So Broken. Dude.

Link.

It needs a comment box.

“Andrew Gelman”:http://www.stat.columbia.edu/~cook/movabletype/archives/2009/02/i-received-a-fr.html is puzzled.

I received a free copy in the mail of an introductory statistics textbook. I showed the book to Yu-Sung and he said: Wow, it’s pretty fancy. I bet it costs $150. I didn’t believe him, but we checked on Amazon and lo! it really does retail for that much. What the . . . ? I asked around and, indeed, it’s commonplace for students to pay well over $100 for introductory textbooks.
Well. I’m planning to write an introductory textbook of my own and I’d like to charge $10 for it. Maybe this isn’t possible, but I think $40 should be doable. And why would anybody require their students to pay $150 for a statistics book when something better is available at less than 1/3 the price?

… It just mystifies me that, in all these different fields, it’s considered acceptable to charge $150 for a textbook. I’d think that all you need is one cartel-breaker in each field and all the prices would come tumbling down. But apparently not. I just don’t understand.

Well, perhaps “crack economist Greg Mankiw”:https://crookedtimber.org/2008/03/04/principles-and-practices-of-economics/ might be able to solve this particular mystery. Or, perhaps, not so much. But more simply, I think that the obvious public choice answer is that the costs of this particular arrangement are borne by the students, who constitute a captive market, rather than by the professors, who actually choose the textbook that is required. All that you need are some very moderate side-payments to persuade self-interested professors to adopt particular textbooks (perhaps even just lowering their search costs by sending them free copies). So the cartel-breaker would have to provide sufficient inducement to the professors, which seems rather unlikely given that they would not be making monopoly profits, and hence would be outbid by those who _are_ in a position to capture them.

Of course, if the professor is teaching their own textbook to large undergraduate intro classes and making large amounts of money from each semi-compelled purchase, then no sidepayments at all are needed (not all professors being as conscientious as Andrew Gelman). There’s clearly an opening for some enterprising grad student to write a paper (perhaps for the _Journal of Economic Perspectives_ or some such) on the characteristics of this very interesting market …

With Bush making his farewell, I thought I’d make the rounds of right-wing blogs to see how they were rising to the occasion. I wondered how low the limbo bar of low standards could go. I was a bit disappointed to start at Red State, see a post entitled “Will the Left Accept That They Were Wrong Wrong About Bush?” and come up with an instant winner. What is the author going to praise Bush for, you ask? “We stand here watching Bush kindly say his goodbyes and we see George W. Bush stepping down like every American president before him (well, except the ones that died in office, of course). Even Darth Cheney is packing up for his last ride into the sunset.”

Bush didn’t stage a coup. (Well, there are a few hours left. But it does seem that he won’t.)

That’s it.

“So, will each of these half sentient, dillweeds fess up that they were wrong? Will they turn to their fellow dillweed, whack-jonse friends and say: “Ya know, I have to hand it to Bush. He was an alright guy for following the Constitution and going home to Texas like he’s supposed ta.”

Only time will tell.

This _Washington Post_ “story”:http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/12/28/AR2008122802124.html on what happened at OSHA over the Bush years tells the usual story of flacks being hired as political appointees to gut enforcement, scientific advice being ignored, internal dissenters being punished and so on. But this bit seemed unusual, even by Bush administration standards.

In 2006, Henshaw was replaced by Edwin G. Foulke Jr., a South Carolina lawyer and former Bush fundraiser who spent years defending companies cited by OSHA for safety and health violations. Foulke quickly acquired a reputation inside the Labor Department as a man who literally fell asleep on the job: Eyewitnesses said they saw him suddenly doze off at staff meetings, during teleconferences, in one-on-one briefings, at retreats involving senior deputies, on the dais at a conference in Europe, at an award ceremony for a corporation and during an interview with a candidate for deputy regional administrator.

His top aides said they rustled papers, wore attention-getting garb, pounded the table for emphasis or gently kicked his leg, all to keep him awake. But, if these tactics failed, sometimes they just continued talking as if he were awake. “We’ll be sitting there and things will fall out of his hands; people will go on talking like nothing ever happened,” said a career official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to talk to a reporter. In an interview, Foulke denied falling asleep at work, although he said he was often tired and sometimes listened with his eyes closed. His goal, he said, was to create the best agency he could, partly by putting in place “performance metrics” not previously used at OSHA.

This “piece”:http://dissentmagazine.org/article/?article=1308 by Benjamin Kunkel (whom I usually have time for), is really, _really_ annoying.

The literary novel illuminates moral problems (including sometimes those that are also political problems) at the expense of sentimental consolation, while genre fiction typically offers consolation at the expense of illumination. … The main formal consequence, then, of a withered moral imagination has to do not with subject matter (love, crime, the future) but with character. Fictional character derives from moral choices made, contemplated, postponed, or ignored—morality is the page on which the stamp of character appears—and the signal formal trait of genre fiction is nothing so much as its lack of complex characters. This deficit entangles even an acknowledged generic triumph like Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968, and the basis of the 1982 movie Blade Runner) in a certain incoherence. The ironic burden of Dick’s novel is to stick up for the warm-blooded humanity of androids (read: clones), and in this way imply the cold-bloodedness of any society that denies fully human status to some category of person. The rub, of course, is that such sci-fi humanism is quickly overcome with another irony, this one unintentional, since it is the hallmark of genre fiction to treat characters instrumentally, putting them through the paces of the plot according to their function as the embodiment of some general psychological or social category and failing or refusing to endow them with the individuality to be found among the livelier inhabitants of the traditional realist novel and, for that matter, the real world. [click to continue…]

Some consumer venting. In 2006, I used “E-Fax”:http://www.efax.com for several months, and then cancelled the service. At that point, it was necessary to “use a chat client”:http://www.elsewhere.org/journal/archives/2004/04/05/cancelling-efax-service/ to cancel – I presume in order to increase the chance of retention by raising hurdles for customers who wish to depart. After going through a lengthy and tedious process of telling the E-Fax representative that no, I did not want to get two months service free to encourage me to stay, I quit, and was told by the representative that my account was cancelled. Story over – or so I thought. Then today, I check the credit card account that the E-fax account billed to (it’s automatically balanced and one that I rarely use) and discover that E-fax have never cancelled, and have been billing me $16.95 a month for the last two years. I call customer service, and eventually get transferred to a supervisor called ‘Martha’ who is polite, but insists (a) that their customer records show that I accepted the offer of two months free service to stay (which is flatly untrue), (b) that the transcript of the chat conversation can’t be found (and because it can’t, she suggests that I must have called to cancel, which was an impossibility at the time), and (c ) that their inflexible policy is only to refund for a maximum of four months of service. She conceded that the online chat agents were encouraged to retain customers – when I asked whether or not their pay reflected their retention success, she told me that she didn’t know, because they were based in India (but suggested, without ever quite explicitly saying so, that they weren’t – I strongly suspect from my knowledge of how these subcontracting relations work that this isn’t true).

Yes – this is partly my own fault for not checking all my accounts regularly to be sure that weird things aren’t happening – but it has left a pretty bad taste in my mouth regarding E-Fax and its business model (a couple of cursory Google searches suggest that I am not the only unhappy customer). So I strongly recommend that before people think about signing up for E-fax, they consider the difficulties of cancelling, the adoption by the company of a cancellation system that provides you with no record to prove that you have cancelled, when in fact you have, and the fact that the sales agent in my case at least seems to have falsely recorded the outcome of our interaction. I told the representative that I understood that this was the policy of the company, but that I would be blogging it to express my strong dissatisfaction – so here it is (and may it put a pox and a plague their Google searches).

“Michael Froomkin”:http://www.discourse.net/archives/2008/10/surveying_the_wreckage.html has a tale of terror.

Recently, the system has been a bi[t] weird, with very slow file access times (windows explorer would take forever to open, ditto with file dialogs in programs), and I also was worried that my copy of Firefox was compromised … First, I decided to take the plunge and migrate to a larger disk, and ordered up a “green” WD7500AACS. (Three quarters of a terrabyte! Whoohoo!) About three or four weeks ago, I copied my files on to it using using XXClone, a nice piece of freeware that basically makes an entire copy of Drive A (including operating system) onto drive B. … But things were still slow sometimes. I decided it was time to kill the trojan, or whatever, that seemed to be infesting my system. I also decided that I should go back to hardware RAID, since I don’t back up my files enough. … When I got back, the files were there, and I ran the first one. It duly called for a reboot and I did it — only to get error messages and a lockup. …at which point the disk wouldn’t boot any more. But no problem, I had my backup, the 160GB version. … But now that the two disks are in the system, with the 750Gb disk on the second pair of SATA ports, which are RAID capable (but were properly set for ordinary non-RAID use in the bios), the Windows system on the first 160GB disk decided they needed to be reactivated. … But the 750GB version worked. So that’s good. But now I’m nervous, things seemed jinxed. So I order up a second WD7500AACS, and plan to RAID mirror them. … Now, time extra backups. I’m a little nervous about hardware raid, in part because I’m a little dyslexic. … So I decided to make a software clone onto the new disk with XXClone, so that whichever way I copied the data would be OK. … I installed the disk, started up the format, and went of to do some stuff. When I got back, I found a blue screen of death, a 0024 failure (that I gather means a loose wire, something version one the sata hardware standard made all too easy). When I tried to reboot, I got a smart drive error – the disk is bad. I flip some disks around. One of the 160GB disks won’t boot either — “Disk error”. When the dust settles I have some very high-tech paperweights. … I’ve lost 3 weeks or more of personal data, only most of which can be reconstructed. . My work files, on the other hand, either on a unix server or on a USB stick, which I religiously back up at home and work, so that’s OK. My personal financial info, which isn’t backed up for the last 3+ weeks, I can recreate

Some life lessons here – the most obvious being the frequently repeated one of backup, backup, backup and _keep non-local copies of your data_ in case of massive system breakdown/fire/nuclear war etc. If it can happen to Michael Froomkin, who is much more technically adept and conscientious about backing up than you are (for most local values of ‘you’) it can happen to anyone. Happily, Michael appears to have lost nothing more than some easily recreatable data (and a lot of time, assuming he can get refunds for non-functioning hardware). If he were someone who didn’t religiously back up his material, he’d be in far worse shape. Non-local file backup is pretty easy to do these days, and relatively cheap. I use “Sugarsync”:http://www.sugarsync.com/ which synchronizes my three Windows machines very nicely ¹ and as a side-benefit provides me with backups against local hardware errors. Kieran discusses a couple of alternatives “here”:http://www.kieranhealy.org/files/misc/workflow-apps.pdf (PDF), but whatever system you use, I really recommend that you institute _some system for doing this_ and that you _do it today_ rather than putting it on the long finger (which will most likely mean, given most people’s heuristics for this kind of stuff, that you won’t do it until you REALLY NEED TO, at which point it will sadly be too late).

¹ I understand that it doesn’t work as well for Macs, which to my deep and everlasting regret isn’t a problem for me. The week before last, my university unexpectedly delivered me a lovely new MacBook Pro, which I had some eight hours to fall in love with before I discovered that it had been sent to me thanks to an administrative error, and that it in fact belonged to one of my colleagues. I’m still bitter, as you can tell (but in the unlikely event that an Apple executive is reading this post, and wants to reach out to the crucial academic-blogger constituency by handing out one of their new machines, they can find an enthusiastic evangelist for their product at this address …) More generally (and to get back from the griping), be aware that Sugarsync is not designed as a back-up product as such, and will do _nothing_ to save you from user generated errors (indeed it may make them more devastating). If you delete the one and only copy of your dissertation datafile from a synchronized folder, you will find of course that it is deleted from the copies of this folder on your other machines too. So caveat emptor.

But the seizure and the deal with JPMorgan came as a shock to Washington Mutual’s board, which was kept completely in the dark: the company’s new chief executive, Alan H. Fishman, was in midair, flying from New York to Seattle at the time the deal was finally brokered, according to people briefed on the situation. Mr. Fishman, who has been on the job for less than three weeks, is eligible for $11.6 million in cash severance and will get to keep his $7.5 million signing bonus, according to an analysis by James F. Reda and Associates. WaMu was not immediately available for comment.

Link. Just imagine that WaMu was caught in a moment of uncharacteristic forthcomingness. Was inclined to wax metaphysical about the great comedy that is both Life and the Universe.