The first part of this problem should have been fixed by the stimulus bill, but unfortunately, the places that needed the most work rarely had any shovel-ready projects of the sort that the stimulus was designed to pay for. Many of these places are simply too poor, and didn't expect any money before the stimulus was announced, so the environmental impact studies and engineering designs that have to take place before any actual construction simply weren't done in time to benefit from the money once it was available.

There is still a large amount of stimulus money that hasn't been spent. I think we need to change the guidelines of the stimulus in order to send money to localities that agree to fast-track the process of converting a decrepit road, bridge, tunnel, water treatment plant etc. into a "shovel-ready project". Even so, it means that the jobs to actually do that work won't materialize for a year or more, but I don't see this as a bad thing.

The crews working on projects right now can count on a second wave of jobs starting up right around the time the ones they're working on now begin winding down. With the current stimulus bill, they're all just praying that the economy will recover enough that there will be someone to pay for their work once their projects are finished. More important to the rest of us, the infrastructure with the most desperate needs for repairs might actually get it.

The other problem is more nuanced. There are jobs out there that our workforce simply isn't prepared to do. We have a critical shortage of pharmacists, nurses, doctors, teachers, engineers and other positions that require lots of training. But we can meet this challenge by providing companies with tax credits to put recent college graduates through the extra training that they need in order to fill those positions, as well as providing extended unemployment benefits and low-interest loans for unemployed people to go back to school.

In most states, people who lose their jobs and go back to school lose their unemployment benefits, making it very hard for people to be re-trained into the careers that are still hiring even in this economy. And college graduates who aren't equipped to immediately do a job that requires specialized training and experience simply can't get hired into anything other than the sorts of jobs that require no training. We're at risk of these well-educated and potentially valuable employees losing any benefit from their undergraduate training through lack of use. Not many people can still do calculus after 4 years of working retail.

To pay for it, I think we need to redefine the TARP bill. Use the money paid back from banks to fund federal education loans, and use the profit from repaid TARP loans to provide tax credits to companies that hire and train college graduates. I don't think we can overstate what a terrible waste it would be for these people, who have taken on massive personal debt in order to get some of the training they need, to see their training languish through years of disuse while the economy slowly recovers. Any money we spend on helping these people get into the highly specialized jobs we desperately need people to do (as opposed to simply importing highly trained people from overseas) is going to come back to us ten-fold over the course of their working lives.

The sum was staggering, but that was a point in their favor. Once people start stringing phenomenal-sounding numbers together, be it hundreds of millions or hundreds of billions, it all starts sounding the same. So yes, the billions sent to Goldman Sachs, Societe Generale, and assorted smaller players would surely make the news, but if they could manufacture a sufficiently noisy scandal, they figured they could redirect public rage against those whose only crime was asking the government to stop their firm from going out of business. The distraction was so brilliantly executed, and the media so willing to lap up every tidbit of mock outrage, that all public discussion of those irrevocably squandered billions now seems like so much silence.

Does no one else realize what happened? Banks who decided to make risky loans, covered by these exotic policies, absolutely should have been forced to face at least some of the consequences of those loans. We didn't bail out AIG so much as we bailed out these banks whose fast and loose credit policies inflated the housing bubble and wrecked the global economy.

Obama was never outraged by bonuses. If he were, he could have said so last month back when Treasury was first alerted to the fact that they were about to be paid. But if the whole distraction engine hadn't gone into high-gear when it did, we'd all still be talking about how incredibly stupid our government officials were (and former candidate Obama prominently among them) to spend so much money to prop up AIG, without so much as an assurance from the assorted policy-holders that they'd be willing to accept a reduction in their payouts. Prior to the bailout, we had the leverage. The insured were facing the risk of getting almost nothing if AIG were simply allowed to collapse. For some reason, we discarded that leverage in our rush to fill the ultimate money pit.

It's an old saw that when the government has to bail out an institution for whatever reason, the investors and creditors are forced to take a major hit, and the taxpayers are always the first to be repaid once the business returns to profitability. Somehow I don't imagine that many of those billions will ever be recovered, and I don't think 80% of AIG is much compensation.

So why didn't it happen this time? I don't know anything for certain, but I don't believe it's mere coincidence that one of the largest holders of credit-default swaps was Goldman Sachs, and that prior to becoming Treasury Secretary, Hank Paulson was its CEO. He had to know how much his old firm was counting on those policies paying off, and if you think that wasn't an ever-present thought in his head as he was negotiating the original AIG bailout, then I've got a sweet deal on a bridge just for you.

But while I'm mad as heck over finding out where the money went, I'm angrier over the crucifixion going on over those bonuses. A few key people came up with the idea for these exotic policies that ultimately tanked the entire capital position of the world's largest insurer. For them, I have no sympathy. But they stopped selling them in 2006. The outrage over those key executives' compensation is already 3 years out of date.

So who got the bonuses this year? Most of them are just regular employees. Some of them might have had a hand drawing up those credit default swaps a few years ago, but they were just doing their jobs. And even the executives who were present when AIG reported that $60 billion loss in the fourth quarter aren't all responsible. They were simply at the helm when the federal government used their company as a conduit for passing money to assorted financial institutions.

In my book, $165 million dollars is so much less than $180 billion that I simply cannot fathom why people are even paying attention to it. Be mad, but not at the people who got paid for doing their jobs. Be mad at the ones who pissed away a trillion dollars (and counting) in Wall St bailouts.

I had two goals in mind here when I wrote them.

First, I wanted to cover my own ass. If I ever find myself in a situation where I might have to either censor or delete one of the blogs or blog feeds, I want to make sure I can point to the TOS and say "this is where you screwed up". When you sit down and really think about it, there's a LOT of stuff someone can do that would fall under the heading of "BAD THINGS". As much as I hope to never be in a situation where I need to delete someone's blog, I want to be covered if it happens.

The second goal was to try and make it readable by non-lawyers, and even somewhat pleasant to read. I don't think I put in any outright jokes (though the "Good Idea / Bad Idea" bits come close in a couple spots), but I tried to keep the tone light and avoid droning.

So, I've now crafted a document which must be both a legally-binding agreement and a light-hearted getting to know you. I've seen this done before. I know it's possible. I'm also pretty sure that there are at least a few gaping legal holes that could come back to bite me, and probably a few places where I give off a bad impression to those who don't know me and my way of writing.

If anyone's willing to point out the spinach in my digital document's teeth, just use the comment section to tell me and I'll try to fix it.

http://harrisonburgblogs.com/terms-of-service/

Thanks!

Well I do. To your run-of-the-mill economist, a 10% chance at $100 is worth $10. Prediction markets are all over the place that work on the exact same principle. I decided that since the odds are printed right there on the ticket, there ought to be a way to figure out what that value really is.

Where the math gets tricky is when you add in the possibility of splitting a jackpot. If yours was the only ticket, and the jackpot (after taxes) was 100 million dollars, and the odds of winning were 1:100,000,000 then the ticket would be worth one dollar, easy. But what if there are 100 million other tickets out there? All of a sudden, you're in a position where, even if you hit that one in 100 million winning ticket, you've only got a roughly 32% chance of keeping all the money to yourself. Obviously the ticket is no longer worth one dollar, but it's still worth something.

The formula I came up with goes something like this:

The probability 'a' that any jackpot will be won unshared is

where 'P' is the probability of winning the lotto in the first place and 'k' is the number of total tickets in play.

Now knowing a, we can find the value of 'x' where x is the value conferred on a single ticket based solely on the size of the jackpot at stake and the number of tickets in play:

again, 'k' represents the number of tickets, 'P' the probability that any single ticket will match the winning numbers, 'J' is the value of the jackpot (after taxes, of course).

Now, I was a little annoyed with this solution, because what I really wanted was a direct formula rather than a summation, but since the corresponding integral also resulted in a summation, I'll just have to live with it. However, I don't have to actually sum all the way to k. After all, how likely is it that every single ticket purchased is going to match the winning numbers? Low enough if it were truly random, but for all the people who buy multiple tickets, they certainly won't play all the same numbers. I find that when putting in real-world values, going beyond n=10 winning tickets is just being silly.

Of course, this equation leads to some head-scratching, because it's hard to apply as-is. You might know the cash value of the jackpot, but you probably don't know how many tickets are in play. Luckily, computers can do some amazing sh*t. There are 2 major multi-state drawing-type lotteries in the US - Mega Millions and Powerball. I can't do much with Powerball because they don't keep an online archive of past winners, but Mega Millions does.

Each of the drawing history pages shows the number of winning tickets at every prize level. I know that the odds of winning any prize in Mega Millions is about 1 in 40. Given that, plus knowing the total number of winners each week, I can create a scatter plot using Excel to see the correlation between the advertised jackpot and the number of tickets sold for that drawing.

I discovered an interesting fact while plotting these numbers - lottery ticket sales are trending up. The same jackpot today will tend to sell more tickets than it would a year or two ago. However, when I only plot data points that are less than 18 months old, I can spit out a classic quadratic function with an R-value of .9955 - way more precise than I had to dared to hope for.

Here it is:

In this case, k is the number of lottery tickets in millions, and J is the advertised jackpot in millions. By looking at it, you can see that no matter what the advertised jackpot, Mega Millions can count on selling at least 17 million tickets.

Now, a couple things to notice. This equation is only good with real-world values up to about 390 million, since that was the highest jackpot ever recorded, as well as my highest data point. I imagine at some point the graph would flatten out, because no matter how high the jackpot gets, there has to be a limit to how much people can spend on lottery tickets. Where exactly the equation would deviate from real values I'm not sure, but don't imagine you can go plugging in a 1 billion dollar jackpot and expect you can trust the answer it spits out. The second thing to keep in mind is that, as I mentioned before, the equation changes over time. The values from 2005 are all way too low to plot on this curve, just as I imagine the values in 2011 could be well off too. Spending habits change, and they're reflected here. I don't know if people will still reference this blog entry five, ten or twenty years from now, but if they do, they need to recreate the equation based on fresh data.

Ok, ok, so that's all well and good, but do you really expect me to do all this math just to figure out the value of a stinking one dollar ticket?

Of course not. All these functions can easily be plugged into a simple computer program, and that's exactly what I've done for you. In addition to the main jackpot, you can add in the lesser prizes. After all, a 1:50 chance of winning $2 is worth 4 cents. That math is pretty easy, since it isn't affected by the number of tickets in play (except in California for some reason).

My solution was to build an ajax-powered calculator. Go check it out on my PHP portfolio blog. To make it cooler, it will automatically fill in the information for the Powerball and Mega Millions lotteries for you. If you just click the link to set it up for either drawing, all the odds and prizes will show up, along with the current jackpot's cash value. If you click the one for Mega Millions, it'll also give you the approximate number of tickets in play. Just set it up and hit "calculate" to immediately discover the value of one random lottery ticket.

Check out the calculator here: http://hiremasonwolf.com/calculating-the-value-of-a-single-lottery-ticket/58

Have fun, but don't expect to ever want to play the lottery again!

But like most college towns, it has a lively and hip feel to the place, lots of friendly people, and lots and lots of tech-savvy students. The biggest industry, I believe, is actually apartment rentals, again due to all those students. I think the second biggest is turkeys (random trivia: Rockingham county, home of Harrisonburg, is the world's turkey capital).

So to keep things short, let's just say I've come to like the place, and I'd like to blog on a Harrisonburg-themed site. I bought the domain harrisonburgblogs.com and built a Wordpress Multi-User (MU) site. I'm not open for general public signups yet, but the homepage is pretty much finished, so you can get a good idea how the site will work if you care to visit.

If I've gotten you to read this far, please bare with me just a little further. At this nascent stage, I would be grateful for any comments or criticisms regarding my new site. Please check it out and then use the comments section to tell me what you think.

I still love Chattanooga and think of my old friends there fondly, but it's time to move on. I view Chattablogs as one of the greatest things that ever happened to the Chattanooga online community, and now I want to give the same gift to the good people of Harrisonburg. I wonder how they'll respond?

If he actually spends it, what is he most likely to buy? In all likelihood, it'll be something made in China or some other country where we already have massive trade imbalances. So for a very limited gain for retailers, along with a more modest gain for banks, we're going to have to borrow $150 billion from whoever is still willing to lend us money.

Somehow, Washington seems to think this is massively clever.

Ok, so that's my rant - now here's my idea.

In the 1930's, our economy slid into a severe depression initiated by a stock market crash. Again, our banks had a huge number of outstanding loans that couldn't be repaid (back then it was loans to other countries rather than mortgages - but the net effect for American banks was the same), and the entire country was suffering as credit dried up and businesses failed. Ultimately, the reason an economy stays in recession is unemployment, and the solution to a recession must include high employment as a key component.

So, how did we get out of that depression? There are some who would say it was World War II, but that's not actually true. The depression ended two years before the war started, and the chief reason was the massive public works projects that the government funded. These projects built roads, bridges, dams, power stations and most of our electric grid. Not only did the projects create good high-paying jobs that led to people being able to spend money and jump-start the economy, but we're still enjoying the fruits of those investments today.

Isn't that the way things ought to work? If we're going to borrow on behalf of our future generations, shouldn't they get something out of it?

Today we've got a deteriorating infrastructure that the Army Corps of Engineers has estimated needs at least 1 Trillion dollars' worth of repairs. Rather than a short-sighted "shot in the arm" approach that benefits Wall Street more than Main Street, and which we have to borrow to fund, I think we should take a page from FDR's playbook. Let's embark on an 8-year plan to rebuild our roads, bridges, and other aspects of our nation's infrastructure. If we were spending $150 billion per year to fix these things, it would provide nearly a million good, steady jobs that, quite frankly we really need done anyway. The unemployment rate would plummet, businesses would still get a boost from the extra cash infused into the economy, and if we have to borrow from our grandkids anyway, at least we could point to something and say, "See? That's what you got out of the deal".

I was quite proud of my creation actually. Certainly at more than 5 feet, it towered over anything I could have built at age 10. And while I was working on it, I really thought it looked great. But then I happened to look back at it from my porch, where the angle happened to make all the difference.

Well, it provided a cute inspiration for a blog post, but I think my wife wants me to knock it down. Personally, I've become strangely proud of it. I mean, it is more than 5 feet tall.

Happy new 100,000,000 seconds everyone!

-------------------------------

Bruce Caldwell has revealed a very interesting point about the way Ron Paul's message has been aggressively twisted by competing GOP candidates - particularly Rudolph Giuliani - and by some members of the media - especially at Fox News. He writes that Ron Paul blaming the U.S. for 9/11 is equivalent to blaming a beautiful woman who is raped, or a rich man who gets robbed and killed. He says it is a dangerous view to believe that our merely living causes terrorism. He is absolutely correct in that sentiment, and also absolutely wrong to think that Ron Paul holds this position.

Ron Paul subscribes to a well-established theory called "blowback". Essentially, our actions overseas can have unintended consequences that can return to haunt us and our interests. This is both straightforward and logical.

To take any action in the internal affairs of another country we must encroach on that country's sovereignty. This is not always a terrible thing, but it is a thing which Ron Paul believes, as do I, that the United States does far too lightly, as if a country's right to run its own affairs is some little thing that we should be allowed to disregard any time it inconveniences us.

I invite Mr Caldwell to consider how we would be upset if, say, Rossville became the new North American base of operations for the Chinese military. Rightly or not, we would see it as an attack on our sovereignty. How much more would we be upset if another country's military overthrew our government and installed one it considered more agreeable! It takes no great leap of deduction to see that when we take these sorts of actions around the world we will inevitably create some enemies.

What I consider preposterous every time I hear a politician say it, and which Mr Caldwell himself parrots even after his analogies, is to think that the terrorists hate us because we are free. Which makes more sense, to think that we incite hatred because we are free, or because we meddle in the affairs of other countries?

I could try to come up with a better metaphor than the ones he used, but what would be the point? To think that our freedom is somehow to blame for terrorism is about as sensible as blaming a beautiful woman for being raped, or a rich man for being killed. In fact, it is less sensible, as even in those two analogies, you can at least picture how the crimes might be motivated by the unfortunate victims. With the "freedom incites terrorism" hypothesis one can not.

I support Ron Paul because he is the first serious candidate I've heard who thinks we ought to mind our own business. Let's quit spending trillions of increasingly devalued dollars on war and on trying to maintain our Cold War empire, and instead start simply talking to other countries, trading with them, and leaving them to run their own affairs.

Dr Paul isn't saying we should simply quit sharing our culture with the world, or that we should cease to involve ourselves on the world stage, just that we shouldn't use our military to impose our will nor try to tell other countries how to run their own affairs. The world isn't going to fall apart because we stopped trying to run it, and the terrorists won't keep finding a steady supply of eager recruits simply because we're free.

Mason Wolf,
New Market, VA

My advice from yesterday was to contact your local cable outlet and ask them to drop FNC from their available channels, on the basis that Fox is acting against the public interest. Also, I recommended contacting the fcc through fccinfo@fcc.gov and telling them that Fox News is violating section 315 of the Federal Communication Act (a.k.a. the "equal time rules"). They've manufactured this forum with the NH GOP as the puppet-figure they claim is sponsoring it, but Fox is the one sending out the invitations. It's a pretty shameful attempt to skirt the equal time rules by claiming they're just covering someone else's event.

Last of all I suggested contacting comments@foxnews.com to inform them of the actions you've taken. There's no need to be rude, as you're merely informing them of the fact that they've got 1 new complaint registered with the FCC, and 1 more request to a local broadcaster to drop them.

I really hope this triggers a reversal by FNC, so they either drop the forum altogether or invite Dr Paul to attend.

Seems some folks didn't do their fact-checking before sending the story out over AP newswire. The debate was cancelled a month ago because of an ABC news debate happening instead on January 5th (where Dr Paul will be attending along with the rest). Worse, Ron Paul's group heard about this the same way the rest of us did, and tried several times, unsuccessfully to contact Fox News about it. Since it had already started blazing through the blogosphere, they went ahead and sent out their own press release, further fanning the flames.

Well, anyway, I've taken down my own article, and hopefully a few other bloggers will do the same as the truth finally catches up to the rumor.

I had no idea a false news story could spread so quickly like this! And here I was a part of it! Sheesh!

1 - http://www.dehp.net/candidate/ [Kucinich, Gravel, Paul and Obama (tie), Romney* on bottom] (this one is out of date - Fred Thompson* not on it)

2 - http://www.vajoe.com/candidate_calculator.html [Gravel, Paul, Kucinich, Fred Thompson* on bottom]

3 - http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/Vote2008/page?id=3623346 [Gravel, Paul, Kucinich]

I find the results interesting because they're all so similar despite the tests being all very different from each other. And I also know that Paul would have scored higher on all three had there been questions about shoring up the value of our currency and balancing the federal budget.

It kinda makes me wish my views were held by more electable candidates, but it's pretty easy to see why I'm a Paul supporter.

So when did I become such a radical liberal anyway? I always thought I was a conservative, but I do think that it's silly to believe America is the only industrialized country in the world that can't figure out universal health care (alas, definitely NOT a Ron Paul position). That's a new position for me, but as far as I can tell nothing else has changed. Well, actually that's not entirely true. Bush sort of convinced me that a professed faith in Jesus, while nice to see, really doesn't qualify someone to lead the nation. I guess that's changed too in the past 7 years.

Man I wish the Republican party would find it's way back to fiscal responsibility, non-interventionism and a commitment to individual liberty. When those stopped being conservative values, I guess I stopped being a conservative.

* Would normally link to appropriate sites in posts like this, but I see no need to improve their sites' PR if I personally dislike their policies.

We Believe . . .

That the free enterprise system is the most productive supplier of human needs and economic justice

That all individuals are entitled to equal rights, justice, and opportunities and should assume their responsibilities as citizens in a free society

That fiscal responsibility and budgetary restraints must be exercised at all levels of government

That the Federal Government must preserve individual liberty by observing constitutional limitations

That peace is best preserved through a strong national defense

That faith in God, as recognized by our Founding Fathers, is essential to the moral fibre of the Nation

---------------
Should it be any wonder that Ron Paul, the only Republican candidate for President to espouse each and every one of these views ended up winning the Virginia State GOP straw poll?

Read more here: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20071221/ap_on_re_us/giuliani_secrecy

Actually, I suspect the total may be even higher than that. Apparently, their servers went down briefly close to midnight, and were unable to process credit card payments for several minutes. When they came back up, about 100,000 got added to the totals almost immediately. As a result, the campaign likely brought in about 6.45 million, but only 6.35 million was actually showing on the meter at midnight. If that's the case, then it's simply a fluke of the internet that Briann won my contest instead of Lou P, but sometimes that's just the way things work out. Either way, I'd like to see an official statement from the campaign once they figure it all out themselves. Must've been a fun 24 hours for that group, don't you think?