Peter Krupa

Dear Anyone Who Wants to Write or Speak in English:

“Beg the question” does not – not - mean “raise the question.” It does not mean that. I’m not going to tell you want it means. If you want to know what it means, google it. Until you know what it means, don’t use it. All I’ll tell you for sure is that it does not – not – mean “raise the question.” It doesn’t ever mean that. Ever. So stop using it as if it does. OK? Just stop. Thank you.

Mikey Hicks, an 8-year-old from New Jersey, is on the terrorist watch list.

The first time he was patted down, at Newark Liberty International Airport, Mikey was 2. He cried.

“… and by recovered I mean, apparently re-dipping their balls in gold.”

The longer I’m alive, the more I think economists are the academic version of Gypsy palm readers: They charge you a lot of money to make stuff up about the future, then when it doesn’t work out, you go back to them for more advice. Watch Eugene Fama, founding father of the efficient-market hypothesis, scuttle sideways like a crab:

So what is your explanation of what happened?

What happened is we went through a big recession, people couldn’t make their mortgage payments, and, of course, the ones with the riskiest mortgages were the most likely not to be able to do it. As a consequence, we had a so-called credit crisis. It wasn’t really a credit crisis. It was an economic crisis.

But surely the start of the credit crisis predated the recession?

I don’t think so. How could it? People don’t walk away from their homes unless they can’t make the payments. That’s an indication that we are in a recession.

So you are saying the recession predated August 2007, when the subprime bond market froze up?

Yeah. It had to, to be showing up among people who had mortgages. Nobody who’s doing mortgage research—we have lots of them here—disagrees with that.

So what caused the recession if it wasn’t the financial crisis?

(Laughs) That’s where economics has always broken down. We don’t know what causes recessions. Now, I’m not a macroeconomist so I don’t feel bad about that. (Laughs again.)

Haha! But the really funny thing about the efficient-market hypothesis is that we know market prices are correct because they are set by markets. Got that? It’s the same reason the Bible is God’s word – because He said it is. In the Bible. Hilarious!

I looked into going back to school recently. I might still do it some day. In some ways it’s hard to see a financial benefit. Cost = ($30,000 annual tuition x 2) + ($40,000 in annual salary foregone x 2) = way more than the benefit I’d gain from Master’s-level government employment (Oh, didn’t you hear? Private sector job growth during the last decade was negative).

Still, I wonder if the current wailing and gnashing of teeth over the expense of undergraduate and graduate education fails to account for details. Take college. The average debt from a four-year degree is now $23,200. That’s either a little or a lot. It’s a little if you studied engineering at MIT. It’s a lot if you majored in Christian Studies at Hillsdale College.

Same with, for example, law school. People gasp about $140,000 debt incurred in the hallowed halls of the Ivy League. However, that cost is neither surprising nor excessive considering it gives one access to six-figure Biglaw salaries. If one doesn’t mind settling for a normal (probably government?) salary, it’s not too difficult for a reasonably intelligent person to get good LSAT scores, get scholarships to a decent law school, graduate with debt that’s not overwhelming, and go on to have a nice local career.

The problem is that Americans are making the same mistake with education as they recently made with real estate. We justify massive borrowing by blindly assuming that the investment will always maintain its value and pay a return. While this was perhaps true for education during the last several decades, it no longer is. Students must now make good choices to get good value.

There’s a really interesting book excerpt in the New York Times Magazine on the globalization of western-style mental illness. Most fascinating is the observation that mental illness is not constant across time and space. Different cultures have different kinds of mental illness, as do different periods of history.

If there is a manifestation of insanity peculiar to the west in the 20th-21st century, I wonder if it might be the phenomenon of public, apparently random shootings. Wikipedia has a list of all known school shootings around the world. Most took place in the west and appear to have started in the 1960s. Likewise, workplace shootings started in the 1980s in the west, which is how the expression “going postal” entered the vernacular.

I think authorities usually write these incidents off as “copycat” shootings – people imitating each other. But that just begs the question: How large a role does imitation plays in the manifestation of mental illness?

And why do the mental illnesses of so many westerners get expressed through random violence?

Every once in awhile I come across a piece that precisely puts its finger on something I’ve been circling and gesturing toward for years. Such a piece is Cory Doctorow’s on the implications of “Close Enough for Rock ‘n Roll” and the Internet:

… rock ‘n’ roll is cheap, experimental and fluid, and devotes most of its energy into the production of music. Orchestral music is expensive, formal and majestic, but tithes a large portion of its effort to coordination and overheads and maintenance.

If the Internet has a motif, it is rock ‘n’ roll’s Protestant Reformation thrashing against the orchestral One Church. Rock ‘n’ roll gets lots of wee kirks built in every hill and dale in which parishioners can find religion in their own ways; choral music erects majestic cathedrals that humble and amaze, but take three generations of laborers to build.

He goes on to apply this framework to media businesses:

This is the pattern: doing something x percent as well with less-than-x percent of the resources. A blog may be 10 percent as good at covering the local news as the old, local paper was, but it costs less than 1 percent of what that old local paper cost to put out. A home recording studio and self-promotion may get your album into 30 percent as many hands, but it does so at five percent of what it costs a record label to put out the same recording.

And that, more than anything I’ve read previously, describes the future of media: Messy, fragmented, rarely-perfect, always interesting and exhilarating and new, always taking risks. In short, we’re on the cusp of something wonderful.

Glee’s writers must have at some point mortgaged their souls to Satan. There is no other way to explain their ability to combine so many dark, cutting, truly funny jokes with the sweet earnestness of “Up With People.”

Seriously, how in the world, in this day and age, can you make a running joke about a deaf show choir (Ha! Get it? They’re deaf! And in a choir!) turn into a tearjerker of a lesson on tolerance that actually fucking works?

Thank goodness Fox has green-lighted season two. I hope that deal with Satan is still in effect.

From the New York Times:

Five years after famously dodging questions about steroids during a nationally televised Congressional hearing, Mark McGwire admitted on Monday to using them throughout his career.