Can we just shoot Javascript and pretend it never happened?

The Gizmodo/Io9/etc. complex has switched to a new design which is astonishingly, stupidly unusable. And slow. It's like it was designed by some sort of idiot savant who had to invent scrollbars from scratch because he'd never heard of them. For comparison, they still have a variation on the old, sane interface.

I'm sure it works adequately on an iPad though, and that's what really matters, right?

Update: A coworker with an iPad tested it for me, and I was wrong, it's completely broken there.

King in Council

Some of the best classes I took at the Harvard Extension School were the World History series with Prof. Ostrowski. Two points he emphasized have stuck with me. The first, the importance of a sufficiently high threshold of evidence. For example, there is no contemporary evidence that Martin Luther nailed his theses to the church door, nor is it ever mentioned in his own extensive writings. Somehow, everyone has still heard this apparently fictional story.

The other point was that a ruler is very seldom an unrestrained, all-powerful dictator. Instead, a much more common model is the King in Council, where the ruler is the balance point between various factions of the elite, who advise him and constrain his actions.

"On the Durability of King and Council: The Continuum Between Dictatorship and Democracy" is quite possibly the academic paper he was inspired by. Certainly it seems like a good discussion of the subject:

Abstract. In practice one rarely observes pure forms of dictatorship that lack a council, or pure forms of parliament that lack an executive. Generally government policies emerge from organizations that combine an executive branch of government, ``the king,'' with a cabinet or parliamentary branch, ``the council.'' This paper provides an explanation for this regularity, and also provides an evolutionary model of the emergence of democracy that does not require a revolution. The analysis demonstrates that the bipolar ``king and council'' constitutional template has a number of properties that gives it great practical efficiency as a method of information processing and as a very flexible institutional arrangement for making collective decisions.

Two thoughts on Egypt

1. The first historical comparison that came to my mind was 1848, but I've seen at least one writer compare the street protests to 1989 in Eastern Europe. The revolutions of 1848 were related but separate, and they mostly failed, or were undermined soon after... but the people remembered, and eventually democracy won (more or less). 1989 was the collapse of an empire, with local governments' weakness in the periphery demonstrating the fragility and lack of power of the Soviet Union in the center. If this is 1989, then the empire that is weakening is the United States.
2. If Mubarak goes, quite possibly the Egyptian cooperation with Israel's Gaza blockade will also go; I suspect it's not popular with actual Egyptians. Relations with Israel would deteriorate. Separately, this would increase the chances of Israeli military action in Gaza. Relations between Israel and Egypt would deteriorate further.

A quick summary of Boston real estate

I discovered this illuminating comment in a Boston Globe real estate blog post:

Just yesterday my boss and a co-worker were INSISTENT that now is not only a great time to buy (my wife and I are potentially first-time buyers) but that right now we are at the ABSOLUTE bottom. Their claims were largely based upon the historically (absurdly) low interest rates and that within the next year jobs were going to come roaring back to Greater Boston and that 300K dump in Arlington that I kind of liked would then be 450K. They stopped just short of using the phrase "buy now or be priced out forever."

... I asked my boss if my salary was going to increase enough to warrant the expected increase in values/asking prices and he changed the subject.

Since housing is almost always bought with debt, prices are determined by how much one can borrow. Now that banks have lending standards again, borrowing is constrained by income and previous savings for down payments. Here's the price/income ratio for the (Greater, stretching to edge of New Hampshire) Boston area, courtesy of Boston Bubble; notice how we're still above the peak of the previous bubble in the late '80s:

It's just a jump to the left, and then a step to the right

In his victory speech last night, Rand Paul noted that "the American people want to know why we have to balance our budget and they don’t." If he actually wanted an answer, it's easy to find out: the Federal government doesn't need to balance its budget because the government can print as much money as it wants. The question is whether this is a good idea; too much extra demand without corresponding productive ability will lead to inflation. That is not a problem at the moment, with millions of workers unemployed and factories sitting idle. Government spending can also be quite wasteful, like the botched banks bailouts or our never ending wars in Iraq and Afghanistan... but there are some signs that once Rand Paul is in Congress he will become a big supporter of the latter brand of government waste. Wise spending on infrastructure, on the other hand, can have a huge positive impact on future growth, and R&D spending created technologies like the computer and the Internet.

In any case, the question is whether the new Republican Congress members are actually serious about balancing the budget is an important one. Demand in the economy can come from exports, households, business or government. Instead of exports, we have imports, and households are suffering from massive debt and unemployment. So either businesses decide to start hiring and investing again, or we're reliant on government spending... and state and municipal governments must balance their budget and are constrained by massive revenue shortfalls.

Thinks to look out for:

1. Renewal of the emergency extended unemployment benefits. There are 3.7 million people claiming unemployment benefits past the standard 26 weeks. The funding for this expires Nov 30th, and depends on a lame duck Congress for renewal. Of course, there are also many others who've hit the limit of 99 weeks and now get nothing.
2. The Catfood Commission. Obama's Deficit Reduction Committee will be announcing its recommendations December 1st, probably with (completely irrelevant and unnecessary) suggestions for cutting Social Security. This may have no short term impact, since to appease the "we got our Social Security and Medicare, so fuck the rest of you" crowd, aka Tea Partiers, the Republicans may try for a phased implementation of cuts.
3. War spending. Just kidding, no one who cares about balanced budgets would dream of cutting that.

Republicans were elected on the back of massive unemployment. It seems unlikely things will improve much by the next election.

Avatar: The Last Airbender and the Corruption of American Youth

I finished watching Avatar: The Last Airbender last night, a TV show aimed at children much in the way an AK-47 is aimed at the heart of a patriotic American soldier.

The "heroes" of the story are members of a ragtag international terrorist conspiracy. Recruited from various corners of the developing world, they are united by an animistic witchcraft religion and an irrational hatred of their world's industrial superpower. Their goal is to impose an environmentalist world government on the unsuspecting citizens of the superpower; there's even an obvious metaphor for so-call anthropomorphic global warming, blamed on the superpower!

The head of the terrorists is the Avatar, the reincarnation of previous Avatars; Avatars are unique in that they can master all four forms of witchcraft, and are supposed to bring "balance" to the world. However, the last Avatar was frozen away in a glacier for a hundred years, and has now returned from hiding to rid the world of "tyranny." Apparently the writers couldn't be bothered to hide the fact they are inspired by the Shi'ite Islam vision of the Mahdi that is so vocally promoted by such figures as Iran's President Ahmadinejad. As Wikipedia explains:

Twelver Shia Muslims believe that the Mahdi is Muhammad al-Mahdi, the Twelfth Imam, who was born in 869 CE and was hidden by God at the age of five (874 CE). He is still alive but has been in occultation, "awaiting the time that God has decreed for his return". ... The Twelfth Imam will return as the Mahdi with "a company of his chosen ones," and his enemies will be led by the one-eyed Antichrist and the Sufyani.

What do we know about the Sufyani?

The Sufyani's army will go to Kufa; a city in Iraq, and from there he will launch an attack against the people of Khurasan. At the Gate of Istakhr, Shuayb bin Salih and the Hashimite under the black banners, will join forces and engage the army of the Sufyani. The battle will be extremely fierce with a tremendous loss of life and the army of the Sufyani will suffer a temporary defeat. It is at this time that a yearning for the Mahdi's appearance is on the lips of everyone.

So, to recap, the hidden Mahdi (Avatar) will return and fight two enemies, one of them one-eyed and the other a defeated general. And, what do you know, the main enemies of the Avatar (Mahdi) and his company of terrorists are a prince, who has had one eye damaged, and his uncle, who used to be a general but was defeated in his attempt to conquer a large city!

I am astonished that this TV show was ever allowed to air in the United States of America, especially since it's entertaining enough that it can be enjoyed by adults, expanding its propagandistic reach even further. Thankfully, the recent movie version is not quite as good as the TV series, so perhaps no more damage will be inflicted on the fragile psyche of our nation's youth.

Changing Times

In 2006 , "Ibrahim Hooper, spokesman for the Council on American-Islamic Relations ... call[ed] Little Green Footballs 'a vicious, anti-Muslim hate site . . . that has unfortunately become popular.'" These days Little Green Footballs has changed its tune because of what the blog's author describes as "anti-Islamic bigotry that goes far beyond simply criticizing radical Islam, into support for fascism, violence, and genocide" and "hatred for President Obama that goes far beyond simply criticizing his policies, into racism, hate speech, and bizarre conspiracy theories."

Meanwhile the rebirth of Fascism in Hungary continues:

Things won't get that bad -- at least that was what Jewish intellectual Gaspar Miklos Tamas, 61, used to think. But he changed his mind one day last year, when a group of men in black uniforms and riding boots appeared outside his house in downtown Budapest, shouting "Heil Hitler, Professor Tamas, how are you?"