I was watching At Issue this morning and they were discussing the current debate in Minnesota about requiring new homes to be equipped with sprinkler systems. Here’s a good link to a discussion of this issue, going through costs and benefits, and providing some facts about house fires. The House rejected such an idea, but the Senate could take it up.

I was just hearing about it for the first time, and of course the libertarian streak in me thought “If I want to put a sprinkler system in my home, I’ll probably pay less in homeowner’s insurance, but that should be a choice I make, not one the goverment imposes on me.” I haven’t been through a house fire and I can’t remember anyone I know ever going through one. They’re not that common these days. In 2009, only 2,564 people died from a fire in a home. I say “only” because more people than that die each year while waiting for kidney transplants they never receive, but the government still won’t let people sell their kidneys to people whose lives would be saved. And now suddenly we have to require people to do spend $3,000 to $5,000 (plus 30 years of interest on it) so that we can stop all the deaths caused by housing fires?

When this came on the television, I said to my girlfriend Sam, “The real question is, how many houses catch on fire every year?” Is it even worth the cost? In 2009, firefighters responded to 362,500 home structure fires. There are over 128 million homes in this country, so your odds are pretty slim that you’ll need a fancy new sprinkler system in your home. As a sign of how much she’s rubbing off on me, my initial concern wasn’t even the price tag it would add to a new home. It was how it might affect the aesthetics of the ceiling.

And as a sign of how much I’m rubbing off on her, her answer to me was, “Actually, the question is, how many house fires result in neighboring houses catching fire?” In that one question, she showed me she understands externalities, insurance markets, and personal responsibility.

I was proud of her last week as we swam with dolphins, snorkeled, and ziplined our way through the treeline outside Puerto Vallarta, and she did it all like she’d been doing it for years. But I think I’m more proud of her for this.

P.S.: A note from a colleague: According to him, the estimated cost is closer to $12,000, and the number one issue with them is false alarms that cause major water damage. Since he’s an economist, he reminds me there are always both Type 1 and Type 2 error. This reminds me of a recent Valentine’s Day dinner gone wrong resulted in a small fire in the dining room. Apparently really tall candles can fall over relatively easily. Who knew? Anyway, I shudder to think that something like that, which we put out in 10 seconds and which caused essentially no damage, could have flooded our whole house.

First, I should apologize for not posting in the last two months. This semester’s schedule has been insane, with 6 courses (4 upper division), 5 preps (3 upper division), and the senior seminar, which has me keeping track of 13 student research projects.

I wish I could blame it all on that, but it’s also the tenure issue. My department has recommended me for tenure and my dean has written to me indicating he will recommend me to the provost. But there’s still a few more months until the university president makes the final decision. I already broke one of Greg Mankiw’s rules for tenure-track faculty (don’t start a blog!), and I’m trying not to break another by getting all political.

It’s a shame in these crazy times that I feel like I have to shut up lest someone take what I say the wrong way and hold it against me but such is life. While I haven’t been posting on political issues, I’ve been following them still. More than I wish, I follow the opinion section of the St. Cloud Times, ABC News, Washington Post, and New York Times. I’ve noticed that the quality of the discourse is largely determined by whether you are allowed to post under a pseudonym or whether you have to put your actual name on your comment.

Where anonymity is protected, the discourse is harsh and personal. I have learned that people “like me” are: evil, stupid, ignorant, in the pockets of corporations, racist, hate the middle class, and want to destroy this country. It doesn’t matter whether the issue is whether we should raise taxes, whether we should allow smoking in restaurants, or whether we should fund Planned Parenthood with tax dollars. Instead of making rational arguments, people just insult each other. It’s sad.

I remember after Gabrielle Giffords was shot how the tone was supposed to change. We were told by our President that we should look at the words we use and ask if they help or if they hurt. I guess it’s easy to take sides when the person you’re taking sides against is a mentally unstable guy with a gun who shoots innocent people. But as soon as real issues came up again (tax increases vs. spending cuts, the rights of government workers to bargain collectively, etc.), the vitriol is back. Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker is equated to Mubarak and Hitler. A left-wing woman attacks an African-American Tea Party member by calling him stupid and asking him how many children he has that he “claims.” (And the media wants to paint the Tea Party as racist and violent?) Maybe the President should issue a reminder about the Giffords rule.

I’m sad for my country that we can’t have debates about these issues without people impugning each other’s personal character. I hear a lot of debate over what the “facts” are — do Wisconsin teachers make more than the private sector? Are unions good or bad for education? Is it more cost-effective to give Planned Parenthood money now than to have to spend money on other social programs later? (Maybe more on that issue in another post.)

Sure, those are important facts for discussion, but in some cases they’re completely irrelevant. You’re not going to change someone’s mind on abortion by pointing out that the government might save money in the long run if there are more abortions. And you’re not likely to change someone’s mind on the other side of the issue by pointing out that our fiscal situation would be improved if we had more young people to work and pay taxes. These are issues of principle, not issues of fact. We are a country made up of different groups of people who feel very differently about the appropriate role of government in our personal and economic decisions. These are very personal beliefs formed by one’s life experiences. People are not likely to change their minds on fundamental issues because you tell them they’re stupid for thinking what they think.

So how about a little more mutual respect and a little less personal attacks?

I like to consider myself a relatively tech-savvy person.

When my colleagues have a question about D2L (our course management system, similar to WebCT or Blackboard), they ask me. When a colleague gets a new iPhone, he asks me how to set up his mail. When I visit my parents every year, they have a list of things I need to show them how to do (and write instructions they can refer to after I’m gone) — how do I rip a CD into iTunes and then burn a copy of it? How do I format something in Excel. How do I set up the wireless network? Usually I feel like I have a good idea of what’s going on, know what questions to ask and know where to find the answers.

Then I started working on my online courses. The goal originally was to have everything in D2L. Each week’s material (a “module”) would be a folder in the Content area and students would click on their different assignments. A Word document with an introduction to the chapter and a set of learning objectives. A link to a lecture presentation or two on video. All of these things would be housed on a media server at SCSU (since taking up space on D2L is, shall we say, frowned upon).

At first I just used PowerPoint and recorded audio. That file would be sent to the tech people on campus and they would convert it using Adobe Presenter into a flash video that students could watch in a web browser. It looked great and worked well. The problem was that it was just me reading a slide. It couldn’t do screen capture. I have colleagues at other schools that have used a software called Camtasia. It captures what’s on your screen so that when you’re talking through your presentation, students can see your cursor. You can highlight things and draw graphs on the screen in real time. And you can open up a web browser to show them an article, or where to go to get a piece of data. It looked cool. Of course, it costs money — $180 or so for educational purposes.

I then learned about Camstudio — a free version that has most of the same features. The only problem is that the flash conversion done by Camstudio has an interface that does not include FF or RW buttons on it. The whole upside to video is that students can rewind a section if they don’t understand it and watch it again.

So I learned about something called Flowplayer, which has a nicer interface — basically, you watch videos in much the same way you would watch a YouTube clip someone put on a blog. You can rewind, fast forward, go to specific points in the video using the slider bar, and expand to full screen. But then I need another software to convert the Camtasia AVI output file into FLV format. Okay, I got that. I also got a video editing program so I can clip out the beginning and ending parts of a presentation if they’re rocky, and I can split up a long video or splice together short ones. And now I don’t have to send every video (which is too big to send in e-mail of course) to the tech people to have them converted to a Flash file.

The question is then: how the heck do I get my students to watch this? I spend hours playing around with some HTML code that would enable Flowplayer but it wouldn’t work. The tech people gave me a workaround but the flash video they created did not include the ability to make the video full-screen, which will be crucial for my students to look at all the graphs.

Then yesterday I finally realized the best solution to my problem. I decided to put the online courses up as two new blogs hosted on my own personal web site. (You’ll see them as the top two links on the right side of the page.) I don’t know how anybody would do what I’m doing using the school’s resources. It’s just too complicated — too many moving parts going on and what ends up getting sacrificed is the experience for students. So instead I’ll have a blog and each post will be a module. I’ll add all the text I need, include video clips they can watch full-screen, and include links to other articles. All in all, I think it’s a great solution. I can password-protect each post and give students the password each week, and other people can’t steal my content. It also means I can give the password to colleagues from other universities who want to see what I’ve done — something I can’t do if the course is all on D2L. In the end, I found a great solution that meets all of my needs and will hopefully provide a quality educational experience to my students.

But I think it’s a little sad that the only way to have an online course set up the way I need it to be set up, so my students can learn what I need them to learn in the way that I think is most effective — and in a way that is not that technologically fancy at all — is to completely bypass the university technology system that is supposed to make everything happen for us. I honestly don’t blame the tech people — I think they’re doing the best they can. They were extremely helpful in helping me realize what exactly it was that I wanted to be able to do in the online course, providing a headset and microphone so I could make my recordings, and answering all my questions in a way that was understandable. I know they’re dealing with restrictions imposed on them by others, security issues, licensing issues, etc. I post this not to complain about the work they have done (because, frankly, without them I would have been even more lost), but to point out that right now we have a system where technology dictates pedagogy. You are told what is possible and you try to mold your course around that — and if you don’t like it, you have to find a way to work around the system. That’s not right. Pedagogy should drive technology, not the other way around

Yesterday I had the opportunity to visit Titanic: the Artifact Exhibition at the Minnesota Science Center in St. Paul. I’m not sure what I was expecting, but I left saddened and amazed at the same time.

In 1912, you had an America and Western Europe that was going through amazing technological progress. The sheer size of the ship was massive: it took over 3 million rivets to assemble the outer hull, and it burned 40 pounds of coal per second. Titanic was a symbol of the times, a ship that was presumed indestructable, offering both unsurpassed luxury for the wealthy and affordability for the working class – a third-class (“steerage”) room cost the equivalent of $650 today, far less than many from Mexico and South America pay people to get them to our country. Its three-turbine propulsion system was an engineering marvel.  Titanic was divided into a dozen or so watertight chambers so that if one or two of them were breached, the boat would still float. The iceberg took down 6 of them, if I remember correctly.

One fact stuck in my head: of all the women that were on Titanic, only three had husbands who survived the disaster. Only 20% of the men on board survived – but of men who had wives, only three men survived. (Here for more on survival rates.) That tells me that the men whose families were on the ship had one foremost priority: get their families off safely. The men whose families were not on board had no such higher motive, and did not cede room in the lifeboats for others’ women and children. As they say, tragedy often reveals both the best and worst in people.

[Quick note: the Titanic had more than enough lifeboats for all of its passengers. Most of them launched prematurely, with husbands worrying about the safety of their families, wanting to make sure the lifeboat was not so crowded that it might sink. If I remember correctly, the first third or so of all lifeboats launched were filled with less than a third of their potential passengers. There were life preservers for everyone (white vests filled with blocks of cork for bouyancy), but the water was below freezing and hypothermia set in within a half hour.]

As you make your way through the exhibit, you cross an amazing collection of personal materials. Teapots from the dining room that somehow survived in perfect condition. Personal items of passengers. A wide assortment of money. Playing cards that look remarkably similar to what we use almost a century later. This is where the exhibit hits home, and Titanic becomes not just a boat that hit an iceberg, but a collection of people. People from the highest social standing to the lowest. Some making their way back to America to resume their businesses, some headed there to start a new life, filled with hope and aspirations. These were real people, and seeing their combs, luggage, and postcards is what reminds you of that.

On a wall at the end of the exhibit is a quote by an Irish poet named Jack Foster: “We are all passengers on the Titanic.” Sound familiar? After 9/11, we were all New Yorkers. We all understood the horror of the tragedy that occurred and felt it could have happened to us. As a country, we banded together to give assistance however we could to the families who lost loved ones. The children who survived the Titanic were assisted through massive charitable giving, even putting some through college. It is sad that it takes a disaster on a scale like this to unite people, but apparently not much has changed in a century.

There are many lessons to be drawn from the Titanic. In an effort to make its planned departure date, much was rushed. The ship ended up sailing without one pair of binoculars on board, a simple detail that may have prevented the disaster. The iceberg field that the Titanic passed through was also navigated by a half dozen other ships that night and the following day, including the Carpathia that rescued its survivors. None of these ships was hit because they were able to steer around the icebergs. They had binoculars to see them, and they weren’t so big that they could not maneuver easily. Rushing through a giant venture and overlooking important details because you are trying to meet some arbitrary date can have major adverse consequences. (Are you listening, Nancy Pelosi?)

You know I’m a supporter of free markets, but there is room for some government guidelines in many industries. People have to know what the rules are in order to compete, and part of the government’s role is to define basic rules of the game. After the Titanic sank, the U.S. and other countries agreed on a variety of new changes. They restricted some radio frequencies from personal use and designated which frequencies would be used by ships, making it easier for them to communicate quickly when they are in trouble. They imposed restrictions on how far north a shipping vessel could navigate, to avoid the kind of waters Titanic found. The result of these actions: since the Titanic, no other such ship has sunk because it hit an iceberg.

If you are down in the St. Paul area, I encourage you to check out the exhibit. It’s $23 for admission to the museum and the exhibit, but it was definitely well worth the money.

I’ve been so busy at work that I haven’t written anything in over a week, and I have to rectify that. I’m starting to get tired of all the health care and budget deficit discussion, and I’m supposed to be relaxing this weekend so it’s time for something a little lighter. I thought I’d share one of my favorite stories.

My good friends Dave and Kim have a timeshare and can use their points just about anywhere they want. In June 2004, they decided to spend a week in Cancun and invited me along — most of the couples I know have found that I usually do a pretty good job playing the third wheel and I don’t mind it at all. After a few days of lounging in the beach, drinking demasiado tequila, and swimming with dolphins (everyone should do that at some point in their lives), we decided to get a little culture.

We set off on a day tour to Chichen Itza with a crazy bus driver who almost ran us off the road a few times. Three hours and a few mild heart attacks later, we set off on our tour of the Mayan ruins. It was both awe-inspiring to see what that civilization accomplished, and haunting to learn of the savage nature of some elements of the culture. The highlight, of course, was the pyramid, El Castillo. Dave and I agreed we would run up the whole thing without stopping — I still remember to this day that there were 91 steps. At the top of the pyramid, there is an inner room but it’s dark, cramped and pretty creepy so you take a quick walk through. Most people just hang out on the outside rim, which is about 6 feet wide, and survey the landscape below. There is room for a few dozen people up there, butit was a hot day and those 91 steps aren’t easy for all the overweight American tourists, so it wasn’t crowded. Maybe a dozen people were up there with us. You get to the top, look around for five minutes, and make your way down. Carefully.

In the picture linked, if you stand at the edge of the left back corner, you can see the entire ruins in the background. It’s a popular place to get your picture taken. When I got to the top, I looked over and saw someone I thought I recognized. He was waiting for a few people to get their picture taken so he and his wife could take each other’s pictures. He looked a lot like a guy who played on my softball team in St. Louis at the time but I thought there was no way that could be him. Then I started thinking. I remembered that he missed our last game because he was getting married and was then going on his honeymoon. I wasn’t sure where he was going on his honeymoon but Cancun seemed like a likely destination. I couldn’t remember his name – everyone on the team called him by his last name and I couldn’t remember that either. I told Dave, “I think I know that guy,” and he said there’s no way. After a minute or two, I finally remembered his name, so I walked over. ”Matt?” He shook his head in disbelief. “Switz?”

Neither of us could believe that in the middle of the jungle, on top of an ancient Mayan pyramid with only about 10 people on it, someone we knew was there at the same time. I told him and his wife that they had to let me take a picture of them, since they each had only a solo picture taken by the other. Still a little shocked at how surreal the situation was, they of course agreed. I hope they have that picture hanging somewhere in their house now so they can tell that story.

It remains the strangest thing that’s ever happened to me. It just goes to show that, as trite and cliche as the saying may be: it really is a small world after all.

This post gets its title from a TV show a few years ago produced by Ice Cube. In the show, some very talented makeup people allow a white family and a black family to change places and live as each other for a few weeks. To me, the most interesting part of the show was when the black man and the white-man-in-black-makeup both experienced the same things: walking down the street and shopping in a store. In one case, a pedestrian walking towards them moves to the edge of the sidewalk to let them pass. The black man thought the pedestrian got out of their way because of race, and the white man thought the pedestrian got out of their way just because she was being a nice person and ceding the path to oncoming traffic. The black man thought they were being stereotyped by the pedestrian as violent, and he couldn’t believe that the white man couldn’t see this. The white man thought the black man was seeing things that simply weren’t there and told him that he was looking for problems that didn’t exist.

You can find some of this here (the whole clip is good, but this part starts at the 4:25 mark and the discussion gets really good at 6:00 in).

I thought of that show when I was watching ABC World News Tonight and they showed an interview with Attorney General Eric Holder. In the piece, the reporter first brought up the Prof. Gates controversy and said that while Holder would not take sides in the situation, he ”acknowledged that he too has been racially profiled.”

For the record, the woman who called 911 when she saw Skip Gates’ front door being broken into never mentioned that the person entering the home was black. She said she didn’t know the race of one of the men and the other one might have been Hispanic but she wasn’t sure. She even said that maybe they lived there and she wasn’t sure what was going on, but it looked weird and maybe the cops should check it out. Mind you, this was in the daytime in a neighborhood that had had a dozen or so daytime break-ins in the previous week, so neighbors were on the lookout for anything suspicious. In my opinion, for anybody to say that a police officer coming to the home and checking things out and asking for identification is racial profiling is absurd. What happened after that is still up for debate.

More to the point of this post, here’s what Holder said about his experience being “racially profiled”:

“I was a young college student driving from New York to Washington, stopped on a highway and told to open the trunk of my car. The police officer told me he wanted to search me for weapons. And I remember, as I got back in my car and continued on my journey, um, how humiliated I felt, um, how angry it got.”

It reminded me of an experience of mine. When I was in grad school in St. Louis, I’d come home at least once a year to visit my mom and stepdad in Phoenix and then on to visit my dad and brother in L.A. The drive from STL to PHX is a good 1,500 miles, and  Albuquerque is the halfway marker on a two-day drive. On one of my trips, I had gone from Phoenix to Albuquerque on day one and woke up early the next day to set out for St. Louis. The sun was rising in the east as I took off driving in that direction and it was not easy to see the road. I was tired and didn’t sleep well, as I had stayed in a Motel 6 (because I was a cheap grad student and had a dog, which every Motel 6 will take for no additional fee). So I was groggy when I set out, and the horrible Motel 6 coffee wasn’t helping any. About a half hour into the trip, I was pulled over by a state trooper. I was doing maybe 70 and the speed limit was 65. I was a bit surprised he pulled me over because I wasn’t going really that fast.

The cop was nice to me, even though Jake was barking at him (of course). He asked me to get out of the car. He asked if I had any marijuana in the car. I said no. He asked what was in the trunk. I said, “Clothes and dog food.” He asked if he could search the trunk. I said, “Absolutely.” While his partner searched the trunk, he talked to me about where I was headed and why. I told him I was going back to grad school and going to be an economics professor some day. He wished me luck in my efforts. After a few minutes, his partner came back and said the trunk was clean. He said I was free to go and told me to make sure not to drive too fast.

When I got back in the car, I thought for a minute or two and ultimately came to a conclusion as to why he pulled me over and searched my car for marijuana: it was my U.C. Berkeley license plate frame. He figured I went to Berkeley, so I must have weed in the car. He was fishing for something, and the fact that I was 5 miles over the speed limit (never enough to get you a ticket, but enough to let them cops pull you over) was his opening. I didn’t feel humiliated. I didn’t get angry. Sure, I was a little annoyed at having been pulled over, but mostly I was relieved that I didn’t get a ticket for speeding.

If I were a black man, I probably would have attributed being stopped and having my car searched for marijuana to my race, just as Eric Holder did in a similar situation, and been upset about it. But I’m not black and neither were the cops, so I attributed it to my U.C. Berkeley license plate. But maybe he just thought I was swerving a bit so he thought he’d check things out to make sure I was okay to drive. And when he pulled me over, maybe he saw that my eyes were a little red because I didn’t sleep well the night before. Who knows, other than the cop that stopped me? I don’t KNOW that it was the license plate frame, but that’s my best guess.

Our experiences color the way we perceive everything that happens to us. Race is still such a dominant factor in society that it’s impossible for people to NOT attribute some things to race. As part of the racial sensitivity program that faculty at SCSU are required to attend when hired, I was told by the people running the workshop that my being white meant that I was a racist –whether I was aware of it or not. I was told then (and reminded by one faculty member in an e-mail sent out today to faculty and staff who subscribe to our announce listserv) that even if you try to be colorblind and treat people equally regardless of race, that task is impossible. It’s apparently naive to think you can treat everybody equally. On the contrary, the person sending that e-mail and the workshop leaders said that the only way to achieve a post-racial society is to actively take race into account. It reminds me of Bush saying that he had to abandon capitalist principles in order to save capitalism — that explanation didn’t make much sense to me, and neither does this.

I wonder how many incidents of “racial profiling” or discrimination are simply a  matter of perception. If Eric Holder has been white and had been stopped by a black polic officer, would he have attributed it to his race? Would Eric Holder have been stopped at all if he were white?

We are told in a speech given by Eric Holder himself that, when it comes to race, America is a nation of cowards. He says that we are afraid to talk about race — and I would argue that it is with good reason. If you are white and talk about race in a way that offends anybody, you will quickly be labeled a racist by some. For example, when some Republican governors said they did not want to take some parts of the stimulus money, Representative James Clyburn (D-SC) said it insulted African-Americans. If you are black and talk about race, some white people will consider you as “injecting” race into a situation that had nothing to do with race. Some would say that’s exactly what Skip Gates has done here. But I hope my example shows that Gates’ life experiences affect the way he perceived that entire situation, so he attributes at least part of what happened to his being black. Did his being handcuffed have anything to do with his race? Only Sgt. Crowley knows. But I think the presumption of innocence, as it held for Skip Gates, should hold for Crowley as well.

I think it says a lot for our society when the worst insult you can hurl at someone is to call them a racist. It shows that we are a society that is conscious of race, that is trying to treat people equally, and that shuns those that would treat people of one race as less than people of another.  Sadly, this is abused by some, who label any discussion of race as “racism,” thereby stifling potentially worthwhile discussion about racial issues. I don’t know if we’ll ever get away from some of the racial issues we have, since our race influences the way we see things. I do know that we have come a long way in the last forty years, and I hope that forty years from now, a police stop will simply be a police stop — and race won’t matter for either the cop or the suspect.

(Updated 12:10am, 7/21)

ABC World News Tonight had a story about the Steamin’ Bean coffee shop in Blue Springs, Missouri. Here’s a link to a UPI article from a few days ago which says basically the same thing the ABC story documented. To spare you from having to read the story, here are the basics:

On Monday, July 6, a customer in the drive-thru window paid for her drink and then paid for the person’s drink behind her in line — she called it her good deed for the day. Well, that person accepted the free drink and was so struck by the generosity of their benefactor that they decided to do the same, paying for the person in line behind them. The chain continues to this day, with over 1,300 drinks being bought.

When there is nobody behind them in the drive-thru line, people donate however much they want and, if that person orders a drink costing less than the donation they make, the difference goes into a charity fund. This “pay it forward” concept has made its way into the coffee shop itself, with people inside just paying money into the charity fund and then getting a free drink out of that fund from money that was supposedly contributed by someone else. The store has even posted signs describing the process. Proceeds from the fund will be used to pay for drinks in the event some jerkoff breaks the chain and doesn’t buy another coffee for someone else. On the ABC News broadcast, the owner said that he hopes the fund proceeds might someday be used to help buy someone’s groceries for a week, or some other helpful act.

ABC News touted this entire process as charity, but is it really? Sure, the first person was being charitable, no question about it. But for everybody else continuing the chain, I’m not sure that it is – especially now that this is a national story and the company itself actually has signs telling customers about the program and basically guilt-tripping them into not breaking the chain. For all of the people going into the Steamin’ Bean today, they get a free drink from someone else and they pay for some other person’s drink. They’re getting a drink and paying for one — how is that any different than the status quo? If they pay $5 and only ask for a $4 coffee drink, sure the $1 difference might be considered charity. But not the entire $5, which is basically the way the story is being presented. And if you donate the same amount of money as your coffee costs, you’re “keeping the chain alive” — yet you haven’t contributed to anything but this story.

The story I link to explains that as of July 15, the chain had reached 1,000 people and the coffee shop had a total of $160 in the charity fund. (They keep track by writing down a bunch of numbers in sequence and crossing them off as they go — one more thing your barista has to do while you wait for your coffee.) Think about those numbers. They’ve served 1,000 drinks and the chain hasn’t been broken, so 1,000 people have taken part in this system — and they’ve only collected $160. The average person is donating 16 cents per drink, and the store is collecting $16 per day in charitable contributions. Most coffee shops make several times that in their tip jar on an average day. But the whole “pay it forward” idea is cute — although it’s been done countless times before and even turned into a bad movie (Kevin Spacey, why have you forsaken us!?). So this story gets nationwide press. If the headline of the story were “Coffee Shop collects $16 per day for charity” I doubt it would get the same publicity.

On a different note, shouldn’t these charitable people actually want the chain to be broken? That would mean that somebody who really, desperately needs a $4 half-caff no-whip soy caramel latte but doesn’t have any money can get one. Only when the chain is broken will the original person’s charitable contribution of a free coffee actually be realized.

This form of incentive system creates some obvious problems. Knowing there’s a slush fund that is used to make up the difference whenever somebody doesn’t have enough money, I have an incentive to order an expensive drink and pay for the next customer’s inexpensive drink.* But with all the publicity and the signs in the coffee shop, people will think I’m a real jerk if I do that. (See the next paragraph.) To avoid that, especially if I’m a local customer, perhaps I contribute as much as the drink would have cost anyway. In that case, there’s nothing charitable about it. And it appears that most people are doing just that, since they’re only collecting $16 per day. But why all the needless complication of buying someone else’s drink instead of your own?

The owner, in a different story, says of this system, “We don’t want anybody to abuse it. The simple fact is that if someone does abuse it, it’ll be gobbled up and go away on its own. It’s the honor system and it can simply vanish if people abuse it.” Ah, now I see. So it’s charity, but don’t abuse it! It was designed to help people pay for coffee as a goodwill gesture, but by God nobody better actually use it for what it was intended for or it will go away! Maybe I’m too cynical, but I don’t think this is charity at all. This is an unnecessarily complicated scheme designed to guilt people into giving money to the coffee shop owner (Garin Bledsoe) so he can donate it to any cause he sees fit. From the story linked in this paragraph:

With a vision “to impact as many as possible from the simple act of goodwill,” Bledsoe contributed some of the pay-it-forward fund to Intelligentsia Coffee and Tea in Chicago during a vacation this past weekend. The Intelligentsia manager nodded along, Bledsoe said, and thought it sounded like a nice concept. Then, Bledsoe pulled out $40 in cash and handed it over.

The owner collects money from people in the town of Blue Springs, Missouri, a satellite city just outside Kansas City. But instead of using it to help people in that community, he gives it to people at a fancy “coffeebar” in Chicago that has its own barista classes, roasting facilities, and a New York City “Training Lab.” Do you think the people in Blue Springs who are donating this money were doing it to help people in Chicago? Doubtful. Yet the national news media are jumping on the story and praising this guy like he just donated both of his kidneys to a pair of albino orphans.

This story reminds me of a practice they use in Petsmart and Petco to get “donations.” After they ring up your order, they ask, “Would you like to donate $1.00 to help homeless animals?” Many grocery stores also set up donation programs like this, but the system is purely voluntary. They have slips of paper at the register you can scan that will add $1, $5 or $10 to your grocery bill, and the money goes to food banks and homeless shelters. But in that case, you just put one of them on the conveyor belt if you feel like being generous. Nobody waves the slips in your face and asks you if you would like to donate $1, $5 or $10 to help starving orphans. The pet stores are more confrontational about it, asking you the question directly. It is the second half of the question that hangs in the air, unspoken. The implied full question is: ”Would you like to donate a dollar to help homeless pets… or are you a cruel, heartless, selfish bastard who can afford to spend $15 on a new chew toy for your precious dog while you allow other dogs to go hungry?”

Now don’t get me wrong — I love animals (some of them are absolutely delicious). I plan on donating to the Humane Society when Jake passes, since that’s where I got him and I think that would be a good way to honor him. But I never donate the dollar at Petsmart because if you’re going to try to coerce a contribution out of me by making me feel guilty about it, I’m not going to donate, plain and simple. In my mind, coerced charity is not charity, and I take a stand on that — partially based on principle, and partially because I simply don’t respond well to guilt trips, as most of my ex-girlfriends would likely confirm. One time at a clothing store, right before I was going to pay, I was asked if I wanted to donate $1.00 to help homeless children. My response: “Nah, screw the kids.”

 When you donate money to a worthwhile cause or help a neighbor because you want to out of the goodness of your heart, that is charity. But when you donate money because you feel compelled to by peer pressure, that is not charity. When you are instructed to donate by signs in the store telling you that it is basically expected of you or by an owner that says it is “abusing the system” if you don’t play along, that is not charity. The “pay it forward” thing might be catchy, but it’s only generating $16 per day, and it’s doing so in an unnecessarily inefficient manner.

My advice to Mr. Bledsoe: just get a tip jar. Let your customers know all the good causes their donations will support. You won’t get the same national coverage, of course. But you’ll probably have more money at the end of the day, and it won’t take as long for your customers to get their drinks.

*And if you know me, you know this is probably what I would do. Actually, if I’m being completely honest, I’d probably just get the free drink and break the chain. It’s not that I’m not charitable. But if this is considered charity, then so is paying my taxes. After all, I put more into the tax system than I take out of it, and my money is used to help other people — ergo, paying my taxes is making a charitable contribution. Yay me.

For the flight to Vancouver last week, my girlfriend bought me the latest copy of Mens Health magazine. There was a lot of good stuff in it, including a few nutrition articles. In addition to a lot of tips about good foods and what not to eat, there was a nice little diet plan. Given your level of exercise during the week and your desired weight, you can easily determine how many calories you should be eating in a day. For me, that’s about 2,600. But in addition to that, it breaks down how many grams of protein, fat and carbs I should be eating.

It’s easy to figure out what you’re supposed to be doing, but keeping track of what you’re actually doing can be difficult. At least, it was until I downloaded a new application for my iPhone called Tap ‘n Track that keeps track of everything. It has a lot of foods already pre-programmed, including popular restaurant meals, and it’s easy to quickly add in something that’s not already on there. It stores your recent meals, so if there’s something you eat all the time, it’s easy to add it. The main feature that I like is that it gives you a current daily summary of the basic nutrition information so you can quickly look at how much protein, fat and carbs you’ve had and figure out where you need to fill in the gaps. Yesterday I was a little light on protein late in the day, so I had a protein shake.

(Update: The newest version of Lose It is, I think, a better calorie-tracking app than Tap ‘n Track. The previous version didn’t allow you to track carbs/protein/fat but now you can. It allows you to create recipes — create a ham sandwich by adding components so that in the future you can just add that one item instead of having to add bread, ham and cheese — and it is a little more visually appealing than Tap ‘n Track. And it’s free.)

I’ve been blessed with a fast metabolism. I remember when I was in junior high poking my dad’s gut and making fun of it and he’d say, “When I was your age, I looked just like you,” implying that my gut was just a matter of time. Now I’m 34, the same age my dad was when I was poking him, and that gut still hasn’t shown up for me. I owe a lot of that to my genetics, because I never really had to think about what I eat. (Thanks, Mom!)

Then I got Tap ‘n Track. I never realized how many calories are in a lot of things I was eating, and I’m not even wasting calories on soda and candy bars like I used to. (I cut out soda about two years ago and cut way back on the alcohol. Now I drink water with almost every meal instead.) I used to eat breakfast, lunch, dinner, and a bedtime snack, and a few little snacks in between. I was thinking that with all the exercise I was doing, I needed more calories — I’ve been trying to gain weight (muscle), not lose it. For the last two days, I’ve had to cut out the bedtime snack because I had already hit my calories for the day. That really woke me up. Now I eat smarter and I eat less, trying to stay at my 2,600 calories and make sure not to have too many carbs. I’m sure I annoy my girlfriend a little with all the calorie- and protein-tracking I’ve been doing for the last few days, but I’m just trying to get an idea of what I normally eat and what I should eat. Once all of that is internalized, I won’t need to track it any more. (I promise!)

If you had asked me a week ago how many calories I took in every day, I would have thought it was around 2,200-2,300. After tracking what I actually eat for the last few days, I realize I was probably taking in about 2,900-3,000.

A lot of states are considering making restaurants put some basic nutritional information on the menus — in some cases it’s calories, and in others it also includes grams of fat. Most fast food restaurants already have brochures you can look at, and a lot of restaurants have the information on their website, but studies have shown that a very tiny percentage of people look at the information in fast food restaurants. (Nobody knows how many people look at the information online.) The newer laws being proposed would make fast food restaurants put the information right up on the big board, and make sit-down restaurants put it right on the menu. If that information were there, you would find that the large french fries at Five Guys weighs in at over 1,400 calories — as much as 37 Oreo cookies. Armed with that knowledge, I think the vast majority of people would order the regular fries instead.

Naturally, fast food restaurants are fighting these laws. As much as I am against most regulation, I think this one would be good — especially considering the health problems caused by obesity. In my ideal scenario, you could eat whatever you want but you’d have to pay for the consequences of those actions. But if we’re going to have Medicare, Medicaid, and some other form of nationalized health care, then we all have a financial interest in obesity being less common – and right now the obesity problem in America is only getting worse. Making restaurants put the calories on the menu would result in people switching what they eat, and then restaurants would reduce their portion sizes to something more reasonable so they could get their calorie count down. The cost of dining out would fall, people would have more disposable income for other things, less food would be wasted, and we’d save money on health care. I think those are all desirable outcomes.

I’m a Libertarian and that means keeping government out of my business as much as possible. I don’t like Big Brother telling me what I can and cannot eat (banning trans-fats in New York, for example). But I am in favor of making restaurants give us this information clearly and visibly so that I can make smarter decisions for myself.

Update 7/27/09: An article from the Wall Street Journal indicates that 9.1% of medical spending is a result of obesity. With more information, it would be easier for people to make simple choices to help prevent this.

I had a great time in Vancouver — it was nice to be out of the country again and see how other people do things. A few things struck me:

1. The prevalence of hybrid cars. I’m not sure if this is a city thing or a Canadian thing, or perhaps it’s because gas was $1.11CAD/liter, which is almost $4USD/gallon at current exchange rates.

2. The lack of fat Canadian people. With all the talk of universal health care or a government option, it is very clear to me that the main reason we in the U.S. spend more on health care than any other country is because most of us eat way too much. In the fattest state in the union, Mississippi, 32.5% of people are obese. But even in the slimmest state in the union, Colorado, 18.9% of people are obese (source). In only 3 of the 50 states did the percentage of obese people decline this year.  Americans are increasingly becoming physically inactive self-indulgent fatties who end up needing drugs and operations because of it, when if everybody ate healthier and exercised, we could cut down much of this. And now that we’re in a recession, people are eating more McDonald’s than ever. Not good…

3. Apparent Canadian indifference in regards to America. We went to a comedy show on Saturday night and nobody said anything about America at all. Sure, there were the obligatory Michael Jackson jokes, but that was about him, not the U.S. I learned there’s apparently a bitter rivalry between people in Vancouver and those in Toronto, or at least the people of Vancouver seems to think so. I guess when you think of your country as the focus of the world, as so many of us do, you expect others to, well, focus on you more. It was kind of a relief that they just want to do their own thing. I wish we ran our foreign policy that way.

P.S. Sunee Dhaliwal, an up-and-coming Canadian comic, was the second act and was better than the headliner. Google him. You’ll laugh. SunDizzle003 is his YouTube channel.

4. Loonies and Toonies (Canadian $1 and $2 coins). The smallest Canadian bill is $5. On the one hand, the coins are cool — it’s nice to have a coin that is actually worth somthing – but in this country we’re so accustomed to thinking of change as being irrelevant that it seems weird to have $2 coins. Now I have to pay attention to change because I could easily have $10 in my pocket and not know it. We saw a few street performers and one of them said at the end of his show that he only wanted paper money. No coins. That was his way of saying he thinks his show is worth no less than $5. I was willing to give him a few bucks, but no way was I going to give him $5 — we came in at the end of his act and that was about all I thought it was worth for what we saw. If he said “give whatever you want, at least a buck or two if you showed up late” and some people give $1 and $2 coins, and people hear coins jingling, they might just give quarters and dimes and suddenly everybody’s a cheapskate. I don’t know if what he did was smart or stupid for having that policy – I just know he didn’t get any of my money because of it. And it felt weird tipping the bellboy or doorman with a coin. It just feels cheap, even though it’s still $2…

5. The lack of American stores. All of my other trips outside the country have been to the Caribbean or Mexico, and there are local stores and shops but always some American ones too. You see local stores, with signs in Spanish, and you understand — of course they have their own stores, they have their own culture and language too. For some reason, I thought that in Canada, since they’re mostly white and speak English, and we have so many multi-national companies, I’d see American companies all over the place. But their Blenz coffee companies were more prevalent than Starbucks. Tim Horton’s restaurants were more prevalent than McDonald’s from what I could tell. (Quick fact check: McDonald’s has 1400 stores in Canada, Horton’s has twice that.) It’s another realization that the U.S. is not the focal point of the world, and I like that. There were lots of 7-11s, which was nice, since there weren’t any in Marquette and aren’t any in St. Cloud. Typing this, I realize I forgot to get a Slurpee while I had the chance. Maybe next time.

As much as I enjoyed my time, it is nice to be back. Grabbing some Qdoba on the way home from the airport last night, I immediately felt home again. It’s nice to be back to my normal routine. I actually missed teaching my summer class, even though I was only gone for a few days. I used to wish I were one of those people who could travel all over the world, and I envied those that do. I still want to go to a few places, but I have no desire to be a global adventurer. As it turns out, I’m happiest just being at home with the best four-legged friend a guy could ask for, a wonderful woman who loves me despite the fact I can’t ever seem to just relax, and a job doing what I love most with fun colleagues that make me feel lucky to show up to work every day.

Here are some quotes from the week that I found interesting. I liked the first one so much I wanted to share it, but thought I should add a few more.

1. “I think we have the best president imaginable in the White House right now, but if we wait on him to solve all our problems, we’re not being America.” Cory Booker, Mayor of Newark (March 8). I love this quote, and I couldn’t agree more, well, at least with the second half of that sentence. It used to be that Americans did not wait for their government to do things for them. Does nobody in government these days remember JFK’s speech? “Ask not your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country.” I was very impressed with Booker on Real Time with Bill Maher – he was level-headed, well-informed and not at all mean-spirited. Pretty much the opposite of Bill Maher.

2. “Nothing is harder in politics than doing something now that costs money in order to gain benefits twenty years from now.” President Barack Obama, (March 5). Amen. I agree with Pres. Obama on this, and wish more politicians took a long-term cost-benefit approach. I also wish more Americans realized the short-run sacrifices that must be made for long-run gains, and voted accordingly.

3. “Never waste a good crisis.” – Senator Hillary Clinton (March 6). Sen. Clinton echoed White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel who said the same thing in November. Hillary’s goal in this speech in Brussels was furthering worldwide efforts on combating climate change. I’m not sure how adding carbon taxes and regulations are going to be easier to get pushed through when the world is in a recession and more people are unemployed and struggling to feed their families and keep their homes, but what do I know? I’m an economist, and we all know Hillary doesn’t care what economists think.

4. “Do you think there’s any truth to what the Republicans are saying, that the Democrats are taking advantage of this crisis to put forth their agenda? Now, that’s how Republicans think because when 9/11 happened, of course, that’s what they did.” –Bill Maher (March 6 – just a few hours after Hillary’s quote above). Uh, yeah, Bill, there is some truth to it. Ask Hillary. I know Bill loves to think that Republicans are evil and Democras are saints, but it’s not just Republicans that are opportunistic. Most politicians are opportunistic. Maher’s quote is similar to one I heard from Judge Andrew Napolitano on the radio earlier this week. I don’t have the exact quote, but his basic point was that Obama is behaving very much like Bush did. Bush used 9/11 to push through the Patriot Act, and Obama is using the current recession to push through his stimulus and budget bills. Both presidents said that the situation was so urgent that they could not waste time with debate, used the urgency of the situation to get a bill passed quickly that otherwise would have met with substantial debate, and implied that anybody who disagreed with them was doing harm to the country.

Update: Here are two more.

5. “If you bound the arms and legs of gold-medal swimmer Michael Phelps, weighed him down with chains, threw him in a pool and he sank, you wouldn’t call it a ‘failure of swimming’. So, when markets have been weighted down by inept and excessive regulation, why call this a ‘failure of capitalism’?”  – Peter Boettke, George Mason University. The same people that say “this is not socialism; we have always had a blend of markets and government” seem to be the same people that now decry capitalism and say that it has failed and now we have to push more towards government intervention. It wasn’t capitalism that failed — it was the specific blend of capitalism and regulation/taxes/subsidies that were in place in the housing and financial markets. People in government are so quick to blame the capitalism portion instead of the regulation/taxes/subsidies portion.

6. “Occasional crises are the cost of the prosperity that entrepreneurial capitalism brings. Try to eliminate risk, and you eliminate entrepreneurship itself.” – more from Peter Boettke, in this editorial. Lambasting bank executives, saying they wanted capitalism on the way up but socialism on the way down, is just fine. The solution is not to destroy capitalism — it is to stop bailing everyone out.

Someone requested a blog from Jake. I wasn’t sure what he would write, so I let him describe his typical day:

“Dave gets up. I’m still sleeping. He gives me breakfast and then goes and works out in the basement. I go down to see what he’s doing. He throws the ball a few times and I run and get it. He doesn’t do that enough. I get bored and go back to bed. He lets me out so I can do my dirty sinful business. He leaves for school. I bark at the garage door for a while, hoping it will convince him to come back in. It doesn’t work.

“I sleep all day until Dave gets home. I hear his car coming down the street and the garage door opens. I grab Big Bunny so I can meet him at the door with it. He loves when I bring him presents when gets home from a hard day at work. He makes dinner for me. Yummers.

“His girlfriend Sam comes over. I bark at her for a while. It’s happy barking. She should feel honored that I like her so much. She doesn’t. I just annoy her. I don’t really care. It’s fun barking at her. I hang out in the living room with them while they watch television.

“Bedtime. I used to have to sleep on the floor, and jump up at around 3am when they’re too tired to notice, and lay at the foot of the bed. Now I’m on the bed before they even get there and they don’t try to kick me off. If they do, I growl at them and they leave me alone. I have them both trained pretty well. I sleep between them, usually on her side. It annoys her. I like annoying her.

“Tomorrow I’ll do the same thing. Life is good.”

One of my favorite columnists is Thomas Sowell, a conservative economist at the Hoover Institute. Every once in a while he throws together a “random thoughts” column – observations that aren’t long enough to warrant an entire column, so he puts a dozen or so of them together. They’re always good. Here’s my lame attempt at the same.

1. Lending money to people who can’t afford it at lower interest rates than their credit histories justified is the major contributing factor in this financial crisis. What is the government’s proposed solution? Let’s loan everybody more money at lower interest rates.

2. I don’t like Elvis and I don’t like gospel music, but for some weird reason I love Elvis singing gospel music. His version of “How Great Thou Art” gives me goosebumps.

3. If my choice is to let corrupt businessmen like Dick Fuld run a bank, or congresspeople like Maxine Waters (who thinks the government should control the banks and the oil companies), I’m going with Tricky Dick every time. At least he has a clue about how a business is actually supposed to be run.

4. One of the most ridiculous commercials I have ever seen is one for Tylenol that ran about a year ago. In it, employees at Tylenol try to convince you to buy their product because they really care about you. They make it for their families too, so you can trust them. One woman even says, “I put love into this product.” Let me get this straight: I’m supposed to buy Tylenol because she puts love into it, even though it costs about 50% more than the Walgreens brand that is chemically identical? As my college roommate Jay used to say, “Oh, that’s rich.”

5. My favorite memory from childhood is coming home after school on a rainy day, sitting on the couch in front of the fireplace with my mom, eating Twinkies and drinking hot chocolate.

6. Thinking is not something that just automatically happens — it is a learned trait. I have a friend with a 3-year-old son. When they are in the car and the boy asks his father why something happened, instead of providing an answer immediately, his father asks him, “Why do you think?” That boy is going to be very smart when he grows up.

7. My favorite television show that nobody else I know seems to know about: The Unit. This season’s premiere was one of the best hours of television I have ever seen in my life. David Mamet’s writing is occasionally too clever by half, when you pause for a second and realize that nobody in real life would ever talk like that except perhaps David Mamet himself. But the rest of the time the show is amazing.

8. My breakfast these days has been a shake that I saw B.J. Penn make during the UFC Primetime episodes leading up to his fight with GSP. Put one small banana, 1/2 cup of instant oats and 1/2 cup of vanilla protein powder in a blender and add about 10 ounces of water. Blend on high until smooth. It tastes very much like a banana milkshake. It’s quick, nutritious, and very inexpensive.

9. The only thing I regret about my college experience is that I did not take a semester abroad. Every person I know that did had an unforgettable experience.

10. My two favorite books ever are Pillars of the Earth by Ken Follett and Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand. The first is a romantic vision of a world centuries ago where, through hard work, a man creates an amazing life for himself and his family for generations to come. The second is the exact opposite: a bleak vision of a world thrown to the brink of destruction because politicians do things because they “feel good” and people soon realize that productive effort is not rewarded, so most simply stop trying. I used to think that the world depicted in Atlas Shrugged would never happen, but now I’m not so sure…

P.S. If you clicked on the Sowell link and enjoyed his writing, you’ll probably like Walter Williams too.

Here’s my take on the octuplet mom. It’s actually not about her as much as it is about how a woman should decide how many embryos to have implanted. Now, I don’t know the science enough to know exactly how much the probability of having one viable embryo increases when the doctor implants, say, 3 embryos instead of 2. If I did, I could do some hard numbers and actually determine the optimal number of embryos given a family’s desire for a specific number of children and their financial resources. What I do know is that the reason people give for implanting a few extra embryos is this: IVF procedures are expensive, and they don’t want to have to pay that cost again if the woman does not become pregnant.

But is it really cost-effective to add more embryos instead of possibly having to do another IVF cycle? Time reports that the cost is approximately $12,000 per cycle. Meanwhile, the average cost of raising a child to the age of 18 is about $320,000. If you ideally want one child and end up with two because you added a few extra embryos, your quest to save $12,000 by not having to have the procedure again has just cost you 26 times more money. True, there are some discount factors here (since the $320,000 is paid out over the span of 18 years), but at a decent interest rate of 5%, you’d have to put over $110,000 in the bank today to get that $320,000. (I know this isn’t a perfect analysis, but since I don’t have the data on the probability of an embryo implanted being viable, it’s not worth going through it.) So while implanting another embryo may increase the odds of having the amount of children you want, if it increases the odds of having one extra child you may not be able to afford by more than 10%, it’s not a smart thing to do.

Here’s my brilliant market solution: IVF insurance. Couples undergoing IVF treatment pay for insurance so that in the event they get too many children, they get annual payments that go towards the cost of raising the child. Insurance companies could get the information to determine the odds of having X number of children when Y embryos are implanted. But given that these couples tend to throw in extra embryos because they don’t want to pay $12,000 in another few months, I’m not sure they’d be willing to pay for the insurance.

Without IVF insurance, here is this economist’s suggestion: determine how many children you want, then determine how many children you can afford — and don’t implant more embryos than children you can afford. If you’re saying, “Duh!” you’re not alone. It seems pretty common sense to me. But judging by the case of Nadya Suleman, apparently common sense is not as common as one might hope.

P.S.  The average number of embryos transferred per cycle in 2005 was 2.4, down from 3.9 ten years before. As our science gets better, we don’t have to put all those eggs in one basket.

I finally had a chance to watch the series premiere of Trust Me this weekend. My girlfriend and I both agreed that if we never saw another episode of it, we wouldn’t feel like we were missing out on anything. Yet we both want to watch another one to see if it gets better. It certainly has the potential, with a great cast that seems to play off each other well. But as a comedy/drama, it doesn’t seem to know which it is and doesn’t do either as well as it should. I’ll give it two more episodes to see if it can find its identity.

What I will remember most is a funeral scene that really made me think. A total jackass of a man died during the episode and at his funeral everyone, struggling to find something good to say about him, just talked about how he was “inspirational.” It made me think about a story I read a while ago about a man who wrote his own obituary when he was around 30 years old. He set out this great life for himself, about his family, his accomplishments, etc. He used that obituary as a challenge to himself to do all the things he wanted to do and to be the man that he thought he could and should be. It made me think about how people will remember me and what I would want them to say about me at my funeral. And while I don’t think I have anything to be ashamed of, I’m still not doing my best to be the man I can be and to be remembered in the way I would hope. Everyone can use a wake-up call every once in a while, and I think I had mine. So I challenge you to think about how you want to be remembered, and to do your best each day to live up to that ideal.

P.S. I talked to my mom tonight and she said that while she likes reading my blog, she didn’t like how I came off in the piece I did on my jury duty experience. It was a little too boastful for her taste. I guess it’s hard to talk about how being smart got you kicked off a jury with all the other smart people without sounding vain. Point taken, Mom. I guess that’s the first place for me to start on that obituary…

If you’ve ever taken a class with me, you know that I have had Sirius satellite radio for years and I love it. I can’t go back to terrestrial radio. I’m glad Sirius and XM merged so that the industry is more viable long-run, and I’m glad that they agreed to freeze prices for a few years so that their current customers don’t get screwed. I don’t listen to regular radio any more, only when my girlfriend borrows my Sirius for a road trip. I actually don’t even listen to music that much any more. In the car, I’m listening to either Howard Stern, Colin Cowherd, or Andrew Wilkow. But at work, I can’t have talk radio — too distracting. I’ve been listening to more music in the office lately (that’s why my door is closed, not because I don’t want students to bother me) because of two relatively new music sources. I like them so much I thought I’d share them with you. 

Simplify (www.simplifymedia.com). Free download, also available for the iPhone. You install the program on your home computer and create an account. It asks you what music files you want to share — I share my iTunes folder, since that’s where all my music is. You can add up to 30 people as friends. Your friends can listen to your music through iTunes or WinAmp, and you can listen to your music on a different computer. You just have to have your computer on and connected to the internet. While I’m at work, I have access to all my music at home on my desktop, as well as any of my friends’ music. With just me and my department chair, I’ve got access to over 4,000 songs. I need more friends with big music collections. (James, that means you.) Feel free to add me. My Simplify profile name is, of course, profswitzer.

Pandora (www.pandora.com). Nothing to download — it plays in your web browser. Available for the iPhone also. They have some pre-loaded radio stations in a variety of genres that are pretty good. But without question the best part about it is the ability to create your own radio stations. Create an account and log in — it remembers you in the future. Type in an artist that you like, or even just a song, and it creates a radio station filled with songs that it thinks you will like. You can add more artists to your station to increase the variety. If you hear a song you don’t like, give it a thumbs down and you’ll never hear it again on that station. If you hear one you like, they’ll increase the frequency with which it plays on that station. It’s a great way to be introduced to new artists (great for someone like me who doesn’t listen to much new music). You can even share music stations with friends — haven’t done it yet, but it sounds cool.

If you have an iPhone, you can use both of these and never have to take up memory space with music files. And it also means that whenever and wherever I am driving, I have access to my music. I’ll probably be listening to Howard anyway, but it’s nice to have options.