The revolution is being tweeted

I've assiduously avoided joining FaceBook, Twitter, or any of these other newfangled social media services. I kinda have a LinkedIn page, but I've not touched it in months.

And now I find the only way to find out what's going on in Iran is to get a Twitter account.

So I join, and I see that Tehran University is under attack. There's no excuse not to get Twitter now. Go do it. Update 1:Photos from the dorms. Update 2: Photos of the revolution

Let's hope the Iranians are able to overthrow the Mullahs. I wish there were something we here could do to help.

mabs0 RT @persiankiwi: students being killed in tehran uni dorm in amirabad right now. this must stop, ahmadinejad must stop. #Iranelection
less than 10 seconds ago from web

WordMarvin RT @persiankiwi: have lost mobile contact in university dorm. cannot recoonect. cannot get info. #Iranelection
less than 10 seconds ago from twhirl

Robot117 RT @bashix: Tehran University dorm is heavily under attack... people need HELP.. spread the word #iranelection
less than 10 seconds ago from web

paris1909 Un-uniformed police with knives PIC http://i40.tinypic.com/o8sy78.jpg #iranelection RT @ghattavi
less than 10 seconds ago from web

jangogh RT @oxfordgirl tehran uni students calling for help - very bad attacks here #iranelection #iranelection s
less than 10 seconds ago from web

Won't someone protect us from the wee fishes?

I think there was a footnote somewhere in Locke about how the point of having government wasn't really to have an impartial arbitrator who could resolve disputes and enforce judgments but rather to make sure that we'd not have fish-based pedicures.

Until Mr. Ho brought his skin-eating fish here from China last year, no salon in the U.S. had been publicly known to employ a live animal in the exfoliation of feet. The novelty factor was such that Mr. Ho became a minor celebrity. On "Good Morning America" in July, Diane Sawyer placed her feet in a tank supplied by Mr. Ho and compared the fish nibbles to "tiny little delicate kisses."

Since then, cosmetology regulators have taken a less flattering view, insisting fish pedicures are unsanitary. At least 14 states, including Texas and Florida, have outlawed them. Virginia doesn't see a problem. Ohio permitted fish pedicures after a review, and other states haven't yet made up their minds. The world of foot care, meanwhile, has been plunged into a piscine uproar. Salon owners who bought fish and tanks before the bans were imposed in their states are fuming.

The issue: cosmetology regulations generally mandate that tools need to be discarded or sanitized after each use. But epidermis-eating fish are too expensive to throw away. "And there's no way to sanitize them unless you bake them for 20 minutes at 350 degrees," says Lynda Elliott, an official with the New Hampshire Board of Barbering, Cosmetology and Esthetics. The board outlawed fish pedicures in November.

The New Hampshire Board of Barbering, Cosmetology and Esthetics?! The fish ban is currently front-page news on their website. The State Motto is curiously missing. Wonder why.

Sometimes, moral panics explain ridiculous regulations. Sometimes, collusion between a cartel of regulated firms and the regulatory agency explains ridiculous regulations. And sometimes we just have Vogons running things. On no account should you allow a member of the New Hampshire Board of Barbering, Cosmetology and Esthetics to read poetry to you.

HT: Book of Joe.

Chutzpah

If a reality TV show sent you to a tropical island filled with gorgeous women (and men), you'd probably not be too happy about being voted off the island. But would it occur to you to sue for wrongful dismissal? It never would have occurred to me, but perhaps I'm insufficiently Gallic.

Reality television faces a bleak future in France after contestants who spent 12 days flirting with the opposite sex on a sun-drenched island won the right to be treated as salaried workers.

In a ground-breaking ruling, the supreme court in France awarded three contestants on the French version of the programme Temptation Island compensation of about €11,000 (£9,500) each. The judges ruled that the trio were entitled to full employment contracts — including overtime, holidays and even damages for wrongful dismissal upon elimination from the show.
...
The case was brought by Anthony Brocheton, Marie Adamiak and Arno Laize, who said that their participation in l’Ile de la Tentation amounted to a job in terms of French labour laws, which stipulate that no one can be made to work more than 35 hours a week. The programme involves scantily clad men and women testing the faithfulness of competing couples with massages, dances and beach walks on an island off Tulum on the Mexican coast.
...
The supreme court upheld the lower tribunal judgment, which said: “Tempting a person of the opposite sex requires concentration and attention.”

There's a reason economists make fun of French labour laws.

Assorted updates

• I'd previously noted the sad case of Janet Moses, drowned by her family in a ritual exorcism. The jury verdicts are now in: one uncle and four aunts found guilty of manslaughter; three others acquitted. All acquitted for the similar (but not fatal) treatment accorded to a 14 year old girl in the same incident. The TV news reports howls of outrage from the public galleries; the audience seems to have thought all should have been acquitted. We'll see what the Court deems appropriate for sentence.


• Another update on ticket scalping, from Slate:

  But even economists who think that tickets are badly mispriced can have problems with ticket scalping. In his Offsetting Behavior blog, economist Eric Crampton discusses another theory of scalping in a post that's probably the only essay in which you'll see an economist turn to an analysis by Trent Reznor of the Nine Inch Nails. Crampton argues that one of the reasons that scalping persists might be because venue operators find shady ways to share in the profits at the expense of fans and performers. Crampton notes that Reznor gives one very good piece of evidence that there's something shady going on here: Ticket sellers could end scalping tomorrow by just printing names on the tickets.

  Surely other economists have turned to Reznor before. No?


• I'd previously argued against two Canterbury philosophers in defense of sweatshops; here's a nice argument from a U San Diego philosopher in favour of sweatshops.

  Abstract:
  This paper argues that a sweatshop worker's choice to accept the conditions of his or her employment is morally significant, both as an exercise of autonomy and as an expression of preference. This fact establishes a moral claim against interference in the conditions of sweatshop labor by third parties such as governments or consumer boycott groups. It should also lead us to doubt those who call for MNEs to voluntarily improve working conditions, at least when their arguments are based on the claim that workers have a moral right to such improvement. These conclusions are defended against three objections: 1) that sweatshop workers' consent to the conditions of their labor is not fully voluntary, 2) that sweatshops' offer of additional labor options is part of an overall package that actually harms workers, 3) that even if sweatshop labor benefits workers, it is nevertheless wrongfully exploitative.

Cover of the Weekly Standard

This is likely the closest I'll ever come to being on the cover of anything. I'm apparently the one in the speedboat.
HT: Denis Dutton

Morning roundup

• A new blog on ticket scalping


• Bryan Caplan follows up on DeLong's non-Socratic dialogue


• Count me surprised: the "Buy-American" spat on US stimulus spending may result in Canada cutting back on some inter-provincial trade barriers

  Jean Charest, Quebec's Premier, told reporters on Monday that provinces are looking to come together and back the Prime Minister, Stephen Harper, in his efforts to get Buy American repealed. He said he's pushing all the provinces to commit to talks with Washington about the willingness to have their procurement markets governed by global trade laws, which is now not the case.

  Canada is notorious for its interprovincial trade barriers. I'd feared that the net result of the US buy-American provisions would be some counterproductive retaliatory tariffs or trade restrictions; it would certainly be a happier result if the end result eased trade restrictions in both countries.

It's not easy being green

Art Carden recently released a paper basically applying the socialist calculation debate argument to environmental calculation. In a world without comprehensive Pigovean taxes on environmental externalities at their sources, it's well-neigh impossible for the green consumer to know whether he's helping or hurting the environment through his consumption decisions. It's the Mises argument in reverse. In the socialist calculation debate, Mises says socialism fails because we can't impute prices to capital goods without prices for consumer goods and consequently we can't rationally allocate capital across sectors. In the environmentalist calculation debate, we can't rationally allocate an environmental price to a consumer good without having environmental prices on capital goods.

In the fully Pigovean world, prices fully convey information about costs including environmental costs. Outside of that world, we probably still do best by looking only to prices as the best potential aggregation of knowable costs.

And so Patri Friedman today points us to a rather nice article on the fallacy of locally-grown produce.

Locally grown produce is rarely efficient. Apply a little mathematics to the problem, and you’ll find that the ugly alternative of giant suburban distribution centers accomplishes the same thing - fresh produce into stores on the same day it’s picked - but with much less fuel burned.

This even extends to local farmers’ markets like you may have in your town, where all the family farmers personally bring their produce to the market to sell. Imagine a map with the market in the center, and the round-trip routes driven by all ~20 vendors radiating out from the market, like the arms of a starfish. Applying our Traveling Salesman model to this map, it’s clear that the farmers’ market is the least efficient model possible, if you are measuring efficiency in terms of delivery miles driven and gallons of diesel burned. To properly restructure this model to be as efficient as its proponents believe it to be, you’d drive a single truck in a calculated route to visit each farm in the morning, sell all the goods in a single store, and then discard or donate the leftover food (why double the driving miles to return perishable goods to the farmers?).

Don’t get me wrong, I love farmers’ markets. We go to our local one sometimes and it’s a fun family event for us. We love the giant, wonderful tomatoes and strawberries that you can’t get at the supermarket. I’d hate to see the experience replaced by the efficient alternative I just described, but then, I understand that farmers’ markets are more of a premium boutique community experience than an efficient (or “green”) way to buy food. The real reasons to enjoy your farmers’ market have nothing to do with it being somehow magically environmentally friendly. It’s the opposite.

Too often, environmentalists are satisfied with the mere appearance and accoutrements of environmentalism, without regard for the underlying facts. Apply some mathematics and some economics, and you’ll find that a smaller environmental footprint is the natural result of improved efficiency.

To a first approximation, we do best simply by using existing price signals about relative scarcity and ignoring worries about food miles or other such considerations. Firms in private markets have every incentive to economize on costs. So long as external costs are positively correlated with internal costs - like how carbon emissions correlate with how much you spend on petrol - it's risky to second-guess prices.

I still frequent the farmers' markets in Christchurch (Lyttelton or Riccarton Bush on Saturdays, Riccarton Market on Sundays), but only because we tend to get better produce there than we do at the supermarket. Of course, if I were in Winnipeg, I'd be going to the rather nice market at the corner of Waverly and Bishop Grandin instead and would especially be trying out their new ice cream shoppe. Information contained in the price of airline tickets is sufficient to keep me shopping at Lyttelton, New Zealand instead -- the carbon costs of flying to Winnipeg are pretty second order considerations.