The Hanover Collaboration

Michael Moore has a new movie out, and I have no interest in seeing it because no one appreciates the problems with health care as completely as I do, and I get frustrated with suffering through other people’s ignorant diatribes. There is something I’ve got to get off my chest about his last movie though. It isn’t very interesting, but since no one else is producing any content, I’m going to go for it.

Did anyone else notice that there are no parallels whatsoever between Fahrenheit 451, the Ray Bradbury book about a dystopian future in which books are systematically burned, and Fahrenheit 9/11, a movie about how Bush, Cheney, and their friends are really bad? The central themes of Fahrenheit 451 have to do with television, media, and advertising cheapening culture and the human experience. The central themes in Fahrenheit 9/11 are that Moore doesn’t like the Bush administration.

MM: How about Fahrenheit 9/11?
Yes Man: Fahrenheit, like the temperature?
MM: Yeah.
YM: Is that, like, the temperature jet fuel burns at, or steel melts at, or something? Like a comment on how there must have been bombs in the towers?
MM: No, no. It’s a book. Fahrenheit 561 or something.
YM: Oh, cool. About government conspiracies and terrorism and shit?
MM: I think so. And they burn all the books to keep it secret.
YM: That’s perfect.

Maybe it happened like that, but it feels kind of flat to me. I’d guess they just didn’t think about it very hard.

Background: The Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), commonly called the “Tamil Tigers” in the States, is a seperatist-terrorist organization in Sri Lanka. Sri Lanka is a West Virginia sized island nation just of the south-east tip of India, with a population of about 20 million. The particulars of the LTTE’s (as I will call them in preference to “Tamil Tigers” so as to seem sophisticated and international) motivation and the righteousness or heinousness of their cause where not discernible in the amount of time I have alloted for this post. Let it be said, however, that the LTTE is not Muslim, and does not seem to discriminate against women. The LTTE wants an independant state in the northern and eastern regions of Sri Lanka, where the Tamil people are in the majority. The Sri Lankan government thinks that “regional autonomy” should be good enough.

Recent news: It appears that the LTTE now have an air force. It is believed they smuggled parts for somewhere between one and five Zlin-143s, a Czech small (one non-turbo prop, two seats) airplane, into the jungle where the planes where reassembled and a secret 650 meter runway constructed. The aircraft were then rigged with makeshift external bomb racks.

The Sri Lankan government has itself a real air force, with supersonic fighters an intercepts made in China, Russia, and Israel. I don’t know how hard it is to shoot down a light aircraft from a supersonic interceptor. It might be easy, it might be hard. I wouldn’t be surprised either way.

Three times in the past month the LTTE air craft have taken off under the cover of night and bombed targets in Sri Lanka. The targets have been the national airport, a fuel storage depot, and a military base. Unlike some other governments, the Sri Lankans were able to respond to the aerial bombardment with anti-aircraft fire. Just like some other governments might, the Sri Lankans also immediately bombarded “rebel targets” somewhere in the jungle that may or may not have had airplanes at them.

I bring this up because I think jungle gorilla fighters with smuggled and re-assembled home made bombers is news more interesting than anything going on in the US right now.

Robbie’s mailing address is:

CPT ROB DAPICE
A Co. 4-23 IN, 172nd SBCT
APO, AE 09322

Juliana Dapice writes that her husband, our beloved friend and former teammate Robbie, scheduled to return home from Iraq this fall has instead had his service in the 172nd Stryker Brigade extended indefinitely, and will be redeployed to Baghdad in the near future.

Best wishes Robbie and Juliana.

v2alt: Jon, what is the word that Physicists use when Mathematicians are being annoying? 10:47
v2alt: I need to use it 10:47
v2alt: You know, when they need to exclude the possibility of e.g. the continuous but nowhere differentiable function. 10:48
v2alt: It’s not degenerate 10:49
v2alt: but I think it sounds like the function has a disease 10:49
v2alt: But it sort of means “contrived” 10:53
v2alt: not “pedantic” 10:55
v2alt: Oh I’ve got it “pathological” 10:55

From the White House, thanks to Greg Mankiw and Angry Bear.

“it costs the mint well more than a cent to make a penny.”

The solution, in my view, is to get rid of the penny.

Indeed, I would advocate this even if the penny were free to manufacture, as I argued earlier this year in the Wall Street Journal. The purpose of the monetary system is to facilitate exchange. The penny no longer serves that purpose. When people start leaving a monetary unit at the cash register for the next customer, the unit is too small to be useful. It is just wasting peoples’ time—the economy’s most valuable resource. The fact that the penny is costly to make only adds force to the argument.

Maybe we should get rid of the nickel, too. We can then round all prices to one decimal rather than two.

Greg Mankiw teaches econ 10 at Harvard

It’s a good idea. I support. But personally, I don’t see why we still have cash at all. We have the technology to get rid of it. We have for a while.

There’s only one reason people still use cash: so that they can break the law and get away with it.

• US Military Spending : Fiscal 2006 $441,600,000,000
• Iran Military Spending Estimated 2003 $4,000,000,000

There are two types of motor oil: normal and synthetic.

Normal oil comes out of the ground and gets refined. A car’s worth of normal oil costs $11 at Walmart, plus $5 for a filter. Tom and Ray say that if you use normal oil, then you should probably change it once ever 5,000 miles. The total do-it-yourself cost of normal oil changes is thus $32 per 10,000 miles.

Synthetic oil is manufactured in a lab. Or a factory. I don’t know what they call it, but it doesn’t come out of the ground. It’s better than normal oil. It doesn’t turn into {not oil} in your car engine as quickly as normal oil does. It costs $22 for a cars worth at Walmart, plus the same filter as above. The boys say it’s ok to wait twice as long on synthetic. 10,000 miles. The diy cost of synthetic oil changes is thus $27 per 10,000.

Jiffylube costs $35 for normal oil, or $65 for synthetic oil. Those of you doing the math in your head have noticed something remarkable at this point. That’s right, you could pay full price for the normal oil change, and give JiffyLube 5 quarts of synthetic oil that you bought yourself at Walmart telling them to use that instead of their own normal oil and you’d still come out on top by $8 from what they would have charged you for synthetic oil, less whatever other way the figure out to rip you off that day.

You can find professional oil changes for $25, but not reliably.

The lesson? If you go to Jiffylube, then get the synthetic. It’s a huge rip-off, but over 10,000 miles you still net $5 over getting two normal oil changes, plus you get 1 {not a trip to Jiffylube} which I’d probably value around $10. It’s win-win. The Jiffylube guys think they’re taking you for a ride with their outrageously priced oil, but you still get the best of them in the long run.

But… now suddenly the Jiffylube versus do-it-yourself calculation has changed. Before when you thought about doing it on your own you were looking at saving $18 (plus manliness points) in return for getting all dirty and scrapping some knuckles. That’s a close call in my book. But now, on the synthetic program, you’re looking at saving $38 (plus manliness points) for doing it yourself. That handily tips the scales for me.

If any does get the Jiffylube synthetic, will you please email how many miles the sticker tells you you can go before you need new oil. I bet it’s still 3,000.

[Discaimer: My favorite tribologist uses normal oil.]

“De Beers gets most of it’s profits not from digging diamonds out of the ground, but from cutting, polishing, and marketing them.”

Actually, De Beers gets most of it’s profits from controlling a cartel that artificially limits supply to drive up prices and collect monopoly rent. That’s why they’re the second most evil corporation in the world.

Good try, though, with the cutting and polishing idea.

I let up the pace a bit as I turned onto Reservoir Road in Newton, or Brookline maybe? I just can’t go as hard when I don’t know where I’m going, and there was another intersection coming up already. Traffic was backed up pretty bad. It was backed up because… because there are three gigantic turkeys in the middle of the road? The gobblers noticed me as I slowed to a walk, and waddled off the road and in my direction. The traffic cleared out and the turkeys walked right past me, within a foot. I was tempted to grab one by the neck, but I also just noticed a cop parked back at the intersection. I walked on, and the turkeys started following me, getting real close like maybe they were going to go for a bite of my thigh. I don’t know how much damage a giant turkey bite does. I wasn’t too worried (except maybe about avian flu), but the cop sure was. He got out and said “I… Get!”, with a slap of two leather gloves, “I would try to get away from those birds!”.

They did kind of have me surrounded at this point. But come on, killer turkeys? Then the cop asked if he could taken down my name and number, because he needed witnesses. “I’m having deja vu with these fucking turkeys” he said in closing.

You’re telling me.

“GLASGOW, SCOTLAND —Lead singer and guitarist for pop band Franz Ferdinand, Alexander Kapranos, is in critical condition today after being shot by a man identified as the bassist for rock group Gavrilo Princip…”

I wish there were somewhere I could bet money against bird flu. I’d bet all of mine. And not just because I think that if bird flu happens I’ll die, and so it won’t matter that I’ve bet all my money. I’d bet all of my money even if I were guaranteed to survive and be poor. That makes it extra bad, because there’s considerable evidence that if bird flu does happen then only poor people will die. So if I bet all my money, and bird flu does happen, then I’ll be the only poor person left.

Bird flu isn’t going to happen.

This reminds me of the time I wanted to stay home from Kindergarden “because I was sick” so that I could play Nintendo.

Iran wants a “civilian” nuclear enrichment program that they’re obviously going to use to make nuclear weapons. The world told them that they couldn’t have nuclear weapons, but they were just going to do it anyway. What could we do to stop them?

The Russian Proposed solution is brilliant. The Russians offered to go into a kind of nuclear co-op with Iran. They’d build an enrichment plant together on Russian soil, and operate it together, and Iran could keep half the product.

Iran gets what they claim they want, and we can be assured they’re not making weapons.

What are you going to do now, Iran? You still want that radioactive product, now that you won’t be able to weaponize it? Do you?

My bet: The Russians secretly sell them the finished nukes. They probably wouldn’t have in the ’80s, but now that they’re a Capitalist-Feudalism, how can they resist?

“Believing there is no God gives me more room for belief in family, people, love, truth, beauty, sex, Jell-o and all the other things I can prove and that make this life the best life I will ever have.”

Penn Jillette, of Penn and Teller, on NPR’s Morning Edition

“This I Believe” is a collection of personal essays on faith, produced by NPR.