackle J’Marcus Webb off waivers and cut Troy Kropog to make room on the 53-man roster. Cornerback Bobby Felder and defensive end D’Aundre Reed were both waived/injured and were put on the Vikings injured reserve list after passing waivers.

Former Vikings Antoine Winfield and Chris Kluwe were both cut by their new teams, which adds a bit more evidence to the “Rick Spielman is an evil genius” file (Spielman cut both players despite good performances over several years and strong fan opinions (Update, 3 September: See this Patrick Reusse post for more grudging acknowledgement of the quality of Spielman’s decision-making)).

The following players have been signed to the eight-man practice squad (for some reason, I always think the PS is 10 players, rather than eight):

  • Joe Banyard, RB
  • Travis Bond, OG
  • Everett Dawkins, DT
  • Chase Ford, TE
  • Kevin Murphy OT
  • Tristan Okpalaugo, DE
  • Rodney Smith, WR
  • Adam Thielen, WR

This month in moral panic watch – “rape porn”

Filed under: Britain, Government, Media — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:24

British PM David Cameron has decided that it’s the duty of his government to crack down on internet pornography. In particular, the British government will be attempting to stamp out violent pornography, aka “rape porn”. This may not be his best idea ever:

Lobby organisations like “End Violence Against Women” and sensationalist news rags like the Daily Mail repeatedly claim that watching violent pornography increases sexual abuse and rape by men.

However, the scientific evidence has stubbornly refused to play along with this view:

U.S. Commission on Obscenity and Pornography (1970) found no evidence of a causal link between pornography and rape

“Pornography and rape: theory and practice? Evidence from crime data in four countries where pornography is easily available” (1991) B Kutchinsky

Examined what happened to the rape statistics in four countries (USA, Denmark, West Germany and Sweden) during periods where the availability of violent pornography went from extreme scarcity to relative abundance.

Quoting the report: “The results showed that in none of the countries did rape increase more than nonsexual violent crimes. This finding in itself would seem sufficient to discard the hypothesis that pornography causes rape“

There’s also the problem that pornography is actually quite popular — with both male and female users — over 40% of all internet users view pornography voluntarily. In fact, large numbers of women admit to enjoying rape fantasies:

Whether the puritans or the feminists like it or not, it is a fact that many women enjoy rape fantasies as explained by this female journalist.

Erotic literature such as Fifty Shades of Grey featuring bondage, spanking, hair pulling, fisting and pinwheeling generated sales of over £10M in six months, to a predominantly female audience.

On a more scientific level, a 1988 study by Pelletier and Herold found that over half of their female respondents had fantasies of forced sex.

Nobody (quite rightly) suggests that women who expose themselves to this sort of “violent porn” literature, or who engage in sexual fantasies of rape are more likely to go out and put themselves into situations where they will be raped.

People clearly understand that there is a world of difference between enjoying rape as a sexual fantasy and the violent, painful reality of actual rape.

The same reasoning must logically apply to men who enjoy rape fantasy and rape porn. There is a world of difference between enjoying rape as a sexual fantasy and the violent reality of actual raping another human being.

To assert that women can enjoy rape fantasy, porn and violent BDSM literature without harm because they understand the difference between fantasy and reality, but men do not is nothing more than misandry.

Macroeconomics and math

Filed under: Economics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 09:06

Noah Smith on the uneasy foundations of modern macroeconomics:

In macro, most of the equations that went into the model seemed to just be assumed. In physics, each equation could be — and presumably had been — tested and verified as holding more-or-less true in the real world. In macro, no one knew if real-world budget constraints really were the things we wrote down. Or the production function. No one knew if this “utility” we assumed people maximized corresponded to what people really maximize in real life. We just assumed a bunch of equations and wrote them down. Then we threw them all together, got some kind of answer or result, and compared the result to some subset of real-world stuff that we had decided we were going to “explain”. Often, that comparison was desultory or token, as in the case of “moment matching”.

In other words, the math was no longer real. It was all made up. You could no longer trust the textbook. When the textbook told you that “Households maximize the expected value of their discounted lifetime utility of consumption”, that was not a Newton’s Law that had been proven approximately true with centuries of physics experiments. It was not even a game theory solution concept that had been proven approximately sometimes true with decades of economics experiments. Instead, it was just some random thing that someone made up and wrote down because A) it was tractable to work with, and B) it sounded plausible enough so that most other economists who looked at it tended not to make too much of a fuss.

We were told not to worry about this. We were told that although macro needed microfoundations — absolutely required them — it was not necessary for the reality of any of these microfoundations to be independently confirmed by evidence. All that was necessary is that the model “worked” after all the microfoundations were thrown together. We were told this not because of any individual failing on the part of any of our teachers, but because this belief is part of the dominant scientific culture of the macro field. It’s the paradigm.

Slate on the gender wage gap

Filed under: Business, Economics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 08:56

Hanna Rosin debunks the meme that “women only get paid 77 cents for every dollar earned by men doing the same job”:

The official Bureau of Labor Department statistics show that the median earnings of full-time female workers is 77 percent of the median earnings of full-time male workers. But that is very different than “77 cents on the dollar for doing the same work as men.” The latter gives the impression that a man and a woman standing next to each other doing the same job for the same number of hours get paid different salaries. That’s not at all the case. “Full time” officially means 35 hours, but men work more hours than women. That’s the first problem: We could be comparing men working 40 hours to women working 35.

How to get a more accurate measure? First, instead of comparing annual wages, start by comparing average weekly wages. This is considered a slightly more accurate measure because it eliminates variables like time off during the year or annual bonuses (and yes, men get higher bonuses, but let’s shelve that for a moment in our quest for a pure wage gap number). By this measure, women earn 81 percent of what men earn, although it varies widely by race. African-American women, for example, earn 94 percent of what African-American men earn in a typical week. Then, when you restrict the comparison to men and women working 40 hours a week, the gap narrows to 87 percent.

[…]

Goldin and Lawrence Katz have done about as close to an apples-to-apples comparison of men’s and women’s wages as exists. (They talk about it here in a Freakonomics discussion.) They tracked male and female MBAs graduating from the University of Chicago from 1990 to 2006. First they controlled for previous job experience, GPA, chosen profession, business-school course and job title. Right out of school, they found only a tiny differential in salary between men and women, which might be because of a little bit of lingering discrimination or because women are worse at negotiating starting salaries. But 10 to 15 years later, the gap widens to 40 percent, almost all of which is due to career interruptions and fewer hours. The gap is even wider for women business school graduates who marry very high earners. (Note: Never marry a rich man).

I’ve posted similar articles on this topic before: August, 2012, June 2012, and July 2010.

South Korea decides against the F-35 and the Eurofighter Typhoon

Filed under: Asia, Military, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 08:40

The South Korean government is in the same situation as the Canadian government: needing to purchase replacements for Cold War era combat aircraft and having a very limited budget to do so. After analyzing their specific needs, South Korea isn’t going to buy either the F-35 or the Eurofighter Typhoon:

On August 18th South Korea selected Boeing’s F-15SE Silent Eagle as the sole candidate for Phase III of its Fighter eXperimental Project (F-X) over Lockheed Martin’s F-35A and the Eurofighter Typhoon. The decision has drawn vociferous criticism from defense experts who fear the selection of F-15SE may not provide the South Korean military with the sufficient Required Operational Capabilities (ROCs) to counterbalance Japan and China’s acquisition of 5th generation stealth fighters.

In hindsight, Zachary Keck of The Diplomat believes that Republic of Korea’s (ROK) preference for the F-15SE over two other competitors was “unsurprising.” After all, Boeing won the previous two fighter competitions with its F-15-K jet. In 2002 and 2008, South Korea bought a total of 61 F-15K jets from Boeing. South Korea’s predilection for the F-15SE is understandable given its 85% platform compatibility with the existing F-15Ks.

However, the most convincing explanation seems to be the fear of “structural disarmament” of the ROK Air Force should it choose to buy yet another batch of expensive fighters to replace the aging F-4 Phantom and F-5 Tiger fighters. Simply stated, the more advanced the fighter jet, the more costly it is. The more expensive the jet, the fewer the South Korean military can purchase. The fewer stealth fighters purchased, the smaller the ROK Air Force.

Here is a mock-up of the F-15SE, courtesy of Wikipedia:

Mockup of the F-15SE Silent Eagle

Mockup of the F-15SE Silent Eagle

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