Here It Is, Your Moment of Zen

A vuvuzela-based burglar alarm.

Boomerangs?

Security in Auckland Airport had a ruler taped to the counter marked for the maximum legal length for knives (6 cm) and the maximum legal length for boomerangs (40 cm). I have a hard time getting a handle on airplane boomerang terrorism scenarios.

<s>closing</s> redirecting the revolving door

The Obama administration has made it somewhat more difficult for executive branch officials to cash in on their government service by becoming lobbyists, which is a step in the right direction.

Of course, that doesn't stop them from becoming vice presidents of major banks primarily due to their ability to advise ion government affairs, but we can't have everything in life.

Podcast!

A while ago, I recorded a philosophy podcast with Luke Muehlhauser on Possible Girls, the Humean theory of motivation, and my version of hedonic utilitarianism. He's gone to the trouble of transcribing the whole thing so you can click over there and read it or download it to listen as you please. Luke has been doing this sort of thing for a while with lots of philosophers and he asks good questions.

He also has a link to my dissertation. It's 188 pages long. Don't bother reading that unless you're very interested in the role of desire in motivation and have a lot of time to spare. Maybe sometime I'll post my shorter-but-still-long paper on that stuff here and explain it a bit. It's probably my biggest career success to date, as it was published in what's probably the top journal in philosophy.

With that, I return to my travels through Australia and New Zealand. Things have been going quite well down here. People at the conference liked my paper titled "Why My Pants Are Not Subject To Requirements of Rationality." Because of philosophy (I have one more talk to give at ANU on Thursday), fun tourism stuff (I'm going to be visiting the Great Barrier Reef from the 19th to the 25th), and internet availability issues, it's not clear when I'll get back to my usual blogging pace. At worst, it'll be around the end of the month.

The Deal, or, A Failure of Imagination

If you size up the tax cuts Republicans wanted, and you size up the tax cuts President Obama wanted, the deal struck some time Monday night or during the day on Tuesday looks like a pretty good deal. Short of expanding the EITC or Child Tax Credit, a payroll tax cut is the most progressive way to cut taxes right now. Extending the unemployment benefits for over a year is crucial given the state of hiring, and with a little luck it may be long enough that hiring will have picked up by the next time they come due. The electorate in Presidential years is more amenable toward raising taxes, and Obama will have more opportunity to control the terms of debate. Really, if Democrats can extract any concessions they want in exchange for cutting the estate tax, they should take that deal every time.

But Barack Obama campaigned against "the smallness of our current politics". He talked about the failure of the country to envision a government capable of doing big things. And he has now delivered us a debate between two governing parties that doesn't extend beyond the four corners of a Heritage Foundation whitepaper. The best thing government can deliver to the American people is a tax cut, and the only difference between the two parties is the question of which taxes get cut. I don't know about you, but I would have a hard time waking up in the morning to go work in OEOB if that's all I were there for.

Obviously, we shouldn't overlook the fact that passing health care reform was a Big Fucking Deal that might not have happened under another President. But carbon pricing appears to be dead in the water and no one has any interest in reviving it. Compromise on infrastructure investments seems to be impossible, since apparently it's now Republican orthodoxy that we never put another dollar into rail investments, even if it means a Republican governor turns down free money from the Feds. At the moment we're suffering from a failure to imagine what it is our government is capable of, and no one seems interested in coming up with any good answers.