(Potentially relevant link)

Greg Mankiw's latest blog post asks (for classroom discussion) the macroeconomic stimulus difference between a bank using bailout money to pay Joe the Plumber to renovate their own bathrooms vs. lending the money to Bob the Baker to hire Joe the Plumber to do the same in his own home.

This is posed in response to Obama's complaint that the banks are using bailout money in the former, 'wasteful' way.

I don't know macroeconomics, but I'm pretty sure the point of the bailout wasn't straight-up stimulus--we use tax breaks and government infrastructure improvements for that. The point was to save the banks from going under.

In doing so it was hoped the banks would be able to loan people money in the short term, but there's more to it than that. In fact, no one really talked about that detail until much later (when it didn't happen).

If the bailouts were our screwed-up way of stimulating the economy, Mankiw's question would be relevant, as hiring people to renovating their bathrooms stimulates the economy. What it doesn't do is help keep the banks afloat. And if the money isn't being used to save the banks, maybe we should be giving the money to someone other than the banks.

To go back closer to Mankiw's question, I can tell you the difference on a less-macroeconomic level: safe loans--and nowadays they're pretty cautious about risk--to Bob the Baker results in future cash flow for the banks. Renovating the bathrooms is probably not going to bring in new money or or reduce future costs. The difference is that the former helps prevent bank failure or need for future bank bailouts, which I'm sure has some notable macroeconomic impact. I don't know how the two options differ stimulus-wise, but the loans seems like the loans would be better for increasing GDP just because more money gets handed back and forth. I just don't really see that as particularly desirable.

GM says this:

19 of our 2009 models have an EPA estimated 30 MPG highway or better2 — more than Toyota, more than Honda.

For 2009, we offer more hybrid choices than any other manufacturer. We currently have six hybrids available.

Well...yeah. Toyota and Honda made a few really good models. GM makes a million so-so models. Some of them are reasonably fuel-efficient. ('11 of our last 13 new-product introductions have been fuel-efficient cars or crossovers.' -- Okay, a bunch of them. Now stop wasting time and money on all those older models that get 6-20MPG.)

37 of our 2009 models have five-star frontal crash safety ratings.

So you have at least 37 2009 models. 19/37 = 0.513513514. But you clearly have more than 37 models or you'd say 'All of our 2009 models'. So probably far fewer than half, in the end.

From a consumer point of view, choice might be good. From a forced-new-owner of the company, it's not so good.

So, Michael (who works in the Archæology library at UT, I believe) apparently mentioned RFIDing all the books in the library to a guy there, and got a lecture on why he was stupid for even talking about it.

The recap Bryan (and I, being nosy) received was: 'Michael, there are twelve million volumes in the library.'

There are numerous reasons why this is a bad objection:

1. Firstly, have the publishers do it, or just do it as books are acquired.
   
2. Every time a book is checked out, RFID tag it. Now the most popular books, at any rate, have been tagged.
   
3. Undergrads are cheap--bordering on free. Unleash them on the stacks.
   

The benefits are many:

1. Even if you only get the 20% most popular books (see item two), you've probably covered the vast majority of activity.
   
2. You don't even need to sort the books anymore. Better, you can sort them by popularity. (Caveat: being able to browse the physical volumes is a very useful capability--just a list of metadata is frequently insufficient. You usually want to browse by subject, not browse random books.)
   
3. If someone fails to return a book, you assemble a strike team and visit its locale. 'Overdue fine? Oh, no, we figure the collateral damage to your apartment during extraction is penalty enough.'
   
4. Now you don't need an expensive television to give you cancer. The books can do it too!
   

I've proposed that we (about twenty Senecans) purchase some twelve million RFID tags and spend a night tagging every volume in the building. Naysayer heed this warning!

A friend of mine just exceeded her lifetime allotment of exclamation marks. She can try purchase more punctuation credits, but exclamation marks are in high demand, especially during the holidays.

Comma credits are volatile, due to the competing forces of texters (who avoid most forms of punctuation) and comma splicers. (This latter force also keeps the cost of semi-colon credits extremely low; frugal consumers make ample use of these under-valued symbols.)

There's a glut on the market for apostrophe credits, thanks again to under-use by the texting community.

If you want a real bargain, try buying bracket or caret credits.

(Potentially relevant link)

The Peace Corps is considered good diplomacy. Send Americans over to help community development and other countries start to like us.

Tommy Thompson wanted to send medical ships around the world to serve as roving hospitals for poor nations. Medical diplomacy.

Kiva, similarly, is about diplomacy. I don't know if donating money that way is as beneficial as donating to PATH (though you have a good chance of getting your Kiva money back to re-donate, which is pretty cool), but if pro-American diplomacy is something you support, that should be another major benefit of Kiva.

How important is it that other countries like us? Seems like if we're decent at doing good things with our foreign policy then our being popular and respected benefits everyone. If we're trying to invade non-aggressive nations based on known-to-be-false evidence, having other nations say 'Get lost'--as France did with Iraq--is a good thing. (Had Britain [and don't forget Poland!] done the same, maybe we wouldn't have gone into Iraq at all.)

For the next four years, at least, I'm guessing we'll be in the former category.

Some time ago, Austin's mayor signed the Urban Environmental Accords and now we seem to have the goal of achieving zero solid waste by 2020. Austin's Solid Waste Services has a list of suggestions (PDF) on how to reduce your waste. It includes:

[at home] Buy in bulk and leave packaging at store
[at your school/business/place of worship] Buy in bulk and ask suppliers to take back packaging

Okay, true that recycling in bulk is more efficient*, but...this is essentially just shifting your waste. Maybe it will convince suppliers to use less packaging?

* I forget what it was, but I was recently looking up the recyclability of something and learned that you have to test it to find out, and it's only worth testing if you have a huge amount to recycle.

I want full scholarships to be a student for the rest of my life. Surely that somehow is a worthwhile investment for society. I'll make insightful comments and ask insightful questions during class, enriching the learning experience for my fellow students.

I just saw an advert on Facebook:

Buy rare Hubble photos
Buy high resolution fine art images printed and framed from rare NASA Hubble Space Telescope archives. Free shipping.

Gee, I'm pretty sure all NASA images (and all Hubble images, obviously) are PUBLIC DOMAIN.

But best of all, the advert has an example image: the Eagle Nebula image, probably most famous and un-rare Hubble image ever.

Oct 31: ICC General Membership Meeting. Hey ya’ll, the meeting is scheduled for Sat Nov. 15th. Be there, or be tagged “uncooperative.” --Jenn from the office

Great! I'll be there. What time? And where?

Nov 12: Get hyped for some ICC charades at the General Membership meeting on November 16th on the deck of Hillel from 2:30-4:30. -- ICC Ed. Coordinator

Great! Where's Hillel? (Google gives the address of a 'Texas Hillel' as 'The Drag', which covers about ten square blocks) And, wait...November 16?

The three things that should always be known about a meeting:
* Who - This has been explained. everyone in ICC. That includes me. Shiny.
* Where - This has been vaguely established.
* When - This is unclear.

My education feels uncoordinated.

UPDATE (before I even posted this): I went to the ICC office for other matters (open on a weekend? Amazing!) and asked the person working there when the meeting was. She told me Sunday, and showed me the flyer posted on the office door. She, however, had no clue at all what or where 'Hillel' was. I told her what I had determined using the magic that is Google, so now at least one member of the ICC staff(-like people) knows where the meeting is.

So, we're using eSlate, (online demo available! In fact, part of my knowledge of the interface described below [such as write-ins] are derived from the demo, not trying it on the actual ballot) electronic voting with a very stupid interface.

Inputs are:
* A dial.
* An 'enter' key.
* 'Prev' and 'Next' keys.
* A 'Cast Ballot' key.
* A 'Help' button.

You enter your 'access code' ([0-9]{4} or perhaps [1-9][0-9]{3}) by using the dial to scroll through the digits 0-9 and selecting 'enter' for each one'. (Scrolling wraps around, and there's a 'Clear last' button after the 0.) It doesn't reset your position after choosing a digit, which was good for me, because mine ended with '22'.

Dial's are hard to use. They're inconvenient. Why are they better than arrow keys, even just two? Maybe people with palsy can more easily manipulate the dial? Sure is a lot harder for me.

After you enter your access code (hope you didn't need to 'Clear Last' on that last digit--it automatically moves on!) Then it has a page of instructions, and then pages of the ballot. Prev/Next will skip between pages, as will using the dial to scroll off the top or bottom of the page. The dial scrolls through each option of each question on the page, so to get to an option for something on the middle of the first page, you first must either scroll through the first half (President, for one), or go to the next page and scroll back through the last half. Write-ins are done similarly to the access code, but you have 26 letters + clear last + space, you only get eighteen characters max, and you get to manually say 'Accept' when the name is complete. If you do a write-in and then switch to something else, it will blank the name in the write-in box, so if you switch back, you have to re-enter the name. Possibly reduces the risk of people accidentally entering a write-in and then accidentally selecting a non-write-in without realising it.

After you've done all pages, it has two pages showing what you selected for each (good: confirmation!) and then you press 'Cast Ballot' and it says the ballot has been cast and to leave the booth. Also good.

Here's the thing, though: when I first switched to the second page and tried scrolling, it didn't scroll through the options as it should. It went to the next page. I went back to the instruction page, saw that I'm right and they're wrong, and after going back and forth for again, the dial started working.

This is really broken and really bizarre behaviour. As a programming, I can say with confidence that it didn't really happen. It's just user error.

As someone who has read a lot about electronic voting in the US, though, and as the user, I'm a lot less confident.

Lessons of the day:
1. Don't reinvent the UI.
1a. You'll just make it worse.
1b. Familiarity is very valuable, especially for UIs a user will see once for a couple minutes every two years, or (more likely) once for two minutes once.
2. Test your voting equipment thoroughly.
2a. Ensure proper behaviour.
2b. Ensure user error is exceptionally rare and is handled gracefully.