prior probability

This is what we will be viewing over the weekend; more details about this documentary are available here, via NPR.

Have you read David Leonhardt’s exposé in the N.Y. Times “The Rich Really Do Pay Lower Taxes Than You“? According to Mr Leonhardt: “For the first time on record, the 400 wealthiest Americans last year paid a lower total tax rate–spanning federal, state, and local taxes–than any other income group ….” What this selective quotation does not tell you, however, is that the overall tax rate on the richest 400 households last year was “only” 23 percent and that the top 1% paid the highest total tax rate (between 29 and 30 percent)! So, why not get rid of all taxes and replace our current complicated and convoluted system with a “single tax“? (In case you are wondering, here is a list of the 400 wealthiest Americans.)

File under “the mysteries of pricing.” As of this writing, it will cost you $25 USD to park your car at a distant parking lot (the tram ride to the park is “free”) and $50 USD if you want to avoid the tram and park your car next to the theme park itself. Why doesn’t Disney just add the cost of parking to the price of each theme park ticket (say, an extra $5 per entrance ticket) and make parking “free”?

They aren’t the only ones to have secret Twitter “burner” accounts, but what motivates this contemporary form of moral cowardice? What if every Twitter user had their own burner account? Bonus question: Does the President (@realDonaldTrump) have a secret Twitter persona as well?

Above is Joan Miró’s painting Personage depicting one of his dreams from the 1920s. According to this blurb, Miró’s art was “stimulated … by hunger-induced hallucinations involving his impressions of poetry. These resulted in the artist’s ‘dream paintings,’ such as Personage, in which ghostly figures hover in a bluish ether…. In these [dream] works Miró began to develop his own language of enigmatic signs: the forms in Personage depict a large vestigial foot and a head with three ‘teeth’ in its grinning mouth. The star shape often represents female genitalia in Miró’s oeuvre, and the dot with four rays symbolizes the vision of a disembodied eye.” The dream painting above is part of the Guggenheim’s collection in New York City.

Celia Cruz was born on this day in 1925 in Havana. ¡Libertad para mi Cuba!

Hat tip: @kottke

We’ve heard of Johannes Haushofer’s iconic “CV of failures“, but Professor Haushofer’s anti-CV has got nothing on Caitlin Kirby’s skirt consisting of academic rejection letters (pictured below). Kirby, a doctoral candidate at Michigan State University, defended her dissertation while wearing a skirt made of 17 rejection letters–rejections from grants, scholarly journals, and academic conferences–that she had received during the course of her graduate studies:

To make this unconventional skirt, Kirby printed out 17 rejection letters and folded each one into a fan, connecting them in rows until they resembled a skirt. According to this report, Kirby still had many rejection letters left over. Good for her! Hat tip: @pickover.

By now, you have probably heard of Greta Thunberg, the world-famous Swedish teenage climate-change activist who has urged immediate action to address the risks posed by man-made climate change. That’s putting it mildly; in the words of Ms Thunberg, “People are suffering. People are dying. Entire ecosystems are collapsing. We are in the beginning of a mass extinction. And all you can talk about is money and fairytales of eternal economic growth. How dare you!” Although Ms Thunberg is no doubt a very eloquent speaker, her stern and strident call for action suffers from a fundamental flaw: one must also consider the benefits–not just the costs–of continued economic growth. Climate activists like Ms Thunberg do a great job of pointing out the environment costs of economic growth, but we must not blind ourselves to the benefits of growth nor ignore the costs of economic decline. A further irony is that curtailing the world’s continued economic growth will make it less likely that we will find a solution to climate change! To sum up, fanaticism in defense of the environment is a vice.