Mindless Philosopher

As the primary season continues, I wanted to review two of my earlier posts:

• I opined that Romney would place only a “strong second” in Iowa despite his increased effort in the state, a prediction that just barely came to pass. I admit that his strength in the state surprised me.

  I would venture that I was on the mark when I said that Romney would wish “he had the extra money he’s spending [in Iowa] to devote to South Carolina, Florida, and other races down the line.” On the flip side, Romney’s marginal dollar spent does not appear to be producing many votes for him — the debates, rather than paid media, seem to be driving this race. So perhaps Romney lacks not for cash, but for charisma.

• Second, when I wrote that a new candidate could enter the field in late March, I did not realize at all that many state primaries do not include a write-in option. I know South Carolina and Virginia do not afford GOP voters this basic right, but I’m not sure the write-in status of the other states. Since the filing deadlines will be well-passed by late March, this “feature” of the process would be a significant hurdle to the GOP finding a white knight.

If you’re an Arlington Democrat, you can vote this evening in the special primary election for county board. Or, if Saturday is more convenient, voting will be open then as well.

Exact info here.

I think I’ll probably vote for Libby Garvey, but there are several great candidates.

Silver just posted an entry in support of the Romney campaign’s decision to compete in Iowa. I respectfully disagree.

I recommend re-reading Silver’s excellent August piece on Iowa in which he examines the ideology of the Republican primary electorate in various states. Iowa tops the list in terms of conservatism, with self-identified conservatives clocking in at a time-travel-enabling 88%. I don’t think that 88% is going to be too fond of Romney, who has run as the moderate candidate this cycle.

Thus, I don’t think it’s likely that Romney will win Iowa. Coming in a strong second (much more likely) won’t help him much, considering that he’s been a perennial “front-runner” for the past year. And here’s where I completely agree with Silver: “The big problem with losing Iowa is that if you don’t win it, someone else will.”

Romney’s biggest advantage is his war chest. He shouldn’t want a quick, three-primaries-and-done campaign. Let this campaign go to Super Tuesday (March 6), when he can dominate the airwaves and crush his opponent(s).

My bet is that Romney does not win Iowa and wishes he had the extra money he’s spending there to devote to South Carolina, Florida, and other races down the line. Given the volatility of the race, I’m not certain of any of the above, but it’s my reading at the moment.

Nate Silver wrote a recent article explaining how it’s not “too late” for a fresh face to enter the Republican Presidential field. I completely agree with that conclusion but disagree on the timeline Silver proposes. Rather than enter the race early in the delegate-selection process, I think the best chance a new conservative Republican (e.g., Louisiana governor Bobby Jindal) has at capturing the nomination is to enter later in the process, after Mitt Romney has appeared to clear the field.

Silver recommends to the candidate in question (he uses Sarah Palin in his example): “Devote all your attention to Iowa.” I completely disagree — Iowa is where the other conservative candidates, like Perry, Cain, and Bachmann, are spending their resources. Even a celebrity such as Palin would have to fight for attention.

Rather, a much better strategy is to wait for everyone except Mitt Romney to run out of money. Some Republican stalwarts will coalesce around their apparent nominee, but I have no doubt that the far right will experience serious angst. If Romney thinks he has the nomination sewn up, he’ll start moderating his issue positions in preparation for the general, and the Tea Party base will get even more uncomfortable with their new leader. Throw in some gaffes (to which Romney is fairly prone — see “Corporations are people” and OH Issue 2), and even loyal Republicans will start to have buyers remorse.

If you’re Bobby Jindal, you want all of the above to come to fruition by about-mid March. Considering Super Tuesday is March 6th, that timeline is tight, but possible. You then want to enter around March 20th, compete in Louisiana as a write-in on March 24 (how convenient — your home state!), and start filing for the April races (which start April 3rd). If Romney crashed-and-burned as quickly as, say, Rick Perry did, running the table would not be out of the question.

The beauty of the April-June races is that they are all winner-take-all (by rule). If you won all contests post-April 3rd (plus Louisiana), you’d garner 1,110 delegates — just shy of a majority, but possibly more than Romney had gained. (Aside: Perhaps you wouldn’t win Utah on June 26th, but some to-be-scheduled territory nominations might occur after April 1.)

Another quirk in the nominating process that would play to your advantage is that many states do not actually pledge all of their delegates to the person who earned them through the ballot box. Despite being the first state to hold a meaningful caucus, Iowa doesn’t pledge any of its delegates to a specific candidate. In effect, all of Iowa’s delegates are “superdelegates” (a term usually reserved for the Democratic convention). There are 162 unpledged delegates available to any candidate in pre-April contests. Those free-to-chose delegates plus April’s winner-take-all delegates would be more than enough to secure the nomination in Tampa.

There are two main ways this strategy could fail:

• Romney has trouble clearing the field. Perhaps Cain is able to raise more money than the conventional wisdom suggests and he’s able to draw out the process — competing against Perry and Romney through the whole of March or later.

• A conservative candidate (e.g., Perry) consolidates the anti-Romney vote and wins. Thus, there’s no Tea Party backlash and no need for a new conservative candidate to enter.

But neither of those scenarios are destined to occur; I’d say both are fairly unlikely (especially the former). Thus, there are many months to go before the GOP process crosses the Rubicon and the field is truly locked-in.

Curious if Obama realizes he has/will use his leverage re: the Keystone Pipeline decision. Roll Call reports, unsurprisingly, that the President will approve the project — no doubt adding thousands of jobs (proponents say 20k, opponents 5k) in this economy is just too tempting for a president facing re-election.

The facts that the oil companies are salivating over this project and that Obama has veto power mean that he can say “yes, if” rather than a straightforward “yes.”

For instance, Obama could condition his approval on Congress mandating that the companies creating/operating the pipeline hire one safety inspector per X miles of pipeline.

Similarly, Obama could condition approval on Congress passing more investment in clean energy tech that will help us recover from our oil addiction.

Would love to see the oil industry lobbyists descend on Capitol Hill pressuring members to pass these types of pro-environment bills.

Republicans have learned how to play this game (see debt ceiling debate), has our President?

Here’s a piece of redundant advice: don’t buy Bitcoins. I heard about them this morning on NPR in a fascinating story. My advice is redundant because at the end of the piece, NPR mentions that Bitcoin’s biggest bank was robbed, so I don’t think anyone is going to buy anyway. However, if that robbery hadn’t occurred, let’s see if I’ve read enough Krugman and Galbraith to explain competently why not to jump in the Bitcoin market.

In the beginning of the story, a Bitcoin proponent mentions how: (1) there’s a fixed supply of Bitcoin, and (2) there’s no Bitcoin “Fed.” The proponent loves Bitcoin because there’s no Fed to “screw it up.” However, the lack of a monetary authority is actually a huge problem, and makes Bitcoin more akin to a pyramid scheme (or, perhaps more accurately, Dutch tulip mania) than a currency.

The Bitcoin early adopters got in when Bitcoins were cheap and started to generate buzz about Bitcoin. The fact that there’s a limited supply no doubt helped raise initial demand. So did the Gawker story about how you could buy drugs with Bitcoin. Demand skyrocketed.

What happens next–a crash–is nearly inevitable and can happen in a few ways. Endogenous catalysts include: early adopters cashing out and reaping the rewards, big retailers not wanting to buy Bitcoins at high prices so they stop accepting them. Exogenous events could be: government raids of accounts used for illicit purposes, bank robberies, runs on a bank, negative (or lack of) publicity.

When enough of the above happen, the price of Bitcoin drops below the price the late-adopters paid for it. These late-comers don’t want to take a loss so they don’t sell/use their Bitcoins. Since no one is using Bitcoins, stores stop taking them (even though they might not mind buying Bitcoins cheaply) because of transaction costs or negative associations with the currency. If no one accepts Bitcoins, there’s no point in buying them. Demand, and the price of a Bitcoin, plummets…just as fast as it skyrocketed initially.

In essence, the Bitcoin economy experiences a recession/depression. When a recession occurs in the real economy, the government or Fed steps in with expansionary fiscal and/or monetary policy. If Bitcoin had a Fed, the Fed would give everyone more Bitcoins at a cheap price so people would have an incentive to use them and get the economy rolling again. That’s why we need a government and a central bank.

And if you don’t believe that hypothetical, think about the recent Bitcoin bank robberies. I bet the Bitcoin customers who lost their shirts would have loved a little help from FDIC.

As usual, government serves a useful role, and libertarian fantasies are nothing more than Ponzi schemes.

Krugman provides the context (use Google for free version) to Perry’s claim that “Over the last two years, 40 percent of the net new jobs created in the United States were created in Texas.”

Wanting to research Krugman’s assertions further, I started Googling for TX’s employment rate (i.e., number of jobs divided by working-aged population). Felix Salmon beat me to the punch:

In sum, though TX hasn’t done too badly, there’s no TX miracle. Furthermore:

1) The graph is very “zoomed in” on they y-axis. There isn’t much difference between the U.S. and Texas, so I’m not trashing TX’s record based on these numbers.

2) Employment ratio might be an unfair metric for TX because of the high proportion of retirees. However, that older population also skews the unemployment ratio in TX’s favor (more demand for goods with fewer working-aged folks competing for jobs). So TX is 1 percentage point better than US on unemployment rate and 1.5 worse on employment ratio … basically a wash.

3) TX has done a poor job recovering from the recession. Unemployment plateaued over 1.5 years ago (Oct 2009!) and there’s no relief in sight (ticked up 0.2 in June). In contrast, the U.S.’s rate is 1 point below it’s max. While high oil prices helped mitigate the initial impact recession, Perry hasn’t been able to drive his state’s economy out of the (slightly shallower) pit.

Paul Krugman says “These spending cuts are going to worsen unemployment…There is no light at the end of this tunnel.” And he’s certainly right that the debt deal has no spending that will help the economy. (Interest rates are plenty low already so there’s no relief in that respect.) The Washington Post thinks this deal might be a win for Obama, but I think the depressed economy next November will more than offset any temporary change in his image among centrists.

The deeper question I’m left wondering is: Could progressives have changed this outcome? Crucially, economic stimulus (or “investment” if you want to be on-message) was not even on the table. There was no concerted effort by left-wing groups to put it on the table. While I can’t be sure, I think a big reason that progressives didn’t even try to force a deal that included short-term spending and long-term savings was the President’s stance. Fostering economic growth via this round of dealmaking seems like a lost cause when the chief negotiator on your side says:

Government has to start living within its means, just like families do. We have to cut the spending we can’t afford so we can put the economy on sounder footing, and give our businesses the confidence they need to grow and create jobs.

So while I’m not sure what we (progressives) could have done differently in this round, I know our goal for the next round: make sure the President uses his veto-power leverage on the expiring Bush tax cuts to spread out the burden of “living within [our] means” (i.e., revenue increases via the wealthy). Which, unfortunately, still won’t help our flagging economy much. Welcome to America’s lost decade.

A few recent trends–twitter, facebook, credit card coupons–and events–Wikileaks, the hacking of citi, and sony–have led me to wonder whether in 50 years there any secrets at all. Currently, several aspects of society are based on the concept of keeping a piece of information secret. You’re not supposed to give out your credit card or social security numbers. Governments spend billions keeping their secrets hidden from the world.

But could that culture change? What if, instead of keeping my credit card secret, I didn’t worry about who knew my credit card number, and just worried that only I could use my credit card. In other words, perhaps we’ll move from a secrecy society to an authentication society. Engineers will invent ways to securely verify who is authoring information, and that will be good enough. If Williams-Sonoma can verify that I’m the one purchasing the bundt pan with my credit card, then I don’t care who has knowledge of my personal information.

People already post a lot of (used-to-be-private) information on Twitter and Facebook. Could we reach the point where people are forced to own up to all their interactions because there’s really no secrecy? If you buy tickets to the new horror flick, you need to be proud of that decision because maybe everyone will be aware of that decision. (Facebook tried to foist a similar regime upon us with Beacon and it backfired, but maybe one day such a system will become a reality.) Perhaps a newfound sense of ownership of our actions will be a net positive; as in, you won’t do anything that you’d be embarrassed for your social circle to know about. I say “your social circle” because while the world could know about all your actions, your friends (and, alas, enemies) are likely the only people who would care.

And while we might lose secrecy, I think we’ll hang on to privacy. Things you do in your own house, in private, without interacting with companies or other human beings, would still be private. Since no one will know about, for example, your proclivity to sing Beiber songs in the shower, that fact can stay private. But, I’m not sure that “what happens in Vegas” will stay in Vegas anymore — information wants to be free.

This trend will probably affect inter-government relations, and already has to a minor degree thanks to Wikileaks. As more states become fully-accepted members of the international community (i.e., the United Nations), perhaps countries will start treating each other as friends rather than, as so often is the case today, distrusting allies. Certainly in recent years, we’ve narrowed the list of enemy states (e.g., North Korea); perhaps the next decades will see a ballooning of countries’ “friends” lists. Then we’ll have fewer reasons to keep secrets from one another. And hence fewer reasons to be distrustful, fewer worries about security breaches, and hopefully fewer reasons to go to war.

I embrace our emerging secret-less society, and think the positives outweigh the negatives. To get the ball rolling, you all should know that I just purchased Nothing To Envy for my Android Kindle. And, so far, it’s a great read.

Hat-tip to TSK for this amazing Harry Potter fanfic. Here’s a taste, selected for the pleasure of my computer science friends:

And when Harry opened his eyes, he saw just what he’d been hoping to see, a folded piece of paper left on the floor, the gift of his future self.

Call that piece of paper “Paper-2”.

Harry tore a piece of paper off his pad.

Call that “Paper-1”. It was, of course, the same piece of paper. You could even see, if you looked closely, that the ragged edges matched.

Harry reviewed in his mind the algorithm that he would follow.

If Harry opened up Paper-2 and it was blank, then he would write “101 x 101” down on Paper-1, fold it up, study for an hour, go back in time, drop off Paper-1 (which would thereby become Paper-2), and head on up out of the cavern level to join his dorm mates for breakfast.

If Harry opened up Paper-2 and it had two numbers written on it, Harry would multiply those numbers together.

If their product equaled 181,429, Harry would write down those two numbers on Paper-1 and send Paper-1 back in time.

Otherwise Harry would add 2 to the number on the right and write down the new pair of numbers on Paper-1. Unless that made the number on the right greater than 997, in which case Harry would add 2 to the number on the left and write down 101 on the right.

And if Paper-2 said 997 x 997, Harry would leave Paper-1 blank.

Which meant that the only possible stable time loop was the one in which Paper-2 contained the two prime factors of 181,429.

If this worked, Harry could use it to recover any sort of answer that was easy to check but hard to find. He wouldn’t have just shown that P=NP once you had a Time-Turner, this trick was more general than that. Harry could use it to find the combinations on combination locks, or passwords of every sort. Maybe even find the entrance to Slytherin’s Chamber of Secrets, if Harry could figure out some systematic way of describing all the locations in Hogwarts. It would be an awesome cheat even by Harry’s standards of cheating.

Harry took Paper-2 in his trembling hand, and unfolded it.