Lee argues well that, while drivers enjoy freedom in a variety of environments, walkable urban settings (often with good transit) provide freedom for those unable to drive to live full and independent lives.

We’re somewhat in this situation ourselves - Jennifer cannot drive at night, but in a walkable environment, she can still go places in the evening (which, in Minnesota, is much of the day during some parts of the year).

I’ll just add that, though I can drive, I generally feel more free on foot, bike, or bus/train than in a car. I enjoy the wind on my face, the feeling of truly being in the city, the ability to take shortcuts and paths inaccessible to cars. I also have the freedom to enjoy my journey, destination, and company without worrying about where to park, or if I paid the meter enough. When I am finished, there will be another bus to take me home. I can live with freedom from worrying about if I need to fix the car, or how much registration and insurance will be.

Basically, I’m free to live rather than maintain, care for, and worry about the state and location of a silly metal box.

If you’ve been following my Twitter stream, you have probably seen that I’m doing some reading and study on Bayesian statistics lately. For a variety of reasons, I find the Bayesian model of statistics quite compelling and am hoping to be able to use it in some of my research.

Traditional statistics, encapsulating well-known methods such as t-tests, ANOVA, etc. are from the frequentist school of statistical thought. The basic idea of frequentist statistics is that the world is described by parameters that are fixed and unknown. These parameters can be all manner of things — the rotation rate of the earth, the average life span of a naked mole rat, or the average number of kittens in a litter of cats. It is rare that we can have access to the entire population of interest (e.g. all mature female cats) to be able to directly measure the parameter, so we estimate parameters by taking random samples from the population, computing some statistic over the sample, and using that as our estimate of the population parameter. Since these parameters are unknown, we do not know their exact values. Since they are fixed, however, we cannot discuss them in probabilistic terms. Probabilistic reasoning only applies to random variables, and parameters are not random — we just don’t know what their values are. Probabilities, expected values, etc. are only meaningful in the context of the outcome of multiple repeated random experiments drawn from the population.

The Bayesian says, “Who cares?”. Bayesian statistics applies probabilistic methods and reasoning directly to the parameters. This doesn’t necessarily mean that the Bayesian thinks the world is really random, though. It turns out that we can use probabilities not only to express the chance that something will occur, but we can also use them to express the extent to which we believe something and the math all still works. So we can use the algebra of probabilities to quantify and describe how much we believe various propositions, such as “the average number of kittens per litter is 47”.

One of the fundamental differences, therefore, is that the frequentist can only apply probabilities to the act of repeating an experiment. The Bayesian can apply probabilities directly to their knowledge of the world. There are other important differences as well — frequentistic statistics is primarily concerned with testing and falsifying hypotheses, while Bayesian focuses more on determining which of several competing models or hypotheses is most likely to be true — but those differences play less of a role in what I find compelling about Bayesian statistics, and it is also possible to apply falsificationist principles in a Bayesian framework.

In the age of e-commerce, sales taxes are a difficult problem. Currently, online retailers such as Amazon.com are under the same rule as mail-order sellers traditionally have been: they only have to collect sales tax from customers located in their state (or states in which they have a physical presence). Recently, this has gained greater attention due to several states passing measures to count affiliate program members (kickbacks for links on blogs, etc.) as a physical presence, so Amazon.com would be required to collect sales tax from customers in any state in which one of its affiliates resides. These affiliates are often private individuals and do no direct sales for Amazon — only referrals — but, in an effort to regain their tax base, states are wanting to see them as a physical presence.

I do not question that e-commerce is presenting significant problems for local economies. Money spent online does not stay in the local economy, and moving sales out-of-state does decrease the tax base for state income taxes. While most states require residents to pay sales tax themselves on out-of-state purchases, it is likely that few actually do so. Particularly in the present time of tight state budgets, this certainly isn’t helping matters.

It is tempting to just say, as many states are attempting to, that Amazon.com should collect sales tax sales to their residents. Citizens for Tax Justice recently published an article accusing Amazon.com of fostering tax evasion and calling the Supreme Court ruling instituting the current system “misguided”.

I think this is an overly simplistic analysis of the situation. There is a complex tangle of issues surrounding sales tax in the U.S., and placing local requirements on Internet-based sellers creates further problems that I think are likely to be worse than the current woes.