Letters to the Editor
Russ Allbery
Published Letters: 7 Editor's Choice: 2
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On 5% responses to polls
[Read the article: Ask the Pilot]
[Read more letters about this article: Here](5% of Muslims in America actually support al Qaeda, according to the poll!)
5% of people taking a poll will agree that the polltaker is a Martian. You have to be very careful about drawing any conclusions at all about any poll numbers below 20% or so, and particularly poll numbers in the range of the margin of error. At 5% of the typical sampling size for this sort of poll, you're now putting weight on responses from people who want to shock the polltaker, who had a horrible day and want to let it out on someone, who are annoyed at being polled and want to sabotage the poll, who didn't even understand what was asked, etc.
That statistic is essentially meaningless.
The 25% number is more meaningful, and I could go into speculation about why Muslims may feel that way for reasons other than "they want to blow up our planes," but that's a topic for another article.
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Betting is a facile analogy
[Read the article: Panic on Wall Street]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]You're not alone in doing this, but I'm disappointed to see yet another discussion of complex financial instruments reduced to an analogy with betting. This simply isn't useful in helping people understand what's truly going on. Most people have a subconscious understanding of betting as something dangerous, kind of shady, and inherently extremely risky (and often fixed). You're invoking all of that by using the analogy, even if it isn't valid.
Unless you believe all investing is equivalent to betting on the Super Bowl, this isn't a good way of explaining the relationship between risk and reward and how that's obfuscated.
These financial instruments are accumulations of real sources of income. At the bottom are a bunch of mortgages getting (hopefully) regular interest payments. It makes perfect sense to aggregate them and sell them. It's entirely reasonable to have the higher-risk mortgages pay higher interest rates in exchange for the increased risk. This is how financial systems work. It's no more betting than buying stocks is betting. It's just more complicated.
To make a sweeping generalization, markets go wrong in two ways: people ignore risk, or people lie about risk. When people ignore risk, they pursue the highest-paying investments, ignoring that there's a reason why they're high-paying. When people lie about risk, they deceive people into thinking an investment with greater gain potential has the same risk level as some traditional investment with less gain potential, and thereby draw money into their investment. That's the part of this story to focus on. Were people just ignoring the risk, putting too much faith in the idea that not all the mortgages will fail at once and hence the senior securities will be safe? Or were people lying?
Talking about betting does nothing to add clarity.
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MNF almost unwatchable
[Read the article: King Kaufman's Sports Daily ]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]I'm apparently joining a large bandwagon, but Kornheiser is possibly the worst commentator I can recall being subjected to and the first game of MNF was just painful. I'll have to listen more closely for the real analysis that you heard, since between the yelling, talking over top of each other, idiotic jokes, and extended nonsense about touchdown celebrations (seriously, WHO CARES?), I missed it. If there were a way to hear the crowd and action on the field and mute the commentators, I would have taken it.
Maybe if you know every sports name by heart and can pick up on subtle points in the middle of spittle-filled rants, screaming, and people talking over the top of each other, you can enjoy PTI; if so, you're a better listener than I. I avoid it and the similar afternoon sports shows like the plague, and being subjected to the same broadcast "style" on MNF is going to leave me not bothering to watch the game if it continues to be this dire.
I don't want to blow this out of proportion, but that was possibly the worst attempt at a sports broadcast I've seen since the last time I tried to watch professional wrestling.
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Ha'penny by Jo Walton
[Read the article: Salon Book Awards 2007]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]I'm disappointed in the lack of genre fiction, some of which deals directly and in ways very well-suited to your criteria with the sorts of issues that Salon regularly discusses.
2007 saw the publication of Jo Walton's Ha'penny, a spectacular alternate history that touches on terrorism, loyalty, the rule of law, whether killing someone truly can change the direction of politics, and the clash between pragmatism and ideals. It's compulsively readable, the sort of book that you can't put down, with memorable characters and ideas that are stronger the more you think about them.
It's a sequel (that can be read stand-alone) of the earlier Farthing, which was sadly overlooked and uses alternate history to look at the tactics people such as Bush use to undermine civil liberty. But Ha'penny is even stronger.
Highly recommended.