'Nuff Said on Rudy

[update]
Scary Guiliani cite from one of the articles, quoting a 1994 speach of his:

Freedom is about the willingness of every single human being to cede to lawful authority a great deal of discretion about what you do.

Tom Tomorrow does it again

from Salon's comic pages:



Put that way, no wonder the Republicans are so anxious to run against her.

Porn for Girls, by Girls

Someone finally cracked the code at Porn for Girls, by Girls. Has to be seen to be believed.

(very safe for work)

'Nuff Said on Scary Movies

I wish I could claim credit for finding this, but it all goes to Mike Eason. If only more women were willing to take the high road like this lady does....

Fruit Flies in the Castro

The boffins at University of Illinois at Chicago have figured out how to make fruit-flies gay, and how to turn them back again. It's very interesting to me because the human gay population for years argued that being gay wasn't genetic, because they didn't want to suffer Mengele-esque attempts to be cured. I always thought this was an unfortunate policy, since the argument "hey, this's how we are, and that's just the way it is" is a much better argument for acceptance vis-a-vis natural rights, &c. than "hey, it's a valid lifestyle choice" (since anything that's a choice is subject to slippery-slope arguments such as whether polygamy/polyandry, consensual teacher-student relationships, &c. should also be allowed). Ammunition for the "that's nature, get over it" crowd has just come through with variably, tunably gay fruit-flies -- if the mechanisms that determine sexual orientation become sufficiently widely understood, then those who feel that things should be otherwise can take it up with their creator, whereas the rest of us can move on and start making the appropriate societal decisions.

Magnetic Energy Storage

So the other day I said to myself, "Self, magnets attract and repel each other. That sounds like work." Then I started thinking: the act of magnetizing NdFeB could be viewed as an act of energy storage. If you take a screw and crank a bunch of very strong magnets together, they should resist that arrangement until they're demagnetized. The question would be: how could this resistance be harvested? One possible way might be to compress a gas, but it'd probably be a lot easier to just compress a gas itself. With magnets, you don't have to worry about gas canisters exploding, but I'm kinda baffled as to how one can extract the energy. Maybe just a stupidly high amount of mechanical advantage?

reforming the Fed

You hear a lot of griping regarding Ron Paul's stand on getting rid of the Federal Reserve bank, calling him an out & out loonie for wanting to go back to the gold standard and the stringency of 100-percent-reserve banking. I don't know, honestly, what's best. In a world where central bankers are doing their damnedest to weaken their currencies, simply keeping one's true money-supply constant would send the value of one's currency through the roof. Good thing? Bad thing? I dunno.

But I do know one thing: there are actually several different Fed rates out there, and no-one talks about the important one -- the discount rate. The DR is what's used to reflect the true, instant cost of money. When you make a net-present-value calculation using anything other than the discount rate, you're including some sort of premium (usually a risk or duration adjustment). The Funds rate is a different matter: what rate banks are allowed to lend to each other at. I propose keeping the Fed -- we've already got it, and quarter-annually pandering to the credit markets is certainly better than the banana republic we'd inhabit if we trusted Congress to manage our money supply.

But why should the Fed regulate the inter-bank rate? Why not let our banks decide among themselves at what rate they are willing to loan money? By letting the rate float, then banks can increase or decrease the their rates in real-time according to market pressures, instead of having to wait for the Fed to make its pronouncements. If you want guaranteed borrowing, use the discount window or repos. If you want market-adjusted funding with varying risk spectra, then talk to the other banks. This still ensures that banks aren't destroyed during market panics, but takes "policy" out of an equation that by definition must constantly change.

A credit crisis is a shortfall in the supply of credit, no different than a gasoline crisis or a doughnut crisis, and is almost always the result of price controls. President Carter did untold damage to our economy fixing our gas prices, and Mugabe's nearly destroyed Zimbabwe with his own price controls. We don't want to find ourselves in the same boat with money. If we want to avoid long-term disaster in the credit markets, we need to get out of the price-fixing business and let the day-in/day-out players make their moves according to the daily realities they face.