Thet’s yer problem right there

Obsidian Wings: The Ice Floes Are Crowded

Here’s an econ textbook quoted by Uwe Reinhardt:

“Prices ration scarce resources. If bread were free, a huge quantity of it would be demanded. Because the resources used to produce bread are scarce, the actual amount of bread has to be rationed among its potential users. Not everyone can have all the bread that they could possibly want. The bread must be rationed somehow; the price system accomplishes this in the following way: Everyone who is willing to pay the equilibrium price gets the good, and everyone who does not, does not.

The rest of the discussion is pretty interesting, complete with the 99-year-old grandmother who is an object lesson in why you don’t leave marginal-coverage issues to the mostly-unregulated marketplace.

But I was kinda amused by the fact that the original example Uwe Reinhardt quotes from his econ 10x textbook is completely contrary to fact. If the price of bread were zero, There’s no real evidence that people would demand much more of it than they do now. Some people might demand a little more, and people people who are too poor to eat non-free food might demand a lot more, but the solution to that part of the problem wouldn’t be some much about making bread more expensive as about making other foodstuffs more affordable for them.

Similarly, if medical care were free, some people might consume a little more — although let’s face it, it’s not generally a good that’s enjoyable to consume — and a few others, mainly those whose lives are such that they don’t have access to other means of maintaining or preserviing their health, would consume a lot more. But as any number of other countries have shown).

Why is this important? Because our current method of doing health-care rationing appears to produce costs trending toward infinity. It’s not about the demand curve at all, it’s about who gets to set prices, who sets the mix of goods and services available to be demanded, what the incentives for various people in the system are.

Like everyone else, I love this review. It exceeds its subject.

io9 – Michael Bay Finally Made An Art Movie – Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen

Transformers: ROTF has mostly gotten pretty hideous reviews, but that’s because people don’t understand that this isn’t a movie, in the conventional sense. It’s an assault on the senses, a barrage of crazy imagery. Imagine that you went back in time to the late 1960s and found Terry Gilliam, fresh from doing his weird low-fi collage/animations for Monty Python. You proceeded to inject Gilliam with so many steroids his penis shrank to the size of a hair follicle, and you smushed a dozen tabs of LSD under his tongue. And then you gave him the GDP of a few sub-Saharan countries. Gilliam might have made a movie not unlike this one.

The French, racially insensitive? Say it ain’t so.

‘King of the Apes’ swings again

the exhibition’s curator, Roger Boulay, has also been keen to investigate why some are left uneasy about Tarzan – especially his relationship to black Africans.

But he says this queasiness is mainly generated by the Hollywood versions of the story, not by Edgar Rice Burroughs’ original novels.

“Sometimes the books can be quite subtle and rich,” he says.

M. Boulay, I read those novels when I was a kid. And subtle is one expletiving thing they were not. Burroughs was a king of camp and in-your-face closeted homoeroticism, but subtle? Nuh-uh.

And it wasn’t so much Tarzan’s relationship to black africans that was a problem (they were, like everyone else in the place, just backdrops for the northern-european-but-not-german Uebermensch) as the author’s constant dicta about race and the bestial aspects of the lower races and the polluting effect of civlization on the noble savage blood and just the whole notion of using an entire goddam continent full of living, breathing intelligent people as a canvas for some white guy’s adventures with a white woman.

“but you do have to remember that he dates from 1912.”

and then some.

The best argument for regulating the hell out of the financial industry

In huge change, Obama’d strip Fed of credit card oversight | McClatchy

American Financial Services Association officials said they didn’t believe that the proposed new agency was a reflection of past regulatory failures.

“We honestly believe that the regulatory bodies in place now have adequately addressed the situation,” said Chris Stinebert, the association’s president and chief executive. “The regulatory structure as it exists now between the federal (government) and the state(s) is working.”

C’mon, you guys just helped CRATER THE ENTIRE WORLD ECONOMY by pushing credit on people who couldn’t afford it and pulling midstream bait-and-switch scams on those who could, and you think the current regulatory morass is fine? Oh, right. You bought legislation that makes it easier to fly a camel through the eye of a needle than to get out of your credit-card debt, and pain at the top of the financial industry is still not being able to afford the second vacation home. I guess you would think that the current setup is working just fine.

Even more chilling is another guy working for the same organization:

However, the commission could end up limiting consumer credit options and innovation just as the economy is beginning to rebound, said Bill Himpler, the executive vice president for government affairs of the American Financial Services Association, the trade association for the consumer credit industry.

When you remember what “innovation” and “consumer credit options” (yep, always the option to pay more) have meant during the runup to this recession, that translates something like, “We’re not lending a lot of money right now because everyone is cutting back and we’re not sure people can pay any more, but as soon as people start having money in their pockets again we’ll have new ways to siphon it back out. And we don’t want anyone interfering with that.”

These folks might be so transparently out of touch with reality because they’ve swallowed their own hype. Or they’ve simply bought enough legislators that they can say stuff like this knowing that no one can touch them.

Web Soap Operas

Blogger’s baby was a hoax — chicagotribune.com

By Sunday night, when “April’s Mom” claimed to have given birth to her “miracle baby” — blogging that April Rose had survived a home birth only to die hours later — her Web site had nearly a million hits.

Maybe this is the next big money-making operation on the web. A million hits even at minimal ad rates is about 20 grand. Figure the total take was several times that, and you’ve got way better revenues than a typical first novel. Somebody could hire a stable of good writers, get a few stock photos, pitch different web operas to different demographics, and bam! Not incredible revenue for any given site or opera company, but a pretty comfortable living all round. At first people would probably be pissed off at getting taken in, but pretty soon you’d have an audience that enjoyed the staging and the faux conflict, like the people who watch reality shows or professional wrestling. And then you’d see people in the know gently explaining matters to their friends who thought the sick babies/wives/grandmothers or the piledriver head-slams were real…

Some real-estate moguls are really innumerate

h/t Eschaton

and so are reporters:

The Center City high-rise condo market may be soft these days, but Residences at Ritz-Carlton developer Craig Spencer won’t let it get the better of his bottom line.

“I turned down a $1.3 million all-cash sale from a buyer who wanted me to cut the price by $50,000,” Spencer said yesterday as he showed a visitor the 8,000-square-foot unfinished penthouse at the top of the 43-story, 270-unit building at 15th Street and South Penn Square.

Now let’s do the math. Say, for example, that this guy is paying 10% on his construction loan, and it actually cost him $500K to build that $1.3-mil unit. For every month he refuses to sell, he’s out about $4200 in actual costs, and he’s also out (conservatively) the $3K a month or so that he could get investing that $800,000 profit somewhere else. And that’s before the cost of lighting, cooling, cleaning and so forth for the apartment in question. So if it takes him an extra six months to sell the unit, he has indeed let his ego get the better of his bottom line. And his cost could well be higher…

The economy is doing worse than you think.

Eschaton

So, no, one month of “only” 350K lost jobs is not enough to make me optimistic that everything is going to turn around, even slowly.

But guess what, it’s worse than that. Every month under normal conditions (ha) the US economy has to produce something like 120-150,000 jobs just to keep up with the natural growth in the labor force from rising population. So that 350,000 job lost, ostensibly turning the corner, is really half a million jobs short of what we need just to stay in the same place. And every time you hear about the number of jobs lost during the recession, mentally add another million and a half or two million people who would have found newly-created jobs under normal conditions, and haven’t been.

(There’s a tiny bit of a twist here, namely that the labor force, the number of people the Bureau of Labor Statistics thinks actually want to be employed, has been shrinking, as it often does in recessions. But that’s not because fewer people need or want jobs, it’s because millions of people look at the market and the odds of actually finding paying work and say, “screw it, I’ll collect social security/file for disability/keep piling up school loans/live on someone’s couch for another year/give up and squat in an abandoned house/anything but keep up the futile search for a job.”)

Why do I think this could be a really bad idea?

Gizmodo – Did You Ever Think You Could Deposit Checks Using Your Phone? Neither Did I – Mobile deposit software

Assuming you don’t already direct deposit all your checks, NCR’s APTRA Passport checking software could be great news. Your phone’s camera, which must be at least 2-megapixels, acts as a scanner that captures an image of the check. APTRA then uses Mitek Systems’ advanced recognition and image quality technologies to validate all data before transmitting those images directly to your financial institution or online banking web site. Presto! You’re done.

Now of course when you deposit a check to your account your bank generally knows who you are and can claw the money back if anything goes wrong, but this just seems like a perfect opportunity for some obvious scams. (Some of those scams could be arranged with paper checks as well, but this being able to script them is always a difference in kind.)

Of course, it will make me feel even more deliciously retro when I deposit a check — gasp — by mail.

This guy should never have been an economics reporter

Magazine Preview – My Personal Credit Crisis – NYTimes.com

I wrote several early-warning articles in 2004 about the spike in go-go mortgages. Before that, I had a hand in covering the Asian financial crisis of 1997, the Russia meltdown in 1998 and the dot-com collapse in 2000. I know a lot about the curveballs that the economy can throw at us.

But in 2004, I joined millions of otherwise-sane Americans in what we now know was a catastrophic binge on overpriced real estate and reckless mortgages. Nobody duped or hypnotized me. Like so many others — borrowers, lenders and the Wall Street dealmakers behind them — I just thought I could beat the odds. We all had our reasons. The brokers and dealmakers were scoring huge commissions. Ordinary homebuyers were stretching to get into first houses, or bigger houses, or better neighborhoods. Some were greedy, some were desperate and some were deceived.

As for me, I had two utterly compelling reasons for taking the plunge: the money was there, and I was in love.

And then he just went and spent $30K a year more than he had, in the magical belief that if he and his spouse looked the other way they’d be fine. He seems to write without any clue to the mindboggling conflict of interest in putting stories in the newspaper every day about people and companies who were even stupider than he was — but whose failure would also result in further disasters for him…

And then it climbs into your bed and smothers you

Gizmodo – Floor-Wiping Worm Robot Provides Crucial Missing Link in Robotic Fossil Record – Fukitorimushi floor-cleaning robot

the little robot is wrapped in a sticky nanocloth sleeve, which collects dust and debris as the robot crawls, worm-style, across the floor.

Its also got sensors to seek out dirt, so it takes a slightly different approach to floor cleaning than the Roomba,

This thing seems really cool, but I would sure hate to have it in the same house with a cat.