After Corbu

Cyber-rapture

Quixote — Sun, 07 Feb 2010 10:17:16 +0000

Mark Dery in Escape Velocity: Cyberculture at the End of the Century:

The rhetoric of escape velocity crosses cyberpunk science fiction with the Pentacostal belief in an apocalyptic Rapture, in which history ends and the faithful are gathered up into the heavens. Visions of a cyber-Rapture are a fatal seduction, distracting us from the devastation of nature, the unraveling of the social fabric, and the widening chasm between the technocratic elite and the minimum-wage masses.

Shorter Dery: Go fuck yourself Ray Kurzweil.

Inner City Pressure

Quixote — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 08:53:24 +0000

A song in honor of my troubles with random undeserved parking citations. I don’t think people have this problem in the suburbs.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Hacking No Child Left Behind

Quixote — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 08:35:08 +0000

It’s hard to describe how awesome it is to see that my former high school district is manipulating No Child Left Behind in such innovative ways. I’m almost proud.

Basically, NCLB school evaluation in Califnornia is based on the percent of 10th graders who pass the HS Exit Exam. It doesn’t matter if the student passes the test in a later grade; the 10th grade rate is the key statistic. The Kern High School District has therefore taken an ‘assume a can-opener’ approach to this challenge and eliminated sophomores. Or at least the low-performing ones.

Here’s how it works:

The Man: We have decided that you have ‘failed’ your freshman year by not earning enough units to be advanced.

You: Fuck me.

The Man: Hey! Language, please.

You: Sorry. That sucks.

The Man: Yes, well, so do your grades. Now you will redo your freshman year and make up the classes you failed so you can rejoin your class.

You: Hmph. What if I fail again? Do I stay a freshman?

The Man: No.

You: Oh. Do I become a sophomore?

The Man: No.

You: Ok…well what?

The Man: You’ll be a junior.

You: Even if I fail? Again?

The Man: Of course. We don’t want to hold you back, we just want to give you more time to succeed.

You: Wait, wait, wait. So you’re saying you’re going to keep me locked in hear for 5 years now?!

The Man: Don’t be ridiculous. If you can’t graduate in 4 years, then there’s nothing we can do to help you.

You: So how is that ‘more time to succeed?’

The Man: Well, it’s more time to prepare for the exit exam, which you won’t take until you’re a sophomore, or in your case, a junior.

You: I’m never going to take that fucking test.

The Man: We know sport. And it’s ok.

You: What?

The Man: Well, I shouldn’t tell you this, but let’s be honest. You’re not going to pass the exit exam. I mean, you might, eventually, but certainly not next year. Not as a sophomore. And we can’t have that. If our sophomore pass rate dives, it’s means lost funds, lost promotions, worse education for all you kids. And that wouldn’t be fair, would it? It’d be better for all of us if you just skipped next years test. I trust you’re agreeable?

You: Maybe. IF I take your test, what if I fail junior year?

The Man: Nothing! It would be unfortunate for you, but rest assured it won’t affect me, and I won’t be on your case. No one will look at that statistic!

You: You guys are gangster. I feel suddenly full of school pride.

The Man: Um, thank you. See you at freshman orientation.

Thank you RISA

Quixote — Thu, 17 Sep 2009 05:46:19 +0000

Because of you, when the boss catches us having rubber band fights we can always just say: ”I’m iterating for p-delta.”

Similar to coders really.

Update: It’s embarrassing when you misspell the punchline.

Counter-revolutionary design

Quixote — Fri, 11 Sep 2009 02:55:00 +0000

What If New York City 3 by Studio Lindfors

This is pretty awesome, but it would make it much harder to use the political & economic disruption of a precipitous rise in sea levels to stage a world revolution.

[vis BLDGBLOG, so so long ago]

Used to say you were flawed if you weren’t free

Quixote — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 20:00:00 +0000

Not that she let’s John Edwards completely off the hook, but this passage by Caitlin Flanagan describing Rielle Hunter is appalling:

…his (former) mistress, a known hellcat who has been flummoxing boy-men since the ’80s and whose rage over Elizabeth’s book is held in check only (and here I’m admittedly basing my speculation largely on what I’ve come to learn about women’s dreams and desires) by her hankering to live in Tara. Hers is not an intelligence or an ambition difficult to plumb, and her dream is almost certainly to have Elizabeth shuffle off the mortal coil so that she can instate herself in the North Carolina pleasure dome and become the fun, hip, “Being Is Free,” bleached-blond, super open-minded, videographing, Power of Now stepmom, a prospect so hideous that it makes Elizabeth Edwards’s last-chance book tour look like what it is: a desperate attempt to protect her sweet, sad children from the influence of this erstwhile cokehead and present-day weasel after she has died.

Really? I harbor no love for Hunter — she was the second party in a deceitful conspiracy that brought down the progressive presidential campaign that I supported — but this seems like an absurd attempt to throw the rhetorical kitchen sink at her. Ta-Nehisi calls it “gender-nationalist,” and I think that’s right in the sense that only Hunter and Elizabeth Edwards are really granted any agency in the piece, whereas John Edwards, party one in the previously mentioned conspiracy, is a dolt who decided to blow up a campaign that was incredibly important to millions of people…why exactly? Because Hunter is a mean slut?

Certainly writing a piece that focuses on Hunter ties in much better with an examination of the life and beliefs of Helen Gurley Brown and gives Flanagan license to critique revisionist feminist historians who would turn Brown’s “how to win a millionaire” guidebook into a liberatory text. And while the magazine-long-form is long, it’s not infinite, so one can excuse the absense of a socio-biological (or whatever) critical framework to explain John’s actions. However, none of that explains the vitriol directed at Hunter, who for all her flaws was not the one tasked with being faithful to a partner or honorable to a movement.

The electoral vanguard will not be uninsured

Quixote — Tue, 08 Sep 2009 11:02:13 +0000

I know that chicken little can be a useful role to play, and I want to see the health care debate pushed left as much as the next blogger, but I also feel bound to abide by certain numbers. The collective blow-up over Baucus’s bill (see TPM, Pandagon, NMMNB, & LGM), while completely justified on the merits — the bill sucks — is completely off base regarding the electoral impact.

Assuming Democrats do pass a bill where “the poor, the unemployed, the working class are forced to pay large sums they don’t have to insurance companies for “junk insurance” with high deductibles” (aimai) or “the problem of the uninsured [is solved] by passing a law forcing them to buy health insurance which, by definition, most a) cannot afford or b) are gambling they won’t need because they’re young and healthy” (TPM), how potentially damaging is the offended constituency? This is a crude question and obviously the morality of a policy has nothing to do with political power. But I’m tired of the ambiguous boogie man of electoral backlash. Let’s quantify:

My chart of voting behavior for insured vs. uninsured people per US HHS Overview of the Uninsured in the United States, KaiserEDU Public Opinion: Health Care and the 2008 Election, and Gallup 2009 Detailed Political ideology.

Uninsured, politically moderate, likely voters (UPMLV). That’s my definition of the demographic who will be directly adversely affected if Democrats pair individual mandates with low levels of government subsidy. At most, that means 4% of voters. 4% isn’t nothing. Plenty of elections have been decided by less. Given current patterns, it’s 2/3 of the 6% swing Republicans potentially need to retake the House, and if Republicans did win 26 seats, that would be a big deal.

However, that number assumes a group so outraged as to produce a 100-0 split. It assumes no subsidies reach the UPMLV to dull the anger. It assumes that the uninsured are moderate at the same rate as the general population, when they likely skew liberal. I don’t feel comfortable trying to quantify these factors, since the combined margins of error become an order of magnitude greater than the size of the population we’re talking about, which of course is the larger point: we’re debating the electoral importance of Microtrends-sized group. Outside of politicians still being scammed by Mark Penn, I think we can agree that this is not going to be a winning argument for better health care reform.

What’s most noteworthy about this whole reform process is that universal/expanded access to insurance is the core of all the health care reform bills, even Baucus’s lame one. Democratic politicians have largely ignored the fact that there’s no real political margin among swing voters in reducing the uninsured. This actually says something pretty positive about the bulk of the Democratic political class.

A few notes about chart methodology:

“% who voted in 2002″ is from KaiserEDU and refers to the percent of uninsured and insured people, respectively, who self-reported having voted in the 2002 midterm congressional elections. I could not locate 2006 data, and in general it is a tragedy that every 2006 & 2008 exit poll didn’t record respondents health insurance status. For shame, pollsters, for shame.
“% of 2002 voters” numbers are determined using the following equation: [ "% of total insured population" x "% insured who voted in 2002" ] / [("% of total insured population" x "% insured who voted in 2002" ) + ("% of total uninsured population" x "% uninsured who voted in 2002" )]
Insured vs. uninsured as a percent of total population comes from the US HHS 2007 population survey, and given recent job losses the uninsured share is undoubtedly higher, likely meaning that uninsured voters will make up a higher percentage of the 2010 electorate.
Final set of bars overlays Gallup’s partisan identification data over the Insured/Uninsured bars for “% 2002 voters”. This is a bad assumption given the income, age, and race statistical disparity between insured and uninsured populations, but is methodologically conservative for estimating “uninsured likely swing voters.”

Bacon-wrapped hot dogs

Quixote — Mon, 07 Sep 2009 13:49:05 +0000

chinatown03 by Juan23

LA hot dogs should really be added to this list. Even my vegetarian wife agrees that when you wrap hot dogs in bacon and serve with fried onions and peppers you have achieved a superior product. Take that New York.

The New After Corbu

Quixote — Sun, 06 Sep 2009 03:03:42 +0000

If you are self-employed, and therefore actually visit the website of blogs you read — as opposed to the rest of us who use RSS readers to mask with javascript our non-work-related internet usage — than you have no doubt noticed that this blog has changed it’s look a bit.

The new header features a shot of Le Corbusier’s Plan Voison, which is a big more relevant than the Chefchaouen picture that was up before. Their is now an After Corbu flickr page, with photos from buildings I visit or images from models I create. I’m not as interested in pictures of complete buildings, as they hide so much, and will try to post my favorite pictures of the contruction process.

There’s also a few new areas to this site, which you can browse at your leisure:

About – a general statement of purpose.
Archives – I found a sweet little module that lays out old posts graphically very nicely.
Links – the ol’ blogroll can now be found here.

It’s still a Wordpress blog, despite my rumblings about switching to Drupal. I had contemplated the switch because — and if you care nothing for web design, feel free to tune out at this point — I’m planning on having different content types on this site, namely Posts, Pictures, Links, & Graphs, and Wordpress is not a natural CMS like Drupal. However, I ultimately decided to put the pictures on an After Corbu flickr page and will soon start adding little micro-posts of graphs & links, which will be differentiated from blog posts by simply overloading the post category feature of Wordpress. It’s not as slick as using a real CMS, but it’s also easier than migrating posts and comments.

Anyway, enjoy!

Sin Taxes for the Financial Industry

Quixote — Sat, 05 Sep 2009 18:35:07 +0000

I really wished Jeff Frankel blogged more since economists have established an (undeserved) reputation in the media as John Hodgman-style general experts, but the prominent ones who aren’t named Krugman skew decidedly right and reinforce the laissez faire conventional wisdom. That said, Frankel came through today with a post on the head of Britain’s financial regulatory agency coming out for transaction taxes in order to shrink the trading volume and raise funds.

Transaction taxes are of course a pet policy of mine (a better economy via better systems design!), and they have a lot of potential to raise government funds while creating positive secondary effects, in the same vein as other proposed ’sin taxes’ such as on soda or pollution. While it may be hard to quantify the behavioural impacts of these taxes, what matters from a policy-making perspective is that, regardless of size, the impacts are positive.

I have yet to see anyone argue that transaction taxes could shrink the time-horizon of investors or increase market volatility. The debate, when it occurs (which is rare, since opponents do not seem willing to engage the issue), is over the significance of the impacts. But of course the impacts aren’t the primary reason to enact the policy; you pass it to raise money for something useful. Something like health care or supertrains or robot gladiators. Any behavioral impacts are gravy.

I really wish that public anger over the bailouts and bonuses to the financial industry could be harnessed into passing a transaction tax — it would certainly be a more productive use of the anger than the abortive attempt to pass special bonus taxes.