They care!

NYTimes: "The White House and the Democratic Party are banking on voters focusing not on the unemployment rate, but on a trend of job growth."

Actual jobs are, of course, far less important than the perception that the unemployed might possibly get their jobs back in 2016. After years with no income, degraded skills, and a resume with a giant hole, and... how's that supposed to work again?

Liberating the world, block by block

From the Guardian:

Ayman Abdullah, a 43-year-old teacher, said he regards [Tahrir] Square as liberated territory.

"This is the first piece of the new Egypt. Mubarak does not rule here anymore. Suleiman does not rule here. We will rule here and will rule all of Egypt," he said.

Which reminded me of the Temporary Autonomous Zone:

Are we who live in the present doomed never to experience autonomy, never to stand for one moment on a bit of land ruled only by freedom? Are we reduced either to nostalgia for the past or nostalgia for the future? Must we wait until the entire world is freed of political control before even one of us can claim to know freedom? Logic and emotion unite to condemn such a supposition. Reason demands that one cannot struggle for what one does not know; and the heart revolts at a universe so cruel as to visit such injustices on our generation alone of humankind.

...

Let us admit that we have attended parties where for one brief night a republic of gratified desires was attained. Shall we not confess that the politics of that night have more reality and force for us than those of, say, the entire U.S. Government? Some of the "parties" we've mentioned lasted for two or three years. Is this something worth imagining, worth fighting for? Let us study invisibility, webworking, psychic nomadism--and who knows what we might attain?

And from Ken MacLeod:

In Tahrir Square last week thousands of people stood up to a counter-revolutionary mob and fought it back, yard by yard over a long day and night, with sticks and stones. In those few hours they proved in practice that the human being's conscious will can change history. They brought the human subject and human emancipation back into politics. Whatever the immediate outcome in Egypt, this consciousness will not go away. We can all go back to being human. That doesn't mean we will all love each other. It means we can fight each other for good reasons.

As someone said on Twitter: 'Yesterday we were all Tunisians. Today we are all Egyptians. Tomorrow we will all be free.'

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.