illimitable dominion

Back to Life!

2008-12-12T04:46:00.002-05:00

My return to the blogosphere has little to nothing to do with spores, barium, or Soviets, but if Metallica can be resuscitated by Rick Rubin...maybe this blogging thing might work again.

Carl Discusses Recent Sporting Events

2007-10-30T00:26:00.000-04:00

Cool song.

2007-08-03T00:42:00.000-04:00

So I certainly no lomger have my finger on the pulse of what the kids are listening to these days, but I did come across this song that's only a year or so old that I dug. Gotta give ups every now and then to what the horn-rimmed glasses and sweater vest set is listening to I suppose.

I love this clip, even after hundreds of viewings...

2007-07-27T02:13:00.000-04:00

now if only I can figure out how to upload Fletch...

Picture of Bub

2007-07-18T17:52:00.000-04:00

This is an anonymous blog, so to quell any interest in what it is I look like, I've included a picture.

An Unexpected Take on an Old Classic

2007-07-09T02:13:00.001-04:00

OK, so all she really does is use the lyrics, but it's cool nonetheless.

A Particularly Strong Yale Class of 2012?

2007-07-06T02:46:00.000-04:00

Greg Mankiw on Harvard's decision to end its early action application program:

I don't make many forecasts on this blog, but here is one off-the-cuff. I bet that with Harvard and Princeton out of the picture, applications to Yale's nonbinding single-choice early action program will see a considerable boost next year. The interesting question is whether a significant number of top candidates, once admitted by Yale, will choose to forgo a Harvard application altogether.

YouTube Brings Us the Tought-Provoking and the Mind-Numbing

2007-07-04T17:35:00.000-04:00

You decide which is which:

EGADS!

2007-06-07T20:17:00.001-04:00

I promise I will write more when these damn finals are over!

And I will get back to all the friends, family, and creditors who have been kind enough to write or have their attorneys write me.

Till then, champagne for my real friends, real pain for my sham friends.

2007-05-13T21:39:00.000-04:00

VCs get all the...12 Year Old Looking Girls

2007-05-09T11:47:00.000-04:00

Tim Draper of Draper Fisher Jurvetson with the oh-so-cute, Natalie Portman.

NBA Refs are Racist.

2007-05-09T10:54:00.000-04:00

paper

summary

Question

2007-05-09T10:49:00.000-04:00

I don't have class between 4:30 Tuesday and Friday afternoon. The Yankees play the White Sox three times over that span next week. How many games should I go to?

Yet another reason to hate the music industry

2007-05-07T21:29:00.000-04:00

Uncle Sam's and CD Heaven will never be the same...

unbelievable

Record shops: Used CDs? Ihre papieren, bitte!

By Ken Fisher | Published: May 07, 2007 - 01:23PM CT

There are a few things lawmakers have decided really ought to be handled with the "care and oversight" that only the government can provide: e.g., tax collection, radioactive materials, biohazards, guns, and CDs. CDs? No, I'm not talking about financial Certificates of Deposit, though that might make more sense. I'm talking about Compact Discs.
Related Stories

New "pawn shop" laws are springing up across the United States that will make selling your used CDs at the local record shop something akin to getting arrested. No, you won't spend any time in jail, but you'll certainly feel like a criminal once the local record shop makes copies of all of your identifying information and even collects your fingerprints. Such is the state of affairs in Florida, which now has the dubious distinction of being so anal about the sale of used music CDs that record shops there are starting to get out of the business of dealing with used content because they don't want to pay a $10,000 bond for the "right" to treat their customers like criminals.

The legislation is supposed to stop the sale of counterfeit and/or stolen music CDs, despite the fact that there has been no proof that this is a particularly pressing problem for record shops in general. Yet John Mitchell, outside counsel for the National Association of Recording Merchandisers, told Billboard that this is part of "some sort of a new trend among states to support second-hand-goods legislation." And he expects it to grow.

In Florida, Utah, and soon in Rhode Island and Wisconsin, selling your used CDs to the local record joint will be more scrutinized than then getting a driver's license in those states. For retailers in Florida, for instance, there's a "waiting period" statue that prohibits them from selling used CDs that they've acquired until 30 days have passed. Furthermore, the Florida law disallows stores from providing anything but store credit for used CDs. It looks like college students will need to stick to blood plasma donations for beer money.

Why this trend, and why now? It's difficult to say, but to be sure, there is no love lost between retailers who sell used CDs and the music industry. The Federal Trade Commission has scrutinized the music industry for putting unfair pressures on retailers who sell used CDs, following a long battle between the music industry and retailers in the mid 90s. The music industry dislikes used CD sales because they don't get a cut of subsequent sales after the first. Now, via the specter of piracy, new legislation is cropping up that will make it even less desirable to sell second-hand goods. Can laws targeting used DVDs be far behind?

The music industry has never been a big fan of the Doctrine of First Sale, and the rise of digital music sales will only exacerbate the tension between consumers who believe that they "own" what they pay for, and the music industry. As more and more content-oriented goods transition to digital formats that are distributed free of physical formats, this issue is going to get tricky because it will be harder to spot the counterfeits from the authentic products, and consumers will still expect to exercise robust rights with the content that they've paid for with their hard-earned cash.

Mike Patton, what are you up to? And do you like Wolfmother?

2007-05-07T15:22:00.000-04:00

Ricky Gervais has damn good taste

2007-04-21T10:14:00.000-04:00

In today's Wall Street Journal, he lists his favorite TV comedies:

Cheers
The Simpsons
Seinfeld
The Larry Sanders Show
Arrested Development

It's just really hard to argue with those. I might throw in a little MWC, or Taxi, but other than that, it's dead on.

Ripped From the Headlines of the WSJ:

2007-04-20T09:02:00.000-04:00

"Wolfowitz skipped appearing at a health conference as the World Bank board considered how to deal with favors he did his girlfriend."

you just can't make headlines like that up.

Arbitrage!

2007-04-20T08:15:00.000-04:00

Yesterday I spent 12 hours at the Gleacher Center doing work.

Highlights included:

Watching a guy run into the bathroom at one point and vomit in the sink. Not exactly what you expect at an executive business school building
Checking the score on the Yankees game. How ridiculous. For those who don't know, the Yankees were down 6-2 with 2 outs in the 9th before they rallied, culminating in a 3 run A-Rod homer to put them ahead 8-6. Fantastic.
I bought a T-Shirt from the bookstore.
I called Sports Authority to ask how many people worked in a typical store. This was after I called my friend Singer, who gave me the layman's answer (uhhh....there's a security guy working the door, a few jackass kids working in the sneaker department, some hotties behind the register, a hick or two in fishing and camping, etc.)
I bought two individual Twix bars for 50 cents each...the double pack was being sold for $1.25. Of all the places in the world where I think it's a bad idea to have reverse economies of scale, I would have to put the GSB right near the top. People here try to arbitrage everything from bonds to gold bullion. The Twix has no chance.
I walked home. It's like two and a half miles, but I couldn't catch a 151 bus for the life of me yesterday, and by the time I switched over to Clark Street trying to catch a 22, I was most of the way there already.

Today's Topic is...

2007-04-10T22:39:00.001-04:00

Cheating:

Post-Easter stockpiling and confusion

2007-04-09T22:14:00.001-04:00

Have the Cadbury Creme Eggs gotten smaller? Indeed, they have.

Priorities

2007-04-03T00:08:00.000-04:00

What does it say about the nightly news when the lead story is about how the Cubs have been placed up for sale (complete with interviews with people on the street giving such insight as "By their record last year, they're not worth much"), which is then followed by Sam Zell to buy the Tribune company (which is why the Cubs are up for sale), and then the clips from opening day (Sox and Cubs), and THEN, oh yeah, in case the news forgot to mention, the Chicago Police Chief is retiring amidst a cloud of scandal?

my guess: College Basketball suX0|2

Filler

2007-03-28T16:51:00.000-04:00

I will post again soon!

It's Pi Day (3.14)

2007-03-14T08:16:00.000-04:00

Cosine, Secant, Tangent, Sine
Three point one four one five nine!

3.1415926535897932384626...

Ahhh Finals...

2007-03-13T23:14:00.000-04:00

Only during finals might you discover that you share a birthday with Freddie Mercury, Werner Herzog, Raquel Welch, George Lazenby, Bill Mazeroski, Bob Newhart, and Paul Volcker.

Happy week and a day past our half birthdays, people.

More Metallica

2007-03-13T21:57:00.000-04:00

Call of Billie Jean!

Cheeky Bastards!

2007-03-11T16:36:00.000-04:00

I saw 300 this weekend. Solid 3 stars.

Check out this post over at Ain't It Cool news, where he explains how at the 3:38 mark in the trailer, there is a still frame from the upcoming Watchmen movie. You have to pause the trailer to see it.

Nerds of the world, get excited.

This'll Be Gone Soon Enough, So...

2007-03-11T16:22:00.000-04:00

1) Although they pretty much suck now, I am excited about Metallica working with Rick Rubin.

2) Although this cover isn't very good, it's not all bad.

3) Mad props to Mariano Rivera for making a cameo.

New Found Religion

2007-03-03T21:06:00.000-05:00

So I was getting on a flight back to Chicago from San Jose yesterday, when I heard this exchange:

guy 1: ...quantum physics.

guy 2: I remember quantum physics. For me, that stuff went in one ear and right out the other.

(pause)

guy 1: Actually, it never went in your ear, it just tunnelled right through your head.

My face contorted and I let out a shriek, pointing at the guy and proclaiming, "WOW!" I have since come to the conclusion that only the existence of a higher power could explain such nerditude. Be afraid. Be very afraid.

Economics: David Letterman Style

2007-02-27T22:28:00.000-05:00

I Returned My New Phone

2007-02-23T12:50:00.002-05:00

After a week with it, I had had enough of the T-Mobile Dash. My reasons:

Windows Mobile is as bad as everyone says it is
The phone could not go all day if I hadn't charged it the night before. I figured that by the time this phone was a year old, the battery life would become a crippling problem.
Sound quality wasn't so good.

So I've now acquired a Blackberry Pearl, which has very much impressed me so far. SureType takes some getting used to (essentially, when you type, it is constantly recommending words you might be typing), but the "Pearl" trackball is very nice.

I've been pretty much completely drunk the past two nights, and have an open bar event tomorrow night. In the meantime, this weekend is admit weekend for Round 1 Applicants at the GSB, also known as those super over-achievers who had their shit together by October.

I Got a New Phone

2007-02-15T19:01:00.001-05:00

So if you don't have my new number, ask. I'll probably send out some mass email soon.

One of My Professors Tackles the Penny

2007-02-11T22:10:00.000-05:00

link

Now That a Penny Isn’t Worth Much, It’s Time to Make It Worth 5 Cents

By AUSTAN GOOLSBEE
Published: February 1, 2007

How dumb do you have to be to mint money at a loss? In the latest only-in-Washington episode, we find that the government may have lost as much as $40 million coining pennies and nickels last year.

The metal in them — the zinc, copper and nickel — has soared in value in the last few years, making the coins more valuable as raw materials than they are as currency. The government reaction has been to ban the melting of the coins to get the metal. But there is a good chance that we will find ourselves in an outright coin shortage of a form we have not seen in four decades and one that harks back to the monetary problems of medieval times.

In their landmark book on monetary history, “The Big Problem of Small Change,” two economists, Thomas J. Sargent of New York University and François R. Velde of the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, point out that before the 20th century, the value of coins came from the material they contained: silver or gold. In the words of economics, it was “commodity money.”

But as the price of silver or gold increased, people pulled the coins from circulation. These shortages are a basic problem with commodity money and began almost as early as Charlemagne’s minting of the first silver penny around 800 A.D.

But the United States doesn’t have commodity money anymore. Our coins are just tokens now. They are valuable only because the government says they are — because the government is willing to trade them for dollars.

And making tokens that cost more to manufacture than they are worth is monetary insanity. We could make them out of any material we want, so why in the world would we lose money?

To stop this senselessness, we would seem to have only two choices: debase the coins (i.e., make them out of something cheaper) or abolish pennies (and, perhaps, even nickels).

The United States has debased money in the past. In World War II, we made steel pennies to save copper. In the 1960s, the high value of silver caused a run on quarters and dimes and led to a full-blown coin shortage until we substituted copper and nickel. We also took most of the copper out of pennies in 1982 for the same reason.

But debasement only puts off the inevitable for a short time. Because the penny is fixed in value at 1 cent, no matter what the penny is made of, the cost of its material will rise with inflation and eventually be worth more than a cent.

Most economists, then, argue that we should use this opportunity to abolish pennies the way Australia, Britain, Finland and the Netherlands abolished their smallest coins. Because of inflation, a penny isn’t half the coin it once was. Indeed, the United States ended the half-cent in 1857 when it was still worth about 8 cents in today’s terms, so we’re probably well overdue to retire some coins.

But polls show that a majority of Americans like their pennies, and abolition might lead people in Illinois — the land of Lincoln, where pennies still work at tollbooths — to outright currency rebellion.

On top of that, Raymond Lombra, an economist at Pennsylvania State University, claims that the rounding of prices — a $6.49 bill would cost you $6.50 — might not be evenly distributed and might cost consumers as much as $600 million a year, a cost that would be paid disproportionately by the poor who use cash more often.

Others counter that retail stores could not get away with such shenanigans. But, clearly, the case for abolishing pennies is not universally believed.

So what to do?

Mr. Velde, in a Chicago Fed Letter issued in February, has come up with a solution that would abolish the penny, solve the excess costs of making nickels, help the poor, keep the Lincoln buffs happy and save hundreds of millions of dollars for taxpayers.

As Mr. Velde explained in an interview, “We face a very medieval problem so I took inspiration from the medieval practice of rebasing.”

He would rebase the penny by having the government declare it to be worth 5 cents.

At first that sounds impossible. But our coins are just tokens the government gives a value to. We can say they are worth whatever we like. Indeed, Mr. Velde observes that the United States did something similar in 1834, when it changed the gold-silver ratio and suddenly the half-eagle $5 coin was actually worth $5.625.

Pennies would then cost a little over 1 cent to make and would be worth a nickel, so the government would again be making a profit on money. We would have plenty of new Lincoln nickels so we could stop minting our current nickels at a heavy loss. The Jefferson nickels would stay in circulation, just as the old wheat pennies do now. Because metal in nickels is valuable, though, they would probably be melted down.

Rebasing pennies is printing money. But don’t get too worried about inflation. With about 140 billion pennies in circulation ($1.4 billion) — counting the ones in your couch and your kids’ piggy banks — this rebalance would make them worth $7 billion, adding about $5.6 billion to the money supply. For comparison, at the start of 2007 there was about $1.4 trillion in currency and money available for purchases, to say nothing of credit cards.

Plus, the money would go disproportionately to the poor (and to people getting allowances from their parents), more than offsetting any “rounding tax” from eliminating the penny.

So pull out those sofa cushions, ladies and gentlemen, and start looking for the shiny face of Honest Abe. All that glitters may not be gold, or even nickel, but it may be worth 5 cents.

Schadenfreude

2007-02-11T12:41:00.000-05:00

Door: 1, Bub: 0

2007-02-09T10:49:00.000-05:00

OUCH!

Picture this: Yours truly has a coffee in my right hand, a book between my right arm and my side, my left glove in my teeth so I can get my left hand into my pocket for my keys. I pull out the keys and go to open the door. Door starts closing a bit, so I go to grab it with my left hand. Because of the cold air outside and the warm air inside, the door slams shut faster than I expected and BAM, I find that my finger gets caught in the door. I quickly reopen the door, walk inside, and start shaking my hand thinking:

Damn, you can break your hand that way
I hope this isn't the kind of injury that is best cured by this shaking I'm doing
Why is there blood all over the floor?

That last question was a bit of a doozy. I looked down and the tip of my left middle finger had turned mostly black with some blue and was bleeding. I still had my glove in my mouth. I went to the emergency room, and after three hours, including one spent watching a decent episode of Law & Order: SVU (Ice-T!) in the waiting room, had some x-rays taken, some hydrogen peroxide poured on it, and was told it wasn't broken, didn't need stitches, nor did I need to lose the finger nail.

So I can write and type, but my rocking ability has been put out of commission for the short term. I also got to show up to school the other day wearing a ridiculous bandage on only my middle finger, which was high comedy in my opinion. I was impressed that most people I knew approached me with genuine concern, as I think my natural response would have been to laugh first and ask questions later.

other random notes:

Those wanting to be sent stuff through the mail should give me their CORRECT address. It's a very important part of the process. I hope whoever the stranger living in St. Louis that I sent my "Famous End of 2006 Mix" to enjoys it.
I had grape vodka for the first time last night. It was made by Three Olive, who stands out in my memory as the vodka bottle that had about a shot left in it, and nobody would drink for two or three of my old roommate and my house parties.
I was selected for the Entrepreneurial Internship Program here at the GSB. This means I can work for a cool small company for the summer. This also puts an end to my flirtation with structured derivative products. You were the most ridiculous sounding career option I could pursue, but in the end it just couldn't work out. It's not you, it's me.
I've decided to ditch my Boston telephone number. It's on my business card, but I just don't want to have a Boston number two years from now. 3-1-2 in the heezy (or 773, I'm not quite sure which one I'll get).
Biggest silver lining of the Colts winning the Super Bowl? Is it class act Marvin Harrison getting a ring? Peyton Manning being able to tell various ESPN know-nothings to STFU? Tony Dungy doing the same? Massholes everywhere watching the Colts, the COLTS, with Adam Vinatieri on their team win the big one? No, it's paycheck-player, gold-grilled UM jerkoff Edgerrin James sitting around his apartment wearing a Cardinals jersey with a frown on his face.
BTW, wrong but funny
The bar where TNDC was last night, Delilah's, not only plays damn fine music, but will be showing Twin Peaks episodes all month on Sundays. FWWM and the Series Premeire this Sunday. Sweet. creepiest bad guy ever. For those of you that have never seen the show, I didn't give anything away.
Some other bar I was in last night was playing Fast Times at Ridgemont High on flat screens, while oldish people danced to 80s tunes, and my friends and I downed red-headed sluts and overpriced Coors Light bottles. As two of the guys I was with had never seen it, I offered to lend it to them in either VHS or DVD format, and told them to observe the scene where Phoebe Cates teaches Jennifer Jason Leigh how to give a blowjob to a carrot. I proclaimed it the best high school movie ever, and didn't back down (like Tom Petty) when confronted with "Better than Dazed and Confused?"

Nostalgia

2007-02-05T21:54:00.000-05:00

As my past week has included writing a feasibility study for a business, as well as reading a case study on E-Ink, a company that sells ink to be used in an array of devices, including eBooks, I grew nostalgic for an eBook device business plan I and a few others wrote once.

Blast from the past!

All the CAD work was me. We were supposed to have already done $3.5M of EBITDA last year. It didn't quite work out that way. :(

It's Obama! It's Obama!

2007-02-04T10:41:00.000-05:00

If I were Barack Obama's campaign manager, I would make this his campaign song. Sure, it's got Lemmy singing "It's a bomber, it's a bomber," but Lemmy's kinda hard to understand, so it works.

Besides, who doesn't like Lemmy? I'll tell you who: the terrorists.

On the moon we can post signs wherever we want! Isn't that right Err?

2007-02-01T00:53:00.000-05:00

Boston is stupid.

Tips and Observations

2007-01-29T21:49:00.000-05:00

1) Don't take an Airborne orally. It is meant to be dissolved in a glass of water and then drank. I made the mistake of chewing on one "straight-up" and had a most unpleasant experience. It wasn't as bad as this, nor did it look as cool as this, but I wouldn't reccomend it nonetheless.

2) Reading the 1992 DOJ and FTC Horizontal Merger Guidelines is probably worse than eating an Airborne. It reminded me that law school must really, really suck.

Three Takes on Milton Friedman

2007-01-29T20:44:00.000-05:00

Tonight most PBS stations are playing a documenatry about the life of economist Milton Friedman. Here are ~~three economists'~~ two economists' and one judge's reflections.

If you don't wanna read from my snazzy blog:
From the Becker-Posner blog
Paul Krugman in the New York Review of Books

On Milton Friedman's Ideas-- Gary Becker

Milton Friedman died this past week. He was the most influential economist of the 20th century when one combines his contributions to both economic science and to public policy. I knew him for many decades starting first when I was a graduate student at Chicago, and then as a colleague, mentor, and very close friend.

I will not dwell here on what a remarkable colleague he was. However, I do want to describe my first exposure to him as a teacher since he enormously changed my approach to economics, and to life itself. After my first class with him a half-century ago, I recognized that I was fortunate to have an extraordinary economist as a teacher. During that class he asked a question, and I shot up my hand and was called on to provide an answer. I still remember what he said, "That is no answer, for you are only restating the question in other words." I sat down humiliated, but I knew he was right. I decided on my way home after a very stimulating class that despite all the economics I had studied at Princeton, and the two economics articles I was in the process of publishing, I had to relearn economics from the ground up. I sat at Friedman's feet for the next six years-- three as an Assistant Professor at Chicago-- learning economics from a fresh perspective. It was the most exciting intellectual period of my life. Further reflections on Friedman as a teacher can be found in my essay on him in the collection edited by Edward Shils, Remembering the University of Chicago: Teachers, Scientists, and Scholars, 1991, University of Chicago Press.

In considering his many contributions to economics I will pass over his major innovations in scientific economics. These include his emphasis on permanent income in explaining aggregate consumption and savings, his study of the monetary history of the United States, his explanation of the stagflation of the 1970's, his analysis of the value of a stable and predictable monetary framework to help stabilize the economy, his early contributions to the theory and measurement of human capital, his discussion of choice under uncertainty, and his famous essay on methodology in economics.

I will discuss instead several ideas in his remarkable book, Capitalism and Freedom, published in 1962, that contains almost all his well-known proposals on how to improve public policy in different fields. These proposals on based on just two fundamental principles. The first is that in the vast majority of situations, individuals know their own interests and what is good for them much better than government officials and intellectuals do. The second is that competition among providers of goods and services, including among producers of ideas and seekers of political office, is the most effective way to serve the interests of individuals and families, especially of the poorer members of society.

The famous education voucher system found in this book, and based on an article published in the 1950's, embodies both principles: that parents generally know the interests of their children better than teachers unions and school boards do, and that competition among schools is the best way to serve the educational interests of children. He added the further insight that one can and should separate government financing of education from government running of schools. The voucher system retains government financing, but forces public schools to compete for funds against private for-profit and non-profit schools. The voucher proposal has I believe won the intellectual battle over the value of competition among schools at the k-12 school level as well as at the college level, but so far vouchers have won only limited political victories in terms of actual implementation. This is mainly due to the dedicated opposition of public school teachers unions who fear competition from private schools.

Both individual choice and competition are the foundation of Friedman's 1962 radical proposal to privatize the social security system. He argued, correctly in my judgment, that the vast majority of families could be trusted to provide for their retirement if given appropriate incentives, and that they should be allowed to invest in retirement funds provided by competitive investment companies. The government-run social security systems then in effect in the United States and all other countries with retirement systems taxed earnings in ways that discouraged effort and encouraged underground activities. These tax receipts were then paid out to retirees according to politically determined criteria. Chile started the first private system of personal accounts modeled along the lines laid out in Capitalism and Freedom, and Chile has since been followed to some degree by many other countries, such as Mexico, Singapore, and Great Britain. The United States has its tax-free IRA's and Sep savings accounts, but this country has not yet implemented privatization of its basic social security system, even though an enormous financial deficit on this system will occur in about 15 years unless the system is significantly reformed.

Friedman also proposed a flat income tax rate in Capitalism and Freedom, and showed that a rate of about 20% in the United States could raise the same revenue and in a much simpler and far less costly way than the quite progressive income tax system in effect in the early 1960's. Further theoretical analysis of what is called optimal tax rates has generally concluded that a rather flat tax would be best at combining efficiency with redistribution of income to poorer families. The appeal to Friedman of the flat tax was based again on his confidence that individuals react to incentives, and that they take steps to further their interests. In this case, he argued that highly progressive taxes induce taxpayers to find and exploit tax loopholes, so that legally, and at times illegally, taxpayers cut their tax payments by hiding income or converting income into other forms. A flat income tax was early introduced by Hong Kong, and has in recent years been followed by many countries, including Russia and eight other Eastern European countries. The United States significantly flattened its income tax structure since the time Friedman wrote this book, especially as a result of the tax reform act of 1986. Unfortunately, a more progressive structure has crept back since that reform.

The voluntary army was not discussed in Capitalism and Freedom, but Friedman did propose to replace the military draft in several articles published about the same time as the book was published. He argued that a voluntary army would attract at reasonable cost a dedicated military force of men and women who volunteered due to a combination of patriotism and economic opportunities. A voluntary system is especially effective in situations where full-scale mobilization of available manpower is not required. His advocacy of the voluntary army induced President Nixon to put Friedman on a committee to consider whether the United States should replace its military draft by a fully voluntary armed force. Many persons on the committee initially opposed this idea, especially General William Westmoreland, head of military operations in Vietnam. Friedman's persuasiveness eventually won over the vast majority of the members to this position, and in 1973 the United States changed to a voluntary armed force. Seeing how well this system has operated, very few military leaders now want to return to a draft.

Friedman proposed in Capitalism and Freedom, and earlier in an article in the 1950's, to abolish the Bretton Woods System of fixed exchange rates, and move to fully flexible exchange rates. Under a flexible exchange system, rates are determined by the competitive supply and demand for different currencies by individuals and businesses. The prevailing view had been that such a system of flexible exchange rates would be unstable, so he argued at length why flexible exchange rates would be not constant but stable--unstable rates implied, he argued, that speculators on the average would lose money, which he did not believe was likely. This view of the behavior of speculators was challenged, but I believe Friedman was basically right. In any case, the issue was decisively settled after Nixon took the United States off the gold standard in 1972, and replaced it with a system of flexible rates in 1973. The Chicago Mercantile Exchange led by Leo Melamed then saw the opportunity to set up futures markets in currencies, which it did with Friedman's help. These markets were enormously successful, and put to rest forever the belief that one could not have an effective system of flexible exchange rates. They provide an opportunity for businesses to hedge their currency risks by trading on currency futures.

The first chapter of Capitalism and Freedom considers the link between economic and political freedom. He argues there that economic freedom promotes political freedom, and that political freedom is not likely to persist without economic freedom. "The kind of economic organization that provides economic freedom directly, namely, competitive capitalism, also promotes political freedom because it separates economic power from political power and in this way enables the one to offset the other." Findings since then suggest that while economic freedom can begin under totalitarian regimes, such as under General Pinochet in Chile and General Chiang Kai-Shek in Taiwan, economic freedom produces economic growth and other changes that usually eventually lead to much greater democracy, as in Taiwan, South Korea, and Chile. The important implication is that China would become more democratic if it continues on its path of greater economic freedom and greater growth.

On whether one can have democracy without economic freedom, Friedman said, "I know of no example in time or place of a society that has been marked by a large measure of political freedom, and that has not also used something comparable to a free market to organize the bulk of economic activity." Sweden and other Scandinavian countries have been vibrant democracies, and yet governments in these countries tax away more than half the income. However, the majority of these taxes are transferred back to individuals in the form of retirement incomes, medical care, and in other ways. Although these countries mainly rely on private enterprise, not government enterprises, to organize their economies, is that "enough" freedom to qualify as economically free? That depends on the definition of economic freedom, yet I believe Friedman is right that thoroughgoing restrictions on economic freedom would turn out to be inconsistent with democracy.

To conclude on a more personal level, I was most impressed by Milton Friedman's sterling character--he would never soften his views to curry favor--his perennial optimism, his loyalty to those he liked, his love of a good argument without any personal attacks on his opponents, and his courage in the face of prolonged and virulent attacks on him by others. I cannot count the number of times I participated with him in seminars, nor how many visits my wife and I shared with Milton and Rose, his wife of almost 70 years. Rose, a fine economist, would not hesitate to differ with her husband when she believed his arguments were wrong or too loose.

When I spoke on the phone with him last Monday, he sounded strong and a bit optimistic about his health, even though he had just returned from a one-week hospital stay with a severe illness, an illness that a few days later took his life. Although his ideas live on stronger than ever, it is hard to believe that he is not here. I can no longer seek his opinions on my papers, but I will continue to ask myself about any ideas I have: would my teacher and dear friend Milton Friedman believe they are any good?

Milton Friedman--Richard Posner

I knew Milton Friedman, but not well; and I am not competent to express an informed opinion on his major academic work, which was in macroeconomics. The economists of his generation with whom I principally associated were George Stigler, Ronald Coase, and Aaron Director (Friedman's brother-in-law)--microeconomists who had a major impact on the law and economics movement.

I did, however, read a few of Friedman's essays. Two in particular struck me around the time I came to Chicago. One was his essay on the methodology of positive economics, in which he argued that the way to test a theory was not by assessing the realism of its assumptions, but by assessing the accuracy of its predictions. Economics makes heavy use of unrealistic assumptions, primarily concerning rationality, and yet the predictions generated by models based on those assumptions are often accurate. Where they are inaccurate, this is a spur to reexamining the assumptions and perhaps modifying them, as is occurring in such fields as finance, where assuming a more complex human psychology than finance theorists traditionally assumed has helped to explain anomalies (from a rational-choice perspective) in the behavior of financial markets.

The emphasis on predictions connects Friedman's essay to Karl Popper's philosophy of science, in which the scientific method is viewed as a matter of making bold hypotheses, confronting them with data, and ascribing tentative (always tentative) validity to the hypotheses that survive the confrontation. Popper's methodology of fallibilism has strong affinities with Friedman's methodology. Both are strongly empiricist. Stigler in conversation merged these two closely related approaches, and I was very struck by the melded approach.

The other essay of Friedman's that struck me was an essay on taxation in which he argued, contrary to the conventional view at the time (though I gather the argument was not original with him), that there was no theoretical reason for supposing income taxes superior in point of efficient resource allocation to excise taxes. An excise tax--say, a 10 percent tax on yachts--drives a wedge between cost and price and so deflects buyers to substitutes that may cost more to produce but look cheaper because they are not taxed at so high a rate. (The effect is the same as monopoly pricing.) But Friedman argued that income taxes have the same effect, by driving a wedge between the cost of work and the wage (price) received by the worker, thus deflecting him to untaxed substitutes, such as leisure, or to jobs that generate untaxed benefits, including leisure in the case of teaching (for example), but also prestige, amenities, tax-favored fringe benefits, and job security. This idea of the parity of excise and income taxes has wide-ranging implications for public policy, since the tendency (still) is to neglect the misallocative effects of income taxation--a neglect of which I think even Friedman was sometimes guilty, as I am about to argue.

Perhaps his most important general contribution to economic policy was the simple, but when he first propounded it largely ignored or rejected, point that people have a better sense of their interests than third parties, including government officials, do. Friedman argued this point with reference to a host of issues, including the choice between a volunteer and a conscript army. With conscription, government officials determine the most productive use of an individual: should he be a soldier, or a worker in an essential industry, or a student, and if a soldier should he be an infantryman, a medic, etc.? In a volunteer army, in contrast, the determination is made by the individual--he chooses whether to be a soldier or not, and (within limits) if he decides to be a soldier what branch, specialty, etc., to work in. A volunteer army should provide a better matching of person to job than conscription, and in addition should create a more efficient balance between labor and capital inputs into military activity by pricing labor at its civilian opportunity costs.

But this is in general rather than in every case. The smaller the armed forces and the less risk of death or serious injury in military service, the more efficient a volunteer army is relative to a conscript one. These conditions are not satisfied in a general war in which a significant fraction of the young adult population is needed for the proper conduct of the war and the risk of death or serious injury is substantial--the situation in World War II. For then the government's heavy demand for military labor, coupled with the high cost of military service to soldiers at significant risk, would drive the market wage rate for such service through the roof. Very heavy taxes would be required to defray the expense of a volunteer army in these circumstances and those taxes would have misallocative effects that might well exceed the misallocative effects of conscription.

I mention this example because I find slightly off-putting what I sensed to be a dogmatic streak in Milton Friedman. I think his belief in the superior efficiency of free markets to government as a means of resource allocation, though fruitful and largely correct, was embraced by him as an article of faith and not merely as a hypothesis. I think he considered it almost a personal affront that the Scandinavian nations, particularly Sweden, could achieve and maintain very high levels of economic output despite very high rates of taxation, an enormous public sector, and extensive wealth redistribution resulting in much greater economic equality than in the United States. I don't think his analytic apparatus could explain such an anomaly.

I also think that Friedman, again more as a matter of faith than of science, exaggerated the correlation between economic and political freedom. A country can be highly productive though it has an authoritarian political system, as in China, or democratic and impoverished, as was true for the first half century or so of India's democracy and remains true to a considerable extent, since India remains extremely poor though it has a large and thriving middle class--an expanding island in the sea of misery. What is true is that commercial values are in tension with aristocratic and militaristic values that support authoritarian government, and also that as people become economically independent they are less subservient, and so less willing to submit to control by politicians; and also that they become more concerned with the protection of property rights, which authoritarian government threatens. But Friedman seemed to share Friedrich Hayek's extreme and inaccurate view that socialism of the sort that Britain embraced under the old Labour Party was incompatible with democracy, and I don't think that there is a good theoretical or empirical basis for that view. The Road to Serfdom flunks the test of accuracy of prediction!

I imagine that without the element of faith that I have been stressing, Friedman might have lacked the moral courage to propound his libertarian views in the chilly intellectual and political climate in which he first advanced them. So it should probably be reckoned on balance a good thing, though not to my personal taste. His advocacy of school vouchers, the volunteer army (in the era in which he advocated it--which we are still in), and the negative income tax demonstrates the fruitfulness of his master micreconomic insight that, in general, people know better than government how to manage their lives. But perhaps not always.

Who Was Milton Friedman?
By Paul Krugman

The history of economic thought in the twentieth century is a bit like the history of Christianity in the sixteenth century. Until John Maynard Keynes published The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money in 1936, economics—at least in the English-speaking world—was completely dominated by free-market orthodoxy. Heresies would occasionally pop up, but they were always suppressed. Classical economics, wrote Keynes in 1936, "conquered England as completely as the Holy Inquisition conquered Spain." And classical economics said that the answer to almost all problems was to let the forces of supply and demand do their job.

But classical economics offered neither explanations nor solutions for the Great Depression. By the middle of the 1930s, the challenges to orthodoxy could no longer be contained. Keynes played the role of Martin Luther, providing the intellectual rigor needed to make heresy respectable. Although Keynes was by no means a leftist—he came to save capitalism, not to bury it—his theory said that free markets could not be counted on to provide full employment, creating a new rationale for large-scale government intervention in the economy.

Keynesianism was a great reformation of economic thought. It was followed, inevitably, by a counter-reformation. A number of economists played important roles in the great revival of classical economics between 1950 and 2000, but none was as influential as Milton Friedman. If Keynes was Luther, Friedman was Ignatius of Loyola, founder of the Jesuits. And like the Jesuits, Friedman's followers have acted as a sort of disciplined army of the faithful, spearheading a broad, but incomplete, rollback of Keynesian heresy. By the century's end, classical economics had regained much though by no means all of its former dominion, and Friedman deserves much of the credit.

I don't want to push the religious analogy too far. Economic theory at least aspires to be science, not theology; it is concerned with earth, not heaven. Keynesian theory initially prevailed because it did a far better job than classical orthodoxy of making sense of the world around us, and Friedman's critique of Keynes became so influential largely because he correctly identified Keynesianism's weak points. And just to be clear: although this essay argues that Friedman was wrong on some issues, and sometimes seemed less than honest with his readers, I regard him as a great economist and a great man.

Milton Friedman played three roles in the intellectual life of the twentieth century. There was Friedman the economist's economist, who wrote technical, more or less apolitical analyses of consumer behavior and inflation. There was Friedman the policy entrepreneur, who spent decades campaigning on behalf of the policy known as monetarism—finally seeing the Federal Reserve and the Bank of England adopt his doctrine at the end of the 1970s, only to abandon it as unworkable a few years later. Finally, there was Friedman the ideologue, the great popularizer of free-market doctrine.

Did the same man play all these roles? Yes and no. All three roles were informed by Friedman's faith in the classical verities of free-market economics. Moreover, Friedman's effectiveness as a popularizer and propagandist rested in part on his well-deserved reputation as a profound economic theorist. But there's an important difference between the rigor of his work as a professional economist and the looser, sometimes questionable logic of his pronouncements as a public intellectual. While Friedman's theoretical work is universally admired by professional economists, there's much more ambivalence about his policy pronouncements and especially his popularizing. And it must be said that there were some serious questions about his intellectual honesty when he was speaking to the mass public.

But let's hold off on the questionable material for a moment, and talk about Friedman the economic theorist. For most of the past two centuries, economic thinking has been dominated by the concept of Homo economicus. The hypothetical Economic Man knows what he wants; his preferences can be expressed mathematically in terms of a "utility function." And his choices are driven by rational calculations about how to maximize that function: whether consumers are deciding between corn flakes or shredded wheat, or investors are deciding between stocks and bonds, those decisions are assumed to be based on comparisons of the "marginal utility," or the added benefit the buyer would get from acquiring a small amount of the alternatives available.

It's easy to make fun of this story. Nobody, not even Nobel-winning economists, really makes decisions that way. But most economists—myself included—nonetheless find Economic Man useful, with the understanding that he's an idealized representation of what we really think is going on. People do have preferences, even if those preferences can't really be expressed by a precise utility function; they usually make sensible decisions, even if they don't literally maximize utility. You might ask, why not represent people the way they really are? The answer is that abstraction, strategic simplification, is the only way we can impose some intellectual order on the complexity of economic life. And the assumption of rational behavior has been a particularly fruitful simplification.

The question, however, is how far to push it. Keynes didn't make an all-out assault on Economic Man, but he often resorted to plausible psychological theorizing rather than careful analysis of what a rational decision-maker would do. Business decisions were driven by "animal spirits," consumer decisions by a psychological tendency to spend some but not all of any increase in income, wage settlements by a sense of fairness, and so on.

But was it really a good idea to diminish the role of Economic Man that much? No, said Friedman, who argued in his 1953 essay "The Methodology of Positive Economics" that economic theories should be judged not by their psychological realism but by their ability to predict behavior. And Friedman's two greatest triumphs as an economic theorist came from applying the hypothesis of rational behavior to questions other economists had thought beyond its reach.

In his 1957 book A Theory of the Consumption Function—not exactly a crowd-pleasing title, but an important topic—Friedman argued that the best way to make sense of saving and spending was not, as Keynes had done, to resort to loose psychological theorizing, but rather to think of individuals as making rational plans about how to spend their wealth over their lifetimes. This wasn't necessarily an anti-Keynesian idea—in fact, the great Keynesian economist Franco Modi-gliani simultaneously and independently made a similar case, with even more care in thinking about rational behavior, in work with Albert Ando. But it did mark a return to classical ways of thinking—and it worked. The details are a bit technical, but Friedman's "permanent income hypothesis" and the Ando-Modigliani "life cycle model" resolved several apparent paradoxes about the relationship between income and spending, and remain the foundations of how economists think about spending and saving to this day.

Friedman's work on consumption behavior would, in itself, have made his academic reputation. An even bigger triumph, however, came from his application of Economic Man theorizing to inflation. In 1958 the New Zealand–born economist A.W. Phillips pointed out that there was a historical correlation between unemployment and inflation, with high inflation associated with low unemployment and vice versa. For a time, economists treated this correlation as if it were a reliable and stable relationship. This led to serious discussion about which point on the "Phillips curve" the government should choose. For example, should the United States accept a higher inflation rate in order to achieve a lower unemployment rate?

In 1967, however, Friedman gave a presidential address to the American Economic Association in which he argued that the correlation between inflation and unemployment, even thought it was visible in the data, did not represent a true trade-off, at least not in the long run. "There is," he said, "always a temporary trade-off between inflation and unemployment; there is no permanent trade-off." In other words, if policymakers were to try to keep unemployment low through a policy of generating higher inflation, they would achieve only temporary success. According to Friedman, unemployment would eventually rise again, even as inflation remained high. The economy would, in other words, suffer the condition Paul Samuelson would later dub "stagflation."

How did Friedman reach this conclusion? (Edmund S. Phelps, who was awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in economics this year, simultaneously and independently arrived at the same result.) As in the case of his work on consumer behavior, Friedman applied the idea of rational behavior. He argued that after a sustained period of inflation, people would build expectations of future inflation into their decisions, nullifying any positive effects of inflation on employment. For example, one reason inflation may lead to higher employment is that hiring more workers becomes profitable when prices rise faster than wages. But once workers understand that the purchasing power of their wages will be eroded by inflation, they will demand higher wage settlements in advance, so that wages keep up with prices. As a result, after inflation has gone on for a while, it will no longer deliver the original boost to employment. In fact, there will be a rise in unemployment if inflation falls short of expectations.

At the time Friedman and Phelps propounded their ideas, the United States had little experience with sustained inflation. So this was truly a prediction rather than an attempt to explain the past. In the 1970s, how-ever, persistent inflation provided a test of the Friedman-Phelps hypothesis. Sure enough, the historical correlation between inflation and unemployment broke down in just the way Friedman and Phelps had predicted: in the 1970s, as the inflation rate rose into double digits, the unemployment rate was as high or higher than in the stable-price years of the 1950s and 1960s. Inflation was eventually brought under control in the 1980s, but only after a painful period of extremely high unemployment, the worst since the Great Depression.

By predicting the phenomenon of stagflation in advance, Friedman and Phelps achieved one of the great triumphs of postwar economics. This triumph, more than anything else, confirmed Milton Friedman's status as a great economist's economist, whatever one may think of his other roles.

One interesting footnote: although Friedman made great strides in macroeconomics by applying the concept of individual rationality, he also knew where to stop. In the 1970s, some economists pushed Friedman's analysis of inflation even further, arguing that there is no usable trade-off between inflation and unemployment even in the short run, because people will anticipate government actions and build that anticipation, as well as past experience, into their price-setting and wage-bargaining. This doctrine, known as "rational expectations," swept through much of academic economics. But Friedman never went there. His reality sense warned that this was taking the idea of Homo economicus too far. And so it proved: Friedman's 1967 address has stood the test of time, while the more extreme views propounded by rational expectations theorists in the Seventies and Eighties have not.

"Everything reminds Milton of the money supply. Well, everything reminds me of sex, but I keep it out of the paper," wrote MIT's Robert Solow in 1966. For decades, Milton Friedman's public image and fame were defined largely by his pronouncements on monetary policy and his creation of the doctrine known as monetarism. It's somewhat surprising to realize, then, that monetarism is now widely regarded as a failure, and that some of the things Friedman said about "money" and monetary policy—unlike what he said about consumption and inflation— appear to have been misleading, and perhaps deliberately so.

To understand what monetarism was all about, the first thing you need to know is that the word "money" doesn't mean quite the same thing in Economese that it does in plain English. When economists talk of the money supply, they don't mean wealth in the usual sense. They mean only those forms of wealth that can be used more or less directly to buy things. Currency—pieces of green paper with pictures of dead presidents on them— is money, and so are bank deposits on which you can write checks. But stocks, bonds, and real estate aren't money, because they have to be converted into cash or bank deposits before they can be used to make purchases.

If the money supply consisted solely of currency, it would be under the direct control of the government—or, more precisely, the Federal Reserve, a monetary agency that, like its counterpart "central banks" in many other countries, is institutionally somewhat separate from the government proper. The fact that the money supply also includes bank deposits makes reality more complicated. The central bank has direct control only over the "monetary base"—the sum of currency in circulation, the currency banks hold in their vaults, and the deposits banks hold at the Federal Reserve—but not the deposits people have made in banks. Under normal circumstances, however, the Federal Reserve's direct control over the monetary base is enough to give it effective control of the overall money supply as well.

Before Keynes, economists considered the money supply a primary tool of economic management. But Keynes argued that under depression conditions, when interest rates are very low, changes in the money supply have little effect on the economy. The logic went like this: when interest rates are 4 or 5 percent, nobody wants to sit on idle cash. But in a situation like that of 1935, when the interest rate on three-month Treasury bills was only 0.14 percent, there is very little incentive to take the risk of putting money to work. The central bank may try to spur the economy by printing large quantities of additional currency; but if the interest rate is already very low the additional cash is likely to languish in bank vaults or under mattresses. Thus Keynes argued that monetary policy, a change in the money supply to manage the economy, would be ineffective. And that's why Keynes and his followers believed that fiscal policy—in particular, an increase in government spending—was necessary to get countries out of the Great Depression.

Why does this matter? Monetary policy is a highly technocratic, mostly apolitical form of government intervention in the economy. If the Fed decides to increase the money supply, all it does is purchase some government bonds from private banks, paying for the bonds by crediting the banks' reserve accounts—in effect, all the Fed has to do is print some more monetary base. By contrast, fiscal policy involves the government much more deeply in the economy, often in a value-laden way: if politicians decide to use public works to promote employment, they need to decide what to build and where. Economists with a free-market bent, then, tend to want to believe that monetary policy is all that's needed; those with a desire to see a more active government tend to believe that fiscal policy is essential.

Economic thinking after the triumph of the Keynesian revolution—as reflected, say, in the early editions of Paul Samuelson's classic textbook[*]— gave priority to fiscal policy, while monetary policy was relegated to the sidelines. As Friedman said in his 1967 address to the American Economic Association:

The wide acceptance of [Keynesian] views in the economics profession meant that for some two decades monetary policy was believed by all but a few reactionary souls to have been rendered obsolete by new economic knowledge. Money did not matter.

Although this may have been an exaggeration, monetary policy was held in relatively low regard through the 1940s and 1950s. Friedman, however, crusaded for the proposition that money did too matter, culminating in the 1963 publication of A Monetary History of the United States, 1867–1960, with Anna Schwartz.

Although A Monetary History is a vast work of extraordinary scholarship, covering a century of monetary developments, its most influential and controversial discussion concerned the Great Depression. Friedman and Schwartz claimed to have refuted Keynes's pessimism about the effectiveness of monetary policy in depression conditions. "The contraction" of the economy, they declared, "is in fact a tragic testimonial to the importance of monetary forces."

But what did they mean by that? From the beginning, the Friedman-Schwartz position seemed a bit slippery. And over time Friedman's presentation of the story grew cruder, not subtler, and eventually began to seem —there's no other way to say this—intellectually dishonest.

In interpreting the origins of the Depression, the distinction between the monetary base (currency plus bank reserves), which the Fed controls directly, and the money supply (currency plus bank deposits) is crucial. The monetary base went up during the early years of the Great Depression, rising from an average of $6.05 billion in 1929 to an average of $7.02 billion in 1933. But the money supply fell sharply, from $26.6 billion to $19.9 billion. This divergence mainly reflected the fallout from the wave of bank failures in 1930–1931: as the public lost faith in banks, people began holding their wealth in cash rather than bank deposits, and those banks that survived began keeping large quantities of cash on hand rather than lending it out, to avert the danger of a bank run. The result was much less lending, and hence much less spending, than there would have been if the public had continued to deposit cash into banks, and banks had continued to lend deposits out to businesses. And since a collapse of spending was the proximate cause of the Depression, the sudden desire of both individuals and banks to hold more cash undoubtedly made the slump worse.

Friedman and Schwartz claimed that the fall in the money supply turned what might have been an ordinary recession into a catastrophic depression, itself an arguable point. But even if we grant that point for the sake of argument, one has to ask whether the Federal Reserve, which after all did increase the monetary base, can be said to have caused the fall in the overall money supply. At least initially, Friedman and Schwartz didn't say that. What they said instead was that the Fed could have prevented the fall in the money supply, in particular by riding to the rescue of the failing banks during the crisis of 1930–1931. If the Fed had rushed to lend money to banks in trouble, the wave of bank failures might have been prevented, which in turn might have avoided both the public's decision to hold cash rather than bank deposits, and the preference of the surviving banks for stashing deposits in their vaults rather than lending the funds out. And this, in turn, might have staved off the worst of the Depression.

An analogy may be helpful here. Suppose that a flu epidemic breaks out, and later analysis suggests that appropriate action by the Centers for Disease Control could have contained the epidemic. It would be fair to blame government officials for failing to take appropriate action. But it would be quite a stretch to say that the government caused the epidemic, or to use the CDC's failure as a demonstration of the superiority of free markets over big government.

Yet many economists, and even more lay readers, have taken Friedman and Schwartz's account to mean that the Federal Reserve actually caused the Great Depression—that the Depression is in some sense a demonstration of the evils of an excessively interventionist government. And in later years, as I've said, Friedman's assertions grew cruder, as if to feed this misperception. In his 1967 presidential address he declared that "the US monetary authorities followed highly deflationary policies," and that the money supply fell "because the Federal Reserve System forced or permitted a sharp reduction in the monetary base, because it failed to exercise the responsibilities assigned to it"—an odd assertion given that the monetary base, as we've seen, actually rose as the money supply was falling. (Friedman may have been referring to a couple of episodes along the way in which the monetary base fell modestly for brief periods, but even so his statement was highly misleading at best.)

By 1976 Friedman was telling readers of Newsweek that "the elementary truth is that the Great Depression was produced by government mismanagement," a statement that his readers surely took to mean that the Depression wouldn't have happened if only the government had kept out of the way—when in fact what Friedman and Schwartz claimed was that the government should have been more active, not less.

Why did historical disputes about the role of monetary policy in the 1930s matter so much in the 1960s? Partly because they fed into Friedman's broader anti-government agenda, of which more below. But the more direct application was to Friedman's advocacy of monetarism. According to this doctrine, the Federal Reserve should keep the money supply growing at a steady, low rate, say 3 percent a year—and not deviate from this target, no matter what is happening in the economy. The idea was to put monetary policy on autopilot, removing any discretion on the part of government officials.

Friedman's case for monetarism was part economic, part political. Steady growth in the money supply, he argued, would lead to a reasonably stable economy. He never claimed that following his rule would eliminate all recessions, but he did argue that the wiggles in the economy's growth path would be small enough to be tolerable —hence the assertion that the Great Depression wouldn't have happened if the Fed had been following a monetarist rule. And along with this qualified faith in the stability of the economy under a monetary rule went Friedman's unqualified contempt for the ability of Federal Reserve officials to do better if given discretion. Exhibit A for the Fed's unreliability was the onset of the Great Depression, but Friedman could point to many other examples of policy gone wrong. "A monetary rule," he wrote in 1972, "would insulate monetary policy both from arbitrary power of a small group of men not subject to control by the electorate and from the short-run pressures of partisan politics."

Monetarism was a powerful force in economic debate for about three decades after Friedman first propounded the doctrine in his 1959 book A Program for Monetary Stability. Today, however, it is a shadow of its former self, for two main reasons.

First, when the United States and the United Kingdom tried to put monetarism into practice at the end of the 1970s, both experienced dismal results: in each country steady growth in the money supply failed to prevent severe recessions. The Federal Reserve officially adopted Friedman-type monetary targets in 1979, but effectively abandoned them in 1982 when the unemployment rate went into double digits. This abandonment was made official in 1984, and ever since then the Fed has engaged in precisely the sort of discretionary fine-tuning that Friedman decried. For example, the Fed responded to the 2001 recession by slashing interest rates and allowing the money supply to grow at rates that sometimes exceeded 10 percent per year. Once the Fed was satisfied that the recovery was solid, it reversed course, raising interest rates and allowing growth in the money supply to drop to zero.

Second, since the early 1980s the Federal Reserve and its counterparts in other countries have done a reasonably good job, undermining Friedman's portrayal of central bankers as irredeemable bunglers. Inflation has stayed low, recessions—except in Japan, of which more in a second— have been relatively brief and shallow. And all this happened in spite of fluctuations in the money supply that horrified monetarists, and led them— Friedman included—to predict disasters that failed to materialize. As David Warsh of The Boston Globe pointed out in 1992, "Friedman blunted his lance forecasting inflation in the 1980s, when he was deeply, frequently wrong."

By 2004, the Economic Report of the President, written by the very conservative economists of the Bush administration, could nonetheless make the highly anti-monetarist declaration that "aggressive monetary policy"— not stable, steady-as-you-go, but aggressive—"can reduce the depth of a recession."

Now, a word about Japan. During the 1990s Japan experienced a sort of minor-key reprise of the Great Depression. The unemployment rate never reached Depression levels, thanks to massive public works spending that had Japan, with less than half America's population, pouring more concrete each year than the United States. But the very low interest rate conditions of the Great Depression reemerged in full. By 1998 the call money rate, the rate on overnight loans between banks, was literally zero.

And under those conditions, monetary policy proved just as ineffective as Keynes had said it was in the 1930s. The Bank of Japan, Japan's equivalent of the Fed, could and did increase the monetary base. But the extra yen were hoarded, not spent. The only consumer durable goods selling well, some Japanese economists told me at the time, were safes. In fact, the Bank of Japan found itself unable even to increase the money supply as much as it wanted. It pushed vast quantities of cash into circulation, but broader measures of the money supply grew very little. An economic recovery finally began a couple of years ago, driven by a revival of business investment to take advantage of new technological opportunities. But monetary policy never was able to get any traction.

In effect, Japan in the Nineties offered a fresh opportunity to test the views of Friedman and Keynes regarding the effectiveness of monetary policy in depression conditions. And the results clearly supported Keynes's pessimism rather than Friedman's optimism.

In 1946 Milton Friedman made his debut as a popularizer of free-market economics with a pamphlet titled "Roofs or Ceilings: The Current Housing Problem" coauthored with George J. Stigler, who would later join him at the University of Chicago. The pamphlet, an attack on the rent controls that were still universal just after World War II, was released under rather odd circumstances: it was a publication of the Foundation for Economic Education, an organization which, as Rick Perlstein writes in Before the Storm (2001), his book about the origins of the modern conservative movement, "spread a libertarian gospel so uncompromising it bordered on anarchism." Robert Welch, the founder of the John Birch Society, sat on the FEE's board. This first venture in free-market popularization prefigured in two ways the course of Friedman's career as a public intellectual over the next six decades.

First, the pamphlet demonstrated Friedman's special willingness to take free-market ideas to their logical limits. Neither the idea that markets are efficient ways to allocate scarce goods nor the proposition that price controls create shortages and inefficiency was new. But many economists, fearing the backlash against a sudden rise in rents (which Friedman and Stigler predicted would be about 30 percent for the nation as a whole), might have proposed some kind of gradual transition to decontrol. Friedman and Stigler dismissed all such concerns.

In the decades ahead, this single-mindedness would become Friedman's trademark. Again and again, he called for market solutions to problems—education, health care, the illegal drug trade—that almost everyone else thought required extensive government intervention. Some of his ideas have received widespread acceptance, like replacing rigid rules on pollution with a system of pollution permits that companies are free to buy and sell. Some, like school vouchers, are broadly supported by the conservative movement but haven't gotten far politically. And some of his proposals, like eliminating licensing procedures for doctors and abolishing the Food and Drug Administration, are considered outlandish even by most conservatives.

Second, the pamphlet showed just how good Friedman was as a popularizer. It's beautifully and cunningly written. There is no jargon; the points are made with cleverly chosen real-world examples, ranging from San Francisco's rapid recovery from the 1906 earthquake to the plight of a 1946 veteran, newly discharged from the army, searching in vain for a decent place to live. The same style, enhanced by video, would mark Friedman's celebrated 1980 TV series Free to Choose.

The odds are that the great swing back toward laissez-faire policies that took place around the world beginning in the 1970s would have happened even if there had been no Milton Friedman. But his tireless and brilliantly effective campaign on behalf of free markets surely helped accelerate the process, both in the United States and around the world. By any measure —protectionism versus free trade; regulation versus deregulation; wages set by collective bargaining and government minimum wages versus wages set by the market—the world has moved a long way in Friedman's direction. And even more striking than his achievement in terms of actual policy changes has been the transformation of the conventional wisdom: most influential people have been so converted to the Friedman way of thinking that it is simply taken as a given that the change in economic policies he promoted has been a force for good. But has it?

Consider first the macroeconomic performance of the US economy. We have data on the real income—that is, income adjusted for inflation—of American families from 1947 to 2005. During the first half of that fifty-eight-year stretch, from 1947 to 1976, Milton Friedman was a voice crying in the wilderness, his ideas ignored by policymakers. But the economy, for all the inefficiencies he decried, delivered dramatic improvements in the standard of living of most Americans: median real income more than doubled. By contrast, the period since 1976 has been one of increasing acceptance of Friedman's ideas; although there remained plenty of government intervention for him to complain about, there was no question that free-market policies became much more widespread. Yet gains in living standards have been far less robust than they were during the previous period: median real income was only about 23 percent higher in 2005 than in 1976.

Part of the reason the second postwar generation didn't do as well as the first was a slower overall rate of economic growth—a fact that may come as a surprise to those who assume that the trend toward free markets has yielded big economic dividends. But another important reason for the lag in most families' living standards was a spectacular increase in economic inequality: during the first postwar generation income growth was broadly spread across the population, but since the late 1970s median income, the income of the typical family, has risen only about a third as fast as average income, which includes the soaring incomes of a small minority at the top.

This raises an interesting point. Milton Friedman often assured audiences that no special institutions, like minimum wages and unions, were needed to ensure that workers would share in the benefits of economic growth. In 1976 he told Newsweek readers that tales of the evil done by the robber barons were pure myth:

There is probably no other period in history, in this or any other country, in which the ordinary man had as large an increase in his standard of living as in the period between the Civil War and the First World War, when unrestrained individualism was most rugged.

(What about the remarkable thirty-year stretch after World War II, which encompassed much of Friedman's own career?) Yet in the decades that followed that pronouncement, as the minimum wage was allowed to fall behind inflation and unions largely disappeared as an important factor in the private sector, working Americans saw their fortunes lag behind growth in the economy as a whole. Was Friedman too sanguine about the generosity of the invisible hand?

To be fair, there are many factors affecting both economic growth and the distribution of income, so we can't blame Friedmanite policies for all disappointments. Still, given the common assumption that the turn toward free-market policies did great things for the US economy and the living standards of ordinary Americans, it's striking how little support one can find for that proposition in the data.

Similar questions about the lack of clear evidence that Friedman's ideas actually work in practice can be raised, with even more force, for Latin America. A decade ago it was common to cite the success of the Chilean economy, where Augusto Pinochet's Chicago-educated advisers turned to free-market policies after Pinochet seized power in 1973, as proof that Friedman-inspired policies showed the path to successful economic development. But although other Latin nations, from Mexico to Argentina, have followed Chile's lead in freeing up trade, privatizing industries, and deregulating, Chile's success story has not been replicated.

On the contrary, the perception of most Latin Americans is that "neoliberal" policies have been a failure: the promised takeoff in economic growth never arrived, while income inequality has worsened. I don't mean to blame everything that has gone wrong in Latin America on the Chicago School, or to idealize what went before; but there is a striking contrast between the perception that Friedman was vindicated and the actual results in economies that turned from the interventionist policies of the early postwar decades to laissez-faire.

On a more narrowly focused topic, one of Friedman's key targets was what he considered the uselessness and counterproductive nature of most government regulation. In an obituary for his one-time collaborator George Stigler, Friedman singled out for praise Stigler's critique of electricity regulation, and his argument that regulators usually end up serving the interests of the regulated rather than those of the public. So how has deregulation worked out?

It started well, with the deregulation of trucking and airlines beginning in the late 1970s. In both cases deregulation, while it didn't make everyone happy, led to increased competition, generally lower prices, and higher efficiency. Deregulation of natural gas was also a success.

But the next big wave of deregulation, in the electricity sector, was a different story. Just as Japan's slump in the 1990s showed that Keynesian worries about the effectiveness of monetary policy were no myth, the California electricity crisis of 2000– 2001—in which power companies and energy traders created an artificial shortage to drive up prices—reminded us of the reality that lay behind tales of the robber barons and their depredations. While other states didn't suffer as severely as California, across the nation electricity deregulation led to higher, not lower, prices, with huge windfall profits for power companies.

Those states that, for whatever reason, didn't get on the deregulation bandwagon in the 1990s now consider themselves lucky. And the luckiest of all are those cities that somehow didn't get the memo about the evils of government and the virtues of the private sector, and still have publicly owned power companies. All of this showed that the original rationale for electricity regulation—the observation that without regulation, power companies would have too much monopoly power—remains as valid as ever.

Should we conclude from this that deregulation is always a bad idea? No—it depends on the specifics. To conclude that deregulation is always and everywhere a bad idea would be to engage in the same kind of absolutist thinking that was, arguably, Milton Friedman's greatest flaw.

In his 1965 review of Friedman and Schwartz's Monetary History, the late Yale economist and Nobel laureate James Tobin gently chided the authors for going too far. "Consider the following three propositions," he wrote. "Money does not matter. It does too matter. Money is all that matters. It is all too easy to slip from the second proposition to the third." And he added that "in their zeal and exuberance" Friedman and his followers had too often done just that.

A similar sequence seems to have happened in Milton Friedman's advocacy of laissez-faire. In the aftermath of the Great Depression, there were many people saying that markets can never work. Friedman had the intellectual courage to say that markets can too work, and his showman's flair combined with his ability to marshal evidence made him the best spokesman for the virtues of free markets since Adam Smith. But he slipped all too easily into claiming both that markets always work and that only markets work. It's extremely hard to find cases in which Friedman acknowledged the possibility that markets could go wrong, or that government intervention could serve a useful purpose.

Friedman's laissez-faire absolutism contributed to an intellectual climate in which faith in markets and disdain for government often trumps the evidence. Developing countries rushed to open up their capital markets, despite warnings that this might expose them to financial crises; then, when the crises duly arrived, many observers blamed the countries' governments, not the instability of international capital flows. Electricity deregulation proceeded despite clear warnings that monopoly power might be a problem; in fact, even as the California electricity crisis was happening, most commentators dismissed concerns about price-rigging as wild conspiracy theories. Conservatives continue to insist that the free market is the answer to the health care crisis, in the teeth of overwhelming evidence to the contrary.

What's odd about Friedman's absolutism on the virtues of markets and the vices of government is that in his work as an economist's economist he was actually a model of restraint. As I pointed out earlier, he made great contributions to economic theory by emphasizing the role of individual rationality—but unlike some of his colleagues, he knew where to stop. Why didn't he exhibit the same restraint in his role as a public intellectual?

The answer, I suspect, is that he got caught up in an essentially political role. Milton Friedman the great economist could and did acknowledge ambiguity. But Milton Friedman the great champion of free markets was expected to preach the true faith, not give voice to doubts. And he ended up playing the role his followers expected. As a result, over time the refreshing iconoclasm of his early career hardened into a rigid defense of what had become the new orthodoxy.

In the long run, great men are remembered for their strengths, not their weaknesses, and Milton Friedman was a very great man indeed—a man of intellectual courage who was one of the most important economic thinkers of all time, and possibly the most brilliant communicator of economic ideas to the general public that ever lived. But there's a good case for arguing that Friedmanism, in the end, went too far, both as a doctrine and in its practical applications. When Friedman was beginning his career as a public intellectual, the times were ripe for a counterreformation against Keynesianism and all that went with it. But what the world needs now, I'd argue, is a counter-counterreformation.

Bub's Guiding Principles

2007-01-24T19:26:00.000-05:00

1. Act like you've been there before
2. Treat others as you'd like to be treated
3. Get shit done
4. Don't fuck it up

That's how I roll, but if you feel the above set is incomplete, I defer to Coach Finstock:

5. never get less than twelve hours sleep
6. never play cards with a guy who has the same first name as a city
7. never get involved with a woman with a tattoo of a dagger on her body.

Now you stick to those, and everything else is cream cheese.

Of course, if you're a nerd I'd add

8. never pursue a strictly dominated strategy
9. never commit the sunk cost fallacy

If you're a drinker, there are the 86 rules of boozing

And if you have a hankering for a laundry list of specifics, watch this:

Behold!

2007-01-22T23:20:00.000-05:00

The Swatch "Bunny Sutra" Model

Sweet mix

2007-01-17T01:06:00.000-05:00

I've queued up Deep Purple's Machine Head, Blue Oyster Cult's Fire of Unknown Origin, Rainbow's Rising, and Atomic Rooster's Death Walks Behind You and randomized the whole playlist.

This is the ideal working environment. WATCH OUT!

In business school...

2007-01-16T00:18:00.000-05:00

you will read sentences such as "49% to 87% of the variance in the rate of new product adoption can be explained by five product-based characteristics" and you will not just dismiss this as phony statistics-laden bunk. Instead, you will highlight it for future reference.

One of my professors described this week as "the week from hell" because of the assignment due Wednesday. Being the smart guy I am, I have put it off, thereby condensing it down to two days of hell at most!

I thought I posted this already, but just in case I didn't

2007-01-12T02:40:00.000-05:00

Little bit of artwork I did a few years back.

np: Deep Purple's Machine Head album

my blog posts tend to be scatalogical, but hey, I update quasi-regularly, and you don't need no stinking password.

2007-01-10T22:07:00.000-05:00

Iron Maiden drummer Nicko McBrain played my father's country club today.

There is currently a poll on slashdot that reads, "What is your hobby?" Answer chocies include:
OSS
Model planes/trains/automobiles
Robots
Games
LARP
I collect spores, mold, and fungus
Cowboyneal watching

My marketing professor had a slide today explaining metrosexuals as a market segment. To illustrate the metrosexual ideal, he had three pictures of celebrities on the slide. Who were the celebrities? Alex Rodriguez, David Beckham, and David Beckham.

Today in class my professor asked if anyone knew what a "wag" was. I correctly answered "Wild Ass Guess."

Linkin Park is a Rollercoaster!

2007-01-04T20:36:00.000-05:00

You Have Bad Taste in Music

Hoobastank sucks too

Cheeseburger, Cheeseburger, Cheeseburger...

2007-01-03T23:45:00.000-05:00

Not quite, but I did have this happen to me at a Chicago bar tonight:

(my friend and I walk in)

bartender: no burger special tonight, fellas (usually burgers are $2.50 on Wednesday nights)

bub: OK. We'll have a Bud and a Miller Lite. Can we see some menus?

bartender: Sure. We're not cooking any of the Mexican food on there either.

bub: Hmm...I'll have the Italian Beef sandwich.

bartender: we don't have Italian beef anymore.

bub: then I guess I'll have the grilled chicken pita. Can I get tater tots with that instead of french fries?

bartender: Well, usually, yeah, but we're out of tots tonight.

bub's friend: I'll have the grilled chicken sandwich.

bartender: gotcha.

(10 minutes pass)

bartender: hey, we don't have any pitas, so is it all right if I just put that grilled chicken on a bun?

bub: fine.

El DeBarge and Ally Sheedy (and a cardboard cutout of Steve Guttenberg)

2007-01-02T22:20:00.000-05:00

Cause why not?

What a Game!

2007-01-02T21:46:00.000-05:00

The Fiesta Bowl between Boise State and Oklahoma, a game I initially said I had no interest in watching.

things to say before 2007 (not all sports...it just starts that way)

2006-12-31T02:34:00.000-05:00

I had previously made the statement that FSU +5 vs. UCLA in the Emerald Bowl was a sucker bet because FSU +5 would end up equaling 5. About three minutes into the game, I saw FSU driving the ball, and that's when I remembered: the PAC-10 sucks. Those USC teams of the past few years were anomolies, and really it is still the conference of no defense. This was the worst FSU team in arguably 30 years (8th in the ACC) and they beat the #4 in the PAC-10, who had just beaten the #1. The thrashing Rutgers put on K-State and that Cal put on A&M would seem to indicate that the Big 12 sucks too.

BTW, thank you Emerald Nuts for not including the word "Nuts" in the Bowl name. The "Emerald Bowl" is much preferred to the "Emerald Nut Bowl." It even took away the awkwardness of players celebrating int he end zone, with a mascot nut with a crown on its head nearby. Somebody tell the good people over at Gaylord Hotels this fact, so that they might respond accordingly. On that note, if FSU wide receiver De'Cody Fagg goes to an AFC East team other than New England next year, we might have Patriot CB Ben Gay covering him twice a season for years to come. Now that's a headline matchup.

Despite Georgia's win over VTech today, I'm still hoping that the SEC wasn't the best conference this year. As much as I dislike Ohio State, I don't wanna hear UF fans gloating about two championships in one season for the rest of eternity.

The Giants defense seriously looks at times as though it is throwing the game. And I'm not just talking about defensive lineman letting th eother team's QB go off and score the go-ahead TD when they're clearly in the grasp, tonight a Redskin WR was double covered on about the one, and the CB just ran away from him while Sam Madison went for the pick and completely missed the ball, allowing for it to fall nicely into the guys hands for a score. If the Giants make the playoffs, which they likely will, it'll only be a testament to the hideous state of the NFC.

Amongst other gifts, my parents (surely with help from my sister) got me a most fantastic Christmas gift in the DVD of Fletch. Out of print, they had to go on ebay to get it, but they did. It's nice to be loved.

I rule at the Trivial Pursuit 80s version. I've got mad skillz. This perennial presedential candidate was sentenced to 15 years in prison during the 80s: Lyndon LaRoche, of course. The married members of the Talking Heads formed this dance band? The Tom Tom Club...who doesn't know that? This middleweight last successfully defended his title against then undefeated John Mugabi. Marvelous Marvin Hagler, no doubt. Somebody stop me! I'm a force of 80s nature! Beware, if playing with 4 people, someone's gonna have to be the Care Bear. The other options are the PC (the choice gamepiece of nerds), the CD, and the Trapper Keeper.

My father is a horrendous Clue player. After making an accusation, wherein the murder weapon was the candlestick, my sister said that couldn't be right, and then secretly showed him a card. My dad then said aloud "So that means I should cross off candlestick?" A few turns later my father made another accusation with the murder weapon being the candlestick. One might guess he was being shrewd. He wasn't.

New possibility in the "bub's new phone" race: the T-Mobile Dash. I've heard complaints about the Pearl's auto-complete function that compensates for having two letters per key. T-Mobile's plan where you can call five people for free is extremely tempting.

Both The Departed and The Pick of Destiny are no longer in theaters nearby. My hesitancy has cost me. Blost you!

I finished reading The Last Night of the Yankee Dynasty by Buster Olney. It was excellent. Feeling nostalgic, I then used a Best Buy Gift Card to buy the 7 DVD retrospective on the Yankees 1996-2001 teams. If you need to watch any or all of those DVDs in their entirety, I'm good for it.

I survived my entire trip down in South Florida without going to 2 of the bars that are open after 10 not named Roy's (where I would only go in dire circumstances). One of these two avoided bars is TGIFridays. I come from a rockin hometown indeed.

I had a packed, 6AM flight back to O'Hare with a middle seat (of course). I left my house around 4:15 after about an hour of sleep. When I finally got back to Chicago, I went out and bought a comforter for my bed, anticipating the frigid Chi-town winter, checked that my car was still there (it was! and with no tickets!!) and passed out by 3PM, only to wake up 18 hours later at 9AM the next day. And to think, I know people who have never slept for more than 12 hours.

I've never been one to subscribe to the "Celebrities Die in 3s" theory, but the recent events taking away from us The Good, the Bad, and the Funky makes you wonder.

I've become addicted to Beerfest. If I quote it nonstop, don't say I didn't warn you. Oktoberfest is for tossers and sheep-shaggers.

The Tragedy of the Bunnies

2006-12-31T02:33:00.000-05:00

Here is the most ridiculous use of a flash game to illustrate an economic principle, in this case, the tragedy of the commons.

What are Jason Forrest's 36 favorite punk songs?

2006-12-31T02:21:00.000-05:00

On Jason Forrest's last album, he had a song called "My 36 Favorite Punk Rock Songs," which is a mashup of his favorite 36 punk songs (ironic, huh?)

Let's see how many of them we can identify.

The track can be played (or downloaded) here

(the above link is setup so that the origin of the link is anonymous...don't freak out if what you initially see starts changing. There are no popups and nothing bad will happen by clicking on it)

I'll start by taking the ones I already know (which are probably the easiest):

Bad Religion - Stranger than Fiction
The Clash - London Calling
The Ramones - Sheena is a Punk Rocker
The Ramones - Blitzkrieg Bop
Minor Threat - In My Eyes
Plastic Bertrand - Ca Plane Pour Moi
The Misfits - Die Die My Darling

and maybe

Dead Kennedys - Too Drunk to Fuck,

but I'm not positive on that one

That's 7 (or 8) down. 29 (or 28) to go.

Whaddya got?

As a sidenote, I think this is my hundredth post. A blog milestone!

All the Stuff (And More)

2006-12-22T12:30:00.000-05:00

It's blog catchup time!

VC Trek/WestQuest - 5 days in Sunnyvale. 0 days of sunshine. 1 alumni mixer in Palo Alto. 3 trips into San Francisco. 10 VC firms: CMEA, Granite, Globespan, Azure, Opus, Blue Run, DFJ, KPCB, TCV, Rustic Canyon. 3 companies: Intel, Cisco, Apple. Met a lot of impressive people, got a lot of great information, found out the A's were leaving Oakland to move into Cisco Stadium in the East/South Bay. Shocking! I also had an incredibly "small world" experience when one of the VCs turned out to be my old roommate's boss's brother. I missed out on seeing Google, Bain San Francisco , Electronic Arts, NVidia, and salesforce.com, but oh well, visiting all those VCs was well worth it. A summary of their advice: Those who were GSB grads were encouraging, those who weren't were realistic. VC's provide services, they're not blind investors. If you want to excel in VC, you need to provide something that's worth it to the entrepreneur. Some of the VCs were even humble enough to point out that they weren't necessarily yet qualified to do this. There are a lot of really cool companies being started right now. It was a lot to think over. Even more fun than Bank Week indeed.
It's not fun to have a middle seat on a packed redeye from San Jose to Atlanta with a crying baby nearby, a drunk lady chatting everyone up in front of you, and Snorey McSnoresloudly in the seat next to her. subpoint: the San Jose Delta terminal suX0r.
South Florida is a cesspool. People are genuinely miserable down here. I think it's the weather. See, I went to the mall yesterday. Also, if you enjoy being cutoff by pickups and/or luxury imported SUVs going 95 mph on the highway, South Florida is the place for you!
I went to the Panthers/Rangers game last night, and the Panthers came back from being down 0-2 in the 3rd to win 3-2. I don't think I've ever seen the Panthers come from behind before. Ed Belfour was in the net. Yes, he's still alive.
I want to see the Departed, that CIA movie, and the Pick of Destiny, and a few others, but I think I will actually see Rocky Balboa first, because I am a lemming.
I've watched BeerFest twice since being home in Florida. And it keeps getting better...every time I see it.
My niece is the cutest niece in the whole world. I have irrefutable proof.

Do you habitually orient yourself with respect to the world at large?

2006-12-22T12:14:00.000-05:00

Not only do I think this article describes me pretty well, but I think it does the same for most all of my college friends. I wonder how well the distinction defines modern day GOP/Democrat splits.

A New Cosmopolitan Social Class Emerges

By Robert Shiller

As globalization proceeds, with the help of ever-faster communications, faster travel and more powerful multinational corporations, a new cosmopolitan social class seems to be emerging. These citizens of the world are developing loyalties to each other that cross national boundaries.

I was at a dinner the other night with Yale World Fellows, a carefully selected group of professionals, representing every major country of the world, who spend a semester at Yale University. It was an unusual experience, because I began to feel that none of these people were really foreign to me. It seemed they were probably easier to talk to than the local Americans who were waiting on us and serving food.

Of course, a cosmopolitan class is hardly new. In fact, 50 years ago, in his classic book Social Theory and Social Structure, the late sociologist Robert Merton described the results of a case study of influential people in a typical US town, Rovere, New Jersey. As a sociologist, he chose this tiny town to study how people relate to each other and influence each other, just as biologists study tiny worms with only a few hundred cells so that they can study how each cell relates to an organism as a whole.

Merton discovered a strong pattern. Rovere's influential people seemed to be sharply divided into "cosmopolitan influentials," who habitually orient themselves with respect to the world at large, and "local influentials," who orient themselves with respect to their own town. As he and his assistants interviewed people, the division between the two groups became more intriguing, and significant, in his mind.

Merton did not say that the cosmopolitan influentials were influential outside Rovere -- apparently none of them was. What stood out instead was their habitual frame of reference, which was tied to their personal identities. When Merton engaged people in conversation, any topic would remind the cosmopolitan influentials of the world at large, while local influentials were reminded of things in their own town.

Cosmopolitan influentials, Merton said, tended to hang their success on their general knowledge, whereas locals relied on their friendships and connections. The cosmopolitan influentials were often uninterested in meeting new people in town -- the locals wanted to know everyone. The cosmopolitan influentials tended to take positions in local government that reflected their broad expertise -- board of health, housing committee, or board of education. The local influentials tended to be in positions that they got through their local popularity -- street commissioner, mayor, or township board member.

The cosmopolitan influential in the town is like the medical specialist -- the local influential is like the family doctor. Merton concluded: "It appears that the cosmopolitan influential has a following because he knows, the local influential because he understands."

The local influentials, Merton discovered, spoke affectionately of their town, as if it were a unique place, and often said they would never leave. The cosmopolitans spoke as if they might leave any day.

What was true in Merton's day is becoming even more starkly true in today's globalized economy. What I find particularly striking is the sense of loyalty developing among cosmopolitans.

After the World Fellows Dinner, the Fellow from Namibia was extolling to me, in impeccable and relaxed English, the beautiful vacation homes I might find (and even buy) there. I felt as if I could perhaps fall into a relationship with him that might work against the interests of the locals in Namibia. I could picture doing that, and he and I would be allies, if I let it happen.

I was left wondering why this is happening on such a scale now. Obviously, improved communications technology plays a role. But how much does that explain the impression that the division between cosmopolitans and locals is so much wider now?

One must realize that individuals choose whether to play the role of cosmopolitan or local, and how much to invest in that role. People make a conscious choice to become either cosmopolitans or locals, depending on their own personal talents and the perceived returns from making the choice.

In the twenty-first century, the new information age creates opportunities not just to be cosmopolitan in spirit and orientation, but to forge strong connections with other cosmopolitans. The cosmopolitans have shared experiences -- they are directly communicating with each other across the globe. Many cosmopolitans around the world now also share the English language, the new lingua franca.

The term "global village" was first popularized in the late 1960s by Canadian communications maven Marshall McLuhan in response to the already powerful communications media of that day. But McLuhan could not have anticipated the cosmopolitan class, because he could not have anticipated the immense development of direct interpersonal communications media that allow cosmopolitans around the world to form friendships.

The cosmopolitans tend to be increasingly wealthy, and their wealth helps mark them as cosmopolitan. Thus, economic inequality is felt differently in today's world. Perhaps it is accepted resignedly, as the cosmopolitan class is too amorphous and ill-defined to be the target of any social movement. There is no spokesperson for the cosmopolitan class, no organization that could be blamed for what is happening.

I fear for the future. How will the cosmopolitan class behave as their role in the world economy continues to strengthen? How unfeeling will they come to be about the people who share their neighborhoods? Most importantly, if resentment by the locals emerges, what political consequences will result?

I passed LEAD!!

2006-12-19T19:19:00.000-05:00

Grade Nondisclosure prohibits me from commenting further.

This is a crummy post to cover over a week of blogging hiatus, but I promise to write more later.

That is the end of the 1st Quarter

2006-12-10T21:12:00.000-05:00

With the submission of my group's 15 page paper on video game consoles between 1999 and 2005, I officially finished my first quarter at the GSB. I shaved my playoff beard and started drinking. I only took three courses this quarter, but one of them was the infamous "Turbo" microeconomics, with John Bates Clark Medal winner and "Genius" Grant Recipient Kevin Murphy. I loved everything about that class, except for perhaps the loads and loads of work that it sometimes required. Nonetheless, I really feel like I learned a lot.

My other two courses were Financial Accounting and Competitive Strategy. Accounting is the language of business, so although it's dry, it needs to be done. Competitive Strategy is the kind of course I expected to take when I came to business school. It was so good, I'm taking another course with the same professor next quarter (Technology Strategy). It was probably the course I did worst in gradewise, but hey, about 2/3 of my grade was based on analysis of video games and ice cream makers...Russian ice cream makers to be more precise.

I now find myself in a hotel in Sunnyvale, CA about to embark on the "VC Trek." I'm pretty excited about it. We're really seeing some high powered VC firms out here in Silicon Valley, that I would be reasearching more carefully if I weren't procrastinating by updating my blog.

Random thoughts:

Does anyone else chuckle everytime they see the Citizen watch commercial with skater Sasha Cohen because she almost has the same name as Ali G?
How exactly did a studio executive greenlight another movie about dragons with Jeremy Irons? Seriously. This is a sign of very, very bad things to come. After the god-awful Dungeons & Dragons, my buddy commented that Jeremy Irons had to sit in a room for years and contemplate what he had done. Apparently that time of reflection is over, and Irons is back to making dragon movies.
This is the first time in a long, long time that I've eaten greasy cheeseburgers two days in a row. Yesterday, feeling happy after finals, I treated myself to the Double Cheddar Charburger over at The Wiener's Circle, complete with a monstrous order of fries. Then today when I got into Sunnyvale, I went looking for a burrito joint or s ub shop, only to settle on an In N Out Burger nearby. Mmm...Animal Style.
If the Dolphins played top-rated teams each week, would they be undefeated on the season?
I'm reading The Last Night of the Yankee Dynasty by Buster Olney, and it's top-notch thus far. Although it kills me that they keep mentioning the 2001 series, and Curt Schilling especially. Put simply, the world is a better place if it were a Curt Schillingless world.
I was in Utah for the first time at the SLC airport, which is tucked in between the mountains and is rather scenic. I still was a bit freaked out thinking that many people around me might have been wearing special Mormon underpants.
It's nice to escape that Chicago weather. I've heard people saying it was "the coldest late Autumn in 17 years" or someshit. All I know is that for about the past week, it was usually in the single digits with the wind chill, which is a bit much for early December. As I expected however, it compared to Boston as "colder, but with less snow and crap." I think by this time in Boston, we would seemingly be assured of more days of snow, ice, and sleet.
Is Paul Krugman getting better about making TV appearances, or is this guy just a chump, or is defense of the current administration and Congress so untenable that Krugman has it easy?
I have eclectic musical taste, but had one of those occurences the other day when I simultaneously bought a CD by the Brodsky Quartet playing a Janacek sonata that I heard live when I was in Prague in Spring 2001, the Ghostface Killah CD with Cherchez La Ghost, and a CD entitled "Welcome to Carcass Cuntry" by Jeff Walker und die Flüffers, an album of folk and country covers by the lead singer and bassist of Carcass. Very strange.
In an attempt to be adult, I'll likely send out X-Mas cards this year. Email me your addresses.
I'm getting a new cell phone shortly, and currently am leaning towards the Blackberry Pearl and T-Mobile, whose unlimited plan for the 5 people you call most seems pretty good. Besides, Verizon fails math

Par for the Course

2006-12-07T14:35:00.000-05:00

Sure enough, when I picked up my drycleaning today, my name was spelled wrong on the ticket.

For those that haven't seen me for a while, I have grown a "playoff beard" for finals (I'm done with two, but still have a group paper to finish) . My inspiration can be seen below.

One Down

2006-12-05T15:26:00.000-05:00

Finished my Financial Accounting exam today and had the opportunity to immediately go upstairs and sell the solutions manual to the text for cold hard cash. Mind you, I had the solutions manual for the 12th (recent) edition, while my textbook is the 9th edition (which I bought in Fall 2000 for a class I took as an undergrad). Interestingly enough, a lot concerning the accounting behind options expensing and goodwill amortization has changed since 2000, but hopefully it didn't trip me up too much having the old text.

Anyhow, I say to the guy "How much for this here solutions manual?"

He says "$19.75"

I say "How about I give you a quarter and you give me a twenty."

He says "Fine."

I then explain "You see I took financial accounting. I can now handle complex transactions like this."

This went much more smoothly than when I went to the drycleaners yesterday and had to give the same lady my phone number three times, my last name three times, and my first name twice. That reminded me of the time I was at a U-Haul and the guy behind the counter asked for my driver's license, took a good look at it, and then asked me how to spell my last name cause he needed to enter it into the computer system.

Metal By Numbers

2006-12-03T12:30:00.000-05:00

This is probably funnier the more you know about metal and metal videos. But hey, I'm not here to please everyone.

whoa

2006-11-30T11:31:00.000-05:00

Things that have happened to me recently:

I had a discussion with someone who had neither seen nor heard of Point Break. Even when I declared " I AM AN F-B-I AGENT!" it didn't ring a bell.
I ~~finished~~ stopped working on and turned in my last turbo microeconomics problem set. This was the hardest problem set and the most work I did for the class since the midterm. I easily put in over 15 hours on it. Our solution to problem 1 took seven pages to write up.
I disagreed with a bona fide genius over whether or not there is diminishing marginal utility on income. He gave me two counterexamples, but I don't find either directly applicable to the question. This has big implications. Diminishing marginal utility on income has always been the way I've thought about justifying a progressive tax structure. If they exist, than a progressive tax structure more accurately taxes an equal amount of utility on each taxpayer. This would be equitable. A flat tax only does so if we can measure utility in dollar amount, which I have a strong inclination to not want to do. If nothing else, I believe the proportion of goods that we consume that are necessities implies diminishing marginal returns on income. I'm not giving this one up easily.
I watched two Catherine Mary Stewart movies in one day, shattering my previous personal record of one.
I recorded a version of me playing guitar and singing "Hurt" by NIN. It's like a cross between the NIN version and the Johnny Cash versions with no production value and bad vocals.
I discovered there is a Medeival Times in Schaumberg!
I spent about twenty minutes constructing a logo that is essentially an economics joke. I have spent more time showing it to people and watching them give me horrific looks for my nerditude.
I caught a bit of Metallica's Some Kind of Monster and still think they suck and sold out.
I may or may not be going to Northern California in 2 weeks.
I discovered that "Lebonese" food is actually the same as "Middle Eastern" food. Kabobs, Schwarma, grape leaves, and baklava included.
I got my classes for next quarter...although I still need to pick one up and recently put in a bid for *gasp* a Friday 8:30 AM course. On Investments no less.
I have lost faith in the G-Men.
I took a stroll throught the Lincoln Park Zoo, seeing lions, tigers, monkeys, llamas, and a rhinoceros. Awesome.
I was told it's snowing 6-10 inches today starting at 3 PM. damn.

Amazing Guitar!!

2006-11-24T12:13:00.000-05:00

This is Dragonforce. They like to play.

Peaches

2006-11-22T12:06:00.000-05:00

November 25, 1988 - November 22, 2006
R.I.P.

The Tax Cut's Role in Changing the Surplus to a Deficit

2006-11-20T01:50:00.000-05:00

Here is a National Review article that tries its best to belittle the degree to which the Bush tax cuts helped erode the government surplus and drive deficits up.

Greg Mankiw writes that "Reasonable people can disagree about whether the Bush tax cuts were advisable, but don't let anyone tell you that the tax cuts were the main reason the surplus of 2001 disappeared."

But Mankiw glazes over the fact that in swinging from a projected $5.6T surplus to a $2.9T deficit (an $8.5T swing), around (and the number is likely slightly overblown due to not accounting for the degree to which tax cuts pay for themselves) $1.8T of that is directly attributable to the tax cuts.

So what is undeniable is that the tax cuts represent about 10-20% of the overall swing, having a larger impact than increased defense spending. Moreover, the current deficit projections would be about a third of what they are now, if the tax cuts weren't in place.

We could also look at the part of the swing from surplus to deficit that was independent of changes in economic assumptions by taking out the $2.5T increase in "technical adjustments and revised economic assumptions." Doing this, we can see that the tax cut is on the order of 20% of the now $6.5T swing.

In other fun economic news, Ross Perot's company is opening a plant in old Mexico. Giant sucking sound anyone?

Derivation of the rule of 72 (or 70 or 69)

2006-11-18T17:55:00.000-05:00

The rule of 72 states that to find the number of years that it will take your investment to double, you divide 72 by the interest rate.

The formula for compound interest is:

A = P(1+r)^t

where A is the size of your account
P is the amount of the principle invested
r is the interest rate
t is the number of time periods (we'll assume years and that r is given as an APR)

the account has doubled when A = 2P, so...

2P = P(1+r)^t

dividing both sides by P...

2 = (1+r)^t

taking the natural logarithm of both sides (the "ln" function on a calculator)

ln(2) = ln((1+r)^t)

there's a property of logarithms where log (a^b) = b*log(a), so we can reduce the above to:

ln(2) = t*ln(1+r)

Two things to note at this point:

1. ln(2) = 0.69314718055994530941723212145818

2. ln(1+r) is roughly equal to r. For r<10%, ln(1+r) is within 5% of r (that is using such an approximation introduces a 5% error). For r<20%, ln(1+r) is within 10% of r

so approximating...

0.693 = t*r

but r is given as a percentage, (15% = .15), so to do the math using whole numbers

69.3 = rt

so you can calculate how long it takes to double your money at a given interest rate using 69.3

72 is a nice number because it has many perfect divisors (2,3,4,6,8,9,12,18,24,36)

using 72 instead of 69.3 introduces about a 4% error, but that error goes in the same direction as the error introduced by using the approximation ln(1+r) = r, so they cancel each other out somewhat.

You can use the rule of 69 (=3*23), 70 (=5*14, =7*10), or 72 to do this. As we used to say when I worked in defense, "It's good enough for government work."

learn more here

Judge rules a burrito is not a sandwich

2006-11-17T16:17:00.000-05:00

Controversy...to the extreme!

How to build a KFC logo visible from outer space

2006-11-14T22:52:00.000-05:00

The (anti) Conservative Manifesto

2006-11-12T12:12:00.000-05:00

I would argue, and this is a bit much for a Sunday morning discussion for sure, that the GOP is a fundementally flawed majority party. The nature of their ideology makes them the ideal watchdog minority party. As critics of rampant Democratic spending and excess, the Republicans do very well. They are good at serving in that capacity.

However, when the Republicans become entrenched in power (as they had been for the past 12 years), we discover three things:

1) They eventually come to be seduced into just as much, if not more, spending than their Democratic counterparts. It seems there exists a force that makes it very difficult to avoid pork spending if you become an incumbent for some time. The GOP, like the Dems before them, start making rationalizations for the earmarks they approve ("I'll approve this bridge project now, because it will help me get re-elected, and ultimately having a small government guy like myself in office is what's best for the district.").

Furthermore, as the GOP doesn't support so many governmental programs like the Dems, the spending on pork might actually cut into the financing of "legitimate" (at least in the left's eyes) government programs. After all, to conservatives, the government has had that amount of spending already. It's just going elsewhere now. Social programs to corporare welfare. A big problem is that corporations demand more money for the same level of satisfaction as the poor. This, of course, ignores the fact that it's questionable as to whether these interests should get any money in the first place.

What clearly develops, however, is a party of empty rhetoric. A small-party in mae government that redistributes wealth just as much as the left, except for the makeup of the recipients of that redistribution.

2) They become obsessed with maintaining that power, whether it be by gerrymandering, disciplined adherence to the party line not observable amongst the Democrats, and failures to expose scandals within their own party for fear of the political repurcussions. i.e. Texas, Tom Delay's grip on the party for so many years, and Mark Foley. Then there are the libertarian-leaning Republicans, who swallow their pride and allow the party to be hijacked by the Christian Coalition. All of this for marginally lower taxes (or is it lower marginal taxes ;) )

3) The Republicans are fundementally poor governors (and I mean this not in the sense of each state's executive, but rather as "those that govern"). There's an easy reason for this. The GOP, allegedly, does not believe in government. Why should we expect them to be good at running the government?

The best example I could think of is this:

If a person did not believe that a child could be taught by anyone, but rather had to learn on her own through books and self-study, why would we expect that individual to be anythiong but a poor teacher?

A more real world example is GWB appointing Michael Brown as the head of FEMA. If you don't ideologically support the existence of FEMA, you likely won't lose sleep over deciding who is best to run the organization.

So that's my theory as to why the Republicans are not good at running the government, and are a much more admirable party when they are out of power. It's difficult to argue that the Democrats are some ideal party, but at least they govern as they say they will. At least they believe their spending helps those that need it. At least they are disorganized enough (and yes, this is a strength) to not fall lockstep with party objectives (at least not to the degree that the GOP was able to achieve). If you disagree with this last point, regardless of the events in CT this past election, I don't see any support nationally for the Democrats to excommunicate Joe Lieberman. In fact, many Democrats supported him all along (I was not one of them).

Residential College vs. Cohort

2006-11-11T02:41:00.000-05:00

In college we had residential colleges. In business school we have cohorts. See if you can tell the difference. Bonus points if you attended neither the Chicago GSB nor my undergrad institution.

Ezra Stiles
Nobels
Davis
Morse
Phoenix
Timothy Dwight
Rockefeller
Silliman
Jonathan Edwards
Pierson
Davenport
Maroons
Berkeley
Stewart
Gargoyles
Calhoun
Branford
Bond
Harper
Walker
Saybrook
Trumbull

The film project I was working on is complete. It's chock full of inside jokes that will likely make it unwatchable to anyone outside of the businesss school. I will likely post it online after the Golden Gargoyles Awards Show next Saturday. Hopefully we take home some hardware that night.

You know you've been in business school too long when...

You consider keeping track of your personal finances using the accrual method of accounting

You start reading the abbreviation "Dr." as "debit"

On a related note, please hit me if you ever catch me saying "At the end of the day." The phrase is out of control here. We're talking every-other-sentence proportions for some people.

Easily worth $1.65B

2006-10-21T13:47:00.000-04:00

I hate the Boy Scouts

2006-10-21T05:11:00.000-04:00

Turns out America's favorite intolerant organization is now letting the MPAA "teach" kids about copyrights.

I hate the Boy Scouts

Do I symapathize with the MPAA? Sure, unlike albums, movies are expensive to make. It's a serious threat to the quality of movies if filmmakers are unable to recoup their expenses and then some.

But indoctrinating children with corporate platitudes is something that any respectable organization would refrain from.

Please write your local Boy Scout organization and remind them that homosexuals and atheists are an active part of the film industry. That might change things.

Dear Whoever Decides Such Things:

2006-10-20T12:30:00.000-04:00

Please add the food group "Rooster Sauce" alongside the existing food groups of fruits and vegetables, grains, meats, and dairy.

Welcome to the North Side, Sweet Lou

2006-10-18T00:43:00.000-04:00

"I have forgotten more baseball than this guy knows." --Lou Pinella on Curt Schilling

Agnostic, Not Atheist

2006-10-16T10:10:00.000-04:00

because sometimes you just think there must be a god, and that god loves metal!

1 mile from my apartment!

My Top 10 of the Decade Thus Far

2006-10-15T15:56:00.000-04:00

The Dillinger Escape Plan - Miss Machine
The Postal Service - Give Up
McLusky - Do Dallas
Radiohead - Kid A
Outkast - Speakerboxxx/The Love Below
System of a Down - Toxicity
M83 - Dead Cities, Red Seas & Lost Ghosts
Deceased - Supernatural Addiction & As the Weird Travel On (I couldn't decide)
Saul Williams - Amethyst Rockstar
Iron Maiden - Brave New World

This was really hard to narrow down to ten (eleven), but I think this is pretty much it. No particular order. The last album not to make the cut: Sigh - Imaginary Sonicscape.

Anyways, if you haven't checked all of these out, you should.

(note: I omitted Love - The Forever Changes Concert and Brian Wilson - SMiLE because it's a bit of a technicality that they were released this decade.) Also note that Iron Maiden's A Matter of Life and Death hasn't completely sunk in yet.

We are number one. All others are number two, or lower.

2006-10-13T03:43:00.000-04:00

yeeuh.

troof

A Music Snob's Delight

2006-10-10T01:50:00.000-04:00

Procrastination

2006-10-08T23:09:00.000-04:00

The teams left in the hunt in baseball last won the World Series in 1989, 1986, 1984, and 1982.

I wonder when the last time each of the last four teams left in any of the big sports hadn't won in over 15 years was.

As the NBA has only had 8 unique Champions in the past 25 years (Heat, Pistons, Spurs, Lakers, Bulls, Rockets, Celtics, and 76ers), I'm guessing it's been a long time for them. Likewise, the NFL has had only 13 champions over that span. The NHL? 12.

Baseball has had 17 different champions over that same time span.

By the way, I realized just earlier that my Competitive Strategy class has 137 pages of reading this week.

Differences in Management Style

2006-10-08T22:50:00.000-04:00

The following is an excerpt from a Harvard Business Review article about the decision making process. It talks about how differences in decision making within the Kennedy administration between the Bay of Pigs invasion and the Cuban Missile Crisis led to the drastically different historical outcomes.

After the botched invasion, Kennedy conducted a review of the foreign policy decision-making process and introduced five major changes, essentially transforming the process into one of inquiry. First, people were urged to participate in discussions as "skeptical generalists"--that is, as disinterested critical thinkers rather than representatives of particular departments. Second, Robert Kennedy and Theodore Sorenson were assigned the role of intellectual watchdog, expected to pursue every possible point of contention, uncovering weaknesses and untested assumptions. Third, task forces were urged to abandon the rules of protocol, eliminating formal agendas and deference to rank. Fourth, participants were expected to split occasionally into subgroups to develop a broad range of options. And finally, President Kennedy decided to absent himself from some of the early task force meetings to avoid influencing other participants and slanting the debate.

The inquiry was used to great effect when in October 1962 President Kennedy learned that the Soviet Union had placed nuclear missiles on Cuban soil, despite repeated assurances from the Soviet ambassador that this would not occur. Kennedy immediately convened a high level task force, which contained many of the same men from the Bay of Pigs invasion, and asked them to frame a response.

...

Ultimately, subgroups developed two positions, one favoring a blockade and the other an air strike.

...

The subgroups exchanged position papers, critiqued each other's proposals and came together to debate the alternatives. They presented Kennedy with both options, leaving him to make the final choice. The result was a carefully framed response, leading to a successful blockade and a peaceful end to the crisis.

It looks like JFK managed quite differently than a certain decider.

Sports

2006-10-07T19:36:00.000-04:00

The Yankees are out of the playoffs.

FSU sucks at football.

The Dolphins are miserable.

The Giants are the Giants.

Damn.

Be Afraid. Be Very Afraid.

2006-10-04T23:00:00.000-04:00

Today on the radio here in Chicago two stations were playing Mr. Big's "To Be With You" at the same time.

Make your time.

Bob Gets the Spirit Award on this One

2006-10-04T00:44:00.000-04:00

Jeter is awesome, but it's hard to argue with Abreu's 4 RBIs (and there's no good Wes Anderson quotes about going 5/5). Did Kyle Farnsworth get into a groove at the end of the 8th there? How many times did McCarver call Detroit, "Chicago?" Can I have more man-love for Giambi at this point? Is that water, sweat, or pure grease in his hair? Dare I go to a game in Detroit this weekend? Where can I get a bullet-proof vest for such an outing? Will I ever see Wang pitch without thinking, "This place is exclusive Wang, so don't tell them you're Jewish?" Was anyone surprised when Myers gave up that homer? Is the guy with the 3rd best batting average in the AL, the weakest link in the Yankees' starting lineup?

As the Yankees provide more questions than answers, I'm moving on...

Having missed two TNDCs (Thursday Night Drinking Clubs), coughed my way all around town, called a friend that once had mono to ask him whether the symptoms I had sounded like mono, scared away friends and colleagues, and made two trips to the student health center, finally my sickness has subsided. I didn't take any cough drops, Nyquil, Dayquil, Sudafed, or Advil for most of the day today. Progress!

In addition, I drank some of the best beer in the world (free beer) at an Entrepreneurship, Venture Capital, and Private Equity Club gathering in Ida Noyes Hall, which is the pub conveniently located next door to the business school here in Chicago. You can't spell "raging party" without EVP. Ok, so you can, but who cares when the EVP is providing free beer, nachos, and fried cheese?

Speaking of Chicago, Job prospects are looking good at this point.

With that I yield the floor to Barney Frank, and one of my favorite quotes of his. It's basically him calling out the Republicans for being the party of empty rhetoric (the context is over an agricultural appropriations bill):

Mr. Chairman, I am here to confess my reading incomprehension. I have listened to many of my conservative friends talk about the wonders of the free market, of the importance of letting the consumers make their best choices, of keeping government out of economic activity, of the virtues of free trade, but then I look at various agricultural programs like this one. Now, it violates every principle of free market economics known to man and two or three not yet discovered.

So I have been forced to conclude that in all of those great free market texts by Ludwig von Mises, Friedrich Hayek and all the others that there is a footnote that says, by the way, none of this applies to agriculture. Now, it may be written in high German, and that may be why I have not been able to discern it, but there is no greater contrast in America today than between the free enterprise rhetoric of so many conservatives and the statist, subsidized, inflationary, protectionist, anti-consumer agricultural policies, and this is one of them.

In particular, I have listened to people, and some of us have said let us protect workers and the environment in trade; let us not have unrestricted free trade; but let us have trade that respects worker rights and environmental rights. And we have been excoriated for our lack of concern for poor countries.

There is no greater obstacle, as it is now clear in the Doha round, to the completion of a comprehensive trade policy than the American agricultural policy, with one exception, European agricultural policy, which is much worse and just as phony.

Sugar is an example. This program is an interference with the legitimate efforts at economic self-help in many foreign nations. So I appreciate the leadership of the gentleman from Arizona [Jeff Flake] and the gentleman from Oregon [Roy Blumenauer]. Here is a chance for some of my free-enterprise-professing friends to get honest with themselves, and now maybe we will see some born-again free enterprisers in the agricultural field.

Keith Olbermann Sums It Up

2006-09-26T21:42:00.000-04:00

That's How I Roll

2006-09-22T00:18:00.000-04:00

It's the big city. Love taps are inevitable.

Wow. I actually went jogging/blogging again.

2006-09-18T20:53:00.000-04:00

The "getting back into the swing of jogging" route (By the way, this is the best application of google maps I've seen. It's just perfect for runners.)

What kept me going after a nearly year long hiatus away from any semblance of exercise (It certainly wasn't the Italian combo sandwich I had for lunch. For those not in the know, an Italian combo sandwich is like roast beef au jus, except it's already been dipped in the au jus, so the whole sandwich is soggy, and there's an Italian sausage inside)?

1) It's an extremely nice, scenic route. It really is a shame that it will be winter here so soon. It is currently the perfect atmosphere for jogging. The weather isn't too hot. And flowers in Lincoln Park and the waves breaking on Lake Michigan add a nice effect.

3) I don't mean to get all Iron Eagle here, but with the right music, anything is possible. My playlist (including warm up and cool down):

1. Guns N Roses - My Michelle
2. System of a Down - B.Y.O.B.
3. Slayer - Angel of Death
4. The Dillinger Escape Plan - Baby's First Coffin
5. The Dillinger Escape Plan - Panasonic Youth
6. Venom - Black Metal
7. Fear Factory - Self Bias Resistor
8. Hypocrisy - The Killing Art
9. Iggy and the Stooges - I Wanna Be Your Dog

While running, I cam to the conclusion that the Dillinger Escape Plan is the best band alive right now, and that it would probably be an incredible opportunity to work for google.org this summer, if I can hook that up. Of course, so far as Friar Tuck knows, I really, really want to work for McKinsey (serves him right if he's not reading my blog).

On politics: If you want to get mad, read this. It's such a sad state that news stories like this appear so regularly that they've lost nearly all their sting. The phrase I've heard that best described the situation was "diminishing marginal anger," which you pretty much have to be an economics nerd to understand.

Speaking of economics nerds, I submitted my bids for classes, and received none, as I underestimated the market. This means I have to participate in future rounds of bidding. It's OK though. Apparently, my Myers-Brigg type is ESTP (Extroverted, Sensing, Thinking, Perceiver). And that says I'm fine with unresolved scheduling issues. Peachy.

Two final, unrelated points:

FSU football just isn't so good. :(

The new Iron Maiden is worth checking out. Much improved over their last outing, and something you should definitely like if your taste in music isn't teh suck.

I am not dead!

2006-09-10T20:35:00.000-04:00

I've just been iDead. But thankfully, I am being iResuscitated.

I should be posting more frequently starting next week, when I regain a steady internet connection.

Then there will be tales of ziplines, cricket, drinking, classes, U-Haul, my favorite Massachusetts citizen, drinking, Cubs, White Sox, driving halfway across the US, sleep deprivation, pub tables, really being 106 miles outside of Chicago, IKEA, drinking, only taking 100,000 spacebucks for lunch, gas, and tolls, Old Style, Algonquin, Wesley Willis, drinking, and more.

Take that Troy State! If you wanna beat this FSU team, you're gonna have to outscore them.

The Details of My Resignation

2006-08-30T11:22:00.000-04:00

Leaving work last Friday was an interesting experience.

Here is a short film that somewhat describes what went down. Except, instead of being gassed at my home and taken to a far-away place, I went to New York and New Jersey for the weekend on my own free will. I suppose you could say I got "gassed," but that's what The Golden Monkey (9.5%!) is for.

And although Chicago does have a beach, I don't believe there is a suffocating bubble in Lake Michigan that is out to get me.

Or is there?

Be seeing you.

Must acquire 1 half pack of cigarettes.

2006-08-30T11:02:00.000-04:00

I'm going to have the rare opportunity to bust out this quote sometime around 10 PM on Friday night:

It's 818 miles to Chicago, we've got a full tank of gas, half a pack of cigarettes, it's dark and we're wearing sunglasses.

The context is that I will be just picking up my friend at the Albany airport on my way out to Chicago. He will have just arrived there from a nearby Bob Dylan concert (at a mythical place called "Wappingers Falls." I hope this is not a Brigadoon-type place, as such mysticism would put a severe damper on my quest to get out to the Midwest), and I will have come out there from Boston, moving truck and towed car in hand, or at least in tow.

We're going to be driving through the night, hoping to arrive in Chicago before the 3PM closing of the management office that holds the keys to my new apartment. Luckily, time is literally on our side, as the one hour Central time difference is in effect.

Hit it!

Who Cries for the Children?

2006-08-24T09:39:00.000-04:00

Ronnie James Dio, of course.

If you can't enjoy that video on any of the many levels on which it's enjoyable, you have no pulse.

A Clarification of the MLB trade "deadline"

2006-08-23T11:13:00.000-04:00

Although it's rarely discussed, there are actually two trade deadlines in baseball:

July 31st, the non-waiver trading deadline, which is usually called the "trade deadline"
& August 31st, the waiver trading deadline

I knew little about waiver trades, other than they often seemed to be little more than salary dumps (e.g. Abreu to the Yankees)

Here's a great explanation I saw online of how waiver trades work. I don't know where it came from, but apparently it's written by former Mets GM, Steve Phillips:

Just because the trade deadline has passed doesn't mean that teams still can't improve. It's just a bit more complicated now. After the deadline, players must go through the often-confusing waiver process to be moved.

During the waiver period, there are controls on player movement. The waiver process was put in place so teams at the top of the division cannot unilaterally load their clubs for the stretch run. It is a system which favors the teams behind in the standings. Teams with lesser records have the first opportunity to improve themselves and can also block better teams from making deals.

What complicates these trades is the timing necessary to move multiple players through waivers and between teams. It can be done. My first trade as general manager of the Mets was a six-player waiver deal which sent Lance Johnson, Mark Clark and Manny Alexander to the Cubs for Mel Rojas, Turk Wendell and Brian McRae.

What are waivers?
The way to best understand waivers is to look at it as this: Teams trying to earn the right to trade their players.

Things to know about waivers during this period
These type of waivers are called Major League Waivers. It is different from "outright waivers" and "unconditional release waivers." I will explain both of those another day.

Players are often not informed they are on Major League Waivers.

Players remain on waivers for a period of 47 business hours. (The waiver period starts at 2 p.m. ET on the given business day and ends at 1 p.m. ET two business days later.)

A waiver claim can be submitted anytime during the 47-hour period a player is on waivers. There is no advantage to submitting the claim in the first hour or the 47th hour.

Major League Waivers are revocable, meaning that if a player gets claimed, his club can pull him back and keep him if they do not reach a deal with the claiming club. If a player is pulled back off of this type of waivers, he cannot be placed on them again for 30 days.

If a player is claimed on waivers, the team which claims the player has 48½ hours (from 1 p.m. ET on the day he was scheduled to clear waivers to 1:30 p.m. ET two business days later) to make a deal with the player's club or he is automatically pulled back off of waivers.

If a player has a no-trade clause, he can be placed on Major League Waivers, but can only be traded or dumped to a team not on his no-trade list or to a team that he gives written approval to waive his no-trade rights.

Also, a player to be named later cannot be an active major league player.

Players can change teams one of three ways during this time of year
1. A player is claimed on waivers and the team awarded the claim makes a trade with the other club. Remember, all 40-man roster players must go through waivers in order to change teams even if they are in the minor leagues. So timing is critical when teams are moving players back and forth.

2. A player is claimed on waivers and the player's team just decides to dump the claimed player on the claiming team. This is what happens sometimes when a team tries to block a deal that their competition might make. The Padres got burned a few years back because they claimed Randy Myers from the Blue Jays. There were rumors that the Braves wanted to make a deal for Myers so the Padres claimed Myers to block the deal. Unfortunately for the Padres, they blocked the deal but the Blue Jays dumped Myers and his hefty contract on them. Myers went on to suffer a significant injury after that.

3. A player clears waivers, meaning that no team claimed him during the 47-hour period, and is later traded to an interested party.

Here's how it works
Starting Aug. 1, each team can have up to seven players per business day scheduled to clear waivers. (The commissioner's office is closed on weekends and holidays.)

Each business day, teams receive a computer-generated document which identifies those payers who have been placed on waivers.

Imagine the waiver wire as a fashion show where up to seven players per day per team are walking down a runway in front of the general managers. The GMs are looking at them, evaluating them and trying to decide whether they want them for their team or whether their competition may want to acquire them. During the 47-hour period in which players are on waivers, general managers are busy talking to scouts and strategizing about players.

General managers decide to claim a player for the following reasons
1. If they really want to trade for a player.

2. If they want to block an opponent's possible deal.

Once the 47-hour period is over, the commissioner's office informs the player's team if he has been claimed by any major league team(s). Only the player's club knows who put in a claim on the player and who was awarded the claim. The claiming teams are just told whether they were awarded the claim or not.

What happens if more than one team claims a player?
Only one team ultimately gets awarded a waiver claim, no matter how many submit claims. Claims are awarded based upon the following criteria:

1. National League teams get first rights over National League players and American League teams get the first shot at American League players.

2. For teams in the same league, the club with the worst record is awarded the claim.

Once a claim is awarded, the two teams' general managers have a discussion and sort through the grounds for the claim: Was it a claim to make a deal or to block a deal? The GMs may have already spoken about the potential for a trade before the player cleared waivers and quite possibly even before he was placed on waivers.

After these discussions, a deal may be consummated, the player may be dumped to the claiming team or the player could be pulled back off waivers.

Dennis Leary on Mel Gibson

2006-08-17T00:44:00.000-04:00

Dear Lord is this funny!

Sweet Home Chicago

2006-08-11T18:46:00.000-04:00

As part of my whirlwind South Florida vacation, last Sunday I got pretty good and drunk, lost some money playing poker, and found myself at Denny's at 7 AM eating country fried steak, eggs, and hashbrowns that I certainly didn't need. I don't even remember how the eggs were cooked, or if I even requested that they be cooked a certain way. I can't tell you what the three guys I was with ordered either. I've since asked how many Dagwoods were ordered, only to be told that the Dagwood is no longer on the menu at Denny's. Let's all bow our heads in rememberance of that fine sandwich.

I managed to get home and in bed by 8 AM. I think I had the presence of mind to drink some water before I hit the sack. This and sleep would be my only defenses against a night of beers, too much Yellow Tail merlot, Stoli Blueberry and Red Bulls, and Denny's coffee. At that point the money lost at poker and squandered at Denny's was what I like to call a "sunk cost."

Fast forward three hours and forty-five minutes later as my cell phone blares out the Halloween theme awakening me, but not doing so in time for me to actually answer the phone. A familiar beep signified to me that the caller had left a message, checking my phone told me that I didn't know who had called. Assuming that this was the guy whom I had told, "The apartment looks great, I'll take it. What do I need to do?" to which he responded, "Lemme get back to you," I hit send to call him back, and cleared my throat.

Then I heard the following:

Hey bub, it's Rose Martinelli from the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business.

At this point I thought to myself, "Holy shit...is this the call that I think it is? Is this the call that I waited for when round 2 decisions came out then when round 3 decisions went out, then in the weeks following the decision date for those accepted in round three? Was the long wait finally over?" I pressed "1" (rewind):

Hey bub, it's Rose Martinelli from the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business. I hope you're well. I wanted to find a couple minutes to chat with you to see if you're still interested in coming to join us.

She's just calling to chat! This is driving me crazy.

I know it's getting a little bit late here in the season,

That's what we call an understatement

but I have an opening if you're interested, so give me a call, thanks.

Now I thought I heard that last line, but I was too busy pondering if this was the real deal, or just some chat aboutwanting to stay on the waitlist. It's weird when you're asked to stay on the waitlist, because nobody wants to. You freak out, and start thinking, "What will they think if I say 'I want to be on your waitlist!'" The point of a waitlist is to get off the waitlist, so asking somebody if they want to remain on the waitlist is an intellectually cruel question.

I listened to the whole message again. After all, I was tired and dehydrated.

Hey bub, it's Rose Martinelli from the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business. I hope you're well. I wanted to find a couple minutes to chat with you to see if you're still interested in coming to join us. I know it's getting a little bit late here in the season, but I have an opening if you're interested, so give me a call, thanks.

Then I stepped out of my room, saw my mother in the kitchen and said, "I think I just got into the University of Chicago," and went back in my room and closed the door.

I then returned Rose Martinelli's call and found out that, yes, in fact, I had gotten into the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business. I don't remember much else about the call except for her saying (paraphrased) "We're sorry to have made you wait so long, but I suppose they say 'better late than never,'" and my responding "I was thinking the more appropriate phrase started 'That which doesn't kill me...'"

I then proceeded to call everyone I knew (almost...if I didn't call you, don't take it personally, you just weren't on the important list).

Then I spent the rest of the day learning what the body feels like the day after hitting the holy trinity of beer, wine, and booze, throwing down some coffee, getting little sleep, and then injecting a sheer adrenaline rush.

What a day.

Lessons learned from Vietnam, as told by Robert McNamara

2006-07-31T11:20:00.000-04:00

We misjudged then — and we have since — the geopolitical intentions of our adversaries … and we exaggerated the dangers to the United States of their actions.
We viewed the people and leaders of South Vietnam in terms of our own experience … We totally misjudged the political forces within the country.
We underestimated the power of nationalism to motivate a people to fight and die for their beliefs and values.
Our judgments of friend and foe alike reflected our profound ignorance of the history, culture, and politics of the people in the area, and the personalities and habits of their leaders.
We failed then — and have since — to recognize the limitations of modern, high-technology military equipment, forces and doctrine…
We failed as well to adapt our military tactics to the task of winning the hearts and minds of people from a totally different culture.
We failed to draw Congress and the American people into a full and frank discussion and debate of the pros and cons of a large-scale military involvement … before we initiated the action.
After the action got under way and unanticipated events forced us off our planned course … we did not fully explain what was happening and why we were doing what we did.
We did not recognize that neither our people nor our leaders are omniscient. Our judgment of what is in another people's or country's best interest should be put to the test of open discussion in international forums. We do not have the God-given right to shape every nation in our image or as we choose.
We did not hold to the principle that U.S. military action … should be carried out only in conjunction with multinational forces supported fully (and not merely cosmetically) by the international community.
We failed to recognize that in international affairs, as in other aspects of life, there may be problems for which there are no immediate solutions … At times, we may have to live with an imperfect, untidy world.

Good thing we learned those valuable lessons in the 70s.

The Night of the Deceased!

2006-07-31T10:58:00.000-04:00

I haven't posted in a while, so I need to play a little catch-up. First and foremost...

I saw Deceased Saturday night at legendary NYC club CBGB's. Wow, what a show.

It turned out to be Mike Smith's last night touring with the band (he's going to continue on ina Brian Wilson/Beach Boys kind of way), so they played for over two hours, busting out a lot of old tunes and covers (3 songs off of Fearless Undead Machines!).

King Fowley, the lead singer, who used to also be the drummer before he lost one of his lungs to complications from a blood clot he had, got behind the set towards the end of the show for the band's cover of Voivod. He hadn't played drums live in over 4 years. They also covered Kreator's Tormentor, and closed the show with Venom's Black Metal.

Here's a conversatin my friend and I had, right after the band played The Funeral Parlour's Secret.

friend: So, uhh, what is the funeral parlour's secret?
bub: I dunno.
(pause)
bub: It can't be good.

Here's a Deceased video off of their Supernatural Addiction album called Elly's Dementia.

If that wasn't enough for you, here's It's Alive:

Time to Play B-Sides

2006-07-14T00:32:00.000-04:00

I'm obsessed with this song of late. Not quite Brian Wilson listening to Be My Little Baby 100 times a day, but getting there. I hear this song in my sleep. And I don't sleep that much.

How (and a touch of Why) You're Being Lied to About the Effect of Tax Cuts

2006-07-12T23:10:00.000-04:00

The declarations coming out of the White House of increased revenue success caused by the Bush tax cuts, even though the deficit is still well over $200B, flies in the face of statements made by two of Bush's former chiefs of his Council of Economic Advisors.

from Brad DeLong (I emboldened some parts):

Suppose you cut taxes. By how much do you have to cut spending in order to keep the budget deficit from growing? Gregory Mankiw--chosen by George W. Bush to chair his Council of Economic Advisers and be his chief economic adviser in 2003-2004--and his coauthor Matthew Weinzierl provide us with their answers to this question in "Dynamic Scoring: A Back-of-the-Envelope Guide". Mankiw and Weinzierl say that, initially, you have to cut spending by almost the entire amount of the tax cut. But if you do so, they say, you find that the economy does grow faster with lower taxes: people work more, people hide less income, and more is saved and invested. In that long run that economists love so much, you only have to cut spending by five dollars out of every six in order to finance a cut in taxes on labor, and you only have to cut spending by one dollar out of every two in order to finance a cut in taxes on capital.

This is ex-Bush CEA Chair Gregory Mankiw's view. It is in accord with the consensus of professional economists: tax cuts that do not unbalance the budget do increase economic growth, but not to the extent that you don't need to cut spending at all.

What if you cut taxes but don't cut spending? There the consensus of economists is equally clear. A tax cut without accompanying spending cuts does not raise but lowers economic growth. In the end taxes must be raised, and raised to a higher level than they were initially. As Ben Bernanke--whom George W. Bush chose to succeed Greg Mankiw as chair of the Council of Economic Advisers, and then chose again to chair the Federal Reserve--puts it:

"The tendency of government budget deficits to reduce investment spending is called crowding out. Reduced investment spending implies slower capital formation, and thus lower economic growth.... This adverse effect of budget deficits on economic growth is probably the most important cost of deficits, and a major reason why economists advise governments to minimize their deficits..."

Hold on tight to both of these views. They are Republican--spotlessly Republican. They are, however, the views of reality-based Republicans, a remnant that are much scarcer on the ground these days than even wild quail.

So why, then, is the Bush administration holding a big press event this afternoon (Tuesday) in order to claim that because of its supply-side policies the 2006 budget deficit will be about $300 billion, much lower than the $423 billion the Bush administration forecast last February? That its 2003 tax cuts have more than paid for themselves? That the tax cuts have accelerated economic growth enough so that they produced a net gain in revenue?

Do they think that reporters won't ask the first obvious question--that back in February your forecasts already included the effects of the 2003 tax cuts on revenue, and do you really think your audience is too stupid to realize that revisions in the forecast since February come from things that have happened since February and not from things that happened three years ago? Do they think that reporters won't ask the second obvious question--that Republicans like Dick Cheney claimed that the 2001 taxcut wouldn't create a deficit, that the 1993 tax increase wouldn't reduce the deficit, and that the 1981 tax cut wouldn't increase the deficit; shouldn't people who are 0 for 3 be less sure of themselves?

Well, actually, yes.

They do think reporters won't ask the obvious questions--or that even if they do the stories that will get written about the press event will be "he said, she said" stories about how "experts" differ, and who knows who is right. Paul Krugman has the best line about the elite Washington press corps's coverage of the Bush administration: if it were to announce this afternoon that the Earth was flat, tomorrow's headlines would read "Bush, Democrats Views on Shape of Earth Differ."

If you read page A1 of last Saturday's New York Times you saw evidence that the Bush administration's expectations of the press corps are not completely wong, as they snookered the generally-reliable Edmund Andrews, who wrote:

"White House officials are expected to announce that... the deficit will be about $100 billion less than what they projected six months ago. The rising tide in tax payments has been building for months, but the increased scale is surprising even seasoned budget analysts.... Tax revenues are climbing twice as fast as the administration predicted in February, so fast that the budget deficit could actually decline this year..."

Andrews makes no mention of the fact that the Bush forecast of six months ago was deliberately highballed by $60 billion or so--precisely so that the administration could claim now that recent news on the deficit has been very good. As non-partisan budge analyst Stan Collender wrote half a year ago, "The Bush administration held a conference call... to say that the 2006 deficit would be $400 billion or more.... [T]his president has a well-established history of overstating the deficit early in the year and then taking credit when it turns out to be lower than projected, even if it has done nothing to make that happen..."

In July 2003 the fiscal 2003 deficit was estimated at $459 billion; the actual outcome was $378 billion. In February 2004 the fiscal 2004 deficit was estimated at $521 billion--more than $100 billion higher than the Congressional Budget Office's contemporaneous estimate, and $108 billion higher than the actual fiscal 2004 deficit of $413 billion. In January 2005 the adminnistration's forecast for the fiscal 2005 deficit was $427 billion--the deficit came in at $318 billion. And in each case the Bush administration trumpeted the "progress" on the deficit made relative to the benchmark set by its own highballed previous forecasts.

How did the Repulican Party ever get into the business of claiming that tax cuts in America today don't just expand the economy enough to make back some of the revenue lost, but expand it enough to make back all? It's not because any group of reality-based Republican economists believed it--they muttered about "charlatans and cranks... fad economics... voodoo economics... snake-oil salesm[e]n... trying to sell a miracle cure..." It's because a Republican journal of ideas called The Public Interest thought it would be a politically convenient claim to make. As its editor [Irving Kristol later explained (here)], his "own rather cavalier attitude toward the budget deficit and other monetary or fiscal problems" arose because "the task, as I saw it, was to create a new majority, which evidently would mean a conservative majority, which came to mean, in turn, a Republican majority--so political effectiveness was the priority, not the accounting deficiencies of government."

Call it a game of Dingbat Kabuki. There has been good news about economic growth and tax revenue this year, but not $120 billion worth. By highballing early estimates of the deficit, and claiming that lower deficits than their own previous forecasts show that tax cuts pay for themselves, they can keep the big-spending and the low-taxes and the balanced-budget Republicans all inside the tent for just a little longer. That is what is going on here.

But if you are actually interested in what is good for the country, and what the effects of tax cuts on the economy are? You will learn nothing from the administration's press event. Remember: "political effectiveness was the priority, not the accounting deficiencies of government."

How can you not love that Krugman quote?

Why Are Nerds Unpopular?

2006-07-11T22:03:00.000-04:00

by Paul Graham

I read this a while back, and I thought it was very well done. For some reason or another I was reminded of it today.

Uncle Bub

2006-07-10T08:48:00.000-04:00

As of Saturday night, I am officially an uncle!

A trip down to see the new baby is happening 8/3. Have your people call my people.

Lost in the Urinal

2006-07-08T12:03:00.000-04:00

This is a surprise even Bill Parcells wouldn't think of

Time flies like an arrow, fruit flies like a banana

2006-07-08T12:01:00.000-04:00

as do intelligent designers (like Kirk Cameron!)

'70s Desert Island Album Draft Results

2006-07-01T21:41:00.000-04:00

Remember the '90s Desert Island Album Draft in which I was involved? Think 20 years earlier. There were more participants this time, so the draft was very intense (almost 400 albums got picked!)

My 70s Island Discography (with youtube links):

Black Sabbath - Black Sabbath
Black Sabbath, NIB, Behind the Wall of Sleep, The Wizard

Black Sabbath - Paranoid
Paranoid, Iron Man, Electric Funeral, Hand of Doom, Planet Caravan, Planet Caravan (covered by Pantera), War Pigs (covered by Faith No More)

Black Sabbath - Master of Reality
Children of the Grave, Into the Void, Lord of this World, After Forver

Black Sabbath - Vol. 4
Snowblind, Laguna Sunrise, Changes, Supernaut

Black Sabbath - Sabotage
Symptom of the Universe, Hole in the Sky

Ramones - Leave Home
Sheena is a Punk Rocker, California Sun

Ramones - Road to Ruin
I Just Wanna Have Something to Do, I Wanna Be Sedated, She's the One

Frank Zappa - Weasels Ripped My Flesh
My Guitar Wants to Kill Your Mama (covered at G3 w/ Steve Vai, Satriani, & Eric Johnson)

Frank Zappa - Over-nite Sensation
Camarillo Brillo, I Am the Slime (on SNL featuring Don Pardo!), Montana

Frank Zappa - Apostrophe (')
Cosmik Debris, Cosmik Debris (covered by Project Object)

The Beach Boys - Sunflower
Forever (covered by John Stamos) (OK I'm ashamed here)

The Beach Boys - Surf's Up
Surf's Up, Long Promised Road, Cool, Cool Water

Judas Priest - Unleashed in the East
The Green Manalishi (with the Two Prong Crown), Diamonds & Rust (ironically done acoustically)

The Clash - Give 'Em Enough Rope
Stay Free, Safe European Home, Tommy Gun

Rush - A Farewell to Kings
Closer to the Heart, A Farewell to Kings, Xanadu (synched to Citizen Kane...wtf??)

Rush - Hemispheres
The Trees, La Villa Strangiato

KISS - Alive II
God of Thunder, Detroit Rock City, Shout It Out Loud, Shock Me, and for those who bought the Peter Criss album first: Beth

Mahavishnu Orchestra - The Inner Mounting Flame
Meeting of the Spirits, The Dance of Maya

Comus - First Utterance
There's nothing on youtube, but search here for Comus, and you can hear some clips there.

The Sex Pistols - Great Rock N Roll Swindle
My Way, The Great Rock 'N' Roll Swindle, Belsen Was a Gas

entire draft:

1.01 Simey - The Who, Who's Next
1.02 John Madden's Lunchbox - The Sex Pistols, Never Mind the Bollocks
1.03 TU - The Rolling Stones, Exile on Main Street
1.04 Marco - Led Zeppelin, Led Zeppelin IV (Zoso)
1.05 TBone - David Bowie, The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust
1.06 Print is Dead - The Allman Brothers Band - Eat a Peach
1.07 Uruk Hai - Stevie Wonder, Innervisions
1.08 Northern Voice - The Rolling Stones, Sticky Fingers
1.09 bub - Black Sabbath, Master of Reality
1.10 Bonzai - Bob Dylan, Blood on the Tracks
1.11 Scott Norwood - Marvin Gaye, What's Going On?
1.12 Eephus - The Modern Lovers, The Modern Lovers
1.13 JZilla - Led Zeppelin, Physical Graffiti
1.14 DrPill - The Beatles, Let It Be
1.15 Pskov - Miles Davis, Bitches Brew
1.16 Uncle Humuna - Pink Floyd, Dark Side of the Moon
1.17 Nigel Tufnel - Pink Floyd, Animals
1.18 Zamboni - Television, Marquee Moon
1.19 Saintfool - The Velvet Underground, Loaded
1.20 Musesboy - Jimi Hendrix, Band of Gypsys (Live)

2.01 Musesboy - Joy Division, Unknown Pleasures
2.02 Saintfool - Bob Marley and the Wailers, Burnin'
2.03 Zamboni - Pink Floyd, Wish You Were Here
2.04 Nigel Tufnel - The Who, Quadrophenia
2.05 Uncle Humuna - The Allman Brothers, Live at the Fillmore East (Live)
2.06 Pskov - Funkadelic - Maggot Brain
2.07 DrPill - Neil young, After the Gold Rush
2.08 JZilla - Pink Floyd, The Wall
2.09 Eephus - Parliament, Mothership Connection
2.10 Scott Norwood - Neil Young, Harvest
2.11 Bonzai - Bruce Springsteen, Born to Run
2.12 bub - Black Sabbath, Black Sabbath
2.13 Northern Voice - CCR, Cosmo's Factory
2.14 Uruk Hai - Funkadelic - One Nation under a Groove
2.15 Print is Dead - Led Zeppelin, Houses of the Holy
2.16 TBone - Miles Davis, A Tribute to Jack Johnson
2.17 Marco - Stevie Wonder, Talking Book
2.18 TU - Derek and the Dominoes, Layla and Other Assorted Love Songs
2.19 John Maddens Lunchbox - The Clash, The Clash
2.20 Simey - The Band, The Last Waltz (Live)

3.01 Simey - Van Morrison, Moondance
3.02 John Maddens Lunchbox - The Ramones, The Ramones
3.03 TU - Lynyrd Skynyrd, Pronounced Leh-Nerd Skin-Nerd
3.04 Marco - Talking Heads, More Songs About Buildings and Food
3.05 TBone - Led Zeppelin - Led Zeppelin III
3.06 Print is Dead - Pink Floyd, Meddle
3.07 Uruk Hai - The Cars, The Cars
3.08 Northern Voice - AC/DC, Highway to Hell
3.09 bub - Black Sabbath, Paranoid
3.10 Bonzai - Lou Reed, Transformer
3.11 Scott Norwood - The Stooges, Fun House
3.12 Eephus - Big Star, #1 Record
3.13 JZilla - Stevie Wonder, Songs in the Key of Life
3.14 DrPill - Gang of Four, Entertainment
3.15 Pskov - David Bowie, Low
3.16 Uncle Humuna - Bob Marley, Exodus
3.17 Nigel Tufnel - David Bowie, Hunky Dory
3.18 Zamboni - Queen, A Night at the Opera
3.19 Saintfool - The Police, Regatta de Blanc
3.20 Musesboy - Neil Young, Rust Never Sleeps

4.01 Musesboy - Talking Heads, Fear of Music
4.02 Saintfool - Iggy Pop, Lust For Life
4.03 Zamboni - Traffic, John Barleycorn Must Die
4.04 Nigel Tufnel - Grateful Dead, American Beauty
4.05 Uncle Humuna - The Doors, Morrison Hotel
4.06 Pskov - Patti Smith, Horses
4.07 DrPill - Miles Davis, On The Corner
4.08 JZilla - Kiss, Alive! (Live)
4.09 Eephus - The Specials, The Specials
4.10 Scott Norwood - Van Halen, Van Halen
4.11 Bonzai - Iggy and The Stooges, Raw Power
4.12 bub - The Beach Boys, Surf's Up
4.13 Northern Voice - Tom Petty & The Heart Breakers, Damn the Torpedoes
4.14 Uruk Hai - Deep Purple, Machinehead
4.15 Print is Dead - Grateful Dead, Europe '72 (Live)
4.16 TBone - Santana, Abraxas
4.17 Marco - Elvis Costello, This Year's Model
4.18 TU - Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young, Deja Vu
4.19 JML - The Saints, (I'm) Stranded
4.20 Simey - The Doors, LA Woman

5.01 Simey - Elvis Costello, Armed Forces
5.02 JML - Michael Jackson, Off The Wall
5.03 TU - Elvis Costello, My Aim is True
5.04 Marco - John Lennon, Plastic Ono Band
5.05 TBone - Bob Dylan & The Band, Before The Flood
5.06 Print is Dead - Bob Dylan, Desire
5.07 Uruk Hai - Bootsy's Rubber Band, Player of The Year
5.08 Northern Voice - The Eagles, Hotel California
5.09 bub - Frank Zappa, Over-Nite Sensation
5.10 Bonzai - Nick Drake, Pink Moon
5.11 Scott Norwood - Ramones, Rocket to Russia
5.12 Eephus - Buzzcocks, Singles Going Steady
5.13 JZilla - Elton John, Goodbye Yellow Brick Road
5.14 DrPill - Blondie, Parallel Lines
5.15 Pskov - Kraftwerk - Trans Europe Express
5.16 Uncle Humuna - The Who, Live at Leeds
5.17 Nigel Tufnel - Fleetwood Mac, Rumours
5.18 Zamboni - George Harrison, All Things Must Pass
5.19 Saintfool - Curtis Mayfield, Superfly
5.20 Musesboy - Paul McCartney & Wings, Band on the Run

6.01 Musesboy - Led Zeppelin, Presence
6.02 Saintfool - Brian Eno, Another Green World
6.03 Zamboni - Rush, 2112
6.04 Nigel Tufnel - Jethro Tull, Aqualung
6.05 Uncle Humuna - The Police, Outlandos D'Amour
6.06 Pskov - Brian Eno - Ambient 1: Music For Airports
6.07 DrPill - Roxy Music, For Your Pleasure
6.08 JZilla - Peter Frampton, Frampton Comes Alive
6.09 Eephus - Nick Drake, Bryter Later
6.10 Scott Norwood - Allman Brothers, Idlewild South
6.11 Bonzai - John Lennon, Imagine
6.12 bub - The Ramones, Road to Ruin
6.13 Northern Voice - Simon & Garfunkel, Bridge Over Troubled Water
6.14 Uruk Hai - Carole King, Tapestry
6.15 Print is Dead - Boston, Boston
6.16 TBone - Randy Newman, Sail Away
6.17 Marco - T. Rex, Electric Warrior
6.18 TU - Brian Eno, Here Come The Warm Jets
6.19 JML - Jeff Wayne, War of the Worlds
6.20 Simey - Janis Joplin, Pearl

7.01 Simey - Elton John, Tumbleweed Connection
7.02 John Madden's Lunchbox - The B-52's, The B52's
7.03 TU - Todd Rundgren, Something/Anything?
7.04 Marco - The Kinks, Lola Vs. the Powerman & the Money-Go-Round, Pt. 1
7.05 TBone - Joe Cocker, Mad Dogs & Englishmen
7.06 Print is Dead - Parliament, Funkentelechy vs. The Placebo Syndrome
7.07 Uruk Hai - Hank Williams Jr., Whiskey Bent & Hell Bound
7.08 Northern Voice - Aerosmith, Toys in the Attic
7.09 bub - Judas Priest, Unleashed in the East
7.10 Bonzai - Devo, Q: Are we not men? A: We are Devo
7.11 Scott Norwood - MC5, Back In The USA
7.12 Eephus - Cheap Trick, Live at Budokan
7.13 JZilla - Aerosmith, Rocks
7.14 DrPill - Bob Dylan & The Band, The Basement Tapes
7.15 Pskov - Wire, Pink Flag
7.16 Uncle Humuna - The Rolling Stones, Some Girls
7.17 Nigel Tufnel - Genesis, The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway
7.18 Zamboni - Steely Dan, Aja
7.19 Saintfool - Iggy Pop, The Idiot
7.20 Musesboy - David Bowie, The Man Who Sold The World

8.01 Musesboy - The Jam - All Mod Cons
8.02 Saintfool - Talking Heads - Talking Heads: 77
8.03 Zamboni - Alan Parsons Project - I Robot
8.04 Nigel Tufnel - Frank Zappa - Joe's Garage
8.05 Uncle Humuna - Brian Eno - Taking Tiger Mountain (By Strategy)
8.06 Pskov - James Brown - Sex Machine
8.07 DrPill - Sly & the Family Stone - There's a Riot Going On
8.08 JZilla - Yes - Close to the Edge
8.09 Eephus - Graham Parker & The Rumour - Squeezing Out Sparks
8.10 Scott Norwood - Cat Stevens - Tea for the Tillerman
8.11 Bonzai - Neil Young - Live Rust
8.12 bub - The Clash - Give 'Em Enough Rope
8.13 Northern Voice - The Guess Who - American Woman
8.14 Uruk Hai - Alice Cooper - Billion Dollar Babies
8.15 Print is Dead - Marshall Tucker Band - Searching for a Rainbow
8.16 TBone - Brian Eno - Before and After Science
8.17 Marco - David Bowie - Aladdin Sane
8.18 TU - Black Sabbath, Sabbath Bloody Sabbath (DAMMIT!)
8.19 JML - Derek and Clive - Come Again
8.20 Simey - Lynyrd Skynyrd - One More from the Road (live)

9.01 Simey - Queeze, Cool for Cats
9.02 JML - Jean Michel Jarre - Oxygene
9.03 TU - Billy Joel, The Stranger
9.04 Marco - Tom Waits - Closing Time
9.05 TBone - Miles Davis - Live Evil
9.06 Print is Dead - James Gang - Rides Again
9.07 Uruk Hai - Commodores, The Commodores
9.08 Northern Voice - Neil Young - Tonight's the Night
9.09 bub - Rush - A Farewell to Kings
9.10 Bonzai - Richard Hell and the Voidoids - Blank Generation
9.11 Scott Norwood - In the City - The Jam
9.12 Eephus - Joni Mitchell, Hejira
9.13 JZilla - Warren Zevon - Excitable Boy
9.14 Drpill - The Congos - Heart of the Congos
9.15 Pskov - Neil Young - On The Beach
9.16 Uncle Humuna - Herbie Hancock - Head Hunters
9.17 Nigel Tufnel - Lynyrd Skynyrd - Second Helping
9.18 Zamboni - Jeff Beck - Blow By Blow
9.19 Saintfool - Peter Gabriel, Peter Gabriel (1)
9.20 Musesboy - Television - Adventure

10.01 Musesboy - The Stranglers - No More Heroes
10.02 Saintfool - Can, Ege Bamyasi
10.03 Zamboni - New York Dolls - New York Dolls
10.04 Nigel Tufnel - Cure - Three Imaginary Boys
10.05 Uncle Humuna - Joni Mitchell - Blue
10.06 Pskov - The Velvet Underground - 1969: The Velvet Undergound Live
10.07 DrPill - Al Green - Let's Stay Together
10.08 JZilla - Judas Priest - Stained Class
10.09 Eephus - Sweet - Desolation Boulevard
10.10 Scott Norwood - Agents of Furtune, Blue Oyster Cult
10.11 Bonzai - The Damned - Damned Damned Damned
10.12 bub - Kiss, Alive II
10.13 Northern Voice - Bruce Springsteen & The E Street Band - The Wild, The Innocent and The E Street Shuffle
10.14 Uruk Hai - Fleetwood Mac, Fleetwood Mac
10.15 Print is Dead - Eric Clapton - Slowhand
10.16 TBone - Harry Nilsson - Nilsson Schmilsson
10.17 Marco - John Prine - John Prine
10.18 TU - Stevie Wonder - Fulfillness' First Finale
10.19 JML - XTC - Drums and Wires
10.20 Simey - Tom Waits - The Heart of Saturday Night

11.01 Simey - Muddy Waters - Hard Again
11.02 JML - Kraftwerk - The Man Machine
11.03 TU - Jackson Browne - Late For The Sky
11.04 Marco - Bruce Springsteen - Darkness On The Edge of Town
11.05 TBone - Aerosmith - Get Your Wings
11.06 Print is Dead - ZZ Top - Tres Hombres
11.07 Uruk Hai - Grand Funk Railroad, Caught in the Act (Live)
11.08 Northern Voice - Thin Lizzy - Jailbreak
11.09 bub - The Mahavishnu Orchestra - The Inner Mounting Flame
11.10 Bonzai - Gram Parsons - Grievous Angel
11.11 Scott Norwood - The Byrds, Untitled
11.12 Eephus - Marvin Gaye, Let's Get It On
11.13 JZilla - Ramones, It's Alive
11.14 DrPill - Fela Kuti - Zombie
11.15 Pskov - *
11.16 Uncle Humuna - Tom Waits - Small Change
11.17 Nigel Tufnel - Kansas - Left Overture
11.18 Zamboni - Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young - 4 Way Street
11.19 Saintfool - neu!, neu!
11.20 Musesboy - Motorhead - Bomber

12.01 Musesboy - The Fall - Dragnet
12.02 Saintfool - Big Star, Radio City
12.03 Zamboni - KISS - Destroyer
12.04 Nigel Tufnel - The Grateful Dead - Terrapin Station
12.05 Uncle Humuna - Al Green - I'm Still in Love With You
12.06 Pskov - *
12.07 DrPill - Bob Marley - Natty Dread
12.08 JZilla - Rush, All The World's a Stage
12.09 Eephus - Lou Reed, Rock N Roll Animal
12.10 Scott Norwood - The Jackson 5, ABC
12.11 Bonzai - Willie Nelson - Red Headed Stranger
12.12 bub - Comus - First Utterance
12.13 Northern Voice - Rod Stewart - Every Picture Tells a Story
12.14 Uruk Hai - Van Morrison, Tupelo Honey
12.15 Print is Dead - Grateful Dead - From The Mars Hotel
12.16 TBone - Patti Smith - Easter
12.17 Marco - Curtis Mayfield---Curtis
12.18 TU - Deep Purple - Made in Japan (Live)
12.19 JML - Adam & the Ants - Dirk Wears White Sox
12.20 Simey - Dr. John - In the Right Place

13.01 Simey - The Grateful Dead - Workingman's Dead
13.02 JML - Radio Birdman - Radios Appear
13.03 TU - David Bowie - Heroes
13.04 Marco - Richard & Linda Thompson - I Want To See The Bright Lights Tonight
13.05 TBone - Al DiMeola - Elegant Gypsy
13.06 Print is Dead - Bob Marley & The Wailers - Catch a Fire
13.07 Uruk Hai - Lynyrd Skynyrd - Street Survivors
13.08 Northern Voice - Queen - Sheer Heart Attack
13.09 bub - The Ramones - Leave Home
13.10 Bonzai - The Band - Rock of Ages
13.11 Scott Norwood - Richard Pryor - That ######'s Crazy
13.12 Eephus - Lee "Scratch" Perry, Super Ape
13.13 JZilla - The Cars - Candy-O
13.14 DrPill - Steely Dan - Pretzel Logic
13.15 Pskov - SKIP*
13.16 Uncle Humuna - B.B. King - Live in Cook County Jail
13.17 Nigel Tufnel - Frank Zappa - Joe's Garage (Acts II and III)
13.18 Zamboni - Yes - Fragile
13.19 Saintfool - Public Image Limited - Public Image
13.20 Musesboy - Hawkwind - Space Ritual (live)

14.01 Musesboy - Magazine - Real Life
14.02 Saintfool - Shuggie Otis - Inspiration Information
14.03 Zamboni - Neil Diamond - Hot August Night
14.04 Nigel Tufnel - The Allman Brothers Band - Brothers and Sisters
14.05 Uncle Humuna - Joe Jackson - Look Sharp
14.06 Pskov - SKIP*
14.07 DrPill - X-Ray Spex - Germ Free Adolescents
14.08 JZilla - Heart - Dreamboat Annie
14.09 Eephus - Mott the Hoople - Mott
14.10 Scott Norwood - James Taylor - Sweet Baby James
14.11 Bonzai - The Rolling Stones - Get Yer Ya-Ya's Out
14.12 bub - Frank Zappa - Apostrophe (')
14.13 Northern Voice - Bob Seger - Night Moves
14.14 Uruk Hai - Parliament - Motor Booty Affair
14.15 Print is Dead - Dire Straits - Dire Straits
14.16 TBone - Tangerine Dream - Phaedra
14.17 Marco - Warren Zevon - Warren Zevon
14.18 TU - TO*
14.19 JML - Motörhead - Overkill
14.20 Simey - Badfinger - Straight Up

15.01 Simey - Supertramp - Breakfast in America
15.02 JML - Abba - Abba
15.03 TU - SKIP*
15.04 Marco - Stiff Little Fingers - Inflammable Material
15.05 TBone - Foreigner - Foreigner
15.06 Print is Dead - Little Feat - Dixie Chicken
15.07 Uruk Hai - The Doobie Brothers - The Captain & Me
15.08 Northern Voice - Journey - Infinity
15.09 bub - Black Sabbath - Sabotage
15.10 Bonzai - The Heartbreakers - L.A.M.F.
15.11 Scott Norwood - Motörhead - Motörhead
15.12 Eephus - Southside Johnny & the Asbury Jukes - Hearts of Stone
15.13 JZilla - The Undertones - The Undertones
15.14 DrPill - Can - Tago Mago
15.15 Pskov - SKIP*
15.16 Uncle Humuna - Traffic - The Low Spark of High Heeled Boys
15.17 Nigel Tufnel - Led Zeppelin - The Song Remains the Same
15.18 Zamboni - Emerson, Lake & Palmer - Trilogy
15.19 Saintfool - David Bowie - Station to Station
15.20 Musesboy - Jonathan Richman - Back In Your Life

16.01 Musesboy - Pink Floyd - Obscured By Clouds
16.02 Saintfool - King Crimson - Red
16.03 Zamboni - Jimmy Cliff - Wonderful World, Beautiful People
16.04 Nigel Tufnel - Pink Floyd - Atom Heart Mother
16.05 Uncle Humuna - Willie Nelson - Stardust
16.06 Pskov - SKIP*
16.07 DrPill - Ornette Coleman - Science Fiction
16.08 JZilla - Spirit - Twelve Dreams of Dr. Sardonicus
16.09 Eephus - Keith Jarrett - The Köln Concert
16.10 Scott Norwood - David Bowie - Young Americans
16.11 Bonzai - Syd Barrett - The Madcap Laughs
16.12 bub - The Sex Pistols - The Great Rock 'N' Roll Swindle
16.13 Northern Voice - Paul Simon - Paul Simon
16.14 Uruk Hai - Heatwave - Too Hot Too Handle
16.15 Print is Dead - AC/DC - High Voltage
16.16 TBone - Vangelis - Opera Sauvage
16.17 Marco - Roxy Music - Country Life
16.18 TU - SKIP*
16.19 JML - Blondie - Eat to the Beat
16.20 Simey - Rolling Stones - Goats Head Soup

17.01 Simey - Marvin Gaye - I Want You
17.02 JML - The Stranglers - Rattus Norvegicus
17.03 TU - SKIP*
17.04 Marco - Kris Kristofferson - Kristofferson
17.05 TBone - Steely Dan - Countdown to Ecstasy
17.06 Print is Dead - Cream - Live Cream
17.07 Uruk Hai - Bachman Turner Overdrive - Not Fragile
17.08 Northern Voice - Gordon Lightfoot - Summertime Dream
17.09 bub - Black Sabbath - Vol. 4
17.10 Bonzai - The Faces - A Nod Is As Good As A Wink ... To A Blind Horse
17.11 Scott Norwood - Creedence Clearwater Revival - Pendulum
17.12 Eephus - Montrose - Montrose
17.13 JZilla - Ted Nugent - Ted Nugent
17.14 DrPill - Faust - Faust IV
17.15 Pskov - SKIP*
17.16 Uncle Humuna - The Grateful Dead - Blues For Allah
17.17 Nigel Tufnel - Genesis - Trespass
17.18 Zamboni - UFO - Lights Out
17.19 Saintfool - Phillip Glass - Einstein On The Beach
17.20 Musesboy - Siouxsie and the Banshees - The Scream

18.01 Musesboy - Punishment Of Luxury - Laughing Academy
18.02 Saintfool - Monty Python - The Album of the Soundtrack of the Trailer of the Film of Monty Python and the Holy Grail
18.03 Zamboni - Fripp & Eno - No Pussyfooting
18.04 Nigel Tufnel - Jackson Browne - Running on Empty
18.05 Uncle Humuna - Dan Hicks & His Hot Licks - Striking it Rich
18.06 Pskov - SKIP*
18.07 DrPill - Wire - Chairs Missing
18.08 JZilla - Golden Earring - Moontan
18.09 Eephus - The Wild Tchoupitoulas - The Wild Tchoupitoulas
18.10 Scott Norwood - Queen - News of the World
18.11 Bonzai - The Dictators - Go Girl Crazy
18.12 bub - The Beach Boys - Sunflower
18.13 Northern Voice - Joni Mitchell - Court and Spark
18.14 Uruk Hai - Grand Funk Railroad - Shinin' On
18.15 Print is Dead - The O'Jays - Backstabbers
18.16 TBone - Genesis - Trick of the Tail
18.17 Marco - Madness - One Step Beyond
18.18 TU - SKIP*
18.19 JML - Electric Light Orchestra - Discovery
18.20 Simey - Jimmy Buffett - You Had To Be There (live)

19.01 Simey - The Allman Brothers Band - Wipe The Windows, Check The Oil, Dollar Gas (live)
19.02 JML - Split Enz - Frenzy
19.03 TU - SKIP*
19.04 Marco - The Slits - Cut
19.05 TBone - AC/DC - Powerage
19.06 Print is Dead - Johnny Cash - Sunday Morning Coming Down
19.07 Uruk Hai - The Isley Brothers - Go For Your Guns
19.08 Northern Voice - Foreigner - Double Vision
19.09 bub - Rush - Hemispheres
19.10 Bonzai - Big Star - Sister Lovers
19.11 Scott Norwood - The Dead Boys - Young Loud & Snotty
19.12 Eephus - Bob Marley & The Wailers - Live
19.13 JZilla - Blondie - Blondie
19.14 DrPill - John Cale - Paris 1919
19.15 Pskov - SKIP*
19.16 Uncle Humuna - Kiss - Love Gun
19.17 Nigel Tufnel - Steely Dan - Can't Buy A Thrill
19.18 Zamboni - Queen - Live Killers
19.19 Saintfool - Fela Kuti - Afrodisiac
19.20 Musesboy - The Mekons - The Quality Of Mercy Is Not Strnen

20.01 Musesboy - Bill Nelson's Red Noise - Sound On Sound
20.02 Saintfool - Fela Kuti, Shuffering & Shmiling
20.03 Zamboni - Steely Dan - The Royal Scam
20.04 Nigel Tufnel - Led Zeppelin - In Through The Out Door
20.05 Uncle Humuna - Duke Ellington & Ray Brown - This One's For Blanton
20.06 Pskov - MIA*
20.07 DrPill - Peter King - Shango
20.08 JZilla - The Rutles - The Rutles
20.09 Eephus - Elvis Presley - Having Fun With Elvis On Stage
20.10 Scott Norwood - Thin Lizzy - Live and Dangerous
20.11 Bonzai - Cheap Trick - Cheap Trick
20.12 bub - Frank Zappa - Weasels Ripped My Flesh
20.13 Northern Voice - Meat Loaf - Bat Out Of Hell
20.14 Uruk Hai - LTD - Togetherness
20.15 Print is Dead - Hot Tuna - Hot Tuna
20.16 TBone - Chick Corea - Return to Forever
20.17 Marco - Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers - Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers
20.18 TU - MIA*
20.19 JML - Sherbet - Howzat
20.20 Simey - Saturday Night Fever Soundtrack

* - Pskov and TU just disappeared from the draft in rounds 11 & 14, respectively