Morning roundup

This morning's worthies on the closing of the browser tabs:

• This one was a long time coming: difficulty in insuring apartments in Wellington (NBR, maybe $). I wonder whether parametric insurance paying out a sufficient amount in the event of a Mercalli VIII event would satisfy bank mortgage requirements.


• Stuff has a new data visualisation up that they're calling the Homicide Report. They introduce a particular innovation: car crashes involving alcohol use are counted as homicides. I fully expect that this statistic will make its way into the wild without the surrounding context of that the figure is mostly car crashes. It would make complete sense to include cases where the driver was convicted of manslaughter. This isn't that. UPDATE: It is that. They only count car crash deaths where murder or manslaughter charges resulted. I need to read more carefully. 


• Glenn Herud reminds farmers that they need to win the hearts and minds of the public, and that facts won't be enough to do it. He points to Jonathan Haidt's work. Those keen on Haidt should be sure to join us in Auckland on 1 August. 


• Meanwhile, Politik ($) reports on agriculture and methane targets, and the Greens' continued opposition to GE ryegrasses that can reduce agricultural methane emissions. If you think that climate change is an emergency, banning one of the more promising ways of improving the ag sector seems a bit odd in a country where agricultural emissions matter. This kind of work has been at least nine years in the making. And we still make it impossible to use GE ryegrasses to improve pastoral emission profiles. Over in Taranaki, the government decided the best way to help folks there adjust to a hasty and badly informed decision to ban their main industry was to have James Cameron fly over and lecture Taranaki about the need to also end livestock farming. The writers for the past few episodes here have been terrible. Coughlan's reporting on it (the prior link) is excellent though. 


• Michael Reddell continues his critique of the RBNZ's proposed increase to bank capital requirements.


• Patch Notes for GoT Episode 5 (spoilers, obviously)


• If you haven't donated to the Internet Archive before, you should consider it. Remember how the Soviets used to erase people from old photographs when their presence in those pictures became politically incorrect? There is non-trivial risk of reasonable chunks of the internet being memory-holed like that. 


• Federalism allows experimentation. Denver's just had a referendum effectively decriminalising (lowest law enforcement priority) magic mushrooms. If the sky doesn't fall (except as perceived by some users during a bad trip), other places may be able to follow suit. If it does, it's easier to undo the experiment in one place. Would that New Zealand could allow more regional experimentation.


• Police Minister Stuart Nash backs a national firearms registry. Never mind that Canada's cost billions, achieved nothing, and was scrapped in an IT cost debacle the likes of which should entirely be expected given New Zealand's track history with this stuff. National might be encouraged to start by asking what unique identifier will be used to ID a firearm in the system. I know it all sounds simple. We register cars! But a car has a VIN. Firearm serial numbers are not necessarily unique. Adding a unique identifier to a firearm is non-trivial. The discussion thread here is a good starting-point. I expect National to let Labour make a serious mistake here rather than try to block or fix things, knowing that the costs of another colossal screw-up will sheet back to Labour. 

Westerosean economics

Donal over at Economics New Zealand draws a few lessons from Game of Thrones. Where I'd thought about the economics of Westeros proper, Donal's looking instead at Hollywood and HBO.

And then there are the economic lessons from GoT itself.

The big lesson from GoT is that if you're spending up big, spend the money on the right things. If the choice is (and it often seems to be), (A) spend US$20 million on the bankable name that you think will put bums on seats no matter what the movie is, or (B) spend US$20 million on sets, locations, effects, no-name but highly competent actors and a quality product, then HBO has successfully demonstrated that the second choice works better, no matter what the bean counters might advise. The more I look at successful products, the more I'm convinced that out of the SPQR mix (service, price, quality, range), quality trumps all in the longer run.

Another lesson is that the public is not made up of ninnies in a convent school. Do we want to watch only MLVS movies? No. But do we want to see sanitised, infantilised, prettified versions of MLVS issues? No we don't. GoT treats its customer base like adults. And like most business strategies that rely on people being intelligent judges of the product, it's a winner.

Another is that it made me wonder about the supposed wonderfulness of our new Ultra Fast Broadband (UFB) rollout. My copper-based ADSL internet service delivered GoT to my laptop, with completely acceptable video quality (and I'm not even getting the top end of copper-based delivery). Remind me why I need to pay more for the same experience delivered over fibre?

Finally, I was struck by the quality of the GoT opening credits. And it seemed to me that there was a good economic motivation for the high quality (as there was for the equally stunning opening credits for the Rome series). Bankers used to adopt the same strategy, and for the same reason. How do you signal to new customers of an intangible service, who know nothing of you or your reputation, that you are a quality service provider? In the case of banks, and I'm thinking here of the likes of Irving Trust and Morgan Guaranty and their erstwhile palazzi on Wall Street, by having extraordinarily opulent-looking head offices. Look how rich we are! How dependable!

And so it goes with the opening titles. Put your production values into the opening - sophisticated computer graphics, lush colouring, an original and striking theme tune, a bit of ambiguity, a hint of special effects - and before they see the rest of it, consumers are convinced that here's a quality product that's had thought and money spent on it.

Maybe, to come full circle, you can't judge a book by its cover. But you can choose a TV series by its opening.

Donal's been watching it on PollyStreaming, which I'd not heard of.

I'd posted on Westerosean economics a couple of years ago. We've since watched all the shows, read Storm of Swords and Feast for Crows, and have almost finished Dance with Dragons. Further thoughts since then are a few lines down - give them a miss if you want to avoid minor spoilers.

• I remain baffled by the relative lack of decent food preservation technologies. In Martin's world, we should have had more rapid food tech development. Even if most winters are relatively short, better food preservation doesn't just enhance longevity, it also gives you better ranges of preserved product. If we figured out canning in the 1700s or so, with only fairly minor winters, how did Westeros not get it sorted much earlier (relative to other tech development)? I can understand that there's bigger risk in having great food stores given the apparent political instability / raiders problems. But they didn't even have glasshouses at the Wall, their only apparent food storage is a giant ice cave inside the wall (great for meat, not so much for fruit and veg), and nobody expected any kind of attack on the south side of the Wall. 
• Even more puzzling is the absence of large-scale glass production in Westeros. When Robb contemplates a glasshouse for the Wall (vegetable growing in winter), he despairs of importing glass from over the sea. Only Winterfell had a glasshouse. Glass + fire = heated greenhouses for basic vegetables and fruit over the winter; while Winterfell's hotsprings make it much easier, they're not the only way of doing things. Wikipedia tells me that England had glass windows before the Norman conquest. I suppose there's some point where glass is sufficiently expensive, and wars sufficiently likely to destroy glasshouses, that there's no point in it. But think of places like the Eyrie. Why no glasshouses? 
• R'hlorr's priests walk around, performing very real very visible miracles, and people still worship the Seven. At least the Seven don't demand blood sacrifice, but doesn't it seem strange that no Kingdom has R'hlorr as the official state religion? Kings seem to have plenty of reason to kill plenty of people all the time, so it's hard to see that squeemishness on that front is the constraint.
• I suppose I'd need to know more about R'hlorr's objective function. If it were simply worshiper maximisation, nothing here makes sense. Every kingdom would have been taken over by R'hlorr followers ages ago, and nobody would have dared switch. Zero evidence that the Seven have any use, plenty of evidence for R'hlorr, and while there's decent evidence for that there's supernatural stuff associated with the Old Gods and the Weirwood, what have they done for anybody lately? Nothing, that's what. "OOOh, we can make spooky noises in the trees." Amazing that it takes until near the end of the (currently) last book for any of the Ironborn to figure out that R'hlorr's where it's at. R'hlorr must then have more specific aims... I'll look forward to the next books.
• It's pretty cool how the Iron Bank makes sure that sovereigns don't default on debt: thick markets in mercenaries allow those with deep pockets to make credible threats for debt collection. Alas, while that let Robb get credit when needed, Westeros would have been a better place had Baratheon (or, rather, Littlefinger for Baratheon) not had access to debt-based financing. And I was surprised that the Iron Bank continued extending credit to Cercei. Wouldn't they have wanted a flip through the books before giving her the money for the fleet?

Comments section open for other observations.

Doing it right

It's great to read a story where fan-sourced content is appreciated by the original work's author instead of stomped on. I'd seen the blog for the "Game of Thrones" cookbook after one of its bloggers visited here after I'd posted on food stores in Westeros. But I hadn't read the backstory of how they moved from blog to publication. The Wall Street Journal gives the story.

The book began as the brainchild of Chelsea Monroe-Cassel and Sariann Lehrer, two Boston twenty-something housemates who are “pretty obsessed” with the Martin books and the HBO series, Ms. Monroe-Cassel said.  Last March, the friends decided to blog about making food inspired by Mr. Martin’s books.  In May, they emailed Mr. Martin to let him know about their blog, and were stunned when he wrote back, saying he would mention the project to his publishers.

For his part, Mr. Martin was interested, because though readers over the years had suggested he write a companion cookbook to his series—detailed food descriptions run throughout the books—“I can’t cook,” Mr. Martin admitted in his forward to the cookbook.

With a penchant for taking creative projects to the extreme, Ms. Cassel-Monroe said she “organized a conspiracy” for Mr. Martin’s “A Dance with Dragons” book tour last summer, delivering baskets of pork pies, and oat and lemon cakes and organizing fellow fans to deliver similar baskets to Mr. Martin as he traveled the country.

And so they went from blogging to writing the official Game of Thrones cookbook.

There's also an unofficial Game of Thrones cookbook.

If you read TechDirt too much*, it's easy to get a bit depressed about rights-holders who seem more interested in stomping on their fans than in encouraging projects that are complementary to their product. It's great that George R.R. Martin gets it.

I'm looking forward to feasting when the book ships end-May. I wonder if David Friedman will review it.

* Today's edition of how-not-to-do-it: Hasbro, whose toys are now less likely to wind up in my shopping basket.

Winter is coming. Where are the storehouses?

Season One Game of Thrones was excellent. But where the hell are the storehouses?

You've hereditary Lords with reasonably long time horizons, at least for the major houses. If winter is of variable duration with a fat right tail to the distribution, and winter occurs after long and variable lags, and the duration of winter is proportionate to the time since the last winter, you'd expect a few things.

Suppose that you expect a year of winter for every year of summer. You'd then be wanting to put away half your crop, every year, for the coming year if food preservation is perfect. In Season 1, it had been about sixty 10 years since the last winter*. There should be storehouses everywhere. Maybe they're all off-camera.

Now, relax the perfect food preservation assumption. In that case, there will be some maximum storage capacity beyond which any further storage is pointless. But in that world, nobody's eating fresh meat: you're eating salted preserved meats, canned fruits, and pickled vegetables coming out of storage because they're hitting their use-by date and replacing the larder with fresh.

Now, maybe summer game and produce is just so plentiful relative to population that we can just throw out anything hitting it's use-by date and replace with fresh without affecting current consumption. But we'd still expect to see lots of smokehouses and storehouses. And, we'd especially expect to see it up near The Wall.

So, why might we not see tons of storehouses?

Maybe everybody migrates south when winter comes. But that's inconsistent with the nursemaid's story about mothers smothering their infants to keep them from starving in the last long winter. And, we'd then expect to see some storehouses in the South for the periodic influx of winter-refugees.

Maybe storage is too risky: if the King can't credibly commit not to predate on the Lords' stores come winter, they won't store food. But that seems nonsensical: the King would then just tax the Lords' current production and run the storage himself.

Or, maybe civil wars are almost certain to happen in any long summer period and burning the storehouses is too common a strategy to make storage worthwhile. You can imagine conventions against this, like conventions against killing Red Cross workers, but any Lord expecting to be on the losing side likely expects to die anyway so there's no margin in not burning the other side's stores. But wouldn't we then still expect big storehouses inside King's Landing? At least some Kings would care enough about his legacy not to burn the storehouses if civil war threatened; moreover, a King who's knifed in the back by his guardsman doesn't get a chance to burn the storehouse.

Or, maybe folks there just have short memories, short time horizons, or really don't want to think about winter. That's consistent with the diminution of the Night's Watch at Castle Black. But it's not a very satisfying explanation. And, it's not consistent with long time horizons evident in investments in maintaining the honour of the various houses. You can say those are often private goods problems and both the Night Watch and storehouses would be more of a public goods problem given opportunities for predation on storehouses come the winter, but the King's there to solve those kinds of public goods problems. Even if the last King was a drunk and a wastrel, we'd at least see evidence of empty and abandoned storehouses from prior monarchs.

Dixit gave us an excellent analysis of Elaine's optimal sponge-use path in Seinfeld; maybe we can convince him to do this one up more formally too. Or maybe it could be an honours project in a future year. Characterise the optimal crop savings rate given different distributional assumptions on the duration of winter and of the gaps between winters and given different parameters on storage depreciation.

*Update: James Butler finds me the geek resources I needed. But I'm still having problems parsing this.

Seasons and climate

Westeros's climate shifts from arid and dry desert climate in the furthest south to cold and harsh Winters in the north and icy wasteland in the lands of Always Winter in the furthest north.

Westeros and Essos both experience extremely long seasons of varying length, usually lasting at least a couple of years each. The maesters try to predict the length of the seasons, monitoring the temperature and days length, to advise on when to plant and when to harvest and how much food to store. However, given the random nature of the seasons, this is not something that can be relied on.

At the beginning of A Game of Thrones the continent has enjoyed an unusually long decade-long summer of peace and plenty and many fear that an equally long and harsh winter will follow. The winter comes at the outset of A Feast for Crows, with the arrival of the White Ravens from the citadel.

It’s noted that winter means that the days grow shorter. It’s not simply that the weather becomes really cold or really warm, but it was explicitly stated by George R. R. Martin and more than once stated that the explanation of the Planet's climate is magical in nature and will be revealed at the end of the series.

Latest Recorded Seasons

• 209AL - Spring (The Great Spring Sickness), following the plague came a two year drought.
• 211AL - Summer
• 221-228 AL - Maekar's summer, broke suddenly and led to a short autumn and a terrible long winter.^[1]
• 254AL - Winter
• 273AL - Three year winter.
• 281AL - the Year of the False Spring.
• 288-298 AL - the long summer.
• 301AL - Winter start.

Ok, so do we then have a winter starting at the end of 228 and running through past the false spring of 281? Or starting in 254? Why do we have Winter followed by a 3-year winter? If Maekar's summer led to a short autumn, 228-254 is not autumn. I need a GoT geek.