Eric Busboom

One of the peculiar things about New York City is how tall the hotdog stands are. They are nearly as tall as the Empire State Building! They really are; the top of a New York hot dog stand and the Empire State Building are both about 6,357,000 meters above the center of the Earth.

There are a lot of things that can be distinguishable, or not, depending on where we put the zero. If the zero point is at the center of the earth, you can’t tell a hot dog stand from a skyscraper, but if you put the zero at ground level, you can. This same principle applies to a lot of things such as the distinguishability of males and females, the importance of humans being 98% genetically similar to chimpanzees, or anything related to racial differences. If we analyze the totality of the personalities of males and females, we are all nearly identical, but if we ignore all of the common elements of our humanity, men and women are very different.

Heart vs Head is an ancient debate, but for most important decisions, we need to use both. For public policy, I think the optimum combination is data and love.

By love, I mean the more sophisticated religious formulations, with many different kinds of love. Love you neighbor, but also love your enemy. Parental love and brotherly love which are often stern, not nice, friendly, or agreeable.

To best use data in making policy decisions, you have to really care about people, but also have enough courage to be willing make people angry. Loving decisions are not always popular. Teens never praise their parents for grounding them.

Predictably, yet another mass shooting has led to yet another impassioned debate about the AR-15. And predictably, this debate will result in no useful outcome, because it is not the discussion we should be having. Instead of debating the AR-15, we should be talking about ammo and politics.

As many gun owners explain in every round of this debate, the AR-15 is just a semiautomatic rifle with some military-style cosmetics. Almost none of the features that gun control advocates get agitated about affect the lethality of the weapon, and they rarely talk about the things that do: muzzle energy, supersonic velocity, and muzzle power. We should be regulating these factors, not how the gun looks.

In the last few years, a lot of people who previously would have hated Libertarian ideas — such as the idea that private organizations should be relatively free from government interference — are now quite happy with them, at least the ones that now allow their team to restrict the free expression of the opposite team.

Most often, this takes the form of an argument that private companies are not subject to the First Amendment. The counter argument is that our country is worse off regardless of who is censoring speech, and even if private interests can curtail speech they don’t like, they shouldn’t.
However, the Supreme Court has often ruled that not only shouldn’t they, they can’t.

Mass movements, and cultural changes in general, are driven by True Believers, people who are committed to their cause with religious zeal. But the core of the movement is often too small to make much progress without mobilizing others. Beyond that core of True Believers, I think, is a much larger group of people who are self-interested and will follow along with the True Believers, not because they believe as the zealots do, but because they see advantages in doing so.

“In recent months, the Data Library has worked to digitize the maps of homeless person counts for the last five years collected by the Downtown San Diego Partnership. The data conversion got underway earlier this year with the assistance of Kearny High School students and more progress is expected this fall.”

UCSD Extension, September 2019

Each summer I host 1 to 3 students to work on refurbishing a 6 axis laboratory robot arm, giving them practical experience with programming, electronics and industrial engineering.

One of my long-term irritations with nonprofits is that donors can get deductions for donations to organizations that don’t have as much social impact as other organizations. I don’t think that donations to most large-city symphonies, or yet another $100M to Harvard, makes much of a social difference, but the donor gets the same tax incentive as donations to other, high-impact organizations.

One way to solve this problem, and tackle a few others as well, would be to replace the standard nonprofit tax deduction with a sliding scale deduction based on impact.

Last September, Columbia Journalism Review reported on American’s low and declining trust in the media. In hope of exposing some reason for hope, they asked if that trust might be restored, and about 75% said it could be, if the media improved accuracy by “not reporting stories before [a news outlet] verifies all the facts and being willing to correct mistakes it makes”

Clearly, media outlets carefully considered that advice while writing stories about Covington High School.

The US has been shedding manufacturing jobs since about 2000. ( Not 1970 as many people believe . ) 

But, a capital spending report for the same period shows that capital spending has not dropped:

Furthermore, manufacturing revenue has been climbing over the period, but income after tax has stayed fairly flat. 

So, if the manufacturing companies are spending less on people, the same amount on machines but not getting more income, where is the additional expense? They could be spending more on raw materials, but the other possibility is that they are spending more on services, in the form of outsourced labor. For instance, instead of hiring janitors directly, they hire a janitorial services firm. In this case, the same number of people are being hired, but the job is shifted from “manufacturing” to “services.” I’m not sure about the details of this effect, but it does mean that the decline in manufacturing jobs may not be as great as it appears.