I’ll Drown – Sóley
Conflict in the quiet car
Tim Kreider reports from the front lines of the battle for our vanishing quiet areas: Amtrak’s quiet car.
I was sitting in my seat, listening to music at a moderate volume on headphones and writing on my laptop, when the man across the aisle — the kind you’d peg as an archivist or musicologist — signaled to me.
“Pardon me, sir,” he said. “Maybe you’re not aware of it, but your typing is disturbing people around you. This is the Quiet Car, where we come to be free from people’s electronic bleeps and blatts.” He really said “bleeps and blatts.”
“I am a devotee of the Quiet Car,” I protested. And yes, I said “devotee.” We really talk like this in the Quiet Car; we’re readers. “I don’t talk on my cellphone or have loud conversations — ”
“I’m not talking about cellphone conversations,” he said, “I’m talking about your typing, which really is very loud and disruptive.”
I was at a loss. I learned to write on a typewriter, and apparently I still strike the keyboard of my laptop with obsolete force. “Well,” I said, trying to figure out which of us, if either, was the jerk here, “I don’t think I’m going to stop typing. I’m a writer; I sit in here so I can work.”
He was polite but implacable. “If you won’t stop, I’ll have to talk to the conductor,” he said.
Looking around, I saw that the Quiet Car wasn’t crowded; there were plenty of empty seats. “I’m not going to leave the Quiet Car,” I told him, “but since it’s bothering you, I will move to another seat.” He thanked me very courteously, as did the woman in front of me. “It really was quite loud,” she whispered.
When the train came to my stop I had to walk by his seat again on my way out. “Glad we could come to a peaceful coexistence,” I said as I passed. He raised a finger to stay me a moment. “There are no conflicts of interest,” he pronounced, “between rational men.” This sounded like a questionable proposition to me, but I appreciated the conciliatory gesture. The quote turns out to be from Ayn Rand. I told you we talked like this in the Quiet Car.
The problem with predicting the future
Michael D. Ward and Nils Metternich examine Nate Silver’s success this past election — his state-by-state electoral predictions were 50-for-50 — and conclude that his methodology can be extended to political events more generally:
Forecasting models need reliable measures of “things that are usefully predictive,” Ulfelder notes. Well, sure. Does this mean that reliability is at issue? Or that we are using data that are not “usefully” predictive? This is a curious claim, especially in light of the controversial nature of polls. Indeed, there exists five decades worth of literature that grapples with exactly those issues in public opinion. Take the recent U.S. election as an example. In 2012 there were two types of models: one type based on fundamentals such as economic growth and unemployment and another based on public opinion surveys. Proponents of the former contend that that the fundamentals present a more salient picture of the election’s underlying dynamics and that polls are largely epiphenomenal. Proponents of the latter argue that public opinion polling reflects the real-time beliefs and future actions of voters.
As it turned out, in this month’s election public opinion polls were considerably more precise than the fundamentals. The fundamentals were not always providing bad predictions, but better is better. Plus there is no getting around the fact that the poll averaging models performed better. Admittedly, many of the polls were updated on the night before the election, though Drew Linzer’s prescientvotamatic.org posted predictions last June that held up this November. To assess the strength of poll aggregation, we might ask how the trajectory of Silver’s predictions over time compare with the results, and there are other quibbles to raise for sure. But better is better.
When it comes to the world, we have a lot of data on things that are important and usefully predictive, such as event data on conflicts and collaborations among different political groups within countries. Is it as reliable as poll data? Yes, just so, but not more. Would we like to have more precise data and be able to have real-time fMRIs of all political actors? Sure, but it is increasingly difficult to convincingly argue that we don’t have enough data.
The problem with this line of reasoning is a somewhat similar issue to that noted by other political writers regarding the potential for a proliferation of Nate Silver types: the more these people become seen as experts, the less incentive there is for firms to pay for, and produce, the underlying data the experts rely on.
In this case, the issue is that, if predictions of world political events begin to look anywhere near as prescient as Nate Silver’s election forecasts have so far, people will start to follow them rabidly, base personal and business decisions on the numbers, and so on. Given a large enough scale, this widespread behavioral reaction to the predictions could very well have a negative effect on the accuracy of the predictions themselves, especially if the forecasts have anything to do with market prices of assets or something similar. This, in turn, could eventually doom the forecasts to irrelevance over a long enough time period, or at the very least produce extremely uneven results.
Related articles
- Nate Silver: It’s the numbers, stupid (rawstory.com)
- War on Nate Silver: Final After-Action Report: The Flag of Reality Flies Uncontested Over Silvergrad Weblogging (delong.typepad.com)
- Nate Silver: it’s the numbers, stupid (guardian.co.uk)
- Has Nate Silver Ruined Politics? (outsidethebeltway.com)
- Nate Silver Brings the End of Pundit Prediction, Not Pundit Analysis (danielmiessler.com)
- Why Math is Like the Honey Badger: Nate Silver Ascendant (blogs.scientificamerican.com)
2 A.M. Tune
Brennistein – Sigur Rós
Side note: this band, probably my favorite of all time, will be performing at the Madison Square Garden in New York on March 25th.
The math of war
At Mondoweiss.net, Phan Nguyen compiled a meticulous piece cataloging all Palestinian rocket and mortar attacks emanating from Gaza since 2004 and found that — in all that time — only 26 people have been killed as a result:
If we borrow the IDF’s claim that more than 12,000 rockets have been fired into Israel in the last twelve years (which I dispute later), we get a kill rate of less than 0.217%. Thus in order to secure a single kill, we should expect to fire about 500 rockets. However, if the goal is to specifically kill Jews rather than foreign workers and Palestinian laborers, then it gets harder. Only 21 Jews have been killed by this method, bringing the kill rate down to 0.175%.
If this sounds disturbing or even anti-Semitic, note that I am just testing the argument of the current Israeli ambassador Michael Oren, who, during Operation Cast Lead, co-wrote an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal claiming that the Gaza rockets and mortars were “more than a crude attempt to kill and terrorize civilians—they were expressions of a genocidal intent.”
Yet the statistics demonstrate that it is much less than a “crude attempt to kill.” One can imagine easier ways to kill a random person than to manufacture and fire 500+ homemade rockets.
As for genocide, at the going kill rate, it would require 4,477,714,286 rockets and mortars, and 4,477,714 years to kill all the Jews in Israel. This is assuming that Israel’s Jewish population does not increase. And of course we would need to factor in the limited range of the projectiles, which would require Israel’s non-growing Jewish population to all congregate in the western Negev by the year 4479726 CE, give or take a few years.
But by then, all of Israel’s Jewish population will have already been exterminated by the country’s other violent killer, automotive accidents.
It makes more sense, then, to suppose that there are political rationales for the firing of rockets and mortars.
Death to Citizens United
That’s what Senator Tom Udall (D-NM) is going for. After surveying his options and concluding that no other alternative exists, Udall — who’s also integral to Senate filibuster reform efforts, which I’m covering in a magazine article to appear within the next month — is pushing for a constitutional amendment:
The amendment would give Congress the constitutional power to regulate the raising and spending of money in national elections, and it would give the states the same power to regulate spending in their elections. The amendment strikes at the fundamental heresy that lies at the heart of both Citizens United and Buckley v. Valeo, the 40-year-old case that made CU inevitable, given the correct composition of a future Supreme Court: namely, that money is speech. To this, of course, was added the equally preposterous notion that corporations are people and that, therefore, they have the same free speech rights as you, me, and the guy on the next bar stool. (How preposterous? Google Santa Clara County vs. Southern Pacific Railroad some time and get a good look at how corporate personhood got birthed on the wrong side of the constitutional blanket.) Pass the amendment, and all of the entangled absurdity of Citizens United goes away. One doomsday machine takes out the other.
As a law student, Udall watched the Buckley case work its way through the system all the way to fruition. He was already a local district attorney in the 1980s when a constitutional amendment was proposed to overturn Buckley. (Udall’s uncle, the late Congressman Mo Udall of Arizona, was one of the early supporters of that amendment and took campaign-finance reform as one of his signature issues when he ran for president in 1976.) He saw clearly where the country was headed once that decision was handed down. He heard the floodgates beginning to creak open.
“Back then, Mo and Dave Obey (the former Wisconsin congressman) believed that, if you could investigate, and find that campaign contributions injected corruption, or the appearance of corruption, into the system, then you could regulate it.” Unfortunately, in its intricate tricks and traps, to borrow a phrase from Senator-elect Warren, Citizens United took care of that, too, with weathervane Anthony Kennedy famously opining within his crucial concurrence to the CU-based decision that struck down the Montana law that corporate independent campaign expenditures “do not give rise to corruption or the appearance of corruption.” And thus are born Super Pacs and phony, covertly-financed 501(c) “welfare” organizations out of which come roaring a thousands attack ads.
“What they’ve done, essentially, is legalize money-laundering,” Udall says. “You can shut down the 501(c) and then sluice the money into the campaign, and the secrecy around the donors is maintained. Secrecy has no place in a democracy and particularly not in the electoral process.
“Once you say that money is speech,then you get what we have now — a Supreme Court that’s getting bolder and bolder in defending its decision. That’s what you saw when the Montana law was struck down. They passed that law because they saw what unlimited and anonymous corporate money could do to democracy. Right now, there is no possible legal remedy to this decision on a national level. We have to go with a constitutional amendment because we have to take the Supreme Court head-on.”
This is still an uphill battle, however: so far only 26 senators support the amendment. So…41 to go, plus the House?
New York and the hurricane
Helena Fitzgerald reflects on her city’s performance during the latest (but most certainly not the last) disaster to befall it:
E. B. White, in his 1949 essay Here is New York, wrote: “No one should come to New York unless he is willing to be lucky.” Obsessively checking twitter, I watched friends and acquaintances, in the midst of disaster, asking plaintively whether bars were open, and where. A photographer I used to know posted a little after midnight, not long after the storm surge’s high tide, that he knew it was dangerous, but he was going to walk over the Williamsburg Bridge to Manhattan to take pictures of the flooding on the Lower East Side and in the East Village. One of the photos shows the FDR drive turned into an unrecognizable river. Another depicts the ConEd center on East 14th, after it had exploded, surrounded by deep, unbroken water, like some kind of science-fiction lighthouse. Walking across the blacked-out bridge, he ran into two people having sex, in the dark, in the middle of the hurricane. “Scared the shit out of me,” he said. But of course, I thought. I wasn’t surprised in the least. Not only because catastrophe, any and all life-threatening events, drive us to affirm life in the most basic way our wanting bodies know how. In any place threatened by a natural disaster, people would have clung to life by having sex in their homes, in bedrooms and living rooms, behind safely closed doors and secured windows. But it didn’t surprise me at all that in this particular city people had thought to put themselves in harm’s way as epically as possible, to go to the very most vulnerable and thrilling center of the disaster — on a bridge, in the dark, over a surging river, at the high point of the hurricane — while they had disaster sex.
“Willing to be lucky” is one way to talk about a city full of people more committed to being interesting than to being safe or happy. This unhinged, adrenaline-addicted prioritizing persists despite any gentrification, beyond any safe neighborhoods. I understood the impulse to go outside and have sex on the bridge in the middle of the hurricane, because it’s an exaggerated version of the impulse to move to New York at all. This place is a city full of unnecessary danger and difficulty, and to move here on purpose is neither logical nor sane. It is not exactly responsible to want everything to be this exciting at every moment. In the same way, it was not exactly responsible or noble of me to feel a thrill when I imagine these dangers turning the city back into something like what my parents experienced. But I admit I felt it anyway.
Are newspapers about to absorb another blow?
That’s what Steven Brill at Reuters is thinking:
The Times article describes the rise of “programmatic advertising,” in which new online tracking technologies allow an advertiser to follow a consumer whose profile fits the advertiser’s targeted demographics wherever the consumer goes online rather than just make an educated guess about the websites that consumer is most likely to visit.
Before programmatic advertising, if an upscale restaurant chain decided that its best prospects were well-to-do men who live in major metropolitan areas and travel a lot, it might buy ads in the business sections of high-end newspapers or on business travel sites. Now the restaurant chain can follow those targeted people to any website they visit. It doesn’t have to buy ads on the sites where the target is most likely to be found but can instead simply bid on an electronic ad exchange to buy the cheapest ad that will reach someone with those demographics no matter where he or she goes (a gossip site, for example).
This erodes the premium upscale newspaper sites can charge. The individual consumer is what’s important and now identifiable, not the place where he sees the ad.
Thus, the Times reports in this article, “The shift is punishing traditional online publishers,” and that online advertising revenue at its own newspaper actually fell 2.2 percent in the last quarter as a result of a decline in the rates the Times is able to charge for Web advertising. That’s a trend reflected lately in the results of most other major newspapers.
In other words, on the heels of the Internet having destroyed the readership and advertising revenue of printed newspapers, further advances in digital technology now threaten the papers’ digital ad business.
Say goodbye to all Bush tax cuts?
That’s what the New Republic‘s Jonathan Cohn wants to do:
Unfortunately, raising taxes on the wealthy will probably not be sufficient to solve our fiscal problems. If we are serious about living up to our financial commitments—in particular, the guarantees of financial security in retirement and provision of basic health care to all—then eventually we will need more revenue. There are lots of ways to do this. The ideal would probably be a carbon tax, because it would have the virtue of raising revenue and slowing global warming. There’s also a case for some kind of consumption tax, which economists tend to think is more efficient than income taxes. But since neither option seems to be viable right now, the next best thing might be to let all of the Bush tax cuts expire, so that everybody—not just the wealthy—go back to paying what they did during the Clinton era.
But wouldn’t raising taxes on the middle class slow the economy? Yes, if the rates went up right away. In fact, one of the most worrisome elements of the fiscal debate right now is that deficit reduction has so much focus. As the economist Peter Diamond has said, Washington is acting like we have a debt crisis and an unemployment problem, when the opposite is true: We have a debt problem and an unemployment crisis. Diamond’s point—which Paul Krugman made in the New York Times recently—is that we should concentrate on bolstering the job market now, while working to stabilize federal finances for the future. The former ideally would involve putting more money into the pockets of the poor and middle class, who are most likely to spend it. Raising taxes on the middle class immediately would, of course, have the opposite effect.
That’s why a better approach might be to preserve tax breaks on incomes up to $250,000, and to renew anti-recessionary programs like extended unemployment insurance and a payroll tax holiday, but only on a temporary basis. And rather than setting these measures to expire on a fixed date, Congress could try an idea economist Peter Orszag has floated: Setting these tax cuts to expire when, and only when, the economy had become stronger. For example, Congress could declare that the tax cuts stay in place until four consecutive months of unemployment below 6 percent, at which point they would slowly phase out. Or Congress could set the tax cuts to expire based on some other indicator, like the employment-to-population ratio, or a combination of several.
I’m with Cohn, at least on principle. I’d have to look more into the specifics to see exactly how this would work in practice. But eventually there’s no reason the Bush tax cuts for the middle class should remain as low as they are either, unless we enact significant reform of the tax code.
Israel’s war on Gazan sports
Dave Zirin asks us to consider why the Israeli Air Force has once again destroyed Gaza’s soccer stadium:
For those attending daily demonstrations against the carnage, this news of a stadium’s destruction must also be seen as an irrelevancy. After all according to The Wall Street Journal, 90 Palestinians, including 50 civilians, have been killed in Gaza. 225 children are among the more than 700 injured and these numbers are climbing. Israeli ground troops are massing at the border and President Obama can only bring himself to defend Israel without criticism. There is only so much concern for a stadium people can be expected to muster.
I think however that we should all take a moment to ask the question, “Why?” Why has the Palestinian sports infrastructure, not to mention Palestinian athletes, always been a target of the Israeli military? Why has the Palestinian domestic soccer league only completed seven seasons since its founding in 1977? Why are players commonly subjected to harassment and violence, not to mention curfews, checkpoints, and all sorts of legal restrictions on their movement? Why were national team players Ayman Alkurd, Shadi Sbakhe and Wajeh Moshate killed by the Israeli Defense Forces during the 2009 military campaign? Why did imprisoned national team player Mahmoud Sarsak require a hunger strike, the international solidarity campaign of Amnesty International, and a formal protest from both FIFA and the 50,000-player soccer union FIFpro to just to win his freedom after three years behind bars?
The answer is simple. Sports is more than loved in Gaza (and it is loved.) It’s an expression of humanity for those living under occupation. It’s not just soccer and it’s not just the boys. Everyone plays, with handball, volleyball, and basketball joining soccer as the most popular choices. To have several thousand people gather to watch a girls sporting event is a way of life. It’s a community event designed not only to cheer those on the field, but cheer those in the stands. As one Palestinian man from Gaza said to me, “[Sports] is our time to forget where we are and remember who we are.”
Attacking the athletic infrastructure is about attacking the idea that joy, normalcy, or a universally recognizable humanity could ever be a part of life for a Palestinian child. This is a critical for Israel both internationally and at home. The only way the Israeli government and its allies can continue to act with such brazen disregard for civilian life is if they convince the world that their adversaries collectively are less than human. The subway ads calling Muslims “savages”, the Islamophobic cartoons and videos that are held up as examples of free speech, are all part of a quilt that says some deaths are not to be mourned.
At home, attacking sports is about nothing less than killing hope. Israel’s total war, underwritten by the United States, is a war not only on Hamas or military installations but on the idea that life can ever be so carefree in Gaza as to involve play. The objective instead is to hear these words of a young girl outside Al Shifa Hospital on November 18th who said, “To the world and people: Why should we be killed and why shouldn’t we have a normal childhood? What did we do to face all this?”
Israel, however, claims that rockets were being fired from the stadium.