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Kathleen Kennedy Townsend, writing in the Atlantic, has figured out that Jesus Christ wants you to be a Democrat. There are, you see, 2500 passages in the New Testament that call on us to care about other people. Rick Perry (and presumably others of his Republican ilk) ignores those passages, according to Ms. Townsend, when he voices “concerted opposition to government social programs”.

Now, of course Rick Perry is no more concertedly opposed to government social programs than is Kathleen Kennedy Townsend; instead, they disagree about how those programs should be structured and how extensive they should be. Not even Ms. Townsend (unless she is an even greater lunatic than she appears to be) believes that such programs should be unlimited, so her disagreement with Rick Perry is largely over where to draw the lines. Somewhere in those 2500 New Testament passages, she’s managed to discern an endorsement for her own preferred lines over Governor Perry’s. Quite a discerning reader she must be.

But it gets worse: According to Ms. Townsend’s reading of the Bible, we ought to “use all the tools we have at hand to help the poor, the sick and the hungry” — and I’m guessing that’s not someplace Kathleen Kennedy Townsend wants to go. That’s because using all the tools at hand to help the poor, the sick and the hungry means unleashing the power of capitalism. Regarding the poor and hungry, it means eliminating barriers to trade and immigration, reducing or eliminating capital taxation, and eliminating or drastically restructuring most federal regulations. Regarding the sick, it means curbing the power of the FDA, eliminating the tax deduction for employer-provided health insurance, and committing ourselves not to regulate the prices of prescription drugs. As a general rule, it means diminishing the power of the political class that Kathleen Kennedy Townsend has devoted her life to serving.

Ms. Townsend might disagree with me about whether those are really the most effective ways to help the poor, the sick and the hungry. If so, I’m pretty sure she’s wrong. So should I conclude, as she does of her own ideological opponents, that (in defiance of the admonitions of Jesus Christ!) she just doesn’t care? Or would jumping to such a conclusion about one’s political adversaries just violate another set of New Testament precepts — you know, the ones about being charitable?

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Oh. Sounds like the mandate is quite unnecessary then, no? With numbers like that, consumers will demand high efficiency vehicles with or without the EPA. Unless, of course, the EPA is, umm….lying.

Lying is of course the least of their sins. It’s one thing to argue that we need to conserve fuel. It’s quite another to argue that politicians and bureaucrats are the people best equipped to decide how we should conserve fuel. A gas tax encourages people to conserve fuel in the most efficient ways they can think of. A flurry of arbitrary top-down regulations serves no plausible purpose beyond transferring power to the politicians who routinely sell exceptions to the highest bidders. Of course, what did you expect from the people who thought it was a good idea for the government to actually run a car company?

It’s a sobering fact that the EPA still has a budget, 10 months after the reformers rode into town. Won’t somebody please lock these guys’ doors and turn off their lights?

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Since May 4, when Sirius rearranged all its channel numbers, my radio has been badly confused. If I punch in station 23, it goes to the station that’s currently 23 for a while, then jumps to the station that used to be 23, etc. And certain stations, which according to the Sirius website are part of my standard package, are completely inaccessible.

Given my past experience with XM customer service, I knew this was not going to be an easy fix, so I’ve been putting off making the call. Today I had some spare time. Sure enough, I’ve spent over TWO HOURS on the phone with these people being alternately put on hold, lied to, put on hold, lied to some more, and put on hold again.

They claim the missing channels are missing because they’re “premium” channels not included in my package. Except that their website clearly identifies these channels as standard channels that *are* part of my package. They tell me that they’re instituting a fix at their end which requires me to leave my radio on for fifteen minutes before it takes effect; this gives them a convenient excuse to hang up and not be there fifteen minutes down the line when nothing has changed. When I complain about how long I’ve been on hold (the automated system always says the wait time is “about eight minutes” before stranding you for half an hour), they give me a direct number to call to bypass the queue. I call that number and am told that no, this number is only for radios installed on airlines or boats. I complain that I’ve just waited twenty minutes to get this message. They give me a *different* number to call, promising me that there is currently no wait at that number. Thirty five minutes later, I’m still waiting.

Ah, but what about just using the form on their web site? Well, you see, that form will not allow me to submit a query unless I give it the serial number of my radio — a serial number that it insists is wrong, even though I have *copied and pasted* it from the “My Account” section of their own damned website. Therefore my query cannot be submitted.

No useful contact by phone, no possible contact whatsoever by web. No email address provided. No way to get help, no way to demand a refund. Let me stress that: Unless I am willing to wait another 40 minutes or so on hold, there is no way even to *request* a refund, not that I believe these evil bastards would grant one in any event.

So. What’s *your* worst customer service story?

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The other side might just as well (i.e. just as pointlessly) argue that Mr. Wahls’s penchant for irrelevance proves the inefficacy of gay parenting.

What’s particularly disturbing to me is all the chatter about how eloquent this kid is, as if eloquence in the service of intellectual misdirection were somehow something to be admired. Odds are, this pernicious message was reinforced by the college writing courses that I complained about in Chapter 23 of The Big Questions.

Zach Wahls gives every appearance of being a likable and accomplished 19-year-old with a good command of the language, and, like many 19-year-olds much of the time, not much to say. Fortunately, that’s a curable condition. I’m counting on his engineering professors to undo whatever damage the English department has managed to inflict.

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The same Times article observes that even without the workplace raids, deportations have reached new heights for two years running at the direction of President Barack Obama — revealing (as if we didn’t already know) that virulent xenophobia is alive and well in the Democratic party too. This is, after all, the same Barack Obama who said in his acceptance speech at the 2008 convention that nobody benefits when an employer undercuts American wages by hiring illegal workers. Well, sure. Nobody, that is, except the employer, his customers, and the illegal workers who, in Barack Obama’s universe, count as “nobody”.

This raises the idle question: Which political party harbors more xenophobia? I have no careful documentation of this, but my impression in the 2008 election was that the Democrat John Edwards was the most despicable of the candidates in this dimension, with the Republican Mitt Romney running a somewhat distant but still unchallenged second. Going back to 2004, it was the Democrat John Kerry who called for federal contracts, whenever possible, to be performed by American workers, demanded tax incentives for firms that hired Americans instead of foreigners, and endorsed legislation encouraging consumers to “buy American”. (If that doesn’t strike you as virulent, ask yourself how you’d feel about a candidate who called for federal contracts, whenever possible, to be performed by white workers, demanded tax incentives for firms that hired whites instead of blacks, and endorsed legislation encouraging consumers to “buy White”.) But it was the Republican victor, George Bush, who followed in his Republican father’s footsteps by dispatching those jackbooted thugs who evoke such nostalgia in Republican leaders of today.

I always had the impression that Bush’s heart was actually in the right place, ever since that day in the year 2000 when, while campaiging for the South Carolina primary, he squelched a heckler with the firm observation that “family values don’t stop at the Rio Grande”. There was no obvious political advantage in it, and it seemed to come from the heart. But Bush, like anyone else, should be judged by his policies, not by his sentiments.

In the most recent election, we saw the execrable Republican Meg Whitman call for the banishment of the woman who she’d seen fit to employ in her home for several years, solely because this woman had been born on the wrong side of an imaginary line. I can’t offhand think of anything quite comparable from a Democrat in 2010, but I bet a little research would turn something up.

On balance, which party is worse? My gut feeling is that the Democrats — the party of Edwards, Kerry and Obama — win this shameful prize, but it’s close, and I could easily be convinced otherwise.

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Now of course Lubos will say that it is I who am twisting words, and in particular that I either “changed the question” or “changed the answer” (or both) between the original post and the offer to bet. That, however, won’t wash, since I’ve agreed, as part of the terms of the bet, to let an impartial panel of statistics professors determine the answer to the question as it was originally posed. So even if I had changed the question (which I haven’t), this would prevent me from getting away with it. (And no, I haven’t changed the answer either. If Lubos claims I have, we can put that to the stats profs also.)

I’m feeling annoyed enough to say a little more along these lines, but first I’d like to make it crystal clear that my annoyance does not extend to readers who are still puzzling this out. The problem with Lubos isn’t that he’s got it wrong; it’s that he’s not the least bit interested in getting it right. A few particulars:

• I asked the question “In a certain country…what is the fraction of the population that is female?”, with a specification that the question was to be answered in expectation. Many — I daresay most — intelligent people get this wrong at first, because they observe (correctly) that the expected difference between boys and girls is zero and then jump to the unwarranted (and false) conclusion that the expected ratio is one. I made this mistake myself when I first saw this problem, as did Lubos. Once I understood it, my twin reactions were “Cool! I just learned something!” and “I’d like to share this cool thing with other people”. Lubos’s reaction was to claim he’d been cheated.
• The correct expected ratio depends on the number of families in the country. For the simple case of a one-family country, it’s 31%. Here’s what Lubos wrote:
  

  You may explain the lower result of 31% obtained previously as an artifact of the selection bias — that we have only considered the `completed families’ that have already received their son.

  But in fact Lubos’s preferred answer of 50% is wrong whether or not you restrict your attention to completed families, and my offer to bet explicitly allows Lubos to decide whether he wants to restrict attention to completed families or not — I will win either way. Why would he have made this completely false and indefensible claim? Apparently, he just throws things like this out without making any prior effort to check them. Lubos has now switched to defending himself on entirely different grounds, which suggests that he’s figured out he was dead wrong about this one. But he’s never acknowledged that.

• Lubos’s latest defense is to convert the problem from “What, in expectation, is the fraction of female births?” to “What is the probability that a given individual is female?”, and to pretend that I both asked and then got the wrong answer to the latter question. In fact my “Big Answer” post points out quite clearly both that the answer to this latter question is 50% and that it is not the question I am asking.
• Lubos now compounds his dishonesty by accusing me of changing questions (and/or answers) midstream. This ignores the fact that I never changed the question (and/or answer). This is largely because, unlike Lubos, I try to think carefully about things before I post them, so, though I sometimes make public mistakes, I don’t make them nearly as often as he does. It also ignores the fact that if I did change the question, he will win the bet, since the original question is what we’ll be adjudicating. My offer (still outstanding) is to bet on the original question in its original wording, as interpreted by a panel of statistics professors from top universities. So when Lubos says that I’ve changed the question, he is, in a word, lying.

If it seems I am being particularly hard on Lubos, it is because a) he deserves it (not just for this incident but for a lifetime pattern) and b) because I’m feeling a little frustrated after seeing some of the same mistakes repeated in comments by people who obviously never digested the original post, or never noticed that their objections had already been answered. Of course I realize that some of this is inevitable because commenters can’t be expected to have digested several hundred previous comments over three separate threads. So let me make this easier by listing some of the most frequently asked (and answered) questions. If you have questions or objections to raise, please check this list before adding a repetitive comment that others will have to slog through.

• You’ve raised a question about the fraction of girls in the average country, but answered it only for the average family. This is sleight of hand. No, read more carefully. The answer is (approximately) 30% for a single family. It is therefore also 30% for a country with one family. It is some other percentage for a country with two families, and some other percentage for a country with three families, et cetera, but it is never 50%.
• Your calculation only works if all families have reached completion. Otherwise the answer is 50%. I’ve given the calculations in the case where all families have reached completion. These calculations certainly need to be slighlty modified otherwise, but the answer will still never be 50%. The assertion that you can get the 50% answer this way is, as far as I can tell, something that Lubos and his ilk have pulled out of their asses. Not only is it false, but they’ve never given the slightest reason to believe it — which suggest that they’ve known perfectly well that they were blustering.
• You asked about the fraction of girls in the population, which we can write as G/G+B. Then you said you wanted to take an expectation. A perfectly reasonable interpretation of that is to replace each variable with its expectation, giving E(G)/E(G)+E(B). That’s 50%. That’s 50%, but it’s not a perfectly reasonable interpretation. By analogy, suppose I ask you to add 3 plus 4 and then square the result. You answer that the result is 25, because 3²+4² is 25. I say, “No, I told you to first add, then square — not to first square and then add. You respond that you squared and you added so your interpretation was perfectly reasonable. Then if you are Lubos, you accuse me of changing the question. But “first square and then add” is not at all the same as “first add and then square”. Neither is “first take expectations and then take ratios” the same as “first take a ratio and then take the expectation”.
• By insisting that we take the original question literally, you are playing a silly word game. It’s nitpicky to insist that we do things in the order you specified. But the entire point of the puzzle — the key interesting fact that we learn from this puzzle — is that the order matters. The expected ratio (which is less than 50%) is not the same as the ratio of the expectations (which is 50%). To blur this distinction is to render the puzzle completely pointless.
• The correct answer, according to you, is approximately 1/2 – 1/4k, where k is the number of families. When k is large, that’s approximately 1/2. So 1/2 is almost exactly the right answer, and you’re just quibbling over tiny differences. First of all, our commenter Thomas Bayes has pointed out quite eloquently in these threads that the 1/4k difference can be of great practical importance. But more importantly, Lubos’s argument gets the (approximately) correct answer for entirely the wrong reason. It is a fluke. It is as if Lubos were to say “Well, everyone has exactly two eyes; therefore the answer is 1/2″. You get no credit for a completely bogus argument that happens to accidentally get the answer right (though in this case it gets it only approximately right!). And many of the arguments that have come up in comments are exactly in that category.
• But according to my simulation….. If you simulated a country with a large number of families, then the correct answer is close enough to 50% that your simulation probably can’t tell the difference. If you simulated a country with a small number of families and got 50%, then your simulation is wrong. This is a simple math problem, and simple math gives the right answer. I have offered to settle bets via competent simulations only because I know there are people out there who don’t trust simple math. But they should.

I’m probably forgetting two or three other oft-repeated errors, but those are some of the main ones. I hope this list will be useful to people who are still sorting these issues out.

Meanwhile, many thanks for the hundreds of useful and insightful comments. I’ve singled out Thomas Bayes, whose insights have been amazing (including his wonderful Taylor series approximation to the correct answer). I should also mention our commenter Tom, who stunned and delighted me by discovering, contrary to all my expectations, that E(G/G+B-1) is exactly 1/2. As Thomas Bayes points out, this is a real problem for the commenters who insist that E(G/G+B) is 1/2. These experessions can’t be equal.

Finally, a word about the status of the bets. There is, at this point, real money on the table. Additional bets might still be coming in. Next week, I’ll post an update on these.

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Apparently some idiot lawyers have gotten it into their heads that the Social Security mandate is okay because it’s called a “tax”, whereas the Obamacare mandate is not okay because it’s enforced by what’s called a system of “fines”. From which I infer that if the government taxes you $1000 and uses it to buy you some health insurance, that’s constitutional. Or, if the government gives you a tax credit for buying insurance (after raising taxes to cover the cost of everyone’s credits, of course), then that’s constitutional — just as tax credits for home insulation are constitutional. Whereas if they just require you to buy $1000 worth of health insurance directly, that’s not constitutional even though it has exactly the same consequences as other policies that are constitutional. From which I infer that the law is an ass.

This false distinction is all the more outrageous because unlike the perfectly constitutional Social Security mandate, the constitutionally suspect Obamacare mandate actually serves a legitimate economic purpose. There’s a case to be made that there are a lot of conditions we ought to be able to insure against but can’t, because those conditions manifest themselves before we’re old enough to buy insurance — sometimes even before we’re born. That in turn creates a case for requiring insurers to cover pre-existing conditions, which in turn necessitates a mandate; otherwise everyone would wait until they’d gotten sick to buy insurance. You might or might not buy that rationale, but at least it’s a rationale. When it comes to Social Security, I can’t see any comparable argument. Unlike, say, cystic fibrosis, old age strikes pretty much everyone.

The U.S. government mandates your retirement strategy. It mandates your hiring practices. If you erect a public building, it mandates the number of wheelchair ramps. It mandates the size of your showerhead, for Christ’s sake. There are at least two significant precedents saying, in effect, that under the Commerce Clause, the U.S. government can mandate any damn thing it wants to. The only exception is health care — the one case where a mandate makes some potential sense.

Don’t get me wrong. I oppose every one of those mandates. But not as vehemently as I oppose a legal system that pretends to have some basis in logic when it is in fact nothing but a bunch of laughably arbitrary decisions based on random and meaningless distinctions that lawyers keep creating so that lawyers can “earn” a living maintaining and interpreting them. The law is an ass, and it deserves a good kicking.

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I missed the memo about the new criteria for hypocrisy, so I’d like a little clarification here. Are Catholics now required to vote solely on the basis of Catholic issues, and union workers solely on the basis of union issues, and billionaires solely on the basis of billionaire issues? Or is it only gays who are forbidden to prioritize, say, foreign affairs and tax policy? And what’s to become of the multifaceted? If you’re a gay Jewish small business owner, to which brand of parochialism are you now in thrall? Please advise.

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I realize that some will criticize the NAACP for over-reacting here, or for mis-reacting. But cut them a break. You don’t see them doing anything truly loonytunes, like, say, commanding the amorphous Tea Party movement to “expel the bigots and racists in your ranks or take full responsibility for all of their actions.” Right?

A hat tip to our frequent commenter Ken B. for pointing me to the video.

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