Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

At this time of year I ask myself what were the biggest stories of the year ending in business/financial news. Last year Covid-related stories of course dominated. This year ... not so much. In fact, I've found it pretty easy to keep Covid, inclusive of Delta's dawn and whatever Omicron has on, off of this list altogether.   The issue of ransomware -- more akin to a computer virus than to the coronavirus -- dominated the late spring, so it gets its props here in two consecutive months. This was also a year when it became obvious that fossil fuels aren't going away, and two of our monthly entries are devoted to that point.  I'll break it down by month as usual, and as is my habit I will avoid assigning priority among the various monthly champions.   January:  Robinhood app.  What looks at first glance like a David-and-Goliath story played out in the final days of this month as a buying campaign for GameStop (GME). The rise of GME delivers a multi-billio...

  Nassim Taleb is refreshing because he writes on social phenomena in a way at a great distance from the usual platitudes of right and left, and that leaves him agreeing with one or the other in ways that seem fortuitous. I just finished reading SKIN IN THE GAME (2018).  The essential idea of the book is that one shouldn't take advice from anyone who doesn't stand to lose if the advice is wrong. Don't buy stock in Apple on the basis of a case made to you by someone who has no Apple in his own portfolio.  This is connected in Taleb's mind with the idea of "fat tails," extraordinary events that aren't at all as extraordinary as they "should" be under Bell-curve or Gaussian probability theory. A bell curve maps one dimension, which can be for example the earnings of Apple next year. The highest point is the most likely outcome. Some absurdly high number for Apple's earning would be the "tail" figure on one head, and bankruptcy-forcing ...

CNN is launching a streaming service for interviews with newsmakers. Chris Wallace, son of legendary television news reporter Mike Wallace, recently quit Fox News.  These two facts are related. Wallace announced his departure at the end of "Fox News Sunday," the closest thing Fox News has had lately to what would once have been considered a proper broadcast TV news show.  Wallace has moderated there since 2003. He ended his last broadcast telling hsi viewers he had had a "great ride" at Fox but was "ready for a new adventure." He did not then make it clear, but the adventure he had in mind was with CNN+, the new streaming service.  Good luck to you, if only for your old man's sake. If he is looking down upon us from some metaphysical analog of a cloud, I imagine he has seen your time with Fox News as an inexplicable detour.  Now, at last, you may be about the family business. 

At 8:23 p.m., Dec. 10, Larry Virden was at the Edwardsville facility, the now-destroyed Amazon warehouse in southern Illinois. He texted Cherie Jones, saying “Amazon won’t let me leave until after the storm blows over.” The tornado touched down 16 minutes later, at 8:39.  The arithmetic is maddening. It does appear that Virden could have gotten home had he left at that time. But it doesn't appear that management was being unreasonable. They did not know precisely when or whether a tornado was going to hit their facility. But they knew the danger was high, and that if it happened it would happen soon.   So they made the (reasonable) determination that their employees had a better chance of sheltering where they were than by taking to the roads. RIP Larry Virden. 

But of news from Seoul, in the Republic of Korea: a growing number of government officials are leaving their jobs and taking new more lucrative ones in the cryptocurrency industry. A member of parliament from the ruling party, Roh Woong-rae, has suggested stricter rules. Of course there is a problem here. Once a few government officials get better jobs in the crypto industry, others come to see their government services as a way to a golden job later in life. Will they then chance doing anything that would alienated their future bosses? Probably not. The corruption is clear enough even when there is no explicit quid pro quo .   Various solutions to this "revolving door" problem have been attempted in the U.S., and in other countries.  I won;t review them here. The bright reader will infer what my own solution is. 

She had a flair with vampire novels. And she saved vampire movies.   Indeed, one might say she resuscitated the genre, and its silver screen derivatives. The campiness of Leslie Nielson's Dracula: Dead and Loving It of 1995 might have seemed to put a stake in Bram Stoker's characters as objects of further Hollywood treatment.  But, if I may mix metaphors, the seed for a revival had already been planted. The year before that, 1994, Neil Jordan directed a motion picture adaptation of Anne Rice's Interview with the Vampire, taking a fresh look at the material. It was not at once a market sensation, despite the presence of Tom Cruise. It was not a sensation precisely because of the weariness of the movie-going public with the whole genre, the weariness that was soon to produce Nielson's act of desperation. And yet over time, in the years to come. the growth of Rice's influence would undo some of the damage that wear-and-tear had done to the whole thought space.    ...

  Last time I mentioned the election in Honduras I said that Xiomara Castro had won, but that her victory might well be contested. I have proved too pessimistic. The National Party has in fact conceded the election results and stepped aside. Castro will be sworn in on January 27.  Ah, I remember when things worked that smoothly in transfers of power in The United States. Where will things go now? Well ... the new President is a professed socialist, but I suspect that is mostly a matter of the marketing power of that label. [Yes, I know, it's marketing power in the US still seems negative outside of Vermont. Honduras is a different place, folks.]  What we know is that she has demanded a new deal from the International Monetary Fund in terms of her country's debt. I can hardly blame her and I have to observe that she doesn't have a great hand to play there. The IMF is simply a surrogate for global bond markets, and they are a stronger force than any momentum generated by an...

  Recently I wrote here about J oe Madison, a radio host with a show on Sirius XM Urban View, announced Nov. 8 that he will not eat solid food until, as he put it, “Congress passes, and President Biden signs,  the Freedom to Vote Act or the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act.” Madison is still at it. He has been fasting for a month. Now he has some company. Twenty-two students are various Arizona colleges are fasting until such time as Senator Kyrsten Sinema agrees to support not only the Freedom to Vote Act but a filibuster carve-out for it.  Sinema is one of Arizona's two Senators. The other, Mark Kelly, is like her a Democrat but, unlike her, is a reliable vote supporting the initiatives of the leadership of the party, on voting rights and other matters. Sinema has been the Jo Manchin of the West, which is presumably why she has been targeted by this effort.  Joe Madison, like a certain kneeling quarterback in ancient days, might have started something big....

Five facts you might want to keep in mind about Devin Nunes' departure from the House of Representatives (to become the CEO of a company that may never really be a thing.) 1) The map of the 22d Congressional district of California, which Nunes represents, is about to be redrawn. It will become less deeply red. 2) Since Nunes is leaving at the end of this year, a special election will be held, before that redraw can be completed. This means that someone will represent that 22d for the final year of its existence in its current form, just long enough to be the incumbent for an effort at re-election within the new district in November.  3) It isn't obvious whether that incumbency in such a circumstance will create much advantage. So, between the redrawing and the special election, it looks as if the new 22d is primed to be a Dem pick-up in November. 4) Nunes has distinguished himself in office chiefly as the filer of meritless defamation lawsuits, one of them against a twitter acc...

The very existence of neutrinos is something that admirers of The Big Bang Theory (the television show, not the actual theory) might think of in terms of a conversation between Leonard and Sheldon.  The theoretical physicists (Sheldon Cooper's real-world colleagues) have been saying they exist for a long time now. Since a paper in 1930 by Wolfgang Pauli.  But the experimentalists (Leonard Hofstadter's tribe) have never been able to find one of the little buggers.  Now, it seems they have. Leonard has reported this and Sheldon has said "I told you so."  Heck, the Japanese built a huge facility specifically devoted to the detection of neutrinos, called the Super Kamiokande. In essence, it is a big tank of water with a lot of photomultiplier tubes in it. The tubes allow the physicists to watch for the predicted "Cherenkov radiation." Whatever that is supposed to be. It didn't help. Now, the credit for the key experimental observation goes to the Large Hadr...

  All these 'school shooting' stories are starting to look the same. Except perhaps for this one. Because with this one we get a controversy over the use of the word "bro." There was an active shooter in the halls of Oxford High. One particular classroom followed the protocol they had learned on 'shooter drills.' They sheltered in place -- locking the door, taping the windows. So far as I can tell, there was no teacher in the room at the time. One of the students seems to have been 'in charge.' Then came a knock on the door. The voice that presumably belonged to the knocker said that he was from the sheriff's office and "it's safe to come out."   In-charge guy, "We're not willing to take that risk right now." Voice from outside, "Come to the door and look at my badge, bro."  I'm impressed that the students in that class had the operational common sense to understand that sheriff's deputies don't cal...

  What kind of blogger would I be if I didn't have a thought about this subject? In my case the arguments on abortion before the Supreme Court last week sent me back, not to 1973, but to 1992.    It is worthwhile to note that 2021 this isn’t the first time  Roe  has seemed on the verge of demise. In 1992, after two Republican presidents over twelve years had made five Supreme Court appointments, there was a widespread expectation that the Court’s decision that year in  Planned Parenthood v. Casey  would overturn it. After all, both Reagan and Bush the elder had made a point of seeking jurists who would overturn Roe v. Wade .  A friend of mine was working for what one may call a junk mail processer at the time. He tells me that among the items of mail they processed was a call for donations from a pro-abortion rights group. The letter began, "The Supreme Court has just eliminated the constitutional protection for...." It asked for the money to figh...

 On November 28 the people of Honduras voted. They appear to have voted for  Xiomara Castro, of the Liberty and Refoundation Party (LIBRE), as their new President.  The election may well be stolen. We may soon find that the ruling party has manufactured enough votes to keep itself in power. Then there will arise the question of what, if anything, the Biden administration can do about that. But the margins of victory seems to be large, so the creation of later 'found' votes will have to be on a big scale.   There were three significant candidates for the office. In addition to Xiomara Castro, there was Nasry Asfura, the candidate of the ruling National Party and the mayor of the capital city, and Yani Rosenthal, of the Liberals. The nominees had each been chosen by party primaries in March. There is a fourth major party, known as the Savior Party, but its candidate, Salvador Nasralla, withdrew on October 13 to become Castro’s running mate. The Castro-Nasralla was...

  Suppose I put forward the following theory of history: human history (or American history, if I want to be specific) is chiefly about a struggle among the providers of various competing psychoactive ("addictive") substances. People who drink a lot of coffee and smoke a lot of tobacco have for a long time believed that they are doing it right and anybody else is doing mind-chemistry wrong. THAT is the key point. Let us call this Critical Pharmacology Theory. Considering contemporary politics, one thing I would be certain to be asked, were I to find any broad audience for this, would be: is this compatible with or at odds with Critical Race Theory. Leave aside the hookum about CRT as it is supposedly being taught in elementary school, or found in the works of Toni Morrison.  It isn't, and it can't be.  CRT used properly refers to a belief expounded upon by, say Derrick Bell or Richard Delgado. It is, so to speak, part of an intra-left debate. It followed upon and was ...

The United States seems to have lost a comforting illusion. The Republican trickery of keeping a seat open for a year until their own guy could fill it, then four years later rushing through a confirmation because ... the next guy couldn't be allowed to fill it -- this has been rather hard on the notion that Supreme Court Justices are in some important sense above the grubby world of politics. Should we regret the loss of that illusion?  In a book I wrote decades ago, about the history of the politics of the Supreme Court, focusing on the period from FDR to George H.W. Bush, from the court-packing plan to the Clarence Thomas hearings, I took a broad position I called "minimal formalism."  A full-blooded or maximalist formalist would answer "yes" to this question. Indeed, he would probably say, "It has not always been an illusion, for important parts of American history it has been the truth -- we should regret, first, the fact that it became an illusion and...

  Joe Madison, a radio host with a show on Sirius XM Urban View, announced Nov. 8 that he will not eat solid food until, as he put it, “Congress passes, and President Biden signs,  the Freedom to Vote Act or the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act.” This could be Big. Bigger than anyone is yet saying. Bobby Sands big. So far as I know he has stuck to it. And there is a clock running. The human body needs food, and seldom survives without it for more than 70 days.  (Bobby Sands, the notorious IRA Provo who demanded he be treated by the Ulster authorities as a political prisoner rather than a criminal, died 66 days in.)  That is Joe Madison, not Bobby Sands, above. 

  An AUMF is a Congressional "Authorization for the Use of Military Force."  Our constitutional scheme contemplates a declaration of war as exactly that, the way in which a President as commander in chief receives authorization for the use of military force.  But the U.S. hasn't declared war on anyone for 80 years. And we made peace with those foes 76 years ago.  Since then, there has been a lot of use for military force. Our executives have not been shy about it. We have the fancy initials AUMF by way of a simulation of the original system. So it would be good to see an Aumf (try pronouncing it as a word, it's kind of fun) repealed. that would be a simulation of making peace.    Putting AUMF Repeal Into Context (justsecurity.org)

Nanotechnology is engineering on a very small scale: atom by atom.  One critical consideration in nanotech is that it works at a scale quantum mechanical effects are important.  I love this stuff. I am of the opinion that contemporary science is much too devoted to distinctions among layers of reality defined by scale. So ... physics deals with atoms, chemistry with molecules, biology with organisms. Each presumes its own set of laws and generally ignores rthe laws of the level below it, aside from general hand-waving acknowledgements when diplomatic. Yet the walls among the disciplines are falling down.  That is a subject for other days, it simply explains why I find nanotechnology -- not so much science as a branch of engineering, operating on the border between physics and chemistry.  Only days ago a team of researchers from two great universities, the University of Toronto on the one hand and Rice University on the other, reported the first measurements of the ul...

I've mentioned before in this blog the book Lost in Math, by Sabine Hossenfelder, a prominent German particle physicist.  The idea behind the title of the book is that contemporary physics is too wedded to the beauty and symmetry (even "supersymmetry," like the kind of symmetry that comes from the planet Krypton) and inadequately concerned with the search for data. It may be that physicists have to accept ugly math that does nothing more beautiful than matching the data, in order to move forward. Today I come back to Hossenfelder and her book in order to quote one particular passage, about Karl Popper. It seems plain enough, but in the context of her broader point there is some ambiguity to it.  For now, I'll just provide the quote: "What I learn [at a certain conference/workshop she attended] is that Karl Popper's idea that scientific theories should be falsifiable has long been an outdated philosophy. I am glad to hear this, as it's a philosophy that n...

Several sad stories have now emerged for the victims of the Astroworld Disaster this month. What fascinates me most, though, is the League Table instinct.  You have to imagine editors in budget meetings. "Can we call this the worst concert disaster ever? The worst at a rap performance? One of the top ten ever? I need a league table!" Of course, this is 2021 and you are a tad more realistic if you imagine that as a Zoom meeting than if you think of railing across a single large table. For the drama of the thing of course you can do it either way. It's your imagination, not mine.  Personally, I think Astroworld lends itself to compare and contrast exercises with Altamont.  The Altamont Free Concert in Dem. 1969 had such a huge impact not because of the great number of deaths ("only" four) but because the idea of hiring Hells' Angels as a security crew seems so monumentally boneheaded.    Here's a link to a contemporary account.  The Rolling Stones Disaster...

  If anything screams "established science" it is the image of the periodic table. Invented 152 years ago, it now adorns the walls of every high school science classroom on the planet.  I knew there had been changes over the years -- those two rows at the bottom especially turn out to be the fruit of discoveries subsequent to Dmitri Mendeleev.  So I recently did some googling, looking for celebratory articles about this two years ago, as the icon passed the 150 years mark.  What I  found was disturbing. The mountains may crumble and Gibraltar may tumble type of disturbing. https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg24132190-400-three-reasons-why-the-periodic-table-needs-a-redesign/  

Writing in a vote is generally an admission of futility.  "Rather than vote for X or Y, I'll write in a vote for Mickey Mouse," one says. If there is only one name on a printed ballot for a particular post, that candidate, then, is generally regarded as a  shoo-in. But like the propositions discussed by Sportin' Life in  Porgy and Bess , it ain't necessarily so. (Sportin' Life is portrayed above, as performed by John W. Bubbles in 1935.)  A write-in campaign was launched this year by the mayor of Buffalo, New York in order to retain the post of Mayor. It has established that, when the candidate is an incumbent, it can work.  Byron Brown, a Democrat who has served four terms as mayor, lost the primary election in June to India Walton: a nurse, union activist, and socialist. The Republican Party did not offer any nominee. So the only candidate listed on the ballots when they were printed up in September was ... India Walton.  What might have been seen as...

  How important is this? Let us think it over. An "organic" molecule is a molecule that contains carbon-hydrogen bonds. All earthly life depends on carbon-hydrogen bonds. The reverse is not true. Not all organic compounds are parts of organisms.  Still, think of this in Bayesian probability terms. Suppose you had yesterday some reasonable guestimate as to how likely it is that the planet Mars does or has ever harbored recognizable life. Today you learn a new fact. You learn for the first time that Mars has organic molecules.  It is pretty clear that your guesstimate of that probability will have to increase from its prior.  NASA's Curiosity rover has discovered organic molecules such as ammonia on Mars | Daily Mail Online

For years now it has been an axiom that five stocks, each representing companies known for consumer technology, are leading the stock market. The accepted acronym for them has been "FANG," if the A is allowed to do double duty.  Literalists write it out, accordingly, as FAANG.  The stocks are: Facebook, Amazon [Apple], Netflix, and Google.  But Google and Facebook have both changed their names. And other customer-electronics firms are also playing a leading role.  So the wise guys have created a new acronym, "MANA MANA."   Meta -- formerly Facebook Alphabet -- formerly Google Netflix Amazon Microsoft  -- no longer bound. to Windows, still or again a powerhouse Apple Nvidia Adobe. That's cute, and as the title indicates it sounds like muppets singing.  One more thing to say: about Microsoft. It was not included on the original FANG list because Microsoft was at that time considered a company in decline -- a giant that had linked itself too tightly...

I had high hopes for Glenn Youngkin as long ago as ... well, his victory in the primary election against the other (more Trumpian) Republicans in the field. He, like Mitt Romney before him, comes from the world of private equity, and the masterminds of that world are much-maligned, their work does have a disruptive effect that draws enmity. But they do much more good than harm -- amidst those disruptions there is a lot of productive innovation and the displacement of settled inefficiencies. Like Romney's Bain, Youngkin's Carlyle is the object of lurid stories about how it throws people out of work. There is some truth to it. And I feel sympathy, drawn from personal experience, for anyone who has been laid off. During the 2012 campaign, Romney made himself seem utterly unsympathetic toward those experiencing the downside of Bain-stoked disruption. He notoriously said "I like being able to fire people." He was trying to make a point about healthcare policy but this, com...

I'll just give the joke as I remember of it and will skip explanation of how it came up.  St Thomas Aquinas walked into a bar and ordered a lot of mead.  The bartender said, "You really plan to drink all that? You have problems?" Because in jokes bartenders are always eager to hear your problems. Aquinas said: "Yes, I just lost my manuscript. An important one, too. I called it the SUMMA THEOLOGICA. It was going to be the definitive explanation of Catholic philosophy, incorporating Aristotle's insights into the body of faith. It was brilliant. I was inspired by God to write it."  Bartender says, "And now it's gone?" Aquinas, "Yes, and I can't help but wonder what message God is trying to send me. Why would he inspire me to write a great work like this and then let me lose it???"  Bartender, "Maybe he was just trying to say, 'You win Summa, you lose Summa.'" 

By most accounts, Elizabeth Holmes' trial for the scam she called "Theranos" is now about half over.  The trial has not gone entirely smoothly. The number of alternative jurors is getting low, in part because one of the alternates seemed more interested in Soduko than in the testimony.  This is ironic in the sense of combining "who would have thought" with "it figgers."  Soduko is a crossword puzzle for 'numbers people.' If that juror is a numbers person, Theranos seems likely to have been the near-perfect trial for them! Yet they missed it. Playing a game with numbers rather than grappling with those the real world provides.  Here's a number: $100 million. That's how much Lisa Peterson put into Theranos on behalf of the DeVos family.  Lisa Peterson is an investment manager for the DeVos' family office. Think of Tom Hagen, who in The Godfather runs a law practice entirely for the Corleone Family. Peterson is the IM equivalent.  Be...

In a footnote on p. 197 Sen writes, "A half-jocular, half-serious objection to the criteria of fairness of Rawls and others runs like this: Why confine oneself in the [original] position  of other human beings only: why not other animals also? Is the biological line so sharply drawn? What this line of attack misses is the fact that Rawls is crystallizing an idea of fairness that our value system does seem to have, rather than constructing a rule of fairness in vacuum based on some notions of biological symmetry. Revolutions do take place demanding equitable treatment of human beings in a manner they do not demanding equality for animals. 'If I were in his shoes' is relevant to a moral argument in a manner that 'if I were in its paws' is not. Our ethical system may have had, as is sometimes claimed, a biological origin, but what is involved here is the use of these systems and not a manufacture of it on some kind of a biological logic. The jest half of the objection...

Okay, that headline doesn't sound like it describes one of the great scandals of our age. This is a little point, but annoying.  In a recent tweet the ACLU quoted Ruth Bader Ginsburg on the subject of abortion and abortion rights.  Clearly there is a Big Picture afoot here. The long "pro-life" campaign to get Roe v. Wade overturned is nearing its (successful) end.  There is a lot that might be said about that, of course. I am not an admirer of the idea of a "privacy right" because I am not inclined to look for the "emanations and penumbra" of legal documents. And in fact Ginsburg, if she had had her druthers, wouldn't have founded a woman's right to an abortion on a broad right to "privacy" either. If I recall correctly, she would have invoked the equal protection clause. But once the case came down, with Harry Blackmun's opinion based largely on Griswold and the right to privacy, there was nothing to be done except to work wit...

Mississippi, a state where pro-death-penalty sentiment was and is very strong, executed six people in 2012.  It has not executed anyone in the years since, largely because pharmaceutical companies have made it difficult for states to get their hands on the drugs used for the lethal injections.  But on Thursday, Oct. 21, the Mississippi Supreme Court announced that David Neal Cox -- the fellow portrayed above -- will be executed on Nov. 21 for the murder of his wife Kim, in May 2010.  David Neal Cox shot Kim twice in May 2010, then sexually assaulted his stepdaughter (the murder victim’s daughter) while Kim was dying. Cox has pleaded guilty. Not only to the murder but to the rape as well -- which means he has given the state the necessary "aggravating" factor allowing for his execution.  What about the issue of pharmaceutical gridlock?  The Mississippi Corrections Commissioner, Burl Cain, says the state has the drugs it will need next month.  But he has also...

  I have been nibbling at the edge of Amartya Sen's book, COLLECTIVE CHOICE AND SOCIAL WELFARE in recent posts.  Today I'd like to dive into the heart of it. But to do that, I have to start with Kenneth Arrow. Arrow is the author of the "impossibility theorem," the logical argument that there is no optimal way to make collective choices -- no voting system, in particular, that will not be open to devastating objections.  Arrow's argument begins with premises about what is an acceptable, or unobjectionable. We want a system in which each of the five will be true: 1) The system can handle any level of pluralism in its inputs (universal domain). 2) The system does not produce paradoxical circles (in which a beats b, b beats c, and c beats a). This demand is known as ordering.  3) If all individuals in the society prefer x to y, then so does "society." The "weak Pareto principle." 4) The independence of irrelevant alternatives. The choice between x...