Why does eBay allow sniping?

5 hours left on this auction (I'd give you the link, but then you'd bid against me!) and I am sweating bullets. Why? Because eBay is a jackass. Or eBay are jackasses. Look, eBay behaves jackasserly. With great jackasseritude. How? They end the auction at a fixed time.

I get what they're trying to do: create the atmosphere of exciting bidding by letting people know when to come watch the end of the auction.

The problem? They haven't attracted people, they've attracted computers. People set up auto-bidders that wait until a fraction of a second before the auction ends and then bid it up. This destroys the "thrill of the bid"

So, honest question, why does eBay let this happen? Here's my proposal: if a bid comes in with less than two minutes left in the auction, the auction gets extended for two minutes. Bam, no worrying if you'll get beat without the chance to respond.

This would take off the pressure to bid "in secret" and have to wait until the end.

So... what's the deal, eBay?

How Obama Earned the Nobel Peace Prize

My theory on how Obama Earned the Nobel Peace Prize

The most dressed up gimp joke you'll hear all day

Renowned physicist and best-selling author Stephen Hawking retired last month, after hitting the mandatory retirement age of 69. After having been the Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge University for 30 years, he'll be missed in the small college town. But he'll also be missed at rival English university Oxford, where he was widely recognized at being single-handedly responsible for their 30-year winning streak in the annual Cambridge-Oxford Mathematics Department Cricket match.

Give me perspective!

It's frustrating that stock chart graphs make it clear when a stock went up and when it went down, but not by how much. If the line goes down to the bottom of the graph, it might be alright (the opening bell just rang, and it's down .01%), or it might be horrific (the company went bankrupt).

Why not have a convention of showing not only the opening-value as a line, but the opening-value +/- mean volatility as lines of different colors. Show me the equator, plus the tropics of cancer and capricorn!

"East Palo Alto police buy back guns"

This headline, "East Palo Alto police buy back guns"...

Is it just me, or does it make it sound like: the Chief of the EPA PD made the conscious decision to sell the department's guns (perhaps because of idealism). Then the next day, he awakens from his fairy-dream-slumber, realizes that police need guns (especially in East Palo Alto), and suddenly they're going around, hat-in-hand, kindly asking to get their firearms back?

The Point/Counterpoint of the Future

Every generation (well, every five years) needs its commentators-at-loggerheads. The 90's had James Carville/Mary Matalin. The 00's had Hannity/Colmes. Today we have Hannity... and more Hannity!

This is the part where I predict the future. Right-wing Pundit, law professor, semi-notable actor, and former-haver-of-Money-that-can-be-won Ben Stein will be the perfect offset to Liberal good-humor-writer-and-mediocre-actor* turned Senator Al Franken, in a show that can only be called...

...Franken-Stein!

*though he's a fantastic actor when he's being Mick Jagger

The Third Path: Restoring Bank Confidence; Compensation

[In The Third Path, we examine both sides of an issue, and find a third (and better) solution]

The Great Depression taught us that the public needs to trust banks. When the '08 Recession hit, we knew we had to help the banks. We thought maybe reducing excessive executive pay would help.

The wise bank executives took a moment from snorting cocaine off the tits of prostitutes made of diamonds while riding on a yacht made of endangered rhinoceros tusk to helpfully point out that it would be folly to cut costs. If we were to reduce their paycheck by even one zero, the best bankers would be so insulted they would quit! We'd be left with the second-rate bankers. These second-rate bankers, you understand, are simply unable to do what the first-rate bankers do (that is, lose billions of dollars. Why, Jim over there worked every day in 2008 and only cost the economy $87 million. Ha!).

In the heat of the moment, we went down the second path. But let's think of a Third Path, now that things have gotten so crazy. (How crazy are they?) They're so crazy that the FDIC wants to borrow money from the banks. This is the equivalent of the fox asking the hen to come over and housesit, because the fox is thinking a vacation would be nice but gets a lot of mail and needs his plants watered. Well, time to strike while the iron is crazy... here's the two-point Bentley Plan.

1. Let banks pay executives as much as they will take.
2. When any bank goes belly-up, their executives get punished according to how much money they got paid in the 12 months that they allowed the bank to fail, according to this schedule:
• <$500,000: Anyone who invested money in the bank can give them a wet willy
• $500,000-$1 million: Need to spend 5 minutes in a small room with an angry porcupine
• $1-3 million: Knees broken. (At this level, the executive ought to appreciate the irony that this is the punishment that befalls the smallest of debtors: the loan shark customer)
• $3-10 million: A pound of flesh is taken. (At this level, the sophisticated executive simply must appreciate the Merchant of Venice allusion)
• $10-20 million: Shot in the head. In front of everyone they have ever loved.
• >$20 million: Shot in the head. In front of everyone they have ever loved. While wearing a clown suit.

This is a classic example of "aligning incentives". If you, as a depositor, hear that your bank president was paid $34 million last year, you can be thrilled that your banks is still healthy. Because, as the saying goes, "who wants to be killed while wearing a clown suit?"

Headlines, obviously a large part of Deborah Sontag's eagle eye

"When Life Names You Lemon" is an article about a memoirist who, well, I don't know. I haven't read it.

I just saw the pitch on the front page: "Lemon Andersen, the child of heroin addicts, is now a memoirist." I'm pretty sure the author (one Deborah Sontag) wrote it for the headline. So that's what I read.

Why I follow @aplusk and not @cnnbrk

I'm on twitter as @dbentley. Recently, there's been a race between Ashton Kutcher and CNN for who can be the first account to have 1 million followers. As of this writing, it's neck and neck.

Personally, I follow @aplusk (Ashton Kutcher) and not @cnnbrk (CNN). Why?

• CNN isn't anything new. It's headlines. It's a wire service. It's an RSS feed limited to <>
• It doesn't try to be anything more. It follows one account. It doesn't interact with the community. Yeah, you "get" the internet. But by that CNN doesn't mean "understanding", it means "getting more eyeballs".

Ashton is creating community and interacting with it. I'm not sure where Twitter's going, but I know that Ashton's leading and CNN's coasting.

Not an important posting

Kraft Mac and Cheese has premium flavors. And they're good. And yet, the premium flavors cost the same at my local store ($1.89). One of them even includes an extra .05 oz net wt. How is the premium mac and cheese not more expensive to make? Or does Kraft simply believe in their product so much that they are subsiziding it?

Idea for the Golden Globes

The Golden Globes have separate awards for Best Dramatic Picture and Best Comedic Picture. My impression is that, were they forced to choose a Best Picture, most years it would be the Best Dramatic Picture winner, and so that category is viewed as "higher". Even though some years, it might maybe...

Well, why don't we try. I think that if you're voting for the Golden Globes, then you should vote for each category separately, and also choose one of them as Best Picture. Then, they should disqualify the Best Picture winner as winning its category. Instead, they would award Best Dramatic Picture winner to the second-place in that category (in years that Dramatic picture won Best Picture).

This would mean that the cast and crew of a Best Dramatic Picture would want to win. But they'd also kinda want to lose, in the hopes that they won Best Picture (which would be announced later).

I think this would make for much cooler shots where some directors would be a little bit happy they lost Best Dramatic Picture. Until they later lost Best Picture, too. To Mamma Mia!

The tears of heart-broken actresses can cure... well, nothing. But they sure make me laugh.

An Honest-to-God Constitutional Crisis!

Man, Rod Blagojevich is a Dick. Determined to go down swinging, he appoints Roland Burris, whose only weakness is sympathizing with that Dick Rod Blagojevich. And suddenly, though no one wants to say it, we have a Constitutional Crisis on our hands. I'm no lawyer, but here's my thinking.

The two major points seem to be:

1. the Constitution, which states that each house of Congress is "the Judge of the Elections, Returns, and Qualifications of its own members". Great, easy enough. The Senate gets to decide everything. Except nope, because the second major point...
2. Powell v. McCormack says that Congress only gets to test the Qualifications set in the Constitution (older than such and such age, citizen of X state for at least Y months, etc.), and can't set the barbarous Qualification of "you can't have been kicked out of Congress before". Meh, not sure I agree with the decision, but hey, it's the Law of the Land.
   

Almost all of the analyses I've seen have been trying to fit the current conditions to the contours of Powell v. McCormack. But what people haven't been mentioning is "Political Question", the doctrine by which the Supreme Court can choose not to decide a case because it has no right to interfere. Somewhere, that clause has to give a house in Congress a right to act in some way to exclude members (or else it wouldn't have been included). And when it exercises that right, it is "the Judge".

That's scary. Because that means that once it figures out exactly the limits of that power, within that realm its power is absolute. And can't be checked. And can be wielded for political purposes. Could someone explain to me why a majority of the Senate couldn't get together and say to prospective Senators (presumably of the other party): "I'm sorry, we don't believe your birth certificate. We think you're 29, and therefore unable to serve in this Senate; better luck never."?

We like Checks and Balances. But it seems here that the Constitution has said "there is an area here where each House is the final authority". I think that's the heart of the issue. At some point, the Supreme Court has to let each House make its own mistakes, and let them card members-elect and then act like dicks, and then have the system come crumbling down with a new amendment that will create an alternative system that has its own pitfalls. Oh Constitutional Crisis, you're so fun to hypothesize about!

Why do Unions like Pensions?

I understand why people like pensions.  You work for a while, then you get to retire, and you don't have to worry.

But there's also lock-in.  You only get the pension if you stay with a company.  Through good times, and bad.  maybe it's not a fun place to work anymore.  Maybe it's downright horrid.  But if you stay for another four years, you get your pension, so you stay.

Why is that good for employees?  Wouldn't it be better to have fluidity (on the part of the workers) so that they can apply not just short-term pressure (strikes) but long-term pressure (retention)?

Or is this a situation where the structure of a union has incentives not aligned with the rank-and-file workers?  (Because if you leave the company, you might fall under a different union representative, or a different union)

Vista and Silverlight: two tastes that really ought to not be forced together

I'm kind of interested in the Mojave Experiment.  Microsoft went out and showed people "Mojave" and how much better it was than Vista, their never-got-off-the-ground-acceptance-wise OS.  And then, "surprise", Mojave is Vista, Soylent Green is People, and Bob is Your Uncle.

A friend was looking for a computer and asking about Vista and with how much vigor she ought avoid it.  My understanding is that much of the backlash is because it's hard to get things working with Vista if you upgrade, but if you get it on a computer you'll be fine.  I was hoping to give her some ciation towards this, and so went to http://www.mojaveexperiment.com/ .

And it requires Silverlight.  Microsoft's other latest technology.  If you're trying to convince slow adopters, why would you use a different early adopter technology?

It's such a great idea, with such a head-in-the-sand implementation.

[These views are my own and not my employer's; though I hope they become yours.  Because I'm right.]

Words' Resurgence

I'm reading George Orwell's Down and Out in Paris and London.  It's a (slightly fictionalized, it turns out) telling of his time being poor in... Paris and London.  Good book, and even though I sometimes disagree with Orwell I never regret the time I spent reading him.

Two big thoughts have struck me:

1) I could make a lot of money compiling a guide to English funny currency.  What the hell is a bob?  And a crown?  What's five and sixpence mean?  And a quid?  (In fact, I know the answers to most of these).  But a Creative Commons-licensed (non-commercial) essay describing the universe and lexicon, along with a per-decade commentary on economics (so you can know how much 4 pounds is in each time period, say) would be awesome.  I imagine that, written well enough, and licensed cheaply enough, you could allow editors to include it in editions of... basically any English Literature book ever.

2) I got to this passage:  "And instantly [] the tramps began to misbehave[]. All round the gallery men lolled in their pews, laughed, chattered..."  Loll is a verb, meaning to lounge around, but in that context it seemed so much to presage "lol" as in "omfg lol" that I wondered if I hadn't gotten a copy of the book remixed a la Laugh-Out-Loud Cats.  It just all worked so well:  a book about tramps that was in the context of laughing by a writer who thought so much about language (yes, 1984, but also its underappreciated precursor "Politics and the English Language".

So, George (nee Eric), tell me, is newspeak really a foreshadowing of teenage girl speak?  My hat, as ever, is off to you.

Q&A with Chris Onstad

Recently, Chris Onstad, author of Achewood (the best webcomic ever) stopped by the New York office.  I was fortunate enough to be given the chance to ask him dumb questions, and watch him turn them into amazingly intelligent and literate answers.  Check it out.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V2ZOSZZTIiE

Why I Support Universal Healthcare

It's basically a three-step logical process.

1. An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.
2. When people get really sick, we (as a society) will have to pay for the cure.
3. So we might as well pay for the prevention.

So, if you disagree with Universal Health Care, and I know there are a lot of you out there who do, which of these three do you disagree with?

Evil Audubon Society

You should check out The Evil Audubon Society, sometimes misspelled as The Evil Autobahn Society.

Top Gun Analogies, taken too far

The Kentucky Derby is rife with potential for comparison to the 1987 cinematic coup de grace "Top Gun".

"I feel the need. The need for speed." Straightforward resemblance to the sport of ponies.

So perhaps it is no surprise that jockey Kent Desormeaux, riding the back of Big Brown (the favorite who went on to win it), chose to commentate a replay of the race by comparing his run to Tom Cruise in that fateful film. Quoth the short, fast man: "I'm locked on now. [] And all I've got to do is pull the trigger."

Eight Belles, the filly who took second place, broke both of her front ankles was immediately put down after two equine ambulances pulled out onto Churchill Downs's track.

It's with a deep understanding of how bad a person I am that I imagine all of the ways I could recast Iceman (played memorably by Val Kilmer)'s line of:

"The plaque for second place is in the women's bathroom."

Going Conventional: A March Madness Case Study

I was talking with friends the other day about sports. All of my friends like sports either significantly more than I do, or significantly less. Thus I was basically talking to myself and wondering how likely conventional wisdom was to be wise.

I know there are all sorts of bookies who know exactly what seeds mean what, but I was more interested in the exception cases. Specifically, what is the largest sub-tree of an NCAA bracket that has had no upsets.

I was positive that 2 team subtrees had this property: that's simply the higher-seeded team winning a game. I would have bet a lot of money at long odds that 4 teams had done it (that is, 1 beats 4 and 2 beats 3 and then 1 beats 2. Of course, in a 16-team seeding, that really means 1 beats 16 and 8 beats 9 and 1 beats 8). But 8 games... I thought happened. And 16 I thought maybe hadn't.

Turns out, 8 teams has happened. As recently as 2007. #2 Georgetown is triumphant over 7 other, lower-seeded teams.

16 teams has happened too. If my scan is correct (though it's late, so I'm open to other examples), in the 1985 tournament. The East region was won by #1 seed Georgetown, who beat seed 16, seed 8 (who beat seed 9), seed 4 (who beat seed 13 and seed 5 (who beat seed 12)), and seed 2 (who beat seed 15, seed 7 (who beat seed 10), and seed 3 (who beat seed 14 and seed 6 (who beat seed 11))).

But before that, I had found that it has also happened to 12 teams. Back in 1982, with a 48-team field, the West region was won by... Georgetown.

I guess the moral of the story is: if you find yourself seeded in a sub-bracket with Georgetown seeded higher than you, you're in for a not-very-upsetting time.

P.S. As a side note, I checked out Georgetown. In 10 out of 17 tournaments I looked at, they won exactly when they were the higher-seeded team. In 4 they lost as a higher seed, and in 3 they won as a lower seed. Thus, in the future, you should expect Georgetown to win exactly those games as they are expected to. They're rather dependable.