Absinthe

Adversity to Risk

Sat, 22 Nov 2008 02:59:51 GMT

I came across this today; a discussion of current and historical corporate bond rates over the past 90 years. The article compares the rate of return on Aaa rated bonds to the rate of return on Baa rated bonds. When lenders are very adverse to taking risks (such as the Great Depression, for instance), the RoR on Aaa and Baa rated bonds are quite disparate. In good economic times the rates are fairly similar. In recent months, the RoR on these two types of bonds has become increasinly disparate. So much so, that the current rate spread of 3% is the worst it's been since the 1930's. We still have a ways to go until the spread matches the 5% rate spread at the height of the Great Depression, but that is one nasty steep slope we are currently climbing. If that slope continues, it won't take long...

Watergate Action Figures

Sat, 15 Nov 2008 16:50:48 GMT

Several years ago, on a whim, I ordered a couple of mugs from Shutterfly for my husband; I went online and downloaded a black and white picture of Nixon, and a picture of Kissinger, and those were the pictures I had printed onto the mugs. I have no idea what inspired me to do this. Although it is true that I have always considered Watergate and the Nixon adminstration humorous, but I can't exactly define why that is.

Anyway, my husband was very happy when he opened that gift. I mean really, really happy. He said it was the best gift he had gotten ever, bar none.

He uses the mugs every day at work, and about once every couple of weeks he gets enthusiastic compliments on them. Apparently other people find Nixon amusing too.

My husband has gone through two Kissinger mugs so far. The first got misplaced (or stolen, my husband suspects, although I think that is kind of an odd thing to steal). The second got broken, and I am unfortunately to blame for that (I was visiting his office and reached for a book and accidently knocked Kissinger off the desk). So Nixon has been going it alone for quite some time now.

So, for this Christmas I have ordered another Kissinger mug. I also ordered a G.Gordon Liddy mug too while I was at it. I recall seeing a picture once of Liddy smiling for the camera while holding up a rifle by his side. Sadly, I couldn't locate that picture online, so the mug has a picture of Liddy standing in front of a big American Flag instead.

Maybe next year I will get my husband Haldeman and Erlichman mugs, so he can round out his collection.

On a whim today I searched for Watergate/Nixon action figures, starting with Nixon. I found a Nixon action figure online at Amazon, but, sadly, no Kissinger, Liddy, Haldeman, or Erlichman action figures are to be found. The Nixon figure doesn't look a whole lot like Nixon, but it does make the double Victory sign, and has a voice chip.

I think the world needs a complete set of Watergate/Nixon administration action figures, complete with accessories like filing cabinets they can riffle through. But maybe it would be just me who would buy them...

Pay equity

Wed, 22 Oct 2008 15:09:07 GMT

This morning in the news: the McCain campaign accuses Obama of paying his female senate staffers 83% the salary of his male staffers.

Is this true? And is there pay equity in McCain's senate office?

Being the data-phile that I am, I looked up the senate staff salaries for McCain and Obama.

If you look at people in each data table who worked the full fiscal period (not just a portion) we have

McCain:

women men

N 25 20

median salary $18000 $16600

mean salary $23000 $19200 diff(women-men)=+0.8 standard deviations

Obama:

women men

N 27 21

median salary $17500 $22100

mean salary $21700 $27900 diff(women-men)= -1.6 standard deviations

The difference between the male and female salaries in the Obama office translates to a probability of only 6% that this disparity occured just by random chance under the null hypothesis of gender equity. The Obama campaign contends that the disparities are simply due to there being more senior (and thus higher paid) male staffers than senior female staffers. But if you take a look at the data table, you will see that many of the job titles make it difficult to discern the seniority levels. Also, under the assumption of gender equity (and the assumption that McCain achieves it), why would Obama employ fractionally far fewer senior female staffers than McCain?

(As an aside, the pay for senate staffers sucks.)

Now, if you will excuse me, I have to go crunch the numbers and see how my state senators measure up as far as pay equity in their offices goes (and if they don't measure up, they can expect an angry letter from at least one consituent...)

UPDATE:

I checked the staff salaries of the two senators of my state and the Democrat (Bayh) had no statistically significant pay inequity among staffers, while the Republican (Lugar) had a gender discrepancy of -1.5 standard deviations (ie; about the same as Obama).

I'll be sending Lugar a letter later today.

I checked Biden while I was at it, and found that he has no statistically significant pay inequity among staffers.

It is worth noting that all 5 of the senators I've looked at employ equal numbers of males and females (within the statistical error).

Voter registration

Mon, 20 Oct 2008 13:29:49 GMT

One thing that completely mystifies me in the US is the whole issue of voter registration (and apparent fraud). Why is this issue of voter registration so freaking complicated in the US???

In Canada, during my years as a voter there, I was also a student and thus moved around fairly frequently so it was hard for the government to keep track of all my moves. But this wasn't a problem, because to vote, all I had to do was show up at my local polling place (which was prominently advertised at many different places immediately prior to the election), bringing a piece of ID and a utility bill to show I was actually resident in that district. It was as simple as that. Obviously, dead people can't show up at a polling place with ID and a utility bill, and neither can Mickey Mouse.

If I had not been so itinerant, I would have gotten my voter registration card in the mail via a government organization called Elections Canada, which develops the voter registration rolls from info from things like Provincial and Territorial motor vehicle registrars, Canada Revenue Agency (think IRS) , Citizenship and Immigration Canada , and Provincial and Territorial vital statistics registrars.

It should be pretty easy to institute something similar in the US. One would think, anyway.

Why you, as a woman, should vote

Sun, 12 Oct 2008 01:57:06 GMT

This was forwarded to me in an e-mail today :

This is the story of our Mothers and Grandmothers who lived only 90 years ago.

Remember, it was not until 1920 that women were granted the right to go to the polls and vote.

The women were innocent and defenceless, but they were jailed nonetheless for picketing the White House, carrying signs asking for the vote.

And by the end of the night, they were barely alive. Forty prison guards wielding clubs and their warden's blessing went on a rampage against the 33 women wrongly convicted of 'obstructing sidewalk traffic.'

They beat Lucy Burns, chained her hands to the cell bars above her head and left her hanging for the night, bleeding and gasping for air.

They hurled Dora Lewis into a dark cell, smashed her head against an iron bed and knocked her out cold. Her cellmate, Alice Cosu, thought Lewis was dead and suffered a heart attack. Additional affidavits describe the guards grabbing, dragging, beating, choking, slamming, pinching, twisting and kicking the women.

Thus unfolded the 'Night of Terror' on Nov. 15, 1917, when the warden at the Occoquan Workhouse in Virginia ordered his guards to teach a lesson to the suffragists imprisoned there because they dared to picket Woodrow Wilson's White House for the right to vote.

For weeks, the women's only water came from an open pail. Their food--all of it colorless slop--was infested with worms.

When one of the leaders, Alice Paul, embarked on a hunger strike, they tied her to a chair, forced a tube down her throat and poured liquid into her until she vomited. She was tortured like this for weeks until word was smuggled out to the press.

So, refresh my memory. Some women won't vote this year because-why, exactly? We have carpool duties? We have to get to work? Our vote doesn't matter? It's raining?

Last week, I went to a sparsely attended screening of HBO's new movie 'Iron Jawed Angels.' It is a graphic depiction of the battle these women waged so that I could pull the curtain at the polling booth and have my say. I am ashamed to say I needed the reminder.

All these years later, voter registration is still my passion. But the actual act of voting had become less personal for me, more rote. Frankly, voting often felt more like an obligation than a privilege. Sometimes it was inconvenient.

My friend Wendy, who is my age and studied women's history, saw the HBO movie, too. When she stopped by my desk to talk about it, she looked angry. She was--with herself. 'One thought kept coming back to me as I watched that movie,' she said. What would those women think of the way I use, or don't use, my right to vote? All of us take it for granted now, not just younger women, but those of us who did seek to learn.' The right to vote, she said, had become valuable to her 'all over again.'

HBO released the movie on video and DVD . I wish all history, social studies and government teachers would include the movie in their curriculum I want it shown on Bunco night, too, and anywhere else women gather. I realize this isn't our usual idea of socializing, but we are not voting in the numbers that we should be, and I think a little shock therapy is in order.

It is jarring to watch Woodrow Wilson and his cronies try to persuade a psychiatrist to declare Alice Paul insane so that she could be permanently institutionalized. And it is inspiring to watch the doctor refuse. Alice Paul was strong, he said, and brave. That didn't make her crazy.

The doctor admonished the men: 'Courage in women is often mistaken for insanity.'

Please, if you are so inclined, pass this on to all the women you know.

We need to get out and vote and use this right that was fought so hard for by these very courageous women. Whether you vote democratic, republican or independent party - remember to vote.

History is being made.

Elections and Econometrics

Sat, 11 Oct 2008 02:16:13 GMT

For my own edification, today I downloaded past Dow Jones Industrial Average data from 1928 to present, and took a look-see just to see what the past trends were, and how bad things right now really are.

I was looking at the data, and noticed curious four year cycles in the market that appeared to be tied to presidential elections. The pattern becomes especially clear if you look at the percentage change in the DJIA from what it was two years previously. Below is a plot of that versus time, with the superimposed vertical bars showing the year that a new president started his term. Note that for every single president since the 1950's, the market tanked within the first year or so of him first taking office, followed by a rally that peaked usually a couple of years before his term ended (the only exception is start of Johnson's term who, when he started, wasn't elected). In fact, the beginning of each of the terms transects rather well the distance between the peak of the rally and the valley of the downturn.

For presidents who served two 4 year terms, there even appears to be economic downturn during their re-election year (the notable exception being Clinton).

It would appear that the American economy does not like the uncertainty that elections and new presidents bring, and the economic downturn centered around the election of new presidents is very predictable. The fact that the economy doesn't recover until a year or so into the start of a new presidential term is bad news because it means that we are very likely going to see the DJIA drop significantly more over the next 12 to 18 months, in a manner only rivaled by the Great Depression.

Update: I just poked around on the internet, and apparently I'm not the first to notice this. See here for instance. Makes me wonder why the droves of economic pundits on the news programs lately don't mention this...

Raise a little hell

Sun, 05 Oct 2008 22:24:51 GMT

We've lived in America for 11 years now, and this is the third presidential election we've witnessed while here. For the first time, just this past month, we have seen ads on the television encouraging people to get registered to vote. Mr.Absinthe commented "its about time".

The lack of interest in voting in the US is at times palpable. USA ranks 139th out of 172 world countries in the percentage of the eligble population who vote (48.3%). In fact, the US has the lowest voting turn out of any first world country. This lack of interest in voting surprised me when I moved here, because in Canada I voted in every single election as soon as I was old enough to vote, and pretty much all of my friends did too. I remember one year in college a big group of us going to the polls, then out to dinner afterwards. And we didn't go in a group because we were going to support en-masse a particular candidate (in fact, we didn't even talk about who we were going to vote for).

I'll admit that I am somewhat off-the-norm in that I exercise my right to vote whenever I can, but my point is that someone like me stands out more in the US than in Canada. The voter turn out in Canada is 68.4%.

Thankfully, news reports indicate that Americans are registering to vote in record numbers this election. Most are young people, which appears to be scaring the hell out of a faction of the established voting population who appear to be quite happy with the status quo of past voter demographics, thank you very much. I've seen some sound bites on the news with people from this faction saying that they are disgusted that young people are registering to vote in such numbers because, apparently, these young people can't possibly make informed voting decisions.

In the Comics section of our Sunday Newspaper, there is a one-panel strip called "Mallard Fillmore". I never find it funny, and barely give it a second glance. However, today I did a double take when I saw it depicted two men digging up artifacts. One says to the other It's a tablet from a forgotten civilization called "America"...whose imminent downfall apparently became obvious when it started to run television commercials...begging its citizens to vote.

Suggesting that widespread voting will be the downfall of a nation is so incredibly, unbelievably f*cked up.

There is a Canadian political comedy show called "This Hour Has 22 Minutes". In 1998, just prior to a Canadian federal election, they produced this music video, featuring music of the Canadian rock band Trooper.

Who stars in the video? Almost every single member of the Canadian Parliament, including the then-Prime-Minister, Jean Chretien. And we are talking about (in many cases) some extremely staid and very uptight people. Indeed, the fact that the most uptight of these people were some of the most exhuberant participants in the video is one of the most fantastic things about it. I realize that Americans watching the clip will recognize few (if any) of the people, but trust me, this video is equivalent to having every single US Senator and Congressperson (and the President) out on the Washington DC mall lip synching to Raise a Little Hell while mugging for the camera and holding signs urging people to vote. There is something about this video that makes me very proud to be a citizen of the country that produced it.

It appears America is changing, and maybe the time will come when we will actually see such a video in America.

In the meantime, raise a little hell, and vote!