Iranian elections (random thoughts prompted by)

I don't have much of value to add to what other, better-informed people are saying about the Iranian election, but I strongly recommend keeping your eye on this continuously-updated HuffPost roundup.

I also want to record some random thoughts that occurred to me as I was sitting at the coffeeshop waiting for my laundry —

1.

While watching the protest footage, I was suddenly reminded of a moment, long ago, while I was traveling in Greece with a bunch of college classmates. Our Greek tour guide was saying something along the lines of "Ancient Greece had the first democratic government. Of course, you may wonder how the birthplace of democracy could keep slaves, but..." etc. There was no hint of irony in her utterance of this sentence. One guy in our group leaned over to me and said, in a low voice, "Does she realize she's talking to Americans? Slavery at the birthplace of democracy? Isn't that how it's done?" I surmised later that the tour guide's patter was probably designed with pan-European audiences in mind.

I don't know what exactly about the Iranian elections made me think of this, except possibly that both remind me of how thoroughly imperfect real-world democracies are, and how many different pieces have to fit together just exactly right to make this form of social organization function to modern standards.

2.

I usually find Huffington Post annoying, but their post seems to be a better guide to what's going on than anything else I can find right now. This sort of real-time but human-curated index synthesizing links to news"paper" stories, blog posts, Twitter posts, and embeddable user-uploaded videos really does seem quite powerful.

It is also a type of media object which traditional outlets are currently ill-equipped to create (and possibly even ideologically opposed to creating). Compare the HuffPost article with the NYTimes equivalent: the latter has less variety, slower updates, and more focus on "official" sources. And this makes the NYTimes version worse, not better.

3.

If Obama determined American foreign policy by listening to everything Joe Lieberman says and making sure to never, ever do that, then he would have a pretty good foreign policy.

Review: Dell Mini 12 with Ubuntu

A few months ago, my old Thinkpad T42 died after 4 years of faithful service. I realized that I usually buy a $2000 laptop every 3 to 4 years; and as an experiment I decided to instead buy one between 1/3 to 1/4 of that cost, and see if it would last me over a year. I also wanted to switch from a 5-pound laptop to something lighter. So, I got a Dell Mini 12 with Ubuntu for about $550 (1.6 Ghz Atom processor, 80GB hard drive); including the second battery I spent $700.

After a few months of regular use, I feel ready to render a verdict.

• The keyboard is OK, but not great. Most of the keys are fine, but the comma, period, and slash keys are half width, which is pretty annoying for a Linux-using touch-typing programmer. I've retrained my fingers to adequate speed under this arrangement (I now hit all three of these keys with my ring finger), but it took some time to get used to, and I'll never be as fast as with a full-sized keyboard.
• You will hit the touchpad accidentally while you're typing. This is impossible to avoid. The touchpad is astonishingly sensitive. I could swear that it picks up tracks when my palm's not even touching the pad.
• The screen is 1280x800, glossy, and about average quality for a notebook screen (which is to say, inferior to a Thinkpad or Macbook Pro screen, but fine for most uses).
• Performance is not impressive. This is an ultralight with compromises. You can't watch Hulu videos full-screen with this computer, and there's noticeable lag when switching among multiple Firefox instances. Lately, however, I spend most of my mobile time either checking email/RSS feeds, or hacking LaTeX and OCaml in emacs while running Pandora in the background. For these purposes, it's perfectly adequate. (I suspect that if I were running Eclipse or some heavyweight development environment I'd be much less happy.)
• Having a super-light computer is a definite pleasure. One of the most underrated human-computer interfaces is the one between your bag and your shoulder. The Mini 12 and its power adapter together weigh about 3 pounds. It feels qualitatively different from, say, a Macbook Pro or Thinkpad T-series.
• This computer runs cool enough to both (a) stay in your lap indefinitely and (b) not require a cooling fan. The hard drive is extremely quiet as well. As a result, the computer's almost perfectly silent. YMMV but I find this extremely pleasurable. I don't think I've ever used a computer this quiet.
• I got the model with preinstalled Ubuntu 8.04 (Hardy Heron). It's a huge bonus for me that I didn't have to reformat or repartition my hard drive and install Linux myself — something I've had to do with almost every computer I've bought in the past decade. Wireless networking, sound, Flash, sleep-and-resume, etc. all just work. The Mini 12 comes with the dell-lpia architecture Ubuntu distribution, rather than x86, but it mostly behaves like any other Ubuntu. (Exceptions: (1) when I first got my Mini, it would occasionally crash under heavy load, but recent kernel updates seem to have fixed the problem; (2) a few packages, such as smlnj, aren't yet compiled for dell-lpia, but this hasn't been a deal-breaker.)

So, the bottom line is that when I don't need to be on my employer's VPN, I throw this thing into my bag more often than my Macbook Pro from work. Take this with a grain of salt, of course, keeping in mind that I'm a fairly atypical computer user. But I, at least, am fairly happy with the purchase.

Shorter Tyler Cowen

"If you adopt a fringe philosophical view on interpersonal versus intertemporal welfare comparisons, then everybody who disagrees with me about health care is wrong."

Cowen enjoys this kind of rhetorical maneuver, I suspect largely because there's nothing that pleases his ego more than to think of himself as not only smarter than liberals, but smarter in a much more unconventional way than liberals. By this standard, Cowen's post of this morning probably caused him to spontaneously ejaculate on his keyboard.

But anybody with an iota of ability to connect abstract ideas to the real world should intensely question a definition of welfare by which a "typical 23-year-old lower-middle-class immigrant has a higher real endowment than does Warren Buffett". In fact, I think you can find this sentence in the dictionary under reductio ad absurdum

And yes, I know what Cowen's referring to when he talks about McKerlie and egalitarianism. I do not find McKerlie convincing. It's the height of arrogance for Cowen to blithely assume that those who disagree with him are either confused about his argument, ignorant of the background, or irrationally rejecting a sound argument for emotional reasons, rather than simply disagreeing about the highly arguable philosophical conjecture which provides the foundation of his argument. Cowen's usually worth reading, but every once in a while all of his personal and intellectual flaws come crashing together in one horrible post that makes me want to get him banned from every restaurant on the planet.

Supreme Court 2009: the big picture

No particular opinion about Sotomayor. She'll most likely replace Souter, Republican whining notwithstanding, and actually that's not very interesting. Souter's a liberal; Sotomayor's a liberal; the balance of the court will be unchanged.

At the risk of being excessively morbid, here's what matters, in roughly increasing order of importance:

• Breyer: 70 years old.
• Stevens: 89 years old (!).
• Ginsburg: 76 years old.
• Kennedy: 72 years old.
• Scalia: 73 years old.
• Life expectancy at birth for American men: 75.15.*
• Time to Election Day 2016: roughly 7 years and 5 months.

It's a cliché by now to remark that the most enduring political successes of Bush 41 and Bush 43 were their Supreme Court nominations. Thomas, Roberts, and Alito are not only uncompromisingly hard-right conservatives; they're all 60 or younger and will probably stay on the court into the 2020s. The ascension of Alito to replace O'Connor was a particular disaster. Gonzales, Meredith, and Ledbetter were only the beginning. We're going to see many more ugly 5-4 decisions in coming years.

But if Obama gets re-elected in 2012, there's a non-negligible chance that he'll get to nominate five or six justices to the court in total, swinging the balance back to a liberal majority — maybe even a 6-3 majority.

Of course, that's assuming a number of coins all come up heads. It's far from certain that Obama's going to be re-elected; it's far from certain that Senate Democrats won't lose the majority or simply cave to Republican demands for conservative nominees; and I wouldn't be surprised if Scalia manages to hang on by his fingernails until he's 110. But the point is that it wouldn't take a miracle for such a dramatic transformation to occur within Obama's Presidency.

Is this surprising? Upon reflection, not especially. On scotusscores.com, the recent 1994-2005 stretch stands out as an unusual period of stasis — as J. Toobin remarks in The Nine, it's the longest interval the court's ever had with the same nine justices. But when justices stay together for a long time, it means that they're also from the same age cohort**, and therefore that they'll also reach retirement age together. O'Connor's retirement and Rehnquist's death were just the leading edge of a generational turnover that will run its course over the next decade or so. And since both parties are now savvy enough to nominate young justices, we can look forward to another relatively long period of stasis after that.

Incidentally, this also means it would be wise for the other liberal justices — Breyer, Stevens, and Ginsburg — to follow Souter's lead and retire as soon as possible, while it's certain who will be nominating and confirming their successors. But reading Toobin's book has convinced me that Supreme Court justices aren't unusually wise, so it's anyone's guess what they'll actually do.

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*OK, time for the caveats. Mean life expectancy at birth is a misleading measure for seventysomething Supreme Court justices. Causes of "young death" like infant mortality and teenage driving accidents and AIDS significantly reduce mean life expectancy at birth, but have no relevance to the life expectancy of people who have passed those filters; so the life expectancy of a 73-year old is considerably higher than the life expectancy of a newborn. Furthermore, Supreme Court justices have an excellent government-funded health care plan, and disagreeing with the politics of the President who would nominate your successor to the Highest Court In The Land is a strong motivator to look after your health. And the probability that Scalia would leave the Court not in a coffin while there's a sitting Democratic President is basically nil. All in all, I suspect that at least one of Scalia or Kennedy will stay on the court past his 80th birthday. So 6-3 is a long shot. 5-4 doesn't seem too unlikely though.

**OK, excluding Thomas, who was an outlier on the Rehnquist Court in more ways than one.

$255,319

...for every GM employee. R. Reich says we've sunk $60 billion into GM. Divide by 235,000 employees as of 2009q1 (according to Google Finance) and voilà.

Last December, I modestly proposed a $100K per employee bailout, for the more meager cost of $25.2 billion in late 2008*. But this is getting ridiculous. How many new small businesses, back-to-college tuition fees, and cross-country moves to more favorable labor markets could GM employees buy with $255K apiece, tax-free? There are places in the country where you can shelter and feed a family of four for the better part of a decade with that sum. I don't subscribe to the notion that uncoordinated masses of individuals axiomatically spend money more effectively than government all the time, but the orderly winding-down of a failing car company doesn't offer a propitious outlook for government management, not least because management of any kind seems essentially futile when you're dealing with a car sailing off a cliff.

Oh, why do I bother.

The car link was sort of fun to dig up though.

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* GM had more employees back then.