Realestate deals in the USA 5:31 AM

Amazing realestate deals in the states

for $2.3 million you could own this amazingly unique property

wowser, wowser, wowser (Roy Rodgers) 4:48 AM

Skull puff n chew .... sounds pathetically like a new kids tv show, but its not.

Alcohol, cigarettes and mcdonalds. These are the sins that the new generation of wowsers have dedicated their lives to saving us from. All those little salvation army soldiers are out there right now doing push ups and polishing their tambourines ready to save us from too much of a good thing.

Only this time they're a little smarter than previous generations. They know that prohibition doesn't work, they know that no matter how hard they shake their little tambourines, they just cant deny al capone and mr asia.

So this time round they're going to be a bit smarter, they are going to try and use economics .. they are going to get government to tax us into salvation.

The rant

The preventative health taskforce has just released another report. The taskforce has a mandate to address three main evils: tobacco, alcohol and obesity. And how do they suggest we address these supposed evils, well mainly through increasing taxation on durries, stubbies and big macs.

No doubt they are also going to suggest the community also be educated ie. ban product advertising, spend heaps of tax dollars on gross television campaigns which try to shock and awe but do little more than turn you off your dinner (its amazing how the only time these bastards force me to watch a doctor squeeze fatty deposits out of someones artery is right around dinner time).

They will also undoubtedly push for the mandatory display of diseased and rotting body bits on packaging. Don't laugh but in a couple of years time i wouldn't be surprised if your big mac came in a burger box covered by a glossy graphic of someones anus being eaten out by cancer.

Do they have a point?

God knows why they are still making such a kerfuffle over cigarettes. I'm starting to feel nothing but pity for that small handful of poor bastards who have been reduced to standing out the front of the office in the rain and snow puffing away. Surely they'll all be dead within the next 10 years either from cancer or exposure. Surely we've won the war on fags so why the fuss?

As to alcohol. Could the wowsers please just piss off and leave us alone.

And then to obesity, I'm less than convinced were drowning in a wave of fatties. And if there are more than there used to be I'm less than convinced its down to fast food as the candidate. We all saw that movie a couple of years ago where the guy ate nothing but maccas for a month and surprise surprise got sick. Well so what? if you dined at Vue De Monde every day for a month you would also get sick. If you ate nothing but lentils all day for a month you would also get sick ... so what. We've also sat through countless hours of jamie oliver craping on about fast food. This is the guy i once saw fry a sausage, a handfull of fatty bacon (cause the fats where the flavour is) and a tomato in nearly a whole stick of butter and then crack eggs into it .... this guy thinks fast food is unhealthy?

If the general public is statistically putting on weight then i suggest it has something to do with some pretty basic economics ... the overall price of all food being lower than it was in previous generations coupled with a general increase in the peoples disposable income. Its not that we're eating more fast food, its most likely that we are simply eating more food, in which case targeting fast food will be ineffectual. This contention is also supported by the differential taxation thats been placed on fast food since the implementation of GST. Fast food already gets treated differentially than fresh food and we're still all apparently fat (although in my case i definitely am fat, and it should be noted I don't eat mcdonalds).

The dodgy economics

Putting aside these general high level concerns. Any analysis produced by the task force must be heavily qualified. The thing is (and theres always a thing and in this case its a biggie) is that basic logic of the preventative health argument is largely an economic myth.

Their argument goes something like this.

The preventative health body produces an economic study that estimates the costs of disease. This cost is then spun into a benefit by means of a counter factual. They become the costs that could be avoided if the rates of disease were decreased. For example, the report may find that obesity costs the Australian economy $10 billion per annum (note ... i made this number up), the reports then go on to say if the proposed measure is successful and reduces rates of disease by say 10% per annum then we should see an approximate benefit a $1 billion per annum in avoided costs.

Without fail the avoided costs are going to be greater than the anticipated cost of the program or proposal. So it then becomes a no brainier ... everyone wins.

In this case skull puff n chew, its even more insidious as the programs themselves will most likely be self funding as they include new taxes. I suggest you would probably find that they produce massive windfall gains to government. If cigarettes are anything to go by, the latest studies have found that the revenue generated by excise taxation on durries exceeds the associated cost of health impacts by a factor of ten. You wont find this mentioned in any reports but don't kid yourself it will most definitely be taken into consideration in the hallowed halls of treasury.

These preventative health studies are seriously flawed and ultimately fallacious. Apart from the usual dodgy statistical assumptions, they all make the mistake of ignoring a couple of major considerations:

1. extending someones life isn't isn't all good.... old age is in and of itself a major driver of health related costs.
2. all these studies universally ignore the benefits associated with consuming these goods

By ignoring the health cost associated with extending peoples lives you seriously bias any cost benefit study. One of the primary drivers of health related costs and publicly funded health related costs is age, or to be more precise, old age. As a result, extending longevity tends to increase overall health spending. The costs associated with diseases such as Alzheimer's, dementia, cardiovascular disease, osteoarthritis and osteoporosis far outweighs those associated with durries, stubbies and big macs. The above may sound heartless, but its not, its just economics, to ignore it is bad science.

These studies also routinely ignore the value of the benefits associated with whatever substance abuse led to the disease in the first place. I like alcohol, I'm not an alcoholic but i do enjoy the odd drink and the odd incident of inebriation. These things provide a definite benefit for me. So much so that i have been known to fork out a couple of hundred on a good bottle of wine or heaven forbid a good bottle of scotch. Stated explicitly, I enjoy booze and if anyone taxes it such that my consumption decreases below a level i would ordinarily consume then there will be an associated loss of utility which should be included in any good economic study, this is also true for cigarettes and big macs (although to be honest I'm more partial to a souvlaki).

Apart from these two, such studies are also subject to a number of less obvious methodological problems. In particular the relationships between disease, labour and productivity are reliant on incredibly strong assumptions relating to such things as time away from labour markets, rate of replacement and effects of productivity levels at work... tweaking any of these assumptions will generally have material impacts on the final number.

The analysis also generally includes a number of statistical techniques which are somewhat questionable, such as the adoption of things like disability adjusted life years (Dalys to those in the know). These tools are supposed to place a value on your loss of ability due to disease. They generally rely on estimates of the statistical value of life.

Don't get me wrong, we shouldn't be squeamish about generating estimates of a statistical value for life. However, they have to be used correctly. In cost benefit analysis the value of life is used to allow for comparison of costs across different projects. In doing so the value will be constant thus the comparative analysis is really only picking up on the number of lives saved or lost. This is good economics.

However the use of an estimated statistical value of life to generate estimate of the aggregate costs of disease to the economy is questionable economics. Although there are a number of different approaches to generating the estimate, most will put the value somewhere between two to three million. And while I have met many economists who regularly use these values (including myself) I am yet to meet any that have total faith in the numbers, nor have I met any that would feel indifferent between a three million dollar payment and death.

I should also mention that the way these studies usually produce results is that you do all the productivity, employment and direct health cost stuff upfront, you leave the Qalys (quality adjusted life years, a concept as equally dodgy as the Dalys discussed above) and Dalys till last, and they are usually able to transform the mere millions you've been working on into billions .. wow ... great if your producing a report for a drug company or government department ... but at the end of the day not really compelling economics.

And now to the conspiracy theory

Here's a further bit of ranting madness. I have absolutely no evidence but i do have a theory, that I suppose could loosely be considered 'public choice'.

I reckon that they whole anti smoking movement has produced a set of skilled professional lobbyists. These lobbyists are now facing the undeniable truth that they have effectively won the war on smoking.

Despite the hype there are hardly any smokers left. They have been reduced to a sad socially ostracised group of people whom most of us automatically assume are just trailer trash or teenagers.

These lobbyists and professionals need gainful employment and its too much of a convenient coincidence that this latest round of wowserism presents them with the biggest opportunity to keep doing what they do best ... ie giving the rest of us the shits.

Are environmentalists retarded OR the unsustainable abuse of Mr Venn's diagrams (Roy Rodgers) 11:30 PM

This blog goes out there for all those that have had to endure the pain of sifting through endless glossy sustainability reports that are stuffed full of meaningless graphics engineered by overpaid and under intelligent environmental consultants who are yet to realize that the phrase “visual learning” is simply code for stupid.

So what’s the beef … well, apart from everything else, I'm sick of the abuse these guys doll out to venn diagrams.

I can't begin to count the number of times I’ve decided to actually check out a graphic rather than turn the page only to find myself immersed in a five minute internal discussion regarding whether I somehow lack the cognitive ability to ‘get it’ or whether the enviro retard that wrote the report doesn’t actually know what a venn diagram is. To date most, if not all, of these discussions conclude in my favor.

I am not going to apologies for the use of the word retard. If you don’t get what a venn diagram is, then you are most definitely intellectually retarded. Venn diagrams are not difficult to understand. They are basically a graphical representation of sets (conventionally these sets are portrayed as circles, but can also be ellipses, squares or just blobs). Where sets overlap it indicates that some members of a set are also members of another set. Where a set is wholly contained within another set it indicates that the set is a subset of the greater set. NOT ROCKET SCIENCE.

Nor can these doyens of stupidity claim unfamiliarity. Venn diagrams are not new. They’ve been around for a few hundred years and their recorded use goes back to the 1600s, predating even Mr Venn himself.

Leibniz used them in the 1600s. This is no accident as Leibniz is one of the founders of propositional calculus (logic) and Venn diagrams are reported to have begun life as a analytical tool used to assist in the understanding of syllogistic arguments — all cats are black, kev is a cat, kev is black. The diagrams allow for the representation of universal and particular contentions (all and some).

So they are definitely not new. No excuses there.

The following website provides ample evidence of the abuse sustainability consultants inflict on venn diagrams (along with other diagrammatic tools). It’s worth a look, just for laughs. You should note that all the diagrams posted on the page are considered to be just grouse!

http://computingforsustainability.wordpress.com/2009/03/15/visualising-sustainability/

Let's take a couple of examples.

Example 1.

At first glance it appears pretty reasonable. I think we can safely say that families, schools and neighborhoods are all subsets of the broader economy.

But this is as far as reasonableness goes. From here on in things start to get real murky. For example:

• the diagram indicates that only a proportion of the family is actually counted as a part of the neighborhood. Now assuming that family is normal, it is highly unlikely that it will be dispersed geographically across multiple neighborhoods. And while it would appear that all the children are actually participants in the neighborhood, the majority of the remaining adults appear to not be. So where are they? The only plausible explanation is that the majority of adults have been excluded from the neighborhood because they have been either chained up in the basement or locked up in the attic. Given that these non neighborhood family participants are adult we can also assume that they are being separated from their community on a voluntary basis (gimps perhaps).
  
  
• a significant number of adult family members attend school. The word school generally refers to primary or secondary school; if the diagram were pertaining to tertiary institutions the set should be labelled education. This indicates one of two things a). the family includes a disproportionately high number of adults who are also teachers b). the family includes a large number of intellectually challenged individuals. Given the suspicion regarding the prevalence of gimps we most likely assume b).
  
  
• The next notable observation is that the school is also not a subset of the neighborhood. This means that the school most likely contains members from multiple neighborhoods from which we can deduce that it must be a private school. Public schools are organized on a neighborhood basis therefore if the school were public we would expect to see it portrayed as a subset of the neighborhood. This supports the contention that the adults who are members of both the family and the school sets must be intellectually challenged. If they were teachers they would not be able to afford the tuition for a private school.

So what does the above Venn diagram tell us? Well I can only speak for myself and I must admit I don’t think the author was trying to provide a diagrammatic representation of a community of affluent but stupid gimps.

Example 2.

God save us ….

Example 3

Please shoot me…. No wait …. Just shoot the retard.

This is where my headache really starts to kick in. Economics is a science not a thing or collection of things, it is a field of study that looks at how participants (not even necessarily humans) allocate resources. So again claiming you can generate a set that encapsulates economics is fallacious. It's akin to having a set labelled physics or biology.

Granted, the term economy is often used to refer to the total system of things and how they interact, but the economy and economics are two different things, in just the same way that the physical world and physics are two different things.

Further confusion is generated by the contention that the environment, social and economic are separate and identifiable sets. After 9 years of formal economic training at both the undergrad and post grad levels I personally don't get it. How can something have a social or environmental benefit or cost and not be included in an economic framework. The retards seem to have missed the point that economics is universal.

The big concern is who exactly is paying for this rubbish and secondly if it's you ... I suggest your enviro retard consultants, by displaying such a base misunderstanding of how to use a Venn diagram, undermine any confidence you could possibly have in any advice they give based on quantitative evidence ... after all venn diagrams are not the hardest things to master.

ACCC to probe big fuel discounts 5:06 AM

ACCC to probe big fuel discounts

Is it just me, or has anyone else noted the absurdity of the Australian COMPETIION and Consumer Commission investigating what can only describe as excessive competion. Although I dont really know what that means ... too much competion? prices too low? too much benefit to that other C word .. Consumers?

Maybe it means no one is looking after the little guy, the small local petrolstation, the one that bob from the footyclub runs. The one that cant compete effectively with the big boys .... For gods sake who is PROTECTING bob and his overpriced petrol from competion!

This is all rather suboptimal from a governance point of view. I mean how confusing is it for an organisation to be chartered with the protection of competition and consumers and then have to act for special interests.

If society wants to enforce inefficiency then we really should establish a new commission one with clear objectives ... the Australian Protection and Subsidisation Commission ... their mandate could be to represent vested commercial interests and block mergers on the grounds they would create too much efficiency and too low prices.

The APSC could stand against subadditivity. Its charter could be the advancement of diseconomies of scale and scope.

Are you serious? (Roy Rodgers) 6:59 AM

Last week SMH ran a gob smakingly absurd story by Cathy Alexander, entitled "Australia not home to the good life". The story centres on Australia's ranking in the recently released happiness index.

Apparently Aus ranks 102 in the happiness index. That’s 102 out of 143. Here are some pearls of wisdom from Cathy ....

South and Central America are home to the happiest, greenest people, the survey found; nine of the top 10 countries are from that region. Costa Rica topped the poll. South-East Asia also did well.

Rich western countries did badly, while African nations came in at rock bottom. Zimbabwewas last.

And some more ....

While Australia disgraced itself in the poll, coming well behind Iraq, Burma and Palestine, there was a shred of good news. Australia beat New Zealand by one place.

Ill give you a second to consume that last one. Yes it did say Iraq was a happier place thanAustralia.

By now your bullshite metres must be spinning wildly out of control.

Heres some stuff Cathy didn't tell you ...

The happy planet index is produced by the New Economics Foundation. The foundation is described by Cathy as a British think tank. A more accurate description would be a bin of environmental Malthusian Marxists who appear to harbour an abject hatred of economic growth. Their self confessed goals are environmentalism and welfare economics. And by welfare economics they are not talking about welfare economics in the proper sense of using microeconomic techniques to assess allocative efficiency. I suspect they are talking about creating a welfare state (which any economists should be able to tell you is a rather shitty idea). ... well in Brittan’s case not creating but rather devolving to a welfare state.

and here is the index

Well it looks like Cathy didn't mention how the index was constructed for a good reason. I don't know about you but my modest exposure to statistics is standing on my shoulder poking its little pencil in my ear screaming ROY, I SMELL BULL! Luckily for us the Foundation was stupid enough to accompany the formula with some definitions.

Happy life years: A stat based largely on self reported life satisfaction data. Self reporting or self selection is at the best of times dodgy as ... just imagine how dodgy it is in regard to happiness. Imagine the framing issues. Where do you start ... even defining happiness is next to impossible. One man's happiness is not another’s. I am 100% confident that my utility function is totally different from that of a lycra clad masochist gimp. What makes him happy is not going to make me happy.

Ecological footprint: a measure of the amount of land required to provide for all resource requirements plus the amount of vegetated land required to sequester (absorb) all their CO2 emissions embodied in the products they consume ... apparently 2.1 hectares is each individuals fair share, any more than that and your using more of the globes resources than you are really entitled to, I also assume any less indicates your being ripped off (my BULLSHIT valve just blew a gasket).

Alpha: the alpha constant is added to ensure that the ecological footprint coefficient of variance matches that of the health life years across the entire dataset. Hey why not ... it would smooth things out some.

Beta: the beta constant is added to ensure that any country with a max life satisfaction of 10, life expectancy of 85, and is living within its "fair share" of resources gets a score of 100. Although i have paraphrased I’m not grossly miss quoting.... so yes they are basically saying the index is rigged to max outcomes for those of us who consume "fairly".

The results are driven primarily by the denominator. The data used shows quite clearly that US, Canada, Europe and Australia all have the highest stasifaction ratings and the highest life expectancies. However, the ecological footprint shows (as would be expected given the relative levels of development) that these countries use the most resourse. The US is the outlier using more than 4 planets worth of resources. Europe, Cananda, Australia and Japan come in at 2 to 4 planets worth. South America, Russia and China come in at 1 to 2 planets and Central America, Africa and West Asia come in at under 1 planet.

... all this begs the question of exactly which planet it is that we are currently running this massive trade imbalance with. It must be someone because we are apparently consuming more than 10 times the amount of resources the earth has to offer. I just bet its those pesky free trading plutonians, sneakly blue little bastards.

I could go on all day, but I’m not going to ... I’m more than convinced this is alot of bull.

The real tragedy here is not the crappy report but rather the crappy reporting. All Cathy had to do was spend 10 minutes on the Web and she would have had enough material to write a much more informative article about the absurd use of statistics to promote an essentially anti growth agenda. The last thing we would want is for developing countries to start getting all uppity.

Check it out for yourself.

Happy Planet Index Link

Just to really piss you off, if you spend enough time on the site you may encounter the following

The Index doesn’t reveal the ‘happiest’ country in the world. It shows the relative efficiency with which nations convert the planet’s natural resources into long and happy lives for their citizens. The nations that top the Index aren’t the happiest places in the world, but the nations that score well show that achieving, long, happy lives without over-stretching the planet’s resources is possible.

So after all that the index turns out not to be about happiness.