Cycling Candidate

I don't know much about Sangin Rahmani, but I love the fact that he's campaigning by bicycle. Of course, the US does have at least one similar candidate. Lawton Chiles walked across Florida when running for the US Senate for the first time.

Brother Mike gets some pub for O.R.

My brother Mike just received a best paper award from Institute for Industrial Engineers for his game theory research. The Stuart News printed a brief interview with him. The article even has a brief description of Operations Research. Nice to see Mike and OR get some press.

Too many Owls

The Longhorns will be watching the Big12 championship game this year. Even though they won as many games as OU, played a tougher conference schedule, and beat OU head to head. They were ranked below OU in most of the computer polls because they played such a weak nonconference schedule. You know your schedule is weak when Rice is the toughest game. Texas chose to play UTEP, Arkansas Rice and Florida Atlantic. OK, Arkansas was supposed to be better, they're an SEC team after all, but they weren't. The moral is, if you are going to play two owls in the same year, you have to win all your games.

Bailout

I can't express how much this whole bail out thing troubles me. Having the government determine what the "correct" price should be in a "normal" market should make any American queasy, but unfortunately, the reaction is very muted. Most of the folks in congress who talk like they are against it are just posturing to get some of their favorite stuff funded or to have their names mentioned on the news.
A couple of thoughts. First, no matter what people say, there is a moral hazard being created if the government spends more than market rates to buy these assets. It's important that not just the folks who made the bad investment go broke'; it's also important that the people who loaned money to the people who made the bad investment also take a hit. If that's me who loaned them money, I should take a hit too. Consider this, if someone borrows a large amount of money and puts it all on red at a casino, keeps the profit if he wins and lets the government pay back the debt if he looses, are you telling me there's no moral hazard? That's pretty much what happened here.

Second, what's all this talk about chaos being so bad. Are you kidding me? Traders thrive on chaos. Markets thrive on chaos. Wall Street really isn't a casino. In a casino all the probabilities are known and almost nothing unusual will happen. In real life, things don't follow textbook probability distributions (especially not the normal distribution).
Finally, if you really insist on propping up this market, you don't need to create this new government entity with super-constitutional powers. Just pass a law: anyone who buys an mortgage-backed-security in the next few weeks and holds it for at least 6 months pays zero capital gains on the profits. That will bring out the vulture capitalist who will really determine what the value of this stuff is.

Goodbye to DJ and AJ

Looks like DJ and AJ will be leaving the longhorns for the NBA. I'm sure it's a tough decision, but at least for DJ, it's a hard thing to pass up. If you are going to be a lottery pick, it's almost reckless to keep playing in the NCAA. If you really like school, you can go back to school when your NBA career is over. Maybe even during your career like Vince Young is doing (although he's playing football). A lot of folks are crying about this ruining college basketball.
Some folks have suggested raising the NBA age to 21. That's just wrong. If someone has the ability to work for a lot of money, you shouldn't deny that person from the ability to earn. What's a better way? How about giving a stipend to the players? Something comparable to a TA's salary, around $1000/month during the season. The players are putting a lot of time into the playing (time they could be spending working) and a lot of folks pay good money to watch them play. How to pay for it: how about a salary cap on coaches? Wouldn't this hurt the small schools? Maybe, but they are already at a disadvantage, and anyway. If you are worried about competition, let more money accrue to the smaller schools.
You might argue that $1000/month isn't much closer to $1,000,000 than $0, but I would argue it is. $1000/month for a student is a lot different than $0. The less money you have, the greater that value of a single dollar. It won't stop everybody from leaving, but it might convince a few more to stay, especially the bubble cases like AJ.

Delta Northwest

The pundits are saying it's for real this time. They do have some good complements. Delta is big in Europe (especially FRA) and Northwest is big in Asia (especially NRT). The are also part of the skyteam alliance.

What to do first? Complete the shrinkage of the MEM hub (covered by CVG and ATL) and the retirement of the DC-9's. What about the other hubs? DL already pulled out of DFW. I'm not sure they will shrink any other hubs. Looking at a map maybe CVG could be a candidate for the axe.



Problems: besides the pilot's agreement, despite the great diversity in DL and NW's fleets, they have almost nothing in common. NW's old planes are DC-9's, 747's and they are about half way to a very slow process of converting to Airbus. Delta's old planes are MD-80's and they are much further along to Boeing's new planes. The only thing they have in common is the discontinued 757-200.

Revenue managment on TV

CNBC did a two hour show on AA sunday at 9pm EDT. They actually interviewed the head of revenue management and tried to explain it. One neat thing, they featured a BDL DFW flight and spoke to the man who paid the most to fly, more than anyone in first class. When they interviewed him (clearly packed in coach), he said "I'm just glad to get on a flight". Almost exactly like Robert Cross' story in Revenue Management. CNBC didn't make it explicit that if AA hadn't jacked up the price, the flight would have been sold out.