Wednesday, June 26, 2013

Hexadecimperial metrics

I was reminded recently of a conversation I had a while back about weights and measures.  Though I was raised bilingually, speaking both Imperial and Metric, I find myself admiring metric but using imperial day-to-day.  (Of course, there are some archaic units I have a fondness for... I love cubits because they are one of the few units of measure I've found that intrinsically imply a lack of precision)  While I do love metric units, the entire SI finds itself mired in a tradition of base 10 numbering (side note:  that's a really poor way to name numbering systems.  All numbering systems are base 10, they simply disagree on the value of 10-1.  Shouldn't it be called base 9+1?  But I digress) Why does anyone think it makes inherent sense for a kilogram to be equal to 0x3E8 grams? (OK, one more side note:  that number is highly frustrating to those, like me, who are fans of both hexadecimal and scientific E notation.)

There are so many places where imperial units get things so tantalizingly close to right.  Rulers are already generally marked off in 1/0x10ths of an inch.  0x10 ounces make a pound.  Of course, they then wander off into lala land with 0xE lbs to the stone, 0xB inches to the foot, etc.  But instead of dismissing entirely, I say let's fix what's broken.  I say let's make a new system of heximetric (HM) measures based on imperial units, so that those with a familiarity with imperial can easily transition because their mental approximations are still approximately right.

0x10 inches to the HM cubit (off by 2 inches)
0x20 inches to the HM yard (off by 4 inches)
0x100 inches to the HM rod (off by 58 inches)
 (call 0x1000 inches a HM half-furlong)
0x2000 inches in the HM furlong (off by 272 inches)
0x10000 inches in the HM mile (off by 2176 inches)

(I'm shocked that a mile is so close to 64k inches, it's only off by
about 3%.  That's kind of neat)

0x10 drachm in an oz (exact)
0x10 oz in a lb (exact)
0x10 lb in a HM stone (off by 2 lbs)
0x80 lb in a HM hundredweight (off by 16 lbs)
 0x100 lb in 2 HM hundredweight
0x800 lb in a HM ton (off by 152 lbs)
 0x1000 in 2 HM tons
0x10 tons in another day older and deeper in debt

One of the minor side-coolnesses to this that I noticed in my conversation is light speed.  To 2 significant digits, lightspeed would be 0x2C,000 HM miles per second.  That just strikes me as kind of cool, in a c=2c way.  (although I would say that I need a better means of notation for powers of 2.  0x2c * 0x10^7 inches/second just looks uglier than 3E8 m/s (dammit, there's that number again.  It's haunting me.))

So, who's with me?

Monday, May 20, 2013

Perspective

One of the things I'm always fascinated by is how the fundamental assumptions we make shape our beliefs, and how those beliefs shape our views of the world and, perhaps most importantly, shape our views of those with different assumptions.  I talked about this sort of thing with respect to crime and punishment in a previous blog post.

A very similar sort of dynamic shows up in the politics of economics.  On the one hand there are people who believe that wealth is money, or the related belief that wealth is a relatively static thing that can be sliced up like a pie and distributed in either a fair or unfair manner.  On the other hand you have people who believe that wealth is a side effect of the movement of money (or that the movement of money is a side effect of the creation of wealth) and that the forcible movement of money not only fails to create wealth, but that it hinders the natural movement of money and the associated wealth thereby generated.  Personally, I clearly fall into the latter category, but this post isn't about right and wrong, it's about how the adherents of those two viewpoints perceive one another.

If you look at economics as an exercise in slicing an immutable pie, then questions on such topics as tax policy are a matter of balance, where harm to the rich is balanced against help for the poor. Or perhaps it's a question of fairness.  Sure, maybe they'll admit that someone who has worked hard and made a bunch of money deserves to end up with a bit more than someone who hasn't, but "How much more is really fair?" they'll ask.

From the other point of view, tax policy is not at all a balancing act.  If the  creation of wealth by the free movement of money is damaged by the non-free movement of money, then taxes aren't a boon to the poor at the expense of the rich, they are instead a harm to all to the benefit of none and the fairest policy is one where they are kept to the minimum possible amount.

What's really interesting to me here is how each side's actions appear to one another. If you believe in equalized redistribution, then the capitalist insistence on minimum taxation appears to be motivated by an insatiable greed.  On the other hand, to a capitalist, the redistributionist's call for fair and balanced taxation make no sense whatsoever in terms of compassion and kindness.  From the perspective that taxation hurts the poor as much or more than it hurts the rich, then an insistence on balance in taxation is not a question of balancing help for the poor against hurt for the rich, but a question of how much hurt to the poor can be tolerated in order to provide hurt to the rich.  Such a thing cannot be explained by compassion, but only makes sense in the context of hatred for the rich.  So say, as an example, that you're looking at a 1% tax increase on someone who makes ten million dollars a year.  From the redistributionist's standpoint, they see resistance as insatiable greed.  "How can you fight against this $100 thousand?  That's merely a drop in the bucket with relation to your income!  You'll barely be inconvenienced by it!  How could you be so greedy as to deny that small amount?  Do you have no human compassion at all?  What kind of vile monster are you?"  While on the other side, the rich capitalist is thinking "That is a fairly small amount, it won't make much difference to the overall quality of my life, perhaps I can afford to let go a groundskeeper or two, I'm sure a slightly disheveled lawn will be a barely noticeable inconvenience to me.  How much coldhearted hatred must these people have for me, that they're willing to sacrifice the entire livelihoods of a few groundskeepers in order to merely mildly inconvenience me?  Do they have no human compassion whatsoever?  What kind of vile monsters are they?"

Thursday, May 16, 2013

Compromise

Over the past year or few, it seems there's always a lot of talk about compromise between the parties, or more accurately the lack thereof.  Democrats say that the Republicans are resistant to compromise, Republicans say that Democrats have redefined compromise to mean getting what they want, and the media wails and moans about how everything would be rainbows and unicorns if everyone would just be willing to compromise a bit.  I've always had a more sanguine view that sure, there are times when compromise is good, but, to give an analogy, when someone says they want to stab you in the heart 20 times, a compromise position of just 10 times doesn't really do you much good.  Now I'm starting to re-think my stand (not on the stabbing part.  I'm still firmly anti-stabbing).

Personally, I compromise all the time.  Most often with myself, usually along the lines of an uneasy peace between my tongue and the size of my waist.  I compromise with my family, my friends, my co-workers.  All of that is fine and good, but I just don't think it scales to the size and shape of politics and government.  Let's take a logical look at it, unrelated to any particular issue.  If the Republicans believe that what the Democrats want to do is harmful to the country, and the Democrats think that what the Republicans want to do is harmful to the country, then what does compromise get us?  It gets us a little of what Republicans want, in exchange for a little of what Democrats want.  If only one side is right, then compromise just hurts the country a little bit.  If both sides are right, then compromise hurts the country more.  Arguing for compromise means that you're working on the assumption that your opponent's beliefs are wrong, as are your own.  Maybe my initial assumptions are wrong.  Maybe one side or the other doesn't really believe that the other side's desires would ultimately be harmful.  I find that unlikely.  I personally know plenty of Republicans who claim to view Democrat policies as immensely harmful.  The same is true of Democrats and their espoused view of Republican policies.  Certainly it's possible that both sides are lying about their views, but that brings up the obvious question, if they don't really see the opponent's policies as harmful, why do they resist them at all?

All of this is certainly not to say that Democrats and Republicans (as well as adherents to any other political philosophies) can't work together.  Going back to my stabbing analogy and making it much more literal, I think that stabbing someone even just once is almost always wrong.  I think there should be a law against it.  I think there is a law against it.  Probably several of them.  I think that Republicans, Democrats, and nearly every third party out there would stand behind that sort of law.  That is an example of working together.  But it's not compromise, it's agreement, and that is an entirely different thing.

Friday, February 15, 2013

Minimum jobs

Way back during Obama's first presidential campaign, one of the things he promised was a $3,000 tax credit for new full-time jobs.  Looks like it's still listed in the change.gov website, under "New American Jobs Tax Credit".  Now, promises are promises, and when they come from a politician they're fairly suspect to begin with (when you don't have absolute dictatorial power, they're both easier and harder - it can often be hard to keep them, but it's easy to blame a failure to keep your promises on someone else).  This particular promise was, and is, unique in a few ways.  First of all, it's an offer to lower (albeit very slightly) taxes on businesses by creating a new loophole for them (hey, if we're going to start saying that every company that uses the tax code as written to get out of paying taxes is using loopholes, let's at least be consistent in our terminology).  It's at least trying to use economic incentives to induce companies to engage in behavior that actually benefits the economy.  Those are shocking things to have proposed by a Democrat.  Of course, it's a one-time thing, and the amount promised is dwarfed by the actual expense of hiring a new employee, but I'll take laws that are minimally effective over ones that are actually dangerous and harmful any day.

There's another way this promise was unusual - it was actually kept, to some extent.  For most of 2010, new hires were worth a $1,000 tax credit, and were exempt from the employer side of Social Security taxes through the end of 2010, which would be a savings of between $940 (for a 40-hour a week minimum wage employee) to $8,010 (for an employee making $106,800 or more during that period, or $128,160 per year if they started on the day the exemption began).  So for some employees, it actually was a $3,000 tax credit, though it could have been as little as $1,940 or as much as $9,010.  As far as fulfilled promises go, that ranks better than most.

Did Obama view it as a complete and total failure?  Because, during his State of the Union address, he said he wanted to raise the federal minimum wage to $9 per hour.  By my calculations, that's a cost of $3,913 to companies for each full time minimum wage employee they have.  So the person who believed a one-time $1,940 tax break for new hires during most of a single year would encourage job growth for some reason doesn't believe that an additional $3,913 per year cost per minimum wage employee - and a cost that lasts forever at that - will hurt employment?

So say I have a company with 200 employees, half of them minimum wage.  I'm going to be paying an extra $391,300 per year.  If I were planning to hire new employees, I could just cut the number I was planning to hire by 26, and it'd balance out.  If I wasn't, I could fire 20 people, on the assumption that the other 80 could manage to work 20% harder (that's probably not a good assumption).  I could cut the wages of the other 100 non-minimum-wage employees.  That certainly wouldn't be a popular choice, but maybe it's the only choice I could make.  I could always raise my prices to compensate, and maybe that would work, or maybe my customers would decide that they could do without my product and demand would dry up.  If I wasn't planning to expand, my workers can't work harder, my non-minimum-wage employees either make too little to be able to drop their pay or have other opportunities that they would take if I tried to, and if my customers won't pay more, then eventually, I will end up closing up shop and putting all 200 people out of work.  Which of those choices is compassionate?  Because they all sound pretty bad to me.

Now the really fun thing is the plan to index minimum wage to inflation.  That's a horrible idea, but does raise a very interesting possibility.  Inflation is the rising cost of goods.  Goods are made by people earning wages.  If we were to tie the wage to the cost of goods, then all it would take is for companies to tie the cost of goods to the minimum wage (which they already do, it's just not obvious), and in mathematical terms we've set the minimum wage to infinity.  Say in simplified terms, that inflation is the cost of a Big Mac, and the minimum wage is set to be 2 Big Mac's worth per hour.  Now all it would take is for McDonald's to set the price of a Big Mac to be one minimum wage hour's worth, and suddenly everyone is making infinite money, but can't afford to buy a burger.

The best analogy I've seen for minimum wage is a short basketball player.  "I sure do wish I could slam-dunk" he thinks to himself, "but I'm only 5'9", and all the guys who can dunk are over 6' tall."  So he comes up with a plan.  He goes to his garage and works late into the night, and the next day heads out to the court.  "Guys" he says "last night I built myself this ruler.  The feet on this ruler are 11" long. I just measured my height with it, and I'm 6'3", so watch me dunk now!"