OK, so maybe money matters maybe

I am generally of the opinion that big money will not matter that much in determining the winners in American presidential politics. Because each party wins about half the time, we would expect rational people (and corporations, although I guess they are now people too) to support both parties; higher spending overall will not necessarily mean higher spending by one party relative to the other. Plus, because presidential politics rely on so many macro issues, and the candidates become very well known by the time the election comes around, the benefits of the extra marginal dollar become quite small.

And yet, I can’t ignore Mitt Romney’s ad blitz in Florida and its effectiveness. After reading the piece in the NYTimes this weekend following Romney’s campaign, you would think that the reason Romney is doing better in Florida is because his campaign told him to “unleash” his aggressive side and start attacking Gingrich. But actually, it just means he outspent Gingrich 5:1. We can look at isolated examples where the bigger money candidate lost (Boxer in CA, Kerry in 2004). But the asymmetry of the Florida election suggests that the age of superspending is just beginning and it will have consequences. It also suggests that because the Establishment can’t rally around a candidate in the way they used to (for fear of incurring Tea Party wrath), their circling of the wagons will just involve tens of millions of dollars.

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Oscar nominees: quick take

The full list is out. What do you all think about it?

What I like:

-Love for Moneyball. Granted, I might be biased due to my love of baseball, but I think it’s a great film, and I like that it got nominated for Best Picture, Brad Pitt for Best Actor, and Jonah Hill for Best Supporting Actor.

-Love for Bridesmaids. One of the year’s best comedies got noms for screenplay and for supporting actress. Only problem is it could have gotten a nod for Best Picture. It certainly deserved it more than The Hangover did.

What I don’t like:

-Movies with bad reviews getting nominated for Best Picture. Previously, it has happened to The Blind Side and to The Reader. This year it happened to Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. It has a 46 on Metacritic. Seems like a bad choice.

-Not enough love for Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. Rooney Mara got a well deserved Best Actress nomination, but I think Fincher could have gotten a Best Director nod, and the film certainly should have been one of nine to be nominated.

What surprised or intrigued me:

-Best Screenplay for A Separation. It already seems guaranteed to win for Best Foreign Film, but it might be truly fantastic to get other noms.

-How does Tintin win the Golden Globe for Best Animated film but not even get nominated for the Oscar?

-The Academy was evidently unable to resist movies that celebrated movies. Hugo and The Artist lead the field. I am excited to see both.

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The tyranny of the 3.5-star review

I was thinking about buying a probe thermometer because I would like to better assess the doneness of my meat, so I went to Amazon to take a look. I typed in “probe thermometer” and Amazon returned a set of thermometers. They vary in price and functionality, but they all have one thing in common: 3.5 stars.

The other day, I decided I wanted to try a new Indian restaurant in my area other than the few I always frequent. Lo and behold, they all have 3.5 stars on Yelp.

It seems obvious that, given enough reviewers, customer reviews should tend to mellow out around, well, 3.5 stars. But there are notable exceptions (consider, for example, IMDB).

What is it about product/service reviews in particular that seems to promote the averaging out around 3.5 stars? Let’s take one heavily reviewed Amazon product — an excellent book that I recently read called The Art of Fielding (in my opinion, the best book ever written about baseball):

5 star: (100)
4 star: (34)
3 star: (35)
2 star: (29)
1 star: (50)

It’s an odd distribution to say the least, but it highlights perhaps the problem of people who write online reviews. They are overwhelmingly very high — I enjoyed this book so much that it warranted a review — or overwhelmingly low — this book was so bad that I decided to review it. Compare this with the reviews for the digital probe thermometers and the effect is similar:

5 star: (41)
4 star: (23)
3 star: (10)
2 star: (12)
1 star: (28)

Again, lots of 5 star reviews and lots of 1 star reviews. Again, though, this points to the kind of person willing to write a review for the product. In buying the product you already analyzed it and expected it to be worth your money. If you were extremely impressed or disappointed, you reviewed it. If you were meh, why bother reviewing?

Thus, all popular products inevitably end up in the meh bin.

Weirdly, this does not apply to non-book pop culture. For example, Adele’s 21 sports a shocking 4.5-star rating, but again, this has to do with the ability to sample the wares before you buy the product (same with movies). Before listening to an album, you have heard the songs enough to know whether you like it enough to buy it.

What’s unnerving about this tyranny of the 3.5-star review is that it then makes the customer reviews essentially worthless. The whole promise of crowd-sourced reviews was that they would remove the monopoly of product-reviewers and open everything up to the masses. Instead, the incentives for responses make it such that the reviews provide little to no value to the consumer.

Whether it’s recipes or Zadie Smith novels, the “pretty good” averaging out of reviews has hurt their ability to tell us much about the product we’re buying. In the end, we either end up trusting the qualitative reviews over the quantitative (a bad proposition, if you ask me) or we buy the product and hope for a generous return policy.

Just as with a lot of the new information-heavy world does not make our decisions any easier, these reviews are just more information without any understanding of what they really mean.

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NEKKID GRANDMA!

I love everything about this clip. From the immediacy and certainty (and loudness) of the answer, to the agreement from the other contestent, to the extremely generous awarding of the answer.

I had to leave my lab for a good several minutes to prevent myself from exploding/crying/dying of laughter in front of my labmates.

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Rollin’, rollin’, rollin’,

The key changes when the guys start singing are really striking. This genre of video fascinates me, as it really highlights the combination of group participation and response to music, mass democracy, voyeurism, and exhibitionism that the Internet inhabits. That is to say, this is a piece of art that is entirely new and could not have ever existed previous to this moment in history.

People can complain about whether or not mashup is worthwhile, but it is at least novel.

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One of the best bets I ever lost

At the beginning of August, I made a bet with a labmate of mine. I said that Rick Perry would win the Republican presidential nomination. The terms were that if I won, my labmate owed me lunch, and if anyone other than Rick Perry won, I would owe him lunch. This is called a “field bet,” and it was a mistake. I should have made him pick someone in particular, as opposed to anyone other than Perry. Alternatively, I could have weighed the stakes differently, so that I owed him a lunch if I lost, but he would owe me, say, 3 lunches if I won.

But I didn’t do either of those, and the reason is that I was feeling very confident. Rick Perry had the swagger and alpha male patriarchal gravitas that Republican voters craved, I thought. He’d sign off on executing innocent people in Texas and not give a fuck. He’d lead with his gut, and not listen to a bunch of egghead “experts.” He was a tough talkin’ Texan, unafraid to display his strong religious faith and wage a cultural war against gays, or the nonreligious, or anyone else that seemed acceptable to pick on:

And at first, it seemed like I made a smart bet. Below is the polling for the GOP nomination, and Perry is in blue:

Almost immediately after I made the bet, he sailed right past Romney! Things looked good. But then a funny thing happened. I hadn’t counted on a few key facts. Namely, Rick Perry was too stupid to talk. I had never listened to him before, but I assumed that because he had won all 10 of his previous electoral contests, he presumably had this basic skill more or less covered. I was wrong. In debate after debate, he showed this very clearly:

And as you all know by now, his support tanked and it never came back. The more conservative base of the GOP that didn’t want Romney moved on to other possibilities: Cain, then Gingrich, then Santorum. As Stendhal explained, this more or less guaranteed that Romney would remain the frontrunner.

Today, the news broke that Rick Perry will drop out of the race and throw his support to Gingrich. Who knows, Gingrich may even win South Carolina and build off that win to challenge Romney. But either way, the bet is over and I bought my labmate lunch. But let me just say, I’ve never been so happy to have lost a bet. Of all the GOP nominees, Perry is the one I disliked the most. His cruelty, ignorance, callousness, and stupidity were an awful and dangerous mixture. In the end, I made the best kind of bet: the kind you win either way. I would gladly buy a lunch if it meant that this awful man would never be president.

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“Just kids”

I know, Rick Perry at this point only deserves to be ignored. He has no chance of winning in South Carolina, etc.

But this quote from Perry about the Marines who allegedly urinated on Taliban corpses struck me:

“When you’re 18 or 19, you do dumb things. These kids made a mistake, there’s not any doubt about it,” the Republican presidential hopeful said. He went on to note that other famous military figures acted the same way in a war environment: “[Winston] Churchill did the same thing.”

Although the Marines should be “appropriately punished” Perry criticized “the idea that this administration would go after these young people for a criminal act.”

You know what’s funny? I almost agree with Perry. Kids do dumb things and make terrible mistakes; punishments for them should be different than those for adults.

I wonder what Rick Perry would say about the case of Napoleon Beazley. When he was 17, Beazley committed a brutal murder of a 63-year-old John Luttig during a carjacking. As a result, the state of Texas in turn murdered Beazley by lethal injection for a crime he committed when he was a “kid.” (He was also convicted by an all-white jury; he was black.) Kids make mistakes and Napoleon Beazley made a terrible one. His environment was rife with violence, and he committed a horrific act of violence. His environment and his age do not excuse his act, certainly, but does his act of murder deserve a murder in kind? Surely, there must be some leniency offered to “kids.”

Except, of course, I already know what Rick Perry says about this case. 18 state legislators, as well as the original trial judge, wrote to Perry to ask him to commute Beazley’s sentence. His response?

“To delay his punishment is to delay justice.”

No leniency. No “just kids.” No “dumb mistake.”

Now, one could argue that murder is different than corpse desecration, but I doubt Perry’s response would be any different for alleged murders of civilians committed by American troops at war. When they are committing a murder that Perry likes, they are “just kids.” When they are committing a murder that he doesn’t, they deserve “ultimate justice.”

Were it not for a Supreme Court decision banning executions for crimes committed while a juvenile, I’m sure Perry would gleefully pull the switch himself.

Rick Perry, good Christian, enjoys murdering his own citizens in the name of justice. He is proud of it, whether they were kids or not.

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NFL rooting hierarchy

Once your favorite team has been knocked out of contention (and this happens often to Cubs fans), sporting events continue to occur and sports fans continue to watch them. How do you choose which team to root for, particularly when you have no connection to either team?

So, I present to you my rooting hierarchy for NFL football, but be warned that it is still full of caveats and loopholes.

1. My team (in this case, the Bears, still, although I accept that one can adopt a new home team after a three-year waiting period, shortened to two years if the team is cosmically bad).
2. Teams with some regional connection or personal link (e.g. the Colts, as a result of my attendance of Indiana University).
3. Teams that play interesting or creative football (e.g. the Saints or the 49ers)
4. Big underdogs (e.g. the Rams)
5. Teams that I basically don’t care about at all but respect for their general competence (e.g. the Falcons)
6. Historical rival teams (e.g. the Packers)
7. Teams with obnoxious fans (e.g. the Patriots, the Giants)
8. Teams I dislike on principle (e.g. the Jets)
9. Teams I hate profoundly for a specific usually time-sensitive reason (e.g. Tebowmania and/or the Steelers for Ben Roethlisberger)

Although this generally holds true, multiple attributes apply to identical teams. In that case, the lower rung wins out; i.e. the Broncos were big underdogs (#4), but unfortunately they had Tebowmania, which means that #9 applied and I actually rooted for the Patriots yesterday. Similarly, although the Giants would normally be in the competent teams category (#5), the obnoxiousness of their fans that I have observed in Connecticut puts them into category #7, meaning I have to root for the Packers (a strange outcome).

In some other sports, there’s a category between #2 and #3 for players I really like, but in football, there are just too many players.

So, in case you were wondering, that meant my rooting for the divisional series was Pats over Broncos, Saints over 49ers (but just… for being more creative), Packers over Giants, and Texans over Ravens.

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In defense of: Romney’s time at Bain

OK, this will not be a full-throated defense. Instead, it’s more of a complication of the narrative being pushed by both Democrats and Romney’s Republican rivals. I hate to say that I’m agreeing with Michael Steele here, but I do agree that our moral qualms with Bain Capital and its business may end up implicating a lot of capitalism as a whole. (Unlike Steele, I don’t think this is entirely a bad thing, but let’s start here.)

Bain Capital, Romney’s company, has the M.O. of a lot of private equity firms: they invest in a variety of companies, lay off workers, slim down unprofitable assets, and groom them to be resold.

As with a lot of companies, if they can make more money elsewhere, they will. Capitalism is about making profits for individual companies, and we should expect companies to lay off workers if that makes the more profitable. Industries shift and costs fall elsewhere; that’s just the cost of capitalism. Each entity, acting in its own self-interest, makes decisions that impact the broader web of goods and services. Bain wasn’t playing the system, manipulating currency markets, or performing rent-seeking behaviors per se. Instead, it was just doing what one expects firms to do.

If we don’t like it, we can try to ameliorate these decisions: better education systems, better unemployment benefits, better job retraining, more government jobs to which to shuttle some of these excess workers, etc. We may also build a system that makes companies contribute more to the costs of terminating workers. But the core problem itself — that private equity firms buy up (often failing) businesses, lay off a bunch of workers, and make a profit off of it — is a core problem of capitalism, not just of Mitt Romney.

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If only the Seven Dwarves had ganged up

So, it looks like the Republican Party will get the nominee they all hate: Mitt Romney. For all that “the base” found him repulsive, his enemies could never coalesce around a single candidate capable of beating him. Now, it’s too late. The media may still describe the Republican primary as a race (much as they did with the Obama/Clinton race after Texas and Ohio), but barring scandal, Romney is now the Republican nominee.

Why didn’t the “anyone but Romney” forces gang up? After all, they really really hate the guy.

What we had was a classic collective action problem. Here’s John Nash via Russell Crowe:

Getting the Republican nomination for President, then, is the “blonde.” The Republican nominee not being Mitt Romney is the “friends.”

The refusal of any of the other nominees to leave the race and/or put support behind other candidates (as Michele Bachmann could have done for Rick Perry, had she done it earlier) made it impossible for the “anyone but Romney” forces to align, even though their policy preferences were largely more in line with each other’s than with Romeny’s. Why didn’t they? Because they each thought that with the field so fractured, they actually had a chance to win. Their overconfidence led to Romney’s eventual dominance.

As a result, no one (except Romney) gets what they want.

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