Half Sigma

Further thoughts on abandoning New Orleans

The governor of Louisiana says no one will be allowed back into the city for 12-16 weeks. So assuming at least 16 weeks (because so far every projection involving the Katrina catastrophe has been over-optimistic) no one will be allowed back into New Orleans until Christmas. And when they get back, their house will probably be gone anyway. And whatever job they had there will also probably be gone. Tourism, one of New Orleans' biggest sources of jobs will not return automatically. People go there to party, not to see a depressed town where where people are homeless and jobless.

Except for people who work in the oil and gas industry who have to be in the area, everyone else will probably find jobs elsewhere and never go back. (This blogger has similar thoughts.)

So I think that the authorities, instead of working under the false assumption that everyone will move back to New Orleans and rebuild everything, need to more realistically work towards easing the former residents' migration to new locations, and making this the number one priority ahead of draining the city, which is no longer filling up with water because the water level has now equalized with the lake.

This end of New Orleans may have the effect of extending the housing bubble a while longer, because all those displaced people will need new homes.

Is New Orleans worth saving?

I'm not talking about the people trapped there, who we need to get out of there as soon as possible. The government authorities have been doing a pretty lousy job on this account and the Superdome was a really stupuid place to use as a shelter.

But what about the city itself? Yesterday morning, we were told 80% of the city was flooded, and since then there have been more levee breaches and waters have continued to rise. By now I assume that close to 100% of the city is flooded.

I'm not a structural engineer, but I am pretty sure that houses flooded up to their roofs cannot be saved, and will have to be torn down and entirely rebuilt once the flood waters are finally gone. So far I have not read any reports about what percentage of homes will have to be torn down and rebuilt, but I'm guessing that the majority of homes in New Orleans will fall into this category.

Does it really make sense to rebuild a home in a "bowl" that's susceptible to future hurricanes? Did it ever make sense to build it there in the first place?

This morning on CNN, there was an interview with a woman who so far was the first person to publicly speak any common sense. She's with her parents in South Carolina and she has no intent to return to New Orleans, she's looking for work elsewhere.

I don't want to see our government spending tens of billions of dollars to restore New Orleans to a condition that will never be what it was before when the money might be better spent closing down the city and moving the people elsewhere.

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Mark agrees with me.

The Inequality Taboo

“Elites throughout the West are living a lie, basing the futures of their societies on the assumption that all groups of people are equal in all respects. Lie is a strong word, but justified. It is a lie because so many elite politicians who profess to believe it in public do not believe it in private. It is a lie because so many elite scholars choose to ignore what is already known and choose not to inquire into what they suspect. We enable ourselves to continue to live the lie by establishing a taboo against discussion of group differences.”

This is one of the best essays ever published, read The Inequality Taboo by Charles Murray.

Bleach blondes and the city

There are lots of blondes to be spotted in New York City Manhattan. The vast majority of them are not natural blondes.

I love the way these bottle blondes look. I like them much better than natural blondes.

I mentioned this to my friend B (remember him from this post), and he surprisingly agreed with me. He suggested that I appreciate the effort they put into their appearance. Yes, that must be it, I agreed.

After thinking about the issue some more, I think it's more complicated than that. First of all, there is probably something in our genetic code that makes us find blonde women more attractive. Steve Sailer has written about this quite a bit.

But why do I prefer the fake blonde variety? Is it just that I appreciate the effort? I think that's only part of it. A woman who puts a lot of effort into having great hair is also likely to put a lot of effort into the rest of her appearance as well. I've just come to associate the bleached blonde hair with the entire package. And knowing that "blondes have more fun," women who consider themselves fun will be more likely to bleach their hair blonde, thus ensuring the truth of oft repeated phrase. And who doesn't like a fun woman?

Also, I think our brains are programmed to synthesize various details about people and determine their social status. The expensive hairstyle becomes associated with higher status and thus we perceive it as more attractive. In the 1970s, a high status hairstyle looked a lot different than a high status hairstyle today, but our brain is able to subconsciously determine what's currently high status, and find that more attractive.

Anti-smoking laws and economics

In New York City, it’s illegal to smoke in a bar or restaurant.

I think this law is great. You can go out to a bar, and not have to deal with cigarette smoke irritating your contact lenses, and not go home with all your clothes smelling like they were dipped in an ashtray.

I conclude that restaurant/bar smoking imposed a significant externality upon non-smokers that outweighed any pleasure that smokers got from smoking. The anti-smoking laws have maximized the economic value of society.

Now I know that libertarians will say that it’s not the government’s business to maximize the value of society, which is something I disagree with.

Free marketeers will say that if smoking was so harmful to non-smokers, the bars and restaurants would have banned it without government intervention. And this I disagree with too. The free market assumption is based on markets being efficient, and clearly markets aren’t always efficient. (NASDAQ bubble anyone?)

The long established tradition of smoking in certain types of establishments remained even after society’s attitude towards smoking had changed. With smokers having very strong expectations of smoking, and restaurants and bars reluctant to tell smoking customers to take their business elsewhere, the status quo with its negative economic consequences was only able to be changed by government action.

My support of anti-smoking laws in public establishments should not be taken to assume that I support making the practice entirely illegal. If people want to harm their health in a manner that doesn’t create any externalities, then I’m all in favor of it, and in fact I’m in favor of marijuana and cocaine also being legalized.

What time do you arrive to work?

As hinted at in my previous post, it's uncool to work an early work schedule.

At the new company I work at in Manhattan, which is a small but up and coming media company that you have probably heard of, I noticed that at 9:00 AM most of the offices here are still empty. The place was more crowded at 6:15 PM when I left last night. Obviously I've picked up some bad habits working for the government, like getting to work before 9:00. (Not to mention the whole bad work ethic problem.)

Paul Fussell, in his book Class, mentioned that the higher you are in class, the later you eat dinner. Maybe it's because the higher classes are still at work when the lower classes are eating?

Maybe the thing is that higher class people have fun and classy things to do at night, while the boring lower class people are just watching TV so they can go to sleep early in order to get an early start on the next day?

IT: not cool; government not cool either

The new job is far cooler than the last one. I used to work for the government. It was indirectly, as a contractor, but this is normal; the government doesn't hire anyone directly anymore. Right wing free market types will say this is a wonderful example of privatization, but what it really is is big government contractors stealing the taxpayers' money by charging twice the price for the same employees the government could hire directly.

But anyway, the government job wasn't cool. Everyone who worked there was horribly boring. Most of the people were over the age of fifty. They arrived to work at seven and left at three.

The only good thing about the government job was that I didn't have to do much work. There was plenty of time to surf the web and post to my blog, all on the taxpayers' dime.

At the new job in Manhattan, there are all sorts of cool people walking around, and they all look young, and the female people are mostly really attractive. Unfortunately, I don't know any of them. I am cloistered with a bunch of people involved in an IT project, and the IT people are always the least cool people at any organization.

And also, I get to experience first hand how the IT industry has been taken over by foreigners. Not that any of them are bad people or anything, but it's interesting how most Americans think working in IT is somehow beneath them. Foreigners are a lot more practical. They see IT as a career that pays the most money and in which it's easy to find jobs.

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Unfortunately I haven't been reading the newspapers recently, nor reading Instapundit, so I have nothing political to write about. I have to settle for writing boring stuff about my personal life that no one could be interested in reading.

Is eighties music the best music ever?

I've been listening to Sirius Satellite Radio's 80s station the past few days. I don't think I've ever enjoyed listening to the radio so much. This music is great!

But looking at this more logically, my guess is that listening to music over and over again creates neural pathways in the brain receptive to the particular musical pattern. As you get older, your brain has more difficulty creating these new neural pathways, and this means that you stop enjoying new music and think the music you heard when you were in your teens and early twenties is the best music ever.

So sadly, the supremecy of eighties music is just an illusion created by my brain and not reality. Nevertheless, I'm going to keep listening to it. When I'm sixty and still listening to eighties music, the younger generations will laugh at my old fogy musical tastes.

Male/female ratio of online dating

Read my thoughts on the male/female ratio of online dating sites.

Conservation and recycling

My previous post on garbage in the city has drawn a surprisingly large number of comments. So here are more of my thoughts on the issue.

Forced conservation is a dumb idea. As has been pointed out by many commenters, one’s time is also a valuable resource, so forcing people to place their trash in different receptacles wastes a huge amount of society’s scarce resources.

If there were a free market solution, then I’d be in favor of it. If the recyclers were going to pay for the recycled goods, and people wanted to put in the extra effort to make some extra money, then I’d be all in favor. But how one spends one’s own time should be a personal decision, and not one forced upon you by the government. Slavery was outlawed 1865, but liberal do-gooders want to bring it back.

The free market is the best way to allocate the values of various resources. The fact that there is no economic incentive to recycle unless government forces it is ample proof that it doesn’t make sense, and there is a heavy burden of proof upon the pro-recycling people to justify their position.

Now I actually do agree with the theory that we are using up our bounty of resources. It’s a simple mathematical fact. The population of the world keeps increasing but the amount of resources that came with the world are finite. I believe that when people far in the future look back in history, the 20th century will be seen as a golden age of man in which resources were abundant. During the current century we are going to hit the limits of Mother Earth to keep giving us more natural resources.

However, once again, I don’t see how recycling or conservation can really stop the inevitable. Only cutting down on population growth can do that, but the human race seems dead set on having more children. The only thing conservation and recycling might accomplish is to set ahead some date by a few years, such as the date that a certain resource runs out will be extended from 2103 to 2112. But whatever the exact date is, mankind will eventually have to deal with the resource running out so in the end it really makes no difference.

August 1 post

At Online Dating Insider I write about filling out the profile at Match.com.

At the Battlestar Galactica Blog I review the Sci Fi channel movie Bloodsuckers.