POWIP Piece of Work In Progress

In the Ballroom

At the Park (with a "k") Plaza. Managed to cadge press credential and even though there was no seating set aside for us, Da Tech Guy and I found spots at a table. I just borrowed a couple of chairs, and voila! Directly in front of me is a stage full of cameras and talking heads and a mixing board. There's a band set up to play, and they're warming up. Above, in front of the two enormous chandeliers, there are nets full of red, white and blue balloons.

There are a couple of guys who look a bit secret servicey, walking around with earpieces, but most of the security seems to have been provided by the hotel management and the Brown campaign. Haven't eaten yet, today, but that's all right. I picked up some rolling tobacco on the way here, and a six pack of Diet Coke, so I'm good to go. No sign so far of Ace or Pam Geller, who were both rumored to have been coming here.

I'm sitting next to Alex, who's the Daily Telegraph's US political reporter, who has posed a series of questions about my view of the campaign, including the role of the Tea Partiers, who seem to exercise a particular fascination for our friends across the pond. For my part, I've asked him why it is that we seem to be getting so much of the news about our own government from their papers, to which he laughed, as though the answer should be obvious. Perhaps they feel the same way.

Parking was an atrocious $27 for the time we're going to be here, but Stacy insisted on our driving in rather than parking the car and taking the subway. Da Tech Guy is a very good host, and has been off interviewing kitchen staff while the MSM types chat with one another and their cameramen and techs.. Even though I don't watch TV, I recognize some of the faces here. Will report more, when there's more to report.

Dan Collins

Dan Collins is a dude who blogs. He used to blog elsewhere. Now he blogs here.

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Okay, So I’m in Fitchburg

At Da Tech Guy's place, hanging out with Stacy. Had to white knuckle it through Vermont and much of New Hampshire. Entering Massachusetts, there were lots of Brown signs, only a couple of Coakley ones. Stacy's scuttlebutt is that Ace and Pam Geller might be at the Parc Plaza, where we're supposed to be later on today.

Talk to you when I know more.

Dan Collins

Dan Collins is a dude who blogs. He used to blog elsewhere. Now he blogs here.

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Annuities, [Non-]lying women, and NJ pols, oh my!

Three stories that caught my eye recently, and reusing/editing comments I made at those places

Substituting Govt annuities for your 401k

Summary of article: proposal for forcing people to buy annuities from their 401ks for retirement income.

My comment: I’m not pro-government control of retirement accounts, but it’s true that a lot of people would be better off with payout [not deferred] =fixed= [not variable] annuities. Most of the annuity bad behavior has been in variable deferred annuities, where one does pay very high fees for possible downside protection against account value dropping below a certain amount, and most are using as a tax-advantaged investment vehicle, not a source of income [indeed, people rarely annuitize with these things - just take a lump sum out at the end]

The problem is that one has to convert a big lump of money into an income stream in retirement, and that’s not necessarily cheap, either.

I used to work for TIAA-CREF as an actuary working on their retirement annuities. TIAA has been around for eighty years, I believe, and their customers on the whole do annuitize at least some of their retirement savings. TIAA is a very stable company, and never does anything crazy [indeed, they dumped all their CDO stuff when they realized there was something dodgy about that]. That is the kind of company you want to buy an income [i.e. payout] annuity from; alas, their best products aren’t available to the general public. I have most of my retirement savings with TIAA right now.

All that said, it would be best for the government to stay out of this. All I could think of when I heard about this was “How are they going to screw this one up”. Given they can't really handle Social Security or Medicare, I don't see them doing this well, either.

Meep

Meep is a member of the Irish Catholic mafia, having a suspiciously high number of green-eyed, red-haired friends. While she doesn’t have red hair herself [except when she goes into the sun (rare for any vampire)], she does have green eyes. She’s a raving Papist and is a life actuary on the side [i.e., she counts dead people]. An amateur pain-in-the-ass [willing to go pro!], she likes covering retirement, mortality, math, and education issues.

I’ve Been Invited to Boston

to a blog row being set up for tomorrow's election, so this is a cup rattler.

I'm also looking into the possibility of heading to Haiti to help with relief efforts there (as I've been invited as well). I'm weighing the possibility that I might be able to do more good for this organization from here, though as horrible as Haiti might be, I feel that my soul-education will be incomplete if I don't go. Anyway, that's what's on my mind.

Many thanks to @darcysport for her kind donation.

Many thanks also due to Br'er Tim at St. Paul Fish. Due to the generosity of both, I'm headed to Massachusetts.

Dan Collins

Dan Collins is a dude who blogs. He used to blog elsewhere. Now he blogs here.

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My mink fur brings all the boys to the yard….

Kelis, now that's my kind of gal:

Of chinchilla and mink she said, “Quite honestly [they] are rodents, and if it weren’t in the form of a coat, I would demand they be put to death anyway.” A little bit scary, no? She also admitted to her desire to eat her prey before she wears it. She says, “[I] would eat pterodactyl if you found some and told me it was meaty and delicious.” Too bad dinosaurs are extinct.

Well sure, dumbass, but note that Kelis wrote =if=. Evidently, she is aware of counterfactual construction.

And considering the in vitro pork I linked to earlier, do not be ruling out those sweet and juicy pterodactyl steaks yet. Them's good eatin'!

[I read some of the comments on Zombie's post and did not consider the religious implications of in vitro pork -- would it be kosher or halal? Even better -- would it be okay on Fridays during Lent? [actually, no, because the whole meatless Friday thing is supposed to be about sacrifice, not clean/unclean issues. It doesn't matter how the meat was procured. [and further, my husband, who I never expected to convert and certainly never asked to convert, keeps to meatless Fridays all year round. I wonder about the sacrificial aspect, as half the time we're having shrimp in lieu of beef stew, say. That's not that sacrificial.]]....pop]

Finally, what's so scary about wishing death upon rodents and other associated vermin? Heck, I have a vendetta against the world's squirrels after one mugged me in Manhattan. It tried to steal my chocolate milkshake [yes, really].

And now the circle of life [or pop] is complete.

Meep

Meep is a member of the Irish Catholic mafia, having a suspiciously high number of green-eyed, red-haired friends. While she doesn’t have red hair herself [except when she goes into the sun (rare for any vampire)], she does have green eyes. She’s a raving Papist and is a life actuary on the side [i.e., she counts dead people]. An amateur pain-in-the-ass [willing to go pro!], she likes covering retirement, mortality, math, and education issues.

Shock: Mayor Quimby Endorses Scott Brown

Story here.

Here's someone who REALLY dislikes Coakley.

Carville poll says only 35% of American voters warm to Congressional health care proposals.

Still, do what comes naturally: Blame Bush.

Has Teddy Kennedy's legacy killed ObamaCare?

Jim Treacher shares his inside intelligence on this Coakley person.

Dan Collins

Dan Collins is a dude who blogs. He used to blog elsewhere. Now he blogs here.

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Aid Slow in Getting to Haitians

The focus on security was criticized by retired lieutenant general Russell Honore, who led the military relief effort on the Gulf Coast after Hurricanes Katrina and Rita. Honore said the U.S. response has been too slow in part because the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) has taken the lead, rather than the military. He said U.S. forces aren't bound by as many rules and could have set up landing strips to deliver aid quickly.

"I say when you have people dying, getting food and water on the ground should end any talk of security," he said.

Many Haitians desperate to leave the capital. Three Haitian children rescued from ruins.

Call careers information, have you got yourself an occupation?

More US troops on the way.

Rubicon Rescue, including Fireman Jeff Lang of Milwaukee, distribute aid, characterize the situation on the ground.

Dan Collins

Dan Collins is a dude who blogs. He used to blog elsewhere. Now he blogs here.

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Marcia, Marcia, Marcia

Patrick Kennedy channels The Brady Bunch:

As I've mentioned, Patrick also appealed to voters to hold on to "my father's seat" after Teddy's widow repeated the Scott Brown formula that it is "the People's Seat," in a TV ad for Coakley. Meanwhile, it appears that Coakley may have evaded the Inevitable Triumph. David Schuster has more "Ted Kennedy's seat" BS. Sorry, David, they haven't lost their minds; they're signalling Americans' beginning a long march to take back their institutions.

Power Line looks at how the poll numbers shake out.

As for the Frumious Bantersnatch . . . shun it.

BTW, you're not smart enough to understand health care:

Bob Kerrey's claim that Scott Brown doesn't believe in evolution goes down the memory hole--but only at the original source.

Shock at MSNBC.

Dan Collins

Dan Collins is a dude who blogs. He used to blog elsewhere. Now he blogs here.

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Science in America

Most of these observations hold true worldwide, but I confine my sphere of concern to the US, because that's what I know best. Consider this a kind of follow-up to my posts on Cass Sunstein.

The conviction was widely held during the last Bush administration that science had been co-opted to the purposes of industry. That is, the Bush administration was accused of being narrowly focused on the immediate applications, especially industrial, of scientific research. There's some truth to this. I mentioned before the last election campaign that I would be willing to embrace any candidate who indicated a serious commitment to a manned expedition to Mars, because the human mind needs scope for dreaming, and because the heuristic often has a value beyond what is available to the moment's identifiable horizon.

We might say that the Bush view of science embraced the empirical. And to those who view science as one among a myriad of dialectics, and who feel that, for example, a Marxian dialectic is "material," or that a feminist dialectic is "material," to the same degree and in the same way the scientific one is, it's natural enough to consider that an ideological position. That doesn't make it true, but as I've noted many times and in many ways, the symbological is more real to the progressive mind than mere facts; so much so that mere facts can seem insignificant in comparison. Lest I seem unsympathetic to symbology, I do believe that Plato's Socrates identified and laid out in their most elementary terms virtually all of the 'why questions' of philosophy, and that is a monumental achievement. 'How' was another question.

On the other hand, we see what's happened to world science under the pressure of ideology in the myriad revelations concerning Anthropogenic Global Warmism, which has, as many have noted, all of the features of religion. In this respect, you would think that the progressive might consider it retrogressive, but he does not. And the divergence between the empirically and symbologically driven perspectives is nothing new; you could say that it is fundamentally the difference between Aristotelianism and Platonism.

Prior to the fall of Constantinople, the Orthodox and Roman Churches attempted to come to some sort of unification, under the pressure of Islamic expansion. Italy was then in the early stages of the Renaissance (later so denominated, to the frustration of Medieval scholars), which, at the time, meant "humanism." The principal idea was that of renovatio imperii, the renewal of empire. Surrounded as they were by remnants of Roman greatness in art, architecture, and public works, the idea was to resurrect as much of classical knowledge as possible in order to recapitulate the intellectual basis for these remarkable achievements. Roman scholarship, in turn, rested largely on their adoption of the knowledge base of the Greeks. So, when the Tridentine and other Councils were in session, European (and especially Italian) scholars were eager to share their discoveries with their Oriental compeers--and this reliance proved to cause them much discomfiture.

As I've mentioned, much of Roman culture was based on borrowing from the Greeks. This was especially true of encyclopedists such as Pliny the Elder, who naturally ransacked what they could from what was extant. Because the Greek tradition was much more immediate and tangible to the Hellenists, they emphasized this, and indeed claimed that there were many mistranslations in the sources that the Humanists had revered as the basis of their reconstructive program. The upshot (especially after the exodus to Europe of many Hellenist scholars after the collapse of Constantinople in 1453) is that the Humanists determined that in order to validate their sources, they needed to do first-hand observation and experiment. Italian nobles began to collect botanical and zoological specimens from the Mediterranean basin. They began to practice dissection and anatomy. They improved on the optics that they had inherited via Islamic sources, and--well, no, they didn't invent the telescope, but the Venetians paid a pretty penny for exclusive rights to the technology, though it leaked out within 15 years. Philosophically, you could say that this initial impetus toward first-hand discovery was a reaction against nominalism.

The Middle Ages were a period of empiricism. That is to say, the formulae, for example, for the construction of a Gothic Cathedral were a kind of geometric cabalism that lives to this day in Masonic tradition. It works, heuristically, in a Pythagorean space, unless it's pushed beyond what it can accommodate, as happened in Beauvais, which became a latter-day analogue of the Tower of Babylon. The Middle Ages also saw the advent of many types of water- and wind-driven machinery that even the Romans had never constructed; indeed, Dante's Satan is a mechanistic medieval version of a kind of putt-putt golf demon, based on the design of a windmill.

The greatest period of pure experimentalism in human history was conducted by sophisticated amateurs such as Robert Boyle. These people were driven by a pure desire to know, and their experiments---designed ingeniously to limit as much as possible the number of variables and lodged firmly in mechanical space rather than in computational models---have provided us with the bedrock insights upon which all of our sciences now stand. Indeed, the limitation of variables provided by island microcosms, along with some fortuitous readings, provided Darwin with the information that he needed to formulate the fundamental ideas of evolution.

Unfortunately, the sophisticated amateur no longer has a place. Between the hard-core empiricist on the one hand, and the hard-core symbolist on the other, that place of science for science's sake has become vanishingly small.

Dan Collins

Dan Collins is a dude who blogs. He used to blog elsewhere. Now he blogs here.

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Geek link dump

I gotta lot of reading up on reinsurance for my new job [reinsurance = insurance for insurance companies, btw], so let me dump a bunch of links without much commentary:

Gentlemen, we have a Geek Gap!

[This may or may not be related to our over-supply of dumbass school admins who call in the bomb squad over a kid's science project. There may be a also be a connection with David Thompson's post that Dan linked to earlier. I loved the affirmative action bumper on DARPA's whining re: lack of cheap IT people who can get security clearances. [btw, I applied for a job at NSA once, but bowed out to take a different job... after they had gone 4 months into the security clearance procedures. So the FBI has my prints. Yay]]

Related: the difficulty of hiring top tier engineers. [note: my dad was an electrical engineer who worked for IBM, but he wasn't top tier... I remember him having to wear standard suit and tie back in the eighties. My current friends and family working for IBM -- much, much different situation]

Yum, yum, Petri dish pork. Two quick thoughts: 1. my fave MRE was the Jamaican jerk pork, which was removed several years back, I think because of the high salt content. Man, I wish they'd bring it back. 2. I've got some vegan friends [i.e., do not eat/use animal products on ethical grounds] - I should ask if this is a game-changer for them. I fully expect a semester-long seminar at Harvard next year touching upon the ethics of stem cell-grown meat [using human embryonic stem cells being an ethical concern? Pshaw. Pig cells, though? Exploitation!] Here's Zombie's take. My take: I grew up on Chef Boyardee and "orange drink". This would be more natural food than I ate as a kid.

IPCC: Ooops, maybe those glaciers are gonna be around a wee bit longer. Hey, math is hard.

Speaking of hard math, the psychology of gambling. While I've often heard people referring to lotteries and gambling in general as a tax on the innumerate, I know an awful lot of numerate people who gamble [I know =lots= of actuaries who love to go to Vegas and play online poker.] But it's true, they tend to stick to the games where some skill can mean a sharp player has an edge. I used to play poker with math and comp. sci. grad students - those were fun, hilarious games. Playing against the med school guys, though.... ugh. And when I got into a game filled with art majors, holy crap, that sucked. I cleaned them out and wasn't invited back... and I'm a shitty poker player [never won with the math/CS crowd.]

Meep

Meep is a member of the Irish Catholic mafia, having a suspiciously high number of green-eyed, red-haired friends. While she doesn’t have red hair herself [except when she goes into the sun (rare for any vampire)], she does have green eyes. She’s a raving Papist and is a life actuary on the side [i.e., she counts dead people]. An amateur pain-in-the-ass [willing to go pro!], she likes covering retirement, mortality, math, and education issues.