Perhaps the least modeled but most important factor in considering mortgage payments is the long-term effect of inflation. Many financial planners and investment advisors will discuss the merits of putting money in stocks or bonds rather than into a mortgage. But few will explain why a strategy of paying down a mortgage early must consider inflation to determine whether it makes sense.
Let me explain.
A while back, I wrote about Peter Singer, David Benatar, and the supposed case against having children. Singer’s blog post in that instance was about one of the more extreme conclusions of Benetar’s reasoning, namely the idea that no one should ever have children leads to the proposition that the human race should end. This argument sounds a bit over-the-top to many.
A recent piece in the New Yorker by Elizabeth Kolbert (entitled “The Case Against Kids”) dials back the rhetoric a bit — in fact, it really downplays Benetar’s ultimate conclusion — and instead writes somewhat approvingly of recent philosophical literature dedicated to proving that intelligent moral humans should not reproduce.
I should admit that when I was younger such arguments might have had a much greater appeal to me. In fact, for over a decade I had convinced myself that there were strong moral reasons not to have children. For me, the argument had to do with my pessimistic outlook on the environment as well as social change and decay. Who would want to bring a child into a world like that which I foresaw in the future?
But then I grew up. continue reading…
Galileo is often held up as the hero of the Scientific Revolution. While the supposedly backward Catholic Church ignored the facts of the “new science,” Galileo supposedly held his ground and insisted in the triumph of reason and the scientific method.
This is the story presented in most textbooks, and it is retold again and again as a model case of science triumphing over superstition.
The problem is that the story is much more complicated. And frankly, when you look at the evidence in detail, you might come away with the conclusion that the Catholic Church was partially right to sanction Galileo.
To be clear about what I’m saying here, Galileo was simply not living up to the scientific standards of his time, and in many ways he was also violating what we think of as scientific standards today.
Before any Galileo fans have a knee-jerk reaction against this, try to find historical evidence that contradicts the gist of my argument below. Also, I am not discounting the many, many, many significant contributions that Galileo made to science. But in this one particular case, I’m not sure modern scientists really want to emulate him or claim him as the paragon of scientific rationality. continue reading…
If you read online cooking or recipe discussions, you frequently hear someone lamenting the fact that “all the stores around me only carry low-fat buttermilk.” This often ends with concern about the epidemic of low-fat products, how they want “authentic full-fat buttermilk,” and perhaps some story from childhood about how Grandpa always drank buttermilk that was thick and coated the glass and “surely wasn’t low-fat.”
There are numerous problems with these posts. The short story is that the “authentic” original buttermilk is ALWAYS “low in fat.” In the case of buttermilk labeling, the word “low-fat” does not mean “relative to what buttermilk naturally is,” but rather “low compared to regular milk.” In the weird world of product labeling, what is “low-fat” is not necessarily lower than is typical for the product, but rather lower than whatever the “standard” amount of fat for some product category is. Regular whole (“full-fat”) milk has between 3 and 4% fat. Traditional buttermilk produced in the traditional manner has less than 1% fat. Therefore, buttermilk, in the realm of dairy product drinks, is by definition “low-fat.”
Somewhere around the time of World War II, dairy producers started making a product that was very much like “authentic” buttermilk but produced in a very different manner. The vast majority of buttermilk found in supermarkets today — whether labeled low-fat, non-fat, or”full-fat” — is produced in this “unauthentic” manner. Most of it is also rather low in fat, for the simple reason that producers want to replicate the fat content of traditional “authentic” buttermilk, which is naturally very low in fat.
In the following discussion, I shall explain the details of these two different types of “buttermilk,” as well as giving an option for people who want to make “full-fat” (unauthentic) buttermilk at home.
Over there, over there
Send the word, send the word over there,
That the Yanks are coming, the Yanks are coming,
Their drums rum-tumming everywhere.
So prepare, send a prayer,
Send the word, send the word to beware—
We’ll be over, we’re coming over,
And we won’t come back till it’s over over there.
—————
Have you ever wondered why we celebrate Veterans Day on November 11 every year? Most other federal holidays, including birthdays of historical figures, get moved to Mondays. Aside from New Year’s Day, which obviously can’t be moved, and Christmas, which has a very strong tradition for a specific date, all other holidays generally float around to create a convenient long weekend.
But Veterans Day does not. It is always celebrated on the 11th day of the 11th month of the year, and those who are involved in ceremonies may know that they generally begin at the 11th hour (11:00 in the morning) on Veterans Day. Hmm — 11:00 on 11/11. This year is 2011, which made it 11:00 on 11/11/11. Perhaps, given the special form of the date this past week, it is time to recall why we celebrate at such an unusual time on such a specific date.
There is another reason why this year is a particularly special time to remember the significance of Veterans Day: the last original veteran died this year, or at least the last U.S. veteran. There is only one remaining in the rest of the world, a 110-year-old woman in England.
What is often forgotten these days is that Veterans Day is actually Armistice Day. On the 11th day of the 11th month at the 11th hour in the year 1918, the armistice—the agreement to end all hostilities—was signed to mark the official end of the First World War, which at that time was known as simply the Great War, or even the War to End All Wars.
Armistice Day was not a celebration of the war. It was not a time for patriotism or for the cheering of veterans for their service. Instead, it was a celebration of peace, of thanksgiving that some veterans did make it home to their families after a senseless war. continue reading…
In a previous post, I explored the history of spacing after sentences, where we saw that the common practice for centuries was to include a much wider space after a period (or other mark that ended a sentence). Since a double space nowadays imitates that practice—which comes from the era where the forms of many of our modern fonts were created—a double space should at least be considered an acceptable choice when typing or typesetting text. Others will prefer the single space, but it is merely a preference. I submit that there is room for both, and there is actually room for better typography in general, which could return to a more detailed distinction between different types of spaces with different widths.
I also summarized the history of the Chicago Manual of Style, which demonstrates the shift in preferences and values from 1900–1950, leading up to their current judgmental position where they only include information on sentence spacing to condemn anyone who would try to make such a distinction. In a Q&A post, one editor explains this position and offers a number of rationales in favor of it:
[I]ntroducing two spaces after the period causes problems: (1) it is inefficient, requiring an extra keystroke for every sentence; (2) even if a program is set to automatically put an extra space after a period, such automation is never foolproof; (3) there is no proof that an extra space actually improves readability—as your comment suggests, it’s probably just a matter of familiarity (Who knows? perhaps it’s actually more efficient to read with less regard for sentences as individual units of thought—many centuries ago, for example in ancient Greece, there were no spaces even between words, and no punctuation); (4) two spaces are harder to control for than one in electronic documents (I find that the earmark of a document that imposes a two-space rule is a smattering of instances of both three spaces and one space after a period, and two spaces in the middle of sentences); and (5) two spaces can cause problems with line breaks in certain programs.
Let’s take each of these objections in turn. continue reading…
The topic of spacing after a period (or “full stop” in some parts of the world) has received a lot of attention in recent years. The vitriol that the single-space camp has toward the double-spacers these days is quite amazing, and typographers have made up an entire fake history to justify their position.
The story usually goes something like this:
Once upon a time, typographical practice was anarchy. Printers put in all sizes of spaces in haphazard ways, including after periods. Then, a standard emerged: the single space after a period. Unfortunately, the evil typewriter came along, and for some unknown reason (usually blamed on monospace fonts), people began to put wider double spaces after periods. Typographers railed against the practice, but they could do nothing. Actual printed work used the single space, but the morons with their typewriters could not be stopped. Early computers and printers used similar monospace typefaces, and the evil persisted. Then, in the past couple decades, it became possible to use proportional fonts easily, and finally typographers could step in and save the day again with their single sentence spaces! The only people today who continue to use double spaces are stodgy old typing teachers and ignorant fools, who dare to think that their practice is okay in the face of the verdict of the experts in typography.
A short version of this story is told, for example, by Grammar Girl in her advice on this question. But perhaps the worst offender in the promulgation of such nonsense is a particularly self-righteous piece in Slate from earlier this year. We are told, “Most ordinary people would know the one-space rule, too, if it weren’t for a quirk of history,” i.e., the typewriter. And we are told that the one-space rule derives from the expert experiences of publishers developed over many years: “We adopted these standards because practitioners of publishing—writers, editors, typographers, and others—settled on them after decades of experience. Among their rules was that we should use one space after a period instead of two—so that’s how we should do it.” As to why they believe this to be so, it’s because double spaces are “ugly”: “A page of text with two spaces between every sentence looks riddled with holes; a page of text with an ordinary space looks just as it should.”
The author, Farhad Manjoo, is astounded to find so many educated and ignorant people who apparently believe that two spaces are okay. He even polls people over Thanksgiving dinner, just so he can tell them how wrong they are! The author subsequently decides to go on a mission to show them why they are wrong, resulting in the linked article.
Unfortunately, this whole story is a fairy tale, made up by typographers to make themselves feel like they are correct in some absolute way. The account is riddled with historical fabrication. Here are some facts:
The question of Mormons and Christianity has been receiving a lot of press again of late. While the statements of Robert Jeffress regarding the First Amendment and religious litmus tests for political office are unusual (and perhaps, in terms of the First Amendment, bizarre) interpretations, his assertion that Mormons are not Christians is nothing new.
In fact, in this belief, he is in line not just with the “three out of four” Southern Baptist pastors, but also the vast majority of mainline Christian denominations. Aside for the Roman Catholics, most of the major liberal Christian denominations have officially stated that Mormons’ understanding of the Christian tradition is so different as to be considered a different religion. The Episcopal Church, the Presbyterian Church, the United Methodists, the largest Lutheran Church in the U.S., and many others have passed official policies (often reaffirming them in the past decade or so) that state that Mormons’ understanding of the Christian tradition is so fundamentally different that it cannot be reconciled in even the most basic ways.
On the issue of baptism, where almost all Christian denominations (including even the Roman Catholics) accept the validity of baptisms of all other Christian denominations, the “traditional” Christian churches agree: Mormons are too different. Baptism is considered as a universal sign of the entrance into the Christian faith by Christians, but Mormon “baptisms” cannot be recognized by Catholics, Episcopalians, Lutherans, Methodists, Presbyterians, and just about anyone else. It’s not just the Southern Baptists or evangelical right-wingers.
But wait: there’s more. What about the Mormons themselves? Do they recognize traditional Christians as “Christian”? Well, not really. The historical foundations of Mormonism claimed that the traditional churches were corrupted and therefore apostate (i.e., separated from God and the legitimate faith).
Official Mormon doctrine still declares that while some “traditional” Christians may be a source for divine inspiration or some truth, the ministry and priesthood of traditional Christianity is illegitimate and incapable of performing their theological functions due to their apostasy. The only true faith, according to the largest Mormon denominations, is Mormonism. The traditional Christians are not really even “Christian” to Mormons. continue reading…
As the tenth anniversary of the tragedy approached, many people in the media began to write stories of remembrance.
Ten years before, a shocking surprise attack had killed roughly 3000 people. The perpetrators of the attack had sought to terrorize Americans when the planes suddenly appeared that morning over an unsuspecting city. Forces were promptly marshaled in response, but many coming to the aid of those involved in the first wave of the attack died as well. The leaders of the U.S. responded swiftly with strong rhetoric, and soon the country was involved in a long war with soldiers dying in unfamiliar, far-away places.
As reporters began to gear up for the tenth anniversary of this horrific event, they found that most people barely thought much about the incident, let alone the date. Many newspapers put a small story on the front page, but it was not the lead — it was buried among the dozen or so other miscellaneous items there. The major magazines barely mentioned the anniversary.
Even in the city where the event had transpired, reactions had become muted with time. A few small ceremonies and religious services were held, but a reporter who interviewed 15 people on the street in that city found that only 9 of them even knew the significance of the day. In another town on the other side of the country, another reporter found only 3 of 23 people interviewed could identify why that date was important.
Ten years after the attack on Pearl Harbor, the “Day Which Will Live in Infamy,” the vast majority of people in the U.S. no longer thought about the significance of December 7th, 1941.
Some readers may find such a comparison with 9/11 to be a bad analogy or even distasteful, but I think it is important to consider why an event that ultimately resulted in a war that killed hundreds of thousands of American soldiers (and wounded more than half a million more) was barely recalled a decade later. Meanwhile, this week we are being treated to a non-stop nation-wide media frenzy of remembrance and memorial over an event that resulted in an ongoing war which has lasted twice as long and has resulted in a tiny fraction of that number of casualties. continue reading…
In recent days, the Obama health insurance mandate has received another blow from the 11th Circuit Court, leading to more speculation that the individual mandate will be ruled unconstitutional.
What is often omitted from the current discussions is how we got into this mess in the first place. The United States has a rather unique (and uniquely dysfunctional) health insurance system. It turns out that the history of health insurance is riddled with inept government interventions and free markets pushing down the quality of care — the same conditions we continue to see today.
