Yet all this is penny-ante stuff. The real money is in entitlements. And the real scandal of this budget is that Obama doesn’t touch them. Not Social Security. Not Medicaid. Not Medicare.

Charles Krauthammer, National Review Online

I don’t expect Democratic presidents to touch this stuff, though they should.  But it’s not like Republicans helped by explicitly campaigning against Democrats for cutting Medicare payments in the Affordable Care Act.

As horrible as what happened this weekend is, the fact of the matter is that political assassinations are extremely rare and it’s simply not the case that the country faces some kind of systematic assassination problem. What’s we do have in the United States is an unusually high level of violent crime across the board, but pulling police resources off their day-to-day work and onto personal security for politicians is going to make that worse.

— Matt Yglesias

I am interested to find out what Matt Yglesias means by the word “unusual,” or “high” for that matter. In 1992, roughly 1.93 million violent crimes occurred among 252 million Americans. In 2009, roughly 1.32 violent crimes occurred among 307 million Americans—the lowest total since 1984, when the population was 30% less than it was today.

Matt Yglesias falls prey to the exact availability bias he fears will cause Americans to overreact to the assassination attempt this weekend. But despite anecdotal, “No Country For Old Men”-esque nostalgia for an America where you didn’t have to lock the doors, America is a far safer place across the board than it has been for decades, the culmination of a trend that has continued since the beginning of the Clinton Administration.  So color me unimpressed with any arguments that adding personal security to a few skittish representatives will do anything to stem this tide.

There’s a way to combine the tracks from OK Computer (hereinafter referred to as 01) and In Rainbows (hereinafter referred to as 10), to form one huge mega-album. As Puddlegum explains, “To create the 01 and 10 playlist, begin with OK Computer’s track one, “Airbag,” and follow this with In Rainbow’s track one, “15 Step.” Alternate the albums, track by track, until you reach “Karma Police” on OK Computer, making “All I Need” the tenth track on the 01 and 10 playlist.” It’s not that they sound nice together; it’s that these songs were definitely meant to make us shit our pants when played like this. In the way that “Golden Slumbers,” “Carry That Weight” and “The End” all flow into each other on The Beatles’ Abbey Road, these songs all flow into one another as well, as if they were all recorded in one big session.

From Cracked: 10 Mind-Blowing Easter Eggs Hidden in Famous Albums

Honestly… I don’t know. The tracks certainly play together like a great roadtrip mix, or at the very least a good greatest hits compilation. But as someone who moonlighted as a college radio DJ, I can say that the transitions aren’t as clean as you would expect if the mix was intentional.

Mastered records for one thing are meant to maintain a consistent feel between tracks. To the extent that is true feels like happenstance. Many of the tracks in both of these records end without ambient noise at the end. That certainly helps.

But even where that is true, some of the sequencing just doesn’t feel quite right.  Electioneering ends with a downward crescendo and a long string sound at the end, and Reckoning abruptly cuts in with a breakbeat as if divorced from the transition of its intended context.  Hmm, but the transition in the original isn’t actually that much better.  But if Radiohead intended these to be played together (at least in this order), wouldn’t they have used samples from OK Computer at the beginning and ends of each In Rainbows track to produce continuity?  Right?

For another, where ambient noise ends a track as in Exit Music, it does not always flow well into the corresponding song (Weird Fishes).  The Cracked folks suggest cross-fading tracks 10 seconds to maximize the effect, but as my bud Kurt says, “couldn’t you make that argument for any songs by the same band?”

One critical way of viewing this project is that it exposes Radiohead as a band that sequences its tracks similarly across records. The feel might be similar in these records because they’ve just decided to take us on the same emotional trip again.

It also reminds me of the time in high school I had a dispute with my friends about whether Pink Floyd really did intend to match Dark Side of the Moon with The Wizard of Oz.  I couldn’t believe that pure coincidence could explain so many synchronicities.

So we decided to put it to a test: we’d match an equally seminal children’s movie with another fantastic classic rock album and see if they matched.  If they did, well . . . Occam’s Razor.

It didn’t take long for Occam to rear his ugly, efficient head as we started the White Album on Bugs Bunny’s second carrot bite in the prelude to Gene Wilder’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.  The beats of Back in the U.S.S.R. matched perfectly with the chocolate drops in the opening scene, Veruca Salt whined for a golden goose over “Cry Baby Cry”, and Revolution 9 was pretty damn trippy with that crazy, smoking locomotive contraption near the end of the movie.  ”Everybody’s Got Something to Hide Except for Me and My Monkey” mocked Charlie as he snuck away an Everlasting Gobstopper.  It was perfect.  Better than the Oz/Pink Floyd connection.

But hey, maybe it’s the versions of the songs I’m using.  Maybe the cross-fade trick really was intended by Yorke & Co.  Maybe keeping exclusive company with Learned Hand has dulled my imagination.  On the bright side, the idea has encouraged me to revisit two truly great records in an interesting way.  Try to listen to it for yourself with this handy Grooveshark playlist.

Why do you think the penalties in this mandate were so toothless to begin with? Do you think it would have been substantially more difficult to get this component of the healthcare package through congress if the included penalties were more severe?

I think that’s an interesting question.  My instinct is:

1. The Obama Administration is heavily influenced by behavioral economists such as Larry Summers and Cass Sunstein, who both hold prominent roles in the cabinet.  They believe the nudging effect of the mandate is really what is at issue, not the deterrence.

2.  It is a Pigouvian tax.  The point is not to get people to buy insurance if they don’t want it.  It is to force people to internalize the externalities they impose on the country when they go around without health insurance.  The penalty allows the government to capture some of these costs while forcing people to indirectly take them into account in their cost-benefit analysis.  Perhaps some people value insurance coverage at $9000 a year for their family, and $11,000 a year isn’t worth it.  The penalty might push them over the edge.  Or not.  Unlike most crimes, the efficient level of coverage might not be zero, as it might be best for some folks not to purchase health insurance.  It’s unlike that my decision not to buy insurance for $11,000 actually costs society $11,000; it may be something like $2000.  This policy might encourage a socially optimal result.  Of course it’s really hard to set taxes like this precisely because we have little information about people’s internal preferences.

3.  It was done for political reasons.  The Obama administration knew it had to produce a budget-neutral bill and this provides extra funding.  Or it was a compromise to satisfy the Hillary Clinton/Tom Daschle camps, and Obama really could care less philosophically about mandates or no.  Or, like Nick suggests, they wanted the mandates higher but Congress couldn’t stomach it.  I doubt this last scenario because of Obama’s opposition to the idea during his campaign, and I believe, his philosophy that doing so would amount to punishing people for being unable to afford insurance.  Shit happens to people’s budgets and it would be unfair for the government to efficiently deter folks just because money gets stretched thin and insurance has to go.

My argument is that the insurance mandate in its current form would not have been effective at stopping those who want to game the system. It should be obvious that many people who currently do not have insurance don’t buy it because of a lack of means, not will. In other words, they simply can’t afford it. Hence the Affordable Care Act.

The primary impetus for a mandate arises out of the general fear that people will not buy insurance because they a) are too lazy to bother filling out forms, or b) will wait until the moment before they need insurance to purchase it, passing on the costs to everyone else in the form of higher premiums. Optimistic technocrats like Cass Sunstein favor the mandate for the first reason—it nudges them into acting in their self-interest. More pessimistic (though arguably less paternalistic) folks favor it for the second—it deters them from acting in their self-interest. I am not sure how many folks fall into category a, and for those I am willing to concede that some would sign up for insurance.  It is a bigger hassle to deal with the IRS than it is to deal with an insurance company. This is the brave new world of libertarian paternalism, and it frightens me. I digress.

I am wholly unconvinced that the mandate has any effect on category b. First, I doubt the fear is justified. Certainly people who think that they can call up an insurance company on the way to the ambulance vastly over-estimate the efficiency and service of America’s private bureaucracies. Insurance companies have no incentive to speed up their client sign-up process to facilitate “on-the-way” purchases. They still need to run their actuarial models to determine premium prices and such. A larger problem results from those who would purchase insurance a few weeks ahead of elective surgery, such as to fix a bum knee. Employer-based health insurance is typically integrated into compensation, so presumably only those who are not afforded these benefits through their job would be candidates to try something like this.

However, the mandate in its current form does not have a harsh enough punishment to actually deter anyone who would try to take advantage of the Act’s prohibition on discriminating against those who have preexisting conditions. Right now, the individual penalty is a minimum of $95 per annum—up to 1% of income—and a maximum penalty of roughly $2000 for families. The current penalty simply would not provide the needed deterrence.

Any punishment is geared towards those who must be deterred, not those who are naturally law abiding, whether out of self-interest or risk aversion. Let’s take the example of bank robbery. There are three types of people: a) those who wouldn’t rob a bank regardless of illegality, b) those who wouldn’t rob one because of the fact of illegality, but not fear of punishment, and c) those who are only deterred by the punishment. The penalty for bank robbery is aimed only at category c, otherwise we wouldn’t punish at all. So among category c folks, any effective punishment must exceed the expected value of the crime. If a bank robbery nets you, say, $11,000 on average, and the punishment is $700, the expected value of robbery is positive. The punishment thus does not deter me from robbing banks.

Similarly, let’s say I derive no or minimal benefit from the security of year-round health insurance, and would just pay premiums at the moment I need coverage if I could. Insurance imposes a cost of $11,000 a year to me on average, while the penalty is somewhere between $95 and $2000. The expected value of not purchasing insurance is positive, hence it cannot deter me from failing to buy it.

The mandate in its current form is clearly effective as a deterrent only to the degree that it affects those who refrain from doing illegal activities merely because they are illegal, and not from fear of the punishment. If you think this number is substantial, fair enough. But I point to marijuana possession, speeding, copyright infringement and jaywalking as pretty strong counter-examples. The mandate imposes no criminal sanctions, and you can’t go to jail for willfully flaunting it. Thus, unless we substantially raise the penalties for noncompliance well above the cost of insurance to account for probability of detection, a more effective strategy is not to make it illegal, but to establish social norms. Norms like “continuous insurance is in each person’s self-interest,” or “purchasing it is a public duty akin to refraining from burglary” would work.  I’m sure Cass Sunstein is working on some method of mass inception to plant these ideas in our collective subconscious as we speak.

While it is regrettable that the “nudge” effect will be lost, there are plenty of other constitutional ways to get lazy folks to buy insurance, such as opt-out policies, tax incentives for the chronically part-time employed (above and beyond the substantial subsidies already provided by the Act), and requiring purchase as a pre-condition to receiving other federal benefits such as unemployment insurance.

And finally, even if the mandate in its current form is essential to the cost-cutting function of the bill, it does nothing to affect its primary moral purpose—to end rescission and expand coverage for those who currently can’t afford it. The budget concern was mostly a conservative one. So long as the Senate remains at least 40% Democratic and Obama has veto powers, the law will at worst be more expensive but roughly intact come 2014.  In fact, President Obama himself opposed mandates while he was a candidate.  Justice Kennedy may do him a favor if he ends up siding with the other conservative justices who would likely strike down the mandate.

• The problem with LeBron leaving isn’t that he is leaving.  If he wanted to win, it would probably have been insane to stay in Cleveland.  That’s fine.  It’s that the way he’s gone about it is disrespectful, and clearly calculated to get the city’s hopes up.
• Lane Kiffin is still a dirtbag.  I’m just saying the Vols deserved it. Anyways, its fitting that USC got slapped with crippling sanctions as soon as he got there.
• Thus it is ok for me to criticize one player for the way he leaves while feeling no sympathy for the fans being left in similar fashion due to the way the previous coach was fired.

I probably would have taken the Kiffin approach to Cleveland if Cavs fans were ever anything but grateful and supportive when they came up short in the playoffs for so many years.  But my understanding is that Cleveland fans were not known for calling LeBron a choke artist or questioning his lack of heart.  So while the distinction is probably unsatisfactory on a superficial level, I think the relationship between the player/coach and the city/team is important in determining how said player/coach should move on to other opportunities.

I’m of course talking about Barry Bonds, decimater of Pirates, false hope inspirer of Giants.

And like Barry Bonds’s in 1993, the brand “LeBron James” is no longer selling a phenomenally talented, highlight reel manufacturing, harmlessly self-aggrandizing kid.  It now sells a calculating, heartless, city-destroying heel.  A calculating, heartless heel who destroys his hometown on national television.*

But karma is a bitch.  The 1993 Giants won 103 games, but still lost the NL West to the Atlanta Braves.  The top-loaded Heat could easily topple if and when Chris Bosh or Dwayne Wade go down with injuries.  Or maybe LeBron’s chokeness is just too much to be compensated for by Dwayne Wade’s clutchness.  No matter how the inevitable collapse of the centerless South Beach juggernaut happens, like so many with Barry Bonds, it’s going to be very, very difficult for people not to actively root for LeBron’s Decision to bite him squarely in the ass.

AAAAAND in related news, I may just be extremely bitter that the Hawks paid Joe Johnson max money to give up in the playoffs to the Miami Heat in 2011. My objection is not so much the decision, as the media circus he manufactured about the Decision.  Just way too cruel for such an anti-climactic, poor TV moment.  And seriously, red checkered shirt?

* (And apparently donated the proceeds of the Decision to the Boys and Girls Club. Ok, that’s not so objectionable.  Shouldn’t that have been the lead-in to the decision?  ”First off, Akron is my home.  I’m donating the proceeds of this event to charity for kids here and 10% of my salary in Miami is going directly to scholarships for underprivileged Ohioans.  So no matter what I decide, and what some people might think of my employment decision, I intend to have a lasting presence here.”  Instead, he had to be goaded into something more like a  ”uh, I gave a lot to this city and this organization.”  Weak sauce.)

David: you should post stuff like this on the blog, with pithy comments. if you are looking for shorter things to post.

Justin: Oh. I was going to write up how brilliant furniture design like this implies a greater need for engineering degrees in our country with a focus on art and aesthetics, and how the lack of more things like this is a failing of us as a society and a culture. The rough draft’s 3 pages.

David: that’s pretty sweet.

Justin: Damnit, I knew I should have put a sarcasm mark at the end of that. My story unfortunately checks out.

David: oh, haha. yes indeed it does.

Not to give a completely inadequate summary of Dr. Preuss’ talk, but he opined about the resistance amongst modern biologists and anatomists to spelling out sapien-simian brain differences as opposed to their similarities. This goes back to Darwin’s efforts, when he spent the better part of his life focusing on the continuity of species, and thus the commonality was far more important to his thesis than the differences, which could be shot down by the religious community as ‘those things unique to God’s chosen creatures.’ The second problem was funding. Dr. Preuss does almost all of his research with higher apes, such as chimpanzees and humans specifically, which is rather expensive compared to ‘similarities’ research done with other mammals like rats and mice.

His brand of academic troubles are something people in my field aren’t really familiar with. In topology, the field of mathematics where my bets are cast, the practical merit is almost zero, but on the other hand lab costs and upkeep are confined to, in order of price, a steady supply of coffee and chalk. Mathematicians don’t have too much trouble getting funding for essentially nothing more than their living costs while they think. Comparative psychologists and neuroscientists, on the other hand, have to pay for expensive equipment, expensive animals, and expensive techniques. The hurdles they must jump to get their work done are much higher, both politically and financially.

Climate-Gate infuriated me to no end, the supposed controversy and its easily dispelled allegations whipping bloviating jerk-face Rush Limbaugh and others into a frenzy, utterly misconstruing scientifically innocuous emails into some sort of conspiracy by Marxist environmentalists. The lesson it taught me is that, though the results and methods and final papers must be subject to peer review, the public seems woefully unequipped to read intimate details of the process without devolving into red-faced polemics. I don’t think this is unique to science— basically any job one works at where one is required to correspond with others via email has all sorts of inside jokes and references non-humorous that others wouldn’t understand, willfully or not, that could indict both ones’ self and ones’ colleagues.

It appears that Dr. Preuss has to preface all of his work with some sort of due diligence on top of good peer-reviewed work with a disclaimer saying that, no, these differences are evolutionarily founded and not created by some god before anyone will take him seriously. The scientists around him are so fearful of a political reprisal that their science has to be modified to fit into a politically conscious world. Anyone who has any care for the sanctity of science should be feeling rightly disgusted at this point. I’m not really sure what an acceptable solution would look like, but science really needs to be allowed to be, as it were, in order to do its job fairly and as objectively as possible. Placing some sort of negligence charge on scientists who don’t do anything wrong but speak familiarly to their colleagues because of the risk of some hacker stealing their emails, or some fat pundit twisting their words and their meanings, could only be a burden that drives up the already high cost of research into these controversial fields, and further puts laypeople in the mindset of distrusting experts to be experts.

Money is the other problem, and it’s intensely tied to politics. It would be nice if we lived in a world where scientists always got unlimited funding for whatever they wanted to research, but that’s unreasonable. What’s also unreasonable is scientific funding fluctuating with political cycles, further miring research with politics, pundits, and polemics at a cost to everyone. Again, an exact solution is not in sight, but I would enjoy seeing something like a set funding pool that’s proportional to budget in a fixed way, overseen by science advocates who, on one hand, can’t lobby for an increase but, on the other hand, aren’t swayed by Congress to fund one field or another.

Dr. Preuss believes his research is fundamental to solving problems as diverse as AIDS vaccine research to handling the diversity of psychological problems that plague people. Other research in other fields similarly makes lofty claims that, sometimes, turn out to be true. Throwing science to the social machinations of political institutions will do nothing but ruin the effectiveness of research and cast doubt, far more doubt than should be due from people who aren’t experts, onto an already distrusted and disparaged scientific community.