Ramblings

GEN McChrystal is testifying before Congress this week about the change in strategy and the Afghanistan surge outlined by President Obama earlier. Spencer Ackerman, one of my favorite defense reporters, explains that Republicans are misunderestimating GEN McChrystal's loyalty to the President. Trying to use a military commander as a tool to bludgeon the political opposition is disgraceful. And it's not working anyway.

So ClimateGate looks to be a lot worse than I originally believed. The Bayesian in me, however, still sees nothing close to enough evidence to overturn my original belief. So if the tree ring data may have been improperly "corrected," that doesn't change the fact that the polar ice caps and ice shelves are shrinking rapidly while glaciers are receding. It doesn't change the fact that changes in seasonal weather patterns (e.g. glacial snow melt in the Himalayas) will lead to sweeping changes in agricultural production in some of the least politically stable regions in the world. Or that the basic mechanism for global warming was established and confirmed long ago.

It's time to think about gift giving. Some economists, who apparently like to model human behavior after simple interest-maximizing robots, claim that gift giving is economically inefficient, and that it's better to give cash. I dunno. I think that gift-giving can very well leave society economically better off. I like to think that people don't always know what they want, and that sometimes the people who know them may know enough to give them something that they'd love more than the cash it's worth, AND would never have thought to buy for themselves in the first place. My mom once bought me a North Face bag that I love and that has gone all over Hawaii, Texas, Alaska, and Europe. If I would have known such a product existed, I would have bought it myself. But I didn't, and that's what makes it a great gift. My mom, apparently an awesome gift-giver, also bought me some pretty expensive headphones while I was in Iraq. Again, if I would've known how useful they were, I would've gotten them for myself for that money. That's the kind of gift that people should be striving for. Think about it - a professional chef has expertise to buy a kitchen utensil his friend, the amateur home cook, may appreciate. Everyone has some kind of expertise over their loved ones - it's appropriate to use it when selecting gifts. So go out and buy gifts that are better than the cash you spend - by buying things that the recipient didn't even know he/she wanted. Easier said than done, but articulating the ideal makes it easier to strive towards the goal.