NFL is considering a rule that would prevent the Patriots from throwing passes longer than five yards

once they gain a four-touchdown lead.

If the opposing team makes it a three-score game, the Patriots would be allowed to file an appeal for "more creative routes," but receivers Randy Moss and Wes Welker are no longer allowed to be on the field together in the second half.

League officials hope the new rule, dubbed "The Other Brady Bill," will provide more acceptable final scores, and improve the self-esteem of players across the league.

according to Matt Mosley.

UPDATE: Rich Tandler recounts episodes when the Redskins ran up the score.

The challenges to scoring beauty and healthcare

by Glen Whitman:

... John scores each woman’s looks on a scale from 0 to 10. Then he interacts with each woman (from behind a screen, if you insist) and scores each woman’s personality on a scale from 0 to 10.

The scores John gives for looks range all over the map, from 0 to 10, while the scores he gives for personality are bunched together in the 6 to 8 range.

To calculate composite scores, the World Mating Association (WMA) decides to rescale the personality scores. It calculates each woman’s personality score as follows: personality = 10 x (raw score – 6) / (8 – 6). In other words, it measures a woman’s score as the percentage of the distance between the lowest-scoring and highest-scoring women. A woman John gave a 7 would be rescaled to a 5, because she’s halfway between 6 and 8. A woman he gave a 6 would now be a 0, and a woman he gave an 8 would now be a 10.

Does this method make sense? Well, let’s see. Take two women, Alma and Betsy. Alma got a 9 on looks and a 6 (now rescaled to 0) on personality. Betsy got a 6 on looks and a 7 (now rescaled to 5) on personality. So Alma’s and Betsy’s composite scores are 4.5 and 5.5 respectively.

“But wait a minute,” John objects. “I said looks and personality were equally important to me. Alma’s three whole points better looking than Betsy. And while her personality is not quite as nice, it’s not that different. I thought they were both nice enough. All things considered, I’d give Alma a 7.5 and Betsy a 6.5. What I’m trying to say, I like Alma better!”

The problem, obviously, is the rescaling. John said personality matters just as much as looks to him – but fortunately for him, he likes most women’s personalities. The WMA’s approach exaggerated the significance of personality to John by treating women whose personalities he liked somewhat (6’s) as women he didn’t like at all, and women whose personalities he liked a lot (8’s) as women he thought were flawless.

The punchline is that the method I’ve just described is the method the World Health Organization (WHO) used to make its composite scores of healthcare system performance. These are the scores used to create the widely-cited rankings of nations’ healthcare systems.

UPDATE: Don Surber holds up Giuliani's prostate as anecdotal evidence (no picture following, and Surber is holding it up figuratively).

Mankiw examines Krugman

and detects traces of economic schizophrenia.

I'm waiting for evidence that aliens kidnapped the Clark medalist about 10 years ago and replaced him with Dopey or Grumpy (but not Happy or Doc).

The Wall Street CEO Graveyard

From the WSJ:

Stan O’Neal is leaving as chief executive officer and chairman of Merrill Lynch in the wake of a record $7.9 billion write-down in fixed income, but he is by no means the first top banker to suffer that fate. Our friends over at sister publication Financial News took a trip down memory lane to look at some senior executives who were forced out after problems at the banks they led.

• Peter Wuffli - UBS - ousted: 2007;
Wuffli was ousted as CEO July 6 after estimated losses of $3.5 billion from hedge fund Dillon Read Capital Management. The bank’s share price rose at half the rate of rivals Credit Suisse Group and Deutsche Bank in the 18 months before he left. UBS Chairman Marcel Ospel backed Wuffli as his successor, but instead the bank’s board showed him the door. Ospel agreed to extend his contract for another three years and former wealth management head Marcel Rohner stepped in to become CEO.

• Philip Purcell - Morgan Stanley - ousted: 2005;
Purcell, formerly chairman and CEO of Morgan Stanley, was forced to step down in June 2005 after a period of discontent among shareholders and employees over the direction of the investment bank and performance since its $10.2 billion combination with Dean Witter. While integration of the brokerage businesses proved problematic, the main charge was that Purcell showed little interest in investment banking and blocked proposals to use Morgan Stanley’s money to make financial bets or to invest in private equity deals. The U.S. bank’s market valuation slipped to about $57 billion in June 2005 from about $94 billion in January 2001, a bigger drop than its main competitors.

• Douglas “Sandy” Warner – J.P. Morgan Chase – retired: 2001;
Variously J.P. Morgan’s chairman, president and CEO, Sandy Warner retired as chairman in September 2001 on the one-year anniversary of its merger with Chase Manhattan. In the month before his retirement JP Morgan Chase announced 3,000 job cuts in its investment-banking business, which had already suffered a major cull in the immediate aftermath of the merger. He recently became an adviser at Carlyle Group.

• Jon Corzine - Goldman Sachs - ousted: 1999;
Corzine, former chief executive and co-chairman of Goldman Sachs, left in January 1999 after 24 years at the investment bank. Goldman insiders claimed Corzine’s ouster was connected to bitter politicking after the bank racked up losses from the Russian debt crisis of 1998, but the official line was that his departure was part of an orderly transition ahead of the bank’s initial public offering. Corzine was later elected to the U.S. senate and now is governor of New Jersey.

• John Gutfreund – Salomon Brothers – resigned: 1991;
Dubbed the “King of Wall Street” in the 1980s, John Gutfreund’s 38 years at Salomon Brothers, where he had been chairman and chief executive for more than 10 years, ended in ignominy after the bank was implicated in illegal trading in the US Treasury bond market. Salomon Brothers under Gutfreund had been the top investment bank in the 1980s. It eventually was bought by Warren Buffet, before being sold to Citigroup.

I worked under Gutfreund and Warner--neither one was visionary or intellectually competitive--but both had strong personal skills. I think Gutfreund was a better manager of talent, but Salomon had more talent at its peak than JPMorgan (in my 2 decades of working).

UPDATE: Felix Salmon has some penetrating organizational insight.

Best quote I read today

... any restriction on liberty reduces the number of things tried and so reduces the rate of progress. In such a society freedom of action is granted to the individual, not because it gives him greater satisfaction but because, if allowed to go his own way, he will on the average serve the rest of us better than under any orders we know how to give. —H. B. Phillips

The ever excellent Steve Conover.

Cris Collinsworth and his 3 decades of NFL experience

on the Patriots:

We are starting to enter the point of the season where we really have to wonder if the New England Patriots are going to be one of the great teams of all-time. What they are doing is simply amazing.

I'm starting to get excited about the prospect of an undefeated season with the Patriots. I know there have been a few teams such as the Broncos and Colts who have made bids at perfection recently, but for the first time in a long time, this seems like a real possibility.

The hurdle for the Patriots is one of the toughest AFCs I've seen in a long time. The Colts, Steelers, Jaguars and Chargers are all really good. And the Patriots still have dates with the Colts and Steelers left on their schedule.

If the Patriots can beat the Colts in Indy, then you have to start having serious conversations about this being the greatest team of all-time, or at least of the salary-cap era. Comparing teams of different eras is hard, because you have to give credit to some of the deep teams that the Steelers and 49ers had. I have for a long time said the 49ers second team of the 1980s could have beaten 80 percent of the league.

But with due credit to the 1972 Dolphins and the 1985 Bears, it is hard to remember a team that was this dominant against its peers, and they definitely are on the right track to be one of the teams for the ages.

Megan advises us

to choose a competitor over Comfort Inn. Especially the one in Jamaica, Queens.

America Cannot Win The War

On Fire: An editorial by Harvey (via Glenn Reynolds):

We offend fire by occupying the holy lands of burnable, burnable forests with our "fireless" nuclear power plants, claiming that we are "better than mere flames". We laugh at fire's "primitiveness" and "simplicity".

Well, apparently fire is stronger than we think, as it continues to prove itself unstoppable despite our recent surge of extinguishing agents. Water, and by extension America, is no match for such a primal force.

How foolish fighting fire is. And what a waste of resources in a country where there are children without health insurance.

Paths to "self-made" wealth

From the WSJ Wealth Report:

In “The Millionaire Next Door,” authors Thomas Stanley and William Danko herald the thrifty rich who save every penny, drive old cars and invest cautiously. Getting rich, they say, is all about being conservative.

Today, Barclays Wealth released a report along with the Economist Intelligence Unit that found 60% of individuals with investible assets of $1 million or more said “a high appetite for risk has been an important influence in their wealth creation.” That compares with 36% of those surveyed with assets under $1 million.

The richer people get, the more comfortable they are with investments others might consider risky. For instance, 77% of respondents worth $3 million or more have invested in individual stocks over the past three years, compared with 55% of those worth less than $1 million.

But there's still the bigger perspective, as I read somewhere a long time ago:

... use worldly wealth to gain friends for yourselves, so that when it is gone, you will be welcomed into eternal dwellings.

"Whoever can be trusted with very little can also be trusted with much, and whoever is dishonest with very little will also be dishonest with much. So if you have not been trustworthy in handling worldly wealth, who will trust you with true riches? And if you have not been trustworthy with someone else's property, who will give you property of your own?

Chris Varvares predicts 25% chance of 2008 recession

We do assume that housing starts trough at 1.18 million units and remain near there through 2008, and we have a 6% nominal, 11.3% real decline in house prices, and push that through personal consumption expenditures via a traditional wealth effect. We still don’t get a recession. It is interesting to compare the current episode to the last recession. Both had one component of fixed investment that was in a sharp decline and hits to wealth from stock prices in 2000, and from house prices presently. This comparison is shown in the chart below. The direct drag on GDP growth from declines in fixed investment are similar, at least in the peak effect (given the expected trough in starts), but the wealth effects are dramatically different!

How the poor, middle-income, and rich voted back in 2004

Over at Statistical Modeling

Neckties hide germs and poor health regimen

alerts Ryan Hagen:

Years after studies first found that dangerous bacteria routinely hitch rides on the neckties of doctors, U.K. health officials have banished the old four-in-hand, along with jewelery and long sleeves, from their hospitals. They hope the ban will slow the spread of Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA), a so-called superbug that accounts for more than 40 percent of inpatient blood infections in the U.K. (Health officials in the U.S. might be advised to follow suit: a 2004 study found that half of the neckties worn by doctors in a New York hospital harbored dangerous pathogens.)

But your tie just might be hiding something besides germs. In a letter to the Financial Times, top Google lawyer Peter Fleischer had the following to say about neckties:

Decorative camouflage for the business suit, designed to shield the middle-aged male physique, with its shrinking shoulders and protruding paunch, from feeling sufficiently self-conscious to hit the gym…. Wouldn’t you like to know whether your business partners are fit? Why should you trust a man in business if he abuses his own body?

Or in politics? Political reporters often fawn over candidates who go tie-less on the campaign trail.

As a dog returns to its vomit

so a fool repeats his folly.

--Proverbs 26:11

Kremlin folly courtesy of Greg Mankiw. And at least the dog has an excuse--excretions are canine blogging, and olfaction the RSS aggregation.

What you talkin' 'bout, Willis???

This past preseason, the Nobel laureate precursor McGahee said:

Going to Buffalo, it was like hitting a brick wall. Like, ‘Damn!’ Can’t go out, can’t do nothing. There’s an Applebee’s, a TGI Friday’s, and they just got a Dave & Busters. They got that, and I’m like, ‘What the?’ And, you know, the women …

“You see, when I was in college that’s what I used to thrive off of,” the 25-year-old says. “The better you do, the more fame you get. So you know, it was like, I was used to that. And then you get to Buffalo and no matter how you do, it’s the same. It’s no big city. You know what I did every day? I came home and played video games.”

Now, Ed Glaeser confirms the Ravens RB theory of urban economics (via Greg Mankiw):

At the onset of the Great Depression, Buffalo had 573,000 inhabitants, making it the 13th-largest city in America. In the 75 years that followed, this once-mighty metropolis lost 55 percent of its population, a decline most dramatic in its blighted inner city but also apparent in its broader metropolitan area, one of the 20 most quickly deteriorating such regions in the nation. Twenty-seven percent of Buffalo’s residents are poor, more than twice the national average. The median family income is just $33,000, less than 60 percent of the nationwide figure of $55,000.

The history of Buffalo helps us understand why it continues to lose people and why it will be hard to reverse the trend. Historians often overstate the importance of the Erie Canal to New York City’s expansion: Gotham grew just as quickly before the canal was dug.

A major culprit in Buffalo’s collapse was a shift in transportation technology, reducing the importance of the Erie Canal and of the cities that arose to take advantage of it.

Other trends compounded Buffalo’s woes. Improvements in electricity transmission made companies’ proximity to Niagara Falls increasingly irrelevant. Mechanization meant that the industry that did remain in the city needed fewer bodies. The appeal of the automobile induced many to leave the older center cities for the suburbs, where property was plentiful and cheaper, or to abandon the area altogether for cities like Los Angeles, built around the car. And Buffalo’s dismal weather didn’t help. January temperatures are one of the best predictors of urban success over the last half-century, with colder climes losing out—and Buffalo isn’t just cold during the winter: blizzards regularly shut the city down completely. The invention of air conditioners and certain public health advances made warmer states even more alluring.

In general, when cities shrink, poverty isn’t far behind, for two reasons—one obvious, the other subtler. The obvious reason: urban populations fall because of relocation of industry and drop in labor demand; as jobs vanish, people living in a city get poorer. The subtler reason: declining areas also become magnets for poor people, attracted by cheap housing.

State and local government did little to improve Buffalo’s chances—in fact, they worsened things considerably. First, New York’s high taxes, burdensome regulations, and pro-union laws made Buffalo less attractive to employers than its more successful southern competitors.

Buffalo also suffered from lousy local politics. During the 1960s, the city government failed to deliver either safety or good schools. Race riots shook the area, and crime rose steadily. Fiscal crises became epidemic. Buffalo had difficulty recruiting police because of low wages and the dangers of the street. Leadership was especially dismal during the late sixties and early seventies, the city’s worst years. Mayor Frank Sedita, who faced ceaseless fiscal problems and surging violence from 1966 to 1973, was a traditional urban politician, better at playing to the city’s various ethnicities than at confronting its ongoing crisis.

Buffalo wasn’t a particularly skilled city in 1970, and it isn’t one now. Fewer than 19 percent of the city’s adults boast a college degree; the number in Manhattan is 57.5 percent. Whereas New York always had some industries, such as finance, that required brainpower, Buffalo’s industries were invariably brawn-based. Buffalo wasn’t a university town like Boston, and it didn’t have Minneapolis’s Scandinavian passion for good lower education. It had the right skill mix for making steel or flour, not for flourishing in the information age.

OK, stop blaming him now. And just think, Baltimore is the standard by which Buffalo fails.

The Mugger Of All Tax Reformers

is Charlie Rangel. Besides wanting to go back to the draft for military service (which would take away the freedom to choose, which is probably the purest form of military accountability to society, not to mention the devaluation of soldiers' lives because of coerced service), he wants to lower corporate taxes in the name of competition and fairness, but raise them on individuals ... in the name of _______ (fill in the blank, I have no clue):

No one thinks his plan has a chance of becoming law this year, but its beauty is as a signal of Democratic intentions for 2009. In proposing what would be the largest tax increase in history, Mr. Rangel is showing the world what he wants the tax code to look like if Democrats run the entire government. None of the Presidential candidates will admit this before November 2008, but give Mr. Rangel credit for having the courage of Hillary Clinton's convictions.

With one very revealing exception. Mr. Rangel does propose to cut the corporate tax rate, of all things, to 30.5% from 35% today. He'd "pay" for this by reducing business credits and deductions. This is revealing because it is a tacit admission that tax rates really do matter to investment choices.

Yet when it comes to individuals, Mr. Rangel seems to think that he can raise rates and no one will behave differently. Thus he proposes to raise taxes on business and the upper-middle class in order to reduce the Alternative Minimum Tax (AMT) that Democrats created to soak the rich but is now threatening to skewer the middle class.

But where Mr. Rangel really gets busy is with his plan for a long-term "revenue neutral" AMT fix. He wants to abolish the AMT permanently and greatly expand "refundable tax credits" for low income families, while adding a 4% income tax surcharge on anyone who makes more than $200,000 a year, or 4.6% if you make $500,000 ($250,000 for singles). Mr. Rangel also wants to raise the capital gains tax rate to 19.6% from 15% today, and raise taxes on dividends, business partnerships, and companies with foreign subsidiaries. Add it all up and you get new taxes of $1 trillion or more.

We sympathize a little with Mr. Rangel, whose bad luck has been to take over his tax chair just when the AMT is becoming the tax that ate the middle-class in the high-tax "blue" states of New York, California and New Jersey. Democrats are desperate to avoid blame for this, even as they've boxed themselves in with their "paygo" promise to offset every tax cut with a tax increase or entitlement spending cut.

Amid slow growth and a housing recession, this couldn't be a worse time to raise taxes on capital gains, dividends and small business. Democrats would be smarter to drop the tax increases and "paygo," and simply patch the AMT for another year. And if Mr. Rangel really wants to reform the tax code in 2009, he's going to have read up on what the Gipper accomplished. All he's proposed so far is a trillion-dollar bomb.

Serves us right. For the most part the academy teaches our students that the higher the tax the better, the media reports to our voters that the answer to failed government programs is to grow the old ones and make new ones, and we elect buffoonery, ...

Democracy = Idiocracy.

Another movie, another ton of carbon emissions

I'm always waiting for one of these Hollywood greenies to speak out about the emissions caused by making films and television programs. There is always a shoot going on, and besides taking away swaths of already scarce street parking, there are about 10 trailers and trucks, idling or running generators in my Tribeca neighborhood.

You guys are telling me to drive a Prius, while my kids are breathing your carbon monoxide and spending money on your media-licensed products. Sure, that's fair.

Cartoon via Greg Mankiw.

New Direction for Energy Independence, National Security, and Consumer Protection Act.

Congress attempts to reduce carbon emissions. Ahem, attempts:

... the bill undermines energy independence by raising taxes on domestic production and throwing up new barriers to exploration. It's hard to see how it has any effect on national security, and we're at a loss about its consumer-protection claim too, unless you think Americans need "protecting" from the incandescent lightbulb. The bill bans those, effective 2012, on page 601.

But its worst (and little noticed) provision may be a requirement that 15% of U.S. electricity be generated from "renewable" sources by 2020. Utilities that can't meet these goals are fined -- taxed, really -- based on how far short of this Eden they fall. Currently, only about 3% is provided by such renewables as wind, solar or "biofuels."

In any case, as we're all discovering with corn-based ethanol, renewables have their own problems, both substantive and political. Liberals are all for wind power -- as long as it doesn't obstruct their oceanfront views off Nantucket. Hydro power is dandy -- except it kills fish and disrupts their habitat. Solar requires acres and acres of real estate. There's plenty of land for solar arrays in the middle of the country, or at least there was before the land was turned over to grow corn for heavily subsidized ethanol. And, by the way, using farmland for energy means using less to grow food -- which means higher prices at the kitchen table, or more food imports, or both. The House Members who voted for this must figure all of this will be some other Congress's problem.

Earlier this year, Mr. Dingell suggested that if Congress were really serious about global warming, it would impose a carbon tax. At least that's being honest about the costs. The "renewables" mandate in the House energy bill, by contrast, is a multibillion-dollar stealth tax on electrical utilities, and ultimately on electricity users. The danger is that, with all eyes on car-mileage standards, this tax could become law without many people even noticing.

ESPN writers sounding too giddy

It's Just One Game!!! Miles to go before they sleep. I remember a scrappy championship team being an inning away from elimination in the 2004 ALCS ...

Jason Stark: You can mark down that 13-1 score as the most lopsided Game 1 blowout in World Series history. And if you want to chalk that up to ... A) the Christy Mathewson of his generation (a.k.a. Josh Beckett) and B) the hottest lineup ever to march to home plate in the annals of 103 Octobers.

Jerry Crasnick: The Red Sox welcomed the Rockies to town with a full-course beatdown menu Wednesday night. It began with a Boston schoolyard tradition -- the atomic wedgie -- followed by a noogie, a nose twist, and the obligatory forfeiture of lunch money and loss of dignity.

These Red Sox are better hitters than Version 2004. But beyond Beckett, Okajima, and Papelbon, the pitchers are vulnerable. I'm short a few WS.4GAMES.BOS, even though I'm long MLB.REDSOX.

Birth Announcement: Prediction Market Industry Association

Press release here (via Jed Christiansen)

Don Surber uses witty humor to punish those we'd rather forget

whoops, I meant forgette, in a recursive blog link, er, linkette.