More Bad News on the Economics of the Internet, But Good News on Yellow Perch

Discount for the fact that I'm a little grouchy about Yahoo! News, as I mentioned a few weeks ago. (By the way, they have now "published" my piece on the debt ceiling, so you can go reread it and earn me fifteen hundredths of a cent.)

But this, by any standard, is egregious: A few weeks ago, the number one story in their listing of top stories, which runs as a sidebar to their other news stories from the AP and AFP and so on, was this one, which begins:

Bell Aquaculture, a pioneer in sustainable fish farming operations, is expanding its production facility in Albany, IN. Formed in 2005, Bell Aquaculture is the nation's largest yellow perch (Perca flavescens) fish farm. Ground was broken today on a $5 million expansion project.

Are you a excited as I am? The largest fish farm in America! Well, all right, the largest yellow perch farm in America. Those folks in Albany, Indiana must be bursting with pride. Maybe Gov. Daniels should reconsider his decision not to run for President. But wait, there's more:

Madison Avenue Meets the Marquis de Sade

"A logical solution was to help their customers to recognize their products by literally branding them with the company’s name or symbol."

--The New York Times

The Gun-Owners' Fantasy

If you ever saw the old play "Charley's Aunt, " you may recall the title character's line, "I'm from Brazil, where the nuts come from." It doesn't sound as good with "Arizona",  but it applies to me.

Yes, another nut has gone into the wholesale murder business in Arizona. This time, a man shot and killed five people and then himself in Yuma. The victims included his ex-wife and her lawyer.

I'm not going to go on and on about how violent America is. Indeed the mass-shooting meme (that's the first time I've ever used that word-- I hope it was correct) has now reached northern Europe as well.

No, what always strikes me in these cases is what they reveal about gun owners' fantasy. I'm not talking about a fantasy of killing people, but about a fantasy of security.  Gun owners believe that lax gun-ownership laws will allow them to protect themselves. Yet these massacres keep taking places in states with lax gun-ownership laws. Two years ago a man in Alabama killed ten people with an assault rifle before killing himself. Despite Alabama's permissive gun laws, not one of his victims was able to put up any resistance.

After the Gabby Giffords shootings, I suggested to some gun nuts at the Volokh Conspiracy blog  that a ban on sale of ammo clips that let you shoot twenty people without reloading would easily pass Supreme Court scrutiny. Predictably, they were outraged. What if, one of them asked, he had to protect his family against a home invasion by several armed people? You or I might think that a Glock with a standard 15-round magazine would offer adequate protection for the run-of-the-mill home invasion, but hey, you never know.

And once you start down the road of being Constitutionally entitled to protection from every conceivable threat, there's no logical stopping place. What if you're being attacked by criminals in an armored car? You clearly need an RPG for self-defense. What about strafing from a Beechcraft? The Colt shoulder-launched missile, the SAM that won the West (I'm making that up). I will survive!

To some extent, of course, this whole fantasy is just the public rationalization  of the real fantasy, which is single-handedly defending yourself against the entire U.S. government. But have you ever noticed, when you read about some man-made or natural tragedy, a tendency to find reasons why it would never have happened to you? I think guns serve that role for gun owners. I would never have been killed if I'd  been at Virginia Tech, because I would've been armed.

The gun-owners' fantasy looks like another facet of the American belief in the possibility of complete security, the same belief that leads us to buy cars that can survive collisions rather than cars that can avoid collisions, and to ban shampoo from airplanes. Maybe Americans need just a dash of fatalism.

Intrade Uptick Lowdown: Update

With regard to the previous post, I discovered that Nate Silver agrees with me, which is always reassuring. He also makes I point I didn't make, which is that small increases in approval may translate into large increases in probability of reelection, because a lot of elections are close.

Reading some of the chat on Intrade's website, I realized that I had overlooked something. The number I quoted was the probability that Obama gets elected president. But for that to happen, two things must happen. First, he must get the nomination. Then, given that he has gotten the nomination, he must get elected. The Intrade markets estimate the probability of him getting the nomination at 92%. (For example, he might for some reason decide not to run. Or he might get caught up in some scandal. Or have health problems. None of these things seems very likely, but they could easily add up to 8%.) If his overall probability of getting reelected is, say, 60%, that implies his probability of being reelected given that he has gotten the nomination is 65% (.92 x .65 = .60). And 65% is a lot closer to my completely subjective and unreliable estimate of the probability that he could defeat the Republican candidate, which was around 2:1, or 67%.

So perhaps it's just as well that I didn't buy in. On the other hand, my point from before still holds: Whatever the true probability was before Osama died, it's got to have gone up a little.

Chronicle of a Death Not Foretold

Intrade is an online "prediction market." The basic idea is that markets aggregate a lot of information from many dispersed individuals trying hard to make money, and so they can usually make better predictions than individuals can. That's why most economists consider the stock market valuation of a company to be the best measure of its value.

Intrade capitalizes on this idea by setting up speculative markets in particular outcomes to be predicted. For example, they might sell shares that (to simplify slightly) will pay $1 if the Higgs Boson subatomic particle is discovered by December 31, 2011, and zero if it isn't. Then if shares are selling for $0.20, as they are, you can interpret that as the market estimating that there is a 20% chance of the Higgs Boson being discovered in 2011. (There are some big caveats here, including whether enough people are participating in this market to give you a good estimate.)

Of course, one of the things people are most interested in forecasting is election results. Recently the Intrade market was predicting the Obama had around a 60% chance of being reelected. That seemed a little low to me, so I briefly thought that I should buy some shares, but of course I didn't.

Holocaust Envy

Those lucky Jews! How come they got to have a Holocaust? Nobody ever listens to our problems, but they just natter on and on. OK, true, no one ever loaded millions of us onto cattle cars to be exterminated, but our suffering was just as great! Well, almost as great. Well, significant.

So says the Catholic Church, trying to present itself as a victim of Hitler. So say the Palestinians, staging a facsimile of Israel's Holocaust Day every year on Israel Independence Day

And now, so says Michele Bachmann, that crushing burden on anyone trying trying to maintain faith in the good judgment of the American people. At a conservative forum in New Hampshire she told of how shocked she was as a child to learn that Americans were unaware until after the war that millions of Jews had died in
Europe.

Bachmann said the next generation will ask similar questions about what their elders did to prevent them from facing a huge tax burden.

"I tell you this story because I think in our day and time, there is no analogy to that horrific action," she said, referring to the Holocaust. "But only to say, we are seeing eclipsed in front of our eyes a similar death and a similar taking away. It is this disenfranchisement that I think we have to answer to."

So just to be clear, there's no analogy between the death of six million Jews and higher taxes. It's just that they're similar. Got it?

Two Remarks on the Politics of the Budget Debate

1. A milestone in Machiavellianism? We may have just seen the birth of the "open-mike fake." Obama had his supposedly private comments to supporters picked up Thursday and reported on ABC. What did he say? Did he reveal that he really does hate whites, or that Joe Biden is a pain in the neck? No. Here's some of it:

"Eliminating the health care bill would cost us $1 trillion. It would add $1 trillion to the deficit. So when Paul Ryan says his priority is to make sure, he's just being America's accountant and trying to, you know, be responsible, this is the same guy that voted for two wars that were unpaid for, voted for the Bush tax cuts that were unpaid for, voted for the prescription drug bill that cost as much as my health care bill -- but wasn't paid for. So it's not on the level. And we’ve got to keep on, you know, keep on shining a light on that.”

Any suggestions about how to "shine a light on that?" No? Boy, is his face red.

Arizona Breaks Even, Karmically Speaking

The New York Times reports that after a California corrections official sent aides to Arizona on a "secret and important mission" to borrow a lethal-injection drug that was in short supply, he sent a thank-you note to his opposite number in Arizona saying "You guys in AZ are life savers."

The Man Who Wasn't There Shows Up

I was quite surprised by Obama's speech today on the deficit. First, of course, he actually stood for something besides bipartisanship. That is to say that while making  it clear he was willing to compromise, he staked out a position some distance away from the Republican position, instead of compromising in advance.

Compromise is a tricky issue for a politician, particularly for a President. One the one hand, the voters seem to hate partisan bickering and want politicians to get things done. On the other hand, politicians pay a penalty for changing their minds, even from the wrong position to the right one. And for a President, perhaps because of the national-security side of the job, looking weak is politically fatal. ( See the 2004 campaign.)  A President is probably better off standing for almost anything than standing for nothing. It helps, of course, when you're taking positions that are overwhelmingly popular: in favor of Medicare, in favor of taxing the rich.

How Not to Poll

The Quinnipiac University poll usually is pretty good. But a recent (late February) poll on funding for Planned Parenthood had a startling textbook example of a bad polling question:

"Do you support or oppose cutting off federal government funding to Planned Parenthood?"