Half Sigma

I’m blogging this

Today in Manhattan I saw a woman wearing a black t-shirt which had the following simple white lettering on the front: I’M BLOGGING THIS.

Meanwhile, I’ve been blogging but just not here. There’s a new post up about the latest episode of Battlestar Galactica and a post about signing up for an online dating service.

Online Dating Insider

One of the other blogs I run is Online Dating Insider. It's been a year since I last posted to it, but yesterday I got it into my head to try an experiment in which I'd use an online dating service and write about it in a blog.

It's going to be somewhat more voyeuristic than Half Sigma, but don't worry, my life is pretty boring so you can be assured that there won't be any Paris Hilton type videos.

Doormen and the city

As far as I know, Manhattan is the only place in the United States where the buildings have “doormen.”

Unlike “salespeople” or “flight attendants,” doormen retain the decidedly non-gender neutral suffix. And this is with good reason. While it’s not uncommon to see a woman police officer, as far as I can tell there is not a single doorwoman in Manhattan.

My apartment building in Arlington, Virginia had a front desk manned (I should stay staffed) twenty-four hours a day. But it wasn’t the same thing. The desk attendant in Arlington would just sit there. The doorman actually opens the door for you. As if I’m too high and mighty to open the door myself.

The doorman also tries to be your buddy. He greets you whenever you walk in or out of the building. And there’s no way in or out except through the main entrance. Unlike in Arlington where I could escape the building in various ways without the front desk attendant seeing me leave.

When I moved into the apartment in Arlington, I didn’t care much for the loss of privacy, and it’s even worse now. It’s a small building (for Manhattan—people in Wyoming might consider it big) and the doormen pay careful attention to everyone leaving and entering the building.

I am told that women especially like to live in doormen building. They must fear being sexually assaulted. Yet somehow, everywhere else in the country women live in buildings without doormen and nothing ever happens to them.

All the doorman friendliness comes at a price. The doormen expect to receive big gratuities at Christmas time, as if the rent in Manhattan wasn’t high enough already.

Garbage in the city

Until now, garbage has just been anything you don’t want that you throw into the—well into the garbage.

But that’s all different in New York City. I opened the door to the room with the garbage chute, and there is this complicated sign saying what you’re allowed to throw down the garbage chute and what’s not supposed to be recycled. There’s a box below the garbage chute. Presumably this is for the recyclables.

This doesn’t sound like such a great idea. A used orange juice carton (supposed to go into the blue bin) sounds like an invitation for roaches and rats to have a snack.

The problems with this dumb recycling law are:

(1) This is a big waste of time. Even if this is saving the city money, I’d rather pay an extra $10/year in taxes and not have to deal with this nonsense.

(2) I graduated in the top 10% of the class in law school and I can’t figure out the sign. Surely people are throwing stuff down the chute they are not supposed to. I already did. Now I live in constant fear that the garbage police will be beating down my apartment door.

Aside from the whole recycling issue, the whole garbage situation here in Manhattan seems very uncivilized. In every other place where I lived, the garbage wound up in big dumpsters, and a truck would drive up to the dumpster, and the dumpster would automatically get lifted and dumped into the garbage truck.

Here in Manhattan, some poor guy who works in the building has to manually place all the garbage into garbage bags and put them out on the curb. At night in the city, everywhere are big stacks of black garbage bags. Half of them seem torn open, with odors of garbage wafting out. And then early in the morning, some garbage men have to pick up the bags by hand and throw them into the garbage truck.

July 18 post

Blogging is just too difficult to do with dialup. The web is no longer dialup friendly. Every page is fat, loaded down with massive graphics and javascript.

But Battlestar Galactica fans can read my lastest comments on the first episode of the second season of the new Battlestar Galactica.

Generation X receives financial support from parents

The title of the article from yesterday’s NY Times, Financially Set, Grandparents Help Keep Families Afloat, Too, on its surface seems to be about grandparents and their grandchildren. But really it’s about a much more interesting topic, parents giving financial support to their adult children.

I have written many posts about how Americans are worse off today than we used to be (in contrast to the don’t worry be happy posts at the ultra-libertarian Café Hayek blog).

The article contains evidence that an important social shift is occurring. For example, an employee at a private school told the reporter that an increasing percentage of tuition checks were written by grandparents, and he estimated that 15% to 20% of kids had grandparents paying the tuition.

The above revelation makes me wonder, what percent of the 85% to 80% of parents who write the checks themselves are receiving significant support from their own parents? Probably quite a large percentage.

How do so many young people afford to live in Manhattan where a studio apartment costs $2,000 per month? Most of my sister’s female friends have their rent paid for by their parents, or perhaps their parents bought a condo and let them live in it. (I think the reason why Manhattan has more female than male residents is because women receive more help of this sort from their parents. This is a topic I hope to write more about in the future.)

This is definitely the dirty secret of generations X and Y. No one comes out and tells you that their parents give them $20,000 per year or more. So the unfortunate with poor parents wonder how all their peers seem to have more money.

Asset inflation certainly has a lot to do with this generational shift. When a young person buys a ridiculously overpriced house from an older seller, it’s a transfer of wealth from the young generation to the old generation.

The government makes this situation worse with Social Security, taking money from the poor young workers and giving it to the rich older retirees.

In general, the ratio of the value of labor compared to the value of capital has been decreasing, which explains why the rich are getting richer and why the older generation is suddenly better off than the younger generation. The young college graduate enters the work force with negative capital because of student loans.

When Muslims become religious

One suspect had fallen out with his mother, a friend said, while another had suddenly grown more religious after going away to college. Two had grown thick beards in recent months, and in general they all had grown more distant from their friends and neighbors, they said.

NY Times.

When Muslims become more religious, they blow stuff up and kill people. This is why it’s dangerous to have many Muslims living in the country, some of them will become religious like these guys in Britain.

Moving

Posting has been light because I'm moving to New York City but I don't yet have an apartment there (I could write an insightful economics post about rent seeking behavior and apartment hunting). I disconnected my computer yesterday and canceled my high speed internet service.

Glenn Reynolds has never had to deal with the dislocation of moving to a new city and changing jobs.

Career schools in NY Times

Article in the NY Times today about the shady practices of career schools.

Some critics also charge that the schools make rosy promises about jobs for their graduates that do not materialize.

Sounds just like law school. This just demonstrates that people from all social classes are easily suckered into spending lots of money for useless “education.”

Cell phones suck

Michael at 2blowhards.com writes about cell phones. I agree with his point that cell phones are inferior to land lines when it comes to sound quality.

Even when I have all of my antenna bars, the cell phone will for no reason drop parts of a conversation. And when there’s only one or two antenna bars, then the quality really sucks.

In addition to the quality problem, the cell phone is just too small to comfortably talk on.

(Hat tip: Marginal Revolution.)

Thomas Friedman on the Muslim problem

On July 4th I wrote that immigration and Islam were the two greatest threats to our freedom.

NY Times columnist Thomas Friedman seems to agree with me. He writes about the London bombings:

The attacks are also deeply disturbing because when jihadist bombers take their madness into the heart of our open societies, our societies are never again quite as open. Indeed, we all just lost a little freedom yesterday.

He is also on point with the following:

The Muslim village has been derelict in condemning the madness of jihadist attacks. When Salman Rushdie wrote a controversial novel involving the prophet Muhammad, he was sentenced to death by the leader of Iran. To this day - to this day - no major Muslim cleric or religious body has ever issued a fatwa condemning Osama bin Laden.

Typepad's facelift

Kudos to Typepad for fixing some of the features that I found most annoying.

(1) Comment moderation: it's not something I ever intend to use, but it's nice that the feature is there.

(2) Typekey: for a long time only Movable Type users were able to use this feature. It's finally integrated into Typepad. Once again, I haven't had any problem with spam comments, but if they ever start happening then I will set the blog so that only people with a Typekey registration can comment.

(3) Better emails: the look of the notification emails has improved, and now finally there is a link to delete trackbacks from the notification email. (Half the trackbacks I get are bogus. If anyone sends me a trackback, and the trackback post doesn't contain any kind of link to me, then out it goes.)

(4) Comment permalinks: finally the comments on the default template have permalinks.

Paul Krugman clueless on obesity

Paul Krugman is on an anti-obesity kick, as demonstrated by his most recent column.

The anti-obesity movement has become the left’s latest cause, even though it’s based on pseudo-science. No one has a clue as to what food is truly “healthy.” People are living longer today than ever before, which creates the presumption that what we are eating today is pretty good stuff. The burden of proof should be on those who say we are eating the wrong stuff.

People lose weight on the Dr. Atkins high fat diet, which is the complete opposite result of what is supposed to happen when you eat a high fat diet.

Previous claims that being overweight causes hundreds of thousands of deaths per year in the U.S. turned out to be completely bogus.

Furthermore, the claim that people are getting fatter is also bogus.

Krugman compares obesity to cigarette smoking, but the two are not comparable. Smoking is a voluntary behavior the people can stop. But one’s body weight is to a large extent determined by one’s genes, and eating is not a bad behavior like smoking. You have to eat in order to live.

Krugman ought to go back to writing about stuff he knows about (allegedly economics) and leave obesity to people who have actually bothered to study the issue in an open minded manner.

Islam strikes again

On July 4th I wrote that the two greatest threats to our freedom were immigration and Islam.

Sure enough, just three days later, Islamic terrorists strike London. And how much do you want to bet that the majority, if not all of, the terrorists were not born in the United Kingdom?

(And see Tim Worstall’s much linked to roundup of posts.)

New York City and libertarianism

New York City is considered to be the bluest of blue cities, and libertarianism is a hardcore rightist "red state" philosophy, so what’s the connection?

The answer is Ayn Rand. Ayn Rand is the inspiration for many libertarians, and some of her whackiest ideas (like returning to the gold standard) are embraced by libertarian types.

Reading The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged, one gets a sense of Ayn Rand’s love of New York City. Could The Fountainhead, a story about an architect who designs skyscrapers, have taken place in any city but New York? Ayn Rand respected the technological and industrial achievement of man, and the creation of an island of skyscrapers is an example of man’s triumph over nature.

It’s unfortunate that modern libertarians have abandoned Ayn Rand’s love of New York City and instead choose to live in out of the way places like New Hampshire (which is, at least, better than Wyoming).

Half Sigma is moving to New York City

The url will remain the same, but the location of the author will be different. Unfortunately, the excitement of the upcoming move has prevented me from posting anything today.

For those who are curious (not likely many people), I will be working for a media company, and no, my new employer doesn't know that I have a blog, so we will keep the blog our little secret. (See my post, Does blogging help you find a job?)

Nine biggest threats to freedom

Since I don’t have anything especially prosaic to say this July 4th, I refer you to Michael Higgins’ list of the nine biggest threats to our freedom.

According to Michael, one of the biggest threats to freedom is celebrity date rape:

Every other week it seems we hear of a story of some women who claims she was raped by a celebrity. It gets down to her word against his. She cannot prove that she did not willingly accept sex – so he walks.

The thing about celebrities is that hordes of women want to have sex with them, so they simply assume that whenever a woman is with them they want sex. The celebrity lives in a world with completely different rules then regular people. I can’t imagine hordes of women wanting desperately to have sex with me.

(To be fair to Michael, he says the “story repeats itself – without celebrity – hundreds of thousands of times each year in every community,” so it’s more than just about celebrity date rape. My criminal law professor, Jeffrie Murphy, loved to talk about rape. I’ve given the issue more than a little thought myself, but hey, this is beyond the scope of this blog post.)

I’m going to be less politically correct than Michael and say that the two biggest threats to our freedom are immigration and Islam.

Simple thoughts on China

Don Boudreax, agreeing with Lawrence Kudlow, writes:

Kudlow opens his op-ed with an appropriate question: "If a store is selling quality products at low prices, why would anyone want to shut it down?"

Indeed, why?

Why indeed?

Hey, maybe because the owner of the store is a communist with an arsenal of nuclear weapons pointed at us and will use the profits to buy more?

Is Tom Cruise "cracked"?

So says Professor Bainbridge:

[Cruise] forgot to mention that a science fiction writer invented Tom's own religion, in whose belief system an alien named Xenu figures prominently. Which may go a long way towards explaining both Tom's interest in science fiction and his inability to express that interest coherently.

Xenu is Scientology’s version of Satan. Satan is a supernatural being while Xenu was a dictator from another planet. Is one belief really any more silly than the other? I don’t see how.

War of the Worlds sucks

Hollywood figures that if you have good special effects, Tom Cruise, and a cute girl precocious for her age in a way only seen in movies, then you don’t actually need a story that makes any sense. Maybe Hollywood is right and War of the Worlds will make a lot of money for everyone involved.

Justice O'Connor retires

Sandra Day O’Connor’s retirement is surprising because, well darn it, it’s the Supreme Court! And everyone was expecting Rehnquist to retire first. Rehnquist might still retire this summer, creating the unusual situation of two simultaneous nominations.

I think the Republicans will wish they took my advice to end the filibuster. Conservatives hope for a strict constructionist like Thomas to be nominated, but there’s a good chance that Bush will be scared by Democrats into nominating a “stealth justice” who will become another Souter.

Unfortunately, the Supreme Court “battle” will probably be about abortion. That’s all that anyone seems to care about. The average person on the street thinks that the Supreme Court’s most important job is to make up abortion law.