The Ambrosini Critique

“A well educated Electorate, being necessary to self-governance in a free State, the right of the people to keep and read Books, shall not be infringed.”

What does this sentence mean? It seems obvious that it doesn’t mean only educated voters have the right to read books. Its pretty clear that it doesn’t mean only agents of the State can read books. It simply means that because literate voters are good for a nation, the people in that nation have the explicit right to own books.

Well, if you buy that parsing of the above sentence then it seems clear there’s only one way to parse the second amendment:

“A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.”

Because armed citizens are good for a nation, the people in that nation have the explicit right to own guns. The only question that remains is: with what arms shall I express my right to bear?

(h/t LanguageLog)

Yes, Dexter is awesome and the second season was an order of magnitude better than the first, the first season being already awesome.

I do have to say The Wire comes closer to being the best TV show of all time, though.

Google has a new chart api that’s pretty full featured. Here’s a chart of some prices in Philadelphia from a project I’m working on with Prof. Lindert:

Pretty neat. Go build some of your own.

Apparently, we’re talking about the UN Human Development Index this week… the god’s demand it.

So, on the theme of “gawd-damn-it-quit-comparing-Iceland (pop. 300k)-to-the-U.S. (pop. 300m)”, here’s the HDI by states:

Connecticut would be third on the list, Delaware and Massachusetts seventh and Minnesota tenth. The lowest ranking state is Mississippi and it still ranks higher than European (so it must be better) Romania and Health Care Paradise Cuba.

Here’s the data (xls).

Wrong.

BTW, I don’t think Quiggin is clear on this point: he’s not saying that “we”¹ have to pressure airlines to upgrade their fleets or “we” have to start planning fewer but longer vacations. He’s saying that more expensive fuels will make airplane trips more expensive. Period. Full stop. Now, because prices happen to be powerful motivators, this *could* induce fleet upgrades or changes in vacation frequency/durations. His point in the end, though, is that these changes in behavior don’t have to be that drastic and they won’t be nearly as drastic as you might expect with the scary sounding “75% decrease in CO2 emissions”.

So fuel price changes induce not-so-painful behavior changes. What causes the fuel prices to go up?

“We”² institute carbon taxes in one form or other.

1. You like those quotes Gabriel? [↩]
2. Isn’t this the same “we” as the one above? [↩]

Sometimes social facts are social facts because its easier for everyone to just agree with everyone else. Example:

There is nothing wrong with being gay. But having a minority sexual preference by definition has costs: a lot fewer potential partners to choose from, for starters. It also makes having children with a partner much more complicated, at least until technology enables us to fuse the DNA from two eggs or two sperm. A loving, non-homophobic parent could choose to turn the gay genes off simply in order to ease their child’s life for reasons that have nothing to do with social stigma.

But of course, even aside from reinforcing (however implicitly) the idea that gayness is a problem, this [pills that make people not gay] is bad for other gay people. They suddenly have even fewer partners to choose from, even less political clout. Moreover, the more parents, or adults, who make that choice, the less attractive gayness becomes, which will tend to push marginal choosers into the “straight” camp. And the charge probably will be led by parents who make their children straight, not to avail them of the network benefits of a majority preference, but by parents who are simply repulsed by homosexuality. One imagines that the gay community will be somewhat resistant to letting those parents in effect make choices for them.

Moreover, reducing variance is bad genetic strategy. The less genetic variety you have, the more vulnerable you are to unforeseen circumstances; genetic variance is a reservoir of potential adaptations. Similarly, even if they were not worthwhile in themselves, the subcultures we now have the medical possibility of destroying are sources of dynamism in our society. We will all be poorer without them.

Actually, read the whole thing to get two other examples.

Is “Oh Holy Night”… until I finish this play list. The “fall on your knees” part really hits me in my proto-religious solarplexes…

… you can take the boy out of the Church, but you can’t take the Church out of the boy¹.

1. Please no Priest jokes. [↩]

From McElreath and Boyd (2007), two evolutionary biologists somethings¹:

This result² is what economists call a “stylized fact,” a conclusion that glosses over many complications, is held by no one to be an actual description of the world, but nevertheless tells us something valuable.

Heh.

1. They’re both in Antropology departments [↩]
2. The result he’s talking about is the fact that even with very low amounts of migration (just one individual per generation), there won’t be significant genetic variation between groups. [↩]

The Author speaks. Excerpt:

The book has provoked strong reactions: praised as ambitious and innovative, denounced as tendentious, derivative, or even “irritating.”

While being vilified on one side as a “social Darwinist,” I have been invited by Jeffrey Sachs, director of the Earthwatch Institute at Columbia University (and friend of Bill Gates, Angelina Jolie and Bono) to address an audience of 1,500 in New York in March 2008 at the State of the Planet Summit on my views of world salvation!

(Extremely depressing edition)

One of the most disturbing, I think perhaps the most disturbing fact in our whole book is that black students coming from families earning over 70,000 are doing worse on their SATS, on average–it’s always on average–than white students from families in the lowest income group. You want to cry hearing that figure. I mean, it’s so terrible.

— Abigail Thernstrom as quoted in this depressing article on race and IQ at gnxp.