• Why more people should ride mass transit (Reason Hit & Run)

He starts out well…

I have met more than three folks, in and out of the establishment media, who speak with authority about mass transportation yet somehow can never get around to using it in the heat of their daily struggles. Judging by this storiedOnion headline, I’m guessing others have met such people as well.

But how frequently, really, are we getting our fix of transit-solution bloviation from people with no practical experience of the “systems” they’re diagnosing and claiming to cure?

…and ends masterfully.

To the owner of a taxi medallion or a member of the Transport Workers Union, minibuses, gypsy cabs, rolling chairs and pedicabs are all redundant, because you’re already providing all the service a customer could legitimately need. If some abuelita is stuck in the rain for 45 minutes waiting to make one of your smart connections, well, that just shows you need more money so the system can be more efficiently planned.

If more people traveled on mass transit more frequently, this would be obvious. Transit doesn’t suck because it lacks central planning. It sucks because it’s artificially scarce.

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Not to be outdone, Radley Balko hops on the good-for-the-goose, great-for-the-gander train:

• Funny how that works (The Agitator)

Apparently running with the notion that taxpayer dollars shouldn’t go to abusers of drugs and alcohol, Rep. Dvorak’s amendment requires legislators to submit to drug tests and a random breathalyzer test. They would have to reimburse the legislative council for the costs of these tests. If the legislator refused or failed the test, he or she would be subject to discipline or an assessed penalty by his or her chamber.

And it passed!

Brilliant.  I could really warm up to the idea that people who spend public funds should be subject to random drug and breathalyzer tests, with urgency, frequency, and strictness — and, regrettably, intrusiveness — increasing in proportion to the number of zeroes under their command.  If you’re getting two hundred bucks worth of food stamps every month, we might maybe get around to you eventually, but if you’re voting on federal budgets you should expect to blow into a tube and have blood drawn every half an hour.

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Tyler Cowen points out that the “Buffett Rule” might have some unintended consequences:

• Very good sentences (Marginal Revolution)

Tax incidence is a hell of a concept.

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Up on this side of the 49th, Frances Woolley notes that entitlement reform is very much like death and taxes:

• Raising the pension age: Not if, but when (Worthwhile Canadian Initiative)

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Finally, Aretae writes about feedback loops in education:

• Feedback systems watch — education

First we have Karl Smith talking sense on debt:

• How’s the recovery doing: A look at the data (Modeled Behavior)

I know I have views on debt that are hard for people to square with, but I hope it makes sense when I say the burden of debt is related to how large you actual debt payments are as a fraction of your income.

So, if you owe 100K at 20% this is going to be more burdensome than 1000K at 1%.

This is not as true for individuals who care what happens to their estates when they die as it is to countries, but I think it’s a more sensible way to look at debt than raw outstanding totals.  Generally speaking people look at static values when they should be looking at rates of change, or we look at first derivatives when we should be looking at second derivatives.

Next, E.D. Kain busts Stephen Colbert’s bubble on Citizens United and the SuperPAC:

• Stephen Colbert’s real advantage: Free air time (The Atlantic)

Despite the Court’s decision having been made on First Amendment grounds, many liberals, upset by disproportionate corporate influence over the political process, worried that the decision would further entrench the power of corporations in American democracy.

Colbert’s satirical super PAC, however, far from effectively satirizing Citizens United, illustrates why this concern is misguided.

Prior to the 2010 decision, one industry already had the ability to dip into its bottomless war chest to influence electioneering. The big media companies, and their parent corporations like GE, have been historically excluded from campaign finance laws like McCain-Feingold. This exclusion was understandable: restricting the freedom of the press is obviously unconstitutional on free speech grounds.

But the media has enormous power over the political process. Colbert’s nightly fake news show, for instance, has done a great deal more to influence American politics than anything his super PAC has achieved. Indeed, the only reason we know about the super PAC — the only reason it exists in the first place — is thanks to Colbert’s media celebrity.

I’m not a fan of “Big <Whatever>” blame-the-oligopoly conspiracy theories, but I wouldn’t be shocked to discover that the hysteria against Citizens United was substantially encouraged by the media companies reporting on the decision and subsequent protests.  The cui bono? is just a bit too strong.

Megan McArdle calls shenanigans.  Her best guess:

I gather what Buffet is talking about is comparing her federal marginal tax rate, including both sides of the employer tax, to what must be his effective tax rate, since there is no marginal rate of 17.4%.  That comparison is beyond bizarre.

The post ends up saying far more about the complexity of the tax code than anything else.

Someone on my blogroll — I think it was Mark Sisson; oh yeah, there we go — recently claimed that “Kids don’t seem to dream about becoming astronauts”.  At the time I thought “Well, companies like Virgin Galactic are actively advertising for astronauts, and Copenhagen Suborbitals are working on open-source space travel, so meh upon thee.”

And now we find that a couple of Lego Maniacs (remember those commercials?) have sent a Lego minifig into space.

(Whoa, space.)

So yeah: Fuck you, haters.  We don’t need the government to steal billions from citizens at the point of a bayonet to make our space-travel dreams come true.

• Do STEM faculties want undergrads to study STEM fields? (Slate)

Presumably because it makes for good writing, he jumps straight to malice as his driving hypothesis:

The STEM departments received large quantities of outside money to conduct research, and they used their pool of graduate students as laboratory labor. An increase in the number of undergraduate students the STEM departments had to teach was a drain on the supply of graduate students, since graduate students would need to be diverted from lab work to teaching assistant work. In the humanities, the situation was quite different. The humanities departments don’t have lucrative outside research grants that require graduate student labor. Instead, their economic problem is a lack of demand for the labor of humanities Ph.D. students. An influx of undergraduates into the major prompted a disbursement of central university funds to employ more teaching assistants and lecturers thus helping to solve the problem of underemployed humanities Ph.D.s. Not coincidentally, the humanities faculties tended to be very eager to recruit people into majoring in their field and were eager to get nonmajors to  take at least a few elective classes. The STEM faculties, by contrast, tended to ward people off with intro classes designed to scare people away and complicated webs of pre-requisites that aimed to weed out nonmajors.

(Emphasis added.)

It’s an interesting thought experiment, although it relies a bit too much upon Yglesias’s omission of the fact that even STEM departments get a lot of funding based on undergraduate enrolment numbers — not to mention the notion that an intro Philosophy course is much the same as an intro CS course and any differences in how they’re taught can be attributed mainly to the incentives under which the profs operate.  This, of course, is not true.

Intro STEM classes aren’t designed to scare people away so much as they’re designed to impart a wide range of utterly fundamental tools in a short period of time — and, yes, to weed out students who lack facility with the basics.  This weeding-out is less a matter of elitism than it is of efficiency: If you don’t have a sufficient grasp of calculus, programming, statics, or organic chem to pass the first-year requirements you’ll only find yourself further behind in subsequent courses.

Similarly, STEM’s complicated webs of prereqs aren’t designed merely to exclude non-majors but to ensure that anyone taking the course can actually, you know, pass it with a sufficiency of effort.  If you don’t walk into my graphics course with an appropriate background in vector calculus, software engineering, data structures and algorithms, and linear algebra — I can’t teach you computer graphics, at least not at the level the department expects from me.  (I can probably get you to the point of drawing a smiley face on the screen.)  As it happens, I taught myself computer graphics starting in high school, and it took me about five years to pick up enough dribs and drabs of vector calculus and &c. to educate myself to roughly the level that a third-year undergrad course, with appropriate prereqs, should be able to achieve in four months.

For all that, Yglesias signs off with a bit of insight:

There’s a lot of sense nowadays that we, as a society, want to push more students into these fields (I’m not sure that consensus is correct but leave it for another day), but if that’s what we want to do we need to structure the financing of colleges to align with that goal.

I’m not sure that I trust someone with so manifestly incomplete a grasp of what STEM education entails to have a useful opinion on whether “that consensus is correct”, but I guess we’ll leave that for another day too.  The priorities of most STEM programmes are dominated by faculty research, and that isn’t a good thing for undergraduate education (though not necessarily for the simplistic reasons Yglesias lays out, although those probably factor in at the margins).  Changing the structure of college financing might help, although I’m skeptical that anyone knows how to do it right.

——

I’m working my way backwards through the archives at Conditioning Research.  Here’s a trio of satisfyingly heterodox articles I found linked there:

• Low cholesterol is bad….

CONCLUSION: A decline in serum total cholesterol levels may be associated with early stages in the development of dementia.

• Eating more whole grains does not make you healthier….

Although reported WG [Whole Grain] intake was significantly increased among intervention groups, and demonstrated good participant compliance, there were no significant differences in any markers of CVD risk between groups. A period of 4 months may be insufficient to change the lifelong disease trajectory associated with CVD. The lack of impact of increasing WG consumption on CVD risk markers implies that public health messages may need to be clarified to consider the source of WG and/or other diet and lifestyle factors linked to the benefits of whole-grain consumption seen in observational studies.

Somewhere in here I need to rant about the perils and pitfalls of observational studies.  In this case: If you observe a bunch of people with low incidence of CVD, and note that they tend to eat a lot of whole grains, it does not follow that whole grains are heart-protective; it only follows that whole grans are correlated with a low-CVD-risk lifestyle in your sample population.

• No problem with red meat

Consumption of processed meats, but not red meats, is associated with higher incidence of CHD and diabetes mellitus. These results highlight the need for better understanding of potential mechanisms of effects and for particular focus on processed meats for dietary and policy recommendations.

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Speaking of heterodoxy, here’s a rather provocative piece of analysis from Dr. Stephanie Seneff on the link between low-fat diets, statins, and Alzheimer’s disease:

• APOE-4: The clue to why low-fat diet and statins may cause Alzheimer’s

Note that while this is written in the style of an academic paper, as far as I can tell it is not itself peer-reviewed and published.  It is however a synthesis of plenty of peer-reviewed and published work; you should probably rate it as at least a full step more trustworthy than this blog post.  Here’s the abstract:

Alzheimer’s is a devastating disease whose incidence is clearly on the rise in America. Fortunately, a significant number of research dollars are currently being spent to try to understand what causes Alzheimer’s. ApoE-4, a particular allele of the apolipoprotein apoE, is a known risk factor. Since apoE plays a critical role in the transport of cholesterol and fats to the brain, it can be hypothesized that insufficient fat and cholesterol in the brain play a critical role in the disease process. In a remarkable recent study, it was found that Alzheimer’s patients have only 1/6 of the concentration of free fatty acids in the cerebrospinal fluid compared to individuals without Alzheimer’s. In parallel, it is becoming very clear that cholesterol is pervasive in the brain, and that it plays a critical role both in nerve transport in the synapse and in maintaining the health of the myelin sheath coating nerve fibers. An extremely high-fat (ketogenic) diet has been found to improve cognitive ability in Alzheimer’s patients. These and other observations described below lead me to conclude that both a low-fat diet and statin drug treatment increase susceptibility to Alzheimer’s.

(Nitpick: Ketogenic diets are very low-carb, not necessarily just high-fat.  Ketosis — nota bene, ketosis is not ketoacidosis — is brought on by a lack of available glycogen.)

——

Now here’s Dr. Jaminet on that NYT ”fat trap” piece:

• My theory of obesity, I: “The fat trap” (Perfect Health Diet)

Briefly:

I believe the brain defends not only (or primarily) an amount of fat mass, but also the health of the body, as reflected by the quantity and quality of lean tissue.

So it is plausible to speak in terms of set points, but there are two set points: a “fat mass set point”, and a “lean tissue quality set point.” The second is dominant: Lean tissue is essential to life, while gains in fat mass may diminish fitness in some environments but will increase fitness in others and are rarely catastrophic. So the tissue-quality set point usually dominates the fat mass set point in its influence upon the brain and behavior.

Definitely plausible, especially given some of the stuff I’ve dug up on the role of skeletal muscle in metabolism.  But Dr. Jaminet loses points for proposing a mechanism that’s difficult to access:

Lean tissue is too important for health, and can be degraded in so many different ways, that signals about its state cannot be entrusted to a fragile, low-bandwidth mechanism like a hormone. Lean tissue signaling uses the high-bandwidth communications of the nervous system. This feedback system is hard for researchers to monitor.

We know damn well that hypertrophy in lean tissues is mediated by insulin, testosterone, growth hormone, and IGF-1 (among many others).  Skeletal muscle hypertrophy — in response to exercise, for example — is accompanied by an increase in muscular insulin sensitivity, and protein intake in general tends to provoke a strong insulin response.  Claiming that lean tissue metabolism is mediated by some sort of poorly-understood and hard-to-research nervous system feedback instead of the hormone activity listed above is extraordinary, and demands extraordinary evidence beyond “Well, most researchers only seem to care about total body mass because it’s easier to track”.  As it stands, “nervous system feedback” comes across as an attempt to make the hypothesis as difficult to falsify as possible, which is the opposite of science.

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Finally, to satisfy the “training” part of the title, here’s a pair of T-Nation articles on how to get wicked strong:

• The 7-step program for getting strong (Tim Henriques)
• Mastering the snatch (Eric Auciello)

Picking a bar up off the ground and putting a bar overhead are both great ways to get strong.  When combined into a single movement, they get even better.

Trying to get excited about brand specific models of modern NASCAR stock cars is a lot like trying to get an erection from a female Lego minifig. Both acts require you to pretend that what you’re lusting over isn’t just an identically-produced plastic shell with fake headlights painted on.

Zing!

Ken spotlights a gaggle of censorious asshats at the London School of Economics:

• Your speech has been weighed in the balance and found wanting (Popehat)

All the tropes of the censorious bureaucrat are there: leaping into action to bring petty power to bear, inquisitorial demands about the reasons for speech, and a bold pronouncement that free expression must be “balanced” — the balancing to be done by petty bureaucrats — against open-ended, vague, and unprincipled anti-discrimination principles. All of this was a result of a cartoon, on an organization’s own Facebook page.

[...]

Ask any student: do you really trust student union leaders to “balance” your right to speak against whatever they feel is important on any given day? Ask any student: what sort of puerile, sanitized campus will you have if the student union defunds any group that ever says anything that anyone could find objectionable? Ask any student: do you really think, for even a moment, that the student union will weigh speech in the balance even-handedly? The London School of Economics Student Union condemns and censors a satirical cartoon on a humanist site — but do you think that those same student union members will lift a censorious finger to condemn or discourage actual threats of violence by people who claim offense at such discourse?

Shock, horror, &c.

There are two reasons for which people — I use the term loosely — enter student politics.  One is to obtain even the merest shred of contrived power and use it to fustigate others.  The other is to “acquire leadership experience” in the hopes of advancing a career in politics and/or management, in order to obtain more power with which to fustigate others.  These aims are not mutually exclusive.  Either way, the power and scope of student government is so paltry as to eliminate the possibility of that institution adding any value to campus life*, but that only motivates the student bureaucrats to exercise that power as often and as viciously as they can possibly manage.

——

* Before you claim that student unions do good by funding student groups, recognize  that the funding is taken from students by the university and only then allocated to the SU for distribution.  Arguably, those groups would be better served if the university cut out the middle man and allocated student-group funds directly — granted that university bureaucrats are a famously persnickety bunch, but in general they lack the puffed-up self-righteousness of student politicians and often have some sense of duty towards the student body.

• Making it in America (The Atlantic)

It is indeed outstanding, and difficult to excerpt.  RTWT.

Meanwhile, Jacob Sullum reports that meth cooks are responding to ever-tightening restrictions on the purchase of pseudoephedrine:

• How to make meth production more dangerous (Reason Hit & Run)

State and federal restrictions on purchases of pseudoephedrine, aimed at curtailing illicit meth production, seem to have [...] helped make the “shake and bake” method, which is simpler and uses less pseudoephedrine, the leading process for domestic production. The upshot is a lot more do-it-yourself production for personal use, using a technique that is more likely to cause injuries because it involves combining volatile chemicals in a two-liter soda bottle that you hold in your hand.

Most of what I’ll call the “consequentialist” opponents to the War On Some Drugs — people who don’t necessarily have a problem with the idea that the feds should be able to use violence to prevent you from using certain drugs, but who see the specific consequences of the Drug War as a bad tradeoff — get squeamish when we ideological zealots talk about legalizing “hard drugs” like heroin and meth.  Perhaps they’d change their minds if confronted with anecdotes like these:

Larger meth labs have been bursting into flame for years, usually in basements, backyard sheds or other private spaces. But those were fires that people could usually escape. Using the shake-and-bake method, drugmakers typically hold the flammable concoction up close, causing burns from the waist to the face.

“From what we see on the medical side, that’s the primary reason the numbers seem to be going up: greater numbers of producers making smaller batches,” said Dr. Michael Smock, director of the burn unit at Mercy Hospital St. Louis….

Nah, probably not.  Experience tells us that most people’s horrified reaction would be “That’s awful!  We need to make it even more illegaler!”  So it goes.

• Lifelong exercise and strength training in older adults (The Urban Athlete)

Today is deadlift day.  This is just one reason why.