economics of second-hand produce

I think it's like this. The farmer's market on Hannover Street in the North End of Boston is not the 'farmer's market' concept I'm familiar, ie, farmers drive into the city to sell their wares.

No, it's not. What it is is farmers selling what they couldn't sell at the local grocery store and grocery stores dumping their shelves' produce for the starting week. It sounds disgusting until you realize that the produce is still within its freshness range, though on the lower end. It's not different from you buying some produce on Saturday (that's your grocery day) and not cooking it till Thursday. Some of the produce is farm fresh, but it's hard to tell.

Because food isn't always a black and white issue. There's some grey area there where what is acceptable for poor people is not so acceptable for rich ones. I'd rather buy 2 heads of 2-day old spinach then one 1-day old spinach (more likely, I'd buy a pound of carrots with the extra dough). The richer you are the less that kind of compromise you're likely to make.

Hungary is acting as Austria's second-week produce market. Some of that produce was probably produced in Hungary, shipped to Austria, sat on shelves/wharehouses, shipped back to Hungary when it wasn't sold in time, and is being sold in Hungary.

(Also the sellers at the Hannover St market are like village farmers - both extra nice 'here, have an apple pretty lady' and extra assholish, 'no you can't pick out which apples you're buying, I decide'.)

food free riding

http://reddit.com/goto?id=w3n5

Darn Mormons. Always being goodie-too-shoes.

Also I don't understand why the restaranteur approached a party that didn't pay and cojoled them into paying. If her policy is "Pay as much as you can," who is she to judge how much another can pay? Perhaps they all got laid off from work, perhaps this was a meeting of the divorcees club of Greater Utah. Perhaps they are sociopaths who can't pay more because of psychological problems (ie, they cannot not free ride when the opportunity presents itself). Who knows.

Darn Mormons. So judgmental.

values in a nanotechnology world

What an awesome thread. It ain't about the minutiae of the science, but about the way humans will deal with a diff environment. Psychology, economics. Very Margret Atwood, very Ursula LeGuin.

I do think that 'rights' will expand. Just like a right to clean tap water and sanitation grew in the 19th century (if your home doesn't have those, expect your children to be taken away by the state). And we may see a right to Internet (if you don't have net access, you children will be taken away to somewhere that does).

What becomes so cheap that it becomes a right, not a luxury?

What becomes valuable? I guess it's like a chemical reaction. The limiting factors determine the size of the output (if you have 5 times as much hydrogen as oxygen, you can still only make one molecule of water per atom of oxygen). So on the material level, certain atoms - titanium, germanium, polonium - become more valuable than others (especially carbon, silicon and nitrogen).

Nitrogen, yeah, it's like what the German scientist did during WWI. Faber (great name)? Found a way to extract nitrogen out of thin air. Before that Germany had to export nitrogen for its agriculture and explosives industries from Chile. You can see why the latter was a problem during the a war.

Plus I wouldn't expect every home to have every needed atom. A T-bone steak dinner 'grown' in a nanoven? Sure. But cobalt or molybdenum or other trace minerals will have to be picked up at the local store. (Expect too the diet moralizing to continue, and parents to fret about what they put into their kids mouths. And for anti-technology reactionaries like today's organics, anti-McD's, slow-foodies, etc.)

But in general. Yeah, design swamps out cost of production, or cost of materials, as the most significant part of a product's cost. So, it will be defended more. Why shouldn't it? We s/w developers charge for our code not for the copies that it gets distributed on. Nanocoders will do the same (and, sure, the Gnostic open sourcers will come out again, saying design is infinitely valuable (like love or music) and so should be given away gratis).

Example, expect celebrity cannablism - meat grown from a famous person's DNA ("I'll have the braised Jolie breasts with alfredo fettucine, and she'll have the coq au Brad Pitt"). 60% of the price of the meal is in copyright fees (just like you pay extra for 'farm fresh' or 'raised wild' foods today).

Land prices will probably fall as more of the earth is opened up to real estate inventory (deserts, oceans). If you can make anything anywhere you can live anywhere. So the concentration of high priced real estate (cities) may become more evenly distributed (of course people said that about the Internet 15 years ago, yet major cities are doing better not worse - sometimes a good pint of beer with friends is unreplicable on the net, or in a bottle).

dollar trading Dec 18

In afternoon New York trading, the 12-nation euro bought $1.3098, up from $1.3078 in New York late Friday. The British pound, however, slipped to $1.9490 from $1.9503.

The dollar strengthened against the Japanese currency, edging up to 118.19 yen from 118.16 yen.

In other trading, the dollar bought 1.2219 Swiss francs, down from 1.2221 late Friday, and 1.1578 Canadian dollars, up from 1.1577.

andre gide on the copyign errors of memesis

“Everything has been said before, but since nobody listens we have to keep going back and beginning all over again.” Andre Gide

psychological neoteny

In a recent issue of Medical Hypotheses, a journal he edits, Charlton argues that unlike previous, more settled societies that could afford to honor a narrow and well-defined worldview (that is, a “mature” one), modern life is tumultuous and ever-changing. Accordingly, it rewards those who retain a certain plasticity of mind and personality. “In a psychological sense, some contemporary individuals never actually become adults,” he writes.

Charlton’s argument is still just a hypothesis, but it makes intuitive sense. For one thing, he notes, education in the modern era — which now routinely extends into an individual’s 20s — rewards a mental openness that could once be safely discarded in the midteens. As he explained in a recent e-mail message, a “likely cause” of the widespread delay in the onset of maturity today was “more prolonged higher education for ever more people, leading to an increase in the ‘unfinished’ personalities that are adaptive to learning.”

Furthermore, he argues, social roles have become less fixed in modern society. We are expected to adapt to change throughout our lives, both in our personal relationships and in our careers, and immaturity, as Charlton added, is “especially helpful in making the best out of enforced job changes, the need for geographic mobility and the requirement to make new social networks.” In fact, he speculates, the ability to retain youthful qualities, now often seen as folly, may someday be recognized as a prized trait.

celebrity narcissism

Interestingly, celebrities with the most skill (musicians) were the least narcissistic; those with no skill (reality-show stars) were, as Pinsky says, “off the narcissism charts.”

When Pinsky and Young published their data, people said, Whoa, celebrities love themselves— what a shocker! But in fact, that’s not the case. “Narcissism is not about self love,” Pinsky says. “It’s a clinical trait that belies a deep sense of emptiness, low self-esteem, emotional detachment, self-loathing, extreme problems with intimacy.”

anchoring and sunk cost effect

It’s an instance of the so-called anchoring effect in psychology, whereby value is judged (or misjudged) by the first number mentioned...

Why does this happen? For starters, as the researchers explained in the June 2006 issue of The Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, low starting prices reduce barriers to entry, tempting even idle browsers to place bids. The increased traffic then generates higher final prices as more buyers bid against one another. Psychological forces play into it as well. Low starting prices entice bidders to invest time and energy in the auction, and while every M.B.A. student knows it’s dumb to base decisions on sunk costs, the eBay bidders did just that, escalating their commitments to their previous bids.

...
Finally, the researchers showed that traffic begets more traffic because later bidders take the number of earlier bidders as proof of an item’s worth. “You see two auctions for the same shirt, each currently at $25,” Galinsky says. “But one has more bids, so you assume it’s more valuable.” What you don’t realize is that the high number of bids has less to do with the item’s value than with that auction’s attractively low starting price.

markets and morals

It is demeaning to history (I'm leaving humans out of it.

If humans aren't even deemed to be beyond "demeaning," why can't they be bought and sold, redeemed at face value? What strange cardinalities. (If human dignity is lower than "history," then humans' lives should be tradeable for this higher-valued "history" - that's what nationalism or any appeal to "Destiny" does.)

Seriously, my argument is simply that economics and ethics go hand in hand -- abolition of slavery closely followed GDP per capita in the industrial revolution ... England (1772), Scotland (1776), France (1790's), Holland (1804?), North US (1804ish), Argentina (1813), British Empire (1830's), Russia (1861), South US (1865), Brazil (1888), etc. What is also curious is that 'humanist' arguments came mostly as rationalizations for facts long on the ground. The American and English abolitionists we remember today (Anti-Slavery Society, Buxton in England; John Brown, Harriet Stowe, Emerson were US Northerners) grew up in an economic system that had already outgrown and outlawed slavery at least a generation before. The must have sounded like a "Classic Rock" station to their immediate communities.

The economic/moral dualness ... that which is tradeable is by definition morally acceptable, and vice versa, that which a society deems sacred or completely immoral is given a value of infinity or zero (in either case, non-tradeable and external to the market). Market externalities define moral boundaries.

A quick survey of moral issues reveals this.

• usury/interest ... financial instruments/derivatives are worth something, rather than being restricted to God's market/Lady Luck
• slavery abolition ... human dignity is unsellable
• intermarriage (racial, class, caste) ... who can/cannot engage in the mating market
• The Beatles selling "Revolution" to a Nike commercial ... the baby-boomers have commoditized their priceless youth
• abortion ... the value of a call option
• cigarette sales to youngsters ... the innocence of children is untradeable
• gay lifestyle & marriage ... who is, or is not able, to engage in mating contracts (as well as the contract between a couple and the rest of their community)
• kidney markets ... "body integrity is not worth an infinite amount, therefore parts are tradeable"
• polygamy ... portfolio diversification vs. the indivisible, sacred value of love
• health care ... should private clinics/insurance be allowed to sell goods?
• recreational drugs ... a sellable drug is a morally acceptable one
• child pornography ... childish innocence, again, deemed untradeable
• farm subsidies ... "a country should be self sufficient in its food production and/or agricultural products (eg, in France) define a self-identity worth paying for"
• energy independence ... "A country is morally obligated to free itself from the free market"
• animal rights/vegetarianism ... "human desire has another limit - an animal's dignity"
• open source software ... a revolt against commercialization ("my creativity is worth so much, it is unsellable - I will give it away for free")
• smoking bans & trans-fat prohibition ... more barriers in public markets

KayJay makes my point however - trading in humans is so beyond his value system that he cannot even fathom a need for anything beyond a moral validation. He finds economic arguments against slavery themselves debasing (this type of 'derivative trading' is immoral): it's an insult to think an anti-slavery opinion can't be bought with just the infinite value of a 'freedom'/human rights argument.

externalities determin moral

A society with no externalities in its markets is one which has traded in all its moral values for economic ones.

We, the collective we, get to choose our externalities. They determine our morals/market boundary. (If kidneys are sellable why not hearts or brains? It must be because life is worth some incalculablely high moral value. An externality-free economy would not care one bit.)

normative versus market values

They present a view that if you remove the lens of morality and how things "should be", many phenomena can be explained through basic economic principles.

I think that's the point of morality. To prevent markets from entering certain spheres of life that a society values of infinity worth, ie, too sacred to price.

scott adams on metnally fucked up

I’ll be happy when society realizes that all humans are mentally fucked up, just in different ways.

brand-name emoticon

I think standard APIs are generally a good thing (decrease transaction costs) yet once in awhile one has to take a stand against standardization, the flattening of the extremes.

Some people fight J2EE or SAT or the standardization of spirituality catholic religions provide, I choose to fight the emoticon. Even if I know it's a fruitless fight - 100 years from now no one wil understand you unless you flatten your affect to one of the off-the-shelf products (imagine a Nokia smirk or a Nextel grimace).

Why Is Religion Natural?

Is religious belief a mere leap into irrationality as many skeptics assume? Psychology suggests that there may be more to belief than the suspension of reason.

Pascal Boyer

explanations for religion

Oct 23, 2006

Highly recommended is Pascal Boyer's Religion Explained. It's a perspective from a data-centric point of view (the data is people, not chemistry or biology or various slices of physical reality that religious arguments devolve into, as people are the subjects under investigation). For example, in the first chapter he enummerates the various secular and theological explanations that have been given for religion over the years ("mind control," "social cohesion," ''enforcement of morality," "fear of death," "cosmology," "people are stupid", etc, etc) - and dismisses each one with hard, counterfactual datapoints. None of these historical explanations fit all the facts, they don't. The book is worth picking up for this amazing feat of counter-intuitive thinking itself. (Secular explanations for religion - Dennett's and Dawking's, for example- are themselves as faulty as religious explanations!)

Another chapter grabbed my attention as he makes a list of beliefs and asks us the reader to pick out which are "real" - that is, which are beliefs that have been believed by some group of people at some time. I was amazed that (a) I was able to partition the list into actual beliefs and never-believed ones with complete accuracy without years of study behind me! and that (b) not everything you can think of is a candidate for religious belief - some ideas don't fit the human psyche at all.

See Boyer's short lecture ... Functional Origins of Religious Concepts. It reads like a set of design patterns.

He also retells a story of an English anthroplogist who was studying a primitive tribal people with animist beliefs. One day there was a report that a house fell down while three tribal elders were having lunch inside, killing them on the spot. The natives quickly told the English anthropologist that ancestor spirits had been neglected by those elders, and the spirits had carried out revenge for the mistreatment. The English anthropologist being a practical man of science decided to look around the site a bit. He picked up a piece of the house's frame and showing it to tribes people said, "See here, old chap, there's a perfectly rational explanation for why the house fell down. Termites ate through the wood and weakened it, causing gravity to make the house fall down. No spirits were involved in the elders' deaths."

The tribesmen looked back at the Englishman as if he was the biggest idiot on the planet. "No d'uh, the termites ate through the wood," they said. "But what caused the termites to eat through the wood at the moment the elders were in the house?"

social mobility and parental love

The question is about social mobility - how far away from his/her parents' income percentile a child's income percentile is. Either up or down.

A completely socially mobile society, ie, one where there is no statistical link between parents' and children's incomes, would be depressing to parents. It would be like Sparta (or Israeli kibbutz) where the state threw all the children together in one big pool. It made parents feel worthless and lacking in control. These societies were not very successful at self-replicating. They required love to be spread too thin.

abstractions in math language

I think Descartes and his geometry/algebra unification scheme should be credited with why we think zero is such an easy concept *today*. If you read the math texts before Descartes (whether Indian or Italian) it's really, really hard to understand what they are talking about. Algebra itself was undergoing formalization wars throughout the 16th century (ie, there were competing notation APIs with various levels of syncopation and symbolization).

http://igitur-archive.library.uu.nl/dissertations/2002-1105-161148/c3.pdf

That's one particular trend in the history of math ... something's hard till someone invents a useful and formal notation for it, a standard. Then the concept is obvious. One less layer of abstraction for the mind to go through to get to the truth ("sensation becomes conception" the neotechies would rhapsodize). I don't doubt geniuses like Brahmagupta were able to think abstractly without the crutch of notation. But a symbolic system allows regular folks like us to get a peek at what they were thinking.

hot springs

Yeah, parts of the US are still a wilderness. And snow tires are required if you're traveling.

There's some real nice places thereabouts. The Rogue River valley. Lots of hot springs.

One place I remember, a mile hike from the road. Bathtub sized basins etched into a side of a ravine by the sulfur. Beautiful view. Isolated. A local plumber comes, scruffy, with a six-pack and a beer belly, strips all the way down and bends over to adjust the waterflow, his wrench and nuts to the world. At that moment a tourist family comes off the trail, with young children, sees the sight full-on, flushes in embarassment, does a perfunctory (and swimsuitted) dip, scuttles away.

make-up sex

Ask her to wear costumes and/or masks when you guys do it. You can pretend they are different partners and you're 'catching up.'

With a little paste and kid-proof scissors make it into a grade-school art project - print out photos of the women you want to have slept with and glue them onto the masks. (If you have photos of these women's other distinguishing characteristics, feel free to explore other materials -- silly putty, that stuff they make kitchen gloves out of now, pencil erasers, etc -- for appropriate dress-up.)

Believe me, girls don't mind that stuff. They love arts and crafts.

iraq and authority dependency

Basically, after a generation of totalitarian rule (or more) the Iraqis didn't know how to control themselves. The Sunnis were spoiled, were used to controlling more than their share, and reacted with anger to Saddam's fall. The Shiites were used to controlling less than their share, and expected to be treated like victims, ie, pitied and taken care of. Only the Kurds had the Goldilocks formula, just right amount of control; they seem to have responded healthily to their 1/2 a generation of semi-independence.

The Arab Iraqis (non-Kurds, non-Turkomen, etc) were, in one fashion or another, dependent on authority, on big daddy.

An addict should have known that this's the case. A recovering addict should have, at least. Should have eased Iraq's role-seeking youths out of a control dependency (onto another perhaps). Should have left more authority in tact, or sent in more to take up place in the power vacuum. Bush's a dry drunk though. Didn't know Iraq needed an active sponsor, 'cause he never had one himself.

which markets is the question

See, I think a flat tax probably is more efficient money-wise (the article didn't show any evidence it). Just like a kidney market is efficient.

However in both cases something is lost. The efficiency comes at a price.

For kidney markets it would entail devaluating the body ("if kidneys cost $X, how much for the rest, sir?"). Quite a few people think it's worth it. They don't think bodies themselves are all that valuable enough.

For a flat tax, it would trade compassion/equitability for higher growth (more so than today, at least). It may be a trade society wants to do. Hard to tell. Either way, I think an economist stops being just an economist when they advocate for markets - it's like a bus driver arguing for more mass transort, or a nephrologist arguing for more kidney transplants. That's why so many economic theories are mere proxies for ethical, political ones.

preadolescent transgenders

Over the past 30 years, Dr. Zucker has treated about 500 preadolescent gender-variant children. In his studies, 80 percent grow out of the behavior, but 15 percent to 20 percent continue to be distressed about their gender and may ultimately change their sex.