Newmark's Door

Especially for fans of the late, great TV show, Seinfeld. I was surprised at just how many references there were. (11 minute video.)

Made me laugh.

Brief scene from a movie I really enjoyed a lot, The Big Short.

I haven't read it, but Howard Zinn richly deserves a good debunking.

"Send your questions about math, physics, or anything else you can think of to: AskAMathematician@gmail.com".

What they don't seem to understand is what will happen to the definition of "quality". Wanna bet it gets grossly distorted from what is contemplated in the "new funding strategy"?

The new appropriations formula will be multiplying the change in performance-weighted student credit hours by the appropriation per credit hour (which is based on national data). Performance‐weighted student credit hours will be calculated for the institutions based on the individual goals for each institution as approved by the BOG. 

I, for one, never believed that "'New Coke' sucked on purpose".

Good. If enrollment dips even a little in the regular public schools, they will feel in their budgets which might spur constructive change.

A rant against the U.S. News & World Report rankings of universities.

As I see it, the rankings use some information that is likely helpful in distinguishing the "best" places from the rest. But the trouble the rankings have--and can't get away from--is Goodhart's Law: "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure."

In my experience, buying a car is pretty unpleasant. My best experiences were ones in which I either didn't have to go a dealer at all (thanks, AAA!) or spent only 15 minutes on the lot just signing paperwork (thanks, car buying service!)

17-minute video outlining what occurred in the Three Kingdoms period of Chinese history.

If both the Left and the Right oppose you,  I'd say you've got a big problem.

The New York Post walks down the entire length of Broadway--"the only street to stretch the entire length of Manhattan" and it reports on what it found: "a staggering number of retail vacancies".

Ha.

Something will have to done soon, so this might be worth a try. (But can we have a some sort of limited test first?)

A single-payer advocate totally changes her mind.

I made that argument so many times, over and over. “The lack of some kind of public health insurance option is crippling the economy! Stifling innovation! Keeping entrepreneurs out of the marketplace! We could revitalize the economy from top to bottom in one year if we fixed this!” was my favorite hobby horse, to the point that even friends who agreed with me asked me to STFU about it, more than once.

I . . . was wrong.

I was so, so, so, wrong.

"When you see puzzling behavior in a market or a hard-to-explain institution, ask first: is a government regulation or bureaucracy involved?"

See "How Government Made the Baby-Formula Shortage Worse," "The U.S. Baby Formula Shortage Is the FDA's Fault," and "Rock‐​a‐​Bye Trade Restrictions on Baby Formula". (Note that there is little overlap in the explanations offered by these three pieces.)

And for a spirited critique of the administration's plan to deal with the shortage see "The White House Plan on Baby Formula Is Classic Biden".

Yet another government policy touted as helping the poor that apparently . . . doesn't.

We use the price effects caused by the passage of rent control in St. Paul, Minnesota in 2021, to study the transfer of wealth across income groups. First, we find that rent control caused property values to fall by 6-7%, for an aggregate loss of $1.6 billion. Both owner-occupied and rental properties lost value, but the losses were larger for rental properties, and in neighborhoods with a higher concentration of rentals. Second, leveraging administrative parcel-level data, we find that the tenants who gained the most from rent control had higher incomes and were more likely to be white, while the owners who lost the most had lower incomes and were more likely to be minorities. For properties with high-income owners and low-income tenants, the transfer of wealth was close to zero. Thus, to the extent that rent control is intended to transfer wealth from high-income to low-income households, the realized impact of the law was the opposite of its intention.

Kevin D. Williamson, "America’s Unwarranted Pessimism".

We Americans suffer from a pronounced bias toward pessimism, a very strange intellectual defect for a people as inexplicably blessed as we are. We love our disaster porn. It wasn’t that long ago that all the best people assured us that we were at “peak oil” and that the United States would never be able to compete with energy superpowers such as Saudi Arabia. That view found a large and committed constituency — a constituency it still enjoys, even after the facts have discredited the prediction. 

Bret Stephens, "Can We Still Be Optimistic About America?" (NY Times, possibly gated.)

Even without the daily reminders of Carter-era inflation, this feels like another era of Carter-style malaise, complete with an unpopular president who tends to inspire more sympathy than he does confidence.

So why am I still an optimist when it comes to America? Because while we are bent, our adversaries are brittle. As we find ways to bend, they can only remain static or shatter.

I haven't looking into the underpinnings of this at all, but its source is supposedly Goldman Sachs, so take it for what it's worth: "Strong Correlation Between Falling Temperatures and Rising Case Growth"

One of my late dad's favorite solutions to the Ills that Beset Us was to demand that fewer lawyers serve in Congress and that Congressfolks have a broader span of occupational backgrounds. (And also, with a very few possible  exceptions, to insist that any law Congress passes apply to Congress as well.)

Related: "The Lawyers’ War on Law".

Well, you know, according to the old saying, what the road to hell is paved with.

If I were still eating hot dogs, I'd eat the local-favorite Carolina Dog or maybe the Italian Dog.

Better than I would have thought given all his jealous haters.

Thanks to the wonders of the Internet, here are some more places that I don't have to visit in person now.

Nearly a decade old. But a few surprises--at least to me--in the top 20.

What real rock-and-roll was.