Sixteen Volts

I really don't know what to say about the opinion piece "Raise Wages, Not Walls", by Michael Dukakis and Daniel J.B. Mitchell. The most benevolent explanation that I can think of that it is an extremely subtle satire of leftism. The scary thing about this piece is that there once was a chance of its author becoming the President of the United States, even though later it turned out that there really wasn't such chance. Even so, it actually scares me to think that the vast majority people out there could read this piece and see nothing logically wrong in its argument that if employers hire illegal immigrants for subminimum wages because citizens don't do those jobs, somehow increasing the minimum wage would increase the number of citizens working those jobs. There is just so much wrong with this panglossian article that while I was reading it, I kept thinking that it can't possibly get any worse, but it just does. The boys at Reason Hit & Run are having fun with it with the post "Destroying Jobs Is a Feature, Not a Bug!"

(My Finnish readers who are not old enough to know or don't remember who Michael Dukakis is might want to check out his Wikipedia page, especially his lopsided loss in the presidential race against Ronald Reagan Bush the Elder. Of course, with modern techniques of advertising, polling and focus groups, there will never again be a U.S. presidential election in which one candidate wins by more than two or three percent in the popular vote or by more than 50 electoral votes, barring the last-minute scenarios with dead girls or live boys.)

Speaking of American politics, even though my wife religiously watches the hip, snarky and satirical fake newsshow "The Daily Show with Jon Stewart", the same way that I used to, my enjoyment of this show has been markedly declining for the past few months, as if the show itself had jumped the shark and that every single episode was exactly the same. An issue or two ago the Mad Magazine (and when was the last time that that magazine was in any way relevant, a few decades ago or something like that?) perfectly deconstructed a typical Daily Show episode, and by doing this so very easily, almost without an effort, revealed what a vapid and shallow target the whole Daily Show really is. (I had been expecting Udolpho to eventually write something scathing about The Daily Show, but I guess that there really is no need to.) It always has the same Jon Stewart jokes and mannerisms which are not funny the hundredth time, followed by the same snickering about the out-of-context sentences from politicians, all greeted with equally stupid laughter from the studio audience.

On a lighter note, of course many people out there are idiots, as the Naval Safety Center site "Photos of the Week" vividly illustrates. Or perhaps their preferences and time orientation are simply different from the mainstream. These people are stupid in the physical world, but a more intellectual type of jolly moron is revealed in the post "The Observers And The Observed" at Discriminations. The logical scaffolding seen there, although abstract, is just as flimsy as the silliest jerry-rigged contraptions in the Safety Center image collection.

I have read that the bookkeepers in Hollywood are good in turning profits to losses and vice versa, but even so, "‘Crash’ Principals Still Await Payments for Their Work" sounds pretty ridiculous to me.

Compared to Americans or even Canadians, my total student loan was a pittance, about ten grand in Canadian dollars. Even though education is free in all levels, one still has to live (and travel a couple of times to Canada), and studying full time allowed me to get my M.Sc. degree in only three and a half years after high school instead of the average six years, and since I got paid to work at the department while studying for my Ph.D. after that (even though that degree took me only about a year and a half, despite teaching quite a lot), I'd say that in overall, doing things that way instead of working at some cash register was a good investment. When we got married, the student loan was the first thing we paid off after the first year together. This was actually perhaps a mistake in retrospect, since putting the same money in mutual funds would have doubled it in five years back then. Ah well, hindsight is always perfect 20/20. I was remound of all this by the post "Freedom 42" at "I, Ectomorph". Excellent. Now that you are free from the chains of the debt monster, go and live your life soaring high like an eagle!

More knowledge is always good, but with increased knowledge also comes increased responsibility when you no longer get to plead ignorance. The opinion piece "Confessions of a "Genetic Outlaw"" laments this fact when it comes to genetic screening. Once you have the genetic screening techniques available, refusing to use them is morally no different from refusing to check whether anybody is crossing the street at the intersection before stepping on the gas pedal of your car to zoom through it. Or someone who knowingly runs over a kid with a car to cripple him and then later tries to tell you that it is nothing but evil nazi eugenics to try to keep kids able-bodied.

My reader from Britain informs me about the news article "Are nurses angels? I don't think so" that offers one view of what the British national health care system has recently become like.

A few days ago, Americans were happy that Lance Armstrong had a worthy successor in Floyd Landis. However, CNN reports that "Landis tests positive" for doping. Frankly, the way that incentives are set in this particular sport and especially Tour de France, I would be surprised if any of the top competitors did not use doping. That is way that winner-takes-all fields generally work, even a small advantage can make a huge difference in final results.

I don't know if Dennis Mangan has been reading The Danimal, who often enjoys pointing out that as much as women love to complain about the "superficial" requirements of male attraction, women are way more superficial and intolerant when it comes to the height of men they would choose to date. If the man falls under a certain threshold in this respect, he can pretty much forget it. Then again, it's not like this is a difficult correlation to observe in the real world, across all cultures. I guess that as long as The Danimal remains in the dusty old Usenet, Dennis is the closest thing to the Master himself in the blogosphere that I have to look up to, as evidenced, for example, by the post "Random Notes on Sexual Attraction". However, I'd like to point out that with the sentence

Seems to me obvious that she doesn't like the competition, however remote the possibility that it would affect her.

about the white woman being surly about a white man admiring Asian woman, we must not pretend that one could somehow magically be safe from the effects of competition. Dennis is not saying so, but this is just something that I'd like to remind everybody of. In any market, be it housing, employment (both hiring and salary negotiation), choice of short- and long-term sexual mating or whatever, we only get to see and directly experience a teeny-tiny local subset of all global participants in that market. But it most certainly does not follow that what we can't see wouldn't affect us in several important ways. Even if we don't know where and why it comes from, we can all feel the effects of the invisible push and pull that results from the aggregate of the individual preferences and choices of all global participants, and these effects are very real even if we directly get to experience only a few local neighbours. This strong but invisible pull of market forces sets up the local conditions that each person has to operate under pretty firmly, and there is no way to escape these forces or the conditions that they impose, no matter how "remote" their origins are.

Usually there is very little that one can locally do to change the local shape of the global playing field. When you apply for a job, want to buy a house or to date some attractive member of the opposite sex, perhaps only a handful of other people are your direct "rivals" in the sense that they would also actively want to have this particular job, house or date, while the vast majority of the six billion people on Earth couldn't care less. But you also have billions of invisible "potential rivals" whose aggregate preferences, choices and actions have already pretty much decided what the salary for that job or the price of that house is going to be, or what kind of person the object of your romantic attempts would like to date and marry, and there really isn't very much leeway left for negotiations. Even the preferences and choices of somebody who lives on the other side of the nation and would never move to live in your town indirectly affect the price you have to pay for your house, via a long chain of shorter-range market effects.

Sure, random fluctuations happen, and in certain sense the whole concept of "market value" is just a huge tautology. But as The Danimal puts it, few homeless midgets ever get to date supermodels, and few mansions are sold for $10. If you are selling a mansion, you'll certainly put the asking price way higher than that, even if you don't personally happen to know anybody who is currently looking to buy that particular mansion. Like the water that always seeks its own level, so do the market prices. What this all means for the options that men and women have in choosing their partners is left as an exercise for the reader. Oh, I know, I know, it is just wrong to analyze human relationships using any concepts of economics, because romantic love is just something that just happens when you least expect it. As "Delenda Est Carthago" put it in the post "Beware Foreign Women!":

Note to commenters: the rules of economic analyses apply to all spheres of our existence, including, in aggregate, the personal ones discussed above, notwithstanding the random noise in the system. So please don't tell me I'm a reprobate for "turning people into commodities" or some such rot. That isn't my point and you ought to know it.

But then again, romantic love can triumph over all. I remember when I was a kid reading a magazine article about some Finnish women who had married into some Mediterranean island with a more... traditional views on woman's place and social life. When the reporter asked if being expected to stay home and dress modestly is oppressive, these women immediately started explaining that their position doesn't mean that they aren't "strong" and "independent" and "respected". Even though my understanding of the ways of the world and the sense of bullshit weren't quite as finely developed as they are today, I recall immediately wondering if these women would be saying that if some Finnish husband had imposed the exact same conditions and duties on them. Probably not. But I'd say that the most revealing thing about Western feminism is the way they just adore cultures whose mainstream is more primitive and oppressive than anything that can be found in the West these days, even if they simultaneously chastise the Western men for even their slightest transgressions against equality. Could it be that their real problem with the Western culture and men is not their supposed "masculinity" or "oppression" but something completely different, and that these are just convenient excuses available at hand? Nah, perish the thought. Meanwhile, the posts "Immigrants are bringing female circumcision to Britain" at "Modern Tribalist" and "Misogyny in Mexico" by Dennis Mangan provide enlightening views on certain non-Western (and thus automatically morally superior) cultures.

Posted by Ilkka Kokkarinen on Thursday, July 27, 2006 at 1:00 PM