Another Monday Message Board. Post comments on any topic. Civil discussion and no coarse language please. Side discussions and idees fixes to the sandpits, please.
I’m now using Substack as a blogging platform, and for my monthly email newsletter. For the moment, I’ll post both at this blog and on Substack. You can also follow me on Mastodon here.
John Quiggin 
Just a word about movies – if anyone has access to TCM, they are playing Cluny Brown in a few hours. It’s a fun romp.
Free rides (continuation of last week’s Message Board)
Agreed that in the second phase of Gutenberg’s revolution, technology has now allowed information to become abundant too. Our current travails with bad information remind us to avoid conflating abundance with a zero price. Progressives are sentimentally attached to the idea of stuff being free as the air, but this is often a mistake. Scrooge is right to point that making goods and services free is a general incitement to wastefulness, and can encourage more serious harms. Very low prices can cut waste dramatically, as with the 5c nudge charge in Europe on plastic shopping bags – this works partly by social pressure, as with the decline in smoking.
Zohran Mamdani’ s eye-catching lefty proposal to make buses free in New York has attracted sound criticism from various Scrooges that the scheme will attract criminals, the homeless (to keep out of the cold) and teenage joyriders (because why not?). Packing buses with such type lowers amenity for other riders. As a pensioner, let me point out that the objection is invalid for free buses for us, as in London: we will avoid rush hours to travel in more comfort at slack times when the transit system runs below capacity and the system marginal cost per crumbly ride is next to nothing. We are rarely antisocial, I hope.
A much bigger harm is spam email. This is only worthwhile for spammers because the marginal cost to them per message is zero. Imagine a 1c per message fee, probably a tax. Normal people generate and send 1 to 100 messages a day, so it would cost them at most $1 a day, well within the limit for abundance. Spam would immediately become uneconomic. There is a genuine difficulty with automated confirmation emails for commercial transactions. Young people send much larger numbers of text messages, so extension to social media is problematic.
Negative externalities are pervasive, and the go-to solution is pricing. Nudges can work, and the externalities may be quite low, so we can often keep the social prices below the abundance threshold. In any case, progressives should mute their enthusiasm for abolishing prices and run the numbers case by case,
I like confirmation emails – I find them helpful for online orders, since my printer is almost never working. Do they count as spam then? I suppose, the seller could charge me the penny.
I tend to give the fish eye to pricing “nudges.” I find the Lexus lanes here so offensive that they are one of the main reasons I mostly don’t vote for California Dems anymore. (This leaves me with no one, in case anyone wonders.) Why should rich people get a bypass? It’s totally unAmerican! Harrumph. (And yes, I have already cut down on driving anyway. I did not need my overlords for that.)
The charges did have a partial win with shopping bags. I think many people now bring the sturdier ones with them. I think it did cut down on that particular form of plastic waste. However, we are still awash in plastic generally. If I were a better person, I suppose I would do bulk buys. Hmm.
And the health policy people used to be in love with co-pays, on the (half baked?) theory that there were all kinds of people making social calls on their doctors. I wonder if they still are pushing these? (Health policy always bored me.) Mind you, the co-pays are still here. (Actually our healthcare system is so dysfunctional, it probably shouldn’t be used as an example.)
I am in a funk, as our subsidies for the transition are going away. Probably before I can use any! Phoo. It must be nice to live somewhere normal.
Re free bus rides, there are parts of SF where you don’t dare to ask for a fare, you really don’t want to provoke a situation. Aside from that, I found that once you adjust your perspective riding on these buses was entertaining and surprisingly friendly.
Thinking about Putin and the Russian war on Ukraine; I previously said, maybe here or maybe elsewhere, that Putin was a fool. Thinking abut that a bit more, and after watching Christine Lagarde commenting on Putin’s competency, in which she found that Putin was on top of his game, I would like to adjust my assessment.
Putin is a competent murderer and as such he is a bigger fool than I had thought.
Trans numbers
Solid but puzzling data on the US trans population in the Guardian.
“1% of the total US population aged 13 and older identifies as trans, including 0.8% of adults (more than 2.1 million people) and 3.3% of youth ages 13 to 17 (roughly 724,000 people). Young adults ages 18 to 24 are significantly more likely to identify as trans (2.72%) than those 35 to 64 (0.42%) and those aged 65 and older (0.26%).”
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/aug/20/trans-people-us-data
There are two main theories explaining the remarkable differences between age groups, plausibly assuming that they are real not noise. A: it’s a closet of denial collapsing. The youth data (3%) are closest to the real all-age frequency, which will rise to match. B: the boom in numbers of self-reported trans youth is a fad, and will subside to the 0.8% of current adults.
Both theories face severe problems. Under theory A, can we believe that adults are perfectly happy to reveal their non-standard sexual orientation to strange pollsters, but not their non-standard perceived gender? Under theory B, why should trans identity fall by half past age 35, and by another half over age 65?
These theories are not the only possibility. Perhaps it’s some unknown chemical or particle in the water or air. The gender of cichlid fish depends on water temperature. It took decades for the link between exposure to lead and violent crime to be established, though very fortunately lead pollution had been cut much earlier on broader precautionary grounds. Maybe it’s down to all three.
This isn’t a parlour game. Difficult medical and legal decisions about care for many young people depend on the answer. One thing we can say that this is no time to be banning independent and sympathetic research on trans identities and doubts.
I think there is a definite role of pollution, maybe especially the endocrine disruptors. Anecdotally, I see the shape of women’s bodies has changed – hip sizes have gone down (at least, viewed from the front). Their bodies are straighter and more like boys’. I don’t see how this could possibly be a good thing. We’ve got to clean up our act.
There could also be other things too of course. And I still think there is a high degree of psychological distress from covid, and in many areas (though not all), being different is a socially acceptable way to get more attention. (That’s not new I guess.)
Whatever the causes, I am in total agreement that we need research. Most importantly, people need to calm down and realize that these personal choices are not going to hurt society – and we must treat each other as well as possible.
So many things are different now. Work type, work culture, social mediums, age of parents having babies, processed foods, hormone additives & accelerated growth additives to foods, daily stress, social acceptance, screen time, prescription medications, environmental conditions etc etc…
We can already see certain unchallenged physical changes occurring to the body like the age of puberty, but there’s also growing evidence that there’s an increase in physiological conditions like autism and ADHD. Very difficult to pinpoint any particular cause or provide hypothesis testing.
Quick question about spaced repetition learning.
I posed this question, seeking a (Google) AI answer: “What is the most effective form of spaced repetition training in terms of spacing repetitions and numbers of repetitions per round?”
The answer was:
“The most effective spaced repetition method uses a system like Piotr Wozniak’s SuperMemo 2 (SM-2) algorithm, which employs increasing intervals between repetitions, not a fixed number, and suggests specific timings that grow exponentially from initial learning. There is no fixed “number of repetitions per round”; rather, the algorithm adapts the interval based on recall difficulty, though a general range of 7-15 repetitions is often sufficient for long-term memory.”
Anybody have any thoughts on this?
I am using a free spaced repetition software platform to train chess patterns (puzzles) for pattern recognition. Due to the sheer number of archetypal and also idiosyncratic (correct term?) patterns I am attempting to acquire, this is becoming a huge exercise. It requires much spaced repetition learning and also overstudy as it is called. The software handles the spacing for review, but as it is free, I have to handle the overstudy requirement in the attempt to embed more automaticity and speed in my pattern recognition and solutions.
What I really wonder is where is the sweet spot in frequency of rep batches versus number of overstudy reps per pattern/puzzle each time a batch is done. The software governs my repetitions and it/I am basically working on about a rep in 12 hrs and doubling after that after each success. But each (timed) failure drops one back down one interval again. When learning a new pattern or repeating a pattern how many reps would be nearest ideal? Perhaps 5, 7, 10 or 15? I have been trying 10 but that is a little tedious for me. Perhaps 5 should suffice?
A single clear, rapid chess pattern recognition and execution we can roughly compare to a single clear, rapid word recognition and execution in comprehension or composition, done verbally. So how long does it take to get a vocab of say 5,000 words, 10,000 word or 20,000 words with full facility for someone of 71 (my age)? I am guessing a pretty darn long time even for a healthy septuagenarian. Though J.Q. is probably considerably better than average at this due to genetics and years of various forms of memory training implicit in his profession and interests (I am guessing).
Further to my post above, I asked the same AI:
“How long does it take to learn a vocabulary of 5,000 words?” The answer was:
“Learning 5,000 words can take anywhere from a little over a year to several years, depending on your learning speed and consistency, with an average of 10-20 words per day leading to 5,000 words in about 17 months to 3 years. However, the most effective way to learn vocabulary is through context, such as reading and immersion, rather than rote memorization, as this helps with long-term retention.”
Of course, I was talking about using SRS (spaced repetition systems) for learning plus factoring in speaking, reading and some immersion. On top of that I was talking about using the SRS to gain some fluency and automaticity in language or some tactical fluency and automaticity in playing out chess tactics and thus in playing chess.
I then compared (unique) chess patterns to words as theorized equivalent units of learning and retention difficulty. Continuing in spec theory then, consider 500 chess puzzles of an average length of 3 moves (of 5 ply or 5 half-moves, thus meaning 5 unique, sequential, linked patterns) where player A moves to start and moves to end the sequence. To learn 500 of these (preferably archetypal) puzzles to automaticity would imply learning 2,500 unique patterns via pattern recognition.
Thus, in this spec theory, learning 500 archetypal chess puzzles featuring 2,500 unique patterns would take, at the same learning rate referred to above for language, about 18 months. Hmmm, I have only been going 6 months on the chess puzzles and I need those 2,500 archetypal patterns for very basic rapid chess fluency. I can see this is going to take a long time. I wanted to get a “vocabulary” of 25,000 archetypal patterns. I am not going to make it, I don’t think. That is my prediction with declining neuroplasticity from current age 71 and perhaps even impending cognitive decline. The attempt might keep me mentally active for a while longer though, who knows?
The Australian government recently held a three-day productivity and economic reform summit which included discussions on the housing crisis and ways to improve productivity. They are not serious in my view. They will not implement the policies necessary to improve performance in these areas. They have already ruled out the policies that would be most effective.
On the productivity front, the governments, state and federal, refuse to do anything about the endemicity of COVID-19 which is serially damaging Australian workers, and not just workers, via repeat infections. These repeat infections lower productivity and lead to ever more serious consequences as people’s immune systems are progressively damaged and weakened. If the governments were serious about productivity, they would seek to contain and near-eradicate COVID-19 and other infectious airborne diseases which are currently permitted near unrestricted circulation.
On the housing front, Albanese has ruled out abolishing negative gearing. Negative gearing is a highly distortionary policy which rewards speculators and the already-rich. It is one of the main factors contributing to Australia’s home ownership and rental crisis by favouring landlords over ordinary Australians.
The red tape furphy is exactly that, a furphy. Red tape is not holding up improvements in productivity or the creation of more housing supply. Red tape (so-called) is not the bottleneck. This red tape palaver is misdirection. When governments don’t want to do anything about the root causes of problems (because they want to pander to vested interests) they blame something that is a convenient scapegoat: red tape in this case. “Red tape” is actually a code phrase. It means regulatory protections for workers and consumers which need to be removed to improve capitalist profits.
All of this shows that Albanese’s government has no intention of reforming anything. It’s going to be more of the same for the benefit of the oligarchs, corporatists and capitalists. I see no reforming change ahead. Neoliberalism continues to intensify.