I make [decisions] as quickly as I can, quicker than the other fellow, if I can. Often my haste is a mistake, but I live with the consequences without complaint.

Three words: Nuclear. Launch. Codes.

Vote.

America, we cannot turn back. Not with so much work to be done. Not with so many children to educate, and so many veterans to care for. Not with an economy to fix and cities to rebuild and farms to save. Not with so many families to protect and so many lives to mend. America, we cannot turn back. We cannot walk alone. At this moment, in this election, we must pledge once more to march into the future. Let us keep that promise — that American promise — and, in the words of Scripture, hold firmly, without wavering, to the hope that we confess.

A director I once had from whom I learned a great deal — in the Norman Schwarzkopf sense¹ — gave a singularly unhelpful note in rehearsal. Despite the lack of usable insight, it was funny (and true), and so it’s stuck with me for a while. I’ve kept thinking that there was, just maybe, something valuable hidden behind it. Now, finally, it’s given me the perfect way to frame my nascent theory.

I call it the More Good; Less Suck Theory.

A director has only so much time available for a given project, so in many ways the overall process is really about resource allocation. So imagine that that time is really some sort of building material. Dirt, or concrete, or whatever works for you. It seems that the natural progression of putting up a play divides into two phases, in which you use the “concrete” available to you for different goals.

The first phase is the More Good phase. Every² play has a few key moments that the whole work hinges on. If the audience understands and believes those moments, then they’ll follow you for the rest of the play, more or less. And so for the first part of the process you’re focusing on building up those key moments, creating the general topography of the play.

But at some point you’re running out of “concrete” and you have to give some attention to the spaces between the key moments. I call this the Less Suck phase. It’s where you try and fill in some of the deepest valleys and try to make them less of a contrast to the good things you’ve hopefully built up so far. You just don’t have enough time to bring everything up to the same high level, but you can make the ride a bit less jarring for the audience.

So there you have it. More Good; [then] Less Suck. Note that this has nothing to do with the relative talent of the actors involved. There are always things that work better than others, and this is just a mental model for prioritizing the things that really have to work. It also by no means implies that things stop getting better; in fact, by filling in those valleys you make it easier for the actors to find more good stuff overall.

1. ”You learn far more from negative leadership than positive leadership. Because you learn how not to do it.”
2. Reasonably-well written

…the apparent end of the boom and bust cycles led us to assume the economy would no longer impose huge, unexpected, and arbitrary losses on large numbers of Americans. So we basically got rid of the safety nets. We abolished welfare, let unemployment insurance wither, and paid scant attention when corporations eliminated defined-benefit pensions and cut health insurance benefits. We even stopped worrying about the safety of small investors, allowing federal deposit insurance to shrink as a proportion of total savings…

(Emphasis mine.) You see, the funny thing about safety nets… they’re not really there for things you planned for. And while it’s true that in your day-to-day life you’d tend engage in riskier behavior with a net than without, applying that mental model of moral hazard doesn’t really translate to most of the decisions we make as economic actors.¹ The biggest difference is transparency.

In daily life we develop a pretty good intuitive sense about the risks we face. We understand reasonably well that running across a busy highway is riskier than crossing at a crosswalk with the light. Or (taking the metaphor literally) we know that, should we choose to walk a tightrope without a net, there is a chance that a sudden gust of wind might unbalance us enough to fall. We make an assessment of the relative risk of that happening, factoring that into our decision to walk or not.

This works pretty well for a lot of the moment-to-moment, direct interactions we have with the world. But it takes surprisingly little indirection for us to get the risk analysis completely wrong (such as the risks of flying vs. driving). And when we’re talking about something as complex as modern markets, we don’t even know most of the risks that exist, much less accurately understand the probabilities and potential impacts. To make matters worse, for most of us the large economic decisions we have to make are fairly tightly constrained. We take the job we can get. We forego health insurance because we can’t afford it. We simply don’t have a choice about walking the tightrope.

It shouldn’t be a shock that the gutting of all the safety systems we’ve put in place over the last century has been at the insistence and urging of those who least need them. It’s easy for someone who hasn’t had to borrow money for over 20 years to say people should “take responsibility”. But the problem² with that attitude is that markets, like many things in life, simply aren’t very predictable. And that means that things you have no control over can utterly wipe you out. Unexpectedly and arbitrarily.

The real evil lurking behind the curtain, though, is that the wealthy few responsible for, among other things, the subprime mess, do understand the risks, and gamble anyway, expecting to be bailed out because of their importance to the economy. And their risky behavior is one of the biggest risks to our individual economic stability — and one we have no way to gauge.

Robert Reich again:

The very rich, fattest investors, and the biggest corporations don’t need safety nets. Now that the booms and busts are back, the rest of us do.

1. No, not that kind of actor. *They* don’t have money.
2. Okay, ONE problem…

When the president does it, that means it’s not illegal.

Just ponder that for a moment. Not even 40 years after the biggest abuser of executive power in these colonies since … well, since the previous King George, I suppose. And now his theory has been made the law of the land. So it’s the Fourth Amendment, as well as basically the parts of the Constitution that used to put limits on the power of the Executive branch, that are gone.L’État, c’est moi indeed.

Now, I’m not particularly naïve about the sausage factory. I know that most of the time you have to compromise to get anything done. But what’s so galling about this latest Democrat capitulation is that it was utterly unnecessary. The Current Occupant has the lowest approval rating ever recorded. Ever. A comment on DailyKos really sums this up:

By the time the election rolls around, the only people left supporting Bush will be the Democrats in the House and Senate.

And just in case you’re still under the delusion that these policies have no impact on anyone but The Terrorists… In my professional world, some of my customers are not in the US. They have laid a (non-negotiable) condition on us that their data can never be on a server located in the US, precisely for this reason.

I’m physically ill.

Update: The indomitable Glenn Greenwald over at Salon has this remarkably concise summary of just what happened:

“Anticlimactic” is a mild description for a scandal that began with disclosure that the President of the United States and the telecom industry were committing felonies for years in how they spied on American citizens, only to end with a Congress controlled by the “opposition party” legalizing the surveillance, protecting the lawbreakers, terminating the only meaningful process for discovering what really happened, and embracing the premise that the President has the power to order private actors to break the law as long as, in his sole discretion, he decrees that doing so is legal.

Update 2
You might ask yourself, “well, it’s probably a bunch of noise over stuff that wasn’t really a big deal.” Here’s Senator Feingold from yesterday’s so-called debate:

I sit on the Intelligence and Judiciary Committees, and I am one of the few members of this body who has been fully briefed on the warrantless wiretapping program. And, based on what I know, I can promise that if more information is declassified about the program in the future, as is likely to happen either due to the Inspector General report, the election of a new President, or simply the passage of time, members of this body will regret that we passed this legislation.

Tonight came the news that you would come
Let my head be sacrificed on the road by which you arrive
All the gazelles in the desert have beheaded themselves
Hopeful that one day you will come to hunt them
The attraction of love will not leave you unmoved
If you don’t come to my funeral, you’ll come to my grave
My soul has come to my lips, come so I may remain alive
After I am no longer, for what purpose will you come?

1. For those that care, it’s a form called ghazal.
2. In a ghazal the second line of each couplet must end with the same word. In this example, the repeated words are خواهی آمد (roughly, ‘you will come’; used in different ways in each line). Neat stuff.

11.1 Do not use nuclear weapons to troubleshoot equipment faults.

What really keeps me awake at night is the realization that, at some point, this became necessary to write down.

1. You might wonder how anyone “stumbles across” stuff like this. Unless you know me, that is.
2. Air Force Instruction. Part of the USAF regulations. This is from AFI 91-114, 3 April 2006, to be specific.

The scenes in which humans plot to recapture the planet have the ease and verisimilitude of re-enactments on America’s Most Wanted.

I must find a way to use this, and soon.

1. Yes, that is saying something.

Just look at what the Saudis said last week: supplies are being cleared at current prices. That means supply and demand are in balance. In other words, this is the goal of the free market. Supposedly, markets are supposed to find the optimal point of efficiency, where consumers are not paying more than they want, and producers are not making less profit than they want.¹ So what’s the problem?

Well, there are plenty. But let’s start with just one: demand for oil (gasoline, diesel, other petroleum products) is relatively inelastic. In broad strokes, that means consumers² can’t fully alter their demand along with price changes. I can’t really shorten my drive to work to save on gas. (One consequence of a relatively inelastic demand is that as prices rise, producer revenues rise.) Other things I can do to alter my demand — trade my car for a hybrid, get a new job, etc — take a long time and may have substantial transaction costs that offset any relief from the price of fuel. But that’s all pretty much Economics 101. High school economics, even, and not really the point I’m trying to make.³

My point is this: an (honest) free-market conservative cannot coherently argue in favor of “doing something” about high gas prices.⁴ The pain you feel at the pump is utterly irrelevant to the “free market.” This is what they’d rather you don’t realize. An “ownership society” means that there are non-owners. Unregulated markets often have outcomes that are disastrous for individuals.

Doesn’t it strike you as a little suspect that the staunchest free-market cheerleaders are all wealthy?

1. Yes, this is a gross oversimplification.
2. Remember that in this case a lot of manufacturers are on the consumer side of the oil market.
3. In the case of oil, there’s also relative price elasticity of supply, which is even further from my point.
4. The best they could offer — and this only from some of the non-purists — would be to argue that the relative monopoly OPEC holds results in a “market failure” and that something should be done about that.

Or, as a bumper sticker I saw downtown put it, “from the people who brought you the weekend.”

1. May Day, if you’re on the lefty side