Lone Gunman

To help explain why toll lanes might not be the great solu­tion to traf­fic con­ges­tion many believe them to be, Tim­o­thy Lee goes to an unex­pected place to draw par­al­lels: your local supermarket.

Super­mar­kets are a good anal­ogy, sug­gests Lee, because they oper­ate in a free mar­ket, are ruth­lessly effi­cient, intensely com­pet­i­tive, and employ ‘lanes’ (check­out queues)… but they don’t use con­ges­tion pric­ing. The rea­sons why they don’t, he says, can also be applied to traf­fic congestion:

First, we have strong and sophis­ti­cated social norms, cul­ti­vated since we were young chil­dren, for wait­ing in lines. This bit of self-organization is extremely impor­tant for the smooth func­tion­ing of civil soci­ety. We see wait­ing your turn as an oblig­a­tion we have to one another, and there­fore not as an oblig­a­tion that a super­mar­ket or trans­porta­tion agency can waive in exchange for a cash pay­ment. I sus­pect cus­tomers would see peo­ple using a tolled check­out lane as break­ing an implicit social contract.

More impor­tantly, cus­tomers would be sus­pi­cious that the super­mar­ket was delib­er­ately under-staffing the free lanes to gin up demand for the express ones. […] In the low-margin gro­cery busi­ness, it would be a pretty effec­tive way for a man­ager to pump up his short-term prof­its, while the long-term harm to the store’s rep­u­ta­tion would be hard […] to quantify.

This lat­ter con­cern seems par­tic­u­larly rel­e­vant to the case of toll roads. The revenue-maximizing pric­ing sched­ule is not the same as the congestion-minimizing sched­ule. An effec­tive congestion-pricing scheme might gen­er­ate rel­a­tively lit­tle rev­enue if peo­ple shift their dri­ving to off-peak times (which is the whole point). The oper­a­tor of a monop­o­lis­tic toll road will face a con­stant temp­ta­tion to boost rev­enues by lim­it­ing through­put on free lanes and jack­ing up the off-peak toll rates. The wide­spread voter per­cep­tion that they’ve “already paid for” many tolled roads through other taxes isn’t exactly right as a mat­ter of fis­cal pol­icy, but I think it’s based on a sound intu­ition: there’s no rea­son to think the polit­i­cal process will set tolls in a way that’s either fair or eco­nom­i­cally efficient.

By sam­pling 4,200 ran­dom URLs span­ning a 14 year period, Maciej Cegłowski, the cre­ator of book­mark­ing web­site Pinboard.in, decided to gather sta­tis­tics on the extent of link rot and how it pro­gressed across time. Inter­ested in find­ing out if there is some sort of ‘half life of links’, he found instead that it is a fairly lin­ear, fast deterioration:

Links appear to die at a steady rate (they don’t have a half life), and you can expect to lose about a quar­ter of them every seven years.

And even that is an opti­mistic result, says Maciej, as not all dead links were able to be dis­cov­ered programmatically. There are also sev­eral unan­swered questions:

• How many of these dead URLs are find­able on archive.org?
• What is the attri­tion rate for short­ened links?
• Is there a sim­ple pro­gram­matic way to detect parked domains?
• Given just a URL, can we make any intel­li­gent guesses about its vul­ner­a­bil­ity to  link rot?

Inter­est­ingly, link rot is what inspired the cre­ation of Pinboard.in (it fea­tures page archiv­ing funci­tonal­ity). This is sim­i­lar to why I started Lone Gun­man: I was los­ing track of inter­est­ing links and arti­cles, and wanted a way to eas­ily find them again as well as help me build con­nec­tions between dis­parate arti­cles and topics.

When it comes to find­ing, order­ing, and eat­ing at eth­nic restau­rants there’s only one place to look for advice: econ­o­mist Tyler Cowen’s Eth­nic Din­ing Guide. I’ve men­tioned Cowen’s guide before (if only in pass­ing), but it’s time I ded­i­cated a post to this trea­sure trove of din­ing advice and, espe­cially, the tips from Cowen’s Gen­eral Remarks.

From an arti­cle in The Wash­ing­ton Post, four strate­gies for find­ing good restau­rants and order­ing well (click through for details):

1. For good value, avoid high-rent areas (those will be expen­sive or chains).
2. Look for com­pe­ti­tion (pos­si­bly a sign of a large immi­grant pop­u­la­tion, pro­vid­ing expertise).
3. Know how to order ‘strate­gi­cally’  from waiters.
4. Be aware of the restau­rant cycle (from open­ing, to acco­lades, to mass production).

Four rules-of-thumb for choos­ing from the menu (be aware of the exceptions):

1. Avoid “ingredients-intensive” dishes, opt for “composition-intensive” instead (i.e. con­tains sauces or com­plex ingre­di­ent mixes).
2. Appe­tiz­ers are supe­rior to main courses in some cuisines; be will­ing to have a ‘side-dishes-only’ meal.
3. Avoid desserts, espe­cially Asian ones.
4. Order for vari­ety, not quan­tity (order more than you think necessary).

And finally, from a recent arti­cle by Cowen in The Atlantic, six rules for din­ing out:

1. In the fan­ci­est restau­rants, order what sounds least appetising.
2. Beware the beau­ti­ful, laugh­ing women (you’re there for food, not the scene/drinks).
3. Get out of the city.
4. Admit what you don’t know, and search/ask intelligently.
5. Exploit restau­rant work­ers (if you see expen­sive labour, think about what your return is… family-run restau­rants may offer the best return).
6. Pre­fer Viet­namese to Thai, Pak­istani to Indian.

Cowen can be a bit out­spo­ken on the topic of food, so bear in mind this comment:

It all makes per­fect sense if you like what Cowen likes, which is inter­est­ing food for a rea­son­able price with­out much ambiance. Which is not what every­one likes.

Whether that’s what you like or not, you’ll still def­i­nitely like Cowen’s book on the sub­ject, An Econ­o­mist Gets Lunch.

For decades we have been told, with cer­tainty, to limit our salt intake or risk heart dis­ease and high blood pressure—but is this advice based on sound sci­en­tific find­ings? The short answer is No.

The evi­dence is incon­sis­tent, incon­clu­sive and con­tra­dic­tory, says promi­nent car­di­ol­o­gist Jere­miah Stam­ler (who used to be an advo­cate for the eat-less-salt cam­paign back in the 60s and 80s), and there­fore the “eat-less-salt” mes­sage is pre­ma­ture and may even be harm­ful.

Last year, two [meta-analyses] were pub­lished by the Cochrane Col­lab­o­ra­tion, an inter­na­tional non­profit orga­ni­za­tion founded to con­duct unbi­ased reviews of med­ical evi­dence. The first of the two reviews con­cluded that cut­ting back “the amount of salt eaten reduces blood pres­sure, but there is insuf­fi­cient evi­dence to con­firm the pre­dicted reduc­tions in peo­ple dying pre­ma­turely or suf­fer­ing car­dio­vas­cu­lar dis­ease.” The sec­ond con­cluded that “we do not know if low salt diets improve or worsen health outcomes.”The idea that eat­ing less salt can worsen health out­comes may sound bizarre, but it also has bio­log­i­cal plau­si­bil­ity and is cel­e­brat­ing its 40th anniver­sary this year, too. A 1972 paper in The New Eng­land Jour­nal of Med­i­cine reported that the less salt peo­ple ate, the higher their lev­els of a sub­stance secreted by the kid­neys, called renin, which set off a phys­i­o­log­i­cal cas­cade of events that seemed to end with an increased risk of heart dis­ease. In this sce­nario: eat less salt, secrete more renin, get heart dis­ease, die prematurely. […]

[Four stud­ies] involv­ing Type 1 dia­bet­ics, Type 2 dia­bet­ics, healthy Euro­peans and patients with chronic heart fail­ure — reported that the peo­ple eat­ing salt at the lower limit of nor­mal were more likely to have heart dis­ease than those eat­ing smack in the mid­dle of the nor­mal range.

via The Browser

As some­one who lives in an eco­nom­i­cally, cli­mat­i­cally and polit­i­cally sta­ble West­ern coun­try, the chances are some­what remote that I’ll ever encounter an emer­gency that requires fore­thought and care­ful plan­ning¹. Nev­er­the­less, that doesn’t stop me from enjoy­ing this list of the 100 most in-demand goods dur­ing an emer­gency.

This list appar­ently orig­i­nates from some­one called Joseph Almond who cre­ated it in 1999 after observ­ing the behav­iour of con­sumers prepar­ing for Y2K-related prob­lems. I say “appar­ently” because I can’t find any sug­ges­tion that this is actu­ally true.

Nev­erth­less, there’s some­thing about this list that is inher­ently intrigu­ing, even though I’m far from a mem­ber of the sur­vival­ism move­ment. Oh, and feel free to share this with the more vogu­ish title: How to pre­pare for the zom­bie apoc­a­lypse. Now that will get you some of them pre­cious retweets.

via Ask MetaFil­ter

¹ Although I’m not know for my futurism.