Links - 13th March 2020 (2)

Bane vs. Joji/Pink Guy/Filthy Frank Memes - "The Bane vs. Joji meme format uses a photoshopped image from the 2012 Batman film The Dark Knight Rises to show supervillain Bane and comedian Joji, aka Filthy Frank’s character Pink Guy in an apparent showdown. The original photo shows Batman and Bane staring each other down in a sewer.As both Bane and Joji have their arms raised to their sides in the image, it appears that they’re egging each other on, as if they’re about to fight. The seriousness and intensity of Bane’s character juxtaposed with the silliness and absurdity of Pink Guy add a layer of comedy to these memes. In some versions of the meme, Bane is depicted as much larger than Filthy Frank while in others, Filthy Frank is larger and looms over Bane."

Germany to Force Net Providers to Hand Over 'Hate Speech' Suspect Data - "Angela Merkel’s government is preparing a new bill that will force Internet Service Providers (ISPs) to hand over data, including passwords, of those accused of engaging in “hate speech” online... Lambrecht was slammed by many over the proposal, with Hamburg’s data protection officer Johannes Caspar calling it an attack on privacy.  “The fight against the ugly phenomena of right-wing extremism and hate crime apparently acts as a door opener for a comprehensive expansion of state control powers”... Populist Alternative for Germany (AfD) politician Joana Cotar said the proposed legislation was a “fight against the free Internet” and argued it would be used to silence citizens critical of the German government.  The far-left Die Linke agreed with the AfD, accusing the government of setting up a surveillance state. Germany already has one of the most draconian sets of laws concerning “hate” on social media, including approving legislation imposing fines of up to 50 million euros on social media companies who do not remove hate content in what the government considers a timely manner.  The German authorities are also known to engage in large-scale raids of citizens accused of spreading “hate speech” online, with a 2016 raid seeing 60 homes searched across 14 states."
Funny how in the effort to stop "Nazis", you end up behaving a lot like them
When the "far left" and "far right" agree on something...

Trickle-down Luxury : Dan Ariely, James B. Duke Professor of Behavioral Economics at Duke University; Robert Frank, Professor of Management, Johnson School of Management, Cornell University : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive - "‘Some of the Latin American countries where revolution often followed in the wake of increases in inequality… You'll see some economists saying, well, it's it's an unfortunate consequence. If we didn't have all this inequality, the economy wouldn't function properly. And so everybody would be poor. That belies the experience of most of the European countries where inequality is much lower, and they've had good growth… what is the consequence of the fact that income has grown only at the top? And the the general rule is that people spend their income. If you have more, you spend more... the people in the middle don't seem jealous, they're not angry as they are in some other societies... But when the people at the top spend more that shifts the frame of reference that people just below the top use to figure out what they need or what's desirable for them...
In the counties where income inequality had grown the most, we saw three particular increases in finance, symptoms of financial distress. One was that people became more likely to file for bankruptcy in those counties… We also saw the biggest increases in divorce rates in those same counties where inequality had grown the most… another measure of financial distress is if you can't pay your bills and meet your mortgage payments… one solution is to move further away... And then you commute the long distance and suffer that inconvenience... when we actually looked we found in the counties where income inequality had grown the most, we saw the biggest increases in long commute times too…
‘Income inequality causes people to basically almost have, psychologically they feel like they have to start spending more money, which gets them to take more financial risks, get more fights with their spouses, and they have sometimes to move to places that are more difficult to commute to work to, in order to try and save money. That's very sad...
We could we could scrap the income tax and move instead to a progressive consumption tax. You pay tax on your your income minus your savings at a very steep rate, once you take [?] beyond a certain threshold. That would give people at the top an incentive to build smaller mansions. A lot of money would be saved. Build a... bigger mansion if you want to, but then pay heavy tax on that. And that would mean the tax burden could go down for people in the middle. So yeah, we could we could ease their burden without really costing the people at the top anything that's really important...
In France, how much they spend on each school doesn't depend on property tax. It's all, the budgets are the same. Still, the best schools are in the more expensive neighborhood, because that's where the students who perform best happen to live’
In other words, high inequality leads to more unproductive spending and conspicuous consumption and other negative consequences, despite libertarians thinking it's not a problem
So much for liberals' constant refrain about school funding being why poor pupils do badly

No, US school funding is actually somewhat progressive. - "It is still commonly supposed by much of the public that school funding is terribly unequal due to reliance on local funding mechanisms (especially property tax).   Although there were once modest inequalities associated with local income levels (several decades earlier), this information is generally wildly out of date today.   Within the vast majority of states districts with less advantaged students (read: higher poverty, lower income, fewer parents with college degrees, minority, etc) actually spend at least as much money per pupil (often more), both overall and in the narrower instructional expenditure category, and where there are inequalities these differences are usually quite modest and fleeting... districts with less advantaged students spend more per pupil... more segregated districts actually spend significantly more progressively (between schools within the district) even controlling for a bunch of other covariates... the notion that school resources are significantly responsible for socioeconomic outcome disparities (particularly within states) is at odds with a great deal of evidence... Above and beyond the lack of large systematic differences in inputs like revenues, there is also very little reason to believe that the modest differences in teacher attributes associated with school SES are of much practical significance today.  For instance, see this study on the association between teacher value-added metrics (VAM) and income amongst 26 representative schools (h/t Spotted Toad).  They find that the average difference in teacher effectiveness is very small... These sorts of achievement gaps are unlikely to be a substantially a result of our distributed education system because we also find similarly large socioeconomic gaps throughout Europe and in other developed countries with much more top-down systems of funding, management, etc"
Clearly, this is reason to channel even more money to poor schools!

NY and CA spend billions more in taxes than TX and FL — and get worse results - " California and New York are dominated by Democrats who have implemented the nation’s highest and sixth-highest marginal income tax rates, respectively, to help finance large social programs and bureaucracies. (New York’s rate rises to second-highest if New York City income tax is included.)Texas and Florida, meanwhile, have been governed mostly by conservative Republicans for decades; they are among the few states that levy no income tax on workers, while maintaining leaner social programs.Our big four states provide a good test case for two very different visions: Do higher taxes and bigger government actually deliver better outcomes, particularly in terms of education, poverty alleviation, and infrastructure? Or can simpler governments and lower taxes actually raise the fortunes of their citizens?... Neither blue state has shown any clear ability to improve the academic outcomes of their kids, alleviate poverty for those in need, or provide good roads and bridges for their people. While Texas and Florida have their share of problems, they seem to foster more upward mobility and trust in government, which partly explains why 6.4 million people have moved to those states since 2010... New York spends the most of any state per pupil by far at over $23,000 and nearly twice as much as the national average of around $12,000. California spends just above the national average. Meanwhile, Florida and Texas spend much less, just north of $9,000.But the difference in outputs is actually quite small... Minority students in Florida, meanwhile, tested among the highest in the nation across the board... there is no clear evidence that blue state anti-poverty spending is accomplishing much. From the end of the last recession in 2010 to 2018, the official poverty rate fell 3 percentage points in California and just 1.3 in New York, while falling 3 points in Texas and 2.8 in Florida.The official poverty rate, which measures only market income, remains slightly higher in absolute terms in Texas and Florida than New York and California. However, according to the supplemental poverty rate, which many social scientists prefer because it includes taxes and transfers and better reflects living standards, California is the poorest state in the nation with 18 percent of its population under the poverty line, followed by 16 percent in Florida, and 14 percent in Texas and New York... New York spends the most per capita of the four states on transportation at $538, according to NASBO, which is above the national average of $476. Florida, Texas, and California all spend below it at $427, $399, and $339, respectively.On a per-mile of highway basis, Florida and New York both spend a lot, around $241,000 and $215,000, respectively, while California and Texas spend less, about $125,000 and $73,000. Those higher per-mile figures could also reflect the higher density of Florida and New York.But while New York is spending a lot on its roads both per person and per mile in the state, there’s no evidence it provides value to the people living there. Its road quality is ranked 26th in the nation by the Federal Highway Administration, bridges 37th by the US Department of Transportation, and overall value of highways 45th by the Reason Foundation.Florida, which spends a lot per mile, seems to be getting better value, with its roads ranking 7th and bridges ranking 3rd. Texas and California, meanwhile, are ranked as having good bridges and bad roads."

Troubled Waters : Dan Ariely, Duke University : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive - "‘Some of the mineral water have a large concentration of minerals and some of them, some contaminants that are not good for you. For example, arsenic in your water… There's some studies showing that some mineral water would have, because it's coming from natural spring will have some arsenic in the water.'...
'Two types of problem with bottled water. First is in some bottled water you can find level, high level of contaminant which are bad for you. That could include sodium, which is not so good, but it also it could include in some cases arsenic... in Central and Eastern Europe they find high level of radium, which is radioactive element… [On pure media being good] That's what we think, or that's what the media or this advertising would like us to think. But the thing is that mineral water should have, or drinking water should have some ingredients that are good for us, for example calcium and magnesium... Some studies have shown that deficiency of calcium and specifically magnesium is associated with a higher frequency of heart attack... Bottled water is actually regulated less strictly by the FDA, which is much less constrained, is much less, relative to the EPA.'"

Can Money Buy Happiness? : Dan Ariely, Duke University : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive - "'What do you spend your money on? Mainly they spend money on stuff and stuff for themselves. And that's fine. It’s nice to have nice house and a nice car and a nice everything. But it turns out when you look at research, doesn't do anything for your happiness. So the question is, if how we usually spend our money isn't making us any happier, is there anything else we can do to get more happiness out of our money?... you'll like the car better a little bit, you'll get used to it. But when you're driving it, it's kind of the same as any other car. So think about being stuck in traffic, it's a little nicer to be in a fancy car than a not fancy car. You're still stuck in traffic, regardless of the car that you're in. So it makes a little difference, but it's not going to change that much. And the difference in price is $40,000 let's say. Think what you could have used that $40,000 for instead of getting a nicer car’
‘But what if, what if it's a Prius?’
‘If it's a Prius, you can look like you're a moral person, and that's a whole other ballgame. But you're still going to be stuck in traffic in your Prius.’
‘Okay, so people don't know how to spend their money correctly. They don't buy the right stuff. So what stuff should they buy?’
‘Anything but stuff... the first one that comes to mind is experiences. So rather than buying material things that lie around, they seem better because you're going to have it forever. But in fact, a TV after a while, it's just a TV. And you just sit and stare at it. Doesn't do anything for you really, you're alone in a room by yourself. Imagine buying an experience with that amount of money, like a vacation, or even a little experience, like a meal out. Turns out, those are way better for happiness and stuff... One of the hardest ones for us to do is rather than buy anything for ourselves, is in fact to buy nothing for ourselves, and instead buy things for other people. And that seems very counterintuitive from many standpoints, which is who's better at getting the most utility out of my money than me using it for my own preferences because I know them perfectly? But it turns out that even though I don't know your gift preferences as well as you do, I get so much happiness from buying for you, that it's better for me to spend my money on you than on myself’...
'You can use your money not to buy love, but to show other people that you care about them, you know, so you take your family on vacations, that's a way really to use money to show love and cement bonds between people. And it's the same with taking somebody out to lunch. You're not buying their friendship, but you are in fact strengthening the friendship...
There's this thing in a lot of religions about the highest form of giving is fully anonymous, you know, the recipient doesn't know you gave, no one else knows you gave either so it's just a pure moral act. And you could think and maybe even hope that that's the best kind of giving for happiness, if you're just doing it to be good. It's totally wrong. So we've done studies and shown that, that yes, that makes you happier giving anonymously than spending on yourself. So it's still better to give than spend on yourself. But giving to someone you know, and giving to them face to face is way better than giving anonymously, because we're human. So we like people to clap for us and smile and say thank you and hug us. And that's a whole other source of happiness that, that we enjoy... Reciprocity… feels very tit for tat, you know, now you owe me a meal. But in fact, people owing each other meals is fantastic. It means you’re friends, it means you have something to talk about, it means I'll see you next week instead of never see you again. It isn't as negative as we often think it is.'"