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Jens 'n' Frens
Idle thoughts of a relatively libertarian Republican in Cambridge, MA, and whomever he invites. Mostly political.
"A strong conviction that something must be done is the parent of many bad measures."
-- Daniel Webster
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Saturday, January 11, 2003 :::
Instapundit has tales of DC's municipal government.
I once got a ticketed in D.C. for "driving through a flashing yellow light." I beat it in court (my novel defense: it's not against the law to drive through a flashing yellow light) but I shouldn't have had to.
::: posted by Steven at 10:43 PM
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Political State Report: straight from the trenches For the second time in three years, storeowner J.C. Adams has shot and killed a would-be armed robber.
Link from Instapundit.
::: posted by Steven at 6:14 PM
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In the letters section of the Globe (not on-line), there's discussion of raising excise taxes on SUV's in proportion to their gas milage (cars with better milage paying smaller taxes). A Joel Feingold of Framingham suggests that a higher gas tax would be simpler and more direct. He's right.
::: posted by Steven at 1:38 PM
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Romney seeks authority to cut local aid Gov. Mitt Romney filed legislation Friday to broaden his emergency authority to cut aid payments to cities and towns to help close an estimated $450 million to $600 million budget gap.
I'm not a fan of the state sending as much money to cities and towns as it does -- they have their own taxing authority. It might make sense to send aid to some of the poorer locales, but I don't think a quarter of the state's budget should be on local aid that goes to every city and town in the commonwealth.
That said, I don't think you can really look at it as a spending cut. Some cities and towns will cut services, and some will raise taxes -- either way, it's pushing the problem downward rather than taking care of it on the state level.
On the other hand, he isn't making cuts solely to local aid. He's looking at cutting local aid by substantially less than the projected budget shortfall, and I think that's appropriate. I just think we have to be careful how we characterize it.
::: posted by Steven at 1:33 PM
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Happy Birthday to Kate over at the Kitchen Cabinet. If you're in an email-sending spirit, they have a hotmail account called "kitchencabinet".
::: posted by Steven at 11:02 AM
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Charles Krauthammer reports, as an aside: When it was suggested to an administration official that Blix was Inspector Clouseau, he protested that this was unfair: ``Clouseau was trying to find stuff.''
::: posted by Steven at 10:45 AM
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Friday, January 10, 2003 :::
Incidentally, more on the wonders of Google: earlier this week I ftped an updated html file to my website; it was meant as the index of a subdirectory, but I put it in the top directory, blowing away the front page. At the time I myself had no backup (I did before I changed jobs, and I do again now), but Google did; I googled "screed against democracy", downloaded Google's cached version of my page, removed the Google-introduced alterations, and restored my page.
::: posted by dWj at 11:55 AM
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I haven't seen the movie Dick, but it's worth noting that Checkers died in 1964, before Nixon became President. Actually, it's probably not worth noting. Don't read this post.
::: posted by dWj at 10:13 AM
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On Krispy Kreme. They seem to be very cultish nation-wide, at least in that part of the nation to which they've expanded. I follow them as much as anything because their stock has high short-interest; a lot of people betting it to go down, with a lot also betting it to go up. It's worth remembering when investing that there are a lot of people in this world who aren't you, but especially on the short side: a company that can get 5% of America absolutely enthralled with it can make a lot of money, regardless of what the other 95% think.
::: posted by dWj at 10:11 AM
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A friend in Cambodia wrote that the temperature has dropped into the mid eighties recently. I responded that it was 23 in Chicago that morning, but that it felt cold because of the wind. It's expected to be fairly cold here for the next week or two now.
::: posted by dWj at 10:06 AM
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Governor Ryan plans to pardon some more people. The mass use of the power to grant pardons and commute sentences for political purposes seems very arrogant to me; as of yet Ryan has been acting on a case by case basis, though there's some suggestion he could yet issue a blanket commutation of all death sentences before Congressman Hair is inaugurated as governor next Monday. I've previously commented to a number of people that the eggs-to-basket ratio of the Presidency bothers me; I feel similarly that most governorships are stronger than we really need any one office-holder to be.
::: posted by dWj at 10:04 AM
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Thursday, January 09, 2003 :::
Viral marketing?
::: posted by Steven at 10:34 PM
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Reportedly, Matthew Hale has been accused of trying to have a judge assassinated. In previous situations I've felt that Hale has been mistreated (in particular he was denied entry to the bar); I have sympathy for the ACLU position that evil law-abiding citizens should not be mistreated by the system. Trying to have someone killed, though, even a lawyer, is appropriately illegal, and I lose any sympathy I had for him quite quickly.
On that sort of topic, the problem I had with "The People vs. Larry Flynt" (the movie) was that it made us like Larry Flynt, if in an embarrassed sort of way. The whole point was that just because someone's contemptible doesn't mean he doesn't enjoy free speech rights, and that point would be better made if he were more contemptible. On the other hand, perhaps that would have led to audiences feeling he shouldn't enjoy free speech rights; many people are less liberal (in the good sense) than I (even they) might like to believe.
::: posted by dWj at 1:55 PM
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Tuesday, January 07, 2003 :::
Roger Ebert's top movie of the year is Minority Report. (It's not clear from the article, but as far as I remember it from the show, these are in order from first to tenth.)
::: posted by dWj at 5:23 PM
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I just found out that my boss will be at the President's address at noon today. I told him to say hi.
::: posted by dWj at 9:59 AM
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Busy this week.
I'm starting an MS in Investment Management program at BU this week. It's a part-time program, except for a week at the beginning and a week at the end. Yesterday's material was mostly review for me. I've been more stressed by other things, like trying to get to know my classmates (it's fewer than thirty people in our class), and make a good impression on them. The email system doesn't recognize me when I try to register for it, and I need to buy a laptop soon (it's only "highly recommended", but since I don't have a desktop that runs Windows, it becomes even more so). And I'll need to start studying tonight or tomorrow night, at the latest.
Perhaps most interesting to people who read this, they talked a lot about the diversity of the class at our orientation. It wasn't diversity of pigmentation, though, it was diversity of background and employment -- most of the class works at financial institutions, but there's a good variety of whom they work for, and in what capacity. I suspect this diversity of experience will add something to classroom discussions.
The University of Michigan will soon argue (has recently argued?) before the Supreme Court that they need racist admissions policies because they want to expose their students to a "diversity of viewpoints", and they're too lazy to do it directly (rather than use race as a heuristic for viewpoint). At least at this one outpost of BU, though, someone seems to be serious.
::: posted by Steven at 6:52 AM
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Monday, January 06, 2003 :::
I happen to fancy ELO, and have discussed with my brother this "Mr. Blue Sky" video that Volkswagen seems to think is a car ad. Even the visuals, because of the music, don't strike me as so depressing; part of this is probably that they're bright and colorful, and the visceral sense from that can't be overwhelmed by such things as meaning. The car seems out of place, for which reason I don't think I entirely get the ad, but I have an ineffable affection for this ad; it just makes me want to go out and give the world a big hug.
::: posted by dWj at 5:27 PM
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In its five-year history, the BCS (college football) championship has gone to a different conference each year. (If you suppose each conference to have an equal chance of winning each year, uncorrelated one year to the next, the odds of that are 5/54, about 9.3%.) Some thoughts on championships in general, and college football in particular:
- The Fiesta Bowl was a great game, but I found myself disappointed that a championship game wasn't more decisive. Even a decisive — say, double-digit — win by a worse team against a better team is not that uncommon in football, but at least it feels like a data point. This game told us that the teams are probably pretty evenly matched. If the purpose of the championship game is to give us a great game between two great teams, this did a good job of that. Determining the better team it didn't.
- The whole idea of a championship — and I myself make this assumption elsewhere in this post — assumes a kind of transitivity that is certainly an approximation to reality. A can beat B can beat C can beat A on a repeatable basis, just based on which teams run well, pass well, etc. To the extent that this is false, we kind of have to define what we even mean if we're striving to find out which team is the best.
- Of course the better team doesn't always win, even in a decisive game — in the NFL, an undefeated season is once heard of — and that the world of college football seems a bit unduly interested in undefeated teams. The estimable Jeff Sagarin put USC #1 in his final rankings, both those using his traditional system and those prepared for the BCS that ignore margin of victory; this is certainly an interesting claim of a team that lost two games, but is by no means indefensible.
- To emphasize that point: two of the teams that won NFL playoff games this weekend lost to the Chicago Bears this season. (One of them beat a team that beat the Bears twice.)
- I've always been skeptical of the idea of a (large) play-off tournament because of the substantial chance for upsets and the reliance on a small number of data points (as opposed to a whole season), but insofar as the playoff system encourages teams to produce tougher schedules without fear of a single loss eliminating them — in college basketball, top teams routinely acquire several losses early in the season without excessive concern — it could yield a system that, taken as a whole, does result in a higher probability that the actual best team will win the championship.
- I do like my —s.
- I'm not a fan of overtime in general; if a game ends in a tie it really isn't decisive whether it's left that way or broken by means of some perversion of the sport in question. (Basketball overtime doesn't pervert the sport so badly, but football, both college and professional, do. Incidentally, I went to bed Friday night after regulation.) There are situation in which a winner simply has to be chosen — single-elimination playoffs, for obvious example. When one doesn't, I don't think the win-loss record should be drained of some of the little information it has in it.
::: posted by dWj at 2:26 PM
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Sunday, January 05, 2003 :::
As college football followers know, Dean almost got his wish on Friday night. Sievers did score a crucial last-second field goal, but it didn't win the game, it just tied it. Miami (Sievers' team) lost in double-overtime.
::: posted by Steven at 12:24 AM
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In women's basketball, #2 UConn beat #5 Tennessee in overtime. UConn's last loss was in March of 2001 (to Notre Dame, in the NCAA semi-finals).
::: posted by Steven at 12:22 AM
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