A Trivia Question

All this stuff about North Korea this week inspired the following trivia question:

The State Sponsors of Terrorism list was started in 1979 with 4 charter states. Which 4 nations were they?

Bonus point: which nation is the only nation of those original four still on the State Sponsors of Terrorism list?

Cheap Land = Unresponsive Fuel Demand

NPR, the New York Times, and media establishments everywhere are running their usual kerfluffle about high gas prices that they always do when the average nationwide price reaches a certain even-numbered benchmark ($3.00! $3.50! $4.00!). In these pieces, there are often some recommendations for ways to get around without using cars, such as using public transportation, walking or riding a bike. Two things are certain: these recommendations will continue to be made by journalists when gas prices reach $4.50, $5.00, $6.00 and beyond, and these recommendations will continue to be ignored by Americans.

The problem is not with the callousness of Americans refusing to give up cars. We are often pointed to the examples in Europe where there are far fewer cars and more public transportation opportunities. But the only reason this automobile-less lifestyle thrives is because the structure of European cities is far different than the structure of American cities, and most of it has to do with the fact that European cities were built before cars were invented. Their cities are set up like the older parts of the older cities of America: high density, variable land use, narrow streets, all characteristics that encourage walking and discourage automobiles. But the newer parts of European cities are also built with more walkable characteristics than the newer parts of American cities. Why is this?

As always, it comes down to economics. Land is more expensive and harder to come by in Europe since more people have lived there for centuries longer than in America. In most of Europe, you had to be descended from nobility, money, the landed gentry, etc. to have a few acres of land. In America, land is plentiful, and we were annexing and giving away hundreds of acres of land at a time less than a century ago to anyone who promised to develop it. Therefore, a developer's can develop a lot more acres at a time in America than in Europe. This leads to lower density, larger areas of large houses and commercial developments, which of course leads to larger profits for developers. Larger developments and cheaper land also means that citizens may buy larger, better houses, as long as they are willing to live a fair distance from their place of employment, or place of shopping, or whatever. As communities spread in all directions, the ability to profitably serve all areas with convenient public transportation goes away. The only options then become cars or possibly bikes. But bicycles aren't all-weather vehicles, and some communities *cough* aren't very friendly to bikes in terms of bicycle infrastructure.

There are some people who could give up driving or decide to move away from Suburbia, but not most. Most of us decide that paying high gas prices is the price to pay for living in a decent-sized house in a good neighborhood. And if there is a ceiling to that price, we haven't found it yet. Are we all going to live in downtown apartments when gas prices get to $6 a gallon? $8 a gallon? $20 a gallon? I sort of doubt it. Therefore the only way most of us are going to save gas is by buying smaller cars, not by changing our modes of transportation or the places we live.

Hillary Clinton Wishes She Was a Republican

There's less than a minute left on the game clock in the primary season game of hoops, and Hillary Clinton is down by 200. She's still trying, still reacting to things Barack Obama does and says, and organizing protests at DNC meetings; in other words, she's fouling like crazy in order to extend the game. After all, Obama is only a mediocre free-throw shooter. But after the last primaries on June 3, the shot clock will be off, and she should be able to call off the horses and let Obama dribble the clock out until the convention in August.

If only Hillary Clinton was a Republican, she would have already locked up the nomination.

I had heard that if the Democrats used the delegate-selection system that Republicans use, then Clinton would be ahead in delegates, but I couldn't find any numbers to tell me exactly by how much. So I charted the delegates won by Obama and Clinton on a primary by primary basis in real life and as if they were apportioned using whichever rules the GOP was using in that contest. In most states, the Republicans use winner-take-all or winner-take-most, but there are a few (e.g. Iowa, North Carolina) where the splits are more proportional to the popular vote. I had to guess on some contests (particularly the winner-take-almost-all primaries), but I have come up with (I think) a fairly reasonable estimate of the difference between the number of pledged delegates Clinton would have and the number of pledged delegates Obama would have if the Democrats copied the Republican's rules, shown below.

Hillary Clinton is down by around 162 pledged delegates in real life, but she's up by around 429 pledged delegates in the GOP-style fantasy situation. Her chances are slim at best, and people are calling for her to quit campaigning and step aside at a deficit of 162. But if Obama had a deficit of more than 2.5 times that, he'd already have had to quit and yield to the mathematical certainty of a Clinton nomination.


So why fuck around with delegates, respective political parties? This is supposed to be a government where people directly elect representatives. Yet even the general election we have the electoral college, not the people, deciding who the next commander-in-chief will be, and sometimes the result can be very different. Why should the political parties mimic this inane system? Since a 600-delegate swing exists when different rules are in play, why must we mess around with unnecessary layers of representative amalgamation that serve only to distort the will of the people?

Who's the Real Democrat?

This post is probably written a week or two late but I've been a bit busy recently.

Hillary Clinton has been making the absolutely ludicrous argument that she makes a better general election candidate because the traditionally blue states have selected her as their Democratic nominee rather than Barack Obama. This is insane for three reasons.

1. The Democratic primary has very little bearing on how the states will elect the president in November. Somehow I just don't see California, New York, New Jersey and most of New England voting for John McCain in November. Blue states don't turn into red states just because their shade of blue didn't prevail. Just ask Vermont.

2. If the democratic primary did have anything to do with the general election, wouldn't it be better if a candidate showed broad appeal from independents and some Republicans rather than narrow appeal from the hard-core leftist party members who would be more likely to vote a straight party ticket anyways? In general elections, the moderate voters will always determine the outcome of an election, since it is almost inconceivable to attract support from both the far-left and the far-right with no support from the middle (unless you're Ron Paul). Therefore, it would seem to me that the candidate the voters in the middle prefer should be the most viable candidate in November. Typically Democrats in red states tend to me more moderate than their blue state brothers, so if you're trying to pick off a few reddish swing states to win an election (Colorado, Missouri), you want to get in good with those Democrats. Admittedly, winning hard-core red states like Utah or Montana doesn't really say anything about the viability of the candidate in the general election, but it's for the same reason that winning Massachusetts and California doesn't say anything about the viability of the candidate.

3. Clinton could be arguing that not being able to win blue states means that Obama is not a true Democrat and does not share Democratic values. But take a look at these maps:

If these were general election maps, which color do you think would represent the Democratic nominee? Would it be blue which is found mostly in small rural communities, or would it be green which is found in large numbers in the big cities? In Ohio, Tennessee, Indiana, Missouri and Texas, Barack Obama (green) won the cities, which almost always go Democratic. In Pennsylvania, he won Philly big. The man won in San Francisco for god's sake! And yet, Hillary Clinton thinks that Barack Obama can't win these blue states. I hate to tell her, but Obama's support in these states came from the same people that will be voting for the Democrat in November, while Hillary's came from the rural towns and counties that will colored bright red on CNN's maps in November.

So, this is a really dumb argument that could favor either candidate.


(Thanks for the maps, NY Times)

The Relative Value of Disenfranchised versus Fraudulent Voters

Even though I know of many other people who would be better qualified to discuss Supreme Court findings, I feel I need to say something about the math involved in today’s 6-3 decision on the Indiana voter ID law.

The case, Crawford v. Marion County Election Board, was a facial challenge of an election law passed by a Republican-controlled state legislature that would require all voters to show an up-to-date, government-issued photo ID in order to vote in-person at precincts throughout the state of Indiana. The usual conservative justices, along with Justice John Paul Stevens, rejected the plaintiff’s facial challenge because there isn’t enough evidence to support the premise that anyone is actually disenfranchised by voter ID laws. The liberal minority, minus Justice Stevens, pointed out that there also wasn’t any evidence to support the state’s premise that anyone has ever committed in-person voter fraud anywhere in Indiana in the entire history of the state. So, understanding that the evidence pickings are slim on both sides, the question is this: Is the casting of a fraudulent vote worse than the prevention of a legitimate vote?

Now I know this question assumes that individual votes actually matter, which is the case for maybe one election per decade somewhere in the U.S., but lets just say for argument’s sake that there are 1,000,000 eligible voters who would turn out for Candidate Rodham and 1,000,000 eligible voters who would turn out for Candidate Hussein, two names I just completely made up. If one person voted for Candidate Hussein twice illegally and he wasn’t caught because he didn’t have to show ID at the polls, then the election would swing to Candidate Hussein by a margin of one vote. Similarly, if one elderly voter for Candidate Rodham couldn’t get on the bus in time to get to a local government office to get a birth certificate to get a valid ID and was therefore disenfranchised, the election would swing to Candidate Hussein by the same margin of one vote. On the face of it, it would seem like a disenfranchised voter has the same value as a fraudulent voter.

One could view this like a supply and demand curve. On the left end of the chart is a situation where no election laws could exist. Vote by email, vote by Facebook profile, vote by randomly shouting in the street. Everything counts, if someone can hear you! If you wanted, you could vote dozens of times, maybe hundreds of times, depending on how much your Mafioso political system rigger was willing to pay you for your time. Total enfranchisement, but also near total corruption. On the right end of the chart is a situation where only the strictest of security measures could be enforced, and unless the government had your retinas and your dna already on file, you couldn’t vote, and even then you’d need to submit three letters of recommendation from congressmen and a self-addressed stamped envelope to the county election board before you could get your voter card. Basically, only the president could vote. No fraud at all, but also near total disenfranchisement.

So you want to be where these two curves meet. According to economics, there should be an optimum point somewhere in the middle where a law could be strict enough to prevent an unwanted amount of fraud while also preventing an unwanted amount of disenfranchisement. In evaluating whether or not the new law is too burdensome, you need to figure out where the existing law is on this curve. Unfortunately this requires data which neither side in the Indiana case was able to provide. But the scant evidence from other places on the internet (yes, supposition based on extensive internet research, as Justice Stevens would retort) reveals two nuggets of information:

1. If enacted for the entire country, this law would have prevented one fraudulent vote cast in a gubernatorial election in Washington in 2004.
2. If enacted for the entire country, 99% of eligible voters would already have met the extra burden, and 99% of the remaining balance of voters could easily meet the burden.

Therefore, assuming the population of the U.S. is 303,960,000 and 2/3rds of them are eligible to vote, the law could disenfranchise about 20,000 eligible voters (0.01%) while preventing one fraudulent ballot. Is one fraudulent ballot worth 20,000 disenfranchised voters? Is voter fraud 20,000 times as repugnant as insurmountable burdens on eligible voters?

I think we need more data.

Edit: Good to know Eric Posner must be reading my blog, except he takes the question farther, adds the variable symbol n, and, oh yeah, writes better.

About Time, PA

Thank God! After six long weeks, we finally have a primary to follow. The media can finally return to the horse-race coverage of politicians!

Congressional Balls!

For the first time really since the Democrats regained a majority in the House of Representatives, they finally decided to wield the power the voters gave to them in the elections of 2006. They didn't cave (yet)!

I am writing this regarding the House's vote in favor of a FISA bill that would substitute judicial review for blanket immunity. Instead of letting the executive branch use a private phone company as a tool to piss on the Constitution's 4th Amendment without legal recourse, the House's bill would allow a phone company to defend itself based on evidence presented in compliance with the Constitution's 6th Amendment.

Bla-dow!

Of course this alternative bill will be vetoed by the President, and there's not enough support from both the House and the Senate to override it, but so what? We've gotten by for years only relying on the original FISA bill without the illegal part that the President wants. We'll be fine. I'm just glad the House was willing to stand up to the President for once.