This might be the key passage of my interview with John Ziegler on Tuesday, for it is, in a nutshell, why conservatives don't win elections anymore. It is not that conservatism generally permits less nuance than liberalism (in terms of political messaging, that is probably one of conservatism's strengths). Rather, the key lies in the second passage that I highlighted. There are a certain segment of conservatives who literally cannot believe that anybody would see the world differently than the way they do. They have not just forgotten how to persuade; they have forgotten about the necessity of persuasion.

I never recommended this article but I keep coming back to it in my thinking. Its a bit too partisan to the point of being unfair, but its interesting nonetheless. I've certainly been confronted with many conservatives who seem to take the position that if you don't agree with their views that there must be something wrong with you. Serious factual objections are just laughed off rather than engaged. Political positions are to be agreed with, not seriously discussed. Its not about the ideas. Its personal.

There are also Liberals who act this way, but the medium is the message, and there may be a connection between this perspective and the conservative preference for radio.

Perhaps in some respects this is what makes living in Atlanta more tolerable than living in San Francisco. Partisans generally conclude that I am the opposite of whatever they are because I'm always critical of their ideas.

Conservatives who assume I'm a liberal don't feel the need to change my views. They think I'm an idiot, and they don't bother talking to me about politics because they are looking for confirmation and are not interested in having a persuasive discussion, particularly with an idiot like me. I am therefore free to continue to be an idiot with only mild annoyance at the fact that I am so perceived.

Liberals who assume I'm a conservative, on the other hand, believe that I am at least complicit with and possibly personally responsible for disease, oppression, genocide, poverty, death, and the general plight of man. I am the enemy, and it is absolutely necessary to change my views so that I stop oppressing people. I am not just to be ridiculed but I am to be hated, and I cannot be left alone to my evil ideas. This tends to make living around liberals a great deal less comfortable.

FiveThirtyEight.com: Politics Done Right: Did Talk Radio Kill Conservatism?

I compare the annual average beat variance of the songs in the US Billboard Top 100 since its inception in 1958 through 2007 to the standard deviation of returns of the S&P 500 for the same year and find that they are significantly negatively correlated. With the recent high stock volatility, people should now prefer less volatile music

SSRN-Music and the Market: Song and Stock Volatility by Philip Maymin

The news references chart is particularly useful.

Google Trends: inflation, deflation

College tuition and fees increased 439 percent from 1982 to 2007, adjusted for inflation, while median family income rose 147 percent.

"Already, we’re one of the few countries where 25- to 34-year-olds are less educated than older workers.”

Higher Education May Soon Be Unaffordable for Most Americans, Report Says - NYTimes.com

The report details an online underground economy that has matured into an efficient, global marketplace in which stolen goods and fraud-related services are regularly bought and sold, and where the estimated value of goods offered by individual traders is measured in millions of dollars. The report is derived from data gathered by Symantec’s Security Technology and Response (STAR) organization, from underground economy servers between July 1, 2007 and June 30, 2008.

The potential value of total advertised goods observed by Symantec was more than $276 million for the reporting period. This value was determined using the advertised prices of the goods and services and measured how much advertisers would make if they liquidated their inventory.

From a year ago:

This paper studies an active underground economy which specializes in the commoditization of activities such as credit card fraud, identity theft, spamming, phishing, online credential theft, and the sale of compromised hosts. Using a seven month trace of logs collected from an active underground market operating on public Internet chat networks, we measure how the shift from “hacking for fun” to “hacking for profit” has given birth to a societal substrate mature enough to steal wealth into the millions of dollars in less than one year.

New Symantec Report Reveals Booming Underground Economy

"The thing that really bothered me was that her attorney kept claiming that nobody reads the terms of service," she said. "I always read the terms of service....If you choose to be lazy and not go through that entire agreement or contract of agreement, then absolutely you should be held liable."

Wow, really?? Is this person really representative of normal people and their opinions? I think she is either lying or confused or crazy, or she doesn't really use computers. Carefully reading every TOS or shinkwrap agreement you encounter on the Internet is completely impractical. Reasonable people might think you responsible, on some level, for abiding by those terms anyway, but the question is HOW responsible? Responsible enough to go to prison for violating the terms? Here an affirmative answer is given by someone who cannot possibly be living up to the standard she professes to.

An observation on the Jury system

My conversation with Liu inspired a systematic study of how blog-hosting companies serving mainland China censor their users' content. All Chinese blog-hosting companies are required by government regulators to censor their users' content in order to keep their business licenses. But as Liu discovered, they all make different choices not only about how to implement censorship requirements, but also how to treat the users who get censored.

The attached presentation is quite interesting.

RConversation: Studying Chinese blog censorship

Stocks are cheap when valued within the context of a financed-based economy once dominated by leverage, cheap financing, and even lower corporate tax rates. That world, however, is in our past not our future. More regulation, lower leverage, higher taxes, and a lack of entrepreneurial testosterone are what we must get used to – that and a government checkbook that allows for healing, but crowds the private sector into an awkward and less productive corner. Dow 5,000? We don’t have to go there if current domestic and global policies are focused on asset price support and eventual recapitalization of lending institutions. But 14,000 is a stretch as well.

naked capitalism: Bill Gross Says Stocks May Not Be So Cheap

You could also, however, argue that we have a bimodal distribution, with one average duration for downturns unrelated to the long-term credit cycle, and another longer duration for small-sample downturns representing unwinding of said cycle. I lean toward the latter view, and thus think most of this discussion of recession durations is unhelpful and not nuanced.

I lean toward that explanation as well.

Paul Kedrosky: The Trouble with Recession Averages

About half of Icelanders aged between 18 and 24 are considering leaving the country, Reykjavik-based newspaper Morgunbladid said, citing a survey of 1,117 people between Oct. 27 and Oct. 29.

“Tens of thousands” will depart, estimated Jesper Christensen, chief analyst at Danske Bank A/S, the biggest lender in neighboring Denmark.

Iceland Meltdown