This past Winter Sony announced that its first two Profile 2.0, BD-Live enabled Blu-Ray Disc players would be available this "summer." The BDP-350 promises to be the first Blu-Ray player to have working with BD-Live that is available for less than $400.

A key question on my mind was: does "summer" mean September? If so I might purchase the "DB-Live capable" Samsung BD-P1500 (which would involve waiting for a Fall firmware upgrade to use BD-Live features) rather than waiting for the Sony players.

Although there is no mention of this new player on the Crutchfield website, I just received a printed Crutchfield catalog that contains both the BDP-350 and BDP-550 Blu-Ray Players as being available for $399 and $599, respectively.

Perhaps this means "summer" is just about here.

Train buff Charlie Martin demonstrates simply and devastatingly, why those who advocate more rail travel in the U.S. are letting their romantic attraction to trains get the better of their rational judgment. (In this case the subject is Megan McArdle, who has previously advocated a similarly misguided extension of the the DC Metro to Dulles airport.) Charlie writes:

I can imagine taking the train to New York on vacation, because I am a train nut and the trip would be fun in itself. But let’s think about this as a business trip: taking the train would not only cost about 1.5 times as much — or four times as much with a compartment, and I’m just sure I’d be all set to go right to work in New York after two full days in a coach seat — but it consumes four working days in travel time. I can manage a one-day business trip by plane, but a one-day trip to New York by train is a five-day trip. Subsidies won’t help: counting in the lost time, Amtrak would have to pay me $4,000 to make up for the time difference. The travel time difference is so large that Amtrak couldn’t compete if train tickets were free.

Reading the actual numbers in Charlie's post was sufficiently eye-opening to make me wonder who would take a train? My wife's short answer was "retirees," but more broadly the answer is: people who like train travel as entertainment.

I have no problem with that, but it does make me wonder why the taxpayers are subsidizing Amtrak as a recreational activity. These subsidies aren't small either! The U.S. Department of Transportation reports that in the last year for which data is available the subsidy per 1,000 passenger miles on the train was a whopping $200 (and was over $400 in 1998). This compares to $6 per 1,000 passenger mile for commercial aviation and minus $1 for automobiles. The subsidy for railroad travel is by far higher than that for any other mode of transportation (including transit!).

Would anyone really design such a system if they were starting from scratch and not facing pressure from established interest groups? The answer is obvious.

(HT Virginia Postrel)

I am pleased to report that our home Media Center setup won the Ultimate Media Center Enthusiast Setup competition run by TheDigitalLifestyle.com home of the Media Center Show Podcast! Thanks to all who voted for our setup.

I confess that I was somewhat surprised to be the winner as some of the other finalists had really impressive setups.

Ian Dixon had asked that I send a photo of the prize package I won (Xbox 360 Elite, three wireless controllers, Halo 3, Mass Effect and Call of Duty 4) which I will do, but here it is:

Per the post yesterday on the Free Will BloggingHeads yesterday, the discussion surrounding Tyler Cowen's proposition that he believes that to a great extent "people should be truly uncertain about almost all of their beliefs." The discussion was mostly about more abstract propositions like the efficacy of free trade or the existence of God, but perhaps it applies to what I had for dinner last night as well.

It's related to his prior writing that

You are wrong so, so, so often.  That is, or rather should be, the central lesson of epistemology.  It is a lesson which hardly anybody ever learns.  And you don't need the fancy philosophical machinery to get there.  That is why the rest of epistemology is so often so fruitless.

Upon thinking about this, it occurs to me that even if one's beliefs really are justified, this probably is a useful way of thinking about many propositions. It made me think of the quotation from Learned Hand that

The spirit of liberty, is the spirit which is not too sure that it is right; the spirit of liberty is the spirit which seeks to understand the minds of other men and women; the spirit of liberty is the spirit which weighs their interests alongside its own without bias.

Watching Will Wilkinson and Tyler Cowen do BloggingHeads.tv dialvlog, made me think of Kara Swisher's mantra in her book about AOL "Nobody knows."

The long passage starts with Tyler saying people should be far less certain of most of their core beliefs, and ends with a spirited discussion about what normative criteria to apply to societies, as if to prove the point.

This is not something you would find on MSNBC.

We just ordered the Ikan for $109 including shipping. This is a special price for the first 100 orders from Peapod customers and represents a whopping $300 discount.

As written up in the New York Times, the main function of this device is to scan the barcodes of items as you are about to throw away the packaging. The device connects to the Internet using your wireless network and adds the scanned item to your shopping list at a web grocer (in our case Peapod). This mainly saves you the trouble of keeping a list and then translating that list into a peapod order-- steps that are a big enough hassle to to significantly reduce my enthusiasm for peapod when we used it before.

I'll write more after we have actually used the device.

Megan McCardle expands on questions of what do people really mean when the ask for more regulation of financial institutions, which I raised here.

Mickey Kaus responds to my previous post by email saying "I thought the problem wasn't a bubble, but it was that their fancy computerized hedging programs didn't work."

I say: Fair point in that my post is probably oversimplified things. The reversal in the run up of housing prices (which in retrospect was a bubble) had several effects:

-- First, as I understand it, the collapse of housing prices was at least a major cause of why the hedging programs did not work. The hedging programs were built on statistical models that ceased to work when there were a variety of changes in the market (including falling housing prices).

-- Second, the implicit belief that housing prices would continue to rise led to more lenient underwriting standards for sub-prime borrowers on the theory that rising home prices would allow lenders to recover lent funds if individual borrowers were unable to repay their loans. When housing prices began to fall, highly leveraged positions in mortgages (especially sub-prime mortgages) lost a significant chunk of their value.

-- Third, high leverage resulted from things having gone so well for so long. This affected the models alluded to in my first point, but more generally infused market participants with the sense that higher leverage really wasn't as imprudent as it might have seemed previously. That attitude is symptomatic of a bubble.

The high leverage of both (a) individual players in the market and (b) systemically, through the creation of derivatives and the like, resulted in a domino effect of failures of entities/funds that undermined confidence in (i) whole asset classes (e.g. sub-prime loans for which buyers disappeared), and (ii) major financial players like Bear Stearns, who people feared would not honor their obligations with respect to other types of trades and financial transactions (i.e. unrelated to sub-prime loans) if Bear were dragged into insolvency because of Bear's leveraged positions in sub-prime loans. 

The problem is that these things are only possible to see in retrospect. Prospectively, they are just as easily explained as a "paradigm shift" as a "bubble." Because often they are a paradigm shift. For example are high oil prices today the result of a bubble or a paradigm shift?

Regulators are no better able to answer this question than market participants (probably less able (the insight of public choice economists)), which is what makes effective regulation difficult. At least when one defines "effective" as improving human welfare instead of as something secondary like making sure an institution maintains $X of equity according to GAAP.  

Larry Summers understands this, which is what makes his insights on regulation interesting and helpful.

Mickey Kaus credulously reprints part of an email that blames this on the political clout of the financial industry. It is certainly plausible that lobbying helped keep the regulatory dogs at bay. The problem with the lax regulation narrative is that there is no plausible counter-narrative of how we would have been much better off if only there had been regulations X, Y and Z.

The reason for this is pretty simple: it is impossible to regulate against bubbles.

If you don't believe me (and why should you?), Larry Summers has an excellent discussion of this here.

I did some more experimenting with Bluetooth USB dongles this evening.

First, I experimented with the Zoom 3411 Class 1 USB dongle. The good: somewhat better range than IOGear (maybe 50 ft instead of 30 feet); and headphones remain paired even after being turned off. The bad: turning off headphones won't automatically result in sound coming out of the PC's speakers; and there is no working ARVCP support (meaning that I can't use the controls on the headphones to move to a different song or pause during playback). On balance the disadvantages out weigh the advantages for me.

Second, I tried the Belkin F8T013 Class 2 USB dongle. This worked just fine (albeit with the same need to manually "connect" the headphones using the USB tray icon whenever they are being used), but appears to be based on the same Broadcom chip as the IOGear USB dongle I had tried previously. So there is no reason to prefer this to the IOGear dongle.

Third, I discovered that Broadcom has drivers that are even more up to date than those offered for downloads by the manufacturers of products that use their chips. As of this writing, a download from the Broadcom website will update your Bluetooth Widcomm drivers to version 6.0.1.6200. These seem to work a little better (in terms of ease of connection) than the older 3300 drivers offered by IOGear and the 4400 drivers offered by Belkin.

So far the winning combination for me is the IOGear Class 1 USB dongle paired with the Song DR-BT50 headphones. The range on the IOGear dongles is little better than Class 2, however. I would be interested in trying a Class 1 dongle with an antenna that used the (so far) reliable Broadcom chipset.