So, since they've been required to actually pay what they promised their employees, unlike a lot of other pensions these days, they now can't make money. Huh. That doesn't strike me as the model of success we should be pushing for.

It might be a good investment to allow/encourage the post office to create a network of state issued email addresses, or whatever other scheme of modernization we might come up with. That's the kind of risky change that large bureaucratic organizations with massive legacy labor costs typically aren't good at. I'm all for letting them experiment. I'm not for throwing money at or trying to force a revival an archaic model of 6-day-a-week service for fewer and fewer first class mail and more and more direct marketing.

Making money on junk mail! That's hardly the romantic vision of an efficient, broad reaching government agency that binds us all together that people weep over now that the Post Office is in trouble. Sure, the post office could radically remake itself, as a poster downthread suggested. The old way of doing things 6 days a week, universal letter service, while employing hundreds of thousands of low skill workers is dead. We can save the brand, but not the old system.

It's true that the Post Office is required to pre-fund its pensions in a burdensome way. That doesn't change the fact that their current setup is not economic. First class mail is declining in usage, but direct marketing through the mail has consistently, and for a long time, increased as a source of revenue. Face it, letters have diminished in importance. People are weeping over a shell of a former institution. The Post Office is just chasing the advertising dollars like everyone else seems to be.

Yeah, probably not, at least not in any predictable way. There are a million things that popular opinion and unrest within China make more likely to be reformed: the Hukou system, land distribution, criminal justice, etc. Single party rule and stringent censorship just don't motivate the Chinese like westerners constantly tell them that it should. I'm of the opinion all of this is a tremendous waste, but I don't expect any majority of the Chinese public to agree with me any time soon.

Ratcheting up Internet restrictions is the norm during times like this. Expect VPN's in-country to also be strangely slower.

What's interesting to me are the new unconventional methods of restraint China always seems to be a pioneer in. It seems protesters throwing leaflets out of taxi cabs is a growing fear, so taxis are restricted in being able to travel around Tiananmen and will their windows locked, with some having control handles removed altogether.

I was present in China during the Arab Spring, when it was feared protest would spread. Any mention of a meetup place for protesters would all of a sudden shoot up the priority list for construction repairs. Many areas were cordoned off with armadas of street sweet sweepers.

Paranoia is an extremely inefficient use of ingenuity.

The interesting thing about this whole episode is that, despite no obvious interventions by the state, the market itself failed to raise prices to clear the market.

In shortages like this, the logistics of gasoline make it difficult to really up capacity even by significant price raises. The gasoline market is highly segmented. It's not very easy to divert supplies from elsewhere and ship gasoline in the quantities needed, unlike with things like food and water.

What "price gouging" can do, however, is eliminate hoarding and frivolous use. $8.00 a gallon really makes you think twice whether you need that generator running 24 hours a day. That can help to calm down the shortage.

The puzzling thing is that gas stations seem to be much to afraid of being seen reaping a windfall profit by raising prices. So instead, we get lines miles long, essentially a gasoline lottery.

I'm not sure that's exactly knowable. Sure, the numbers are way better than contradictory pundit guts, but for instance, we had no way of knowing if a "Bradley Effect" would have been in play. Response rates for polling firms consistently came in below 10%. Polling is getting harder and harder in an age where fewer people have landlines and polling cell phones is restricted. As of now, state polls are good guides. They will be right up until they aren't, and then the science will change.

I'm not saying that the probability of systematic error is large, just unknowable. It was a perfectly reasonable and scientific position for a Republican to say "Romney's chances are equal to the probability of error in the polls, and I hope that probability is large."

Romney's own internal numbers had Obama up by 5 in Ohio the weekend before the election even.

Exactly. Neither Nate nor any of the many other poll aggregators (Sam Wang, Drew Linzer, etc.) have found any way to conquer the inherit unpredictability of political events far into the future. Read Daniel Kahnemann. Experts, no matter how "scientific" their methods are consistently wrong and worse at predicting politics far into the future than the proverbial dart throwing monkey.

We care about Nate Silver and people that do what he does for two reasons: 1) They definitively point out that most pundits are full of crap and unwilling to realize that polling, not their guts, describe what's happening in the short run in the most accurate way currently possible. 2) For partisan reasons. Democrats love Silver because his numbers provided a security blanket to liberals afraid for Obama. To be fair, had the election turned out different and Nate's numbers called it for Romney, Republicans would be lionizing him as well, and we'd all be mocking whatever the Democratic version of "Unskewed Polls" had been. That popular media figures skew left really helps Silver's celebrity this time around.

I'm no geologist, but I have learned a bit of stats.

A twenty-five-fold increase, that excludes the largest outlying event, in the number of earthquakes would seem to be statistically significant of something.

Putting aside the possible implication that you think science should censor politically unsavory findings and renege on its mission, this won't be like other warnings from scientists. Climate is a big impersonal force that's hard to grasp. It unfolds slowly and is hard to really "experience" first hand. A tripling of the number of earthquakes in the midwest is, shall we say, slightly more visceral.

I'm generally in favor exploring geo-engineering. Since, does anyone really expect to get China and India(the greatest sources of future emissions) to postpone carbon intensive growth through treaties? Inducing earthquakes seems much more dangerous than any scheme that involves adding reflective particles to the atmosphere. Engineering the atmosphere, as tough and uncertain as that is, is made easier by the fact that gases introduced to the upper atmosphere will fade in effect on a reasonable time scale and the faucet can be turned at off at any time. Fracturing the crust is much more permanent. It could be earthquakes now, but magma popping up in the middle of Cleveland later. There's no way to put the rock back together.

This seems like a pretty interesting game, fit for nerd parties and the like. Solving territorial or resource disputes? Not so much. You and your friends are basically equal. State actors, ethnic groups, etc. tend not to be perfectly equal. For example, I doubt the Sunni insurgency in Iraq would have submitted to such an auction. The same goes for the actors in the South China Sea, Israel Palestine, really any territorial dispute of note.

I could see something like this being useful for divvying things like mineral resources that crop in international waters, like all those manganese nodes on the ocean floor.