Marginal Revolution

Simple sense about discount rates

Geoffrey Heal writes:

Sterner and Persson...talk about the effect of changes in relative prices rather than consumption of produced and environmental goods, but the point is the same.  If we consume both produced goods and the services of the environment...then we can expect that with climate change environmental services will become scarce relative to produced goods and therefore their price will rise relative to that of produced goods.  Consequently, the present value of an increment of environmental services may be rising over time, and the consumption discount rate on environmental services may thus be negative...This could be the case even with a positive pure rate of time preference...

Here is the paper.  Here is an ungated version.  In the interests of fairness to both sides of this debate, I should note that while I believe the costs of climate change are higher than most people think, I also believe that the costs of fixing the problem are higher than people think.

Heads in the Sand

That's by Matt Yglesias (son of Rafael Yglesias) and the subtitle is How the Republicans Screw Up Foreign Policy and Foreign Policy Screws Up the Democrats.  Anyone who reads books on foreign policy should buy this book.  Most of all it is a critique of recent practice and a defense of liberal internationalism.  He calls for negotiating with Iran, not digging in deeper in Iraq, and more generally accepting multilateral frameworks for the use of American military power.  I agree with the policy recommendations though I would package them differently.  I view liberal internationalism as a kind of noble lie which will in any case be superseded by American exceptionalism, most of all because of differing European and American experiences in WWII and differing degrees of religiosity.  Rightly or wrongly, Americans are more likely to see menaces abroad and of course America is the only country that can even try to do much about them.  Of course we've shown we're not up to the job, noting that Afghanistan (a just war, I might add, and do note it commanded international support for a while but that turned out not to matter) is probably going even worse than Iraq by standards of long-run viability.  If our interventions are counterproductive then constraints on those interventions are beneficial and in that regard we can embrace internationalism for practical reasons. 

But I can't have a high opinion of internationalism per se, perhaps because I've spent too much time actually working in multilateral institutions.  The incentive is to negotiate at the margin, and eke out a somewhat better deal for one's nation and carry victories to diplomatic superiors back home, rather than to actually solve the international problem in cooperative fashion.  If there is any good solution to be had, the large number of negotiating parties usually requires America to play von Stackelberg leader (remember Yugoslavia?), noting that our ability to do this has broken down for reasons that go beyond the failures of Bush.  The EU now precommits to a greater role in global decisions and many more countries are wealthy and have global interests.  Media spin means that no one wants to take too many sacrifices.  I think once a Democrat assumes the Presidency it will become clear just how much the old order has broken down, probably forever.  European diplomats were cynical in the first place and don't forget that the Security Council still has two members whose influence is more or less pure poison.  I can't imagine what liberal internationalism means, for instance, when it comes to allocating the thawing bits of the Arctic and the associated oil wealth.  What will happen if/when the Russians simply try to grab more than international conventions allow them? 

Note, by the way, that Saddam and Chirac really were gift-giving friends; that's not just a right-wing fantasy.  At some level American voters understand much of this, albeit in excessively provincial terms, and they simply won't, in the electoral sense, allow the Democrats to inhabit the old space of internationalism.

In game-theoretic terms I would say the key question is what is the "threat point" America adopts when it offers to join international coalitions.  Whatever Matt's answer might be (his book is not written in that sort of lingo) that is now the key question, noting that whatever threat point you specify you have to be willing to live with.  One paradox is that the more internationalist your default threat point is, the less effective a country actually will be in leading an international coalition.

In short, I'm all for talk of liberal internationalism as long as we don't take it too seriously on its own terms.  My prediction is that, doctrinally, Matt will eventually end up somewhere else, even though his practical advice is very sound and very well articulated and doesn't much need to be changed.  I hereby sentence him to one full month spent working at the United Nations.

Wacky Patents

A satellite missed its orbit.  The problem can be fixed but, believe it or not, Boeing has a patent on using the moon, i.e. gravity, to change a satellite's orbit!  The patent probably wouldn't hold up in court but because of a different lawsuit Boeing is threatening to sue anyway if the firm uses the procedure.  Since the costs of a lawsuit are high and the satellite is insured, down it may come.

More here including interesting material on space salvage.  Hat tip to Boing Boing.  Tabarrok on patent reform here.

Why are there so few eligible bachelors?

...game theory predicts, and empirical studies of auctions bear out, that auctions will often be won by "weak" bidders, who know that they can be outbid and so bid more aggressively, while the "strong" bidders will hold out for a really great deal. You can find a technical discussion of this here. (Be warned: "Bidding Behavior in Asymmetric Auctions" is not for everyone, and I certainly won't claim to have a handle on all the math.) But you can also see how this works intuitively if you just consider that with a lot at stake in getting it right in one shot, it's the women who are confident that they are holding a strong hand who are likely to hold out and wait for the perfect prospect.

This is how you come to the Eligible-Bachelor Paradox, which is no longer so paradoxical. The pool of appealing men shrinks as many are married off and taken out of the game, leaving a disproportionate number of men who are notably imperfect (perhaps they are short, socially awkward, underemployed). And at the same time, you get a pool of women weighted toward the attractive, desirable "strong bidders."

Where have all the most appealing men gone? Married young, most of them—and sometimes to women whose most salient characteristic was not their beauty, or passion, or intellect, but their decisiveness.

Here is the full argument.  I don't, however, quite buy this as the explanation of the phenomenon.  I view the real world auction as being held -- at least if you wish -- continuously rather than at discrete times.  So the "strong bidding women" can always cave and settle for a "lesser man" after an optimal amount of waiting, yet many don't.  The distinction between period-by-period happiness and overall lifetime happiness also shapes the market.  As smart single women mature, their lives get better and better.  "Settling" becomes psychologically harder, even if it would make some of the "settlers" happy in the longer run.  So settling doesn't happen; decisiveness become harder to conjure up at the same time that its long-run value is increasing, or in other words behavioral economics is very much at work here.

seriously

The New York Times reports:

In “The Visitor”, Richard Jenkins plays an economist whose flagging joie de vivre is restored when he takes up drumming.

It opens today in limited release.

It's by the guy who made The Station Agent, a movie about a New Jersey resident with achondroplasia; here is more information.

Iraq update

A loyal MR reader sent me the following from Reuters:

Bombings and strife apart, Iraq is proving an oasis for investors battered by global financial turmoil, Citi argued in a research note on Thursday.

The cost of insuring country-region Iraq's bonds against default has fallen so sharply that they now costs less to insure than Venezuelan debt, said Citi economist David Lubin.  "Judging from the performance of spreads in the market for sovereign credit risk, one could argue that Iraq has become something of a safe haven in recent months," he said.

Oil-exporter Iraq has benefited from an improvement in its foreign-exchange reserves. Iraqi five-year credit default swaps -- instruments which protect against debt default -- tightened to 520 basis points from around 635 bps at the start of the year. Similar instruments for Venezuela, whose President Hugo Chavez is leading a wave of takeovers to wrest companies from private and foreign ownership, are currently trading at 611 bps. Like their developed counterparts, emerging markets have been hit by a deepening in risk aversion in the wake of the credit crunch sparked by U.S. subprime mortgage defaults.

Lubin said chances of a further decline in Iraq risk premium were strong given the country's fiscal discipline but warned that the central government could face challenges from the rising influence of provincial rulers.

As I interpret the email from my source, he is not personally so bullish on Iraqi reconstruction; rather some people are rushing out of other assets and preferring Iraq for its (relative) safety.  So you needn't read this in an optimistic light.  Alternatively, you might view this as a bet on the U.S. Presidential race and the rising prospects of the Republicans.

Whatever happened to markets in everything?

I posted this on northern Virginia Craigslist and haven't heard a peep:

I am looking to learn how to use Second Life.  I would like a series of lessons from a tutor with extensive experience in Second Life.  I don't need anything very complicated, just an introduction to the basics. Please email me your rates.

Why is this market failing me?  And what should I do next?

The infinitely bad sneeze

Zack writes to me:

You're in an airport, about to go through the security line. You sneeze, which delays you by two seconds. It doesn't just delay you by two seconds, though; it also delays everyone waiting in line behind you. And everyone who will show up while the people currently in line haven't gone through yet. In fact, if you assume that the queue is never empty, which even at 3 in the morning is true for the major airlines, we're talking about arbitrarily large quantities of wasted time.

I believe that airport queues do eventually empty out, if only at 4 a.m., so is there any setting where this result might hold?  And if so, what is your obligation to produce infinitely good outcomes, say by cutting off your nose?  On the philosophical side, you might find this debate relevant.  By the way, here is Zack on ranking the babies.

Incentives are everywhere

The introduction of automated cameras that ticket people who run a red light has given some cities a "clever" idea - let's reduce the yellow-light period and increase ticket revenue.  Here's one example from Dallas. 

An investigation by KDFW-TV, a local TV station, found that of the ten cameras that issued the greatest number of tickets in the city, seven were located at intersections where the yellow duration is shorter than the bare minimum recommended by the Texas Department of Transportation (TxDOT).

The city’s second highest revenue producing camera, for example, was located at the intersection of Greenville Avenue and Mockingbird Lane. It issued 9407 tickets worth $705,525 between January 1 and August 31, 2007. At the intersections on Greenville Avenue leading up to the camera intersection, however, yellows are at least 3.5 or 4.0 seconds in duration, but the ticket-producing intersection’s yellow stands at just 3.15 seconds. That is 0.35 seconds shorter than TxDOT’s recommended bare minimum.

More examples here and a hat tip to J-Walk Blog.

What I've Been Reading

1. Steven Teles, The Rise of the Conservative Legal Movement.  It covers the Federalist Society, GMU School of Law, Institute for Justice, among other institutions.  The material rang true to what I know; Orin Kerr comments.

2. Ted Hughes, Birthday Letters.  This one blew me away; you don't even have to like poetry, it is more like reading letters.  You do need to know a little about his life with Sylvia Plath to appreciate it.  A modern masterpiece, highly recommended.

3. 2666: A Novel, by Roberto Bolaño, you can pre-order it here.  So far I'm only reading the Amazon site every few days or so, thinking about when the book will come.

4. Francisco Goldman, The Art of Political Murder: Who Killed the Bishop?.  Maybe the best book on why Guatemala is such a mess but also on why there is hope.  Make sure you read the dissenting reviews on Amazon.

5. Hubble: The Mirror on the Universe, revised and updated, by Robin Kerrod and Carole Stott.  Stunning.  Most smart people make the mistake of not reading enough picture books.  It's not just that the pictures are good; the text must concentrate on what is truly essential.

Jacqueline Passey resumes blogging

Here.  And here's a new blog on the liquidity freeze in auction-rate securities.  And here is Matt Yglesias on the free trade agreement with Colombia.

Average starting salaries by major

Economics comes in 4th, with an average of $43,419.

Sebastian Mallaby on hedge funds

The most striking fact about the ongoing financial mayhem is that it is concentrated not in lightly regulated hedge funds but in more heavily regulated commercial and investment banks. It is banks that created subprime mortgage securities. It is banks that mispriced them. And it is banks that filled their own coffers with this toxic paper, losing hundreds of billions of dollars. A somewhat breathless March 31 Financial Times article proclaimed the closing of the worst month for hedge funds since the collapse of the infamous Long Term Capital Management in 1998. But the average fund tracked by the Chicago-based firm Hedge Fund Research declined by a mere 2.4 percent in March, bringing the cumulative fall for the first quarter of 2008 to 2.7 percent. By contrast, the bank-heavy financial services component of the S&P 500 fell 12.3 percent in the first quarter.

Hedge funds, for the most part, have weathered the storm remarkably well.

Here is more, interesting throughout and in my view largely correct.  See also related remarks by Megan McArdle.

It Wasn't Me

As finance minister, Mr Cowen was responsible for a startling 13 per cent rise in government spending last year, which turned a budget surplus of 2.9 per cent of gross domestic product in 2006 into a forecast deficit of 1.2 per cent this year.

“It was an election year, but if you increase spending that much, you will make some mistakes,” says Alan Barrett, senior economist at Ireland’s Economic and Social Research Institute.

“I do not think anyone would say from the state of public services that it was worth it.”

Cowen is now confirmed as Irish prime minister, here is one story.

Black Los Angeles in Jim Crow America

That's the subtitle, the title is Bound for Freedom and it is by Douglas Flamming.  This book is a good antidote to libertarians who assign too much blame to state governments, and not enough blame to voluntary norms, when it comes to Southern segregation and Jim Crow.  Early in the twentieth century, Los Angeles was devoid of the oppressive Jim Crow laws that were so common in the South.  In fact California had some (unenforced) laws prohibiting discrimination according to race.  Yet according to one survey only three of two hundred saloons would serve blacks.  Most hotels did not accept blacks either and that was in direct contradiction to state law.  Both Hollywood and the petroleum industry for the most part refused to hire blacks, even for jobs of unskilled labor.  On the positive side, many of the businesses along Central Avenue were fully integrated, serving Latino and Japanese customers as well.  Blacks did have, overall, a much better existence in LA than in the South but this volume shows that Jim Crow cannot simply be blamed on oppressive government regulations.

Here is my earlier post on Jim Crow in sports.

Antiquity was richer than we think

George Grantham writes:

In recent decades the conventional dating of the origins of Western Europe’s economic ascendancy to the tenth and eleventh centuries AD has been called in question by archaeological findings and reinterpretations of the early medieval texts indicating significantly higher levels of material prosperity in Antiquity than conventional accounts consider plausible. On the basis of that evidence it appears likely that at its peak the classical economy was almost as large as that of Western Europe on the eve of the Industrial Revolution.

Here is sixty pages more, noting that every single page of this paper has interesting material, a remarkable achievement.  Here is one bit:

Between 1300 and 900 BC three innovations turned out to be crucial for the eventual integration of Europe’s economic space. The earliest was the improvement in ship construction and sailing technique. As will be discussed in more detail below, the decisive changes in rigging and hull construction that permitted larger and more robust ships were achieved before the Aegean collapse in response to the growing bulk trade in timber and agricultural produce. The perfection of ferrous metallurgy by Cypriot and Aegean smiths was the second decisive innovation. Unlike the changes in naval architecture, the metallurgical innovations of the Aegean Dark Age were an unexpected by-product of economic collapse. The third major development affecting the later expansion of trading networks was the transformation of Proto-Canaanite syllabaries into a true alphabet consisting of approximately two dozen phonetic signs. The triumph of the alphabet was also a consequence of the Aegean collapse, which destroyed the earlier and slightly more cumbersome cuneiform script employed to document administrative and commercial transactions outside Egypt.

The pointer is from Razib.  Here is Grantham on the agricultural revolution.

The burdens of fame

Germany's celebrity polar bear Knut has triggered a new controversy by fishing out 10 live carp from his moat and killing them in front of visitors.  Critics say Berlin Zoo should not have put live fish inside Knut's enclosure...The Frankfurter Allgemeine news website reports that Knut "senselessly murdered the carp", fishing them out, playing with them and then leaving the remains.

And it seems that the Green Party has complained.  Um....HE'S A POLAR BEAR!

Addendum: The story is here.  You can survey the German-language press here.  The FAZ article is here.  While I can imagine valid criticisms of zoos, this is not one of them.  It also should be noted that Knut's normal diet does not consist of tofu.

Assorted Links

• Keith Chen (of monkey sex fame) says cognitive dissonance may be an artifact of an unappreciated Monty Hall problem.

• Brad DeLong is an "optimist" on housing.  Even if wrong this puts him in good company.

• The economics of Barack Obama Senior is upsetting some people.

Why is monogamy associated with economic development?

Eric Gould, Omer Moav and Avi Simhon offer a new answer in the March 2008 American Economic Review: female inequality.  Economic growth means that some women have higher human capital than others and thus they are better suited at producing and rearing high quality children.  Wealthy men with lots of human capital will start to bid for these women and they will have to offer them exclusive status; these men also wish to invest in a smaller number of higher quality children.

In other words, male inequality encourages polygamy while female inequality discourages it.  Apparently female inequality has been winning that race.

The hypothesis also helps explain why polygamy unravels so decisively at some point.  Since monogamy itself encourages children (including daughters) with higher human capital, initial tendencies toward monogamy are self-reinforcing.

Here is an earlier ungated version of the paper.  Or buy the new version here for $7.50.  Here are previous MR posts on polygamy.

Headlines

As Price of Lead Soars, British Churches Find Holes in Roof

It is described as the most serious assault on British churches since the Reformation; the roofs of course are made partly of lead.  And here are stories from the U.S.  In some cases entire neighborhoods are being rendered uninhabitable by the boom in commodities prices and the induced theft. 

More on Bartels

I'm a little surprised that the Bartels result is receiving so much attention because the result, in slightly different form, has long been known to political economists under the rubric of partisan business cycle theory.  In a nutshell, the theory of partisan business cycles says that Democrats care more about reducing unemployment, Republicans care more about reducing inflation.  Wage growth is set according to expected inflation in advance of an election.  Since which party will win the election is unknown wages growth is set according to a mean of the Democrat (high) and Republican (low) expected inflation rates.  If Democrats are elected they inflate and real wages fall creating a boom.  If Republicans are elected they reduce inflation and real wages rise creating a bust.  Notice that in PBC theory neither party creates a boom or bust it's uncertainty which drives the result - if the winning party were known there would be neither boom nor bust.

Ok, there's plenty to question about the theory but let's look at the data.

Notice that in the second year of just about every Democratic Presidency there is a boom.  Interestingly, the boom is biggest for Truman whose reelection was highly uncertain (remember Dewey wins!) thus expected inflation would have been low and the boom big.  Similarly the boom is smallest (relative to the surrounding years) for Clinton II a relatively certain reelection.

Now look at Republicans in just about every second year of a Republican Presidency there is a bust.  The one major exception being Reagan II where uncertainty about the outcome was low.

It's pretty clear that this result can explain Bartels's result which is exactly Tyler's point in his post.   It's equally clear that when we consider Presidents there aren't many data points.  (PBC does appear to hold somewhat in other countries).

Notice that the reason for the result, according to PBC, is sticky wages and the business cycle and not some nefarious story about taxes, oligarchies and political conspiracies.

Haitian prison

If international minimum standards of about four square metres for every prisoner were met, the National Penitentiary would hold a little more than 400 inmates. On the day Maclean's visits the prison, there are 3,331 men jailed inside. Most, at least 90 per cent, have not had a trial. They are held under the euphemistic term "preventative detention," and because of a lack of judges, proper evidence, and even vehicles to transport them to court, it is unlikely many will be tried any time soon. "People sleep on top of people in here," one prisoner says through the bars of a bathroom-sized cell that holds 43 people. Most are standing. Others have fashioned hammocks out of scraps of cloth and have suspended themselves from the bars of the cell's high window, where they can get more light and air...

Here is more.  And that is not all:

There is a punishment cell, perhaps four feet tall, where no one can stand. The punishment cell is crowded, but less so than other cells, and some inmates prefer it. "You have people who do things wrong just so they have a place to lie down or to be safe from gangs," Cadet says.

Here is a video about recent food riots in Haiti, and no those are not in the prisons.

Assorted links

1. Why Messiaen is important

2. The demise of the semi-colon?

3. Jason Furman on fixing our fiscal problems

4. More proposals for limiting chess draws

Larry Bartels, and how Republican Presidents drive income inequality

He writes:

In any case, the largest partisan differences in income growth, by far, occur in the second year of each administration.

The link, by the way, answers many objections to his basic thesis.  View this graph if you don't already know the argument.  The core claim is that Republican Presidents are better for the rich and Democratic Presidents are better for the poor, and to a striking degree. 

I view the statistical significance of the Bartels result as stemming from monetary policy.  Republicans are more willing to break the back of inflation and risk an immediate recession.  Alternatively, it could be said that central bankers expect enough support for tough, anti-inflation decisions only from Republican Presidents.  (Note that Jimmy Carter, who did support Volcker, is in fact the single Democratic outlier.)  Note that without the monetary policy effect, only a few data points, mostly from very recent times, support the basic claim.  Without the monetary policy effect, I do not think that statistical significance would remain.  Furthermore other plausible channels for income inequality effects, such as tax and regulatory decisions, would not be concentrated in the second year of each administration.  Monetary policy decisions would be.  A recession, by generating more unemployment, hurts the poor the most in proportional terms.

So what does this all mean?

Inflation is good for the poor in the short run, since many poor are debtors.  But inflation is bad for the poor in the long run.  Just ask anyone who lived through the New Zealand inflation of the 1970s.

So Bartels could have entitled his key graph: "Democratic Presidents live for the short run and we need a Republican President every now and then."

Addendum: Even Paul Krugman wonders about the basic mechanism driving the result.

World Wide Losses are the Best Losses

From the frozen lands of Norway's Arctic Circle to the hot sands of the Middle East and the booming metropolis of Shanghai the losses from America's subprime crisis are popping up around the world like angry whac-a-moles.  The losses are large and appear larger by being found in the most unexpected of places.  Today the focus is on these world-wide losses but I think future historians will focus on how the crisis demonstrated to everyone the power of integrated capital markets to diversify risk. 

The losses, of course, are regrettable and the desire to find and apportion blame for the crisis among investors, home buyers, mortgage brokers, credit analysts and regulators is understandable.  We should and will learn lessons.  And yet, despite problems with transparency one of those lessons ought to be that the crisis would have been worse if the losses had been more concentrated.

From this perspective, world-wide losses are perhaps the best losses of all.

How free trade affects thievery, part II

Yes commodity prices are high:

A thief sneaked under the sport utility vehicle with a battery-powered saw, slicing from the Toyota’s underbelly what may be one of the most expensive small parts of the auto world: the catalytic converter, an essential emissions-control device made with small amounts of metals more precious than gold. Who knew?

...Theft of scrap metals like copper and aluminum has been common here and across the country for years, fueled by rising construction costs and the building boom in China. But now thieves have found an easy payday from the upper echelon of the periodic table. It seems there may not be an easier place to score some platinum than under the hood of a car...

The catalytic converter is made with trace amounts of platinum, palladium and rhodium, which speed chemical reactions and help clean emissions at very high temperatures. Selling stolen converters to scrap yards or recyclers, a thief can net a couple of hundred dollars apiece.

Here is the story.  Here is part I in the series.  Here is a man who died trying to extract gold from his computer.

The erotics of investing

When young men were shown erotic pictures, they were more likely to make a larger financial gamble than if they were shown a picture of something scary, such as a snake, or something neutral, such as a stapler, university researchers reported.

The arousing pictures lit up the same part of the brain that lights up when financial risks are taken.

...The study conforms with recent research that indicates men shown a pornographic movie were more likely to make riskier sexual decisions. Another suggests straight men think less about their financial future after being shown pictures of pretty women.

Here is more.  One question -- and perhaps a more direct test of the hypothesis -- is whether traders in more sexually integrated firms do in fact behave differently.  Or how about companies located next to modeling agencies?  I suspect in real social settings the effect washes out, for reasons identified by Freud (among others) some time ago.  The more literally minded among us might also question whether a stapler is in fact a neutral image.  It isn't for me.

Jeff Sachs on biodiversity

His new book Common Wealth devotes an entire chapter to this important topic.  Sachs writes:

The main lesson of ecology is the interconnectedness of the various parts of an ecosystem and the dangers of abrupt, nonlinear, and even catastrophic changes caused by modest forcings...It is a basic finding that biological diversity increases the productivity and resilience of ecosystems.  With more species filling more niches in a given location, a biodiverse ecosystem is better buffered against external shocks in is more adept at cycling nutrients, capturing solar radiation, utilizing water resources, and preventing the takeover of the system by single predators, weeds, or pathogens.  In other words, preserving biodiversity helps to preserve all aspects of ecosystem functions.  Removing one or more species from an ecosystem, for example, by selective harvesting of trees or fish or hunted animals, can lead to a cascade of ecological changes with large, adverse, and nonlinear effects on the functioning of the ecosystem.

Now, loyal MR readers may remember that I am genuinely uncertain how much we should worry about the loss of biodiversity.  I do know the following:

1. Many smart people who know much more science than I do are very worried about the loss of biodiversity.

2. Given that the human population has ballooned for the foreseeable future, massive losses in biodiversity are inevitable.  The question is how bad the marginal losses will be, if we do not adapt policy accordingly.

3. If I had to conduct a debate and argue that the marginal loss of biodiversity was going to be a tragedy for human beings (obviously, I can see the loss to animals, and yes I do count that for something), I would not do very well.  Yes Yana's children won't eat tuna and then I would sputter something about carbon and nitrogen cycles.

So OK readers, help me out.  I've read Sachs's passage and I don't think I disagree with any of the claims in it.  But I still cannot articulate to a skeptic exactly what marginal disaster will come if we do not take drastic action to preserve biodiversity.

Please use the comments to set me straight.  What exactly will go wrong?  And do not compare seven billion humans to pristine nature.  Compare seven billion humans with bad biodiversity policy to, say, five billion humans with a pretty good biodiversity policy.  What exactly is the difference?  What are these costs as a percentage of gdp? 

Please be as specific as possible; I genuinely would like to learn more.