Make it harder to cross the street

It turns out some of the key FCC people working to determine the future of net neutrality used to work at Comcast. The same path is also traveled in reverse quite frequently.

But overall, the FCC is one of many agencies that have fallen victim to regulatory capture. Beyond campaign contributions and other more visible aspects of the influence trade in Washington, moneyed special interest groups control the regulatory process by placing their representatives into public office, while dangling lucrative salaries to those in office who are considering retirement. The incentives, with pay often rising to seven and eight figure salaries on K Street, are enough to give large corporations effective control over the rule-making process.

...

The revolving door, however, provides a clear and semi-legal way for businesses to directly give unlimited cash and gifts to officials who act in their favor. One of the most famous examples of this dynamic is the case of Meredith Attwell Baker, an FCC Commissioner who left her job right after voting in favor of the Comcast merger with NBC. Her next career move? She became a high-level lobbyist for Comcast, the company she had just blessed. Earlier this week, she announced her next gig, as president of CTIA, the primary wireless industry trade group. She’ll have her work cut out for her in lobbying her former colleagues. CTIA has already warned the FCC from taking up any new net neutrality regulations.
 

In a democracy, if you don't want the money of corporations completely taking over policy-making, you can't allow people leaving office to immediately cross the street to a corner office on K-Street with a huge salary, and you also shouldn't allow those public officials to go work for a company in an industry they were regulating before. It's much too simple a way to essentially offer a deferred bribe.

Unbelievable but true facts

A trillion is a gigantic number. Really, really gigantic, but most people can't truly understand the difference between a million, a billion, and a trillion because those numbers are almost unfathomable.
So instead of using money to describe numbers, I'm going to use time. I fudged some dates or numbers to use major events; forgive me.
1 (one) second ago, you started reading this sentence.
10 (ten) seconds ago, you were about halfway through my first paragraph.
100 (one hundred) seconds ago, you were reading someone else's comment (depending on how this is ranked).
1000 (one thousand) seconds ago, if you started browsing reddit, you're probably finishing around now. My source is very old, but it's the most recent that I could find.
10,000 (ten thousand) seconds ago, if you started watching The Dark Knight or The Dark Knight Rises, you'd be ending around now.
100,000 (one hundred thousand) seconds ago, you were browsing yesterday's reddit.
1,000,000 (one million) seconds ago, if you felt sick from a bad case of the flu, you'd be feeling better around now.
10,000,000 (ten million) seconds ago, if you got pregnant, you'd start showing around now.
100,000,000 (one hundred million) seconds ago, Deepwater Horizon just stopped leaking.
1,000,000,000 (one billion) seconds ago, President Reagan was one year into his first term.
10,000,000,000 (ten billion) seconds ago, the Salem Witch Trials were happening.
100,000,000,000 (one hundred billion) seconds ago, the Trojan War just ended and Helen of Troy is about to commit suicide.
1,000,000,000,000 (one trillion) seconds ago, the oldest known cave paintings were being painted.
10,000,000,000,000 (ten trillion) seconds ago, Neanderthals had just started wandering the Earth (although some estimates say they were around before then).
100,000,000,000,000 (one hundred trillion) seconds ago, Africa collided with Europe to form the Mediterranean Sea.
1,000,000,000,000,000 (one quadrillion) seconds ago, South America detached from Antarctica and the Alps started to rise.
 

More of these in this Reddit thread. Another classic:

The number of ways to shuffle a deck of cards is 80,658,175,170,943,878,571,660,636,856,403,766,975,289,505,440,883,277,824,000,000,000,000.
 

To wit, “There are more ways to shuffle a deck of cards then there are atoms in our solar system.” Or, for a more impressive party conversation trick, have someone shuffle a deck of cards and then note that the arrangement of cards they just produced has likely never been seen in the history of the universe.

Narrative framing in restaurant reviews

Researchers analyzed over 900,000 online restaurant reviews to understand how people structured positive and negative reviews from a narrative perspective.

Negative reviews, especially in expensive restaurants, were more likely to use features previously associated with narratives of trauma: negative emotional vocabulary, a focus on the past actions of third person actors such as waiters, and increased use of references to “we” and “us”, suggesting that negative reviews function as a means of coping with service–related trauma. Positive reviews also employed framings contextualized by expense: inexpensive restaurant reviews use the language of addiction to frame the reviewer as craving fatty or starchy foods. Positive reviews of expensive restaurants were long narratives using long words emphasizing the reviewer’s linguistic capital and also focusing on sensory pleasure. Our results demonstrate that portraying the self, whether as well–educated, as a victim, or even as addicted to chocolate, is a key function of reviews and suggests the important role of online reviews in exploring social psychological variables.
 

Anyone who's spent some time reading restaurant reviews on Yelp will feel a pang of recognition. Perhaps taking a restaurant to task after a poor service experience is a cathartic way of dealing with the trauma, explaining why someone might take the time to write yet another review when a restaurant on Yelp already has hundreds or thousands of reviews.

In summary, one–star reviews were overwhelmingly focused on narrating experiences of trauma rather than discussing food, both portraying the author as a victim and using first person plural to express solace in community.
 

The narrative style of the hyperbolic negative restaurant review, with its first person framing, has made them well-suited to serving as dramatic monologues.

On positive reviews of inexpensive restaurants:

Whether there is in fact a biochemical link between junk food cravings and drug addiction is an open question in the literature [4]. Nonetheless, our results suggest that the folk model of this belief is productive and widespread in consumer reviews. Hormes and Rozin (2010) found that participants rated the words “craving” and “addiction” in various languages as being most appropriately applied to drugs, alcohol, or food. Our study extends these results to show that the metaphor of food as an addiction or craving tends to apply to a particular subset of foods. The foods that are “craved” are foods that are in some way non–normative: they are meaty, sugary, starchy foods, generally fast food and street food, or small snack–like inexpensive ethnic foods. Craved foods aren’t vegetables, or main courses like meatloaf or fish or even side dishes like mashed potatoes. The folk model of what we crave or are addicted to encompasses foods that are somehow considered inappropriate for a meal, bad for you (unhealthily full of fats and sugars), inexpensive, comfort food that we feel guilty for having but eat anyhow.

The result that women are more likely to use this metaphor in our data is also consistent with previous results. Rozin, et al. (1991) found that females are significantly more likely to express cravings for chocolate than males. Zellner, et al. (1999), Weingarten and Elston (1990), and Osman and Sobal (2006) found that female undergraduates were more likely than males to report food cravings. Our results do not distinguish among the possible causes of the greater number of these expressions by female reviewers: women might be more likely than men to have these cravings or feelings, women might be more comfortable than men to admitting to these cravings, or women might simply be more likely than men to use this particular linguistic metaphor to describe their otherwise identical desires.
 

This makes intuitive sense. Most people are more likely to eat more affordable food repeatedly and thus describe them as an addictive substance. I wonder if the prevalent discussion of the health risks of of meaty, starchy foods contributes to the language of addiction when describing them; guilt and addiction are so entwined.

Positive reviews of expensive restaurants use a different narrative framing.

We first examined review features linked with educational capital. Education is strongly associated with differences in socioeconomic status, and in fact is one of the main ways that class status is defined in social scientific studies, along with work and income. Previous work on food advertising found that advertising of more expensive products employs longer, more complex words and longer sentences (Freedman and Jurafsky, 2011), presumably because complex words or sentences signal the writers’ higher educational capital, and hence project higher social status. We therefore tested whether this use of more complex language to project “linguistic capital” was similarly associated with price in reviews, predicting that reviews more expensive restaurants would be longer and use longer words.

The second feature we investigate frames food as a sensual or even sexual pleasure. This tendency is widespread in expensive wine reviews, which make extensive use of phrases like sexy, sensual, seductive, voluptuously textured, ravishing, and hedonistic (Lehrer, 2009; McCoy, 2005; Shesgreen, 2003). Television food commercials in the United States also emphasize “sensual hedonism” with words like luscious, indulgent, irresistible, and decadent (Strauss, 2005). We therefore expected reviews of expensive restaurants to use words related to sex or sensuality.
 

The data confirmed their hypotheses.

I wonder how much of this narrative framing results from some level of confirmation bias. If you spend so much on a restaurant meal, you're going to feel great pressure to justify your decision, and describing the meal with more more complex words and longer sentences might be one way to justify your expense as having led to a more sophisticated, sensual experience.

The case against the American Revolution

In middle school, we were assigned a pro-con debate about the American Revolution; I happened to be on the pro side, but as I read through the arguments, I became increasingly disturbed and eventually decided that the pro-Revolution arguments were weak or fallacious.

The Revolution was a bloodbath with ~100,000 casualties or fatalities followed by 62,000 Loyalist refugees fleeing the country for fear of retaliation and their expropriation; this is a butcher’s bill that did not seem justified in the least by anything in Britain or America’s subsequent history (what, were the British going to randomly massacre Americans for fun?), even now with a population of >300 million, and much less back when the population was 1/100th the size. Independence was granted to similar English colonies at the smaller price of “waiting a while”: Canada was essentially autonomous by 1867 (less than a century later) and Australia was first settled in 1788 with autonomous colonies not long behind and the current Commonwealth formed by 1901. (Nor did Canada or Australia suffer worse at England’s hands during the waiting period than, say, America in that time suffered at its own hands.) In the long run, independence may have been good for the USA, but this would be due to sheer accident: the British were holding the frontier at the Appalachians (see Royal Proclamation of 1763), and Napoleon likely would not have been willing engage in the Louisiana Purchase with English colonies inasmuch as he was at war with England. (Assuming we see this as a good thing: Bryan Caplan describes that as removing “the last real check on American aggression against the Indians”.)

Neither of these is a very strong argument; the British could easily have revoked the Proclamation in face of the colonial resistance (and in practice did), and Napoleon could not hold onto New France for very long against the British fleets. The argument from ‘freedom’ is a buzzword or unsupported by the facts - Canada and Australia are hardly hellhole bastions of totalitarianism, and are ranked by Freedom House as being as free as the USA. (Steve Sailer asks “Yet how much real difference did the very different political paths of America and Canada make in the long run?”)

And there are important arguments for the opposite, that America would have been better off under British rule - Britain ended slavery very early on and likely would have ended slavery in the colonies as well. (Some have argued that with continued control of the southern colonies, Britain would have not been able to do this; but the usual arguments for the Revolution center on the tyranny of Britain - so was the dog wagging the tail or the tail the dog?) The South crucially depended on England’s tacit support (seeing the South as a counterweight to the dangerous North?), so the American Civil War would either never have started or have been suppressed very quickly. The Civil War would also have lacked its intellectual justification of states’ rights if the states had remained Crown colonies. The Civil War was so bloody and destructive that avoiding it is worth a great deal indeed. And then there comes WWI and WWII. It is not hard to see how America remaining a colony would have been better for both Europe and America.
 

One of many things this guy has changed his mind about.

Death, but not by thin air

For many years, the most lucrative commercial guiding operation on Mt. Everest has been a company called Himalayan Experience, or Himex, which is owned by a New Zealand mountaineer named Russell Brice. In the spring of 2012, more than a month into the climbing season, he became increasingly worried about a bulge of glacial ice three hundred yards wide that was frozen tenuously to Everest’s West Shoulder, hanging like a massive sword of Damocles directly over the main route up the Nepal side of the mountain. Brice’s clients (“members,” in the parlance of Himalayan mountaineering), Western guides, and Sherpas repeatedly had to climb beneath the threatening ice bulge as they moved up and down the mountain to acclimatize and establish a series of higher camps necessary for their summit assault. One day, Brice timed how long it took his head guide, Adrian Ballinger (“who is incredibly fast,” he wrote in the blog post excerpted below), to climb through the most hazardous terrain:

It took him 22 min from the beginning to the end of the danger zone. For the Sherpas carrying a heavy load it took 30 min and most of our members took between 45 min and one hour to walk underneath this dangerous cliff. In my opinion, this is far too long to be exposed to such a danger and when I see around 50 people moving underneath the cliff at one time, it scares me.

Adding to Brice’s concern, some of his most experienced Sherpas, ordinarily exceedingly stoical men, approached him to say that the conditions on the mountain made them fear for their lives. One of them actually broke down in tears as he confessed this. So on May 7, 2012, Brice made an announcement that shocked most of the thousand people camped at the base of Everest: he was pulling all his guides, members, and Sherpas off the mountain, packing up their tents and equipment, and heading home. He was widely criticized for this decision in 2012, and not just by clients who were forced to abandon their dreams of climbing the world’s highest mountain without receiving a refund for the forty-three thousand euros they had paid him in advance. Many of the other expedition leaders also thought Brice was wildly overreacting. The reputation of Himex took a major hit.

After what happened last Friday, though, it’s hard to argue with Brice’s call.
 

Jon Krakauer on the last week's climbing accident on Mt. Everest, the worst in its history.

I did not realize just how much the dangers of climbing Everest have shifted since Krakauer wrote the riveting Into Thin Air. The danger of the thin air has been lessened for Western climbers.

Western climbers now use bottled oxygen much more liberally than they did in the past; many Western climbers now prophylactically dose themselves with dexamethasone, a powerful steroid, when they ascend above twenty-two thousand feet, which has proven to be an effective strategy for minimizing the risk of contracting high-altitude cerebral edema (HACE) and high-altitude pulmonary edema (HAPE), potentially fatal ailments that are common on Everest...
 

It wasn't thin air that caused last week's tragedy. In fact it was quite the opposite: water in its solid state, “an overhanging wedge of ice the size of a Beverly Hills mansion.”

I enjoy tests of endurance, and I don't mind long bouts of physical discomfort and pain, but I've never had any urge to combine it with the roll of the dice with Death that seems to be climbing mountains like Everest and K2.