Both groups reported corresponding increments in negative mood following negative mood induction, and decreases in negative mood following alcohol or placebo drink consumption. Both groups reported similar levels of subjective intoxication. It is concluded that the expectancy factor plays a key role in reducing negative mood regardless of actual beverage consumption.

My key finding is whatever beer they chose for the study clearly tastes like a nonalcoholic placebo drink, and that would increase my sadness regardless.

Security guard who opened the door for me: “What are you here for?”
Me: “Driver’s license renewal.”
Guard: “Not gonna happen.  Come back tomorrow.”
Me: “Why not?”
Guard: “Computer system is down.  Come back tomorrow.”
Me: “Do you think there’s any chance they’ll get it back online?”
Guard: “Hell no, it’s been down since 8:30 this morning!”
Me: “Don’t you think it would have been helpful to post that somewhere so–”
Guard [cutting me off]: “Come back tomorrow.  Maybe you’ll have better luck then.” [starts a new conversation with another guard]

I’ve blocked off Wednesday morning for my second visit, and had to reschedule a dental appointment to find that time in my calendar.  This time, I’ll probably have to rent a zipcar or take a bus to get there.  And if it doesn’t work out, I’ll have a cool 48 hours left (counting my birthday) to renew before my license expires and I’m subject to retaking the driving exam or some other nonsense.

:(

I witnessed an altercation this morning directly pertaining to the question above.  I’m currently writing this from a coffeehouse where the wi-fi is down due to some broken tech part.  I can connect via my phone so this doesn’t really affect me, but it definitely inconvenienced one of the other customers, who asked for a refund on her coffee and was refused by the barista.  The customer argued that she had planned to do work requiring internet during her morning coffee, and had she known in advance that the wi-fi was down she would have gone to another coffeehouse.

Maybe I’m biased as a frequent coffeehouse wi-fi user, but I think the customer has a valid point here.  Consider the case where a man needs a haircut and he picks a barbershop that also does the neck shave, hot towel, and massage.  We would say colloquially that he’s paying for the haircut and the rest are “free” amenities.  However, if one visit the barber cut the customer’s hair, then declined to provide the additional services, we would think it perfectly reasonable for the customer to object and I would argue he is well within his bounds to ask for a refund or at least a discount — the service provided did not meet his reasonable expectation.

I choose my coffee shops as much for the atmosphere and wi-fi as for the coffee, and I frequently work remotely.  In the years before I could connect my laptop to my phone’s internet provider, it was a significant inconvenience to show up, pay for my coffee (which I nearly always order for “here”), sit down, turn on my laptop, and find out the internet was down.  I suppose it’s just as inconvenient when the coffeehouse is irregularly busy and I can’t find a seat, or if it’s unusually loud or there’s a band that evening or something, but it would be reasonable to assume that I could make a judgment about those things before placing my order.

In my view, coffeehouses that choose to have regular wi-fi access are responsible for maintaining the service as a part of the total package, or else notifying customers prior to taking their orders (a sign on the register would be reasonable) when the wi-fi is down.  And if they don’t, maybe the coffeehouse shouldn’t have to advertise refunds for people who expected functional wi-fi, but it seems a reasonable policy not to deny refunds to the customers who see it as a big enough deal to raise the issue.

Utah is phasing out firing squads because of the media attention and bad image they cause, legislators and corrections officials said.

It was in Utah in 1977 that Gary Gilmore was executed by firing squad, which he chose over hanging. His case became notorious, not only because it was the first execution in the nation after a 10-year legal hiatus, but also because he insisted on being put to death rather than pursuing appeals. “Let’s do it,” he famously said just before his death.

In 1996 in Utah, John Albert Taylor became the only other prisoner in recent history to be executed by firing squad. The event attracted hordes of reporters who often, to the chagrin of Utah officials, invoked images of raw, frontier justice. Mr. Gardner’s execution, if and when it occurs, appears certain to attract similar worldwide attention.

I don’t know much about how the shift from firing squad and electric chair to lethal injection came about politically, but I suspect it was a bootleggers and baptists-style coalition of government officials who wanted less public attention on the executions and death penalty opponents who wanted to eliminate punishments they deemed to be more cruel.

If I’m correct (and people who have studied this more than I are welcome to challenge my hypothesis), then it seems like the government let PR trump purpose here, since their argument in favor of capital punishment entirely hinges on its effectiveness as a deterrent. Setting actual cruelty aside for a moment, it seems to me that the government would want to favor the maximum appearance of cruelty it could get away with, if it cared at all about the effectiveness of capital punishment as a deterrent.  But the above excerpt suggests the more cruel the punishment appears, the more politically infeasible capital punishment becomes, putting the government in the awkward position of defending its use as a deterrent while simultaneously hoping no one notices it’s happening.

So here’s my question for opponents of capital punishment: would the best strategy not be to favor executions with the greatest public appearance of cruelty, in hopes of turning public opinion against capital punishment?  With apologies for slipping a utilitarian calculus into my argument, wouldn’t the difference in actual cruelty between firing squad and lethal injection (assuming the data bears out a significant difference) be worth the PR gain if it led to the abolition of capital punishment?

Seems to me like the effort to make capital punishment less cruel has only made the issue less salient and therefore less difficult for opponents to get state legislators to outlaw it.

“They’ve been set up by going to college and thinking if you work hard at something you enjoy doing, you’ll be rewarded,” says Nan Mooney, author of Not Keeping Up with Our Parents. “But it’s not true anymore.”

And later in the article:

“There is still a rhetoric in this country that if you do work hard, you should be able to do well,” says Mooney. “And if you’re not doing well, it’s because you didn’t work hard enough or you weren’t smart enough. So then when you’re still working at Starbucks at 30 years old, you feel like, I screwed up, what do I do? It generates a lot of self-doubt that will stay with you.”

Basically, some moron (sounds like it was usually a parent) gave millennials bad advice about how to get a job in this world.  Here are three things every millennial needs to know right now about getting your dream job:

1. Each additional college degree does not move you along some sort of probability curve toward a guaranteed high-paying job in your desired industry, and moreover, grad school can sometimes hurt you in foregone income, experience, and networking, or by limiting your choices by saddling you with debt.  Sure, an additional degree almost always increases the probability of getting a better job all else equal, but when is all else equal?  Opportunity costs, people!

2. Networking is the best way to get jobs, and the bigger your obstacles are to getting your dream job — few positions open, blemishes in your past, fewer socioeconomic advantages — the more important effective networking becomes.  And by the way, effective networking is not stalking, it’s relationship building.  The best networkers develop many friends and acquaintances, not mere connections.  Networking also is not nepotism.  These words mean different things, so get off that high-horse… or stay on that high-horse if you prefer, it doesn’t change the way things are.  Want to get a job at an advocacy nonprofit to fight the evils of networking?  I’ve got bad news for you: without networking, you won’t get it.

3. Having a quarter-life crisis about your “plight” gets you precisely nowhere.  Whoever said the American Dream was supposed to be easy?  If you’re one of the people described in the article who’s upset that you’re still working at Starbucks and living in your parents’ basement, think about the fact that you got to spend four to seven years jacking around in college.  Or better yet, think about the people in a much worse position than you who leave their families behind and cross the border every day in pursuit of the American Dream only to be greeted with outright bigotry by many citizens, some of whom exercise said bigotry through government force.

Millennials: The bottom line is if you want to get your dream job, the best thing you can do is put yourself in a position to know everything you can about the paths into that industry, the skills required for that industry, and the people involved in that industry, then go from there.  the keys to success Mommy and Daddy told you are no longer true, if they ever were, so suck it up and take control of your career path.

The only problem with asking proponents of this bill to relocate their money in the direction of their mouth is this fundamentally misunderstands what just took place.  For the vast majority of the ground troops, the calculus wasn’t that x billion over x years is okay if it saves x lives and reduces the debt by x percent.  The calculus was either “universal enrollment good, costs be damned” or it was “Democrats good, Republicans be damned.”  Everything else was daily talking points to persuade independents.

Libby puts it another way:

Supporting health care reform is kind of like turning your twitter avatar green, or having one of those Jesus fish or Free Tibet stickers on your car; it’s supporting a cause that you think is righteous, without personally doing or sacrificing anything. Much like an audience at a play, you know how you expect events to play out morally and logically, and when reality agrees with your expectations – math and finances be damned – you’re happy and you feel like justice has been served. If not, then a great injustice has occurred, the nation is ungovernable, the other team is being underhanded and deceptive, and the world is going to hell in a handbasket.

Don’t believe me?  Ask yourself how many ardent supporters of this bill would have backed off if the CBO estimate had come back a trillion dollars higher.  (Many ardent supporters lamented that the bill wasn’t expensive or sweeping enough, you will recall.)  And I’m not even trying to pass moral judgment here — maybe achieving universal enrollment or Democrats beating Republicans really are victories worth limitless cost.  I don’t think so, but I suppose I could be mistaken.  I’m just saying that, short of actual catastrophe, I don’t think ardent supporters would care one bit if the figures they cited in order to get the bill passed turned out to be horribly incorrect.  The bill passed, end of story.

And I do believe that will happen.  Do I know how many people will be better off?  Not a clue.  Do I think it will make enough people better off, and to a great enough degree, that it’s worth the costs it will impose on the majority of Americans for decades to come?  I have no idea how to answer that question, at least not without some sort of a priori appeal to either egalitarian or individualist virtues, and now we’re in a moral debate.

I suppose I could attempt to weigh the costs and benefits, but it’s an incalculable exercise.  Sure, I’ve written several times about direct costs, but that’s an easy lie to expose to anyone willing to listen.  The bill won’t save us money over 10 years or 20 years or ever — if you actually believe that, you don’t understand economics or politics, and I’ll debate you any day of the week.

It’s incalculable because of the unseen costs, which few people on either side of the aisle are talking about.  A libertarian professor I know once said he believed that libertarianism’s greatest intellectual contribution is a recognition of the unseen.  We’ll never see what open competition could have done to health costs in markets for health care left free of government interference.  We’ll never see how the voluntarily uninsured would have spent the money they’re now required to spend on plans.  We’ll never see how many lives could have been saved or how much healthier we could be in a world with technological innovations that are more costly and burdensome to develop as a result of government.  I’m not saying there will be no technology and no innovation, I’m saying when we make these choices “as a society” we sacrifice the unseen what-could-have-been for a “bird in the hand is worth two in the bush” philosophy that defies the most basic tenets of economics.

I know a cautiously optimistic public intellectual who says we’re going to get freer and more prosperous only because the pace of human ingenuity will always outpace government’s ability to stifle it. It’s a sad irony that government’s inefficiency relative to individual entrepreneurship is precisely what allows it to impose huge burdens on society and come back later to say “see, things aren’t nearly as bad as you thought” thus paving the way for further intrusion.  There’s a seemingly endless debate between those who say “think what economic growth we’d have with less government” and those who retort “but without government, what makes you think we’d have growth at all?”  Except that thanks to politics, the debate is awfully one-sided in favor of a intervene-more approach.  Surveys of past presidents bear this out especially well: a few presidents deliberately did very little to get in the way of the people, and even where increased prosperity resulted, you’ll find those presidents sitting comfortably at the bottom of the popularity lists.

Do I think the world’s coming to an end because we have sweeping health care legislation?  Absolutely not — certainly not before 2014 (remember, the start date was pushed a few elections back for precisely the reasons you’d suspect) and probably not at all.  I simply have to believe that the more dismal predictions won’t bear out.  We’re certainly not going to get most of was promised, no question about that.  At the end of the day I suspect, as I do with most government legislation, that we’ll be much better off than the worst fears of the naysayers but much much worse off than we could have been in a world without it.  But because it’s unseen, no one will ever know.

I’ll say again what I’ve said before: although I disagree with you, if you want to support a really bad bill in order to lay the psychological architecture for a permanent entitlement program, or because you can’t bear the thought of the Democrats not winning this one, that’s your business.  But if you believe the bill is financially solvent, you are deluding yourself.

[Update 3/21/10: Not to mention another sobering reality: “this legislation would set in motion political forces that would make additional spending inevitable.”]

I’ll side with the guy who bothered to take substitution effects and positive externalities into account.