DangerLlama

Le Tour is done.

It was a great race, and I’m OK with a Contador win, though I was rooting for Andy Schleck. I don’t think Contador is a very honorable winner. He appears to be in it for himself, with a history of controversial moves. Not any one incident is bad enough, but they add up.

I kept having nagging thoughts about doping this year, though. Not to say anyone actually was doping, per se, but that didn’t stop me from assigning probabilities. For Schleck, I’d say it’s close to 3-5% that he’s doping. For contador, I put it somewhere around  25-30%. I was influenced by the fact that he was with Astana. Probabilities for Lance are nil, but I’m not all that sad to see him go.

I’m a huge fan of Marginal Revolution. I think Tyler Cowen is probably one of the most important economists writing today (or at least will be considered so retrospectively).  Perusing his archives, I stumbled upon this post, and found particularly interesting his last comment:

5. Blogging builds up good work habits; the deadline is always “now.”

So I’m going to take his advice and start blogging more often. Not about anything in particular. Just what’s interesting. Get ready for quantity over quality, world. Hopefully the second will eventually flow from the first. Miscellaneous links:

- Cowen on how to read fast.

- Scott Sumner on Growth and Economic Policy. I like his definition of “neoliberal” and would say I tend towards that myself.

As promised a year ago, I present to you a copy of my senior paper: Microbrew Consumption in the United States – research on blue laws and how they affect microbrew consumption. It could stand to have a significant amount of improvement as the math is, to put it mildly, weak. Limited data set availability as well as a  very short period of time in which to do research made my job more difficult. My original intent was to  expand my research efforts during graduate school but this won’t happen for some time due to the imminent arrival of one young James Tiberious Mills or Luke Skywalker Mills (we just can’t come to a consensus!).

If you’re reading this paper for the sheer pleasure of it (wtf?) the takeaway should be that blue laws are not a mechanism through which we should be promoting a diversity of consumption. While artificial scarcity or supply regulation can have interesting effects on a market, they are almost always detrimental to it. Colorado, my home state, has a strong brewing culture in spite of our blue laws, not because of them.

If you’re reading this paper as a part of a research project – where in some last ditch effort for data you stumbled upon this lonely corner of the web, then I should mention that I’m happy with the model, but unhappy with the availability of data. I’m very curious to see what happens when you run a regression with, say, 10 years worth of data on price, consumption, ABC info, etc. Please let me know if you or anyone you know is running with this kind of research as it’s very near and dear to my heart…and my liver.

Apparently the “birther” movement is gaining a foothold again in this post 11/4 world. With Obama’s popularity on the wane, it’s clear that the “crazy” segment of the right wing is coming out swinging (cue “Right Wing Hatred” video #1). What’s interesting to me are the various arguments being put forth surrounding the mental stability of those arguing that Barack Obama was, in fact, born in Kenya.

Some seem to think it’s a sort of soft-racism. I’m inclined to believe it’s a more generic form of adult temper-tantrum thrown by the “losing side” of the last election. It goes something like this: Obama is the face of socialism and everything that’s wrong with leftist America, so arguments undermining the legitimacy of his claim to the Presidency must be true. Sources say his birth certificate was never produced, therefore he clearly wasn’t born in the U.S. (don’t try to follow the logic, there is none).  But perhaps the most impressive argument of all is this one (ironic text alert for the humor impaired).

I don’t know what the moral of the story is. I’m just here to point and laugh.

More links that I’ve missed posting:

The Kindle and DRM. – Not so inflamatory now that Amazon deleted all those copies of 1984 from users’ kindles. The later debacle killed my previous lust for the device.

My wife posted some commentary on the Jamie Thomas verdict. The link is a month old, but it’s always worth talking about.

Folks at work are giving me crap for wearing a suit and tie to work. No, it’s not “Job or Jail.” This time around I’m presenting my research paper, “Microbrew Consumption in the United States” to the Economics faculty at MSCD.

I’ll post the paper here for posterity after I’ve presented it. But here’s the Cliff’s Notes version: The data don’t seem to support the idea that letting grocery stores sell full strength beer will kill microbrewing in Colorado.

Wish me luck.

Seth Godin’s got a blog post about Too much free. If you’re an econ nerd, it’ll get you all worked up over diminishing marginal utility.  It’s worth also pointing to Chris Anderson on Free, one of the better Econtalk podcasts.

Other useful links (done Tyler Cowen style):

1. Alice – this has nothing to do with economics or anything even remotely rational, really. It’s just worth a watch.

2. Penelope Trunk thinks you should cuss more at work.

3. Louis C.K. thinks you should be more amazed than you are. A lesson on real productivity, and why living in the past would suck, for the three people who haven’t seen this already.

The eminent Greg Mankiw links us to a quiz drawn from recent AP macroconomics tests.

This video pretty much sums up Twitter. Sure, there are tweet-ups and twot spots and the like, but Twitter does seem to have become the new way to abstract friendship. It’s like SMS without the phone number or the privacy. Of course, I’ve become a twitter addict which makes this post all the more ironic.

Over the past few days, I’ve been thinking more and more about institutional memory as it applies to the Great Depression. Specifically, the Great Depression was two or three generations ago for most of us.  I wonder how much institutional memory (or lack thereof) plays a role in people’s positions on the current recession as well as Paulson – and now Tim Geithner’s – bailout packages.

What would people have said about all of this 40 years ago? What about 20 years ago?

My hypothesis is that we’ve lost some of that institutional memory vis a vis the Great Depression. There is more “let the banks fail” talk going on than I think we whould have seen in years past.  I don’t think we’re headed for another depression, not by a long shot, but I also don’t think doing nothing is a viable strategy.

If you’ve noticed more police handing out speeding tickets lately, you’re not alone. STLToday (via TalkLeft) makes mention of a recent study that shows police forces often make up for city revenue shortfalls by increasing the number of traffic tickets they give out.

It might be time to ease up in the gas pedal (not that any of us speed, mind you).