Taller people seem to have a number of social advantages, from increased earnings to (for men) increased desirability. It’s also an advantage in negotiations.

Various explanations for this have been posited, for example the fairly plausible idea that height correlates greater physical development earlier in life and hence to greater self-esteem.

A study cited in The Body has a Mind of its Own, however, suggests that we deal with height in a way that is both more ingrained and more shallow than that.
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I’ve posted about reasons not to go to grad school before, but I missed a classic post: “Straight Talk about Grad School”.

My own feelings about my postgrad degrees are largely positive, but I think there’s a big difference between shorter postgrad courses (like mine) and doctoral programs.

The MetaFilter discussion about this post includes a comment quoting this classic:

The At-Home PhD Simulator

1. Give a $30,000 donation to the university of your choice, on your credit card.
2. Go to the library and write. Write pages and pages. Every time you reach 50 pages, burn all of them. Repeat for several years.
3. Take out an ad in Craiglist for someone to pretend to be your advisor. Set up periodic meetings with them where they read your drafts and give you the exact opposite of the advice they gave you three months ago.
4. Adjunct a course at your local college. Give lots of written work. Submit everything you get to one of the online plagiarism detectors. Despair for humanity.
5. After ten years, throw a dart at a map. Move where ever it lands for the rest of your life.

All that being said, I’m not sure I’d actually argue against doing a PhD.; I know plenty of people who seem relatively happy to have them. (Although most of those people seem to have done them outside the United States, a factor which may or may not be meaningful.)

I found this New York Times article on “The Damage of Card Rewards” to be rather interesting. Basically, to pay for reward programs aimed at getting the better-off to spend more, credit card companies charge merchants more, and merchants reflect these costs in their prices—but everyone pays the same prices, while only the users of reward programs get offsetting benefits.

The article essentially concludes that there is no solution to this problem—and, unless I missed something, doesn’t address regulation. I’m not necessarily advocating regulation here—it’s likely the banks would simply use it to enrich themselves further somehow, although that’s a practical political problem rather than a theoretical economic one—but I do think it’s odd to set up a problem like this, that seems like it could obviously be tackled using an approach of tweaking market rules, while barely mentioning that approach at all.

Upon typing that title, I realized that it sounds quite like a modern fairy tale or children’s story. Of course, if it were a fairy tale, then the faithful sponsors would stick with Tiger as he attempted to slay the foul beasts of public opprobrium and frenzied media—but instead at least one major sponsor, Accenture, is walking away.
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Naturally, as soon as it became popular to use Facebook to promote political causes, it became attractive to distort the practice. The ease of online ”participation”—clicking a button or, at most, filling out a form—makes it rather difficult to judge just how committed to their causes participants are.

Furthermore, if it’s easy to click, then it’s also easy to persuade people to click, which is not always a good thing.
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I’ve come across what feels like another wave of articles related to bullying recently. I previously wrote about my thoughts on institutional responses, but this time my focus is on some of the causes, as well as how technical rules are unlikely to eliminate the problem.
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No, not tax collectors. At least, in democracies, there’s a notion that collected taxes are disbursed according to the wishes of some significant portion of the populace. Here, I’m talking about the trend of the last few decades for police departments (and other law enforcement agencies) to confiscate property (and cash)—and then use it to fund themselves. Financial Cryptography discusses this issue, outlining its history in measure meant to crack down on money laundering. The Economist also has an article on the issue, and this line should make clear how dubious the whole thing is:

The 2002 Proceeds of Crime Act expanded these powers greatly, allowing courts to seize more or less anything owned by a convict deemed to have a “criminal lifestyle”, and introducing a power of civil recovery, whereby assets may be confiscated through the civil courts even if their owner has not been convicted of a crime.

—“Ill-gotten gains”. The Economist, 8 Oct 2009.

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Figuring out what plug (or adapter) to use in a given country is almost like a game; in any case, I found this Gizmodo article well worth the read: “Giz Explains: Why Every Country Has a Different F#$%ing Plug”.

Michael Lewis’ book Moneyball has something of a cult following, and helped its main subject, Oakland Athletics general manager Billy Beane. The essential idea is that by focusing on non-traditional (in baseball terms) statistical analysis (called Sabermetrics), Beane could identify arbitrage opportunities in baseball markets.
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Living in a capitalist society, many of our pastimes and interests are based on exploitation of one kind or another.

Some of these forms of exploitation are reviled because of their outright cruelty. This revulsion isn’t consistent. One of the things that keeps us calm about them is a veneer of fairness, which allows us to move along in acceptance instad of trying to figure out how to fight. Even if we don’t believe it, either enough other people do or we think enough other people do, which is one of the things that keeps our current system ticking along.

Does our requirement for “fairness” increase the more direct the connection is between the exploitation and our enjoyment? This question is one that struck me while reading Malcom Gladwell’s “Football, dogfighting, and brain damage”.
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It should be clear to any reasonable observer that Wall Street is a rapacious hive of sharks who will do more or less anything at all for money, and that the financial industry is politically powerful enough at this point to get away with more or less anything. It should also be clear that the term “corruption” doesn’t really do justice to their antics.

That being said, I’m still agog at some of what’s covered in this Mait Taibbi article:
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The Kardashev Scale is used to measure a civilization’s technology level, using the measure of its energy consumption—or, more accurately, the amount of energy the civilization can harness. In light of the ongoing computing/networking revolution, I’m curious about what percentage of our energy use is by data centers.
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The new Yankee Stadium opened this year, and with it came a rather large increase in ticket prices. The most outrageously-priced seats are in the “Legends Suite”, and they go from about $500 to about $2500 each.

Reporter Wright Thompson got an assignment to write about what having one of those seats is like, and his article “Seats of Gold” is excellent. Included in it is a damning critique of Wall Street, because the corrupt culture of brokers inducing traders to buy things includes lavishing them with all kinds of entertainment, including prime Yankees tickets:

In exchange for tickets, the trader orders whatever the broker is selling. Everybody wins. The broker gets his sale. The trader gets his seat behind the dugout. Well, almost everybody. You, I’m afraid, get screwed with your pants on. Wall Street was not only trifling with our financial future but also driving up ticket prices.

—Wright Thompson. “Seats of Gold”. ESPN, 5 Oct 2009.

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The NCAA is the National Collegiate Athletics Assocation, the governing body for American college sports. One of the responsibilities it has taken upon itself is the policing of student amateur status, to make sure that colleges do not entice star athletes to join their progams with money or other bribes. I already considered this a ridiculous situation, but realized today that I underestimated just how ridiculous it was.
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(Actually, I’m considering a return to a wider variety of omnivorism, but that’s not as cool a title.)

I gave up eating meat about ten years ago. Since then I’ve been an ovo-lacto-pesce-vegetarian. Now, for the first time, I’m seriously considering eating meat again.
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I know this has been on BoingBoing already, but it seems so ridiculous that I can’t resist posting it here too:

[The City of Bozeman]’s background check policy … states that to be considered for a job applicants must provide log-in information and passwords for social network sites in which they participate
(emphasis mine)
—“Bozeman City job requirement raises privacy concerns”, Dan Boyce, montanasnewsstation.com, 18 Jun 2009

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I’m not surprised, but I’m not happy: ‘Court Jails Pirate Bay Founders’.

I figured, given the amount of pressure brought to bear, that the court would use any means it could to find them guilty. I’m not sure they actually are guilty given the way the laws are written.

(Oh, and for anyone who wants to claim that their defense was to get away on a “technicality”: as my friend Deirdre used to say, all laws are technicalities.)

From one form of labor exploitation to another, different but with some similarities: grad school in the humanities.
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It’s not surprising that some athletes make terrible financial decisions, and one often hears about the Michael Vicks and Mike Tysons of the world ending up with nothing. But I didn’t realize that it was quite so common, and that these examples aren’t exceptions but rather the rule. According to a recent Sports Illustrated article, “[b]y the time they’ve been retired for two years, 78% of former NFL players have gone bankrupt or are under financial stress because of joblessness or divorce”.
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This is pretty interesting: advocacy groups for the homeless are helping them move into empty foreclosed homes.

Also, apparently US banks have a significant “shadow inventory” of foreclosed homes they’re not selling.

Michael Hudson’s Counterpunch article on how the USA’s global economic hegemony functions, and how it relates to the current international economic climate, is worth reading.
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Even though I don’t live in Manhattan, I’m still disturbed by this graph:

I love San Francisco and have no desire to leave; moreover, if I did leave, New York City would be one of the places I’d consider going to! I’ve been a city person my entire life, and somehow even the difference betwewen Berkeley and San Francisco is something I feel on an emotional level. Worse, I’m picky about cities, and moving to Houston isn’t looking too likely right now.

I’d love to see Dublin (probably quite high) and Berlin (possibly a lot lower) on this graph, but I’m not sure where I could find that data.

The graph is from page 12 of “Reviving the City of Aspiration”, a report by Center for an Urban Future, and I found it via this post on the Queens Crap blog.

By “Detroit” I primarily mean the Big Three automakers. The first thing I’m linking to isn’t satire, although it might seem that way. It’s also quite important to register the fact that the headline is not a metaphor. Oh, and look at the pictures in the slideshow.

Once done with that, have a chaser. The chaser is satire. Although it might be closer to actual reality in several respects than the hope piece.