The Yin Blog

I thought I left frigid weather behind. . . .

. . . but it's sub-freezing right now in Portland!  Oh well, at least we're well stocked with winter clothing, and besides, at least we're not having blizzard conditions possible.

Overweight at 5'10" and 120 lbs?

This is pretty weird -- the model who was picture in the supposedly Photoshopped Ralph Lauren ad is 5'10" and 120 lbs, and she says she was fired for being "too fat."  Wha???

It just happens that when I started college, I was 5'10" and 120 lbs.  No one considered me overweight.  I was extremely skinny, and stayed that way the entire year in part because I ran cross-country.  No freshman 15 for me, which means someone else gained 30 lbs to balance me out!   

Now, I realize that weight for males versus females isn't directly translatable, because men are supposed to have more heavy muscle mass.  Still, I gained that mythical 15 pounds over the next four years so that I was 5'10" and 135 lbs when I graduated.  I was still considered very skinny.  By the time I started law school four years after college, I was 5'10" and 150 lbs.  I'm pretty sure that my law school classmates would remember that I was still skinny back then.  So even if you can't compare men and women directly, I gained 30 lbs between my weight at the beginning of college to when I went to law school, and I was skinny the whole time.  I just can't see how a woman could possibly be considered fat at 5'10" and 120 lbs.  I think maybe the term we are looking for is "too skinny"?

Don't have Amazon.com teach geography to the kids!

Amazon sure has some weird ideas about geography.  I mean, I live in Oregon, which isn't *that* far from Nevada.  Yet, look at the route that my package is taking:

October 12, 2009	12:24:00 PM	LOUISVILLE KY US	Arrival Scan
October 12, 2009	11:42:00 AM	LOUISVILLE KY US	Arrival Scan
October 10, 2009	12:10:00 PM	LAS VEGAS NV US	Departure Scan
October 10, 2009	01:43:00 AM	LAS VEGAS NV US	Arrival Scan
October 10, 2009	12:54:00 AM	LAS VEGAS NV US	Departure Scan
October 9, 2009	06:58:00 PM	LAS VEGAS NV US	Shipment received by carrier
October 9, 2009	05:39:08 PM	North Las Vegas NV US	Shipment has left seller facility and is in transit

Kentucky?!?  Why is my package going to Kentucky first?

Just when I thought the Polanski saga couldn't get more disgusting

It's bad enough that there are people -- including French government officials -- who are jumping to defend Roman Polanski the fugitive.  It's bad enough that his underlying crime, to which he pled guilty, is pretty heinous.  What's even worse is that, per this news story, that (1) Polanski agreed to pay his rape victim $150,000 but then apparently never actually paid her; and (2) that he fled the U.S. because he didn't want to serve an additional 48 days in jail:

Polanski pleaded guilty to unlawful sexual intercourse and a judge sent him to prison for a 90-day psychiatric evaluation. However, he was released after 42 days by an evaluator who deemed him mentally sound and unlikely to offend again.

The judge responded by saying he was going to send Polanski back to jail for the remainder of the 90 days and that afterward he would ask Polanski to agree to a "voluntary deportation." Polanski then fled the country the night before he was scheduled to be sentenced, Feb. 1, 1978.

That's why he fled the country?!?  He was so spoiled that seven additional weeks of prison was too much for him to bear?

And you have to love this -- when his lawyer was asked about whether Polanski had ever paid the victim the amount he agreed to to settle her case, the lawyer apparently responded like this:

Polanski's attorney, David Finkle, said he couldn't remember details of the case and declined comment.

"It's ancient," Finkle said.

You can't remember whether your client ever paid off a settlement that he agreed to?!?

Democracy -- does it mean what the NY Times thinks it means?

The New York Times has an editorial today against the death penalty that reiterates what seems to me to be the best argument against capital punishment: its cost.  As the Times notes:

Perhaps the most extreme example is California, whose death row costs taxpayers $114 million a year beyond the cost of imprisoning convicts for life. The state has executed 13 people since 1976 for a total of about $250 million per execution. This is a state whose prisons are filled to bursting (unconstitutionally so, the courts say) and whose government has imposed doomsday-level cuts to social services, health care, schools and parks.

I find the fiscal argument quite compelling.  But why does it cost so much to try to execute someone?  There are penalty phase trials (to decide whether the sentence should be life imprisonment or death), there are statutory rights to appeals and post-conviction relief, and there are rights to counsel.  What I found puzzling in the Times editorial was this observation:

There is also a 15-to-20-year appeals process, but simply getting rid of it would be undemocratic and would increase the number of innocent people put to death.

Did the Times mean that it would be undemocratic for a state government to abolish the right to appeal death sentences by fiat?  Or that it abolishing the right to appeal would be undemocratic no matter who decides to do it?

Neither possibility fits "democratic" very well.  If duly elected state legislators abolish the right to appeal (putting aside whether that's constitutional), why isn't that democratic?  I don't imagine the Times means that it's not democratic because it wasn't the product of direct democracy.  I mean, technically, it would be true that if the legislature did it, it would not be democratic so much as "democratic republican" . . . but that distinction doesn't make sense in the context of the anti-death penalty argument that the paper is advancing.

And if the right to appeal death sentences were abolished by, say, a voter initiative, what could be more democratic than that?  (Note: I don't mean to suggest that voter initiative democracy is necessarily a good thing.)

So what does the Times mean by "democratic"?  Does it mean "humane," "moral," or "appropriate"? 

I will never subscribe to Money Magazine (I think)

I don't think I'll ever subscribe to Money Magazine if its "analysis" of the soundness of Social Security is an example of its journalism.

In its discussion of why you should be counting on(!) Social Security as part of your retirement planning, it notes: 

Despite what you may hear about the system going broke, the funds from workers' payroll taxes will cover all retirees' payments until 2016 even if no changes are made to the current program. After that the Social Security Administration can cover full benefits until 2037 by cashing in its Treasury bonds from the Social Security trust fund. And when the bonds run out, income from payroll taxes would be enough to cover about 75% of payments for decades.

Um . . . where does Money think that the government will come up with the cash to pay off those T-bills in the trust fund?  What is a T-bill, anyway?  It's just a piece of paper saying that the government will pay some amount of money on the specified future date, along with interest.  It's not a claim against actual assets.

Since the government does not actually segregate Social Security tax collections, it simply adds it to the federal budget sheet.  In other words, the government takes in income through two ways -- income taxes and Social Security taxes.  (I'm oversimplifying here, there are obviously other income sources.)  Call those X and Y.  The government spends its income on Social Security benefits and other spending (defense, courts, FBI, etc.).  Call those A and B.

If X+Y > A+B, then yea, we have a surplus.  This is what happened during the later parts of the Clinton Administration.  Note that it wasn't a true operating surplus, which would be X > B.  In other words, the Clinton Administration claimed a balanced budget but only by "borrowing" from the Social Security trust fund.

Our current situation, on the other hand, is X+Y<A+B.  Oh no, a deficit!  Call the difference between the two sides Z.  This is our deficit.  How do we come up with $Z?  We borrow it by issuing more T-bills.

Okay, in 2016, what is projected to happen is that A > Y.  Social Security will have to pay out more than it collects.  According to Money, that's no problem, because for all these years, Y > A, so the federal government owes the trust fund some immense amount of money.  The trust fund will just collect on that debt.

But wait a minute.  That accumulated trust surplus is not in a bank account with Wells Fargo that you could just start to withdraw from.  It was already spent in all those years when B > X.  And unless X > B, the government doesn't actually have extra money to pay back the trust fund.  So the government will have to borrow more money, call it W, to make up the gap between A and Y.  Worse yet, because X >>B, and because we don't have the Social Security surplus to raid, the government is going to have to borrow even more money to make up that operating deficit.  In other words, at the same time the government is borrowing W to pay for Social Security, it still needs to be borrowing Z, only Z is going to be more like ZZZZZ.

And we haven't even talked about the impact of the projected universal health care coverage!

Do you feel comfortable about the future of Social Security when it depends on the government's ability to issue T-bills to raise W while at the same time issuing T-bills to raise ZZZZZ?!?  How much of our GDP is going to go toward paying the interest on that?

But I thought he was just a "person of interest" and *not* a "suspect"!

Just a couple of days ago, the police arrested, er, took into custody a Yale lab technician as a "person of interest" in the murder of a female Yale grad student.  The TV news accounts that I saw showed the police emphasizing that the tech was not a suspect.

Today, I read:

A Yale lab technician appeared in court and was charged with murder Thursday hours after his arrest in the killing of a graduate student whose body was found stuffed in the wall of the research building where they both worked.

Am I surprised?  Should anyone be surprised?  Of course not.  Doesn't everyone translate "person of interest" into "suspect"?

"1" is not a prime number!

While watching the summer season finale of "Burn Notice" (awesome stuff!), I caught a commercial for Sonic.  The gist of it was some math nerd talking about how easy it was for him to remember some combination of numbers, one digit of which was "2" -- because it's the second prime number.

No, no, no!  2 is the first prime number, because 1 is not prime.  A prime number is a number divisible only by itself and by 1; in other words, it has two divisors.  1 is not such a number.

14 or so hours 'til my new HD TiVo goes online!

Back when I was setting up the utilities for our new home in Portland, I was confronted with the cable company vs. phone company dilemma.  I opted for the cable company (Comcast) partly because I was concerned about having satellite TV in a location where it rains so much.  And Comcast's triple-bundle deal was pretty good.

However, I was prepared to abandon my beloved TiVo because the two Series 2 machines that I have aren't HD compatible, and Comcast threw in free use of an HD DVR for 6 months.

WIthin a couple of days of using the cable DVR, though, I couldn't stand it.  It's not just that we're used to the comforting doo-doo-doo sound that TiVo makes when you fast-forward; it's that TiVo's interface is technologically superior in just about every way you can imagine.  When you super fast-forward and then hit play, TiVo is smart enough to rewind a few seconds back.  That way, when you see your show start again (after speeding through commercials), the auto-rewind gets you to the right spot without forcing you to rewind manually.  Not so with the Comcast DVR.

And then when it comes to scheduling recordings . . . .  I can't believe how stupid the cable DVR is.  Although I selected the option of recording only first run and not repeats, it somehow gets confused by cable network shows like "Burn Notice."  I ended up having to delete manually a bunch of repeat episodes -- ones that I'd watched within the last 30 days(!).

So, I called up TiVo, found out that I was eligible to upgrade my dual-tuner Series 2 TiVo and get a new HD TiVo for $100 off.  Cool deal!  It arrived today, and the Comcast tech is scheduled to come tomorrow to put in the cable smart cards, and then I will be reunited with my beloved TiVo!

Why is it 100+ degrees in Oregon?!?

It's always been sunny in Portland when I've visited, but I fully expect to get my share of gray, overcast days.  What I didn't expect was that it would be in the high 80s or hotter just about every day we've been here, including today's 102 degrees.  True, we have central air conditioning in our house, but apparently the air compressor isn't strong enough to cool the entire house.  The downstairs is nicely chilled, but the upstairs is still very warm. . . .