Byung Kyu Park's Personal Website

A report from a nobody claims (via Now! Hampshire)

Franklin was chosen for the report because it has the longest history in the state with a spending cap, said Gottlob, who is the principal of PolEcon Research of Dover and who considers himself a fiscal conservative. The report and its conclusion were meant to be non-political, although he acknowledged that the subject matter is inherently political.

“The expenditure cap in place in Franklin for nearly two decades has clearly resulted in lower levels of local government expenditures than comparable communities in New Hampshire,” the report began, adding that “the lower level of property tax-supported spending in Franklin is largely the result of lower spending on education, in part, because Franklin receives more state education aid per pupil than almost any other city in New Hampshire except Berlin.

How is the quality of education measured in the dollar amount of education spending? If I take a stack of $100 bills and set them on fire, in the name of education, and I make sure that it is entered as education spending in the accounting books, have I benefited the education system, or have I just burned money (and broken federal laws about not burning money)?

The excerpts from this utterly incomprehensible report continues with similar nonsense, such as that tax caps are “a race to the bottom”. I think I like that race to the bottom. As a resident of California, I would hope that Californian legislators would look at the outflow of their population and start offering more competitive local tax rates. I mean, it would be too late for me, but perhaps someone else will decide not to move out of California if the sales tax were, for one, no longer at the level of tithing.

I mean, are you better off with WalMart moving into your town—putting a downward pressure on price of everything—or with Starbucks moving into your town—putting upward pressure on price of coffee and increasing the supply of elitist assholes? How could it be worse for people to keep more of their own money? Are you hurt by the fact that you weren’t robbed at gunpoint today?

For what it’s worth, the residents of city of Franklin also do not comprehend this report:

The people of Franklin, said Merrifield, “are the best judge of the impact of the tax cap and they have lived with this the longest and I think that everybody in our community would say that we’re better off than before we adopted the tax cap.”

He said Franklin voters “have had numerous opportunities to remove the tax cap or alter it to allow for greater spending and the voters have routinely sided with the strictest interpretation. If we were to hold a referendum on this measure today, I would be very surprised to see it overturned.”

Remember this when some other sophist or tax-supported academic tries to tell you that more tax is good: the greatest accomplishments in this country, such as the invention of light bulb and the invention of automobile, happened at a time when there was zero (peacetime) federal income tax and very low local taxes. If we could do that with so little taxes, then less tax cannot possibly be so bad.

Apparently the trial at Princeton isn’t working out too well (via Slashdot)

“I hate to sound like a Luddite, but this technology is a poor excuse of an academic tool,” said Aaron Horvath ’10, a student in Civil Society and Public Policy. “It’s clunky, slow and a real pain to operate.”

Horvath said that using the Kindle has required completely changing the way he completes his coursework.

“Much of my learning comes from a physical interaction with the text: bookmarks, highlights, page-tearing, sticky notes and other marks representing the importance of certain passages — not to mention margin notes, where most of my paper ideas come from and interaction with the material occurs,” he explained. “All these things have been lost, and if not lost they’re too slow to keep up with my thinking, and the ‘features’ have been rendered useless.”

Um, I hate to sound like a jerk, but he does sound like a luddite. He can do all of those things with Kindle, with the exception of, perhaps, ripping out pages.

I admit Kindle is horrible for scientific reading. Too little scientific texts are available in Kindle format, and conversion from PDF to Kindle format (or rather, the popular Mobipocket format, which is what essentially .azw files are) doesn’t work well for mathematical equations.

But, for reading materials consisting mostly of English-language (Kindle has issues with some Unicode fonts as well) text, meant to be read from start to finish without too much jumping around, Kindle works fine. In fact, it works better than physical books, because you can annotate without the fear of having to erase the marks later or running out of margin space. If the guy couldn’t figure out how to do this, frankly, does he really belong in a university?

In fact, this trial may be dominated by a single person who, for one reason or another, seems to be biased against Kindle: Prof. Katz. All the students who complain are from his class, and he is the only professor quoted as critical of the device. And his criticism? All of his own making, i.e. Kindle won’t be available next year so I don’t want to annotate with it (or transfer his old annotations; that shouldn’t be a problem for his student now, should it), or Kindle book isn’t an “analog book”, so it doesn’t use the same pagination.

I’ll gloss over the fact that books are actually more “digital” than “analog”—if it were analog, you would have what’s called “signal degradation”, you don’t have that with written texts—and as for the pagination problem, you have the exact same problem using two different versions of the same text (perhaps different editions by different publishers). It’s hardly a problem unique to Kindle, and besides, classic texts should have their own chapter and line number system which should keep them independent of arbitrary pagination, as far as citations go.

To be completely frank, I don’t see the point of universities subsidizing Kindle devices (Amazon donating them to the founder’s alma mater is a different matter, of course), no more than I see the point of universities subsidizing the students’ laptops. I do think anyone considering getting an ebook reader, i.e. Kindle or any of its competitors, should consider whether the rather hefty price ($200+, more than what you would pay for a basic netbook) is really worth it.

For me, it wasn’t really just the size of the device or its screen that made me buy Kindle (although I did love them after seeing them). It was the free wireless and Wikipedia access. But somehow, in an academic class setting, unless some course really heavily relies on accessing Wikipedia out in the field without wifi or wired Internet access, I don’t see the advantage of Kindle over, say, a good, cheap netbook—unless, of course, the person buying Kindle considers its e-ink screen worth the lack of some functionalities.

Apparently divorces and spousal infidelity is too expensive to continue in this economic climate.

On second thought, I’m not sure if this is actually a good thing. Divorces are like market corrections. If it needs to happen, then the more quickly it happens (and is over), the better. The Great Depression wasn’t great because of the magnitude of the market correction, but because of its length, and the current recession is bigger for the fact that the necessary market correction, which would’ve burst the housing bubble, was delayed and delayed until the Fed couldn’t hold it back any more.

Schwimmer makes a convincing case that GOP needs to go nuclear.

Incidentally, he links to this UC Berkeley page where helpful instructions for building a nuclear bomb is laid out, step by step with complete list of vendors and reliable contractors who can do the job.

Oh, wouldn’t it be ironic that UC Berkeley is helping GOP go nuclear?

Apparently 1000 faculty signed a petition saying, “that workers earning under $40,000 a year be exempted from mandatory furloughs and pay cuts that began this month for most of the system’s staff and faculty.”

Well, that sounds like a good idea. And in fact, we can make that program, demand, plan, or whatever you call it, pay for itself, by increasing the furloughs for these 1000 faculty! After all, the faculty should take their fair share of the cut, and as a more highly-paid individual, they should share a larger percentage (percentage of their usual earnings) of the burden!

If you don’t see the absurdity of this proposal (or the even more absurd proposal that the university increase spending in any area without corresponding cuts elsewhere, especially when there is no profit margin to serve as a buffer), then we are not going to see eye to eye. If you don’t see the hypocrisy of faculty protesting these cuts without making personal contributions (hey, how about some donation to the university?) to make the cuts unnecessary, I am not sure if I want to talk to you even. This is the same hypocrisy you see in some white proponents of affirmative action who would not resign from their positions of power so that a black person or another minority can take their position instead.

I frankly didn’t see the crowd firsthand. I came to work at 8 a.m., crossed the picket line as I wanted to, and did my job. The picture makes it look like a sizable crowd in the Sproul Plaza, but then, UC Berkeley does have 30,000 students and all they had to do was walk 5, 10 minutes to get to the rally location, so excuse me for doubting the enthusiasm of the crowd there.

P.S. BTW, who ever chose red the color to show support for this rally? Red? Really? Couldn’t you have chosen something else? Like blue and gold, maybe? I’m not the one to get hung up on vain symbolism, but why did they have to choose the color of communism to identify the rally with? And why did any American student choose to wear it?

Max Schulz argues that global warming is a myth because computer simulations can’t be trusted:

At this point, there was every reason to think that running other problems through these increasingly powerful machines would yield useful results. That was the thinking that led Forrester to collaborate with the Club of Rome in the early 1970s. They devised a model of planetary resources that considered a variety of interconnected dynamic systems and global scenarios — death rates, birth rates, natural-resource depletion, population density, capital investment, crowding, pollution, etc. They fed the model into a large MIT mainframe and flipped the switch.

Forrester’s partners published the results in the 1972 bestseller Limits to Growth. They predicted a rapidly growing global population combining with rapid resource depletion to spark violent social upheaval. Limits to Growth suggested that disasters and die-offs were imminent, and that the survivors would live in a world of misery and scarcity.

Well, in fairness to climatologists (unlike Scientologists, I think they deserve some respect), their models are not completely wrong—and they are not trying to model something as complex as a human, only the amount of CO₂ generated by one and the effect of the released “toxin”.

In fact, Prof. Muller says that he trusts the latest computer models—at least as much as he trusts the back-of-the-envelope calculation performed about 100 years ago, which happens to agree with the latest computer models. (Colloquium webcast. It’s a good talk; abstract here.)

Of course, if the current calculation is only as accurate as what they could do without computers 100 years ago, then it goes without saying that we haven’t made much improvements in that area, i.e. the calculation is not complete garbage, but it ain’t gospel either.

In case you don’t want to listen through Prof. Muller’s talk at the colloquium two weeks ago, here’s the scientific consensus on global warming: (1) warming is real, there is overall rise in global temperature, at least up until 2000 or so; (2) the hypothesis that natural causes (solar activity, etc. anything but CO₂ levels) alone are responsible for the warming is excluded within 90% confidence level, i.e. outside that 10% chance, human activities probably contributed to, although is not solely responsible for, global warming seen in the 20th century.

Aside from these, I don’t know any other broad, data-backed scientific consensus on climate change. Anything more dire you hear is probably either a politician or a scientist (or both) trying to scare you into action.

PJTV has a “generational theft calculator” that calculates how much your share of the burden will be for a government program, since the politicians don’t do a good job of telling you how much you will personally be paying—what comes out (as hand-out) must get taxed, right?

Somewhat weak-kneed response from the Academic Senate says:

The Berkeley Senate Divisional Council shares the deep concern of all faculty, students, and staff about the terrible effects of the budget cuts imposed on the public teaching and research mission of the University. However, after discussion, the Divisional Council also recognizes the diversity of faculty opinion on the merits of a walkout. We therefore neither endorse nor oppose a walkout, regarding participation in it as a matter of individual faculty conscience, and knowing that faculty will meet their obligations to their students. We know that the campus administration sees matters in the same light.

Diversity of faculty opinion? Sure, diversity is all good, but the fact is, classes are not being held when and where they were originally scheduled!

Where is the list of faculty supporting this walkout? I would like to make sure that their “diversity of opinion” does not hurt my learning environment and avoid their classes if possible. Surely if you are brave enough to have an opinion (and voice them), you are brave enough for the consequences?

UC President Mark Yudof addresses criticisms, explains the situation:

I actually think the students ought to be angry about the fee increase proposal. I mean, I don’t see why they shouldn’t be. They are going up by tens and tens of percents. I’m angry about it too. I liked the old system. The closer it was to being free the happier I was. But that’s not the world I live in. And that’s not the world the Board of Regents lives in. And you could have 18 or 26 new board members and a new president and 10 new chancellors. But unless President Obama gives them a printing press, they are going to have much the same sort of decisions. Maybe some nuanced differences, but there aren’t many choices.

No one is happy about the fee increases (perhaps the one thing students, especially those from middle class who actually pay tuition, unlike graduate students or students from families earning under $60,000, might really be angry about). Everyone has done everything, except for relying on “faith-based budgeting”, to avoid that, and now it has to be done as a measure of last resort.

I’d recommend you to listen to the whole video (or read the whole transcript, as I did). I myself am personally taking this as the true account of our situation that hasn’t been muddled and corrupted by unions and other special interests. But even if you do not have the same faith in the university administration as I do (to me, the University is mother and father; nothing I have today has come from anywhere but from the University, so I am not an impartial judge of what the University does), the least you can do, if you are fair-minded and open-minded as so many college students claim to be, is listen to both sides.

Weigh the evidences they present, not the rhetorics or publicity stunts, and decide for yourself: how will my walking out on the 24th improve the situation? Whom and whose policies are you really protesting, and do you really have any other alternative (this is Alinsky’s rule #11, by the way)?

… and as someone who would like to return to that wonderful country several more times in the future, I do hope that we remain allies.

Just 3 more years, Poland and other American allies. Can you hold out for three more years, please?