DoD Eats Away
Reuters –
President George W. Bush said on Saturday his upcoming budget proposal would emphasize restraint on domestic spending while making defense and war costs for Iraq and Afghanistan the top priority.
“Cutting the deficit during a time of war requires us to restrain spending in other areas,” Bush said in his weekly radio address.
NYT –
The Bush administration is seeking a record military budget of $622 billion for the 2008 fiscal year, Pentagon officials have said. The sum includes more than $140 billion for war-related costs.
Wish some of that cash went to actually providing services to the American public.
ConvinceMe
Someone’s finally monetizing classic internet flaming.
Prizes vs Grants
Leonhardt of the NYT considers both in relation to Netflix:
With four and a half years to go in the contest, the Hungarians’ model is already 6.75 percent better than Cinematch. And Netflix hasn’t had to pay for their time. In effect, the company “has recruited a large fraction of the machine learning community for almost no money,” as Mr. Hinton, the Toronto professor, put it.
These are the two essential advantages of prizes. They pay for nothing but performance, and they ensure that anyone with a good idea — not just the usual experts — can take a crack at a tough problem.
…and global warming:
Just look at how both political parties have so far tried to deal with global warming. They have handed out grants and subsidies for various alternative energy sources like ethanol, even though nobody knows what the best sources will ultimately be. A much smarter approach would be to mandate that the economy use less carbon. This would effectively set up a multibillion-dollar prize — in the form of new customers — for whichever companies came up with efficient energy sources.
Robin Hanson (historian of the prize/grant conflict and mentioned in the article) weighs in here.
On Davos Absurdity
Love Gideon Rachman’s take:
On a “Davos night“:
A young global leader announced that we now had to listen to a discussion on climate change between Shimon Peres and Claudia Schiffer. (I’m not making this up.) I headed for the bar, since although there are many things that I find interesting about Claudia Schiffer, her views on climate change are not among them.
On a globalization seminar:
First, in the session for the whole group, there was a cartoonist drawing pictures on a whiteboard, to accompany the discussion. So when somebody mentioned the “Dangerous Dogs Act” in Britain, she drew a picture of a dangerous dog. Useful, I suppose, in case Professor Stiglitz was unfamiliar with the concept.
On the prestige game:
Since everybody enjoys the status game at Davos, the organisers have added a few extra twists. These include giving people different coloured badges to signify their different levels of prestige. Mere journalists get yellow badges; while “media fellows” like me get white badges. I was quietly congratulating myself on being a media fellow, when I bumped into the editor of “The Economist”. The good news was that he seemed to have the same colour badge as me. The bad news was that he was heading off to a closed session for “media leaders”, which I was excluded from. However, I was then cheered by bumping into another former Economist colleague, who is still stuck on the lowest rung of the ladder – “young global leader”.
On dinner:
I knew it was a good idea to go to the “classic clarets” dinner. Some crazed benefactor had donated an extraordinary collection of wines for us to taste: Latour 1952, Lafite 1962, Cheval Blanc 1975 – and six others.
Seated next to me was Victor Yanukovitch, the prime minister of Ukraine. Since we do not share a common language, we were unable to exchange the usual chit-chat – “faint whiff of pencil shavings” – that sort of thing. In the event, he had to leave half-way through. This was a lucky break for me, since he left behind unfinished samples of Latour and Lafite, which I swiftly poured into my own tasting glasses. It did cross my mind that there have been some unpleasant cases of poisoning involving politicians from this part of the world – so I hesitated briefly before knocking back Yanukovitch’s left-overs. But what the hell, you don’t get to taste Latour every day. I’m pretty sure I got away with it. I do feel fairly appalling this morning – but I think it’s just a standard issue hang-over.
Finally, on a more serious note:
Davos man does not seem to be particularly worried by the business implications of chaos in the Middle East. There were 17 sessions at the forum devoted to climate change – and just one to global political risk. A debate on “globalisation at the crossroads” considered three main threats to the world economy – failed trade talks, financial regulation and global economic imbalances. Nobody mentioned the war.
NFL Goes After Big Screens
SI–
Initially, the league objected to the church’s plan to charge a fee to attend and that the church used the license-protected words “Super Bowl” in its promotions.
Pastor John D. Newland said he told the NFL his church would not charge anyone and that it would drop the use of the forbidden words.
But the NFL objected to the church’s plans to use a projector to show the game, saying the law limits it to one TV no bigger than 55 inches.
Hmm. The family projector is paired with a 120 inch screen. Wonder if the next step is to pair cease and desist letters with every screen sold?