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June 30, 2005

Quick Update on Kelo

Congress isn't taking the Kelo ruling sitting down. In response to public outcry, several members are introducing legislation to withhold federal funds from projects that use Kelo-style imminent domain tactics.

"The only silver lining to this decision is the possibility that this time the Court has finally gone too far and that the American people are ready to reassert their constitutional authority," said DeLay, R-Texas
...
Legislation in the works would ban the use of federal funds for any project getting the go-ahead using the Kelo v. City of New London decision.

"They're going to have to find their own money, instead of coming to Washington," said Rep. James Sensenbrenner, chairman of the House Judiciary Committee.

Sensenbrenner and the committee's top Democrat, Rep. John Conyers of Michigan, are planning a bill that would prevent Washington from claiming eminent domain for economic development and block any state or local government from getting federal funds for projects.

Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, introduced a similar bill on Monday. The Supreme Court has overturned other congressional attempts to supersede its decisions.

"It is clearly within the power of Congress to limit the use of federal funds," Cornyn said.

Not all agree, however.

House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi of California says she is opposed to any legislation that would withhold federal dollars "for the enforcement of any decision of the Supreme Court, no matter how opposed I am to that decision."

I'm not sure that principle applies here, since the proposed legislation is to withhold federal assistance in a local government's plan to condemn and rebuild on private property. There never was going to be any federal "enforcement" of the decision, just a federal helping hand in the funding of the construction. Pelosi has a nice sounding platitude here, but I think she's on the wrong side of the issue in this case.

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Dad in hospital again

My dad is back in the hospital. I got a call from my Mom this morning that she couldn't wake him. It turns out that the had fallen into a diabetic coma due to extremely low blood sugar (the meter was at 32). The paramedics were able to diagnose the condition and revive him. He's down at the ER now being stabilized, and I suspect they'll want to keep him overnight for observation. I think this is just a problem of his continuing weight loss. I don't have a current number, but at the rate it's been dropping, I'd bet he's fallen below 130 pounds.

This adds to a whole host of other fires at both work and home that are keeping me home this weekend. I'd planned to go up to Indiana for a friend's wedding, but with everything going on, I just can't get away. If anyone has something going on Sunday or Monday, I could probably use an excuse to get out of the house for a couple of hours.

Family by Dan | Permalink | Comments (2)

June 29, 2005

14 Years

Fourteen years ago today, I kissed MAW in front some friends and family.

My best man turned to me and said, "Ok, now it's too late."

Family by Dan | Permalink | Comments (1)

Kelo Kicks Back

I haven't said much about the recent Kelo vs. New London Supreme Court ruling on imminent domain. I'm not sufficiently familiar with the details to render a strong opinion, but in general I'm opposed to it since, as a property owner, I'm somewhat keen on property rights.

But anyway, this is just too ironic to be true, but it apparently is. An investor named Logan Clements is pressing the Towne of Weare, New Hampshire, to use its newfound powers of imminent domain to comdemn the property at 34 Cilley Hill Rd to make way for a new hotel that he wants to build. What's the catch? That property is the home of Justice David Souter, who voted in favor of these new imminent domain powers.

Of course, this is all contrived. Clements is not in the hotel or real estate business. He's CEO of a small media company, but if the city council (Board of Selectmen in this case) is like-minded and votes to condemn, we'll get to watch the interesting spectacle of Souter (or more likely, his lawyers) arguing against the precedent set in his ruling.

In truth, though, I doubt this latest ruling would actually apply. While I haven't read the ruling, I read enough commentary to see that this ruling is supposedly restricted to those areas that are in ecomonic decline and in need of revitalization. There's enough other law and case law (think "economic development zone" and "free enterprize zone" projects and funding) that there should be a reasonably good understanding as to what is meant here.

Still, it would be a delicious irony.

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June 28, 2005

The Model Talks Back

Here's just a quick one I knocked out last night while MAW was out with friends. Mostly I was just trying to play with a new lighting technique and a new skin-realism kit, but I ended up with something reminiscent of the days when I actually had time to do figure study photos. Some of the best moments back then came not in the actual shot, but in the back and forth with the model. Here's one giving me a little sass. (Not Work Safe, so think before you click.)

If you think it's so easy, you strip
and let me take the pictures.
(click to enlarge)

The image itself isn't that amazing or inventive, but I think my renders are getting more realistic. There's still some joint problems around the hip there, but that's a common problem with this particular model.

The lighting technique was really just to use multiple, parallel spotlights (5 in a big plus sign) to simulate a larger diffuse light, and then to use ray traced shadows with a large blur radius. I think the lights needed to be a little closer together, but it definitely looks less harsh than many of my other renders.

The skin effects are a new material package that I can't even begin to explain, but it takes the figure, the primary light, and then calculates a shitload of stuff to beef up the material. It goes from one texture map and one bump map to something like twenty shader nodes, ranging from Blinn to Fresnel lighting. For $12, it was well worth the purchase. The skin went from looking mannequinish to looking fairly real.

I'm making slow progress on my next "serious" project (as mentioned in "Mt. Stripmore"), but it's held up over a wardrobe issue -- something clearly not a problem in this instance.

Render by Dan | Permalink | Comments (0)

A quick tour through site statistics

Every once in a while I take a quick glance at my site statistics, mostly on the lookout to see if I'm approaching my bandwidth limit. I'm not.

But it also shows up some interesting things. For example:

That's it. I now return you to your previously schedule program: Bush and Colin Powell Felching Cheerleaders.

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June 26, 2005

My mother would be proud...

Take the MIT Weblog Survey

It's a medium length survey for a weblog study that MIT is doing. The most interesting bit for me was a section on people you know, how you know them, and whether or not you met them online. The interesting thing about it is that while I've been actively using online forums for over twenty years (going all the way back to an active BBS-life in the 80's), I was not able to answer a single one of their questions with, "Yes, I met them online." For someone who uses technology so much, I appear to be rather biased towards the flesh.

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June 24, 2005

Mt. Stripmore

Here's a little image I worked up last night. It was really just a feasiblity test for a new landscape technique I was experimenting with. I'm actually working on another image altogether, and for that one I'll need to have a statue/monument rising out of the mountains in the background. In the final image, she will be clothed (at least partially) and holding a spear or some other exotic polearm, all still made from stone. However, for here I just needed her as a placeholder, so I didn't bother to clothe her or decorate the pole at all. As a result, she looks a bit like a pole-dancing stripper.

Thus, I give you:

Mount Stripmore
(a monument to all those impressive gymnasts who just happen to be naked)
(click to enlarge)

For those of you interested in such things, the technique was amazingly simple. In fact, it was so simple I was pretty sure it wasn't going to work well or perhaps not at all. On top of that, I'd seen no mention of it in any of my newsgroup search queries. But nonetheless, I think it worked very well.

I positioned several cylinders of varying height in my scene, and then draped a large cloth over them. I altered the cloth properties to make it extra stretchy, and it draped down fairly convincingly. The rest of the effect is just bump maps and color ramps driven by a combination of the Z value (i.e. elevation) and the face normal (i.e. slope). Thus, the high steep areas got a brownish-white color and a very harsh turbulence bump map, while the lower and flatter areas got a greenish color with a softer bump map.

The green still doesn't have the vegetation look I'm after, but it's probably good enough for the eventual image. Remember, this is really just going to be in the background. On the other hand, I can be a bit of a perfectionist on these trivial details. I won't even tell you how long I spent working out a starfield texture once. But here, I think the key is to switch more fully to a more convicing soft bump map when I get to the green, and I just now realized that one good way to do that would be drive the switch not off the elevation and slope, but to drive it off of the color change itself which was driven off those things. It would be very similar, but I could make the change much more sharply just by measuring the green component of the color ramp. I'll have to try that one over the weekend.

I might also play with turning the bump map into a displacement map. It would make for a longer render, but I think it would make the ridge lines look better. (For the unitiated, bump maps give the appearance of bumps via false self-shadowing while displacement maps really do make bumps which then cast real shadows.)

The statue got a little bit of the bump map further down, but then it transitions into another bump map I'd develped before: stucco. From a distance, it looks just like a pocked/weathered stone. (Though in the future, I'll probably want to tone down the specular channel.) I also have some ideas for making the mountain-to-statue transition areas a bit better.

The clouds in the background are the only bitmap texture in the entire scene. Everything else is procedural. That's important to me, because when I render something hi-res for printing, bitmaps that are good enough for screen rendering sometimes show artifacts at 300 dpi. Plus, with some of my hi-res renders, I'm having a hard enough time keeping the whole mess under the 2GB application memory limit as it is without adding a lot of unnecessary bitmap textures to the mix.

Anyway, it was just a feasibility study, but I thought it came out well enough to share.

Render by Dan | Permalink | Comments (0)

June 22, 2005

Top 10 not in the Top 100

The American Film Institute has furthered the case for their disolution by releasing yet another Top 100 list. This time it was the Top 100 Film Quotes. While there were some good ones in there, there's always plenty of better ones left out. Part of it, I suspect, is that they needed to keep the list at PG-13, but others were left out surely for a lack of class -- on the part of the list maker, not the quote. ;)

So, let's start a little meme/parlor game. What are the top 10 quotes left out of the top 100 quotes?

  1. "Luke, I am your father." The Empire Strikes Back.
  2. "Yippikiyay, motherfucker." Die Hard
  3. "Snakes... why did it have to be snakes?" Raiders of the Lost Ark
  4. "There is no spoon." The Matrix
  5. "The first rule of Fight Club is that you do not talk about Fight Club." Fight Club
  6. "My name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my father. Prepare to die." The Princess Bride
  7. "Now I want you to remember that no bastard ever won a war by dying for his country. He won it by making the other poor dumb bastard die for his country." Patton
  8. "I say we take off and nuke the entire site from orbit. It's the only way to be sure." (response) "Fucking-A!" Aliens
  9. "I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. Time to die." Bladerunner
  10. "Monkeys? You think a money knows he's sittin' on top of a rocket that might explode? These astronaut boys they know that, see? Well, I'll tell you something, it takes a special kind of man to volunteer for a suicide mission, especially one that's on TV." The Right Stuff

What are your top ten?

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In Defense of Marriage: A Modest Proposal

There’s been a lot of talk recently about the declining state of marriage in our country, and what to do about the pressing threats against it. While it’s certainly true that marriage is in trouble (increasing numbers of single parents, high divorce rates, etc.), I’m not quite so sure the political class has correctly identified the real threats. So, acting as a modern Jonathan Swift, I will take it on myself to spell out the three main threats to marriage, ones that have already done great damage, and make some modest proposals to combat them.

Risk #1: Longevity

In the long-lost days of marital bliss and purity, say one to two thousand years ago, people didn’t live nearly so long. A man was old at thirty-five, if he even lasted that long. Apart from a hard life being a shorter one, a virtual army of plagues, mishaps, poor sanitation, and yes, even armies, was arrayed against him. His wife had it just about as hard, but she also had to go through numerous pregnancies and labors. Without any real medical care to speak of, a good number of those pregnancies were fatal. Put those two together, and “until death do us part” was a fifteen to twenty year commitment, starting at about age fifteen and lasting until one partner’s luck ran out. And if you married a widow or widower, it was an even shorter commitment.

Fifteen years isn’t all that long. Certainly you can get tired of someone in that amount of time (not you MAW, ok?), but even if you did, what would you do about it? Go look for someone new in the remaining five years of your life? No, just ride it out and hope she’s still there to help you to the chamber pot in your last days.

But now, fifteen years is nothing, especially if you marry in your twenties. After fifteen years, you’re still fairly young and healthy. Good health care has delivered a double-bonus for the wives, with low infant mortality and reliable birth control lowering the number of pregnancies and good doctors and hospitals to make those pregnancies more survivable. Looking down the road, it’s not a dwindling five years ahead, it’s thirty-five or forty. Add it up, and you’re looking at “until death do us part” lasting over fifty years. Fifty years is a long time to wake up next the same face every morning, too long for a lot of folks.

Modest proposal: Give this health care thing the boot. It has caused nothing but trouble for marriage, so let folks have their good thirty or forty years of life and then cut them off. No more antibiotics, no insulin shots, no open heart surgery. Take away their sanitary toilets and the clean food, and while you’re at it, rip the insulation out of the walls. If they’re so eager to stay on this Earth, let them really experience the elements. Divorce rates will plummet, not to mention the savings to the Social Security program.


Risk #2: Easy Divorce and Women’s Rights

These are really two threats, but they’re somewhat linked. They rose together, so I’ll treat them together. Again, back in our state of marital bliss, it was almost impossible to get a divorce. If you didn’t have kids yet, you could maybe get an annulment, but divorce was a step towards adultery, and unless you were a king or queen in the Pope’s good graces, you’d stand a better chance of beating a murder rap. Meanwhile, women had no real property rights. In fact, they almost were property. Hence, a divorce would leave them penniless, and it’s not like there was a robust economy ready to hire them as skilled labor. If they were lucky, an abbey might take them in, but by and large, women had no choice but to stay in a marriage.

Now, divorce is easy. Most states have a “no fault” clause that makes it as simple as dissolving a contract. Even those that make it a little harder don’t really make it that hard. It just makes for more legal fees. Probably the most painful part of the divorce now is the division of the kids (“no, honey, really, you should take the kids…”) and the assets (“I earned that Mercedes, you asshole!”). On the assets, this comes down to the fact that women now have full property rights, so they can end up owning the house just like their hubbies.

And of course, women also have quite a bit of economic opportunity now. While there are still elements of pay disparity and glass ceilings (though, as a counterexample, my penultimate boss is the highest paid women in the world), women can go out and get a job capable of supporting themselves and their kids. It’s certainly not as good as a dual-income household or having a “free” live-in maid/cook/nanny, but it’s good enough that women can consider it a viable choice to staying in a bad marriage.

Modest proposal: Clearly, we’ve been heading in the wrong direction here if it has resulted in the decay of such a sacred institution. Women shouldn’t have these kinds of choices. Strip them of their property rights, and rely on either some nicely repressive laws or at least vengeful social condemnation to keep women out of the workforce and schools. Barefoot and pregnant is clearly the road to marital bliss.

And for those who still try to get a divorce? Well, simple, just make it illegal. There are no divorces. It is “until death do us part”, enforced by unsympathetic law. Any who attempt it, say by separation and subsequent new cohabitation, should be locked up for spousal abandonment and adultery. That’s a real “Defense of Marriage Act”.

Risk #3: Acceptance of Out-of-Wedlock Child-rearing

Once again in our age of marital bliss and respect, sex was strictly for husband and wife. It never, ever happened any other time. I don’t care what you read. No, scholarly research doesn’t count. It’s all lies. I read “The Scarlet Letter”, so I know how extramarital sex was dealt with. Actually, I only read the first chapter and then the Cliff notes, but I got the idea.

You got married to have sex, and you stayed married to raise the kids. If you reversed the order of those things, then dammit, you got married, and did so in a hurry in ye-olde-pitchfork-wedding. Having and raising a child out of wedlock was simply just not done. A young girl finding herself in that situation either married some poor schmuck, prayed for a miscarriage, or left the kid on the steps of the church.

Now it’s quite acceptable to have and raise a child out of wedlock. It’s not easy, mind you, but it’s acceptable. So, why get married in the first place? Get together, have the kid, and then trade off duties. Keep dating, maybe marry someone else. Maybe not. You can still be a good parent, just not a married one.

Modest proposal: Well, since the purpose of marriage is the creation of children – I seem to have been reading that a lot lately in some other debate on marriage – how can we allow children outside of marriage? Clearly, those who would attempt it are immoral creatures deserving of punishment. I recommend jail time for the fornicators, and since such unnatural children could never grow up into normal, responsible citizens, let’s not waste the effort on the little bastards. If they’re born outside of a marriage, then no schooling for them. In fact, let’s just cut off all government assistance to them. That ought to make someone think twice about skipping out on sacred marriage. Either that, or at least they’ll be lining up at Planned Parenthood, both before and after the fact.


Reality Check

For those of you not acquainted with the works of Jonathan Swift, he once wrote an essay, “A Modest Proposal”, suggesting that the solution to Irish poverty and famine was for the Irish to eat their own children. Of course, he didn’t really believe it. He was using over-the-top sarcasm to highlight the hypocrisy of those who took Irish problems lightly. Similarly, I am not in favor of any of my modest proposals here.

However, I do believe I have correctly identified the biggest “threats” to the institution of marriage. You might find my list to be incomplete, perhaps missing one item in particular, but compared to the big three, anything else is a trifle unworthy of note. There are those who are speaking up vehemently about recent threats to marriage, but I note that they never mention these three. Well, I’ll admit that the third threat does rate an occasional sideways glance, but it has largely been unseen since the days of Murphy Brown.

Why are these threats being largely ignored when their effects are so well documented and their solutions so straightforward? It is because we have decided that we want these things. No one wants to give up long life or women’s rights or easy divorce or the choice to be a single parent. These were battles that were won with great difficulty and passion, and no wants to give up the gains. That they have damaged marriage as a side effect is regrettable, because marriage truly is a sacred and wonderful thing, but no one wants to give up the things that got us here.

So the next time someone speaks of doing something silly in defense of marriage, maybe you need to question their real commitment to the cause. If they’re not ready to act on these threats, are they really serious about the fight?

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June 19, 2005

Strayhorn Commits, Hutchison Bows, Perry Pivots, and Pickle Goes Sour

Well, it was a very eventful weekend for Texas politics. Carol Keaton-McClellan-Rhylandor-I've-gone-through-more-men-than-Elizabeth-Taylor-Strayhorn has committed to run for Governor in the Repulican primary next year. (Like she hasn't been running for governor for the last two years already!)

Senator Hutchison, who IMO could have phoned in a Gubernatorial victory, has decided to run for Senate again. I find this a pity since she's a decent candidate to become the first female U.S. President, and a couple of terms in the Governor's seat would put her on a good track.

The current (and soon-to-be-ex-at-this-rate) Governor Rick Perry vetoed the school financing bill and ordered a special session to begin Tuesday. I, for one, was not disappointed that the regular session ended without a school financing solution, since all the ideas being discussed were IMO just bad ideas. I wonder how much his decision was based on She-of-Many_Names' assertion that he was lacking in the leadership department.

And the beloved Jake "J. J." Pickle died. The former Congressman was much loved in the local Austin area, though I often think it had less to do with his politics (which were not particularly outlying or memorable) but for the fact that he delivered the pork in abundance. As such, a variety of government-contract-funded research institutes around here bear his name.

So, what might have been a walk-away governor race next year looks to be a slugfest Republican primary of Perry vs. Strayhorn. To be honest, I'll gladly support Perry in that contest. He's mostly harmless, though annoying. On the other hand, Whatshername's constant calls "to do something for the children" sounds like a big tax boost and a dozen pet programs that will fumble along for a generation before being merged into the Texas Railroad Commission, just to give them something to do.

But still, Perry has not impressed me as a governor, and let's face, there's not much a Texas governor has to do. So, I might be crossing the aisle on this one, maybe even to Kinky Friedman. After all, if our governor is going to be a joke, shouldn't he at least be funny?

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June 16, 2005

Stock up on Nyquil

Nyquil (along with any other product with pseudoephedrine) takes one step closer to being a controlled substance:

Texas governor Rick Perry signed bills today that are aimed at curbing the use of methamphetamine.

One of the bills requires products containing pseudoephedrine be placed behind a pharmacy counter or in a locked case.

The bill also says that people who buy pseudoephedrine or similar products must be at least 16 years old, show identification and sign for the purchase.

Pseudoephedrine is a main ingredient in a number of over-the-counter drugs like Sudafed, Nyquil and Sinutab.

It can be extracted by boiling down the cold medicines. Toxic chemicals are then used to turn the substance into highly concentrated meth.

You know, if it was up to me, anyone caught turning pseudoephedrine into meth would be sentenced to five years of the common cold. Just inject them with a new strain of the rhinovirus every week, and then deny them access to decongestants.

But that's just me.

[Side note: I've read some "analysis" that borders on conspiracy theory that suggests that this is really being done as a favor to a couple of drug companies that have a new patented replacement for pseudoephedrine that cannot be turned into meth and thus is immune from laws such as this.]

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Immortalized in a comic

I've evidently been immortalized in a comic, Day Old Bagels. I'm not sure how I feel about being portrayed as kilt-wearing goat-sodomizer, but... I just get all misty-eyed to have my Scottish heritage recognized. <g>

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June 15, 2005

The Budget Deficit is a Good Thing?

In a recent comment thread, I mentioned an essay I’d read arguing that we should always have a federal budget deficit with an ever increasing national debt. It was put forward in the 1998 or 1999 timeframe when there was a modest budget surplus and static modeling from the CBO was predicting increasing surpluses out to the ten year horizon. At the time, there was serious talk around the country of paying down the national debt. It was in this context that this argument was made in favor of budget deficits. I don’t necessarily agree with it, nor do I have strong feelings against it either. Mostly I just found it interesting, so I’m doing my best to pass it on here.

The argument came in three parts, but it was only the last that I found truly interesting. The first part was that it would be far better to pass the surplus on to the taxpayers as a tax cut than to let it stay in Washington in the promise that it would go towards paying off the debt. If Congress were told that anything “left over” would go towards paying off the debt, then you could almost guarantee that there would be nothing left over. The thinking was that operating under a deficit would act as a restraint on spending. Thus, it was best to keep the money from passing through Washington in the first place.

The second part was that debt technicalities and the whole Social Security accounting structure was going to make it difficult to pay things off. About a trillion dollars of the debt cannot be paid off immediately due to the way it’s structured. Also, and my memory is fuzzy on this part, but it would become very difficult to pay off the portion of the debt that is “owed” to the Social Security Trust Fund. Specifically, putting real, non-government assets into the fund would pose a problem. It would mean the government taking ownership of what had previously been private assets through the form of corporate stocks or bonds or even real physical assets. The notion of a few trillion dollars of private property flowing into a government controlled trust fund has profound implications. It would allow the government to exercise significant control over those parts of the private sector, not through the traditional means of regulation and taxation but through private means of corporate boards and business deals. It would be a little like socialism or communism, but at least the government would have bought the assets honestly. The real risk is that parts of the private sector could be drastically altered, not because it made business sense, but because of a shift in the political climate. That’s an inefficiency we don’t need.

This third part was the aspect that I found the most intriguing. It has to do with the risk associated with a particular debt, and how the appropriate interest rate is assigned to that debt. There are two components to determining an interest rate. [Note: There are actually more, including the current supply and demand for debt of various risk levels, but that aspect was not included in this argument.] First, there is a prediction of inflation over the length of the note. If you expect inflation to be 3% over the course of the note, then you want the note to earn at least 3% interest each year. Second, there is an adjustment for risk to offset the chance that the debtor will default and leave the creditor with nothing or with questionable collateral. Giving unsecured money to a bankrupt person is more risky than loaning for a home mortgage, so the interest rate should be appropriately higher.

A fair amount of analysis has gone into the risk component, indexing credit histories and payment actions of millions of previous debtors, but predicting the inflation rate is tougher. It is a subject where economists can debate endlessly and not find an answer. (One of many subjects…) But another way of posing the question is: what interest rate should you charge for a debt with zero risk of default? Fortunately, we have a way of answering that. The United States has never defaulted on a debt. The current government took over the debts incurred during the Articles of Confederation, and they took over the debts of the Continental Congress and the individual colonies. [Note: It did not pick up the debts of the southern Confederacy after the Civil War, but it considered those debts to have been incurred by an illegitimate government, and rightly so IMO.] Add it up, and you have a creditor with 230+ years of perfect credit history along with the earning power to maintain payments on an increasing level of debt. For practical purposes, you can consider this as a perfect debtor with a zero risk of default. Well, it’s not really zero, but it’s pretty damn close and is the closest thing that exists in the financial world.

Now, the price of government debt is not set by the government. It is set by the market, a mass of analysts having the same debate as the economists, but unlike the economists debating in a room, the market provides a way to settle the debate by the balance of buying and selling of the debt. Bond-holders vote with their dollars. Don’t confuse this with the interest rate set by the Federal Reserve. That is the rate at which the Fed will make short-term loans to banks to cover any gaps in their deposit balance. It has a way of trickling out to influence other short-term debt rates, but its effect on government bond rates is very indirect. Specifically, the Fed rate can contract or expand the money supply and acts as a correcting measure against inflation or deflation, and the risk of inflation (or lack thereof) is what ultimately drives long term interest rates.

So, the various federal bond yields act as a significant reference point for the rest of the bond industry, both public and private across the world. It is significant precisely because it is a large amount of debt. It’s not worked out by five guys in a back room. Instead, it is worked out by millions of bond holders dealing with trillions of dollars. In turn, other creditors make loans at rates of the U.S. bond rate plus a risk adjustment. [Again, supply and demand enters into it as well as our trade balance.] This allows the rest of the bond market to operate much more efficiently than if everyone had to guess the appropriate rate for a zero-risk investment with no way to reach consensus. An efficient bond market is essential for business development because it makes it easier for companies to borrow when necessary.

Thus, the argument goes, it is in the best interest of the world economy for the U.S. government to never pay off all of its debt. Instead, to facilitate the bond market, it should always maintain enough debt to make the U.S. bond rates significant, i.e. that they represent the result of a sufficiently large market at work. That magic size should not be measured in dollars but instead as a fraction of the larger economy, specifically the U.S. GDP, but if there is no budget deficit, or too small of a deficit, then as the GDP grows, this debt pool will shrink as a percentage of the GDP and become less meaningful to the rest of the bond market. So, as long as the GDP is growing, it is important to maintain a budget deficit to keep pace with it, holding the debt at the same fraction of the GDP as is desired by the bond market. It’s impossible to steer the fiscal policy that precisely, but veering too much one way or the other would be a sign for corrective action.

Now, the essay did go on to say that the “current” debt levels (as of the late 90’s) were almost certainly higher than necessary for an efficient bond market, so the author was not opposed to a modest debt pay-down. However, given his fears about a spendthrift Congress, he would have preferred to see several years of a balanced budget or a low deficit to allow the debt to merely remain static or near-static in dollar terms while slowly shrinking down to the appropriate size relative to the GDP. At that point, he would suggest a modest increase in spending (or reduction in taxes) to boost the deficit back to a level to maintain the debt against the GDP.

Personally, I’m not so sure about it. I understand the importance of the zero-risk debt to the bond market, but it’s not free. It comes at the cost of paying the interest on those bonds with taxpayer dollars. That’s money that could have stayed in the economy doing other productive things, and that kind of gain should be enough to offset any inefficiency introduced to the bond market. Smaller markets for low-risk bonds (state or foreign debt or asset-heavy corporate bonds) should still be able to establish a series of floors, and recent gains in market transparency and communication have made these markets much more efficient at reaching appropriate prices. Nevertheless, I found it to be an interesting argument that there is a downside to paying off the national debt.

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Buying my last Father's Day card

I bought and mailed my last Father's Day card today. Mom emailed to report that the doctor says there's nothing left to do but to make Dad comfortable until the end. They're calling in Hospice now, and it will probably be over in a month or two.

It's what I expected but still sad.

Family by Dan | Permalink | Comments (1)

How bad can it get? Pretty good, that's how bad.

Here's a recipe from some guys who went to the illogical extremes to answer the question: What is the most delicious worst thing for a human that can be made on a grill?

Check out The Hot Dog Rollup.

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June 14, 2005

The Laffer Curve in Action

I'm passing on some selections from a Wall Street Journal piece of the recent surge in tax receipts following the Bush tax cuts. I'd just direct you to the article itself, but it's subscriber only.

As legend has it the famous Laffer Curve was first drawn by economist Arthur Laffer in 1974 on a cocktail napkin ...
...
The theory is really one of the simplest concepts in economics. ... The idea is that lowering the tax rate on production, work, investment, and risk-taking will spur more of these activities and thereby will often lead to more tax revenue collections for the government rather than less.

In the 1980s, President Ronald Reagan chopped the highest personal income tax rate from the confiscatory 70% rate that he inherited when he entered office to 28% when he left office and the resulting economic burst caused federal tax receipts to almost precisely double: from $517 billion to $1,032 billion.

Now we have overpowering confirming evidence from the Bush tax cuts of May 2003. The jewel of the Bush economic plan was the reduction in tax rates on dividends from 39.6% to 15% and on capital gains from 20% to 15%. These sharp cuts in the double tax on capital investment were intended to reverse the 2000-01 stock market crash, which had liquidated some $6 trillion in American household wealth, and to inspire a revival in business capital investment, which had also collapsed during the recession. The tax cuts were narrowly enacted despite the usual indignant primal screams from the greed and envy lobby about "tax cuts for the super rich."

Last week the Congressional Budget Office released its latest report on tax revenue collections. The numbers are an eye-popping vindication of the Laffer Curve and the Bush tax cut's real economic value. Federal tax revenues have surged in the first eight months of this fiscal year by $187 billion. This represents a 15.4% rise in federal tax receipts over 2004. Individual and corporate income tax receipts have exploded like a cap let off a geyser, up 30% in the two years since the tax cut. Once again, tax rate cuts have created a virtuous chain reaction of higher economic growth, more jobs, higher corporate profits, and finally more tax receipts.
...
Alas, all of the fiscal news is not celebratory. The CBO also reports that federal expenditures are up $110 billion, or 7.2%, so far this year as the congressional Republican spending spree rolls on. Nonetheless, it now appears that the budget deficit will be at least $60 billion lower than last year and states and cities, led by California, which a few years ago were awash in debt themselves, will enjoy net surpluses of at least $50 billion. ...
...
All of this brings us to the crucial policy issue of whether Congress will observe these new economic and revenue data and have the common sense to keep a good thing going by making the Bush tax cuts permanent. Thanks to inane budget rules in Congress the capital gains and dividend tax cuts are currently set to expire in 2008. (When was the last time a spending program in Washington expired?) One thing would seem certain: Raising the tax rates on capital gains and dividends would be a formula for choking off the expansion and reversing the stock market climb. Until now, the Democrats in Congress have in unison sanctimoniously charged that the government can't afford the price tag of making the tax cut permanent. But, of course, all this new fiscal evidence points to precisely the opposite conclusion: that we can't afford not to make the tax cuts permanent.

So, can we please stop with the over-used and false diatribe that the deficits are being caused by tax cuts? Tax revenue is rising. The deficits are being caused by spending. Feel free to debate the spending, both civilian and military. Just get your numbers straight on the revenue side.

Politics by Dan | Permalink | Comments (16)

June 13, 2005

Friday Five: Fixing up 'This Old School'

I’m playing catchup…

Last Friday’s question comes from me…

A train leaves Chicago at 3pm travelling south towards New York at 80 pounds per hour. Meanwhile, a car leaves London on Tuesday, heading towards Los Angeles at 3.5 meters per sterling pound. When the two meet, a hapless high school student will realize he's never going to get into college. Before that happens, suggest five ways in which your local school system could be improved to better prepare students for either college or the real world or both. (Bonus points for someone who can tell me when the train and car will meet.)

Damn… what was I on when I wrote that? I probably had some ideas when I posed the question, but now… well, I’m pretty drained at the moment, so don’t hold me to any of these. They’re quite off the cuff.

  1. Increase parental involvement: I don’t know how you make it happen (that’s next week’s question), but this has to be the most important difference in getting a good education vs. getting a bad education. Parents who are willing to get involved in their kids’ education will make sure that they get a good education. I attended one of the richest and best (widely recognized) school systems in the state of Texas, perhaps even in the nation. (We won the national Academic Decathlon something like four or five years in a row, but I digress…) Furthermore, I was on the “honor” track, so in theory I got the cream of the crop in teacher selection. However, and I say this with glowing respect to the teaching profession, most of those teachers didn’t teach me anything, or at least not anything worthwhile. There were exceptions of course (kudos to Shoemaker, Gorman, name-forgotten-Geometry-teacher, Steele, Wolgehegan, Fabian, and Taylor), but for the most part, they shoveled a plate of facts and formulas in front of me and asked that I regurgitate them at appropriate intervals. What really made me learn was the constant driving by my parents, especially my father, to learn that stuff and “get those tickets”. My theory is that the main reason rich districts produce such good students (in general) is because rich parents believe in the importance of education and whip that into their children.

  2. Disband the NEA: The NEA (the national teachers’ union – slap my hand if I got the name or acronym wrong) is the biggest roadblock to improving schools. Now, yes, I do believe that teachers should have the same right as anyone else to organize their labor for the purpose of collective bargaining, and yes, I agree that teachers do know a thing or two about what separates good education from bad education. However, the NEA as an organization has tremendous lobbying power and a strong voice in setting national, state, and local education policies, and they have used that power to oppose virtually every recent school reform except for “spend more money”. Now, you might think that spending more money really is the solution, but the NEA’s primary goal is NOT to improve the education of students. It is to increase the salaries and benefits of its members, the teachers. If the real solution to improving education turns out to be in opposition of teachers’ pay, then you can be sure that the NEA will oppose it, claiming to be a body of unbiased experts. So, I suggest blowing it up (not literally, but I wouldn’t mind seeing them go down in a fire of union fraud and bankruptcy) and replacing it with a bunch of local, unrelated teachers’ unions and one or more national professional associations, similar to the IEEE or ACM. Let the local unions deal with local salary/benefit issues, and let the professional association discuss and opine on the best ways to education children. Those two functions are unrelated and should be separate.

  3. Don’t spend more money: Well, maybe you do have to spend more money, but I am sick and fucking tired of hearing the old mantra that we just need to spend more money. Hell, we’ve been spending more money for thirty years as we’ve watched the schools get worse. (I assume they’re getting worse – why else all the angst? Either that, or it’s all a hoax, trying to extort more money, but I digress…) I’m also tired of the constant comparisons of dollars per student ratios. “New York schools are better than Texas schools because New York spends the most per student while Texas comes in at 44th.” Whoever thinks that is in much more need of an education than I, a Texas-educated idiot. Did it ever occur to them that it’s just cheaper to live in Texas than in New York? And where it’s cheaper to live, the labor is cheaper. In general, New Yorkers make more than folks in Austin, from the teachers to the cab drivers, the plumbers, the window washers and so on. Does this mean that New York has better cabs or pipes or cleaner windows? No, it just means that labor is more expensive in New York than in Austin. The same goes for comparing Plano and Round Rock to Laredo and San Angelo. Spending more money doesn’t necessarily mean you’re getting a better product. All it really tells you is that you’re paying more. If you’re going to rely on a metric, pick something better.

  4. End Zero Tolerance policies and return authority to man-on-the-spot: I know this came as a reaction to some pretty bad situations with drugs and weapons in schools, but these are a ridiculous solution. They aim to please the masses by saying that the problem will go away because we won’t tolerate the problem. Well, the problems haven’t gone away, and all they have done is upped the ante for getting caught breaking the most trivial regulations. [See the War on Drugs and mandatory drug sentencing for a similar “success story”.] Instead, give some authority back to the local administrator to use his judgment to decide which infractions can be ignored and which require harsh punishment. While I am a big fan of the predictability of the rule of law, I’m also a big fan of the independent judges who administer that law.

  5. Require results and experiment in the face of failure: In some cases, the public schools deliver. In some cases, they don’t. There are at least a hundred ways to measure this, and I’m not strongly in favor of one vs. the other. Also, I don’t believe in equality of outcome. Some schools are just going to outperform others, but if we have to pay for the education, we should expect results. That doesn’t necessarily means every student must pass a certain test, or that a set percentage of students must graduate. In truth, I think those standards should be set locally since that’s where the money is coming from and where the parents of the children live. And if a school (whether public or private) is failing to deliver those results, we need to be allowed to experiment with other solutions. Maybe that’s charter schools or even the dreaded religious schools [insert hysterical Christian Fascism diatribe here] or maybe just some fundamental changes to the public schools. But don’t just shrug and say, “Well, it’s a complex issue that needs further study… but in the meantime, I know that more money would improve things.”

Well, not my best, but not bad for off the cuff.

Oh, the answer to the bonus question is: On alternate Tuesdays, but only if the price of silver is on the decline. I'll give Adam partial credit for his own surrealism.

Other Friday Fiver’s are running for school board here.

Meme by Dan | Permalink | Comments (1)

My father is dying

I spent this past weekend with my parents. I took MAW and the kids with me out west to see my dad one last time. I don't really want to delve into the details here, but I don't think he'll make it through the summer. Chances are, I will not see him again.

This is just an FYI out to some friends.

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June 08, 2005

Playing with the new version of Poser

I upgraded from Poser version 5 to version 6 in March, but I didn't actually install it until this week when service release 1 was available. Here's my first render with it. It's not really NWS, but it's a little risque.

Holding a Fairy
(click thumbnail for full image)


What I really wanted to test here was a new lighting technique that lets you render things as if they were glowing fairly well. You just turn off all the lights, crank up the ambient light value on the glowing object, and then set all the other objects to "gather" light. Unfortunately, the gathering is very weak and somewhat spotty, so it wouldn't come out right. I ended up using a couple of point-source lights (also new) and fudging a few things. I'm still not quite happy with how the lighting turned out, but I'm going to set it aside for now, maybe to return later to fiddle with it some more.

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June 03, 2005

Lost and Found on the Internet

I just found a new service that I wanted to share. Basically, it's a lost and found service for the internet. StuffBak will give you small stickers (or perhaps you have to buy them...not sure) that you can place on various items. It contains their URL, an 800 number, a unique ID, and in bright yellow letters "REWARD FOR RETURN!"

The idea is that if an honest person comes across your $400 PDA or camera or whatever, they would like to return it to you. Even if they're a little less than honest, a reward might induce them, but they still have no idea of how to find you. Well, the StuffBak sticker gives them a way to report the item, and StuffBak will arrange the shipping and return to you. The service is technically free until they actually return an item to you, and then it's just $14.95 plus shipping (typically less than $30 total).

Yes, you could achieve much of this just by engraving your contact info onto the item (if it's big enough), but there is a nice convenience and privacy factor here. I have a similar service for my keys, provided by my alumni association, where I carry a keychain ornament that allows a finder to just drop the keys into mailbox, eventually getting them back to me for a fee.

Now, I did say it's "technically" free. It's really just free for the first year after the activation of the label. After that, it's either $2.95 per year per label, or $20 for any number of labels for five years. (You do the math.) Also, any reward you promise is obviously paid by you, but StuffBak handles the details, providing immediate gratification to your hopeful Samaritan.

A field test run by CNBC showed that 5 out of 6 items were returned within three days, so it seems to work. (Plus, the one item not returned was so cheap that I wouldn't have used the service on it in the first place.)

Anyway, I just thought I'd pass it on in recognition of, "Hey... that's a good idea."

Technology by Dan | Permalink | Comments (0)