Angus gets nudged!

So Richard Thaler has an NYT op-ed, The Power of Nudges for Good and Bad

You can read it here.

I thought it was a bit unbalanced, and I tweeted the following:

Shorter version of @R_Thaler: Government nudge good, Private nudge bad. https://t.co/Trv12cjg8V

— kevin grier (@ez_angus) October 31, 2015

Richard was not pleased and tweeted back (he's pretty aggressive on Twitter):

Total and willful misread. Nudges can be good or evil from either source. https://t.co/oG6vAw6Yh7

— Richard H Thaler (@R_Thaler) October 31, 2015

"Total" is a matter of fact, and can be discussed "Willful" is just a cheap shot.

As to whether or not I misread it, here is Thaler in the piece:


"As far as I know, the government teams in Britain and the United States that have focused on nudging have followed these guidelines scrupulously. But the private sector is another matter. In this domain, I see much more troubling behavior."

So I tweeted a 140 character version of that quote back to him and dropped the mic.

But then Richard tweeted,

@FarmerHayek @ez_angus I have said the opposite dozens of times. Read the book!
— Richard H Thaler (@R_Thaler) October 31, 2015


And then I realized, "hey Angus, you got NUDGED"!!!

Though it's not clear to me how the first sentence in any way incentivizes me to follow the command in the second.

Lying, Cheating, and Introduction to Congress

So, people are surprised that Harvard students are cheating.  Really?  I'm not.

Harvard students don't always see an actual professor.  Harvard is a place where many of the world's best (perhaps the very best) students go to be taught by many of the world's angriest (perhaps the very angriest) graduate students.  Yes, the faculty are fantastic.  But the only place you will ever see some of them is on the faculty web page.

NOT surprisingly, then, given the atmosphere, cheating is rampant.  I suppose this should upset people, but it doesn't.  The undergrads are Harvard are so smart, so worldly, so bright and interesting that they can function as their own educational facility.  They don't always have faculty, but they don't need them.

There is one place, however, where cheating should clearly not upset people.  In fact, it ought to be required.  The course?  Introduction to Congress:  where cheating is part of the learning.  After all, if you don't cheat, you don't really understand government in action.  These kids are clearly destined for a success in politics.

Nod to Angry Alex

Boys Named Sue: Blown Call, Injunction Sought

Here's the story: high school football team denied chance to kick field goal, on what was clearly a terrible call.

The video:

They have a point. But suing? Really? It was 41 yard field goal attempt, in high school. That is not a gimme.

G'accuse!

Where seldom is heard, a missing G word, and judges do strip searches all day!

At the World Scrabble Finals in Warsaw, one competitor accused another having hidden the "G" tile. He demanded that the miscreant be strip searched to find the missing tile.

In the US this would have been done, as long as the guy spoke Spanish and had committed a traffic offense. But not in Poland.

(Yes, the title is intentionally misspelled)

Nod to the Blonde

Carnival Fraud: Really?

So...sheriff's deputies run undercover sting operation to pester people at carnivals.

Because we all want to make sure that no one actually wins any prizes.

Anthony Dewayne Ellis, 32, of Locust Grove, and Kenneth Lea McLeod, 50, of Ashland, Va., agreed to change the rules of a game for undercover Tulsa County sheriff’s deputies, according to an arrest report.

The carnival workers were operating a game involving throwing darts into star-shaped holes when they gave a discounted price to the deputies, who later asked “what it would take to win the big prize,” the report says.

The workers awarded the prize — a stuffed character from the game Angry Birds — after letting the deputies play for $20 regardless of the outcome.

The game’s posted rules required paying $5 to throw darts into the holes for prizes of escalating value, the report says.

State law requires that rules for carnival games be posted at all times. Contradicting the posted rules is a misdemeanor.

(Nod to Jackie Blue, who never cheats)

The culture that is France

There's a chess cheating scandal. Yes, somehow it's both possible to cheat at chess and there are people who find it worth their while to do so. French people:

"According to the French federation, while international grand master Sebastien Feller, 19, was involved in a game, Cyril Marzolo followed developments over the internet and used computer software to establish the best next move. The answer was then sent by means of a coded text message to the third member of the team, Arnaud Hauchard. The third member would then sit himself at a particular table in the competition hall. Each table represented an agreed square on the chess board."

Feller's prize for these intricate shennanigans? 5,000 Euro, according this report.

Well done, lads!

He's just not that into you

Danny G is taking this whole LeBron breakup thing pretty hard:

"The Cleveland Cavaliers have poured hundreds of thousands of dollars into a high-powered Midwestern law firm to investigate their suspicions that the Miami Heat broke NBA tampering rules while pursuing LeBron James, and owner Dan Gilbert has privately vowed he won’t relent until he has a thick binder of findings to drop on the desk of the NBA commissioner, league sources told Yahoo! Sports."

Man, I know break-ups are tough, but this is nuts. Hiring a private dick to try and piece together whether your ex started cheating on you before the divorce? Does he think he'll get LeBron back?

I guess he just wants LeBron's new love to be hurting too. He should just sneak up on Pat Riley and sucker-punch him!