Steve Kass

Here’s the path of US Airways flight 1549 today, according to the track log at FlightAware, drawn on Google Earth. Amazing work by the pilots.

Other flight tracking sites were buggy, like this one (admittedly in beta):

Today President-Elect Obama talked about dialogue and disagreement. That should remind me that as President, he’ll stay committed to bridging differences through understanding and respect.

His inauguration party ought to include people whose viewpoints differ from Obama’s on issues that divide Americans, issues like abortion and the scope of civil rights. It reflects the sincerity of his commitment. Obama should invite people who have the same sincere commitment.

Unfortunately, Obama extended an invitation to Rick Warren, who, in televised and recorded remarks as recently as this week, has roundly and repeatedly dismissed and marginalized gay Americans. In addition, he probably offended millions of Americans committed to extending the civil right of marriage to gay Americans.

Mr. Warren had every right to support Proposition 8. He also had the right to support it just as he did: disrespectfully and dismissively, and without any gesture towards bridging differences or attempting to understand.

The way he supported it (not simply that he did) should have disqualified him from the inauguration ceremony.

Mr. Warren’s offense was neither acceptable nor trivial, but Obama’s invitation means he considered it one or the other, if not both. Mr. Warren dismissed gay relationships as shallow at best, having more in common with incest and pedophilia than with marriage. He swiftly dismissed tens of thousands of gay Americans who have married without fanfare (not to mention millions of civil rights supporters) by saying gay Americans really seek public approval, not marriage rights. And he ignorantly and cruelly characterized the struggle as one between a 5000 year old tradition identical in every religion and culture (even if it weren’t a wild fiction, it wouldn’t be a coherent argument) and the need to "appease" a tiny minority of Americans (where do I begin?)
Dear Mr. Obama,

Please listen to those who’ve taken issue with your choice. Respect us, understand us better, and replace Mr. Warren with someone else, perhaps someone who shares Warren’s viewpoints, but whose behavior has earned him or her the honor and prestige your invitation accords.

Sincerely yours,

Steve Kass
Madison, NJ

I’ve often been puzzled by the contradictory statistics about lifespan and smoking.

According to many reports, smoking shortens lifespan by 13.2 years for men and 14.5 years for women. (Google smoking 13.2 14.5)

Studies of smoking and life expectancy, however, tend to find that non-smokers can expect to live only about five years longer than smokers.

What’s going on?

According to standard life expectancy tables, a living 70-year-old has a remaining life expectancy of about 14 years. An 80-year-old can expect to live about 8 or 9 more years. At any age, there’s an actuarial estimate for remaining life expectancy, and it’s always a positive number.

I haven’t done the calculation, but my guess is that Americans die, on average, with an average remaining life expectancy of about 10 years.

Does this mean that "death shortens lifespan by 10 years"? No.

Consider skydivers. Death by skydiving is likely to occur at a relatively young age. Say the average age of skydivers in fatal skydiving accidents is 40. Since 40-year-olds have an average life expectancy of 39 years, is it reasonable to say that "skydiving shortens lifespan by 39 years"?

Consider (any) surgery on 75-year-olds. Some of them die from the surgery, and the life expectancy of a 75-year-old is about 11 years. Does geriatric surgery shorten lifespan by 11 years? No. Not for those who don’t die, and not for those who do, either, since on average they were probably less healthy than average to begin with.

Consider being born prematurely. The average actuarial life expectancy of a 0-year-old is about 77 years. Some premature babies die (77 years earlier than the actuarial estimate). Does being born prematurely shorten lifespan by 77 years? Not for those who live.

The often-quoted 13.2 and 14.5 year figures follow this methodology. Those numbers are the average (for men and women respectively) actuarial life expectancy estimates for people who die from a disease directly attributable to their smoking.

Since death alone, by this logic, shortens lifespan by about 10 years, death by smoking probably only knocks of a few years, not 13 or 14. And if you don’t die from smoking, who knows – maybe your death only shortens your life expectancy by 8 or 10 years.

Go figure.

In today’s New York Times, Warren Buffett tells us to buy stocks now, while people are scared and times are tough. Wait for the robins, he says, and spring will be over.

He offers a historical illustration to support his advice:

During the Depression, the Dow hit its low, 41, on July 8, 1932. Economic conditions, though, kept deteriorating until Franklin D. Roosevelt took office in March 1933. By that time, the market had already advanced 30 percent. Or think back to the early days of World War II, when things were going badly for the United States in Europe and the Pacific. The market hit bottom in April 1942, well before Allied fortunes turned. Again, in the early 1980s, the time to buy stocks was when inflation raged and the economy was in the tank. In short, bad news is an investor’s best friend. It lets you buy a slice of America’s future at a marked-down price.

No doubt buying on July 8, 1932 would have been opportune. The Dow had fallen for nearly three years, dropping almost 90% off its high of 380 in September, 1929. Today, the Dow has been falling for only a year and is down 40% from its 2007 high. Coincidentally, that’s just the Dow’s position a year after the September 1929 high. Down 40% in the first year. If now is the time to buy, was the historical parallel of now, September, 1930, the time to buy? Not at all. The Dow would go on to lose another 80% in the 22 months after September 1930, not recovering for another 18 years. Not until 1950 would stocks bought in 1930 begin to show a profit.

Buy low, sell high. That’s great advice – for time travelers. Regular folk don’t know whether we’re at the bottom or whether the bottom is far away. Buffett understands the market better than I do, and his recommendation may be sound. But his historical excerpt doesn’t support buying now. Not that any historical excerpt can support any recommendation in the crazy game of chance we call the stock market.

Updated October 19, 2008

Factcheck.org is wrong when they say Obama “mischaracterized” an aspect of McCain’s health care plan.

In last night’s debate, Obama said that under McCain’s proposal, “Your employer now has to pay taxes on the health care that you’re getting from your employer.”Factcheck says Obama got it wrong, and Factcheck says that employers would not “be taxed on the value of health benefits provided to workers.

“Factcheck is forgetting about FICA, a 15%+ payroll tax split between employers and their employees. The employer tax rate on wages and taxable benefits is around 7%. Absent a new loophole for employers in McCain’s plan, if health benefits become taxable, well, they become taxable, and they will be taxed.

Under McCain’s plan, employers that provide health care benefits will have these three choices, none of which is likely to help fix the health care problem:

1. Increase their health care budget by 7% to pay the new McCain tax (which is separate from any inflationary rise in health care costs)
2. Reduce health care benefits to employees by 7% in order to stay even
3. Stop providing health care benefits to employees, since those costs will rise even more rapidly than earlier predicted

Personally, I think payroll taxes are a good thing, but they should apply to benefits only when those benefits are surrogate wages (company cars, houses, stock, golf memberships, and so on). Until we have government health care, employer-provided health care benefits should remain untaxed, for both the employer and the employee.

If Obama got something wrong here, it wasn’t a fact. Obama missed the opportunity to point out that under the McCain proposal, both workers and employers will be taxed on the value of employer-provided health care benefits.

[Added on October 19, 2008] After the debate, a McCain spokesman said McCain never intended to impose payroll tax on health benefits. A recent Wall Street Journal article by Laura Meckler shows that McCain’s camp hasn’t been clear about this.

Factcheck.org, among other publications, claims McCain’s plan will not impose payroll tax on employers for what they spend on employee health benefits. Perhaps they’re right, but they don’t give any convincing evidence. They note that the McCain-Palin web site “now says this,” but I disagree. Here’s the paragraph I assume Factcheck.org is referring to, with my annotations:

Employers will have the same incentive to provide health insurance as they do today since they will continue to deduct the cost of health insurance they provide to employees. Nothing will change. [These costs are, and will continue to be, deductible expenses from the employer’s income, and thus not subject to corporation tax. Corporation tax is a different tax than payroll tax, and there’s been no debate or question about the corporation tax liability.]  In addition [The phrase “in addition” means something new is coming into discussion. In this case, it’s the issue of payroll taxes. The words “in addition” tell us that the previous sentence was not about payroll taxes.], payroll taxes will be protected from taxes under the McCain plan. [Huh? The promise that “payroll taxes will be protected from taxes” sounds nice, but I don’t know what it means. This is either a typo or an intent to mislead.]

This McCain paragraph doesn’t say anywhere that health care benefits will remain exempt from the employer’s payroll tax. It suggests only that they will remain exempt from a different tax, the employer’s corporation tax. The words “payroll taxes” appear in the paragraph only in a context having nothing to do with health care benefits (“taxes will be protected from taxes “).

Given how easy it would be for McCain to have made a clear statement about this, I think McCain plans, or is at least leaving open the possibility, to impose employer payroll taxes (not corporation tax, not individual income tax, and not employee payroll tax) on health care benefits paid to employees.

In a tour de force of apologetic paragraphs, New York Times columnist David Brooks denounces as “baloney” the idea that “the McCain on the campaign trail is the real McCain.” Believe the last “half-century of evidence,” not what you see today.

It’s all perfectly in character for the longtime McCain supporter until out of the blue, WHAM!, he delivers the knockout punch line. “[I]t seemed worth stepping back to recall the fundamentals — about McCain.”

McCain: his fundamentals are strong. I can’t believe Brooks missed the irony, and I hope in the days to come he decides not to be subtle.

From the Wall Street Journal’s “Washington Wire” today (notes added):

The two presidential campaigns have issued competing timelines of events today leading up to McCain’s call to cancel the debates. Here is Obama’s version:

“At 8:30 this morning, Senator Obama called Senator McCain to ask him if he would join in issuing a joint statement outlining their shared principles and conditions for the Treasury proposal and urging Congress and the White House to act in a bipartisan manner to pass such a proposal. At 2:30 this afternoon, Senator McCain returned Senator Obama’s call and agreed to join him in issuing such a statement. The two campaigns are currently working together on the details.”

Shortly after, the McCain campaign released their version:

“Senator Obama phoned Senator McCain at 8:30 am this morning but did not reach him. The topic of Senator Obama’s call to Senator McCain was never discussed [1]. Senator McCain was meeting with economic advisers and talking to leaders in Congress throughout the day prior to calling [2] Senator Obama. At 2:30 pm, Senator McCain phoned Senator Obama and expressed deep concern that the plan on the table would not pass as it currently stands. He asked Senator Obama to join him in returning to Washington to lead a bipartisan effort [4] to solve this problem.”

Translator’s notes:

[1]: “Never discussed”: If Obama did not reach McCain, nothing was discussed. Note that the following is equally true, though understandably the McCain camp chose not to include it in their press release: “A McCain plan to withdraw from the race and apologize for his repeated lies was not discussed.”
[2]: “prior to calling”: Before 2:30, but in all likelihood, not at 8:30, when Obama phoned with the joint statement idea, or the McCain statement would have been specific. Had the McCain camp been cleverer, they wouldn’t have mentioned the exact time of the call at all, because the single mention draws attention to the later non-mention.
[3]: “lead a bipartisan effort”: Here is the McCain camp’s best use of rhetoric in the release. (“Best”, of course, is relative, and does not imply lack of sleaze.) They have rhetorically taken Obama’s good idea (“issuing a joint statement”), kept the concept (“<verb> joint <good thing>”), and concocted a replacement readers might believe is theirs (“lead a bipartisan effort”). The indefinite article “a” emphasizes that there was no earlier mention of a bipartisan effort, and it may be true there wasn’t. But McCain surely knew at this point that Obama had suggested a joint statement, and I bet they talked about it. 

So this is the likely sequence of events:

• Obama called McCain at 8:30 am.
• McCain hears the phone ring, sees it’s Obama, and lets the call go to voice mail. There’s no conversation.
• McCain listens to the voice mail and knows that Obama came up with a good idea before him (McCain).
• Later on, McCain has a few meetings and phone calls.
• At 2:30pm, McCain called Obama, who answered.
• McCain and Obama discuss doing something together.
• Obama’s camp issues a press release about all this.
• McCain’s camp reads the Obama press release. They immediately realize how damaging it would be to ignore, since it hits them hard: Obama had a good idea, and first; McCain didn’t answer an 8:30 call, so where was he?; and regarding any bipartisanship between the candidates, Obama is in control and decisive.
• The McCain team scrambles its writers, and “shortly” afterwards, they issue their own press release crafted to address the strong points of the Obama release as fast as they can. They choose not to lie outright. (You can get in trouble when you make up lies in a hurry.)

The Journal, which is no way “in the tank” for Obama, is appropriately cynical.

In the news today: Governor Palin’s Yahoo! account was hacked. But could it be a hoax? Or could it be Act I of a staged stunt by Palin supporters? I won’t hazard a guess, but I will point out something strange: One of the eye-catching phrases in the message headers posted on wikileaks.org is “CONFIDENTIAL Ethics Matter.” That phrase is sure to get some attention, but for now (i.e., 15 minutes before this post) Google returns only five hits. Three were from today’s news, and the other two were from the .doc and .pdf versions of Alaska’s “Executive Branch Code of Ethics.” Crafty, or just plain weird?[Added at 19:42: The header data from one of the Palin family pictures on wikileaks.org says the photo was taken with a Blackberry Curve 8310. Blackberry…Blackberry… wasn’t that in the news yesterday, too?]

With Software, Till Tampering Is Hard to Find
By Roy Furchgott
August 29, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/30/technology/30zapper.html

As hard as zapper software is to detect, it is easy to make, said Jeff Moss, organizer of the annual hacker convention Def Con. “If it runs on a Windows system and you are a competent Windows administrator, you can do it,” he said.

According to analysts at the consulting firm Frost & Sullivan, 85 percent of all point-of-sale systems, as cash registers are called, run on the Windows operating system, although other systems are also vulnerable.

Don’t blame the operating system; blame the hardware. Modern technology has replaced paper and indelible pen (a twentieth-century write-once, read-only data collection and storage system with physical properties that make forgery difficult; see http://www.flickr.com/photos/stevegarfield/616793140/) with the technological equivalent of a Magic Slate (a 1970’s toy; see http://www.landofthelost.com/slate.htm), which is child’s play to alter.

Do electronic systems that record transactions on write-once storage even exist? The technology exists, and it’s dirt cheap. Why can’t businesses be required to keep permanent, inalterable transaction records? Ultimately it may be impossible to prevent a crooked business owner from embezzling from his or her own business or committing tax fraud. But why make life easy for them by allowing Magic Slates for accountability?

Humans can’t perceive detail and blue at the same time. Our eyes aren’t engineered for it.

We perceive detail at the center of our visual field. The eye’s light- and color-sensitive cells, called cones, are packed most densely at the fovea, the center of the retina. (The retina has more pixels per inch at its center, if you like.) We distinguish shades of blue wherever we have “blue” cones, the one of our three types of cones most selective for blue colors.

To read blue, we need to perceive detail and shades of blue at once. Except we can’t. There are no blue cones in the fovea.

If you can’t read the words below, there’s nothing wrong with you. You’re just human. If only the software and web designers understood.