Writing

I've had this goal for a long time to write everyday. But maybe I'm just not gritty enough.

I think what has always appealed to me about writing is the ability to create something out of seemingly nothing. Your thoughts, which are constantly spinning during the day, can be transformed into coherent thoughts by the focused force of concentration it takes to put words down on the page. If you do it often enough it no longer even feels like work, and the words just pour out of you. When you're hammering away at the keyboard, and the words appear on the screen just as fast as you type them, as if your hands were directly connected to the synapses in your brain, it's a wonderful feeling of accomplishment. But of course real writing requires rewriting, requires rethinking. It's not enough just to hammer away, you also have to be critical of what you're actually saying. Is that what I mean? How will someone reading this understand what I just said? Is that the point I want to make? What's the most important thing I'm trying to convey? Is this boring? And so on. If you don't think about those things your writing becomes little more than typing.

What am I trying to say right now? I suppose it's that I needed to start typing to start writing again. I've made a lot of excuses about why I didn't want to write, and all of those moments of laziness have added up over time to a lot of non-writing, which was the opposite of my goal in the beginning. I want to write, and so I had to start with something, and sometimes nothing turns into something quite worth writing.

Hard Not to Yell

If we default on our national debt, or come close enough that the market demands higher interest rates on our debt, adding hundred and hundreds of billions of dollars in long term debt liabilities for current and future tax payers to pay, it will be one of the most needlessly stupid self-inflicted errors of any government ever. To wit here is a collection of comments from sane conservatives (no, those words do not have to be mutually exclusive, and for most of this country's history they weren't) compiled by Adam Ozimek with some sensible words about the debt ceiling compiled . As Ozimek says

I’m trying not to get shrill here, it’s getting hard.

I wanna go to Grand Rapids

A Long Dark Shadow

This is just a startling quote from Adam Hochschild's new book To End All Wars

More than 700 million artillery and mortar rounds were fired on the Western Front between 1914 and 1918, of which an estimated 15 percent failed to explode. Every year these leftover shells kill people-36 in 1991 alone, for instance, when France excavated the track bed for a new high-speed rail line. Dotted throughout the region are patches of uncleared forest or scrub surrounded by yellow danger signs in French and Enflish warning hikers away. The French government employs teams of demineurs, roving bomb-disposal specialists, who respond to calls when villagers discover shells; they collect and destroy 900 tons of unexploded munitions each year. More than 630 French demineurs have died in the line of duty since 1946. (Hochschild, xii)

I suppose I shouldn't be surprised at the enormity or the staying power of the Great War in our lives, but I am. It is still hard to grasp death and destruction on such an absurdly industrial scale, and yet the reality of the modern mechanized war that World War I inaugurated has been with us now for almost a century. A contemporary example is useful to illustrate the relative destructive power unleashed from 1914-1918. The people of Afgahnistan, and the allied soldiers fighting there know all too well the reality of modern war, and the all the deadly detritus it leaves behind. But even Afganhistan, the "most minded country in the world" with it's 30 years of internecine conflict, currently has only an estimated 100,000 land mines (past figures have indicated numbers as high as 500,000 land mines, but the US military has helped clear a lot of mines). The unexploded ordinance remaining at the end of World War I according to Hochschild's numbers would number over 100 million. I know that land mines and unexploded ordinance are different (land mines are intentionally hidden, unexploded ordinance is not), but this gives you an idea of the extreme scale of destruction that World War I unleashed.

And even beyond the shear number of bombs and the dead they left behind, there is something terrifyingly special about the First World War's brand of mechanized destruction. Perhaps because it was the first, perhaps because so many of its participants didn't yet understand the new rules of war, the First World War has always seemed especially cruel. It murdered the innocence of the modern world, and we've lived in its shadow ever since.

This Says it All

h/t Slate and Think Progress

Scott Adams Should Take a History Course

Scott Adams is famous for writing a satirical cartoon that makes a number of astute, funny observations about life in the modern office environment. He also now has a rather well-read blog, which I've enjoyed reading on occasion. A post of his from last week though caught my eye for its particular obtuseness, a characteristic I hadn't often associated with Adams.

h/t andrew sullivan

The post is about what Adams calls the "Education Complexity Shift," which is short-hand for his observation that life in the modern world has become very quickly very complex, too quickly for the U.S's education system to keep up. Thus our education system is failing most of our students (the "B Students" Adams calls them) by not providing the kinds of basic practical education that they're really going to need in life to help them succeed, and is instead focusing on topics that most students will forget quickly like history, calculus, trigonometry, etc. Adams wants schools to focus on more "practical" topics like teaching students how to start a business, or how to compare financial documents, because presumably these are the kinds of skills that businesses are looking for. Adams doesn't have a problem with history or trigonometry per se, he thinks they're certainly better than teaching nothing, just not better than practical subjects that teach "marketable" skills. But lets take his argument piece by piece. Here is Adams first point

I'll begin by stipulating that any field of study is helpful in training a student's mind to become more of a learning machine. Two hundred years ago, when life itself was simple (feed the horse, plant the corn) you needed to make school artificially complicated to stretch a student's mind. Once a student's mind was expanded, stressed, stretched and challenged, it became a powerful tool when released back into the relatively simple "real world."

What's interesting is that Adams while maligning history's practical value in today's "complex" society decides to begin his post by just making up his own history to justify his argument for why history is not particularly valuable for most people to know in the modern world. Yes, back in the good old days in early 19th century America when life was so simple, when feeding horses and picking corn were our only concerns. It's totally reductionist. The early 19th Century wasn't really less complex than our lives today. We were fighting wars in Libiya just like today. America was expanding rapidly westward and usurping land from Native Americans as they went. Not what one would consider an uncomplicated endeavor. Slavery was a very present evil in American society, which of course did not complicate society at all (wink wink). Women were denied equal standing with men, again not a complication at all. Oh, and I almost forgot, the U.S. was trying out this little known experiment called representative democracy, which had never succeeded before, except in some tiny Greek city states 2000 years ago, and that could really only be considered a minor complication, I mean James Madison just made slight mention in the Federalist Papers of the fact that what the U.S. was doing was totally revolutionary in every sense of the word and might very well fail, though he was optimistic. Basically early 19th Century America was pretty freaking complicated, and there was a lot for a person to learn to succeed in it (imagine being an ambitious woman in 1811, just imagine it for a second, and basically every thing that Scott Adams says in this paragraph turns to dust), so this idea that all of a sudden we've arrived in 2011 in an uncomplicated world is a total reductionist invention that has no support from the real world that Adams presumes to know so much about. The world has always been full of complications, lets just accept that as our base reality as human beings. It's why we're so lucky to be an adaptable species. Our systems of education are to my mind best when they enhance our abilities to adapt, but we'll get to that more as we move further into Adam's argument. On to his second point.

The Education Complexity Shift observes that the real world has become more complicated than school. Imagine trying to teach a young child how to do the routine adult task of planning the most efficient trip by plane, or getting a mortgage, or investing. How about planning a wedding? How many pieces of software do you use for your job?

His point here is clearly that these are all important things that kids need to know how to do but which are never (or at least very rarely) actually taught in school, and it would be better if they were taught them because unlike history or calculus these things will actually be used in almost every person's day to day life with measurable consequences if not used correctly (e.g. lost time, money etc.). But while I'd agree that it's useful to know each of these things, I still think that it's much more important to learn how to think clearly and learn how to reason well and learn how to learn well, and learn to treat others with respect and dignity, which is what education is supposed to teach us. So these things that Adams mentioned like finding the most efficient flight seem trivial by comparison as each one can be overcome if the prerequisites of clear, critical thinking, learning to learn, and treating others with respect are first met. Let's move on to Adams closing argument

Today, life is more complicated than school. That means the best way to expand a student's mind is by teaching more about the practical complexities of the real world and less about, for example, the history of Europe, or trigonometry.

I'll pause here to acknowledge that both history and trigonometry are useful for students who plan to become historians or rocket scientists. For the other 99.9% of the world, little from those classes will be retained. The only benefit from much of what is taught in school is generic training of the mind, and for that we now have a better and more complicated option: the real world.

Some of you will argue that learning history is important on a number of levels, including creating a shared culture, understanding other countries, and avoiding the mistakes of the past. I agree. And if the question was teaching history versus teaching nothing, history would be the best choice every time. But if you compare teaching history with, for example, teaching a kid how to compare complicated financial alternatives, I'd always choose the skill that has the most practical value. You get all the benefit of generic mental training plus some real world benefits if any of it is retained.

I'd still teach history in school. But I think the world will survive if some of the details are skipped to make room for more relevant coursework.

Well you see it's interesting because in college I majored in History and German Literature and now I work as a budget analyst (go figure) and yet I've still maintained the ability to pull apart and critique reductionist historical arguments (which by the way comes in very handy in analyzing budgets).

I see Adams' point about the added benefits of teaching kids how to do things like compare complex financial alternatives, and I think that such lessons can and should be made a greater part of current curriculum, but I am absolutely not a believer in dismantling our liberal arts education system in favor of a dramatically greater emphasis on practical education. You see, this goes back to my point about adaptability. I think that school should focus on developing skills like critical thinking, reading comprehension, logical reasoning, verbal communication, written communication, etc. that would be applicable to any job. There should be practical elements to each of those skills that are taught, but by providing a good general base of skills to our students we can ensure that they have the ability to change careers both when its suits their interests and when its a necessity. I got the job I have now because I could write clearly, think clearly, and communicate clearly. I happened to learn that studying history and German literature and a whole lot of other stuff. Those were the things that interested me, and that made acquiring the skills I just mentioned a whole lot easier to stomach. You have to provide kids with enough opportunities to spark their imagination, and that includes teaching them a lot of different things, not just practical things, in order to teach them the core skills you know they'll need. In an op ed piece for the Wall Street Journal, Adams mentions that for him in college that meant having the opportunity to try his hand at entrepreneurship. For some other kid it might be learning trigonometry, or it might be physics, or it might be music, or basketball, or whatever. The point is there are a lot of different ways for a person to learn. We shouldn't be too focused on practical application from the start. We need to get kids attention first. I don't presume to think that that's easy, but I do know many people have tried this before, and perhaps the best place to start is by taking a look at history, the repository of all our mistakes, a pretty good place to learn about literally anything you want to know.

Ranting on Healthcare and Human Nature

I am not an expert in health care policy, the subject of my following rant, but I do know something about human nature, which is my primary critique in my following rant.

Andrew Sullivan is my favorite blogger by a wide margin, and not because I agree with him on every issue, but because I find his temperament to largely fit my own. He cares passionately about a great many issues, and is always ready to voice his opinion on them, but he is also often willing to listen to the other side and acknowledge the other side of the issue and even admit when he is wrong and change his opinion accordingly. But there are a few issues on which he becomes very stubborn and fixated on some truly unworkable positions. One of those issues is the deficit, and as health care costs are the single biggest driver of long-term budget deficits, Sullivan is now fixated on Paul Ryan's draconian plans for Medicare (never-mind Medicaid).

Sullivan, as he usually does, opens his post on Ryan's Medicare reform proposal by directing his readers to a substantive, well-reasoned, thought-provoking article on the issue at hand.

The most helpful piece I've read on Paul Ryan's proposal suggests that a voucher system for Medicare may be popular - but it likely won't cut costs, as the history of Medicare Advantage shows. Money quote from Austin Frakt:

'The politics of Medicare are such that Ryan’s idea, paying for care entirely through private plans, costs more. That's not due to a market failure, but a political one. Congress likes to spend money; insurers, providers and beneficiaries like to receive it. Congress spends even more when it can satisfy those interests under the guise of a seemingly pro-market, pro-competitive program. When it comes to cost control and considering the political calculus of Congress, vouchers and Medicare don't add up.'

Sullivan is right, Austin Frakt, an Assistant Professor at Health Policy and Management at Boston University, has written a very illuminating piece on Paul Ryan's proposal to turn Medicare fully into a voucher program while also reducing its benefits overall. Here's the evidence that Frakt uses that leads to the conclusion that Sullivan quotes above:

About Ryan's plan, economist Paul Krugman wrote in the New York Times, "[W]e already know, from experience with the Medicare Advantage program, that a voucher system would have higher, not lower, costs than our current system." Krugman is correct: When it comes to Medicare, vouchers and cost control, it seems you can't get all three.

Though rarely described this way, the private Medicare Advantage plans are a (voluntary) voucher system. When covering a beneficiary, an Advantage plan receives a fixed monthly payment from Medicare that depends on the beneficiary's county of residence and health status. That fixed monthly payment is tantamount to a voucher. With it, beneficiaries can select from any Advantage plan operating in their county. They can also stick with traditional fee-for-service Medicare--and about three in four beneficiaries do so.

But today, the market-based arm of the program costs more, not less, per beneficiary. Those fixed monthly payments to Advantage plans are, on average, 13 percent above fee-for-service Medicare costs. It didn't start out that way. Originally, private Medicare plans were paid 95 percent of per beneficiary fee-for-service costs. The logic was that private plans ought to be able to provide Medicare services more efficiently than traditional Medicare through a combination of controlling utilization and driving hard bargains with providers. So, Medicare used to take five percent off the top.

Then Congress began to ratchet up payments, first with the 1997 Balanced Budget Act and more recently with the 2003 Medicare Modernization Act. (This year’s health reform law aims to reduce Advantage payments, though still not below 100 percent of fee-for-service costs on average.) Ironically, traditional Medicare payment regulatory reforms--like the prospective payment of hospitals and home health agencies--have been more successful (even if not anywhere near successful enough) in mollifying the rate of growth in the program's costs.

What's going on? Why is the market-based Advantage voucher system not helping to control Medicare costs? The answer is that health care cost control is tough, technically and politically. Provider groups typically resist it. When it pertains to Medicare, beneficiaries resist it too. By adding another private-sector layer to the program--health insurers--the Advantage program invites a third source of political pressure. Rent-seeking by providers and insurers, as well as the power of the beneficiary constituency, align in their encouragement of higher Advantage payments. Congress, apparently, is willing to yield to that encouragement.

This is not a particularly surprising state of affairs as there are a whole host of issues where rent-seekers have captured the votes of Congress, the insurance industry just happens to be one of the most powerful and effective rent-seekers lobbying Congress. But Sullivan isn't convinced that the insurance industry couldn't be made to heel in order to keep the deficit down:

The argument seems to be that private insurance companies have so much political clout that they would be a more formidable impediment to cost-control than traditional, single payer Medicare. That seems defeatist to me. And, as Krugman points out, there is a very strong and simple mechanism for cost control in the Ryan-Rivlin proposal:

I’m sure that the Republicans will claim savings — but those savings will come entirely from limiting the vouchers to below the rate of rise in health care costs; in effect, they will come from denying medical care to those who can’t afford to top up their premiums.

But of course Sullivan doesn't quote Krugman's most important argument for why Ryan's Medicare plans are in for a bumpy ride.

Oh, and for all those older Americans who voted GOP last year because those nasty Democrats were going to cut Medicare, I have just one word: suckers!

Krugman is a little too glib here for my taste, but his point stands: it's very hard to imagine seniors (and the baby boomers who are about to join them) taking on more of the costs of covering their medical expenses just when they're reaching the age when those costs are the highest without putting up a very big fight that they would most likely win. As Krugman alludes to, Medicare is a very popular program with both republicans and democrats, one that even many supposedly small government conservatives support, though sadly many of them mistakenly believe that medicare is not a government program (in no small part because their leaders lie to them repeatedly). But somehow Sullivan expects seniors to go along with something that is so obviously against their own self-interest when there is seemingly no political reason why they should have to besides the deficit being big (which isn't yet an economically pressing concern as interest rates are really low, and of course low interest rates make seniors even more sensitive to higher medical care costs as low interest rates are really bad for savers).

Yep: seniors will have to accept limits to the care they receive. And instead of the government rationing, they will just have vouchers that do not keep up with the price of cutting edge medicine. That should not mean abandoning the cost controls in health insurance reform, and constant exerimentation to make the health sector more efficient. And such an austere remedy requires, to my mind, sacrifice from those who earn over $250,000 a year.

However much I might want to agree with Sullivan that drastic measures are needed to shore up the US deficit, especially over the long-term, which as a matter of course involves tackling medical costs, I don't see for the life of me how he can possibly think that Paul Ryan's plan is anything but DOA. Not only does Ryan's plan make the wrong assumptions about Congress, but it makes the wrong asumptions about seniors, the most powerful voting block in America. Sullivan can hope that politicians will show some back bone and stand up to insurers, but given their history and absolutely no change in their incentive structure there is no reason to believe they would. Sullivan can hope that seniors would act altruisticaly in their golden years to help safeguard their grandchildren from a crushing debt burden, but again, with no change in their incentive structure, why would they? Imagine you're 68 years old, you have just enough saved to make it relatively comfortably to 85, but you don't know how things would work out beyond that. Then the economic crisis hits, and while your retirement is safe since you were smart and hid it in bonds and savings accounts, all of a sudden the math has changed dramatically on your rate of return on your savings with interest rates being so low. Also, your only daughter's husband has just lost his job and your daughter is struggling to take care of her family as the primary bread-winner, so it's pretty hard to imagine having her take care of you too. Now someone comes along and says they might be raising the cost of your health care. How do you feel right now? I don't think you're feeling really generous, and I completely understand even though I'm 27 and I might be paying for the costs of your health care for the rest of my life.

Finally, just to add one more substantive critique to the Ryan plan, I encourage you to take a look at a report [pdf] McKinsey and Co. did a few years ago on why health care costs are so high in the U.S. I suggest reading the whole analysis, it's very good, but here's their final conclusion, which I think provides one final simple substantive reason why I think both Sullivan and Ryan are off base:

Our analysis shows that the high costs of US health care are widespread across the system. In the public debate about how to bring costs under better control, different advocates have proposed a variety of preferred targets for change--whether the administrative complexity of the privagte system, the profitability of the pharmaceutical companies, or the compensation system for physicians. Yet, our analysis shows that most components of the US health care system are economically distorted and that no single factor is either the cause, or the sivler bullet, for reform actions. To be effective, refrom in the US health care system will need to involve all key stakeholders and will require the proposal of solutions that are placed in the context of a coherent set of principles covering both the demand and the supply sides of the system.

Ryan's proposal only tackles one side of the issue by artificially reducing demand by reducing the amount of money that people have to spend on health care. It does nothing to address the issue of costs on the supply side, except by assuming that they'll be taken care of with less demand. But regardless of whether that's good economics, can you really imagine big pharma, the AMA, or the big medical supply companies, just giving up all the money they've made off the system without a fight? You have to address that issue or it will eat you alive. The worst assumption that both Ryan and Sulivan make is that they assume that to solve the issue of high medical costs all you really need to do is get a few groups of people to give up some very large government funded benefits. But in reality you actually need a whole lot of groups of people to give up a whole lot of government funded benefits, and I'm not entirely sure why seniors need to be first on the list of people needing to give up benefits.

Story Time

A duck named Francis, a brilliantly white feathered fellow with a sly disposition, was in debt to an even-tempered but not to be trifled with mallard named Fred to the tune of $100 American. As a result Francis, non-confrontational by nature, had been avoiding Fred, and Fred knew it, and Fred wanted to do something about it. So Fred started scheming. He knew that Francis had a particular weakness for crumb cake, and he also knew one of Francis' good friends Nicholas was not particularly astute and couldn't keep a secret. So Fred sought out Nicholas at the local watering hole, Perry's pond, and just so happened to drop the innocent little detail that Hoffman's Bakery, which is located on the eastern side of Perry's pond, would be throwing out a large batch of crumb cake that had gone unsold, and that Mr. Hoffman himself had promised to share some of the crumb cake with the ducks at the pond that afternoon. This sent Nicholas into a tittering display of wing flapping highlighted by several loud quacks that Fred found rather annoying, but then everything Nicholas did Fred found annoying.

After extricating himself from his seemingly long conversation with Nicholas, Fred quickly flew over to the area of the pond just behind Hoffman's Bakery and found a discrete spot behind some bushes where he could hide and wait for Francis to arrive. And a scant 30 minutes later Francis did arrive along with Nicholas and 20 other ducks, who had only too easily overheard Nicholas' excited chattering about free crumb cake at the pond. Now Fred had his chance, he flew up from behind the bushes and landed right in front of Francis and straight-forwardly asked him "where's my money, and why have you been avoiding me?" Though seemingly benign in nature this mild excitement was too much for Nicholas given his steady diet of crumb cake and high levels of stress from being in debt and not confronting his problems. He promptly keeled over and died on the spot.

The End

The Middle East Revolution in the Scope of Carl Sagan's Vision for Our Planet

H/T Exum via Sullivan

Good Advice

I try to leave out the parts that people skip. ~Elmore Leonard

What's Fair About It?

Joe Posnanski is, I am convinced, the most insightful sports writer working in America today, and he had another gem of an article a couple days ago. Posnanski was writing about the "fairness" of the NFL playoffs.

We, as American sports fans, like endings. I think that speaks a little bit to who we are. We tend to think of September baseball games being more important than April games. We tend to think of heroics in the fourth quarter being more meaningful than heroics in the second. We tend to put more stock into great Sunday finishes in golf than great Thursday opening rounds. I think the vast majority of us believe in the fairness of playoffs over the fairness of extended excellence, the value of single-elimination games over the value of many weeks of consistent winning. Like I say: I think that speaks a little bit to who we are.

I think this is right on target, American's like to duke it out, to settle the score, and that fits with the NFL playoff system. But Posnanski is just getting warmed up. After going through the intricacies of the NFL playoff system, he gets to a very interesting and important question, but one that he points out is often off limits for discussion.

I love the NFL playoffs. I love the randomness of it. The NFL is built around that Any Given Sunday credo, and the game thrives largely because of that. You really don’t know what’s going to happen. But the question I think about, the question I want to ask here, is: WHY do we love that sort of randomness?

I bring up the BCS again. Lately, it feels like I have been arguing a lot in favor of the BCS, which is a weird thing because I don’t like the BCS system, don’t have any desire to argue for it, and I absolutely would prefer a well-designed college football playoff. My problem, I guess, is that I want to have a discussion, and it seems that almost nobody wants to talk about it. It seems like just about any time I bring up the question — is a playoff really MORE FAIR — I get yelled at, even by close friends. The BCS has been demonized past the point of absurdity, past the point where anyone even LISTENS when someone suggests that, hey, maybe it’s not that bad.

Is a playoff really MORE FAIR? What does fair even mean? This year in college football, the BCS system had Oregon play Auburn for a trophy they called the national championship trophy. This left out other very good teams, particularly undefeated TCU. This wasn’t fair. There was much griping about it, and rightfully so. It is absurd and somewhat arrogant to believe that we can use our eyes and our computer systems and our innate sense of the game to look at more than 100 Division I football teams playing somewhat self-determined schedules and simply pick the two best teams. The flaws in the system are obvious.

But aren’t the playoff flaws obvious, too? This year in the NFL, the playoff system included a seven-win team and took one 10-6 wild-card team while leaving two other 10-6 teams at home. The system made a 12-win team and two 11-win teams go on the road for their first game, while three teams with 10 or fewer wins (including the NFL’s first seven-win playoff team) played home games. This year, the NFL rewarded New England and Atlanta for their 14- and 13-win seasons by giving them an extra week to heal and home field advantage. This seems like a seismic advantage. But is it really? We cannot argue that they promptly lost convincingly — making that one loss much more important than their stellar 16-game seasons. We cannot argue that 12 of the last 24 bye teams have lost their first playoff game.

I think this is an oft misunderstood point among most American sports fans, and especially most critics of the BCS system in college football. I would argue that the argument against the BCS is not that it is more unfair than a playoff alternative, but that it doesn't give enough teams the opportunity to settle things on the field. Those aren't the same thing. A playoff simply by virtue of increasing the number of teams competing for the championship increases the odds that the team that wins the championship will not have had the best record during the regular season. A playoff, as Posnanski says, prizes success over a smaller time frame. The BCS does as well, but in order to make it to that prized smaller time frame (the 1 game championship) a team has to be successful (at least as determined by the BCS system) over a longer time frame. This is less true in the NFL playoff structure (e.g. 7-9 Seattle made the playoffs this year while two 10-6 teams did not).

This is all my way of saying that we should get discussions of fairness out of the BCS debate. If we as Americans like the idea of settling things on the field with a winner take all game at the end of season as the culmination of a sudden death playoff as opposed to allowing pollsters and computers to tell us who the best teams are and then having them duke it out then so be it, but let's not delude ourselves into thinking that will make things more fair. In fact the fairest system may well be that of the English Premier league and other sporting leagues that share its structure. Here is Wikipedia's description of how it works.

There are 20 clubs in the Premier League. During the course of a season (from August to May) each club plays the others twice (a double round-robin system), once at their home stadium and once at that of their opponents, for a total of 38 games. Teams receive three points for a win and one point for a draw. No points are awarded for a loss. Teams are ranked by total points, then goal difference, and then goals scored. At the end of each season, the club with the most points is crowned champion. If points are equal, the goal difference and then goals scored determine the winner. If still equal, teams are deemed to occupy the same position. If there is a tie for the championship, for relegation, or for qualification to other competitions, a play-off match at a neutral venue decides rank.^[21] The three lowest placed teams are relegated into the Football League Championship and the top two teams from the Championship, together with the winner of play-offs involving the third to sixth placed Championship clubs, are promoted in their place.

This is a fairer system because by prizing success over the course of an entire season as opposed to a few games, one makes certain that the team with the best record wins the championship. Why is this fairer? Because with chance any team can lose one game, especially at a high level of competition, but over the course of a season the best team will win out because of the greater sample size of games to weed out those succeeding because of chance from those succeeding because of talent, hard work, and teamwork. But we'll never get such a system in America fair as it may be because as Posnanski argues, its not the American way. Success over the long term may be immeasurably harder than success over the moment or over the course of a game, but it's also more fun to watch two teams compete for it all when the stakes are at their highest.

In the wake of their defeat, few are probably ready to recognize the greatness of the Patriots. What they have achieved over the past 10 years is much harder to achieve than what the Jets achieved over one game, but to the victor goes the spoils, for now at least.

A Child's Dream

James Fallows hits the nail on the head for why Obama's speech tonight was so successful

Because it was hopeful and positive, even joyous, rather than morose.

The standard comparisons of the past four days have been to Ronald Reagan after the Challenger disaster and Bill Clinton after Oklahoma City. Tonight's speech matched those as a demonstration of "head of state" presence, and far exceeded them as oratory -- while being completely different in tone and nature. They, in retrospect, were mainly -- and effectively -- designed to note tragic loss. Obama turned this into a celebration -- of the people who were killed, of the values they lived by, and of the way their example could bring out the better in all of us and in our country.

Also, Andrew Sullivan wrote reflecting the President's call to live up to the dreams of what those who died in Tuscon have for our country.

To rate this address on any political meter would be to demean it. The president wrested free of politics tonight and spoke of greater things. I pledge myself to try and follow his advice and debate with vigor and spirit and candor and bluntness, but with more civility, more empathy, and, yes, more love.

I was personally affected by this speech perhaps more than any other political speech I've ever heard, and I think that's because it focused so much on people's personal lives, who the six victims of the shooting were as wives and husbands, parents and grandparents, brothers and sisters, neighbors and colleagues. You could see in his eyes that the President was very moved by the tragedy, and that the death of 9 year-old Christina Taylor Green affected him most of all. It must be his greatest fear that someone would target his daughters, and I think the central message of the speech reflects that. The message was, can we live up to Christina Taylor Green's imagining of what this country can be? Can we be as good as she wants us to be? For a father I think that must be a very powerful feeling, to think about what your daughter's wishes for you are, what her wishes are for this country, especially if you can imagine her being taken from you before she got to grow old. The dreams of a child who's gone become in some ways a burden, or a task unmet. She wasn't able to see it through, but perhaps we can see it through for her. It's sort of a modern day "better angels of our nature." The best in us are the beautiful dreams of our children. It's a wonderful message in this time of sorrow, it is a way to heal us, a way to remind us of our own dreams and that we once believed them attainable and perhaps can again.

A Sacred Effort

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The President captures the emotion and the spirit of the times. As Frederick Douglas once said of a speech by Abraham Lincoln that was "a sacred effort."

History Runs Together

This is a great photo/graphic showing the layers of graffiti over a thousand years on a rock in Red Rocks Canyon National Monument just outside of Las Vegas.

The Crush of Search

There is something very sad to me about search engine optimization, that the search for content is ruled often by a very savvy computer algorithm devoid of human emotion searching out what it has been told (partly by me and partly by coders and partly by its own interactions with the web) are the things I want without ever engaging with me on a purely human level. I think that may be why as Andrew Sullivan argues so many of the main media aggregation sites, the Daily Dish, Huffpo, Drudge, et al. have a single human being at their core. You trust that person to deliver the news of the day filtered through their own foibles and unabashed human uniqueness. We still seek out human connection on the web even though we are interfacing through so much inhuman code. It's why facebook and twitter have seen such explosive growth. We go to people we know, people we can interact with to get the information we're after. Of course some might argue that since code is a human creation it can't really be inhuman. Perhaps I just don't understand it well enough to see the human behind its creation. But of course code is designed to straighten the lines of what it means to be human. It is not designed to be a cardigan wearing bespectacled librarian with an exquisite and intricate knowledge of 19th century Russian literature, it is designed to take me to the site with the most connections to the search terms I entered, whether that is the best source of information I was looking for or not. Search is of course an incredible innovation that has made finding information millions of times easier than it ever was before. Information no longer has to be cataloged, it simply has to be available for search. But there is a loss implicit in this transaction, and perhaps that loss is worth it, but there is a loss just the same in that we no longer connect with people as directly (and by that I mean there are now layers of technology between us)as we once did in our search for information, and that leaves me a little cold.

H/T Andrew Sullivan

The Science Behind Why Oregon is #1 in Football

What if Political Boundaries Were Based on Social Connections?

H/T @spatialanalysis

Slow to Change

Ezra Klein has a nice short post quoting an academic involved in developing "metrics" to measure the effectiveness of government programs. This is all to0 sadly true:

Many academics--myself included--have participated in efforts to produce these numbers. GPRA- measures are quite valuable to document that you have done the work, and to characterize the populations an intervention serves. These measures do not provide the kind of program evaluation information policymakers really need to understand which programs are most effective or cost-effective. Funders generally require too many numbers and reports, which have a way of being collected in a nice binder that sits on a shelf, pleasantly undisturbed.

It's not enough just to count things and measure things, that counting and measuring has to actually mean something, it has to actually have a purpose, and generally speaking for program management purposes, performance information should facilitate better decision-making so that programs and agencies become more effective and efficient. But 250 year-old organizations that face no competition are slow to change.