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It’s Gotta Be the Shorts: When Michael Jordan hit the NBA, he wanted to keep wearing his North Carolina shorts, for luck.  To do this, he wore them under his NBA shorts, which forced him to wear longer, baggier shorts.

Michael Jordan’s UNC short shorts wouldn’t fit under his Chicago Bulls short shorts, so he had to wear baggy, knee-length Bulls shorts instead, as seen here. In doing so, he broke the mold set forth by players before him. […] But soon, these extra long shorts became the favored style.  By 2003, almost every single NBA player had jettisoned the short shorts for the longer variety.

This is a great PBS Frontline from 1994 about the De Beers diamond cartel, and how that company has manipulated the availability of diamonds to create a false scarcity and keep prices high.  It tells the story of a pretty wretched state of affairs.  De Beers essentially defines the phrase “evil corporation.”

The thing is this: diamonds are not inherently scarce, and therefore not inherently valuable. This is a grand charade perpetuated quite effectively by De Beers.  To be clear: the value of diamonds is purely a result of market manipulation, nothing more.

The key is the phrase towards the end:

After a century of maneuvers to control the supply and price of diamonds, the cartel’s greatest accomplishment may be that it has transformed the illusion that diamonds are valuable into a hard reality, and the future of the diamond empire may now rest with the complicity of millions of consumers all invested in the myth that diamonds will be valuable forever.

Between the Lines: Interesting article about the dynamics of designing parking in Los Angeles.  Thoughout the article weaves the fact that L.A. is a city built around parking lots – that type of land usage is the single biggest thing that defines the city.

Our downtown contains more parking spaces per acre than any other city in the world and has been adding them at a rate of about 1,000 a year for a century. If you grew up here, the earliest and most essential phrase drilled into you by adults—“Remember, we’re in blue Mickey”—was uttered in a parking lot bigger than Disneyland itself. Angelenos can immediately recognize outsiders, lost souls seen wandering through parking garages with no memory of where the Corolla sits

Lots of information about parking theory – how it works, how cities attempt to manage it, and how it has defined Los Angeles over the years.

(Of course, if you’re Miami, you just build a parking ramp so gorgeous that people want to hold wedding receptions in it.)

‘I don’t like that word’: Cynthia Nixon says she is bisexual after causing outrage by saying she is ‘gay by choice’: Cynthia Nixon made some really interesting comments recently about her late-in-life lesbianism.

She’s struggling to make the point that she wasn’t gay her whole life, and then just finally admitted it.  She had two children with her college sweetheart, and lived a heterosexual life for decades.  She claims to have just made a choice later in life to….switch.

‘I say it doesn’t matter if we flew here or we swam here, it matters that we are here and we are one group and let us stop trying to make a litmus test for who is considered gay and who is not.’

Cynthia said she hasn’t always been gay and finds it ‘offensive’ that people say she has.

She continued: ‘Why can’t it be a choice? Why is that any less legitimate? It seems we’re just ceding this point to bigots who are demanding it, and I don’t think that they should define the terms of the debate.

Obviously, this has enraged a lot of people, but her point is clearly that she doesn’t want to delegitimize her previous relationships, which I can understand.

‘But I do completely feel that when I was in relationships with men, I was in love and in lust with those men.

‘And then I met Christine and I fell in love and lust with her.

[…] ‘I also feel like people think I was walking around in a cloud and didn’t realise I was gay, which I find really offensive. I find it offensive to me, but I also find it offensive to all the men I’ve been out with.’

Unpacking The Invisible Knapsack (PDF link): If you see left-wing conspiracies everywhere, then best to stay far away from this essay.  It’s a discussion about the generally unacknowledged racial privilege given to whites, written by a professor al Wellesley who has also examined the gender privileges given to me.

What she does here is explain a lot of the things that white people take for granted which people of other races cannot.  I admit that some of it was eye-opening.  Here’s a sample.

I can if I wish arrange to be in the company of people of my race most of the time. […]

I  can swear, or dress in second hand  clothes, or not  answer letters, without having people  attribute these choices to the bad morals, the poverty, or the illiteracy of my race. […]

I can speak in public to a powerful male group without putting my race on trial. […]

I can remain oblivious of the language and customs of persons of color who constitute the world’s majority without feeling in my culture any penalty for such oblivious. […]

I can take a job with an affirmative action employer without having coworkers on the job suspect that I got it because of race. […]

I can choose blemish cover or bandages in “flesh” color and have them more or less match my skin. […]

I was playing around with a New York Times interactive tool on unemployment rates once.  It let you slice-and-dice the current unemployment rate by various criteria.  I limited it to males and then removed all other races except “Caucasian.” I found that current unemployment for white males was actually really, really low – I remember it being far lower than the healthy unemployment rate for the nation during the boom times.

My first thought: “Well, at least I’m safe.”

I will admit that white males enjoy a vast number of small, unspoken privileges.  But this essay has a tone of conspiracy, like we’re actively working to keep it this way.  I also object to the use of the word “oppress” and “oppressor.”  That implies active force, in my mind.  I don’t passively “oppress” someone, and – speaking for myself – I don’t actively do it either.

So, this one is a mixed bag.  It’s absolutely eye-opening, and worth reading for that reason alone.  I hope it affects my behavior in some subconscious way to make the world a better, more welcoming place.  But, at the same time, it stands a general indictment of my race (and, through inference) my gender which I’m not prepared to accept.

If this writer is implying that I’m an active part of a racial conspiracy, she needs to provide a little more evidence of that.

Balancing the Budget, For Real: This article makes the argument that the balanced budget of the late 90s came about as the result of two budget deals – one under Bush Sr. and one under Clinton – that both raised taxes and limited spending (via PAYGO).

These results run 100 percent contrary to Republican dogma, which is that tax increases, especially on the rich, do not yield additional revenue because people will cease working and investing, and the economy will stagnate. Yet the hallmarks of the 1990 and 1993 budget deals were an increase in the top income tax rate; first to 31 percent from 28 percent, and then to 39.6 percent. Revenue clearly rose, as did the economy.

The argument that lowering taxes increases revenue is something I discussed last month.  This editorial claims proof that the reverse is true — raising taxes, when coupled with spending controls, lowers the deficit, apparently to zero and beyond.

How Doctors Die: Extremely interesting perspective at an uncomfortable subject — how much effort to save ourselves from death is worthwhile?

Years ago, Charlie, a highly respected orthopedist and a mentor of mine, found a lump in his stomach. He had a surgeon explore the area, and the diagnosis was pancreatic cancer. This surgeon was one of the best in the country. He had even invented a new procedure for this exact cancer that could triple a patient’s five-year-survival odds—from 5 percent to 15 percent—albeit with a poor quality of life. Charlie was uninterested. He went home the next day, closed his practice, and never set foot in a hospital again. He focused on spending time with family and feeling as good as possible. Several months later, he died at home. He got no chemotherapy, radiation, or surgical treatment. Medicare didn’t spend much on him.

Here’s the key:

Of course, doctors don’t want to die; they want to live. But they know enough about modern medicine to know its limits [...] Almost all medical professionals have seen what we call “futile care” being performed on people.

Urban Search and Rescue: United States FEMA Marking: Interesting information on the markings written on houses during natural disaster rescue efforts:

• A single diagonal slash indicates that a search in the building is in progress. This is used to indicate searcher locations and to avoid duplication of the search effort.
• An X inside a square means "Dangerous – Do Not Enter!"
• An X with writing around it means "Search Completed", with the time (and the date if appropriate) written above the X, the team conducting the search written to the left side of the X, the results of the search (number of victims removed, number of dead, type of search such as primary or secondary) written below the X, and any additional information noted about the structure to the right of the X.

For nonprofits, government money is appealing, but might not help the bottom line: Turns out that taking government money is inefficient for a non-profit.

For every $1,000 given through a government grant, nonprofits reduced their investment in other forms of fundraising by an average of $137. That, in turn, meant an average drop of $772 in gifts from private donors. In other words, that $1,000 check from the government netted only $410, on average, because grant recipients reduced how much they tried to raise money through other means.

What’s interesting is how efficient their fundraising is normally.  Look at those numbers again – a $137 investment in fundraising was responsible for $772 in donated dollars.  That’s an ROI of 463%.  Wow.

I just finished Ron Paul’s book Liberty Defined.  It’s a collection of essays on “50 essential issues that affect our freedom.”  There’s everything from Abortion to Zionism (yes, it’s in alphabetical order), with all sorts of other stuff in between – the CIA, torture, moral hazard, envy, unions, etc.

It was…okay.  I agree with him on some stuff, and think he’s hopelessly naïve on others.  (Also, he’s not a very good writer – a lot of it was very scattered and meandearing; I defy anyone to make heads or tails of his chapter on slavery.)  I think Paul is as libertarian as we’ve ever seen in a maintream-ish political candidate, which means he doesn’t have a snowball’s chance in hell of being elected.

However, there’s one sentence in the afterword that I though rang extremely true, and is worth quoting:

We need to become tolerant of the imperfections that come with freedom, and we need to give up the illusion that somehow putting government in charge of anything is going to improve its workings, much less bring on utopia.

I’ve come to appreciate this sentiment.  There are so many things that sound great in theory, but just never work in practice.  Freedom is a dirty business sometimes.  It’s not perfect, and never will be.  We can strive to make it equitable, but there will always be winners and losers.

This is what I found so humorous about the Occupy protests.  They started off with lofty goals, and then realized some very sad truths – a lot of people in their encampments were freeloading, theft was a problem, drug use was a problem, and their meetings were descending into chaos because no one was in charge and there was no – gasp! – hierarchical power structure.

Democracy works, and so does capitalism most of the time. They were created to solve very real problems.  I’m not saying that some people don’t get treated unfairly, and some other people don’t get to be greedy bastards at the expense of others, but that’s how freedom works.

It’s not perfect, but it’s the best we have.