Author: Ruben Bolling

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The Great Schlep from The Great Schlep on Vimeo.

I can’t pretend to know or understand all the details or even the major points of the proposed financial bailout because it’s changing every moment. But from what I can gather from media reports, it looks to be a swindling of American taxpayers on a monstrous scale.

We’re going to spend, just to start, $700 billion — that’s $2,000 from every man, woman and child in the land — to buy the worst, most problematic assets from financial institutions that had made the mistake of buying them. We’re going to buy them at prices way above their market prices.

Some are saying that we’re not really losing $700 billion, because even though we’re buying these instruments at prices above what anyone will pay for them now, we’ll eventually get to sell the assets, and maybe we’ll even make a profit. Let me tell you: we’ll take a loss on that money, and it will be huge.

After the bailout, the government will be holding all these toxic mortgage-related assets. How is it going to know what it’s got, how to value it, and how to sell it? These aren’t cartons of apples, they’re some of the most complex financial instruments known to man, each instrument governed by hundreds and hundreds of pages of documents.

So who is our government going to sell them to? There’s only one group on earth that it could sell it to — the same financial institutions they bought them from.

We’ll have the biggest, dumbest, most bureaucratic institution, our US Government, trying to sell $700 billion in insanely complicated financial instruments to a group of the most sophisticated, smartest, nimblest institutions, the banks that created the damn things. Who’s going to come out ahead?

These bankers are geniuses at finding the game, understanding the rules, and figuring out a way to win. And the new game is going to be Fleece the Government.

But this huge giveaway to the investment banks is necessary, as the investment banker who is the Treasury Secretary assures us, to loosen the credit markets and save the economy. If the federal government is willing to spend $700 billion, there are other ways to loosen the credit markets, ways in which the government is more likely to get some sort of upside if things go well.

We’re told they’re going to put some “safeguards” into the plan as a compromise to those who oppose it, but these modifications will just make the rules of the game a little more interesting for the bankers. For example, the plan supposedly is going to place limits on executive compensation for the the banks that participate. These bankers are ingenious at getting around rules, but if you want to see truly mind-boggling creativity, place limits on a banker’s actual compensation, and watch the sparks fly.

At a time when the deficit is around $9.7 trillion, dragging down our currency and economy, the structuring of this deal is a disaster.

A while ago, I used to occasionally do multi-part Tom the Dancing Bugs, often featuring Charley the Australopithecine.  Since these have never been reprinted, I thought I’d use the blog to show some of these old comics.  Today, I’m starting a series that ran in June, 1993, and I’ll run the subsequent runs every week or so.

Tom Tomorrow’s new book is now out!
The Future’s So Bright I Can’t Bear To Look:

I went to the opening reception of the Kim Deitch exhibit at the Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art last week, and I urge you to go to this really cool exhibit on an important cartoonist.

In this week’s yarn:  The townsfolk want Old Man McCain to be sheriff.  They’d damn well better understand that he ain’t changin’ who he is for any man.

I saw the movie "21" on an airplane last month; it's about a bunch of math geniuses (genii?) who card-count their way to riches and various character arcs at the blackjack tables of Las Vegas.

 

Kevin Spacey plays the math professor ringleader of the operation, who recruits a super-genius student who impresses him by incredibly solving what Spacey's character calls the "Game Show Host Problem."  This is actually an old chestnut, more commonly referred to as the "Monty Hall Puzzle," and it was apparently originally presented by the self-proclaimed possessor of the world's highest IQ, Marilyn vos Savant, in her column in Parade Magazine.

 

I'm going to make my first-ever attempt to embed a YouTube video… the scene in which Kevin Spacey explains the puzzle should appear below, but I may get it wrong.  I'm no genius.  If the embedding doesn't work, here is a link to the video.

 

Okay, if you've watched this scene, you get the idea of the puzzle.  If you were unable to watch it because of either of our technical inabilities, I'll let the esteemed writer Mark Evanier explain the puzzle, as he wrote about it (in his excellent blog) last week:

 

Here's how it works.  You're on a game show not unlike Mr. Hall's legendary Let's Make a Deal. There are three doors. One of them conceals a new car. The other two have goats behind them. You get to pick a door and you will win the prize behind it. Obviously, the idea is to go home with a car, not a goat.

So you pick your door. Then the host (who knows where the car is hidden) says, "Let's see what's behind the door you didn't pick!" He opens one of the doors that conceals a goat. You feel lucky you did not pick that door.

The host then asks you, "Before we reveal the prize behind the door you selected, would you like to swap? Would you like to take the other door instead of the one you picked?"

The problem: Should you swap?  Would it make you more likely to win the car, less likely…or would it make no difference?

Most people say it would make no difference.  Amazingly, they are wrong.  You double the odds of winning the car if you switch.

The solution given is that the selection should be switched because the door you chose has a 1/3 chance of success, while the other unopened door now has a 2/3 chance of success.

 

This solution is surprising, counter-intuitive… and wrong.

 

Marilyn vos Savant was wrong.  The solution given by Mark Evanier was wrong.  And the solution given by these fictional math geniuses of "21" was spectacularly wrong.   

 

What am I talking about?!  How can all these real and fictional geniuses be wrong?

 

Switching doors can double your odds of winning, but only if Monty Hall not only knows which door has the car, but is REQUIRED under the rules of the game to open a door that (i) is not the door you chose, and (ii) is not the door that has the car behind it.  This must be stated as part of the puzzle in order for the correct solution to be that there is an advantage to switching doors.

 

This is not merely a semantic distinction — it is critical to the problem. If Monty Hall is operating under those rigid rules, by opening a goat door after you've chosen, he is giving you valuable information.  If you guessed correctly (a 1/3 chance), he can open either of the other two doors.  But if you guessed incorrectly (a 2/3 chance), he is FORCED to open up the one door that is neither your choice nor the door with the car.

 

Now, the puzzle, as presented by Kevin Spacey, does not state that Monty Hall is required to open up any door.  He simply says that after you choose your door, Monty "decides" to open up another one that reveals a goat.

 

If the rules of the game are that he opens a randomly selected door after you make your choice, then the logic of switching doors break down — there is no advantage to switching whatsoever.

 

If he simply opens up a door without regard to any pre-determined rules of the game, there is also no advantage to switching.  You don't know why he opened a door, so you haven't gained any information.

 

And in fact, in the clip from the movie "21," the solution given is spectacularly wrong because Kevin Spacey's genius character explicitly posits that you don't know why Monty Hall is opening up a door — he says that the game show host may be trying to "playing a trick on you, trying to use reverse psychology to get you to pick a goat."  Despite what these fictional math geniuses say, there surely is no advantage to switching in this case, because, again, you've gained no useful information.  It may be to your disadvantage to switch under these circumstances.

 

Let's say you play this game 100 times, and Monty reveals a goat door only when you've initially picked the car door (and does nothing when you initially pick the goat door — just opens your door and tells you that you lost).  67 times you'll pick a goat door and automatically lose.  If you adopt a switching strategy, the 33 times you pick a car door, you'll then be shown a goat door by Monty, get "tricked" into switching, and lose.  The switching strategy will yield you exactly zero wins out of 100.  (Refusing to switch will give you 33 wins.)

 

The same holds true if you play only once.  You pick a door, and then Monty reveals a goat door.  Unless his actions are explicitly part of the rules of the game, you have no idea why he showed you the goat door.  He may have only showed it to you because your first pick was the car door, and he is in fact trying to trick you into switching. You're now in a mind game with Monty Hall that has nothing to do with the "statistics" and "variable change," that Kevin Spacey's super-student refers to.

 

This distinction is part of the reason the commonly-given solution is so counter-intuitive.  The way it's presented, you're playing this game, and Monty Hall suddenly and without explanation reveals a goat door and gives you a chance to switch — it doesn't seem as though it would be to your advantage to do so, and in fact it isn't.  But once you say that Monty Hall is required under the rules of the game to reveal a goat door and give you a chance to switch, it makes a bit more intuitive sense that there may be an advantage in switching (and in fact there would be).

 

If you've seen this movie, you now know why Kevin Spacey's blackjack plan didn't go so well.  These guys weren't quite as smart as they thought they were.

At the Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art in NYC:

Karl Rove, on the August 9 Face the Nation, predicted that Obama was going to make an expedient, political, cynical Vice President choice:

I think he’s going to make an intensely political choice, not a
governing choice.  He’s going to view this through the
prism of a candidate, not through the prism of president; that is to
say, he’s going to pick somebody that he thinks will on the margin help
him in a state like Indiana or Missouri or Virginia. He’s not going to
be thinking big and broad about the responsibilities of president.

Rove went on to say that if Obama picked Tim Kaine, who Rove said has three years’ experience as Governor of Virginia, he would be putting electoral concerns above the national interest:

So if he were to pick Governor Kaine, it would be an intensely
political choice where he said, "You know what? I’m really not, first
and foremost, concerned with, is this person capable of being president
of the United States? What I’m concerned about is, can he bring me the
electoral votes of the state of Virginia, the 13 electoral votes in
Virginia?"

via Talking Points Memo.

I’m pretty late to this, but here is the Conan O’Brien clip in which Triumph the Insult Comic Dog visits the San Diego Comic-Con.  You’ll note that Smigel never used the interview I saw, with long-haired Joker.

http://widgets.nbc.com/o/4727a250e66f9723/48a445b2ebcef9a1/4741e3c5156499a7/b625b8c0

While seeing Triumph deliver his insults on TV can seem mean, watching the filming reveals that Smigel himself tempers that — you can’t see his face, but he’s smiling and chuckling through the whole thing.

And I think I happened to see his last interview of the day.  After he wrapped up, he stood around posing for pictures, signing things, and kidding around with everyone.  For a long time.  I watched for a while, walked away, talked to some friends, and when I walked by later, Smigel was still there.