What a Town

Guess which town you can take part in an active forest restoration at a site once visited by Benjamin Franklin, pick and consume autumn olive berries near the Atlantic Ocean, catch a musical about Charles Manson, and stand in a room five stories beneath the ground in a room filled with over $290B in gold?

What city am I in?

Only in New York!

In the past month, I’ve done everything listed above and the variety of those experiences is one of the reasons I don’t mind paying the high cost of living here. I mean, I mind, but not enough to move away.

If you live in or around the city, or are visiting from someplace else, you should consider visiting The Conference House on Staten Island, the Jamaica Bay Wildlife Refuge in Brooklyn, and the New York Federal Reserve in lower Manhattan. While Charles Manson: The Musical is only on for another few weeks in 2010, but check out End Times Productions for other off-Broadway shows. Although the comedy was hit or miss, the overall production was highly enjoyable.

It's not all concrete jungle -- view from the Jamaica Bay Wildlife Refuge in Brooklyn

The Re-election of Michael Bloomberg

Despite the hotly contested third-term controversy, I thought Mr. Bloomberg deserved to be re-elected. Using private sector strategies, the city has seen gains in the areas of the environment, education, crime, security, and public finances. While his job creation claims are a bit dubious, it is clear that NYC is still a great place to live and work. Despite the massive financial collapse NYC’s unemployment rate is holding steady with the national average, no small feat considering NYC was disproportionally damaged by the financial crisis.

Perhaps Bloomberg’s greatest achievement is in education. By increasing the number of charter schools from 17 with 3,200 students when he took office to 78 with 24,000 students today, Bloomberg is further experimenting with ideas that will come to revolutionize education in America. Results vary for charter schools in NYC but are overwhelmingly positive. Education is the single most important issue in local politics and should remain so due to its unique ability to influence other issues (i.e., crime, housing, public financing, and the economy). Only by closing the achievement gap will our society regain a leadership position in primary and secondary education. Michael Bloomberg has arguably made the most significant contributions to making New York City’s schools a model for other urban school systems.

Redefining Ethnic Food

Growing up, I remember thinking a gyro or shrimp fried rice was ethnic. That was in the suburbs.

Having lived in six distinct metropolitan areas in the past eight years and visited countless more, I can safely say that my opinions on what constitutes excellent food and what may seem weird or strange to some might be perfectly normal to another.

It is in that spirit which my friend Kat and I are exploring new culinary ventures in NYC and beyond, sharing our experiences, and telling you how you can participate. Join us as we redefine ethnic food over at Weird Food Club NYC

Suppon stew (Tokyo)

This Idea Has Been Removed Due to Copyright Violations

Today, I followed a link from Reddit to YouTube only to find out that the video has been taken down for rights violation. Fair enough. In a knowledge economy, I buy into the stealing content is equivalent to stealing a car argument. However, why doesn’t the rights owner allow YouTube to be a platform of distribution? For example, if there is a clip of a documentary, tell me to pay $4.95 to see the clip, I might do it, the rights’ owners get their money and they pay a small fee to YouTube for finding the interested party. Instead, I cannot find this link anywhere else on the web and even if I did find the original documentary, film, show, etc. I might not be willing to pay $19.95 for the whole thing; I just want to see the relevant clip.

The web is driving interested users to YouTube and other content sharing sites only to see those users turned away. Stop turning them away. Offer them pay-per-play. See if they take it. Most won’t, but some will. It’s free money if you think about it.

Getting My Superfreak On

I'm halfway through the new, Superfreakonomics and so far it lives up to the challenge of being just as good as its predecessor. Who know oral sex from sex workers in Chicago costs an average of $37.26? Also highly intriguing, and controversial, is how they represented or apparently represented some ideas about carbon's effect on the global climate. Having actually heard Levitt and Dubner speak publically about that chapter, I fully believe that their advocacy of geoengineering options or, at the very least, their desire to see geoengineering options discussed seriously is well founded and not part of any denial camp movement.

p.s., I would be willing to sell my coveted autographed copy for no less than $250K which I will probably use for bail money if the original research on baby naming turns out to be false: Kevins (plural) tend to end up in jail.

PEZ info for Barb

Sadly, the PEZ museum in Easton, PA closed at the end of 2008. A piece of me died inside as I had made a special pilgramige to Easton just for the museum itself a number of years ago.

A self-ascribed Pezhead, I can tell you that the only other PEZ museum is in Burlingame, CA. If you're ever in the Bay Area, check it out, as I intend to next time I'm in those parts.

Even more tragic than the demise of the museum in Easton, is the fact the PEZ company in Orange, CT does not offer public tours due to FDA regulations. I found this out the hard way many many years ago, when the idea of going "to the source" popped in my adolescent brain.

You can go on a tour via the intertubes, and let us pray daily that the executives at the PEZ company will catch on to Mr. Hershey's idea: a few rides, a strategically designed "how-it's-made" PEZ theme ride (i.e. PEZ WORLD), and a combination museum/store.

Additional revenue streams, Joe!

We Have A Winner

Why do I think the government should consider using prizes as a way to drive domestic policy goals? Well, the most substantial problems facing humankind are problems associated with the Tragedy of the Commons, henceforth TOTC. The TOTC is when the costs associated with production are externalized (e.g., pollution) Since internalizing those costs typically involves enforcement and those enforcement costs are born by individuals who may not directly experience the damage of the externalities, in many instances the equilibrium solution is to allow over consumption/production of resources with vast externalities being absorbed by unaffiliated entities or to enforce so ineffectively as to allow the problem to persist.

The vast majority of problems in society are solved via the free market system, meaning not everyone is negatively influenced by every problem but private entrepreneurs develop solutions to solve problems that are both niche (bridge from point A to point B) and broad (development of polymers). In the bridge example, only a small portion of the population may ever use the bridge, whereas almost everyone in the world benefits from the use of plastics.

With TOTC problems however, individual entrepreneurs have no incentive (or not a sufficient enough incentive) to solve the problem and thus those problems persist. I would argue that the use of prize incentives instituted by private or public institution is the most effective method to solve TOTC problems.

The Netflix Prize and the X-Prize Foundation are two modern examples of how financial incentives can bring market forces into play to solve complex problems. The benefit to the sponsor is that the prize is only awarded if all the criteria are met. So rather than the Department of Energy allocating limited resources to the projects that they think will have the best probability of success, by offering a prize, let’s say, for scalable solar cell production under some commercially viable threshold, various ideas compete using private capital and the public funds are only used to reimburse the winner. The market will attract private capital to the best ideas and the prize money will serve as the exit strategy for competing ideas/entrepreneurs. The social welfare of the citizens is maximized and could be done so further if the government uses an insurance provider as the actual payee and pays an annual premium for the ability to offer such a substantial prize.

Why isn’t the Dept of Energy using prizes in this way? Why are they investing in projects in states that are green and yellow in terms of kWh/m2/Day? Why not bring private market forces into the equation yielding entrepreneurs from all over the world seeking to maximize efficiency in renewable energy production?

Rockin' Robin: Tweeting Our Way to Mediocrity

I can’t say I’m necessary surprised. There’s this terrible tendency for people to see something truthful and beneficial and take it too its logical extreme, however inane. Certainly email trumps snail-mail and I can even see the value in away messages, whether they be in AIM, Facebook, or Gmail, as I went to college during an era when one could use there AIM away message to signal which frat party (of several) they were most likely to attend, solicit laughs from their peers using witty banter, and share links to newly discovered websites. To this day, I find these features helpful.

However, someone caught on to the trend and decided the future for all of us to give an account of minute-by-minute play of our lives. Wrong.

First off, who wants to read anything called a tweet? Tweeting? Seriously?

Secondly, I could read a well written post by Richard Posner, find out some interesting information/research being distributed by Tyler Cowen, or I could read 10-30 tweets from my family and friends which would yield such insights as:

Steve I love lamp

Large Marge Scrambling eggs

Sandman88 Meh

I don’t think I’m doing out on a limb by extrapolating those hypothetical tweets would be similarly uninspiring for the majority of the population, leading me to conclude that the value of Twitter to the consumer is close to zero, and to the producer it’s all a big ego boost.

If I would graph the frequency of tweets a given individual makes, I could accurately predict how much of a narcissist they are likely to be, and also the likelihood that I would enjoy spending time with that person (Fun Index), which has an inverse relationship with the Narcissist Index.

Narcissist index (y-axis), tweets per month (y-axis)

I’ll let Twitter defend itself and I’ll make commentary. Twitter proffers the following examples of why anyone in their right mind would benefit from this tool:

Eating soup? Research shows that moms want to know.

Any mother checking their offspring’s twitter account to see if they are eating soup or not should be executed

Running late to a meeting? Your co–workers might find that useful.

If you’re running late to a meeting the onus is on YOU to call your co-workers to inform them of your status, not on THEM to check on YOUR status. Twitter is adding an extra step here that says “I’m too good to call you, please check on what I have posted online about what I’m doing” One word comes to mind when thinking about the mentality of a twitter user: gross

Partying? Your friends may want to join you.

Again, I have a party; I call, text, or email my friends that I want to join. I don’t tweet the location to every person on the planet, expecting them to follow me around like goddamn groupies

If any of you are still not convinced that Twitter is valueless then please sign-up for my latest idea: Pher

We’ll take the concept one step further, grunts of emotions, boiled down to binary expressions of positive of negative, with a slight inclination of what motivated said emotion.

Officially, when using Pher one is actually “phing” (verb) or posting a “ph” (noun)

What?

Pher is yah, people!

Why?

Info is yah, people!
No pajamas, meh.
Party yah, Richards!

How?

With Pher, you can meh or yah, totally!

It’s the modern antidote to information overload. War is Peace. Fair and Balanced.