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Assorted Links 3/11/10

Judge Jim Gray on The Six Groups That Benefit From Drug Prohibition

• Speechwriting: Preparing Speeches and Oral Presentations, March 12, 2010
• Word Workshop: Writing for Government and Business: Critical Thinking and Writing, April 15, 2010
• Word Workshop: Writing to Persuade: Hone Your Persuasive Writing Skills, April 16, 2010
• Media Relations for Public Affairs Professionals, May 4, 2010
• Advanced Media Relations, May 5, 2010
• Public Affairs and the Internet: Advanced Techniques and Strategies, May 6, 2010
• Crisis Communications Training, May 7, 2010
• SnowJob: Revising the Non-Farm Payrolls Report - "It appears as though the concerns expressed by the Administration about the snow storms and their impact on lost employment was overdone, if not misplaced. The market is pleasantly surprised with this -36,000 jobs number, since the expectations had been calibrated lower so effectively.
  
  In fairness to the Obama Administration, they are only doing what Bush II, Clinton, and Bush I* had been doing right along with almost every statistic that they have issued. It's called 'perception management.' Greece used one method of accounting management in shaping the numbers, and the US uses its own approach to what is essentially a similar problem.
  . . .
  Or perhaps the US economy and its monetary system are an increasingly untenable Ponzi scheme, the mother of frauds."
• You Think Joe Stiglitz is Funny? NYT is funny, too! - "I accept, as Angus did before, that debt might be okay if we were investing it. But we are not. We are using debt to fund pet projects that have no purpose other than re-electing Senators, or paying to put more people on the public employment roles so they will reliably vote Democrat.
  
  Third, the dude actually says, 'According to this school of thought, as our debt grows, lenders will be willing to take the risk of giving more money only if they can get more in return. And yet with the rise of China, India and Brazil, the world is awash in money looking for safe places.' That's not a school of thought, that's accounting physics. Further, if either the Eurozone or Chinese get their act together, our complacency ('sure we suck, but they suck worse! Eat that pie!') will be hammered."
• Gendercide - "Most people know China and northern India have unnaturally large numbers of boys. But few appreciate how bad the problem is, or that it is rising. In China the imbalance between the sexes was 108 boys to 100 girls for the generation born in the late 1980s; for the generation of the early 2000s, it was 124 to 100. In some Chinese provinces the ratio is an unprecedented 130 to 100. The destruction is worst in China but has spread far beyond. Other East Asian countries, including Taiwan and Singapore, former communist states in the western Balkans and the Caucasus, and even sections of America’s population (Chinese- and Japanese-Americans, for example): all these have distorted sex ratios. Gendercide exists on almost every continent. It affects rich and poor; educated and illiterate; Hindu, Muslim, Confucian and Christian alike.
  
  Wealth does not stop it. Taiwan and Singapore have open, rich economies. Within China and India the areas with the worst sex ratios are the richest, best-educated ones. And China’s one-child policy can only be part of the problem, given that so many other countries are affected.
  . . .
  And all countries need to raise the value of girls. They should encourage female education; abolish laws and customs that prevent daughters inheriting property; make examples of hospitals and clinics with impossible sex ratios; get women engaged in public life--using everything from television newsreaders to women traffic police. Mao Zedong said 'women hold up half the sky.' The world needs to do more to prevent a gendercide that will have the sky crashing down."
• Return of the natives: Beneath the idealism and political correctness of Avatar, in the spotlight at the Oscars on Sunday, lie brutal racist undertones. - "The film teaches us that the only choice the aborigines have is to be saved by the human beings or to be destroyed by them. In other words, they can choose either to be the victim of imperialist reality, or to play their allotted role in the white man's fantasy."
• Alice In Wonderland - "Johnny Depp did not work well in this role and the character he played came off as your creepy Uncle Harold rather than the whimsical character that defines the role of the Mad Hatter and would have worked and been better suited here."
• California Doing a Rendition of the Housing Industry on the Budget – $20 Billion Budget Deficit and Massive Amount of Distress Inventory. How Banks Raided the U.S. Treasury with the aid of the Federal Reserve and have Damaged Housing Further. - "The banking system has captured our government and frustration is boiling over. Yet those in the housing and banking industry seem complacent and even self congratulatory that we 'have avoided Great Depression 2.0.' Really? Now we’re taking advice from the same group of cronies that led the economy off the financial cliff. And the most troubling thing is we are at the height of unemployment even though the headline rate seems to have steadied out. California’s unemployment rate still continues to move upward hitting 12.5 percent. Yet all is well in delusional banking world since their idea of a solution is simply not foreclosing. What is even worse, these banking crooks are now offering fire sale deals to other banks and hedge fund investors! I’ve contacted a few banks about short sales and in many cases, preference is being given to “all cash” investors. Glad those bailouts are supporting the crony banking system.
  . . .
  I’ve talked with colleagues who are Republicans and Democrats and both are absolutely appalled by what is going on with Wall Street and the housing industry. They have transformed our economy into one giant casino and houses are now life sized Monopoly tokens that are traded on the New York Stock Exchange with no regard to local economies. Moral hazard applies to the masses yet those rules don’t apply to the plutocracy that sits on Wall Street."
• Housing: A Tale of Boom and Bust and a Puzzle - "That is happening in many areas - I've heard a number of stories of homeowners staying in their homes and not paying their mortgage, and the banks not foreclosing - and, at the same time, there is intense competition for any home that comes on the market.
  
  This is a real mystery right now.
  . . .To be clear, I have my own views why the lenders are not foreclosing. Part of it is policy - it is government policy to restrict supply and boost demand to support asset prices and limit the losses for the banks. Part of it is inadequate staffing. Another reason is the lenders are making an effort to find alternatives to foreclosure (modifications, short sales, deed-in-lieu). Of course a majority of modifications will eventually redefault, but that still restricts supply for now. It isn't one reason - and the real puzzle is when (and how many) distressed sales will hit the market."
• Human Terrain Mapping - "It’s about time the Afghans get to enjoy the sight of foreign women.
  
  With rifles."
• The fable of Emanuel the Great - "From too many years of covering politics, I have come to believe as Axiom One that the absolute worst advice politicians ever receive comes from journalists who fancy themselves great campaign strategists."
• Peggy, Clytie, Ethel: 1926 - "June 21, 1926. Washington, D.C. 'Peggy Walsh, Clytie Collier and Ethel Barrymore Colt.' National Photo Company glass negative." (photo)
• Building a Better Teacher - "Lemov, for his part, finds hope in what he has already accomplished. The day that I watched Bellucci’s math class, Lemov sat next to me, beaming. He was still smiling an hour later, when we walked out of the school together to his car. ''You could change the world with a first-year teacher like that, he said."
• Secret millionaire donates fortune to Lake Forest College - "Like many people who lived through the Great Depression, Grace Groner was exceptionally restrained with her money.
  
  She got her clothes from rummage sales. She walked everywhere rather than buy a car. And her one-bedroom house in Lake Forest held little more than a few plain pieces of furniture, some mismatched dishes and a hulking TV set that appeared left over from the Johnson administration.
  
  Her one splurge was a small scholarship program she had created for Lake Forest College, her alma mater. She planned to contribute more upon her death, and when she passed away in January, at the age of 100, her attorney informed the college president what that gift added up to."
• More on Wind - "Any traditional capacity (fossil fuel, nuclear) except perhaps gas turbines takes on the order of a day or more to start up -- if you don’t take that long, the thermal stresses alone will blow the whole place up. During the whole startup and shutdown, and through any 'standby' time, the plant is burning fuel. Since we don’t have a good wind energy storage system, some percentage of wind capacity must be backed up with hot standby, because it can disappear in an instant. We are learning now, contrary to earlier assumptions, that wind speeds can be correlated pretty highly over wide geographies, meaning that spreading the wind turbines out does not necessarily do a lot to reduce the standby needs. And since plant startups take time, even gas turbines take some time to get running, the percentage of wind power that required hot backup is pretty high...."
• Why I Ban Laptops From the Classroom - "Too many students with laptops were distracting others around them, including one group viewing a soccer tournament during a lecture. The complaints about this ban never cease....
  . . .
  The next obstacle to overcome is text messaging during class."
• US Government Working With Pharma Companies To Raise Drug Prices In Other Countries - "A series of stories from Jamie Love at KEI highlight the troubling cozy relationship between pharmaceutical companies and the US government in trying to raise drug prices in other countries -- which very likely will come at the expense of the health of citizens in those countries."
• Roberts: Scene at State of Union 'very troubling' - " U.S. Chief Justice John Roberts said Tuesday the scene at President Barack Obama's first State of the Union address was "very troubling" and that the annual speech to Congress has 'degenerated into a political pep rally.'
  
  Responding to a University of Alabama law student's question about the Senate's method of confirming justices, Roberts said senators improperly try to make political points by asking questions they know nominees can't answer because of judicial ethics rules.
  . . .
  Justice Antonin Scalia once said he no longer goes to the annual speech because the justices "sit there like bumps on a log" in an otherwise highly partisan atmosphere."

Taxonomy of Effective Teaching Practices

• Cop’s book defies stereotypes - "Martin Preib is a Chicago cop. And he's a Chicago writer.
  
  You hear that a cop has written a book, and there's a temptation, grounded in stereotype, to think of stock characters: a tough guy, sultry women, Outfit bagmen with plenty of attitude and, of course, gunplay.
  
  But his book, 'The Wagon and Other Stories From the City' (University of Chicago Press, $20) isn't pulp fiction."
• Detroit school board leader can’t write - "A product of Detroit Public Schools now leads the school board that’s trying to raise worst-in-the-nation literacy scores. Otis Mathis can’t write, reveals Detroit News columnist Laura Berman. The board president’s e-mails are notoriously garbled:"
• Friday's Three Burning Legal Questions - "1) Question: I'm an adult male, and recently I've been thinking about getting circumcised. I saw an ad on Craigslist by some dude who says he can do it for me out of a mini-operating room in his home. He tells me he's a doctor. Should I go for it?"
• Wheat Ridge High School Class of 1970 - "The reonion committee is working away planning the 40th reunion the weekend of August 13-15, 2010. Wheat Ridge, Colorado WRHS1970.com"
• Common Market Food Co-op - "Common Market Food Co-op was a 'new wave food co-op' located at 1329 California Street in Denver, Colorado, from 1975 - 1980. It started as a buying club at the University of Denver in the early 1970s, and for a few years prior to moving to the old Safeway at 13th and California Streets, Common Market operated out of a small storefront on Champa Street."
• Succinylcholine, A Perfect Poison, Makes Appearance in the Dubai Killing - "According to Dubai authorities, and as reported by ABC News, Hamas operative Mahmoud al-Mabhouh was given a shot of succinylcholine prior to other grossly things done to his body on the fateful (for him) day of January 19, 2010. And since your humble correspondent is an anesthesiologist by day, and by call at night, let me tell you why succinylcholine is such a perfect murder weapon.
  
  The best poisons usually have three things in common: small effective dose, also called Median Lethal Dose (or LD50), ease of administration, and rapid and definitive action. The fourth characteristic, the difficulty in detection by a forensics team is a big premium that most poisons don't posses. Most poisons, that is, except succinylcholine and maybe a few others."
• The Great Burger Battle - "Sports bore me but I can’t get enough of the great burger battle. McDonald’s reported sales increases of 4.8 last month. Most of the increases are overseas but it is no surprise that its domestic sales are solid as can be.
  
  Their new coffees, which now include frozen drinks, are a close competitor to Starbucks, and in buying them you don’t have to endure a lecture about how you are doing your part to save the planet.
  
  For breakfast, you can get a traditional biscuit or croissant with sausage or move into the new line that includes a fruit parfait for a buck (how is this possible?) or an apple-walnut salad. This stuff is amazing.
  
  And I would compare their Angus burger next to any hamburger in a fancy restaurant that costs twice as much.
  
  This is a company that knows how to market, how to adapt, how to change. And in my town, the McDonald’s is the happiest place around. They offer wi-fi and smiling employees who are quick with a quip and a smile. The place is full of energy and life and is teeming with the sense of progress.
  . . .
  It always amazes me how demanding Americans can be toward private enterprise. Everything must be 100% correct or the customer flips out. But put these same people in line at the post office or the customs line at the airport and they become complacent slaves doing everything they are told. They don’t even complain about it.
  
  It’s as if our expectations are different and we are okay with that. We expect the government to be slow, rude, abusive, unreasonable, and unresponsive and we adapt ourselves to that and figure that this is what is necessary for security or the general welfare or whatever. We let them have our money and our lives and call it a day."

Assasination [sic] and hotel door security

• Why Google Android Favoritism Isn’t Punishing Consumers and Partners - "Mark rightly points out that the coolest new Android apps are appearing on handsets with newer builds of Android first -- and sometimes exclusively. Google Maps Navigation debuted on the Motorola Droid with Android 2.0 and Google Buzz is supported on 2.x as well. But I ask myself: if I were Google and I wanted to rock out a new app and build the biggest buzz, I’d get it on the heartiest hardware first so it really shines from a performance perspective. I’d also pair it with hardware designed to show it off -- the Droid car dock morphs what’s essentially a software product into a look-alike, standalone GPS device. That simple dock, designed specifically for the Droid, takes the Google software solution and transforms the experience. Don’t think so? Imagine if Google debuted the software on the original G1. The impact would be muted without a dock and on less capable hardware. Instead, Google chose the right hardware combination to show it off and the stock value of some GPS makers dropped 20%.
  . . .
  If you have to 'blame' someone, choose either Motorola who made the phone or Verizon who decided to sell the phone. All Google does for this phone is provide versions of it’s mobile platform to the phone maker. If I had to pick on someone in this specific case, it would be Motorola -- the Devour runs Motorola’s custom interface called MotoBlur and Motorola doesn’t offer that UI on anything higher than Android 1.6. There’s your likely culprit in this case, which has nothing to do with Google’s perceived favoritism for current Android versions."
• Dreaded Words for One in Love - "It happened to me back when I was in the marriage market. And perhaps it happened to you."
• Two expats master the Cantonese language - "The Chinese language is notoriously complex. There are the tones, the accents, and not to mention the writing! China and Singapore use simplified Chinese characters, while Hong Kong and Taiwan still use traditional Chinese characters.
  
  Then there are the different dialects. Mandarin is spoken in China, Taiwan, and Singapore. Hong Kong and China’s southern Guangdong Province mainly speak Cantonese.
  
  That being said, there’s few sadder sights than an expat who’s lived in Asia for years and still doesn’t speak the language of his adopted home. CNNgo profiled two Westerners who defy that stereotype in this article: How two gwailos learned to speak perfect Cantonese."
• BS Alert 2! Steve Wozniak (And The Media) Still Spreading Prius UA Obfuscation - "One of my pet gripes about the media and celebrities is the lack of follow-up and accountability. Remember all the hoopla about Steve Wozniak’s Prius with the mysterious electronics glitch that he could manipulate to create UA? My take was that obviously his cruise control had a minor bug that only showed up at over eighty mph. Woz readily admitted that he could disengage it with a tap on the brakes. Well, thanks to his celebrity status and the coverage, the story ended with Toyota agreeing to take his Prius for a week to test it thoroughly. So what happened?
  . . .
  Sounds like he’s got it all figured out. Toyota just needs to add a Reboot button on the dash. Meanwhile, Wozniak said he’ll continue to drive his Prius, and trusts its safety, and won’t buy another car.
  
  My guess is that he never handed it over to Toyota, or he did and they told him something he didn’t want to hear or repeat."
• Energizer Battery Charger Hides Trojan For 3 Years - "Apparently the Energizer DUO USB Battery Charger has been carrying around a nasty little trojan that can wreak havoc on your system. CERT has issued a warning...
  . . .
  That’s right, something as simple as plugging in your USB battery charger could give someone complete control over your system."

. . . . . . . . .

March 11, 2010 08:17 AM   Link    Comments (0)

Assorted Links 3/7/10

What Makes a Hero? – Rough Cut

• Speechwriting: Preparing Speeches and Oral Presentations, March 12, 2010
• Word Workshop: Writing for Government and Business: Critical Thinking and Writing, April 15, 2010
• Word Workshop: Writing to Persuade: Hone Your Persuasive Writing Skills, April 16, 2010
• Media Relations for Public Affairs Professionals, May 4, 2010
• Advanced Media Relations, May 5, 2010
• Public Affairs and the Internet: Advanced Techniques and Strategies, May 6, 2010
• Crisis Communications Training, May 7, 2010
• The Philosophical Cow - "Should a cow behind a haystack of ignorance choose the world with the highest expectation of utility? In which case, a world of many cows each destined for slaughter could well be preferable to one with many fewer but happier cows.
  
  Or is it wrong to compare the zero of non-existence with existence? Should a cow philosopher focus on making cows happy or on making happy cows? If the former, would one (or two) supremely happy cows not be best?
  
  I think these questions are important both for thinking about cows and animal rights and for human beings. Tyler has thought a lot about these issues (e.g. here, here and elsewhere). Some people, however, think that cow philosophy is just a bunch of bull."
• Little-used ‘Staple-and-bind’ parliamentary procedure will allow Democrats to pass health bill with just nine votes in House, three in Senate - "Democrat insiders say that an obscure parliamentary procedure known as 'Staple-and-Bind' will be used as an alternative to pass a health care overhaul should reconciliation efforts fail. 'Staple-and-bind' refers to the final act of preparing legislation, using an industrial-grade stapler and a three-ring binder, for shipment.
  . . .
  Congressional Democrats have also purchased a Staple Jihad 5000 Nail Gun, the only street-legal stapler capable of binding the massive legislation. The propane-powered stapler can penetrate up to 3,000 8.5″ x 11″ pages, which leaves room for Democrats to nationalize other aspects of medical delivery including dentistry, veterinary medicine and crystal healing stones."
• King Rudy and the gun ban - "In its wisdom, the U.S. Supreme Court finally took up Chicago's ridiculous 27-year-old handgun ban on Tuesday.
  
  Why is it ridiculous? Because only three classes of people are comfortable with handguns in the anti-handgun city:
  
  Cops, criminals and the politically connected.
  
  Mayor Richard Daley sure is upset that the ban might be overturned. But he probably has more armed guards protecting him than the president of Venezuela.
  
  Chicago aldermen are allowed to carry handguns. I wanted to ask the chairman of the City Council's police committee about those gun-toting aldermen. But there was no chairman. The last one just resigned after pleading guilty to federal bribery charges, so he wasn't around.
  
  If the Supreme Court really wanted to know why some folks in Chicago have guns and others don't, they should have called an expert witness:
  
  Rudy Acosta, the former 'gangsta' rap impresario, or King Rudy, as he likes to be known."
• What Journalists Like: #40 the grumpy old reporter - "He shuns technology. When he talks about lead, he’s not talking about a journalist’s first graph. He still remembers typesetting. Hell, he still uses a rolodex. While journalists born after the Carter administration click away on their Blackberries and iPhones, the entire newsroom can hear the screeching noise coming from the grumpy old reporter’s cassette tape recorder as he plays back an interview. Most journalists have never even owned a cassette tape before. The grumpy old reporter still refers blackberries as a fruit and couldn’t use an iPhone if his life depended on it."
• I’ve Been Given a Reason to Vote Republican - "Michael Moore Says He’s Not Coming Back to Arizona Until State 'Elects a Democrat as Senator'"
• Cyberwar Or Moral Panic? Beware Of Ex-Politicians Screaming About Cyberthreats - "For years and years we've been hearing about the supposed threats of 'cyberwar' and 'cyberterrosism.' For nearly a decade we've questioned whether this was all hype, and the story hasn't changed. Sure, there are hackers and those who look to break into systems, but the real risks and overall threats still seem fairly minimal. But that's not enough for some people. Wired's Ryan Singel has a long, but excellent look at how former director of national intelligence (now consultant) Michael McConnell appears to be trying to build up a giant moral panic about this ill-defined threat, with the goal of basically ripping out the guts of today's internet to recreate it with almost no privacy at all."
• Good Grief! - "Unless you’re an idiot -- like me -- if you own a home, you probably should have grieved your property taxes over the last couple of years, maybe even more than once. It’s almost a sure thing that your municipality has been assessing your home at more than what it’s worth -- and that you’ve been paying your taxes on that inflated value. (Many tax bills, like mine, include the value at which the municipality is carrying your property.)"
• The Housing Metrics of Southern California – Seasonal Home Sales, Inflation Adjusted Home Prices, Tens of Thousands Living Rent Free, and the Japanese Experience. - "People are realizing the problems in the housing market are simply a bigger reflection of the lingering issues in the overall economy. There have now been a few stories comparing California with the issues being experienced in troubled Greece. JP Morgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon echoed his concerns regarding California. The markets seem to underestimate how profound the issues are in the California economy. What is more troubling is California is merely a reflection of other states. The Legislative Analyst Office projects deficits deep into 2014 and each year we experience a deficit will require higher taxes or deeper cuts. That is why focusing on jobs is such an important barometer for the improvement of the overall economy. Without one net added job in California people are already counting the next housing boom. The numbers simply do not reflect this assumption.
  . . .
  The above tells you a lot. While the median home price in Southern California is down by 46 percent from the peak the typical monthly mortgage payment is down 52 percent from the peak. People are committing to half the monthly payment amount and this has more to do with the health of the economy. I know many would love to have a $1,170 monthly mortgage for a place in Southern California."
• State polls show gathering storm - "Congress, it turns out, isn’t the only institution held in low esteem by voters this year.
  
  According to a POLITICO review of publicly available polling data, numerous state legislatures are also bottoming out, showing off-the-charts disapproval ratings accompanied by stunning levels of voter cynicism.
  
  It all adds up to a toxic election-year brew for legislators inside and outside Washington."
• One young American still wants to serve in the Marines - "Jordan Blashek, Princeton '09, turned down a chance to go to med school and he joined the Marines, beginning at OCS at Quantico, for at least four years. He explains why."
• Renters Priced Out of Homes In Heavily Planned Montgomery County (MD) - "The Washington Post reports on a new study by a tenant advocacy group in Montgomery County, Maryland arguing that renters are being priced out of homes. The problem is likely to get worse as the economy picks up, demand for housing increases, and the supply can't keep up with demand."
• Another Journalist-Stenographer Makes a Lame Attempt to Tell the Truth About Legal Hiring - "The law schools lie about how much their students make so they themselves can make more money. And then they feed those false, inflated salary and employment numbers to the NALP to hide the true source of the numbers--the law schools themselves.
  
  This is a whitewash of false stats. Why do you so called journalists never question this aspect of these stats?"
• FORTHCOMING WORKS BY DR. BOLI. - "In 2002, a revolutionary piece of legislation completely changed the face of accounting in the United States. Yet, incredibly, until now there has been no comprehensive examination of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act aimed specifically at children under the age of twelve. Now, at last, Dr. Boli rectifies this glaring omission in the publishing world. A Child’s Picture Book of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act is aimed at children who have exhausted the resources of the more general accounting picture-books and wish to have specific information about Sarbanes-Oxley in a visual form. Enchanting illustrations bring auditor independence, corporate responsibility, and enhanced financial disclosures to vivid life."
• A History of the California Housing Gold Rush – The Financial Expansion of California Real Estate from 1850 to 2010. - "I decided to dig up some old Census data to show how dramatically housing has shifted over the years. Many in the housing industry assume that real estate has always been the way it currently is but forgetting about history can lead many into challenging situations. In 1910 and 1920 the majority of Americans rented their home. Of the 20 million dwellings in 1920 only 4 million were mortgaged. Today, the majority of American households own a home. The homeownership rate has fallen since the crisis started."
• Get up earlier, Germans tell Greeks - "Here, people work until they are 67 and there is no 14th-month salary for civil servants. Here, nobody needs to pay a €1,000 bribe to get a hospital bed in time.
  
  Our petrol stations have cash registers, taxi drivers give receipts and farmers don't swindle EU subsidies with millions of non-existent olive trees.
  
  Germany also has high debts but we can settle them. That's because we get up early and work all day."
• Thank You For Not Expressing Yourself - "Not every devotee of reason is himself reasonable: that is a lesson that the convinced, indeed militant, atheist, Richard Dawkins, has recently learned. It would, perhaps, be an exaggeration to say that he has learned it the hard way, for what he has suffered hardly compares with, say, what foreign communists suffered when, exiling themselves to Moscow in the 1920s and 30s, they learnt the hard way that barbarism did not spring mainly, let alone only, from the profit motive; but he has nevertheless learned it by unpleasant experience.
  
  He ran a website for people of like mind, but noticed that many of the comments that appeared on it were beside the point, either mere gossip or insult. So he announced that he was going to exercise a little control over what appeared on it - as was his right since it was, after all, his site. Censorship is not failing to publish something, it is forbidding something to be published, which is not at all the same thing, though the difference is sometimes ill-appreciated.
  
  The torrent of vile abuse that he received after his announcement took him aback. Its vehemence was shocking; someone called him ‘a suppurating rat’s rectum.’
  . . .
  The insults and abuse did not come from uneducated people. This is not surprising, really, because uneducated people are unlikely to care very much what George Bernard Shaw thought of the germ theory of disease; most of them have other, more practical things to think about. You have to have read Bernard Shaw to care, and these days at least, I think only university types are likely to do that.
  
  Indeed, much of the abuse, even the vilest, came from university professors. Almost to a man (or woman), they said that what I had written was so outrageous, so ill-considered and ill-motivated, that it was not worth the trouble of refutation. On the other hand, they thought its author was worth insulting, if their practice was anything to go by. I didn’t know whether I -- a mere scribbler -- should feel flattered that I was deemed worthy of the scatological venom of professors (not all of them from minor institutions, and some of them quite eminent).
  
  What struck me most about these missives is the sheer amount of hatred that they contained. It was not disdain or even contempt, but hatred.
  . . .
  With the coming of the internet, the tone of the criticism changed. It became shriller, more personal, more hate-filled. It wasn’t just that I had made a mistake, I must be an evil person, probably in the pay of some disreputable organisation or other. (There are very few of us who are not in the pay of someone, and no one is entirely reputable.)
  . . .
  The question now arises as to whether it is a good thing that people should be able now so easily to express their rage, irritation, frustration and hatred. Here, I think, we come to a disagreement between those of classical, and those of romantic, disposition.
  
  According to the latter, self-expression is a good in itself, irrespective of what is expressed. Indeed, such people are likely to believe that any sentiment that does not find its outward expression will turn inward and poison the person who has not been able to express it. Better to strangle a new-born babe and all that.
  
  The person of more classical disposition does not believe this. On the contrary, he believes that there are some things that are much better not expressed at all. He counterbalances his belief in the value of freedom of opinion with that in the value of freedom from opinion. He believes that rage will not decrease with its habitual expression, but rather increase with it."
• Missouri Budget Overstates Revenues By Up To $1 billion; Indiana Revenue Falls Short; Budget Battles In Washington; Budget Gaps In Kansas - "Budget news from state after state is grim. When will this matter? No one knows but service cutbacks are coming, as are huge layoffs.
  . . .
  In case you missed it, New Jersey Governor Chris Christie laid it on the line in a speech to about 200 mayors at the New Jersey League of Municipalities.
  
  Chris Christie Actions
  
  * He froze aid to schools
  * Challenged school boards.
  * Wants to change arbitration rules for public workers
  * Requests public-private salary and benefits parity
  * Demands pension reform
  * Property tax hikes not an option
  * Wants to get rid of programs like COAH
  * Is not thinking about the next election
  . . .
  Reckless government spending, not a recession is what caused this mess. The recession just made the problem noticeable sooner. Since spending is the problem, higher taxes cannot be the solution. Higher taxes just encourage more reckless spending."

Cows With Guns




Logorama

• Saint Cesar of Delano - "When Cesar Chavez died in his sleep in 1993, not yet a very old man at 66, he died--as he had so often portrayed himself in life--as a loser. The United Farm Workers (UFW) union he had co­founded was in decline; the union had 5,000 members, equivalent to the population of one very small Central Valley town. The labor in California’s agricultural fields was largely taken up by Mexican migrant workers--the very workers Chavez had been unable to reconcile to his American union, whom he had branded “scabs” and wanted reported to immigration authorities.
  . . .
  I remember sitting in bad traffic on the San Diego Freeway and looking up to see a photograph of Cesar Chavez on a billboard. His eyes were downcast. He balanced a rake and a shovel over his right shoulder. In the upper-­left-­hand corner was the corporate logo of a bitten ­apple."
• The Philosophical Cow - "Suppose that you are a cow philosopher contemplating the welfare of cows. In the world today there are about 1.3 billion of your compatriots. It would be a fine thing for cows if all cows were well treated and if none were slaughtered for food. Nevertheless, being a clever cow, you understand that it's the demand for beef that brings cows to life. How do you regard such a trade off?
  
  If each cow brought to life adds even some small bit of cow utility to the grand total of cow welfare must not beef eaters be lauded, at least if they are hungry enough? Or is the pro beef-eater argument simply repugnant?"
• What if High School Ended After 11th (or Even 10th) Grade? - "Efforts to eliminate at least one year of high school for some students have been gaining momentum in recent weeks.
  
  As The Times’s Sam Dillon reported last month, public schools in eight states recently adopted a pilot program, effective next year, that will allow 10th graders in certain schools to test out of high school classes, earn diplomas and advance to community college. (Those states are Connecticut, Kentucky, Maine, New Hampshire, New Mexico, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island and Vermont.)"
• Wheat Ridge High School Class of 1970 - "The reonion committee is working away planning the 40th reunion the weekend of August 13-15, 2010. Wheat Ridge, Colorado WRHS1970.com"
• Common Market Food Co-op - "Common Market Food Co-op was a 'new wave food co-op' located at 1329 California Street in Denver, Colorado, from 1975 - 1980. It started as a buying club at the University of Denver in the early 1970s, and for a few years prior to moving to the old Safeway at 13th and California Streets, Common Market operated out of a small storefront on Champa Street."
• Your high IQ will kill your startup - "Intelligence is like a knife. If you are intelligent, you are at a clear advantage against people who are not intelligent. But if you are intelligent, and another person is not as intelligent, but the other person is willing to train harder than you, the other person will very quickly overtake you in ability.
  
  People who are born intelligent start off life with everything easy for them. They don't have to work hard to get good grades, they never really have to do much to get ahead. The major challenge of early life is school - and school is designed for average people. So intelligent people just breeze through.
  
  But there is a point where every intelligent person faces something that requires more than intelligence. It requires hard work, it requires the ability to fail, it requires being able to do tough tasks, boring tasks. For the first time in their life, in spite of their intelligence, these intelligent people are challenged, and they start failing. Like when they first attempt to create a startup.
  
  And that's where most of them retreat. They focus on things they can't fail on, and ignore the other important things. They start to blame other things (like the school system). They procrastinate. They refuse to face new problems because they know they will not be able to handle them, and this does not fit into their worldview that they are invincible."
• How to Get People to Respond to Your Ad NOW - "Want customers to take immediate action? Offer something free."
• My Favorite Negative Book Review - "For those who haven't heard, Professor Joseph Weiler is facing criminal charges for publishing a negative book review, and has asked others dig up far more negative reviews so that he may prove this one is nothing out of the ordinary. Steven Landsburg published his nominee here. Here is mine, written by Edward Snyder (University of Chicago) and published in the prestigious Journal of Economic Literature on 'Confessions of an Economic Hit Man.' Here is the opening paragraph:"
• The Pentagon Shooter - "Naturally, this means the gunman is a Tea Bagger. Why? Well, an utter absence of evidence can't be a bar to leaping to the target conclusion, now can it?
  
  The syllogism on offer is that the gunman was heavily into his illegal weed. Marijuana is a gateway drug to libertarianism, lots of Tea Partiers are libertarian, QED.
  
  Oh, well - in the MSM this guy will either be crazy or a righty. *If* the intrepid researcher has found the same guy than the gunman had a number of Bush-bashing books on his Amazon wish list. That's just more proof he is a disgruntled righty, since so many true believers think Bush was too moderate."
• New Yorkers 'Share a Cab' - "It may be commonplace in Washington, D.C., but in New York City, sharing a cab ride is still a rarity. That's changing with a new one-year pilot program that will allow up to four passengers to share a taxi along three routes in Manhattan for a discounted per-person flat fare of $3 to $4. The shared rides, which will pick up passengers at designated taxi stands and allow them to hop-off anywhere along the route, will only be active during morning rush hours."
• The Great Grocery Smackdown - "Buy my food at Walmart? No thanks. Until recently, I had been to exactly one Walmart in my life, at the insistence of a friend I was visiting in Natchez, Mississippi, about 10 years ago. It was one of the sights, she said. Up and down the aisles we went, properly impressed by the endless rows and endless abundance. Not the produce section. I saw rows of prepackaged, plastic-trapped fruits and vegetables. I would never think of shopping there.
  
  Not even if I could get environmentally correct food. Walmart’s move into organics was then getting under way, but it just seemed cynical—a way to grab market share while driving small stores and farmers out of business. Then, last year, the market for organic milk started to go down along with the economy, and dairy farmers in Vermont and other states, who had made big investments in organic certification, began losing contracts and selling their farms. A guaranteed large buyer of organic milk began to look more attractive. And friends started telling me I needed to look seriously at Walmart’s efforts to sell sustainably raised food."

How Will The End Of Print Journalism Affect Old Loons Who Hoard Newspapers?

• The implications of a money-making Android app - "There's been plenty written about the App Store gold rush, but this is the first rags-to-semi-riches piece I've seen about the Android Market. Edward Kim, creator of the Car Locator app, saw his daily revenue jump from around $100 per day to more than $400 per day when the $3.99 app claimed a featured spot in the Market."
• How cybercriminals invade social networks, companies - "The attacks run the gamut. In just four weeks earlier this year, one band of low-level cyberthieves, known in security circles as the Kneber gang, pilfered 68,000 account logons from 2,411 companies, including user names and passwords for 3,644 Facebook accounts. Active since late 2008, the Kneber gang has probably cracked into "a much higher number" of companies, says Tim Belcher, CTO of security firm NetWitness, which rooted out one of the gang's storage computers.
  . . .
  On the high end, the Koobface worm, initially set loose 19 months ago, continues to increase in sophistication as it spreads through Facebook, Twitter, MySpace and other social networks. At its peak last August, more than 1 million Koobface-infected PCs inside North American companies were taking instructions from criminal controllers to carry out typical botnet criminal activities, says Gunter Ollmann, vice president of research at security firm Damballa.
  . . .
  Each infected PC in a corporate network represents a potential path to valuable intellectual property, such as customer lists, patents or strategic documents. That's what the attackers who breached Google and 30 other tech, media, defense and financial companies in January were after. Those attacks -- referred to in security circles as Operation Aurora -- very likely were initiated by faked friendly messages sent to specific senior employees at the targeted companies, says George Kurtz, McAfee's chief technology officer.
  
  The attack on the picnicking co-workers at the financial firm illustrates how targeted attacks work. Last fall, attackers somehow got access to Bob's Facebook account, logged into it, grabbed his contact list of 50 to 60 friends and began manually reviewing messages and postings on his profile page. Noting discussions about a recent picnic, the attackers next sent individual messages, purporting to carry a link to picnic photos, to about a dozen of Bob's closest Facebook friends, including Alice. The link in each message led to a malicious executable file, a small computer program.
  
  Upon clicking on the bad file, Alice unknowingly downloaded a rudimentary keystroke logger, a program designed to save everything she typed at her keyboard and, once an hour, send a text file of her keystrokes to a free Gmail account controlled by the attacker. The keystroke logger was of a type that is widely available for free on the Internet.
  
  The attackers reviewed the hourly keystroke reports from Alice's laptop and took note when she logged into a virtual private network account to access her company's network. With her username and password, the attackers logged on to the financial firm's network and roamed around it for two weeks."
• Anatomy of Toyota's Problem Pedal: Mechanic's Diary - "Toyota has recalled millions of cars and trucks--4.2 million to replace floor mats that might impede throttle-pedal travel, and 2.4 million to install a shim behind the electronic pedal assembly. All of the affected pedal assemblies were made by Canadian supplier CTS. Toyota's boffins have documented a problem that can make a few of these pedals slow to return, and maybe even stick down. Problem solved.
  
  But the media, Congress--and personal-injury lawyers--smell the blood in the water. Not to diminish the injuries and a few deaths attributable to these very real mechanical problems, but they're statistically only a very small blip, which may explain why Toyota took so long to identify the issue, especially when it has symptoms similar to the similarly documented floor mat recall.
  . . .
  Bottom line: The system is not only redundant, it's double-redundant. The signal lines from the pedal to the ECM are isolated. The voltages used in the system are DC voltages--any RF voltages introduced into the system, by, say, that microwave oven you have in the passenger seat, would be AC voltages, which the ECM's conditioned inputs would simply ignore. Neither your cellphone nor Johnny's PlayStation have the power to induce much confusion into the system.
  
  These throttle-by-wire systems are very difficult to confuse--they're designed to be robust, and any conceivable failure is engineered to command not an open throttle but an error message.
  
  So what to make of the unintended acceleration cases popping up by the dozens? Not the ones explainable by problem sticky pedals, but the ones documented by people who claim their vehicle ran away on its own, with no input, and resisted all attempts to stop it? Some can probably be explained as an attempt to get rid of a car consumers no longer desire. Some are probably the result of Audi 5000 Syndrome, where drivers simply lost track of their feet and depressed the gas instead of the brake. It's happened to me: Luckily I recognized the phenomenon and corrected before it went bang. Others may not have the presence of mind.
  
  But the possibility that a vehicle could go from idling at a traffic light to terrific, uncalled-for and uncontrollable acceleration because the guy next to you at a traffic light answered his cellphone? Or some ghost in the machine or a hacker caused a software glitch that made your car run away and the brakes suddenly simultaneously fail? Not in the least bit likely. Toyota deserves a better deal than the media and Congress are giving it."
• Taking Memes Seriously - "The hilarious scorn poured on Dawkins and his memes by the Australian philosopher David Stove is entirely deserved:
  
  I try to think of what I, or anyone, could say to him, to help restrain him from going over the edge into absolute madness. But if a man believes that, when he was first taught Pythagoras' Theorem at school, his brain was parasitized by a certain micro-maggot which, 2600 years earlier had parasitized the brain of Pythagoras...what can one say to him, with any hope of effect...One might try saying to Dr. Dawkins: "Look, you are in the phone book, and they print millions of copies of the phone book - right? But now you don't believe, do you, that you are there millions of times over 'in the form of' printed letters, or 'realized in' the chemistry of ink and newsprint?" But I would be so afraid of being told by Dr. Dawkins that he does believe this that I do not think I would have the courage to put the question to him.
  
  No person of even mediocre intellect and disinterested mind can read Dawkins' chapter on memes without feeling these same sensations of contempt. Yet so far was this inauspicious inception of the meme meme from discouraging Dawkins' dutiful Yankee minion, Daniel Dennett (a man of very mediocre intellect, though a mind anything but disinterested), that he mildly reproaches his master for failing to defend the notion of memes in subsequent publications with the full strenuousness that Dennet himself is willing to exert for its vindication.
  
  Several chapters in Darwin's Dangerous Idea are devoted to the defense of memes, marked from beginning to end by that hectoring and digressive style which has become Dennett's calling card, and by which he has earned his status as the clown prince of contemporary academic philosophy. So, in a purported disquisition into a 'science of memetics,' Dennett takes a tangential journey which passes through tales about his grandson, West Side Story, the camouflaged wings of moths, the propensity of scientists to employ acronyms, fictional scenarios of spy-hunting, and a long quote from the physicist Richard Feynman, singing a hymn to the virtues of philosophical materialism. None of this, of course, has the least bearing on Dennett's central issue- or at least what ought to be Dennett's central issue - of whether or not memes actually exist, though, in fairness, these passages do prompt in the reader an admiration for the perseverance of a man who, so evidently stricken with an acute form of Attention Deficit Disorder, still managed to carve out for himself a lucrative career in academe.
  . . .
  Actually, by this point in the book, the image of Dennett's brain as a pile of worm-infested shit will strike the reader as remarkably apropos; it would certainly provide an explanation of sorts for the quality of his writing. Nonetheless, one would like to point out - again, quite wearily - that larvae and parasites are things which can be observed and measured, and that if the author wants us to believe that memes are such kinds of entities, possessing the same kinds of properties, then, for God's sake, show them to us!"

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March 7, 2010 09:57 AM   Link    Comments (0)

"The Myth Of Originality..." Copyright and Copywrong

All Creative Work is Deriviative

Nina Paley alerts us to a neat writeup (with illustrations) that she did, discussing the concept of originality, and why it's so often misconstrued. First, things that many people think are "original" usually aren't very original at all. They tend to be derivative in some way or another -- a point that we've made here many times. And yet, many people seem to think that there's some sort of objective standard for originality, and that something that involves a direct copy of something else as part of the process can't count as original (though, they conveniently ignore it when "the greats" like Mozart or Shakespeare did a direct cut-and-paste type of copying in their own works).

The Myth Of Originality..., techdirt

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March 6, 2010 12:37 PM   Link    Comments (0)

Assorted Links 3/3/10

Richard Feynman on "Social Sciences"

Clueless Woman Calls Tech Show When Her Stolen Wi-Fi Disappears

• Speechwriting: Preparing Speeches and Oral Presentations, March 12, 2010
• Word Workshop: Writing for Government and Business: Critical Thinking and Writing, April 15, 2010
• Word Workshop: Writing to Persuade: Hone Your Persuasive Writing Skills, April 16, 2010
• Media Relations for Public Affairs Professionals, May 4, 2010
• Advanced Media Relations, May 5, 2010
• Public Affairs and the Internet: Advanced Techniques and Strategies, May 6, 2010
• Crisis Communications Training, May 7, 2010
• Many borrowers in default stay put as lenders delay evictions - "Despite being months behind, many strapped residents are hanging on to their homes, essentially living rent-free. Pressure on banks to modify loans and a glut of inventory are driving the trend.
  . . .
  In the Inland Empire, an estimated 100,000 homeowners are living rent-free, according to economist John Husing, who based that number on the difference between loan delinquencies and foreclosures. Industry experts say it's difficult to say how many families are in that situation nationally because only banks know for sure how many customers have stopped paying entirely.
  
  But Rick Sharga of Irvine data tracker RealtyTrac notes that the number of loans in which the borrower hasn't made a payment in 90 days or more but is not in foreclosure is at 5.1% nationally, a record high. And yet the number of foreclosures last year was 2.9 million, below the 3.2 million that RealtyTrac economists predicted.
  
  More evidence is provided by another firm, ForeclosureRadar, which says it now takes an average of 229 days for a bank to foreclose on a home in California after sending a notice of default, up from 146 days in August 2008."
• Regulation Now, Regulation Tomorrow, Regulation Forever - "What accounts for the particular rottenness of the Republican party? The GOP is in the opposition catbird seat; the economy is in a coma; President Obama's popularity is in free-fall, and the smaller-government message is the only one that is resonating with voters. Yet GOP hegemony from 2001-2007 resulted in massive government growth and the largest increase in regulation in three decades. When put to the iron test of governance, the Republicans keep going easy on Obama's criminally incompetent economic team. Overnight sensation Sen. Scott Brown (R-Massachusetts) voted for the new jobs bill. How can this be?"
• Tracking Your Taxes: Earmarks to Nowhere - "If a project doesn't make economic sense, how does it survive year after year? The answer often lies in the power of the sponsor, and over the last 50 years there has been no more powerful appropriator than West Virginia Democrat Sen. Robert Byrd. By some accounts, Byrd himself has spent $3 billion dollars in taxpayer money. More than 40 projects in West Virginia that have been paid for with tax dollars are named after him.
  
  From the Robert C. Byrd Locks and Dam to the Robert C. Byrd Telescope to the Robert C. Byrd Hilltop Office Complex, the list goes on and on. But one of his most ambitious projects is 'Corridor H,' a four-lane highway in his home state that goes, literally, nowhere.
  
  'Corridor H ... has certainly helped (Byrd) retain the title of the 'King of Pork.'' said Schatz, the taxpayer watchdog. 'Corridor H has been a boondoggle since the beginning. It's something that is one of these roads to nowhere that ends short of the adjoining state line.'
  
  So far, taxpayers have invested almost $2 billion in the massive highway, which ends in a field. Virginia has no plans to ever actually connect a companion highway to West Virginia's 25-mile stretch of concrete, leaving the monster as yet another monument to waste, or one of the more expensive examples of how Congress works."
• The Future of America Housing – 5 Charts Showing Continued Pressure on Home Prices for the next Few Years. Household formation, Trend to Urban Centers, Lower Prices, Over Construction. - "Housing prices in most urban areas will face pressure in the upcoming years because of a variety of factors. Last month as prices fell in many areas including Southern California, some were surprised because a belief that a trough had been hit had already set in. This is not the case. For the most part the bulk of home sales are still coming from the distress side. These homes do not yield the bank the full balance of the mortgage and consequently push overall prices lower. In many troubled states like California, Florida, Nevada, and Arizona many of these homes are secured by questionable mortgages so the gap between the current mortgage and the market price is rather large.
  
  We also have issues on the supply side. During the peak days of the bubble housing starts were running at a stunningly high rate of 2 million per year. This at a time when household formation was closer to 1.2 million. So this enormous imbalance occurred. The current stall in housing starts is simply allowing the overall market to catch up. That is one of the big questions regarding when housing will recover. When will housing starts pick up? Today we are going to look at 5 major trends that will keep housing prices low for the next few years."
• Nancy Pelosi's brutal reality check - "And even as Obama, Emanuel and Reid have struggled to execute the Democratic agenda, she has delivered on her end of the bargain, winning House approval of a health care bill, a climate change bill and a jobs bill.
  
  '[In] the House of Representatives, my mark is the mark of our members. We have passed every piece of legislation that is part of the Obama agenda. Whether it’s the creation of jobs, expanding access to health care, creating new green jobs for the future, regulatory reform, we have passed the full agenda,' Pelosi said over the weekend on ABC’s 'This Week.'
  
  Still, those victories have come at a cost -- leaving Democrats in more conservative districts exposed and some others bristling over the 'Pelosi style.'
  
  'She doesn’t delegate,' said one House Democrat close to the speaker. 'It’s her biggest flaw. She has to have her hand in every decision.'
  
  That means there’s no one else to blame for Democratic setbacks other than Pelosi, and she will have to answer if the party suffers at the polls.
  
  A corollary to that complaint is that Pelosi has dealt with House Republicans’ penchant for short-circuiting the legislative process by writing key bills in partisan fashion behind closed doors."
• Taking Back the Infantry Half-​​Kilometer - "Okay, time for a deep dive into the tactical. The point of departure is this paper by Army Maj. Thomas Ehrhart, Increasing Small Arms Lethality in Afghanistan: Taking Back the Infantry Half-​​Kilometer, written last year at the Command and General Staff College, that says fighting in Afghanistan has exposed the fact that American infantry are poorly equipped and trained for long range firefights.
  
  In Afghanistan, the infantryman’s 'weapons, doctrine, and marksmanship training do not provide a precise, lethal fire capability to 500 meters and are therefore inappropriate,' Ehrhart says. Unlike on the streets of Iraq, where firefights were few and were typically fought under 300 meters, insurgents in Afghanistan skillfully use the wide open rural and mountainous terrain to stretch the battlefield.
  . . .
  The American military, and particularly the Army, has been 'platform focused,' doctrine and weapons development has focused on crews fighting a mounted weapons system, be it a tank, Bradley or what have you (the Army plans to spend $7 billion over the next few years to develop a new armored fighting vehicle to add to its massive fleet of armored fighting vehicles). The future of irregular conflict will predominantly be small-​​unit infantry fights, a fact the acquisition community has not grasped. It’s about time they did and begin fielding lightweight, highly accurate and lethal weapons that are easily carried by the infantry."
• Has the last fighter pilot already been born? - "I am not sure it is true, but we are at a point where having a human in the cockpit for the vast majority of the combat missions flown in our current wars can be more of a hindrance than a help. Humans have physical needs and consequently can't remain on station as long as drones. In most cases any ordnance fired is guided electronically and the pilot only ends up pushing a button. That can happen in a cockpit 20,000 ft. above the battlefield, or 10,000 miles away in Las Vegas.
  . . .
  I think that we do need human fighter pilots for now, but that we are not far from the time where fighter drones are a better answer. When was the last dogfight? Vietnam? And even if we must take on 4th and 5th generation Russian and Chinese fighters, aren't we going to be doing so at sensor range? Won't the determining factor be the ability to detect and launch on the other guy from the furthest away. If so wouldn't we be better served by having many more drones that can carry the same weapons and can stay on station longer?"
• Higher Tuition and Two Subway Sandwich Shops!? Berkeley Students Declare War - "The Vietnam War. Crushing racial segregation. A glut of hoagie shops! The student battle for justice clearly goes on! And Californians have much more to look forward to: Thursday will be a statewide 'Day of Action,' and in addition to deafening demands for continued taking from taxpayers, students will no doubt also give Fuddruckers, or maybe even Starbucks, it’s long-deserved comeuppance.
  
  The day of liberation -- and really amped-up rent-seeking -- is finally at hand!"
• More Numbers Support Faux-Recovery Thesis - "More numbers came out last week that support the thesis that the GDP growth at the end of 2009 is really a faux-recovery that won't be sustainable or a solid foundation to build on.
  
  Sales of existing homes fell 7.2% in January, according to the National Association of Realtors. Single-family home sales dropped 6.9%, while condo sales dropped 8.1%.
  . . .
  If my concerns wind up justified in 2010 (though seriously, take the word of every economic analyst with a grain of salt, has no one learned that lesson from the crash?), then perhaps consumer spending really should pick up in the next few months. If the Fed does lose its handle on inflation then we might as well use the purchasing power of our dollars while we've still got it."

San Francisco 1905: Before the Regulators

• Nat'l Enquirer Weighs Opening D.C. Bureau - "The National Enquirer may strut its stuff and open up a Washington office, FishbowlDC has learned. The supermarket tabloid is riding the wave of busting the affair and subsequent baby girl of former Sen. John Edwards (D-N.C.) and Rielle Hunter.
  
  In fact, said National Enquirer Executive Editor Barry Levine, credibility would be at an all-time high in the nation's capitol, since the publication just received the nod from Pulitzer to be nominated for prizes in two categories."
• Ask The Best And Brightest: Is SUA An American Pandemic? - "One thing is clear so far: Germany doesn’t get UA incidents worthy of mention. Japan, a country with a population approximately half of the U.S.A., receives 134 reports in 3 years. The U.S.A. received nearly 6000 complaints for all brands for the 2008 model years alone, writes Consumer Report. It’s an UA pandemic!"
• Take That, Tojo! - "The Axis automotive powers have declared war on American motorists and our cherished union-made way of life. They've established secret assembly beach heads in so-called 'right-to-work' occupied Vichy states like Alabama and Tennessee, manufacturing six sigma deathtrap jalopies with hillbilly slave dupes paid less than prevailing wages!
  
  And now Hitler and Hirohito have opened up a second front in their crazed plan for world market share domination right here in America's auto malls. Don't let those whimsical inflatable gorillas and wind-whipped plastic pennants fool you: lurking behind every Toyota showroom lies a rat's nest of fifth columnist and Jap saboteurs scheming to get you behind the wheel of a Tokyo timebomb!
  
  Don't let Tojo turn you into a unwitting freeway kamikaze for the "Divine Emperor"! At the U.S. Department of General Motors, our G-Men are working 'round the clock to stop Jap sneak attacks on America's publicly owned automotive industrial arsenal. But here on the home front, America's vehicular victory requires the vigilance of regular Joes and Janes like you. Together we can Shun the Huns and Nip the Nips, and send 'em packing their non-union Priuses back to Yokohama!"
• When Did My Life Become an Endless Saturday Night Live Skit? - "For all the seriousness the practice of law entails, you will surely encounter a few humorous experiences throughout your career. If you are a regular reader of this blog, you already know I have enough stories to fill a lifetime of cocktail parties. At times, I feel as if I am trapped in an endless Saturday Night Live skit. Some highlights include a client who was arrested for stealing a fresh water salmon (he stuck it down his pants), a man who insisted I legally change his last name to Budweiser so that he could sue the beer company for millions, and a gentleman who wanted the instructions in his will to include placing his body on a raft and having it set on fire on the Connecticut River."
• Wheat Ridge High School Class of 1970 - "The reonion committee is working away planning the 40th reunion the weekend of August 13-15, 2010. Wheat Ridge, Colorado WRHS1970.com"
• Common Market Food Co-op - "Common Market Food Co-op was a 'new wave food co-op' located at 1329 California Street in Denver, Colorado, from 1975 - 1980. It started as a buying club at the University of Denver in the late 1960s, and for a few years prior to moving to the old Safeway at 13th and California Streets, Common Market operated out of a small storefront on Champa Street."
• From Bully to Felon - "John Grisham would have to struggle to invent a character as brilliant and unethical as Bill Lerach. It is a credit to the reporting talents of Patrick Dillon and Carl M. Cannon that, in 'Circle of Greed,' they capture the felon- lawyer in all his charm and ruthlessness. Along the way they show how the plaintiffs' bar has transformed the process of class actions into big business.
  . . .
  Much of the riveting detail in 'Circle of Greed' comes from Mr. Lerach, who cooperated fully with the authors. They seem to buy his line that his actions were motivated by his desire to protect innocent shareholders from greedy corporations. The book's overall argument--as the title suggests--is that it was corporate greed that created Mr. Lerach and provided a model for his ethical failings. That claim is unfair to the many honest companies who were Lerach victims and implausible in any case, thanks to the authors' own vivid evidence of Mr. Lerach's outsize criminal behavior."
• The War in Heaven on Earth - "It's always a delicate matter how to go about telling people who need to be told, 'Shut up and go sit down' to shut up and go sit down in a loving manner. A careful reading of your question, however, indicates that we are really not talking about 'people' here. We are talking about one person.
  . . .
  I spoke with both the organist and the organ company and unfortunately they have both shown me that the organ is set as softly as it will go. It's very loud in this echoey old church. Maybe you'd be happier if we switched to a guitar Mass or liturgical dance."
• Bogus Copyright Claim Silences Yet Another Larry Lessig YouTube Presentation - "Nearly a year ago, we wrote about how a YouTube presentation done by well known law professor (and strong believer in fair use and fixing copyright law) Larry Lessig had been taken down, because his video, in explaining copyright and fair use and other such things, used a snippet of a Warner Music song to demonstrate a point. There could be no clearer example of fair use -- but the video was still taken down. There was some dispute at the time as to whether or not this was an actual DMCA takedown, or merely YouTube's audio/video fingerprinting technology (which the entertainment industry insists can understand fair use and not block it). But, in the end, does it really make a difference? A takedown over copyright is a takedown over copyright.
  
  Amazingly enough, it appears that almost the exact same thing has happened again. A video of one of Lessig's presentations, that he just posted -- a 'cha'" he had done for the OpenVideoAlliance a week or so ago, about open culture and fair use, has received notice that it has been silenced. It hasn't been taken down entirely -- but the entire audio track from the 42 minute video is completely gone. All of it. In the comments, some say there's a notification somewhere that the audio has been disabled because of 'an audio track that has not been authorized by WMG' (Warner Music Group) -- which would be the same company whose copyright caused the issue a year ago -- but I haven't seen or heard that particular message anywhere."
• Psssst . . . There's sugar in there - "By now, everybody should know that foods like breakfast cereals, breads, bagels, pretzels, and crackers cause blood sugar to skyrocket after you eat them. But sometimes you eat something you thought was safe only to find you're showing blood sugars of 120, 130, 150+ mg/dl.
  
  Where can you find such 'stealth' sources of sugars that can screw up your postprandial blood sugars, small LDL, inflammation, blood pressure, and cause you to grow visceral fat? Here's a few:"

Lawrence Lessig website chat

• The High Cost of Free TV - "Despite the fact that 91 percent of American households get their television via cable or satellite huge chunks of radio-spectrum are locked up in the dead technology of over-the-air television. In his Economic View column today Richard Thaler features the work of our GMU colleague Tom Hazlett who argues that auctioning off the spectrum to the high value users would generate at least $100 billion for the government and generate a trillion dollars of value to consumers."
• A Prism for Jolicloud: Web-Centric Desktop Apps - "I recently bought a netbook and installed Jolicloud, a Linux/Ubuntu distro designed as a replacement for, or companion to, Windows. Jolicloud was a revelation, something fresh and new in the seemingly snail-paced world of desktop computing. The bold idea of Jolicloud is that the browser is the operating system. It's all you need and you don't need to even think about it. The browser is a core service that supports all applications but it can recede into the background and let applications take the foreground."
• RoSS Simulator Preps Surgeons to Use da Vinci Robot - "Researchers from Roswell Park Cancer Institute and State University of New York at Buffalo, developed a surgical simulator to help train physicians to operate the da Vinci robot. The RoSS Robotic Surgical Simulator has been turned into a product and commercialized by a spinoff called Simulated Surgical Systems of Williamsville, NY. Practicing physicians and students can train on common tasks like suturing and knot tying, and even perform complete procedures like radical prostatectomies and hysterectomies."
• Tattoo-removing lasers used to lift dirt from great works of art - "The technique removes material from a solid surface by vaporising it with a laser beam. Called laser ablation, it can lift dirt without damaging the underlying surface.
  . . .
  The team also reported encouraging results of laser cleaning underwater for materials that could deteriorate if exposed to air."
• Chilean Quake Likely Shifted Earth’s Axis, NASA Scientist Says - "The earthquake that killed more than 700 people in Chile on Feb. 27 probably shifted the Earth’s axis and shortened the day, a National Aeronautics and Space Administration scientist said.
  
  Earthquakes can involve shifting hundreds of kilometers of rock by several meters, changing the distribution of mass on the planet. This affects the Earth’s rotation, said Richard Gross, a geophysicist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, who uses a computer model to calculate the effects.
  
  'The length of the day should have gotten shorter by 1.26 microseconds (millionths of a second),' Gross, said today in an e-mailed reply to questions. 'The axis about which the Earth’s mass is balanced should have moved by 2.7 milliarcseconds (about 8 centimeters or 3 inches).'"
• Gmail Security Enhancements Expected Tuesday - "Google will roll out a number of security enhancements to Gmail this week, and perhaps as early as Tuesday, says a source with knowledge of the new features. The changes are specifically designed to cut down on phishing and hacking attacks on Gmail accounts."
• Compare Product Prices from eBay and Amazon - "Q-Compare is a useful tool that will let you compare prices of products from both eBay and Amazon marketplaces on the same page. You may use the service to compare the current prices and shipping charges of books, DVDs, electronics and all the other product categories."
• Earthquake in Chile - "At 3:34 am local time, today, February 27th, a devastating magnitude 8.8 earthquake struck Chile, one of the strongest earthquakes ever recorded. According to Chilean authorities, over 400 people are now known to have been killed. The earthquake also triggered a Tsunami which is right now propagating across the Pacific Ocean, due to arrive in Hawaii in hours (around 11:00 am local time). The severity of the Tsunami is still not known, but alerts are being issued across the Pacific. (Entry updated four times, now 45 photos total)"
• iStubz: Extra-short iPhone/iPod cable - "The iStubz is a miniature USB cable for iPhones/iPods. It comes in either 7cm or 22cm lengths, and is probably the best eight dollar purchase I've made in the past year. The reason I'm so in love with this little tool is that it can live permanently in my bag without taking up any space or tangling up on anything. This is great since I regularly forget to charge my iPhone at night and often have to charge it on the go."

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March 3, 2010 08:17 AM   Link    Comments (0)

Assorted Links 2/28/10

Treat Me Like a Dog!




Art Blakey's Wisdom

• Capitol Hill Workshop, March 3-5, 2010
• Speechwriting: Preparing Speeches and Oral Presentations, March 12, 2010
• Is Inflation Coming? - "Mr. Market doesnt seem to think so. The WSJ reports on the first auction of 30 year TIPS (Treasury Inflation Protected Securities) in nearly 10 years. The Journal thinks the auction was weak; I read it as Mr. Market doesn't see much prospect for a period of the kind of inflation some are warning about.
  . . .
  So based on the 30 year conventional bond yield of 4.731% and the TIP yield of 2.229% one gets an inflation forecast by Treasury bond market participants of 2.44%. Interestingly, that is very close to the Fed's long term inflation target of 2.5%.
  
  I generally pay great respect to the message that Mr. Market is sending. Certainly a lot more than to those 'buy gold inflation is coming' ads on TV and radio."
• Small Planes and Lone Terrorist Nutcases - "On the face of it, Joseph Stack flying a private plane into the Austin, TX IRS office is no different than Nidal Hasan shooting up Ft. Hood: a lone extremist nutcase. If one is a terrorist and the other is a criminal, the difference is more political or religious than anything else.
  
  Personally, I wouldn't call either a terrorist. Nor would I call Amy Bishop, who opened fire on her department after she was denied tenure, a terrorist.
  
  I consider both Theodore Kaczynski (the Unibomber) and Bruce Ivans (the anthrax mailer) to be terrorists, but John Muhammad and Lee Malvo (the DC snipers) to be criminals. Clearly there is grey area.
  
  I note that the primary counterterrorist measures I advocate -- investigation and intelligence -- can't possibly make a difference against any of these people. Lone nuts are pretty much impossible to detect in advance, and thus pretty much impossible to defend against: a point Cato's Jim Harper made in a smart series of posts. And once they attack, conventional police work is how we capture those that simply don't care if they're caught or killed."
• Obama to deliver health care The Chicago Way - "President Barack Obama will star in his very own televised entertainment spectacular on Thursday -- let's call it Federal Health Care Kabuki Theater.
  
  The Republicans wanted to dance. Now they'll have to step lightly. They were foolish to get trapped in his so-called summit on national health care. Or did they actually think they could outperform the skinny fellow from Chicago?
  
  The president is taking this one last chance to push his health care agenda, which by his own estimate will cost about $1 trillion over 10 years. That's money America doesn't have, but he could probably just print some more.
  
  Obama will be in his element, talking and lecturing, the law professor framing the debate. He'll spend hours being seen as reasonable. The Republicans will balk and the president will shrug. He'll sigh and say he tried to reason with them but they refused.
  
  Then once the cameras are turned off, he'll take out the baseball bat and explain how things get done The Chicago Way.
  . . .
  Americans won't know exactly what's in that federal health care bill that will change our lives. We won't know how much it will cost us, or which insiders get rich, until after it's all done.
  
  Naturally, the insiders will know. And after it becomes law, they might let the rest of us in on it.
  
  That doesn't sound much like a man transcending the politics of the past, does it?
  
  It sounds as if The Washington Way is just like The Chicago Way."
• China Said to Purchase Remainder of IMF Gold Sale - "The bullion banks can use paper gold to manipulate pricing around key events like this week's options expiration in the short term. They are powerful, and have many friends, their demimonde, who will help them to spin the facts, place opinion pieces, and resurrect old studies, to convince a gullible public once again that their promises are good, that their paper riches are wealth. This is the essence of the shaping of public opinion, the hidden persuaders, the not always subtle propaganda campaigns that so often pass for news these days.
  
  But the international currency regime is changing, and the developing countries are choosing to protect their reserves in traditional ways. For the first time in over twenty years the central banks have become net buyers of gold.
  
  The wealthy are buying physical silver and gold in anticipation of a dislocation in the structure of the existing international currency regime, no matter what they might say publicly to reassure the markets. This we know. Whether this is the most prudent thing to have done only time will tell, since there are a range of possible outcomes, and probabilities. But change is in the wind; the time of reckoning approaches and the accounts will be tallied and settled."
• The Future of Money: It’s Flexible, Frictionless and (Almost) Free - "The banks and credit card companies have spent 50 years building a proprietary, locked-down system that handles roughly $2 trillion in credit card transactions and another $1.3 trillion in debit card transactions every year. Until recently, vendors had little choice but to participate in this system, even though -- like a medieval toll road -- it is long and bumpy and full of intermediaries eager to take their cut. Take the common swipe. When a retailer initiates a transaction, the store’s point-of-sale system provider -- the company that leases out the industrial-gray card reader to the merchant for a monthly fee -- registers the sale price and passes the information on to the store’s bank. The bank records its fee and passes on the purchase information to the credit card company. The credit card company then takes its share, authorizes all the previous fees, and sends the information to the buyer’s bank, which routes the remaining balance back to the store. All in all, it takes between 24 and 72 hours for the vendor to get any money, and along the way up to 3.5 percent of the sale has been siphoned away.
  
  In the earliest days of credit cards, those fees paid for an important service. Until the late 1950s, each card was usually tied to a single bank or merchant, limiting its usefulness and resulting in a walletload of unique cards. But when BankAmericard -- later renamed Visa -- offered to split its fees with other banks, those banks began to offer Visa cards to their customers, and merchants began accepting Visa as a way to drive sales. Meanwhile, Visa and rival MasterCard -- as well as distant competitors American Express and Discover -- used their share of the fees to build their own global technological infrastructures, pipes that connected all the various banks and businesses to ensure speedy data transmission. For its time, it was a technologically impressive system that, for a price, brought ease and convenience to millions of buyers and sellers.
  
  But today, vendors are seeing fewer benefits from paying those fees, even as credit card companies have jacked them up over the years."
• Goodwin Liu on the Second Amendment - "Boalt Hall Associate Dean Goodwin H. Liu has been nominated to serve on the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals. Some readers and Senators may be interested in his viewpoint on Second Amendment and other constitutional issue related to firearms policy. So here’s an excerpt from his article Separation Anxiety: Congress, The Courts, And The Constitution, 91 Georgetown Law Journal 439 (Jan. 2003). Liu’s co-author on the article is Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton. The article is based on a 2002 speech that Senator Clinton presented at Georgetown, sponsored by the American Constitution Society. Senator Clinton and Professor Liu criticize recent Supreme Court decisions declaring two federal gun control laws unconstitutional:"
• Pro-life leaders say Pelosi lied, again, on federal abortion funding - "House Speaker Nancy Pelosi wrapped up today's White House Health Care Summit with a characteristically confrontational lecture in which she rebuked House Minority Leader John Boehner for saying the Obamacare proposal approved by the Senate and as modified recently by the White House provides public funding for abortions.
  
  'I think it’s really important to note, though, and I want the record to show, because two statements were made here that were not factual in relationship to these bills,' Pelosi said. 'My colleague, Leader Boehner, the law of the land is there is no public funding of abortion and there is no public funding of abortion in these bills and I don't want our listeners or viewers to get the wrong impression from what you said.'
  
  Pelosi's assertion brought immediate responses from pro-life leaders who claim the Senate bill indirectly uses federal tax dollars to fund abortion services provided through new Community Health Centers established by the legislation.
  . . .
  Under the Senate health care bill that will be the main bill Obama and Democrats push through Congress, there is no ban on abortion funding. While some states can opt out of funding abortions under the plan, taxpayers in other states will be forced to pay for them, Johnson said."
• The case against college - "College degrees are overrated, writes Ramesh Ponnuru in Time. While college graduates earn more, that’s partly because those who complete a degree are smarter, on average, than those who don’t. Sending not-so-smart people to college simply boosts the dropout rate.
  . . .
  College-prep programs may be too hard for vocationally oriented students. In some cases, what passes for college prep is too easy. 'College- and career-ready' is the new mantra. We need to define 'career ready' in a way that will guide high school instruction for the kids who prefer moola moola to boola boola."
• Prof. Bernanke Instructs Congress--Again - "This deficit spending problem 'is not 10 years away, it affects the markets today,' Bernanke replied to a question to Rep. Ed Royce (R-Calif.), the only person on the [House Financial Services] committee who appears to not be a few peas short of a casserole, upon which committee chairman Barney Frank (D-Mass.) cut off this line of questioning."
• What to Expect in November - "[Alan I. Abramowitz's] model has a result that will startle many of our readers: Republicans will pick up 37 House seats in November. That is remarkably close to the 40 seats the GOP needs to take outright control of the House."
• Pictures of a Market Crash: Beware the Ides of March, And What Follows After - "There are a fair number of private and public forecasters with whom I speak that anticipate a significant market decline in March. As you know I tend to agree, but with the important caveat that we are in a very different monetary landscape than the last time the Fed engaged in quantitative easing, the early 1930's.
  . . .
  Although one cannot see it just yet in the fog of corrupted government statistics, the economy is not improving and the US Consumers are flat on their back, scraping by for the most part, except for the upper percentiles who were made fat by the credit bubble, and are still extracting rents from it.
  
  There are still far too many otherwise responsible people who are not taking the situation with the high seriousness it deserves."
• Federalism and the Akaka BillFederalism and the Akaka Bill - "There is also a second potential federalism problem with the Akaka bill. By authorizing the creation of a tribal government for native Hawaiians, Congress is carving out a new sovereign entity within the territory of the existing state of Hawaii. It’s far from clear that Congress has the power to do such a thing under the Constitution. Article IV, Section 3 of the Constitution states that 'no new States shall be formed or erected within the Jurisdiction of any other State; nor any State be formed by the Junction of two or more States, or Parts of States, without the Consent of the Legislatures of the States concerned as well as of the Congress.' The new Hawaiian tribal government may not have powers great enough for it to count as a 'State' within the meaning of Article IV. Still, the federally mandated creation of a new sovereign entity within the boundaries of an existing state is constitutionally dubious. It is not authorized by the enumerated powers of Congress."
• World's Smallest Political Quiz - "Take the Quiz now and find out where you fit on the political map!"

Shame On You, Rhonda Smith
She then sold the car to someone else....

• Odeon Cinemas Admit The Experience At Their Theaters Is So Bad It Can't Compete With Your Home Theater - "We've seen this before, but it's still really incredible. The Odeon movie theater chain is apparently refusing to show the new Alice in Wonderland film, directed by Tim Burton, in the UK, Ireland and Italy, because Disney is (smartly) trying to shorten the "window" between the cinema release and the DVD release. Basically, what Odeon is admitting here is that it knows the experience of going to its theaters is so bad that it simply can't compete with watching the movie at home. This is a rather stunning admission by Odeon and probably should make you think twice before going to any Odeon theaters."
• Superwoman syndrome fuels pill-pop culture - "Almost 6 percent of American women, that's 7.5 million adult women, report using prescription medicines for a boost of energy, a dose of calm or other non-medical reasons, according to the latest numbers from the National Institute on Drug Abuse.
  
  'Many may not consider what they're doing abuse because they're using a prescribed drug,' says Susan R.B. Weiss, chief of NIDA's Science Policy Branch. 'Many of these medications are being taken as performance-enhancers.'
  
  While street drug use has been declining in recent years, prescription drug abuse has been up since the 1990s.
  
  The trend seems to be partly driven by more and more women popping pills. While men make up the majority of abusers of street drugs, including meth, cocaine and heroin, women are just as likely to abuse prescription pills as men."
• Rep. Souder And The Denso Distraction - "News that the FBI had raided three Japanese supplier companies in the Detroit area came in the middle of yesterday’s epic Toyota hearings, adding to the day’s chaos and misinformation. The FBI said clearly at the time that Denso, Tokai Riko and Yazaki were raided as part of an antitrust investigation, which we now know [via Reuters] involves alleged cartel activities in the wiring harness supply market, and involves European firms like France’s Leoni as well. Despite the fact that Denso and Yazaki are cooperating with investigators, and that the US raids appear to be in support of an EU investigation, Rep Mark Souder (R-IN) took the opportunity to connect the Denso raid with the Toyota recall hearings in shameless style. And all to help clear the name of the US-based supplier CTS, which has been blamed for the sticky pedal recall, which just so happens to be in Rep. Souder’s district."
• Wheat Ridge High School Class of 1970 - "The reonion committee is working away planning the 40th reunion the weekend of August 13-15, 2010. Wheat Ridge, Colorado WRHS1970.com"
• Common Market Food Co-op - "Common Market Food Co-op was a 'new wave food co-op' located at 1329 California Street in Denver, Colorado, from 1975 - 1980. It started as a buying club at the University of Denver in the late 1960s, and for a few years prior to moving to the old Safeway at 13th and California Streets, Common Market operated out of a small storefront on Champa Street."
• Bad Check Scams Expanding and "Improving" - "whatever you think you know about cashier’s checks and certified checks being secure simply doesn’t apply any more. Some forged bank checks are so good that you cannot distinguish them from the real thing simply by looking at them. Please make sure that your staff, your colleagues, your clients and your friends understand this.
  . . .
  A new wrinkle is the scammer calling other professionals (like real estate agents) to get the names of local lawyers and then using that person’s name when they contact the lawyer to give them more credibility. A referral from a local businessperson isn’t going to be a scammer, right? There are reports of this fraud expanding and that is why this is a good topic for a law firm client newsletter. A person who is trying to sell a house might hear from a foreigner who is going to move to the state and wants to buy the house. They send a large certified check as a deposit and then a few days later note that a tragedy has occurring preventing them from moving. They ask the person to return part of the deposit, keeping a nice portion for their trouble.
  
  While we have typically seen these checks in the mid six figures, Dan notes that the amounts are becoming lower to make them seem less suspicious. Let’s face it. Stealing $50,000 ten times a year is a pretty good living for a thief."
• Some Philosophy of the Gym - "I spent my lunch hour today at the gym across the street from my office. It’s a simple, compact affair, heavily economized in its use of space, split into three roughly-equal sections of weights, floor mats, and an aerobics area. The walls are heavily mirrored and it has three scales in different locations, at least two more than could be required by any practical consideration. Every weekday, the gym swells for the morning, lunch and evening rushes, as hundreds of my colleagues and coworkers pour into the sweaty, crowded, clanking dungeon.
  . . .
  OK, sure. I’ll buy the health explanation from the 40-year-old who spends a half hour on the treadmill, three times a week. Maybe they do some light weights too, because their doctors told them it was a good idea. I think they’d be better off, physically and spiritually, going hiking with their friends, tobogganing with their kids, or having sex with their spouses, but I will at least grant that they are trudging away to extend and improve their lives. The question then becomes: How fractured, lonely, and atomized has our society become, that the most popular form of exercise is the monotonous, low-intensity self-torture that goes on under the soul-sucking fluorescent lights of GoodLife Fitness? Activities that make your heart pump faster are not hard to find. Dreary hours on the exercise bicycle are the norm because we have chosen to make it so. Because we are sick, and for whatever reason our desire to connect with other people is so weak that we prefer a solitary workout over game of touch football.
  . . .
  Regardless of their motivation -- sex appeal, an unhealthy desire to be unnaturally healthy, or just the need to distract themselves from an otherwise boring, lonely and unconnected life -- the characters in the gym are a uniquely depressing bunch, shackled by sweatbands and malaise."
• N.Y. Firm Faces Bankruptcy from $164,000 E-Banking Loss - "Karen McCarthy, owner of Merrick, N.Y. based Little & King LLC, a small promotions company, discovered on Monday, Feb. 15 that her firm’s bank account had been emptied the previous Friday. McCarthy said she immediately called her bank -- Cherry Hill, N.J. based TD Bank -- and learned that between Feb. 10 and Feb. 12, unknown thieves had made five wire transfers out of the account to two individuals and two companies with whom the McCarthys had never had any prior business."
• Nicholas Kristof on toxins and autism - "Kristof doesn't note that identical twins both are autistic ninety percent or more of the time (conditional on one of the twins being autistic), yet the concordance is much lower for fraternal twins. That militates in favor of genetic explanations, although the mechanics of transmission are poorly understood. It's wrong to cite genetics as explaining one-quarter of autism cases or to imply that genetics do not explain three-quarters. There are recent studies which look for correlated genes across autistics and find less than overwhelming results and perhaps this is what he has in mind. More accurately, there is a common problem with finding "simple" genetic markers for traits which are very likely or even certain to be genetic. The degree of correlation across genetic patterns we can find should not be taken as a measure of how many autistic cases -- or any other condition -- can be explained by genetics.
  . . .
  Cross-sectional studies, spanning decades of age groups, suggest a roughly constant rate of autism, even when environmental toxins are changing considerably over those lengthy time periods. Plenty of other studies relate autism clusters successfully to non-toxin factors, such as parental education or supply-side services or standards of diagnosis.
  
  There are likely well over 50 million autistics in the world and most of them have not had significant exposure to the cited toxins. While there are some plausible heterogeneities within autism, it is necessary to ask whether 'genes *or* toxins' is one of those and probably it is not."

America, These Are Your Leaders: Maxine Waters Edition
CBS follows up with a reasonable question: "Is Maxine Waters really as dumb as she seems?"

• MagicJack dials wrong number in legal attack on Boing Boing - "Gadget maker MagicJack recently lost a defamation lawsuit that it filed against Boing Boing. The judge dismissed its case and ordered it to pay us more than $50,000 in legal costs.
  
  The Florida-based VOIP company promotes a USB dongle that allows subscribers to make free or inexpensive phone calls over the internet. I posted in April 2008 about its terms of service--which include the right to analyze customers' calls--and various iffy characteristics of its website.
  
  We had no idea that it would file a baseless lawsuit to try and shut me up, that CEO Dan Borislow would offer to buy our silence after disparaging his own lawyers, or that MagicJack would ultimately face legal consequences for trying to intimidate critics.
  
  At several points in the process, we could have taken a check and walked away: as it is, the award doesn't quite cover our costs. But we don't like being bullied, and we wanted the chance to tell anyone else threatened by this company what to expect.
  . . .
  We would not agree to keep the actual legal dispute confidential under any circumstances. However, we offered not to publish details of our legal costs or their settlement if Borislow would donate $25,000 to charity. MagicJack, however, offered to pay our legal bill only if we'd agree to keep the whole dispute confidential; when we refused, Borislow wrote that he would 'see us in court.' Nonetheless, we're happy with the outcome. The irony for MagicJack is that the proceedings are public record, so the silence it sought was effectively worthless."
• Netflix Paid Los Gatos $2.5 Million in Sales Tax in 2009 - "The Los Gatos Observer reports that Netflix paid $2.5 million in sales tax in 2009."
• What Am I Doing Here? Tall Buildings and High Anxiety in Las Vegas - "A note on Las Vegas nomenclature: It’s gaming, not gambling. Gambling is a foolish activity that can only end in tears. Gaming is harmless entertainment. Please keep them straight.
  . . .
  Survived 'Viva Elvis® by Cirque de Soleil™,' billed as “a harmonious fusion of dance, acrobatics, and live music.” It is not harmonious. It is an assault on the senses. Feel slightly guilty that I had my fingers jammed in my ears for the entire show with one of CityCenter’s PR reps sitting next to me.
  . . .
  The lobby of the Mandarin Oriental smells like fancy soap, and the Sky Bar has panoramic views. But I start to feel claustrophobic and duck out of the event. For a certain type of person, Vegas is a non-stop party. For me, it induces a kind of persistent low-grade anxiety. There’s something dystopic about the place generally, and CityCenter is starting to feel like the world of Blade Runner come to life. I head back to my room, shut the black-out curtains and lie in bed. More people commit suicide in Las Vegas than in any other city in the United States.
  . . .
  Am I the only person not entranced by the Bellagio fountains? They’re visually impressive and a technological feat, fine, but it’s hard for me to enjoy anything accompanied by the schlocky music of Elton John.
  . . .
  Ditch the tour to head out to the Strip so I can buy a souvenir for my daughter. (A small stuffed animal in the Aria gift shop goes for $68.) Walk down to the New York New York complex, which has an air of squalid desperation. How it will survive with CityCenter and other new developments competing for business is beyond me. A friend quips that the only way they could fill the place is 'if they reenact 9/11 every morning.' No comment.
  . . .
  Drinks at Prime Meats, in Brooklyn, with my wife. Realistically, this place is as much an artifice as anything on the Strip, a re-imagining of a 19th-century saloon, complete with polished bar, antique typography, Edison bulbs. Why, then, does it feel so much more honest? Because its aesthetic is filtered through a contemporary sensibility? Because it seems a natural part of a vibrant neighborhood? Is this all bullshit I invent to make myself feel more comfortable? Could the real problem with Las Vegas -- my real problem with Las Vegas -- be that its commercial imperatives are simply too transparent?"
• Ten Things I Learned While Trading for Victor Niederhoffer - "6.) Warren Buffett. Victor is not a fan of Warren Buffett. This forced me to look at Buffett in a whole new way. Is Buffett a value investor? What other tricks of the trade has Buffett used over the years? I ended up reading every biography of Buffett, going through four decades of SEC filings, and pouring over not only his Berkshire letters but his prior letters from his hedge fund days (1957-1969). The result was my book, 'Trade Like Warren Buffett.'
  . . .
  9.) Keep Life Interesting. Victor surrounds himself by games and the people who enjoy them. When I knew him, he took regular checkers lessons, played tennis every day, and has some of the oddest collections I’ve ever seen. He stands out on a crowded city street and seems to spend part of each day seeking out new and interesting experiences. He often asked me what I’d been reading and if it was trading related he was disappointed. Trading is ultimately a window into the psyche of the world at that moment."
• “Tin Whiskers” Implicated In Unintended Acceleration Problems - "A number of articles have appeared implicating tin whiskers as a potential source or complicating factor in Toyota’s (and other manufacturers’) unintended acceleration issues. The phenomenon of tin whiskers, a crystalline metallurgical phenomenon involving the spontaneous growth of tiny, filiform hairs from a metallic surface, can cause short circuits and arcing in electric equipment. First discovered in phone switching equipment in the 1940’s, the addition of lead to tin solder largely eliminated the problem. But the push to eliminate lead from electronic assemblies has led to a nasty re-growth of the pesky whiskers."
• It's The Execution That Matters, Not The Idea - "For years we've tried to explain the difference between ideas and execution, and how lots of people have ideas (in fact, many have the same ideas entirely independently), but without good execution, those ideas aren't really worth much at all. This point comes up a lot in the debates we have over the patent system -- with patent system supporters often overvaluing the idea part, and grossly underestimating the importance of execution. Often this is because they've never built a real business, and don't realize how little an initial idea plays into the final product. The two are often oceans apart. But stopping others from executing well (or forcing them to fork over a ton of money) just because they executed well where you did not? That doesn't seem like encouraging innovation or promoting progress at all."

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February 28, 2010 09:17 AM   Link    Comments (0)

Assorted Links 2/25/10

7 of the most powerful persuasion techniques by expert Robert Cialdini

• The Defense Budget, February 26, 2010
• Capitol Hill Workshop, March 3-5, 2010
• Speechwriting: Preparing Speeches and Oral Presentations, March 12, 2010
• Is it ‘raining’ hard enough? - "Faced with historic revenue drops, states have tapped their rainy day funds in fiscal 2009 and 2010 at levels not seen since the 2001 recession to help close budget gaps totaling some $290 billion. The decision to go to these funds has renewed the debate about how much states should be setting aside in these reserves and when to use the money. A few states, meanwhile, have been able to leave their funds intact. Texas, for example, is sitting on $8 billion in its fund and has relied instead on federal stimulus money to balance its budget.
  
  It’s a common perception that rainy day funds are like the couple’s savings account and can be spent in emergencies. But they actually are more like 401(k) or other accounts that put contraints on the funds.
  . . .
  But a handful of states haven’t gone that route at all and can boast that their rainy day funds remain essentially untouched. Texas has so much set aside that its $8 billion and Alaska’s reserves of $6.9 billion are badly skewing the national average of what states hold in their rainy day fund and ending balances in their budgets. Figuring the two states in, the average comes to 4.8 percent of states’ annual expenditures. Without them, it’s a paltry 2.7 percent, according to NASBO. That’s far below the 5 percent that many budget experts and bond rating agencies typically recommend states hold in reserves. "
• Morning Must Reads -- All Obama, all the time - "They say the legislation was not enough of him and too much of Congress. He was too restrained in using his gifts to convince the undecided and smite his enemies.
  
  Letting Obama be Obama may win the primaries or a debate with John McCain, but it’s not going to convince voters that a warmed-over version of Harry Reid’s health plan is worth $125 billion a year to a bankrupt government and a good deal of disruption to the current standards of access and quality.
  
  Obama has talked about the plan in two States of the Union, a special joint session of Congress called just for that purpose, more than 30 speeches, an online ad, and at least a dozen weekly radio addresses, but still the electorate resists.
  
  In fact, the more people hear about the plan, the less they like it. But the solution from the president’s crew: More Obama!"
• Ignorance is Not Stupidity, Redux - "If voters tend to be ignorant and often illogical in their evaluation of the information they know, transferring more power to government in order to adopt paternalistic policies will only increase the impact of the types of cognitive errors paternalists seek to correct."
• TSA Detains Possible Terrorist Armed With Flashcards - "Nicholas George, who is from Philadelphia, is a student at Pomona College in California and is studying Arabic there. This is a good thing. We need people to study and learn Arabic so they can translate things and see if anybody else who speaks Arabic is trying to kill us. To learn a foreign language, sometimes one uses flashcards. Sometimes, especially if one wants to become fluent, one actually travels to the countries where the language is spoken, and that will mean your passport will show that you have been to the Middle East.
  
  The suspiciously stamped passport, and the über-suspicious flashcards, neither of which an actual terrorist would have been carrying, caused TSA agents in Philadelphia to detain George, handcuff him, and interrogate him for four hours. He missed his flight and had to travel the next day. ACLU contacted. Lawsuit filed. Lesson almost certainly not learned."
• Basically, It's Over: A parable about how one nation came to financial ruin. - "Basicland's investment and commercial bankers were hostile to change. Like the objecting economists, the bankers wanted change exactly opposite to change wanted by the Good Father. Such bankers provided constructive services to Basicland. But they had only moderate earnings, which they deeply resented because Basicland's casinos--which provided no such constructive services--reported immoderate earnings from their bucket-shop systems. Moreover, foreign investment bankers had also reported immoderate earnings after building their own bucket-shop systems--and carefully obscuring this fact with ingenious twaddle, including claims that rational risk-management systems were in place, supervised by perfect regulators. Naturally, the ambitious Basicland bankers desired to prosper like the foreign bankers. And so they came to believe that the Good Father lacked any understanding of important and eternal causes of human progress that the bankers were trying to serve by creating more bucket shops in Basicland.
  
  Of course, the most effective political opposition to change came from the gambling casinos themselves. This was not surprising, as at least one casino was located in each legislative district. The casinos resented being compared with cancer when they saw themselves as part of a long-established industry that provided harmless pleasure while improving the thinking skills of its customers.
  
  As it worked out, the politicians ignored the Good Father one more time, and the Basicland banks were allowed to open bucket shops and to finance the purchase and carry of real securities with extreme financial leverage. A couple of economic messes followed, during which every constituency tried to avoid hardship by deflecting it to others. Much counterproductive governmental action was taken, and the country's credit was reduced to tatters. Basicland is now under new management, using a new governmental system. It also has a new nickname: Sorrowland."

GoMeals iPhone App Makes Food Management Easier for Diabetics

• Two Cheers for Credit Cards - "Ever since someone in grad school deviously introduced me to the concept of "irrational" debt aversion, I have been carrying credit-card balances that are far too high. Believe me, I understand the tricks these companies pull, like the clause in fine print where you unwittingly pledged away your firstborn.
  . . .
  The most obvious benefit of credit cards is that they offer a very flexible and convenient method for individuals to borrow money.
  . . .
  Ironically, the widespread use of credit cards actually promotes the safety of an individual's assets, or at the very least allows a much wider scope for purchasing without a proportional increase in the danger of theft.
  . . .
  Besides their intrinsic honesty, the ultimate reason most people pay their credit-card bills -- enough so that the industry is profitable -- is that they don't want to ruin their credit score."
• LAUSD's Dance of the Lemons: Why firing the desk-sleepers, burnouts, hotheads and other failed teachers is all but impossible - "But the [LA] Weekly has found, in a five-month investigation, that principals and school district leaders have all but given up dismissing such teachers. In the past decade, LAUSD officials spent $3.5 million trying to fire just seven of the district's 33,000 teachers for poor classroom performance -- and only four were fired, during legal struggles that wore on, on average, for five years each. Two of the three others were paid large settlements, and one was reinstated. The average cost of each battle is $500,000.
  
  During our investigation, in which we obtained hundreds of documents using the California Public Records Act, we also discovered that 32 underperforming teachers were initially recommended for firing, but then secretly paid $50,000 by the district, on average, to leave without a fight. Moreover, 66 unnamed teachers are being continually recycled through a costly mentoring and retraining program but failing to improve, and another 400 anonymous teachers have been ordered to attend the retraining."
• How to avoid becoming senile: - "Don't retire. You know the old expression, 'Use it or lose it?' It's correct. Nobody's saying you need to do back-breaking work until you're 94 but retirement often involves too little mental stimulation and that can hasten mental decline:"
• Wheat Ridge High School Class of 1970 - "The reonion committee is working away planning the 40th reunion the weekend of August 13-15, 2010. Wheat Ridge, Colorado WRHS1970.com"
• Common Market Food Co-op - "Common Market Food Co-op was a 'new wave food co-op' located at 1329 California Street in Denver, Colorado, from 1975 - 1980. It started as a buying club at the University of Denver in the late 1960s, and for a few years prior to moving to the old Safeway at 13th and California Streets, Common Market operated out of a small storefront on Champa Street."
• “Dean” Karen H. Rothenberg, Come on Down! - "Dean Karen Rothenberg, 'come on down!' You’re the next contestant on this week’s exciting episode of Big Debt! Step right up to Contestant’s Row and compete for millions in Stafford loan loot, alumni shakedowns, and lush government subsidies. All yours for the taking Karen, here behind the big doors on The Price is Right!
  
  For those not in our studio audience, this bulletin: News broke over the weekend that former dean of laughable TTT toilet U. Maryland Law, Karen Rothenberg, received $350,000 in compensation for several sabbaticals she apparently never took. Like most pseudo-academic lowlifes who suckle at the Stafford Loan teat, Karen’s apparently corrupt as well as lazy. The incident reeks of backroom dealing and criminal shadiness, all par for the course in the cesspool of today’s education racket. Read about it here:"
• Full Genome Sequencing Helps Create Personalized Blood Cancer Test - "Clinical researchers at Johns Hopkins University have developed a new methodology for creating individualized cancer blood tests based on DNA sequencing. Since it is now becoming more affordable to detect cancer markers in free floating DNA, those markers can be used as a template for a blood test to track the progress of cancer therapy."
• *The New Yorker* writes up Peter Chang and *China Star* - "Yes I know the article is gated but I wanted to blog the link anyway, out of sheer enthusiasm. It's a superb piece. China Star is my favorite Fairfax restaurant and it's the #1 restaurant for GMU blogger lunches and debates (though one of us hates it; can you guess which one? We make him go nonetheless). It's also where we take job candidates, at least the ones we respect. Even though Chang is now gone, the restaurant remains superb in the hands of his successors, who have kept many of his original recipes."

Advertising Is Content, Content Is Advertising, I'm On A Horse

• Aeron: Best office chair investment - "I've been testing an Aeron Chair since 2001 and I'm ready to say, 'Go for it.' Why now? Because I just realized that it is the cheapest chair I've ever owned. I’m 6’ 2”, 200-plus pounds, and put a lot of daily wear-and-tear on my chair. So I wasn’t surprised when, after eight years of use the seat cracked: I was sitting there and it gave way by about two inches. Except for an early problem with a slight wiggle in the base (which Herman Miller paid to have fixed) the chair has worked flawlessly."

. . . . . . . . .

February 25, 2010 08:27 AM   Link    Comments (0)

Assorted Links 2/22/10

School Accused Of Spying On Kids In Their Homes With Spyware That Secretly Activated Webcams

• The President's Budget, February 23, 2010
• The Defense Budget, February 26, 2010
• Capitol Hill Workshop, March 3-5, 2010
• Speechwriting: Preparing Speeches and Oral Presentations, March 12, 2010
• State and Local governments going broke - "While union membership has fallen in the private sector, many government employees work under union contracts. Combine that with the ability of union support to sway election results (and have union government employees serving in legislatures) at the state and local level and it's a recipe for fiscal disaster."
• States Sink in Benefits Hole - "The pension problems started well before the recession. Even in good times, states were skipping pension payments, leaving larger holes to fill in future years. State legislatures also increased benefit levels without setting aside extra money to pay for them.
  
  As a result, annual pension costs for states and participating local governments more than doubled, to more than $64 billion, from fiscal 2000 to fiscal 2008, said Susan Urahn, the research group's managing director."
• Just What I Needed - "let me address the gold / silver / fiat money question.
  
  I have just never understood why there is so much concern over currency, as if this were the number one problem. No question that a fiat money does in fact give the government enormous power. But the currency is more a reflection of power the state already has, rather than a cause of it.
  . . .
  Here's the thing: the government doesn't control the money supply NOW. If you have a credit card, or several, you can create large amounts of new money, all by yourself. Anytime you secure a new line of credit, and actually spend it.... there goes the money supply. And if the government buys bonds, in 'open market operations,' that doesn't mean that banks will lend. The velocity of money is endogenous, as we have seen recently as credit dried up and people (and banks) held much larger cash balances in the forms of savings and reserves.
  
  Again, I'm not denying that a fiat money creates enormous power for the state. Of course it does. But the war on drugs, the war in Iraq, the Patriot Act, restrictions on the right to marry, restrictions on hiring, regulations and taxes on small business, involuntary annexation....I could go on. Why would you start with money, as the number one problem?"
• MSM denial over IRS bomber's left-wing discontent - "Before crashing his plane into an IRS office building, Joe Stack wrote and posted online a diatribe against insurance and drug companies, private health care, George W. Bush, and the Catholic Church. Subtract out the subtle hints at his planned terror act, and a similar rant could have appeared in some form on any of several left-wing message boards.
  
  Despite this, it isn't just willfully blind posters on those same left-wing message boards that are trying to insinuate some connection between the Tea Party movement and this apparent tax-evader and suicide pilot, who railed against Congress for failing to pass health reform."
• School Accused Of Spying On Kids In Their Homes With Spyware That Secretly Activated Webcams - "A whole bunch of you are sending in this absolutely horrifying story of a school district outside of Philadelphia that apparently gave its students laptops that included hidden software that allowed district officials to secretly turn on the laptops' webcams and monitor student activities, no matter where they were. This all came to light when a student was disciplined for 'improper behavior in his home' with the evidence being a photo of the kid from his laptop webcam. The district is now being sued for this. It's rather stunning that anyone thought this was a good idea. Secretly spying on children in their homes when they have a very real expectation of privacy is downright horrifying. It's not hard to see how this could be abused in very dangerous ways."
• Buy an iPhone or get a million dollars - (wise cartoon)
• Where Did Our Real Wealth Go? - "In other words, Greece is the canary in the mine of the impending crack-up of the modern welfare state. It is a great gift to us all, this example. A year ago, the socialists, even as they were juggling and falsifying their books, were bragging that the Wall Street meltdown was a referendum -- and capitalism was doomed. Now, the entire socialist dream is exposed and even the most ardent statist knows that there is no longer enough 'others' to pay the tab.
  
  The poor EU learned that the Greek siesta, the 10PM Athenian dinners, the state power company vans at the beaches in the workday afternoons, the kafenions full of 50-year-old men at 11AM, the angry students perpetually in the streets at each hinted reform, and the moonlighting telephone employees all came at the expense of far harder-working Scandinavian and German socialists, who apparently now realize a nice two weeks each year on Santorini or Crete aren’t worth billions of their own Euros in rescue bailouts.
  . . .
  So for a while longer, we need the miner, the oil pumper, the farmer, the fabricator, the carpenter, the road-builder, the railroad guy, the cement layer, the chemist, the computer engineer -- and the system that allows them all to create wealth unimpeded by government and in an environment in which the citizen who benefits from their labor appreciates their industry.
  
  Yes, before we have the actor, the writer, the professor, the insurer, the investor, the regulator, and the politicians, we need the elemental among us to find or create material wealth. We, the sloganeering class, forgot that, and so subsidize our high living either on borrowed money or the prior productive investment of those now in the grave yards."
• Putting “Holds” on Hold - "What is missed in the debate over holds is whether the Senate should be moving nominations by unanimous consent in the first place. President Obama’s supporters contend that his nominees deserve an up or down vote. Yet that is exactly what is required by a hold: an up or down vote. Holds do not have to be honored by the Majority Leader (else why doesn’t someone just place a hold on health care?). In fact, nominations are privileged motions, meaning the Majority Leader can bring up a nomination for debate and vote at any time."
• Get Over It because there will be no Housing Boom This Decade – 5 Factors That Will Drag Housing Down in the Next Ten Years. - "Now one month doesn’t make a trend of course but if you only listen to the real estate industry and banking cabal you would think that all of a sudden we are circa 2003 real estate. There is this pervasive speculative attitude once again in the air even in the face of a 12.4 percent unemployment rate. The unemployment situation was revised last month nationwide and the BLS upped the number of jobs lost in this recession from the 'low' 7 million to 8.4 million. So basically we were underestimating how 'good' things were for an entire year (the BLS has suspect numbers because of their methodology). Yet this is part of the new economic psychology where real data is ignored in exchange for bread and circus statistics and political theatre. The reality is we are not going to see any sort of housing boom for the next decade. In fact, housing will be weak for the next ten years (at least) regardless of what the government and Wall Street attempts to do.
  . . .
  With most conservative estimates, 25 percent of current mortgage holders are underwater. That is, they owe more on their home than it is worth.
  . . .
  Baby boomers to a large extent drove this housing bubble. Many had purchased in the 1990s so were able to ride the mega bubble or trade up in housing. Many also sucked the equity out of their homes to fill every nook and cranny with new stainless steel fridges and flat screen televisions. As the housing bubble ramped up they saw their housing porn shows telling them to purchase granite countertops because no home is complete without putting shiny rocks in your kitchen. But as the bubble of a decade recedes, people are left with artifacts of consumption and no real wealth. It isn’t like a cow that you can live off but these items are sitting there reflecting years of consumption. Massive gas sucking SUVs sit parked in the driveway ready to suck your wallet dry at the next trip to the gas station."
• Are prices going up or down? - "Meanwhile, John Williams at Shadowstats.com reports: 'Adjusted to pre-Clinton (1990) methodology, annual CPI eased to roughly 6.0% growth in January from to 6.1% in December, while the SGS-Alternate Consumer Inflation Measure, which reverses gimmicked changes to official CPI reporting methodologies back to 1980, rose to about 9.8% (9.76% for those using the extra digit) in January, versus 9.7% in December.'"
• Repeat after me: Opportunity Cost - "Holy half-wit, Batman! This person has zero concept of opportunity cost.
  
  Hard to tell, exactly, but I think the implied value of this person's time is about $6 per hour. So, if you are making minimum wage, by all means take his advice.
  
  Otherwise, read this, and stop shopping once you have to make a new reservation for $1 decrements in plane fare."
• Amnesty International and the World of International NGOs - "Be careful what you wish for when you wish for American decline. American decline would almost certainly entail the decline of those universal values and, along with them, the human monitors whose universal claims are unlikely to thrive under a multipolarity championed by, for example, China. (Perhaps the most depressing phenomenon in all this, however, is the Obama administration’s embrace of ideological decline in advance of any historically materialist (what we Marxists like to call 'objective') reason to do so. I refer particularly to the entirely unnecessary group hug of the demotion of free speech by the US at the UN Human Rights Council.)"
• Toyota: New State Farm Disclosures Trigger Accusations Of Lackadaisical NHTSA - "Akio Toyoda is spending the weekend in Japan, being prepped for his appearance in front of the modern day version of the tribunal of the Spanish Inquisition, better known as a Congressional Hearing.
  
  According to Reuters, and as suggested by TTAC, Toyoda 'is likely to undergo intense preparation. Toyota may hire lawyers to drill him with mock questions, one consultant said. A company source said it had not yet been decided whether Toyoda would speak in Japanese or English, but the company has already contacted some translation companies.'
  
  The weekend drill was interrupted by the news that State Farm had informed the NHTSA as early as February 27, 2004, that the insurance company had five claims of unwanted acceleration in the 2002 Lexus ES 300 during the previous 12 months. Reuters broke the story, writing 'the insurer said earlier this month it had contacted the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration in late 2007. However, prompted by the public interest in Toyota, the insurer reviewed its records again and has now found that it contacted safety regulators initially in 2004.' All hell broke loose …"
• Great Moments in (Anti) Stimulus - "There were many reasons to oppose last year’s so-called stimulus legislation. But perhaps one of the most compelling reasons is that politicians and bureaucrats inevitably do really stupid things because the federal budget is a racket designed to funnel the maximum amount of money to powerful interest groups."

How a Movement is Made

• Poor Teen Sleeping Due To Lack Of Blue Light? - "The kids need more blue light in their classrooms in the morning to get their melatonin production and circadian cycle working correctly."
• Before You Go Locking Up All Of Those “Crazy” People… - "If we were to start locking up all of the people who exhibit warning signs for violent behavior, we would be committing a lot of Type I error, not to mention trouncing on people’s civil liberties. We’re then faced with a tradeoff- is it worth infringing on the rights of many people in order to prevent the few that turn out to be crazy from acting on their craziness? Given the often-made point that we all probably exhibit some sort of warning sign at one point or another, I’m guessing that that answer is a no. That said, the Huntsville woman shot her brother and wasn’t charged because her mom said it was an accident. Next time, maybe we’ll have a lesson on credibility and conflict of interest."
• Domestic Violence and Abuse: Signs of Abuse and Abusive Relationships - "Domestic violence and abuse can happen to anyone, yet the problem is often overlooked, excused, or denied. This is especially true when the abuse is psychological, rather than physical. Emotional abuse is often minimized, yet it can leave deep and lasting scars.
  
  Noticing and acknowledging the warning signs and symptoms of domestic violence and abuse is the first step to ending it. No one should live in fear of the person they love. If you recognize yourself or someone you know in the following warning signs and descriptions of abuse, don’t hesitate to reach out."
• Is Your Partner Emotionally Abusive? - "Just because you aren't getting smacked around doesn't mean you aren't suffering. In fact, verbal abuse and emotional abuse in relationships is on the rise, and the psychological damage it inflicts can be crippling. To escape this insidious torment, you have to be able to spot the symptoms."
• Wheat Ridge High School Class of 1970 - "The reonion committee is working away planning the 40th reunion the weekend of August 13-15, 2010. Wheat Ridge, Colorado WRHS1970.com"
• Common Market Food Co-op - "Common Market Food Co-op was a 'new wave food co-op' located at 1329 California Street in Denver, Colorado, from 1975 - 1980. It started as a buying club at the University of Denver in the late 1960s, and for a few years prior to moving to the old Safeway at 13th and California Streets, Common Market operated out of a small storefront on Champa Street."

LAPD hassles food trucks

• Why I'm Dropping Google - "For a company whose unofficial slogan is 'Don't Be Evil,' Google has been ignoring its so-called core value with alarming frequency as of late. And because of that, I decided to delete my Gmail account, along with all other Google services that I am able to do without. I have also deleted as much personal information as possible from my Google profile.
  . . .
  But not only does Google dominate the search (and, hence, advertising) market, it also knows a lot about you. By adding more and more 'free' services--free in exchange for the annoyance of ads, and for users' giving up their privacy--Google accumulates a wealth of information about your interests, your browsing habits, your contacts, the blogs you visit (using your Google profile), pictures of your home, and much more. (Do you know how much information Google has connected to your Gmail address? Check here: You may be surprised.) Not only does Google have this information on its servers, but if anyone were to be able to hack into your Google account, they'd have a wealth of information about you too (and your business, if you use Google Docs for business documents)."
• Reminder: You Don't Compete With Piracy By Being Lame, The DVD Edition - "It's a point we've tried to make over and over again: you don't compete with "piracy" by offering a product that's a lot worse. And yet, so many people do. A bunch of you have sent over the following image that highlights this in the DVD world (tragically, no one seems to know who made this image -- but if anyone knows, please tell us in the comments and we'll add it to the post). It shows how an unauthorized downloaded copy of The Matrix lets you start watching it immediately. But if you purchase the legitimate DVD, it forces you to sit through multiple FBI warnings and multiple trailers for other movies, with no ability to skip past them. It's humorous, but the point it makes is really important. When your product is less valuable (and yes, that includes being more annoying) than the unauthorized alternatives, you're going to be hard pressed to get people to agree to pay you for your product. "

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February 22, 2010 09:57 AM   Link    Comments (0)

Assorted Links 2/18/10

The Truth About Taxes 1939

• The President's Budget, February 23, 2010
• The Defense Budget, February 26, 2010
• Capitol Hill Workshop, March 3-5, 2010
• Speechwriting: Preparing Speeches and Oral Presentations, March 12, 2010
• another one bites the dust - "Evan Bayh is the latest to announce that he won't face the voters this fall.
  
  Will the last Demo pol left please turn out the lights?
  
  While I think it's very funny how little fight appears left in the Dems, please don't think I am pleased about the possible return of the Republicans. Heaven forfend. I am kind of a 'pox on both your houses' guy."
• Generosity and heroics of the Berlin airlift - "After gigantic sacrifices, the United States was finally able in 1945 to celebrate the defeat of Nazi Germany in World War II. Only three years later, the United States found itself making even more sacrifices related to Germany, but this time to stave off starvation in West Berlin, a bombed-out city where countless former Nazis lived.
  
  Richard Reeves, a prolific journalist-historian, decided to write a book about what became known as the Berlin airlift because so many Americans today know little or nothing about the seemingly impossible - and highly unlikely - humanitarian mission.
  
  Before starting to write Daring Young Men, Reeves, born in 1937, had been contemplating the changed perception of the United States throughout the world. At the end of World War II, it seemed, citizens of other nations looked upon the United States as bighearted, willingly sharing its disproportionate wealth. But during the first decade of the 21st century, many inhabitants of other lands viewed the United States 'as arrogant, self-righteous, brutal, even a monster using our very substantial power to try to enforce a new order, a kind of global neo-imperialism,' Reeves writes."
• Test Drive It! - "When shopping for clothes, you try them on to see if they fit. When buying a car, you take it for a test spin and check out the CARFAX report. When looking at a home, you tour it and hire an inspector.
  
  It's a shame that our young people don't take this same approach when deciding to go to law school. How, then, shall we "test drive" it? How can you make an informed decision? How do you know which side to believe: the optimistic law school admissions staff or the disgruntled JD Undergrounders? Underdogs, with a little research and soul-searching, you will come up with the truth."
• 3 Ways to Prepare for the CARD Act - "On February 22, 2010, the Credit Card Accountability, Responsibility, and Disclosure Act, better known as CARD, will go into effect and consumers can start breathing a little easier as some of the worst abuses in the industry are curtailed. Don’t start celebrating just yet, though. We predict that issuers are going to get creative seeking profits elsewhere, so it’s important to take the time to understand what changes may be coming in a few weeks -- and how to protect yourself now.
  
  Below find our predictions for how card issuers will find new profits in the days after the legislation takes effect, and also three suggestions for staying ahead."
• The government has your baby's DNA - "When Annie Brown's daughter, Isabel, was a month old, her pediatrician asked Brown and her husband to sit down because he had some bad news to tell them: Isabel carried a gene that put her at risk for cystic fibrosis.
  
  While grateful to have the information -- Isabel received further testing and she doesn't have the disease -- the Mankato, Minnesota, couple wondered how the doctor knew about Isabel's genes in the first place. After all, they'd never consented to genetic testing.
  
  It's simple, the pediatrician answered: Newborn babies in the United States are routinely screened for a panel of genetic diseases. Since the testing is mandated by the government, it's often done without the parents' consent, according to Brad Therrell, director of the National Newborn Screening & Genetics Resource Center.
  
  In many states, such as Florida, where Isabel was born, babies' DNA is stored indefinitely, according to the resource center."
• Scalia on the Right to Secede - "Eugene says the Civil War didn’t settle whether there is a right to secede. Ilya agrees. But it looks like Justice Scalia might disagree."
• Instruction and Recall: - "Eugene notes the interesting question of whether a state could pass an advisory recall of a Senator. As I discussed in one of my papers on the 17th Amendment (see this article, pages 171–173 especially) for the Framers the issues of 'instruction' and 'recall' were tied up together. Under the Articles of Confederation, state legislatures had the power of both instruction and recall. Under the Constitution, however, state legislatures continued to exercise the power of instruction, but no longer had the power of recall for failure to follow instructions. Senators were understood as being 'ambassadors' of the state to the national government, thus it followed that they could be instructed.
  
  The absence of a power of recall was a major sticking point for the Anti-Federalists, who anticipated that without the power of recall, the power of instruction would be largely a dead letter. "
• Yes the Senate is broken (but not in the way you might think) - "Congress is broken because it has acquired more power than mere mortals can handle.
  
  I really don't know how we are going to fix that, but by all means, let's not pretend that changing some rules of procedure will fix the problems in our broken legislative branch."
• Rhode Island District Fires All Its HS Teachers - "Performance, it seems is abysmal. The district’s high school graduation rate is said to be less than 50 percent, and things have been bad for a long time. Charged with turning things around, the superintendent asked teachers (who are making between $70,000 and $78,000 vs. the town’s median income of $22,000) to work an extra 25 minutes a day, provide tutoring on a rotating schedule, and have lunch with the kids once a week. The union said no. So superintendent Frances Gallo went reluctantly to plan B: she fired the school’s entire staff.
  
  Union leaders seem to think that the old rules still apply. Maybe they do, for now. The union plans to challenge the firings and it remains to be seen if they’ll find a way to reverse them.
  
  But America is reaching a tipping point after which the old rules will go out the window. "
• Was Alaska a Good Buy? - "The U.S. bought Alaska from the Russian Empire in 1867 for $7.2 million. At the time the purchase was derided as 'Seward's Folly,' but today it's common to compare the purchase price with Alaska's gross state product of $45 billion and claim it a resounding success. But is that the right comparison?"
• Tom Hoenig and The Fed - "On Tuesday, he once again spoke on the true threat of inflation, and noted that maybe, just maybe, massive and crushing amounts of debt aren't the most wonderful things in the world. Last month, he was the lone voice of dissent against the Fed's continued policy of full-bore inflation and easy money.
  
  Hoenig, president of the Kansas City Fed, was also probably the only high ranking Fed official who ever expressed doubts about the true state of the economy back in 2007. While Hoenig was doubting, Bernanke and company were still touting the 'fundamentally sound' American economy.
  
  I'm not trying to make Hoenig out to be some kind of hero or sage, but Hoenig's lone dissent helps to highlight just how divorced from reality most of the Fed's leadership is. As a central banker, Hoenig is part of the problem, but a tight money policy is certainly better than a loose money policy in an age in which there is so little capital accumulation and in which the market-rate of interest would undoubtedly be many times the artificial Fed-set rate."
• Eleven Principles of Financial Reform - "The corruption of the socio-political system runs deep, and is embedded in the national consciousness as a reflexive set of slogans (the big lies) that substitute for practical thought and effective policy formation. The examples of thinkspeak are numerous. People become parrots for their favorite corporate news/opinion channel, to which they become emotionally addicted, because otherwise, reality is too painful and complex to face. And so they are blinded and cut off from productive and even civil discourse, trapped within deep wells of subjectivity.
  . . .
  What will it take? It took the Japanese about twenty years of economic privation to finally get rid of the LDP political party that had ruled the country since the Second World War. It may take ten years of stagflation and economic hardship for the American people to wake up and put an end to the crony capitalism that has captured its two party political system. A good start would be to continue to defeat incumbents from both parties, and to start electing viable third party candidates."
• Health Reform Moves to the States: The Case of Minnesota - "The apparent collapse of health reform in Washington has shifted attention back to the question of what (if anything) states can do to control prices, improve the delivery system, and/or expand coverage at time when revenues are collapsing.
  
  Over the course of the next few weeks, Governing will take a look at several alternatives being proposed. We'll start today by highlighting the ideas of Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty."

A scene from Mr. Hulot's Holiday

• Mamma Mia! - "Q. When did you begin to plan your wedding?
  
  A. Well, actually, I didn’t plan my wedding; my mother did.
  
  Q. Did you participate in your mother’s planning of your wedding?
  
  A. No. My family is Italian.
  
  Q. When did your mother begin to plan your wedding?
  
  Q. When I was born."
• Let's move away from TV, computer and video games for healthier future - "So I'm somewhat hurt that Mrs. Obama didn't ask me before she announced her initiative.
  
  I would have told her, 'You're a soccer mom -- have you ever seen an obese soccer player?'
  
  But rather than focus on physical activity, the 'Let's Move!' initiative focuses on top-down bureaucratic programs stressing nutrition."
• A lethal business model targets Middle America - "Sugar cane farmers from a tiny Mexican county use savvy marketing and low prices to push black-tar heroin in the United States."
• Wheat Ridge High School Class of 1970 - "The reonion committee is working away planning the 40th reunion the weekend of August 13-15, 2010. Wheat Ridge, Colorado WRHS1970.com"
• Common Market Food Co-op - "Common Market Food Co-op was a 'new wave food co-op' located at 1329 California Street in Denver, Colorado, from 1975 - 1980. It started as a buying club at the University of Denver in the late 1960s, and for a few years prior to moving to the old Safeway at 13th and California Streets, Common Market operated out of a small storefront on Champa Street."
• Hammer Time: Happy Returns - "Does retail always give you the best return when it comes to cars? The reflexive answer is ‘yes’. But the real answer is ‘It depends’. I’ve seen cars bought at dealer auctions that don’t have a chance in a felon’s hell of reclaiming their outrageous price. This week there was a Barney inspired purple 1998 Dodge Caravan with 118k that sold for $3000. That one will have to be financed to a hardcore Prince fan with a brood. A little while back I also saw this Farley inspired van go for $5800. That one is still at the dealer’s lot begging for monetary penance. Of course, these two extreme examples are somewhere between a lightning strike and a snow flurry in Atlanta. So what’s the norm?
  
  If we’re looking at ‘cash purchases’ for new cars, the public with rare exception pays the premium. Sometimes dealers will buy the new fashionable car at a stiff premium at a dealer auction to get more traffic into their place. Otherwise, the public pays it all… and it’s really not much of one in most cases. Most vehicles sell somewhere between a 1% to 10% premium in the retail markets. But even then the dealers often have to factor out the pigs that simply sit, and it’s not always cut and dry. The popular brands offer a few lackluster models and sometimes an errant option package or two. The declining ones offer the most porkish of pointless plentitude and have a net negative return in the end. In a recessionary market almost everyone has headaches and migraines. But the general public with finance companies in tow offer all the medicine needed to treat it."
• The Tasters "Weren't Entirely Happy." - "From a logical point of view, it's impossible to understand why food nerds have such a hard time believing that Wal-Mart could bring excellent food to the masses. The Wal-Mart model can and does work for a wide spectrum of goods. Organic mixed greens are not so very different from sweaters or shotguns or Popsicles or toilet paper as far as Wal-mart is concerned. But food scold Michael Pollan (among others) has so demonized the company that an article in The Atlantic noting that Wal-Mart sells rather nice veg reads like a revelation.
  . . .
  The taste testers preferred the Wal-Mart veggies overwhelmingly, with complaints about the meat and dairy."
• Is glycemic index irrelevant? - "There are several fundamental flaws with the notion that low-glycemic index foods are good for you:
  . . .
  2) Foods like whole wheat pasta have a low glycemic index because the blood sugar effect over the usual 90 minutes is increased to a lesser degree. The problem is that it remains increased for an extended period of up to several hours. In other words, the blood sugar-increasing effect of pasta, even whole grain, is long and sustained.
  . . .
  Don’t be falsely reassured by foods because they are billed as 'low-glycemic index.' View low-glycemic index foods as indulgences, something you might have once in a while, since a slice of whole grain bread is really not that different from a icing-covered cupcake."
• What's the Easiest Way to Share Large Files and Media with Friends? - "For this writer and tech enthusiast's money, the easiest and best way to share large files of any kind with your friends and family is to simply install Opera Unite, walk through a couple of quick configuration screens, and then send them the URL and password to access your content from any browser."
• The Night They Burned Ranum's Papers - "At about 2:30 a.m. on May 22, 1968, as New York City police entered Hamilton Hall, on Columbia University's Morningside Heights campus, to clear it of demonstrators, files belonging to Orest A. Ranum, an associate professor of history, were ransacked, and papers documenting more than 10 years of research were burned. The fire came at the tail end of a month of protests that had roiled Columbia, paralyzing the university and provoking the biggest police bust ever undertaken on an American campus. Members of Students for a Democratic Society, which led the protests, denied responsibility for the arson, claiming that if anyone had set fire to Ranum's papers, it was the police.
  
  Now a key participant in the Columbia rebellion has made a startling confession. Mark Rudd, who was chairman of the SDS chapter during the disturbances, acknowledges that a fellow radical, John "J.J." Jacobs, set the fire in Hamilton Hall, and that he, Rudd, went along with the plan. The confession, a depressing postscript to the 1960s, solves a four-decade-long mystery. It offers a grim testament to just how mean things got at Columbia, and a sobering reminder that not all student radicals were starry-eyed idealists. In more than a couple of cases, they were power-hungry extremists jostling for control of the student-protest movement. And Ranum had the audacity to get in their way."
• Skype Over 3G Now Ringing on Verizon Wireless - "AT&T might be hesitant to allow Skype calls over 3G on the iPhone, but Verizon Wireless is making a statement about its network -- today, the carrier announced Skype voice support over 3G on various handsets. The BlackBerry Storm 9530, Storm2 9550, Curve 8330, Curve 8530, 8830 World Edition and Tour 9630 smartphones are all supported starting next month. Even the recently popular Android phones like the Droid, Droid Eris and newly announced Devour will gain mobile Skype capabilities on Verizon’s EVDO network."

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February 18, 2010 07:57 AM   Link    Comments (0)

Assorted Links 2/15/10

Tyler Cowen, Marginal Revolution and Tyler Cowen's Ethnic Dining Guide




Apparently This Is What Economics Does To People…

• Strategies for Working with Congress: Effective Communication and Advocacy on Capitol Hill, February 18, 2010
• The President's Budget, February 23, 2010
• The Defense Budget, February 26, 2010
• Capitol Hill Workshop, March 3-5, 2010
• Speechwriting: Preparing Speeches and Oral Presentations, March 12, 2010
• Sidewalk Accountability and Parking Property Rights - "Through the Mid-Atlantic, rules regarding sidewalk shoveling vary from the mere expectation of courtesy to fines up to $100 for homeowners and business owners who do not do the right thing. While these municipal rules vary in how well they encourage citizens to maintain sidewalks, this issue might be better dealt with at a neighborhood rather than a city level.
  . . .
  In another snow-related economic conundrum, vehicle owners struggle to protect their rights to parking spaces that they have laboriously shoveled. In Boston, drivers can legally save their cleaned spots with lawn chairs or cones, but no such official rule exists in DC. However, an unscientific Washington Post poll found that 76% of respondents favored the right to reserve parking spots, effectively suggesting that the effort of shoveling is worth a guarantee of property rights."
• How many people die from lack of health insurance? - "I agree with her conclusion:
  
  'Intuitively, I feel as if there should be some effect. But if the results are this messy, I would guess that the effect is not very big.'"
• How Insurers Reject You: BlueCross BlueShield of Texas' blueprint for denying health policies. - "The people who most urgently need Congress to pass health care reform belong to a different group. They're the 9 percent of Americans who purchase health care for themselves or their families in the so-called 'nongroup market,' which is where most of the horror stories you've heard about health insurance tend to occur. On second thought, that's not quite right. The people who most urgently need health reform are those who aspire to join the 9 percent, but can't, either because no nongroup insurer will take them or because any nongroup insurer that will take them has priced its policy sky-high to offset some medical risk or another. Neither wealthy enough to pay for nongroup insurance nor poor enough to qualify for Medicaid, these spurned customers end up among the 15 percent of Americans who receive no health insurance at all. Should you lose your job and fail to find another, expect to purchase nongroup insurance or, worse, not purchase it. Together, these two groups represent one-quarter of the population."
• Bipolar or TDD? Asperger’s or autism spectrum? - "Asperger’s Syndrome and autism could become “autism spectrum disorders,” a change opposed by many Asperger’s advocates."
• TARP Panel: Small Banks Are Facing Loan Woes - "Nearly 3,000 small U.S. banks could be forced to dramatically curtail their lending because of losses on commercial real-estate loans, a congressional inquiry concluded.
  
  The findings, set to be released Thursday by the Congressional Oversight Panel as part of its scrutiny of the Troubled Asset Relief Program, point to yet another obstacle for the slow-moving economic recovery. The small banks being threatened by loans they made for shopping centers, offices, hotels and apartments represent a major cog in the U.S. credit system, especially to entrepreneurs."
• Unofficial Problem Bank List at 605 - "This is an unofficial list of Problem Banks compiled only from public sources."
• Why the House Democrats are about 100 votes short - "So you, as a Democratic member with potentially serious opposition, do the political caucus. If you vote for the Senate bill, you’re voting for something that has 35% support nationwide and probably a little less than that in your district. You will have voted for the Cornhusker Hustle and the Louisiana Purchase. Your Republican opponent will ask why you voted for something that gave taxpayers in Nebraska and Louisiana better treatment than the people you represent (there are no Democratic House members running for reelection in those two states: Nebraska has only Republican House members and the single Louisiana House Democrat is running for the Senate). The only protection you have against this is the assurance that the Senate parliamentarian and scared incumbent senators will come through for you, and that Harry Reid will pursue a steady course.
  
  So your response to the leadership is either, I gotta think about this, or, Hell no. The House Democratic leadership’s problem is that it cannot credibly promise that the Senate will keep its part of the bargain."
• Virginia: Pretty Darn Satisfied - "As it happens, Gallup has just produced a 'well-being' ranking for the 50 U.S. states (though using a different methodology). What I find interesting is that most Americans are satisfied with the quality of life that their state offers. There is some variation between states, but that variation falls within a relatively narrow range of 82.3% (North Dakota) and 69.0% (Nevada) in terms of percent satisfied.
  
  Virginia falls within the 'high' range of satisfaction and, indeed, is the only state east of the Mississippi River to do so. We are an outlier -- most states with high well being are clustered among the northwestern plains and mountain states. The least satisfied, not surprisingly, are characterized by high unemployment and/or high poverty. Yet Gallup notes that the correlation between economic outlook and satisfaction is far from perfect. Remarkably, even as the recession deepened last year, satisfaction levels improved modestly across much of the country."
• The $555,000 Student-Loan Burden - "But as tuitions rise, many people are borrowing heavily to pay their bills. Some no doubt view it as "good debt," because an education can lead to a higher salary. But in practice, student loans are one of the most toxic debts, requiring extreme consumer caution and, as Dr. Bisutti learned, responsibility.
  
  Unlike other kinds of debt, student loans can be particularly hard to wriggle out of. Homeowners who can't make their mortgage payments can hand over the keys to their house to their lender. Credit-card and even gambling debts can be discharged in bankruptcy. But ditching a student loan is virtually impossible, especially once a collection agency gets involved. Although lenders may trim payments, getting fees or principals waived seldom happens.
  
  Yet many former students are trying. There is an estimated $730 billion in outstanding federal and private student-loan debt, says Mark Kantrowitz of FinAid.org, a Web site that tracks financial-aid issues--and only 40% of that debt is actively being repaid. The rest is in default, or in deferment, which means that payments and interest are halted, or in 'forbearance,' which means payments are halted while interest accrues."
• Just How Ugly Is The Sovereign Default Truth? How Self Delusions Prevent Recognition Of Reality - "Today we finally saw a crack in the 30 Year Auction. And as the crack belongs to an ever more brittle wall holding back trillions in debt just begging to be revalued to fair value, and to an unmanipulated supply and demand curve, more and more fissures in the smooth and fake facade of sovereign debt will soon appear, only this time not somewhere out of sight and out of mind like Greece, but in our own back yard. At that point the financial oligarchy will very much wish the Methadone had been administered sooner (roughly about March 2009, when we first suggested it). It will however be far too late, and the decades of self delusion will finally end."
• Schwarzman Says Kowtow to Banks or They Will Strangle the Economy - "Can someone shut these banking industry narcissists up?
  . . .
  The last thing the public should do now is turn down the heat on bankers. We have just been through the greatest looting of the public purse in history. We cannot relent until we understand how it happened and have put new rules in place to prevent its recurrence."
• How Long Is Long Term? - "It may be heretical, therefore, to note that in an investment sense, 10 years is not an eternity. Yes, as an alternative to the all-too-common focus on one-year returns or other short stretches, a 10-year measure provides welcome perspective. It's apt to cover more than one market cycle and a variety of macroeconomic environments. We here at Morningstar often cite that period for such reasons. But for an individual investor, there are benefits to thinking far beyond a mere decade. How about 30 or 40 years?"
• President Palin? - "Sarah Palin can be a dazzling performer. But she’s still capable of saying that Obama could improve his chances for reelection if he 'played the war card … decided to declare war on Iran.' Her articulation of political ideas remains remarkably thin. The Republican bench may be weak, but I don’t think it’s that weak."
• Scrappers: the financial crisis up close and personal - "Scrappers is an unusual, interesting and engaging film you won't see down at the multiplex.
  . . .
  The film combines affecting portraits of the lives of the two scrappers, an interesting look at how global finance affects ordinary people, and an examination of the role and function of micro-markets and how regulation gets in their way. The movie is also a detailed picture of the south side of Chicago, and has a wonderful original score by Chicago musician Frank Rosaly."
• Intelligent, Respectable Women Across Globe Inexplicably Excited For Figure Skating - "As the 2010 Winter Olympics get underway, the prospect of watching figure skating and ice dancing in all their forms has inspired a surprising amount of giddy exuberance in otherwise levelheaded women worldwide."

What is the Hexayurt?

• Social Cons and the Lure of the Seduction Community - "We are overhearing a breathless conversation between tongue-clucking older women and disaffected young men. It is an orgy of confirmation bias, more vulgar--but perhaps more entertaining--than anything Allen can tell us about the depredations of modern dating."
• You Are More Likely To Read This Story Because Its Headline Contains No Punctuation - "Avoiding personal responsibility used to be clean and simple. Caught red-handed? The devil made you do it. End of story.
  
  But today we have a dizzying array of bogus blaming options. We can choose from rap music, movies, TV, video games, the Internet, Twinkies, genes, society, the neighbor’s kid, our upbringing, the booze talking, atheism, evolution, the definition of 'is,' planets, stars, lunar phases, the ever-vague and passive 'mistakes were made,' the economy, being an only child, not being an only child, and more. Just keeping track can exhaust the most adept excuse-maker. Call me extreme, but some days I wonder if it might be easier simply to say, 'I made a mistake.'
  
  I saved the excuse that accuses my profession for last: 'The advertising made me do it.' If you fed your kids fast food until your spouse mistook them for the minivan, blew the budget on a video game system, or bought trendy clothes you didn’t need and that went out of style as you were paying for them, take heart. You can blame us slick advertising people and our so-called hypnotic work.
  
  Just one problem. No advertisement has the power to make you act against your will.
  . . .
  This is not to say that all advertising is ineffective (though much of it is). The right ads can boost a product’s sales. Conversely, the wrong ads can drive them down. Taco Bell’s experience with its spokes-Chihuahua illustrates both. Prior to introducing the pooch, the chain had enjoyed steady sales. When the Chihuahua came on the scene, his popularity soared, but sales plummeted. When Taco Bell switched to dogless commercials with close-ups of savory ingredients, sales rebounded. (Ironically, by ad industry standards the Chihuahua campaign was 'highly creative,' whereas its successful replacement was woefully lackluster.)
  . . .
  Ads that deceive also deserve mention. To find examples of legal but deceptive advertising practices, you have only to search through ads for alternative medicine, political candidates, diet plans, hearing aids, stock market predictors, multi-level companies, or subliminal self-improvement CDs, to name a few. Many such ads toe the legal line by placing qualifying language in small type that occupies five percent of the ad space, and using the remaining 95 percent to mislead. A five percent weasel does not unmake a lie."
• [Denied Tenure,] Professor Said to Be Charged After 3 Are Killed in Alabama - "Three faculty members at the University of Alabama in Huntsville were shot to death, and three other people were seriously wounded at a biology faculty meeting on Friday afternoon, university officials said.
  
  The Associated Press reported that a biology professor, identified as Amy Bishop, was charged with murder.
  
  According to a faculty member, the professor had applied for tenure, been turned down, and appealed the decision. She learned on Friday that she had been denied once again.
  . . .
  Officials said the dead were all biology professors, G. K. Podila, the department’s chairman; Maria Ragland Davis; and Adriel D. Johnson Sr. Two other biology professors, Luis Rogelio Cruz-Vera and Joseph G. Leahy, as well as a professor’s assistant, Stephanie Monticciolo, are at Huntsville Hospital in conditions ranging from stable to critical." There will be a few openings now.
• Wheat Ridge High School Class of 1970 - "The reonion committee is working away planning the 40th reunion the weekend of August 13-15, 2010. Wheat Ridge, Colorado WRHS1970.com"
• Common Market Food Co-op - "Common Market Food Co-op was a 'new wave food co-op' located at 1329 California Street in Denver, Colorado, from 1975 - 1980. It started as a buying club at the University of Denver in the late 1960s, and for a few years prior to moving to the old Safeway at 13th and California Streets, Common Market operated out of a small storefront on Champa Street."
• How do bar owners get you to drink more? - "They turn the music up:"
• Google Brings the Power of the Pie Chart - "Google's latest release, the Google Chart Tools, will make it easier for sites to show their users data in a meaningful, visual and interactive manner.
  
  These tools are broken down into two parts: image charts and interactive charts. The image charts work off a simple URL structure, defining all of the necessary characteristics through URL parameters. The interactive charts, while still relatively simple compared to custom creation, use a slightly more complicated Javascript library."
• Beautiful Gold, So-So Silver & Shameful Bronze - "But on the bright side, at least we get curling back on American television. Where it belongs."
• Why? - "The complete article discusses these frustrations and the work by DC politicians and bureaucrats to correct the problems, but nowhere does the author ask the simple question, 'Why are DC residents required to obtain a license to lease their property to begin with?'
  . . .
  And I'd be willing to bet a week's salary that there was actually nothing wrong with either the outlets or the smoke detector. As two cops have told me, they can pull over any car and find something that violates some law or code. So much for the rule of law."
• What you should look for in a marriage partner: - "Marriage isn't all fun and games. In the past I've posted about marriage making you poorer, killing sex drive, and making you fat. So if you're gonna do it, do it right. But how do you know who to marry? Should you just trust your feelings or pick the person who 'looks good on paper'? Luckily, science has answers for us:
  . . .
  1) Find someone who you idealize and who idealizes you.
  . . .
  3) Guys, you want to avoid that whole 'involuntarily celibate' situation that men fear after years of marriage? Don't marry a woman who is sexually submissive:
  . . .
  6) What about attractiveness and happiness? Everybody is happier when the wife is better looking than the husband is."
• The Death of Big Law - "Large law firms face unprecedented stress. Many have dissolved, gone bankrupt or significantly downsized in recent years. This paper provides an economic analysis of the forces driving the downsizing of Big Law. It shows that this downsizing reflects a basically precarious business model rather than just a shrinking economy. Because large law firms do not own durable, firm-specific property, a set of strict conditions must exist to bind the firm together. Several pressures have pushed the unraveling of these conditions, including increased global competition and the rise of in-house counsel. The large law firm’s business model therefore requires fundamental restructuring. Combining insights from the theory of the firm, intellectual property, and the economics of legal services, this paper discusses new models that might replace Big Law, how these new models might push through regulatory barriers, and the broader implications of Big Law’s demise for legal education, the creation of law and lawyers’ role in society."

Domino's Turns A Loss In A Lawsuit It Wasn't Involved In Into A TV Commercial




The End, Perhaps, of Hitler Parodies

• Top 10 Google Settings You Should Know About - "As the outcry over Google Buzz's privacy has shown us, it's smart to explore settings in Gmail, along with other places you're sharing data with the search giant. Let's take a look at 10 privacy, convenience, and annoyance fixers you should know."
• Free Speech on Campus: Michael Oren at UC Irvine - "Michael Oren, the Israeli Ambassador to the United States recently gave a speech -- or at least tried to give a speech -- at UC Irvine at the invitation of UCI’s law school and political science department. A group of students at UC Irvine, apparently all members of the Muslim Students Union , decided to try to stop the speech.
  
  The students came up with the following plan. They had been told that if they interrupted the speech, they would be arrested for disturbing a public event, so the students went sequentially, each interrupting the Ambassador once. Each student would stand up in the middle of the speech and start screaming out condemnation, which would trigger the wild applause of many other students in the audience. The student would then walk to the aisle to be arrested and escorted out by campus police. Once the Ambassador started again, the next student would go, resulting in a total of 10 interruptions to the speech and arrests of 11 students, 8 from UC Irvine and 3 from UC Riverside. The video is here:"
• Top 10 YouTube Videos of All Time - "4. Jeff Dunham - Achmed the Dead Terrorist; 104,013,553 views"
• Cyber warfare: don't inflate it, don't underestimate it - "Near-term hotspots and the most vulnerable target
  
  MS: Broadly, what do you see happening within cyber warfare over the next few years?
  
  JC: Africa has a huge population of infected computers. I read one estimate a few months ago that they have about 100 million PCs scattered throughout the continent and maybe 80 percent of those are infected. Once broadband hits Africa, then you've got this huge opportunity for botnets to spring up. These mega botnets could conceivably dwarf Conficker or some of these other huge botnets.
  
  East Africa is another spot to watch. In Somalia, where piracy is lucrative and the area is so lawless, it's such a chaotic environment. There's a growth of religious extremists there as well. So you've got criminals with a huge pile of cash, these pirates, and then you have these radical extremists looking for ways to create havoc. Should their interests coincide, I would fear for very destructive Internet attacks.
  
  MS: Last question: Out of all this, what's the thing that keeps you up at night?
  
  JC: The most worrisome thing to me is the vulnerability of the power grid. I just released a report on this -- it's Project Grey Goose's Report on Critical Infrastructure -- where I and my team of researchers document the problem. The Department of Defense has identified 34 critical assets to conducting its mission. Thirty-one out of the 34 are dependent on the public power grid.
  
  I know in my state of Washington, they tell us that if there's an earthquake or some other natural disaster, you can expect no help for at least seven days. There will be no police response, no 911 response, no National Guard for at least seven days because they'll all be busy protecting critical infrastructures. And so that's what I worry about. The grid is so vulnerable. It would cause a lot of chaos here if somebody were to actually attack it."
• Critical Security Update for Adobe Flash Player - "Adobe Systems Inc. today (Feb. 11, 2010) released an updated version of its Flash Player software to fix two critical security holes in the ubiquitous Web browser plugin. Adobe also issued a security update for its Air software, a central component of several widely-used Web applications, such as Tweetdeck.
  
  The Flash update brings the newest, patched version of Flash to v. 10.0.45.2, and applies to all supported platforms, including Windows, Mac and Linux installations. Visit this link to find out what version of Flash you have. The latest update is available from this link."
• Less Lamp – The Only Lamp That You’re Actually Supposed To Break - "When you unbox the Less Lamp, you’ll find that it’s the absolute worst excuse for a lighting fixture, as it’s basically just a solid black egg. The idea is that you’ll use the included pick to poke holes in it. Heck, you can even break off the bottom portion of the egg to let out more light. As you can imagine, nothing this artsy-sounding ever comes cheap. This particular lamp will set you back $800. That’s right, eight hundred smackeroos for a lamp that you’re going to break immediately."

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February 15, 2010 07:57 AM   Link    Comments (0)

Assorted Links 2/12/10

Steve Meyers: Global Debt Crisis and 2010 Forecast Update

• Strategies for Working with Congress: Effective Communication and Advocacy on Capitol Hill, February 18, 2010
• The President's Budget, February 23, 2010
• The Defense Budget, February 26, 2010
• Capitol Hill Workshop, March 3-5, 2010
• Speechwriting: Preparing Speeches and Oral Presentations, March 12, 2010
• Tyler Cowen on "Haiti: An Outsider's Perspective" - "Come out to the GMU Economics Society lecture with Tyler Cowen on Haiti: An Outsider's Perspective" -- Tuesday, February 16th at 5:30pm in Enterprise 80." GMU Enterprise Center: 4031 University Drive, Fairfax, VA 22030. From the Fairfax Campus: Turn right onto University Drive. Follow University Drive through 1 traffic signal (Fairfax City Hall on left at signal) and past a Fire Station. Make a right onto South Street and then an immediate left into the parking lot. The entrance of the building faces South Street. The Mason Enterprise Center is located on the 2nd Floor.
• Super Bowl Commercials - Best part of the game
• The Life of a "Puppy Bowl" Referee - "As a teenager, Andrew Schechter played lead roles in theater productions of 'Zorba the Greek' and 'A Midsummer's Night Dream.' He thought he'd stay in the theater, but after interning for an entertainment company in Los Angeles in 2005, he became interested in the other side of the stage--producing. Today he works as an associate producer for Animal Planet, a cable television network, helping arrange shoots for various animal-driven shows, such as Dogs 101 and Cats 101. On Feb. 7 he'll put on his acting hat for the third year for one of Animal Planet's most popular shows, working as the referee for 'Puppy Bowl,' two hours of alternative programming before the Super Bowl and featuring 43 playing puppies. He gets a break for kitten halftime."
• Law Professors Aren't Lazy, Law Schools Are Ineffective - "Ms. Furi-Perry does, however, scratch around the periphery of the real and much more serious problem with legal education. It is based on a 'Langdellian' model that has been embraced by the universities that house the law schools. Build a box, get a few academically inclined individuals with law degrees to teach students about the law, and rake in large amounts of tuition with low overhead. No need for the expensive plumbing, equipment, and facilities that must be provided or paid for in conjunction with other graduate programs such as those in the medical arts and sciences.
  
  There is also no need in this model to teach students how to actually function in practice as lawyers, as the model only requires them to study the law and then gives them a certificate acknowledging that they have successfully completed that task.
  
  The success of [being a professor] is measured in very large part by the pound, in terms of the pages and words churned out in law reviews and books that are a 'must publish' each year, not the quality of the student from an employability perspective.
  
  This is in sharp contrast to the medical professions which actually train their students to practice. Law schools and those that are familiar with them have come to this realization and the current trend is now toward 'practice ready' graduates and 'outcome based' assessments. This will require universities to put some money back into the cash cows they call law schools, as it requires resources to be added to the development of oral and written skills courses and practice clinics that are made a part of the academic curriculum. Many law schools are already beginning to make strides in that regard and I suspect more and more will in the future."
• The Big Lie About the 'Life of the Mind' - "A year ago, I wrote a column called 'Graduate School in the Humanities: Just Don't Go,' advising students that grad school is a bad idea unless they have no need to earn a living for themselves or anyone else, they are rich or connected (or partnered with someone who is), or they are earning a credential for a job they already hold.
  
  In a March 2009 follow-up essay, I removed the category of people who are fortunately partnered because, as many readers wrote in to tell me, graduate school and the 'two-body problem' often breaks up many seemingly stable relationships. You can't assume any partnership will withstand the strains of entry into the academic life.
  
  Those columns won renewed attention last month from multiple Web sites, and have since attracted a lot of mail and online commentary. The responses tended to split into two categories: One said that I was overemphasizing the pragmatic aspects of graduate school at the expense of the 'life of the mind' for its own sake. The other set of responses, and by far the more numerous, were from graduate students and adjuncts asking why no one had told them that their job prospects were so poor and wondering what they should do now.
  
  I detected more than a little sanctimony and denial in most of the comments from the first group and a great deal of pain and disillusionment in the latter. The former seem used to being applauded by authorities; the latter seem to expect to be slapped down for raising questions. That's why they write to me, I believe. They want confirmation that something is wrong with higher education, that they have been lied to, systematically."
• Controversial National Labor Relations Board nominee Craig Becker shot down in Senate - "By a vote of 52 to 33, the Obama administration nominee to the National Labor Relations Board, Craig Becker, just failed to get the 60 votes needed for his nomination to proceed in the Senate.
  
  Yesterday, Sen. Ben Nelson, D-Neb., came out against Becker's nomination. Senate Republicans and grassroots conservatives had been opposing Becker's nomination from the get-go. As a law professor, Becker had written a law review article about how the NLRB could be used to remake labor regulations in favor of unions without congressional approval. More recently, Becker had acted as counsel for the SEIU and AFL-CIO."
• Food Stamps – The Great Recession’s Soup Lines - "A record 38.2 million Americans were enrolled in the food stamp program at latest count, up 246,000 from the previous month and the latest in record-high monthly tallies that began in December 2008."
• The California Financial Gambler’s Fallacy – 5 Reasons Why the Budget and the Economy will Keep Home Prices Stagnant. Banks Paying Property Taxes on Shadow Inventory. - "Buying a home today is a big gamble but that didn’t seem to stop many California buyers from getting in over their heads before and I’m sure it won’t stop many from doing it again. Banks and realtors are more than happy to indulge in your speculation."
• Gary Shilling: Higher Government Pay Will "Likely Lead to a Tax Revolt" - "14.8 million Americans are currently out of work and looking for a job, according to a report released today by the Bureaus of Labor Statistics. Even if you do have a job, wages have not increased substantially over the last ten years, with one exception: government workers.
  
  Thanks to generous health-care benefits and pensions, it pays - more than ever - to work in the public sector. Economist Gary Shilling fears dubious consequences if state and local workers continue to make more money and at the same time governments raise taxes and cut services."
• States Face Big Costs to Dig Out From Blizzard - "State and local governments along the East Coast digging out from a historic blizzard are now trying to figure out how to pay the bills.
  
  Some mid-Atlantic cities were clobbered with as much as 40 inches of snow in the past few days, following storms earlier in the season, and more snow was forecast for Tuesday and Wednesday. The Virginia Department of Transportation estimated it would remove 500,000 tons of snow in northern Virginia--equivalent to about 17,000 miles of road--from just the latest downfall. "
• Reports from the Front Lines of “Snowmageddon” - "In fairness, a jurisdiction that gets massive snowstorms as rarely as DC can’t be as well-prepared for them as a northern city. If it was, that would be a sign that DC authorities have invested too many resources in snowstorm preparation. That said, things are a lot better where I am in northern Virginia. Until the second round of snow began tonight, the main roads were completely cleaned, and I was able to drive out to buy last minute supplies in Arlington and Falls Church with minimum trouble. Our own street (a small side street) was only just barely driveable, but still could be used. Much of the difference between DC and Virginia is probably attributable to DC’s famously incompetent municipal government. I’m very glad that I 'voted with my feet' against them when I first moved to the region."
• Looking for a Leg Up in a Bad Economy - "Many students are choosing trade or training schools over traditional colleges or universities because of the quick turn around from enrollment to graduation (as early as nine months) and the prospect of 'recession proof' careers.
  . . .
  'It cost entirely too much money nowadays to got to four-year colleges,' Mr. Canty said. 'I think a training school is better because you’re not paying for a name, you’re paying for the actual education.'
  
  At a four-year college, he said, 'I think you’re actually paying for the windows and the big school and the size of the classroom.'"
• Order! I Said Order! - "Far be it from finem respice to suggest that a bit of successful impromptu sport with House republicans (not exactly the most dangerous game roaming the great Congressional plains of the Serengeti, after all) on their quasi-vacation might have created a bit of executive overconfidence. In this light, it might also be unkind to suggest that this whole 'question time' thing is highly unlikely to end well for this (or future) executives in the United States. Or that, on top of everything else, the idea as a whole is a quite dangerous and volatile experiment for American politics when taken to its natural conclusion- even if one ignores the patently obvious separation of powers issues it raises.
  . . .
  Several key components to understanding why Prime Minister's Question time works in the United Kingdom (and would likely be a disaster in the United States) require a certain cultural understanding of America's special friends across the pond. A certain naïveté in this area is probably why so many Americans seem so in love with the idea.
  . . .
  What, for example, is one to make of the fact that, in the United States, simply delivering campaign rhetoric, even from the safe remove of broadcast video, that might contain invective even half as caustic as that encountered on a weekly basis during Prime Minister's Question time entails the anguished advice and debate of about $250,000 in political consultant hours on the wisdom of 'going negative?'
  
  It is telling that the State of the Union permits no greater feedback to the First Presenter than cheering and no greater expression of disdain than polite golf-clapping. In this light it is not particularly surprising that Supreme Court Justices are expected to display, for the duration, a narcotic vacancy so complete (even when, as recently, they are directly accosted by the speaker) that even the most modest reaction is cause for scandal. So extensive is the horror evoked by the possibility that the judiciary may be seen to affront the will of the executive through interaction it is no wonder that several Justices simply refuse to attend the proceedings any longer.
  . . .
  When an institution like the executive branch can be seen to doggedly employ arguments asserting separation of powers to avoid even submitting videotaped answers in response to Congressional queries pursuant to a potentially criminal investigation on the grounds that it might damage the privilege of future executives, well, it is hard to imagine weekly, direct questioning and cross examination of even a law professor-grandmaster debate champion by what amounts to a pack of mostly current or former lawyers lasting very long.
  
  Also easily forgotten is the fact that real debate of the non-contrived variety is exceedingly time consuming and labor intensive. Margaret Thatcher regularly spent eight to ten hours preparing for fifteen minutes of weekly Prime Minister's Question time. It is, quite frankly, hard to credit that sort of weekly commitment from the executive branch in the United States, that is, before endless complaints referring to the need to 'get back to the business of governing' begin to issue forth, first from the likes of Robert Gibbs just in front of progressively higher elements of the administration and finally the executive himself."
• A Cult of Oddballs and Misfits? - "For instance, in October 2009, a Gallup poll reported that 44 percent of Americans favor making marijuana legal. The consensus amongst elite policymakers may not match public opinion yet, but it hardly strikes me as a fringe idea."
• Thomas Friedman proposes a new rate of marginal transformation - "By the way, how would we feel if each al Qaeda attack came with 50 new madrassas?
  . . .
  Is the problem lack of school buildings? Is there a recipe for building a modern state and capitalist polity in Yemen? I'm all ears."
• The Galbraith Revival: The aristocratic economist’s big-government ideas are back in vogue. - "There remains, however, an astonishingly gaping absence in Galbraith’s worldview. While he is perfectly able to see the defects of businessmen--their inclination to megalomania, greed, hypocrisy, and special pleading--he is quite unable to see the same traits in government bureaucrats. It is as if he has read, and taken to heart, the work of Sinclair Lewis, but never even skimmed the work of Kafka.
  . . .
  In his 1981 autobiography, A Life in Our Times, he recalls the way academics flocked to Washington at the beginning of the New Deal. 'Word had . . . reached the university that a nearly unlimited number of jobs were open for economists at unbelievably high pay in the federal government,' he writes. 'All the new agencies needed this talent. Students who had been resisting for years the completion of theses and the resulting unemployment now finished them up in weeks. Some did not even stop to do that. So a new gold rush began.' One might think that this would have opened his eyes to the vested interests of bureaucracy--to the possibility that large government programs might operate more for the interest of the apparatchiks than for that of the alleged beneficiaries. But it never did.
  . . .
  There is, of course, a deep psychological tension in Galbraith. He always talks about the rich as though he were not one of them; but the impoverished rarely spend their winters at Gstaad, Switzerland, as he did. He accepts that enrichment can be licit, no doubt thinking primarily of his own; but his enrichment came about by advocating in best-selling books the governmental expropriation of the riches of others. This enabled him to maintain his image of himself as one of the moral elect, one of those generous souls among the rich whom he describes in The Good Society, patrons of the poor--who themselves 'are largely without political voice except as they are supported and represented by the considerable number in the more fortunate brackets who feel and express concern.'
  
  Here we reach the heart of the matter. Galbraith’s thinking about social and economic matters was always de haut en bas; his solutions emerged from the Olympian heights of his own ratiocination, to be applied to the clueless multitudes below.
  . . .
  Galbraith’s egotism and condescension toward most of the human race is evident in his admiration for Franklin D. Roosevelt--or rather, in the grounds for that admiration. Here he is in the preface to Name-Dropping, a singularly uninformative book of reminiscences of the great whom he met: 'I turn now to Franklin Roosevelt, the first and in many ways the greatest of those I encountered over a lifetime. And the one, more than incidentally, who accorded me the most responsibility.' I think you would have to have a pretty tough carapace of self-regard not to recognize the absurdity of this, or to have the gall to commit it to print.
  
  At another point, Galbraith writes that Roosevelt saw the United States 'as a vast estate extended out from his family home at Hyde Park, New York. For this he had responsibility, and particularly for the citizens and workers thereon.' A tree-planting program that Roosevelt initiated in the Plains states, for instance, was 'the reaction of a great landlord, an obvious step to improve appearance and property values, a benign action for the tenantry.' Galbraith meant this as praise, which is not surprising, because his own attitude toward the country was similar. The people were sheep, and government, with Galbraith as advisor, was the shepherd.
  . . .
  The main function of what Galbraith writes is to minimize the horrors of Communism, upon which he has hardly a word. Indeed, strict political control never intrudes much on his consciousness when he is in the Communist world. 'I have generally avoided quoting by name my Polish . . . sources in this account,' he writes. 'This is not because I have any great fear of compromising them. Many people . . . take no small pride in speaking plainly and do so without evident restraint.'
  
  Other priceless observations follow. Noticing the drabness with which people are dressed, Galbraith remarks that it 'may be the problem of socialism. Planners can provide for everything but color, and they cannot allow for that because so much of it is associated with idiocy great and small. In any case, the people of Poland have more liberty than variety.' One of the great advantages of Galbraith-style planning is the elimination of 'idiocy great and small,' of the kind that people are apt to embrace when they have the choice. The solution: eliminate choice. You can have any color you like, so long as it’s chosen by the philosopher-king."

Attn, DC Reasonoids: Conquer Snowpacalypse 2 Tonight With Former New Mexico Gov. Gary Johnson at Reason's DC HQ

• UC Berkeley has "Nobel Laureate Only" parking spaces - "When I was at UT Austin, a school which is famously car-unfriendly, it was rumored that one of the elder patriarchs of the College of Natural Sciences--a man who had multiple doctoral degrees and had been given countless awards for his work both as a scientific researcher and an educational administrator--had once quipped that the honor that was most valuable to him, on a daily basis, was the "O" parking permit that let him leave his car literally in the shadow of UT's iconic tower."
• Phase Change Material Could Cool Houses - "MIT's Technology Review reports on paraffin wax capsules could use the cold of evening to cool rooms in the day."
• The New Dating Game: Back to the New Paleolithic Age. - "The whole point of the sexual and feminist revolutions was to obliterate the sexual double standard that supposedly stood in the way of ultimate female freedom. The twin revolutions obliterated much more, but the double standard has reemerged in a harsher, crueler form: wreaking havoc on beta men and on beta women, too, who, as the declining marriage rate indicates, have trouble finding and securing long-term mates in a supply-saturated short-term sexual marketplace. Gorgeous alpha women fare fine--for a few years until the younger competition comes of age. But no woman, alpha or beta, seems able to escape the atavistic preference of men both alpha and beta for ladylike and virginal wives (the Darwinist explanation is that those traits are predictors of marital fidelity, assuring men that the offspring that their spouses bear are theirs, too). And every aspect of New Paleolithic mating culture discourages the sexual restraint once imposed on both sexes that constituted a firm foundation for both family life and civilization."
• Wheat Ridge High School Class of 1970 - "The reonion committee is working away planning the 40th reunion the weekend of August 13-15, 2010. Wheat Ridge, Colorado WRHS1970.com"
• Common Market Food Co-op - "Common Market Food Co-op was a 'new wave food co-op' located at 1329 California Street in Denver, Colorado, from 1975 - 1980. It started as a buying club at the University of Denver in the late 1960s, and for a few years prior to moving to the old Safeway at 13th and California Streets, Common Market operated out of a small storefront on Champa Street."
• When did Nigerian scammers take over the Home Depot? - "Mrs. Angus sends email to Home Depot asking if we can return it at a local store or if we have to mail it back. Next day, we get a response from their "customer care" department:
  . . .
  Now there are a lot of funny things here. 'Inconvenience'? 'further assistance'? cannot exchange 'the entire product'?"
• John Locke in Washington - "If you dig your car out from its frozen tomb, do you then own that parking spot until the sun melts open the rest of the curbside space?"
• Who’s Afraid Of Electric Power Steering? - "Here’s a challenge: try to find a review of the Toyota Corolla that doesn’t bemoan its numb steering. Now try with a Chevy Cobalt. Or a Venza, or Vibe, Or Rav4, or Equinox. What do these vehicles have in common? Column-mounted electric power steering systems from JTEKT, a Toyota spin-off supplier which has done a brisk business in these fun-eliminating steering systems. And though the motor press has been bashing electric power assist steering (EPAS or EPS) for its deleterious effect on handling, the explosive growth in these systems may put more at risk than mere enthusiast-approved steering feel.
  
  This anesthetization of steering systems has not taken place because manufacturers appreciate the proliferation of words like 'numb' and 'overboosted' in reviews of their products. EPS offers improved efficiency due to its reduction of parasitic losses, and is cheaper to manufacture than traditional hydraulic systems. This killer combination offers manufacturers a combination of improvements that have proven near-impossible to resist, resulting in the broad proliferation of EPS systems. And if reduced steering feel were the only casualty of the switch, it would be a tradeoff that any manufacturer would be willing to run.
  
  But as EPS has exploded onto the market, a number of troubling issues has plagued the system. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has opened investigations into the Chevy Cobalt and Toyota Corolla, which share the column-mounted JTEKT EPS system. Cobalt, which moved to an EPS system for the 2005 model year has been haunted by an accelerating number of failures since the switch, while the Corolla investigation centers on Corollas built since the 2009 model-year switch to EPS."
• Tyranny Unmasked - "A government, like an individual is embarrassed or ruined, by expenses beyond its income. It cannot export its patronage, its exclusive privileges, and its extravagance, to foreign nations, and bring back foreign cargoes of frugality and equal laws for home consumption.
  . . .
  It is, in fact by too much proficiency in the art of political spinning and weaving, and not by too little patronage of capitalists, that our prosperity has been lost.
  . . .
  The richest treasury in Europe was at that time united with the most miserable people, instead of being an indication of their happiness and prosperity. The Swiss Cantons are remarkable for the poverty of their treasuries, and the happiness of their people. The severity of their climate and sterility of their soil, are both compensated by the frugality of their governments; and two great natural evils are more than countervailed by one political blessing. If a poor country is made happy by this cardinal political virtue, what would be its effects in a rich one? The Committee are fond of comparisons. Let them compare the situation of Switzerland; a rugged country under a severe climate; with that of their neighbours the French and Italians, favoured with fine soils and genial latitudes. All writers unite in declaring that the happiness of the Swiss far exceeds theirs."

Google Fiber for Communities

• Have You Ever Seen a Lunar Rainbow? - "This is not a rainbow. It's a moonbow, an extremely rare atmospheric phenomenon caused by the near-full moon that it's extremely hard to catch. So hard, in fact, that you can only see its colors thanks to long-exposure photography."
• Don't Friend Me, Bro! I Quit! - "My name is Futurelawyer, and I was addicted to Facebook. Which is why I quit. Family, friends, friends of friends, people who wouldn't be my friends in any other version of reality, and spies who wanted to become my friend to check up on me for some nefarious purpose; I quit. I am no longer yours to toy with."
• A Novel Resin to Treat Early Cavities - "DMG America, a dental technology company out of Englewood, N.J., is selling a light cured infiltrant resin that is useful for treating early cavities. At the very early stage of tooth decay, before a formal, treatable cavity has developed, fluoride treatment is often used as prophylaxis. But after a certain level of tooth decay, fluoride will be of no use, yet drilling the tooth to treat the cavity is not merited either, since filling a cavity with this method destroys healthy tooth tissue, and it is uncertain whether the decay will continue to a point that requires treatment."
• Pants Pockets: Decorative or Functional? - "Alas, I've always believed that pockets were made for stuffin'. For example, my right-rear pocket is for my wallet. (I used to put a card-carrier in the left-rear one, but with great effort abandoned that practice and thinned down my plastic so that they fit in the wallet.) The left front pocket is for car keys and ChapStick, the right front for coins, and both might hold a Kleenex or two."
• Feature Not a Bug - "I find it pretty hilarious that folks on the left suddenly feel the US is ungovernable, largely because they have not been able to pass a couple of complicated and risky legislative initiatives. Was the US ungovernable when Bush couldn’t pass Social Security reform? It seems that showing leadership on a national scale with diverse interests is a tad harder than running a grad school policy round-table. Oddly, the left seems befuddled by actual diversity of opinion, rather than the faux diversity with lock-stepped beliefs they built in academia and among themselves."
• How good is good? - From the comments: "I read once that a prude is a good woman in the worst sense of the word."
• Beware the pitfalls of renting rooms to head off foreclosure - "In fact, Kilgore says, those looking for a mortgage loan modification may actually be encouraged to go this route because such modifications usually require the homeowner to demonstrate some type of increased income in order to qualify for the modification. Renting out rooms is a quick way to do this.
  
  But, she points out, anyone thinking of becoming a landlord in their own homes needs to go into such a venture with eyes wide open. There are many potential pitfalls.
  
  For example, Kilgore says a leaky roof may be a mere inconvenience for you and your family, remedied with a bucket or two strategically placed. But if it happens to be leaking over the heads of your new tenants, local laws may mandate that you repair the roof, which can be costly."
• Anything But Studying - "The latest snapshot of how University of California students spend their time suggests sleep and socializing were far more important than classes and studying to the average undergraduate there. But that was two years ago, before institutions and families plunged into economic turmoil, and things may have changed.
  
  In a survey conducted on all nine of the university’s undergraduate campuses in the spring of 2008 and completed by 63,600 students, students on average reported getting six-and-a-half hours of sleep each night and spending 41 hours a week on social and leisure activities. Meanwhile, students said they spent a little more than 28 hours each week combined on class and homework.
  . . .
  Students spent on average 7.6 hours a week working a job, 6.1 hours on co-curricular activities and 1.8 hours on religious or spiritual activities. Higher tuition and greater financial pressures within families may force students to take on more hours of work.
  . . .
  In average weekly study time, the difference between a 3.60 GPA and a 2.79 or lower GPA is only about an hour a week, with high-GPA students averaging about 13 hours a week of studying while students with GPAs of 2.79 or lower reported studying for a little less than 12 hours each week.
  
  But high joblessness rates, coupled with rising tuition and the potential that students will graduate with greater debt burdens, could lead students to spend more time focused on their studies, Brint said. 'Because it’s costing more and because there’s so much uncertainty out there about whether you can get a job and what kind of job it is, it could cause people to redouble their efforts in the classroom.'"

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February 12, 2010 08:37 AM   Link    Comments (0)

Assorted Links 2/9/10

Some Excerpts from Comedy Session at AEA Annual Meeting

• Strategies for Working with Congress: Effective Communication and Advocacy on Capitol Hill, February 18, 2010
• The President's Budget, February 23, 2010
• The Defense Budget, February 26, 2010
• Capitol Hill Workshop, March 3-5, 2010
• Speechwriting: Preparing Speeches and Oral Presentations, March 12, 2010
• Boston cops arrest people who videotape their actions - "They’re invoking laws against wiretapping, which you might naively think were passed to protect the people from the authorities, not vice versa, [Boston Globe/Daniel Rowinski, New England Center for Investigative Reporting; Radley Balko, Reason "Hit and Run"] Now lawyer Simon Glik, who was arrested for recording an arrest, is suing three cops and the city ."
• Super Bowl 44 - "Most will spend three hours or more watching flickering television images to catch 11 minutes of actual playing, during which they will learn what I will learn in one second the next day: who won."

Pen spinning gets competitive in Hong Kong

• Revisiting the Marriage Supermarket - "Imagine, says Tim, a marriage supermarket. In this supermarket any man and woman who pair up get $100 to split between them. Suppose 20 men and 20 women show up at the supermarket, it's pretty clear that all the men and women will pair up and split the $100 gain about equally, $50,$50. Now imagine that the sex ratio changes to 19 men and 20 women. Surprisingly, a tiny change in the ratio has a big effect on the outcome.
  
  Imagine that 19 men and women have paired up splitting the gains $50:$50 but leaving one woman with neither a spouse nor any gain. Being rational this unmatched woman is unlikely to accede to being left with nothing and will instead muscle in on an existing pairing offering the man say a $60:$40 split. The man being rational will accept but this still leaves one women unpaired and she will now counter-offer $70:$30. And so it goes."
• “Heart Attack restaurant owner sues Heart Stoppers owner over theme” - "Two US restaurants are battling in court over who originated the medical disaster theme of serving food unhealthy enough to put diners in hospital."
• Wheat Ridge High School Class of 1970 - "The reonion committee is working away planning the 40th reunion the weekend of August 13-15, 2010. Wheat Ridge, Colorado WRHS1970.com"
• Common Market Food Co-op - "Common Market Food Co-op was a 'new wave food co-op' located at 1329 California Street in Denver, Colorado, from 1975 - 1980. It started as a buying club at the University of Denver in the late 1960s, and for a few years prior to moving to the old Safeway at 13th and California Streets, Common Market operated out of a small storefront on Champa Street."

What if famous filmmakers directed the Super Bowl?

• Photosynthesis uses quantum interactions to harvest light - "A new experimental setup using photosynthetic proteins shows that, when they are stimulated with light, they interact on a quantum level: their states are dependent on one another, which allows them to transmit energy efficiently.
  
  Photosynthesis relies on proteins that absorb light, which excites their electrons, giving them enough energy to move within or even exit the molecule. This excitation energy is transmitted between molecules to a reaction center, where it is harvested for use by the organism. Until recently, scientists thought that the energy was transferred according to classical laws because of the size and complexity of the proteins, but this new research shows that quantum interactions are at work."
• Ford Shelby GT500: Too Much Is Just Enough - "This baby’s got 550 horsepower and 510 foot-pounds of torque. With those kinds of figures, it’s easy to see just what a monster of a car the GT500 should be at the track or on the strip.
  
  That’s a 10 horsepower boost over the previous model. It comes from an all-new 5.4-liter supercharged aluminum engine that is 102 pounds lighter than the previous cast-iron plant and uses Ford’s patented plasma-coating technology. That cuts friction and shaves another 8.5 pounds from the block because the cylinders don’t need cast iron liners. Sweet! Not only that, but the new mill offers better fuel economy than the outgoing GT500, returning a claimed 23 mpg highway and 15 city. Yeah, yeah… that’s nothing great. But we’re talking about a hardcore muscle car here, and it is good enough to eliminate the gas guzzler tax. The boost in fuel economy comes from, among other things, lower weight and electric power assist steering."

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February 9, 2010 09:57 AM   Link    Comments (0)

Assorted Links 2/7/10

Robert C. Byrd Center for Rural Health

Has Carly Fiorina jumped the shark -- or the sheep?

Mike Gravel 2008

• Congress in a Nutshell: Understanding Congress, February 10, 2010
• Congressional Dynamics and the Legislative Process, February 11, 2010
• Strategies for Working with Congress: Effective Communication and Advocacy on Capitol Hill, February 18, 2010
• The President's Budget, February 23, 2010
• The Defense Budget, February 26, 2010
• Capitol Hill Workshop, March 3-5, 2010
• Speechwriting: Preparing Speeches and Oral Presentations, March 12, 2010
• Natural Gas – We Got it Half Right - "Our energy situation broadly cleaves into two main functions – natural gas, and electricity. Natural gas is used for industry, heating homes and powering stoves, and is taking a greater portion of the electrical generation load. Electricity also overlaps with gas when it comes to home heating and cooling, and is obviously a large component for industrial uses. However, the natural gas and electricity energy industries in the United States have moved in profoundly different directions over the last few decades. The purpose of this post is to describe where we are, as a country, with regards to natural gas. In short -- we got it half right.
  
  Natural gas has three main components, broadly speaking – 1) exploration / extraction 2) transportation 3) distribution. In general, natural gas is lightly regulated for exploration / extraction, has general principles for transportation (open access) and is pretty heavily regulated for distribution (local monopolies). "
• LPS: Mortgage Delinquencies Reach 10% - "More foreclosures and short sales coming!"
• Moody's: Deficits Jeopardize U.S. Government's Aaa Bond Rating - "In other words, the Federal government is moving in the wrong direction on fiscal, tax and economic policy, which is beginning to erode what was once a rock-solid trust in its creditworthiness on the part of the capital markets. And these guys have been pretty tolerant of the patterns of Federal fiscal irresponsibility we've seen in recent decades—so you know it's getting really bad when the markets quietly start sounding the alarm.
  
  To that point, Arizona Republic columnist Bob Robb is right in pointing out today that the latest Obama budget effectively sets a new--and much higher--baseline for federal spending, with no draw-down in sight even after the economy recovers."
• War on AIDS Hangs in Balance as U.S. Curbs Help for Africa - "Seven years after the U.S. launched its widely hailed program to fight AIDS in the developing world, the battle is reaching a critical turning point. The growth in U.S. funding, which underwrites nearly half the world's AIDS relief, has slowed dramatically. At the same time, the number of people requiring treatment has skyrocketed.
  . . .
  The most immediate concern is getting enough lifesaving drugs to all those who need them. Under the Bush administration, the President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, or Pepfar, set aggressive goals for getting people with HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, into drug therapy, eventually enrolling some 2.4 million by the end of last year. The Obama administration, which plans to expand international AIDS treatment to at least 4 million by 2013, nevertheless has signaled nearly flat budgets through fiscal 2011. Critics are questioning whether the reduced spending pace means the administration doesn't plan to use the full $48 billion authorized by Congress by 2013."
• Are law schools pulling a “Plato’s Cave?” - "From kindergarten’s opening minutes forward, it’s beyond axiomatic that 'college is a must' and 'education is the answer.' One’s own VIP ticket, a backstage pass to a concert called success. Early indeed it begins. Before Junior is through soiling his diapers, he’s likely endured a flickering barrage of phonics-building DVDs, cognitive-theory coaches, and other fashionable accessories of the preschool-pimp parasites to whom his parents earnestly fell victim. It’s beyond endemic.
  . . .
  On the subject of cost, let’s further break down the tuition digits for a laughing-stock 'school' like Seton Hall. You’re looking at $44,000 a year; $22,000 a semester. There are roughly 14 weeks in a semester with about 15 hours of class a week. Do the math. You’re paying roughly $104 an hour, or $1.73 a minute at sticker price. A long-distance call to your uncle in Madagascar is probably cheaper.
  . . .
  The JD carnival’s opening act is invariably the 'successful alumni' spiel. These masters of illusion make David Copperfield seem a mere piker. Like Plato’s parable, the lemmings march lock-step into an auditorium’s dimmed cave and intently watch these 'shadows' grab the podium and commence their smoke n’ mirrors act. Without fail, these shadow grad shills are valedictorian and/or Top 1% types, the hand-picked winners of the TTT lottery. Maybe the ABA brochures should adopt a new sweepstakes-esque catchphrase, such as 'all it takes is Access Group and a dream' or 'hey, you never know?' Why not? As Big Debt readers know, one’s chances of success in today’s glutted legal industry is as likely as a winning Powerball ticket.
  . . .
  Kids, seriously, if you are currently enrolled at Seton Hall, Brooklyn, ‘Bozo, NYLS or any other also-ran private school, take a good, hard look at first semester grades. Realize that you can bail out now and save yourself a lifetime of crushing, impoverished misery. You’re on board the Titanic and the iceberg has been hit, but lifeboats remain. Board them now. Don’t go down with the ship and hope you’ll find some flotsam or jetsam to grab hold of in the drying cesspool of the legal job market. There is no 'market' to speak of, just hordes of heavily indebted losers cold-sending resumes into craigslist’s barren ghetto. Your leverage via a vis salary is pathetic, like trying to budge a boulder with a chopstick. Jobs paying south of 40 (and even 30) K a year are getting bombarded with hundreds of resumes in the infamous 'white-out' phenomenon described in our Shingle Hanger post last month.
  . . .
  Today’s kids have- we posit- no excuse. They’ve heard the blogosphere’s bad news and thus proceed at their peril. Most make the law-school decision mindlessly as moths flying into a porchlight (and encountering a similar result). Yet onward the lemmings flutter, munching popcorn in Plato’s cave as the charade proceeds. At pre-law websites like Top Law Schools, the children find their prospects forever bullish, naïve as toddlers awaiting Santa’s chimney-slide. They’re in for an empty stocking and a face-full of soot. Better burn that lump of coal Santa leaves you for heat, since that’s the only 'gift' you’re getting from today’s legal industry, kids."
• School Crisis In Nevada; Governor Seeks To Cancel Collective Bargaining With Schools Because The State Is Broke - "Nevada has an $881 million budget deficit and drastic cuts are on the horizon for education. Governor Gibbons is investigating options of canceling collective bargaining agreements with school districts. Unfortunately that maneuver is likely illegal.
  . . .
  Budget crises in nearly every state are the defining problem right now, yet none of the other bloggers are talking about it. I am swamped with material and struggling to keep up."
• State Pensions, from Scott Brooks - "The pension problem in this country is a time bomb that is set to go and will likely either cripple the nation or be one of the final straws that breaks our back. Remember, pensions are backed up by the PBGC.."
• It's a Scam! - "Contrary to what our cowardly commenter claims, however, a physician group cannot 'comply' with the messenger model. The whole thing is a scam. Since the messenger model is basically the FTC's imaginary friend, only the FTC knows what it looks like. So even if a physician group spends thousands of dollars on antitrust counsel -- in many cases, an ex-FTC lawyer -- who tells them exactly how to 'comply' with the messenger model, the FTC will just turn around and say, 'No, that's not what we meant!'
  
  Keep this in mind. There's been at least 40 or 50 FTC cases brought against physician groups for violating the messenger model policy. This encompasses something like 15,000 physicians. Is it really plausible that all of them didn't know how to comply with the rule? Or is it more likely that the FTC adopted the messenger model as a way of ratcheting up the demand for antitrust lawyers? Call me a skeptic, but I'm going with option B."
• The Quiet Energy Revolution - "Two monumental shifts in the world of energy are underway right now: one technological, the other financial. They will change the way we power our lives (especially our cars), provide a real measure of energy security, and help curb greenhouse gas emissions. Neither shift has anything to do with the turn to a green renewable energy economy promised by President Obama. Physics ensures that will never happen, no matter how much wishful thinking (and government subsidy) is applied. Sorry, greens, carbon-based energy will continue to dominate our energy future, not windmills or solar panels.
  
  The first profound shift was made possible by a little-noticed technological breakthrough in the last three years that has changed the way we extract natural gas. Engineers now make use of two important innovations. One is horizontal, or directional, drilling, which permits wells to move laterally beneath the surface instead of going straight down. This technology minimizes the number of holes that have to be drilled, leaving a smaller surface footprint and accessing a larger area. The other technology is hydraulic fracturing, used to extract gas trapped in porous shale rock. In this process, also known as fracking, water and chemicals are pumped at tremendous pressure into shale rock formations to push gas into pockets for easier recovery.
  
  By marrying and perfecting the two processes into a technology called horizontal fracking, engineering has virtually created, from nothing, new natural gas resources, previously regarded as inaccessibly locked in useless shale deposits. Suddenly, the mammoth shale formations in Texas, Pennsylvania, Ohio, New York, North Dakota, and elsewhere have the potential to produce abundant amounts of gas for decades to come."
• Your Neighbor is being foreclosed on but you don’t know it. 3 Identical Homes on the Same Street Telling us a Very Different Story Each. Real Homes of Genius -- A $630,000 Foreclosure in Cerritos has a Neighboring Home Renting for $2,150. Or You Can Buy a Similar Home Today for $549,000. - "The rental is identical in size to the other two homes. A 3 bedrooms and 1.75 bath home listed at 1,100 square feet. This is an excellent example of what is going on because we have virtually three identical homes all in the same block but telling us very different stories. You would have to be out of your mind to pay the current price. You would be buying at a peak low in mortgage rates in an area that can clearly only support a rental income of $2,150. Think about that. No investor in their right mind would pay this amount. And rates will go up. Just look what happened to the markets today once people realize a country can’t pay their debt (hello California!). If you bought this home as an investor, you would be negative cash flowing by over $1,000 per month depending on your down payment. That would be a dumb move right off the bat and keep in mind, for investment properties the interest rate is much higher and you have to go in with at least 20 percent down. This is why I believe we are far from a bottom in many markets that are filled with shadow inventory. And let us run those numbers."
• Sunlight memo to Congress: Here's how to do earmark disclosure - "President Obama's remarks during last State of the Union address included an admonition to Congress to change the way it discloses earmarks, by putting all of the information about every earmark on one web site that is easily accessible to the public.
  
  That was good advice and there is no practical or philosophical reason why Congress should delay doing that as soon as possible. But Congress being Congress, additional 'encouragement' will almost certainly be required.
  
  To that end, the Sunlight Foundation, a Washington non-profit devoted to increasing transparency and accountability in government, is circulating a useful How-to that should be required reading for every Member of Congress:"
• Grading Agencies’ High-Value Data Sets - "I wrote here a few weeks ago about the 'high-value data sets' -- three per agency -- that the federal government would soon be releasing at Data.gov. They were released on January 22nd, and we’ve been poring over them ever since. More on that below.
  
  Tomorrow, agencies are supposed to have their 'open government' sites put up -- sites where they make their data feeds available and easily findable for the public. There are a couple of different sites monitoring when those sites are going up.
  . . .
  With the help of Cato interns Solomon Stein and Sasha Davydenko, I assigned three points to each feed that had to do with management, deliberation, or results. The resulting numerical scores — 9, 6, 3, or 0 — translate into grades: A, B, C, or D respectively. F was reserved for agencies that didn’t produce feeds."
• Two Letters Re: Lessons Learned from the Oklahoma Ice Storm of 2010 - "The Oklahoma Ice Storm of 2010 is now melting away and as usual there were lessons learned. Many of these should have been 'known' before but we are never as prepared as we should be. In that vein I am going to rehash several things that went right, a few that went wrong, and others that we can improve on the next time that 'life as usual' is not."
• Weisberg: God Bless America? No, God Damn America! - "[Slate editor-in-chief Jacob] Weisberg is not just wrong in his parsing of American disenchantment. He's wrong to think it's a tragedy. Increasing numbers of Americans in the vast lands to be found outside the D.C. Beltway (join us, Jacob, the water's fine!) understand that government delivers far too little at far too high a price. (Libertarians would take that realization much further, but we are banned from Weisberg's empire of the mind.) Skepticism about authority, expectation of better performance, and a determination to get more for your dollar are not problems that need to be solved. They're bedrock American ideals."
• Gerard Alexander On the Condescending Attitude of the Democratic Party - "A day in hell for me would be spent having to listen to a debate between Michael Moore (or Paul Krugman) and Ann Coulter (or Bill O'Reilly)."

Ray Hudson, GolTV: "like a Jedi knight"




Ray Hudson, GolTV: "Stop talking about tennis players and stupid Hollywood hackers!"

Hudson described the goal to me this way. “It was an overhead kick, at an angle, just into the corner of the box, and I called it, if I remember correctly, ‘A Bernini sculpture of a goal, that rivals the Ecstasy of St. Teresa.’ Now, there are probably two people around the United States tuning in who had even heard of Bernini. But for me, it was that good. And in my opinion, instances like that need to be compared to something monumental, to something of an exquisiteness completely unique. And that sculpture came immediately to mind.” He went on: “[During the replays] there was this one wonderful shot of the defender who had been the closest to Ronny, who had just seen this goal, and he was simply stupefied. I described him like Lot’s wife, turning to salt. And then the next second the camera cut away to this little blonde boy in the stands, this little cherub in a Barcelona shirt, and he started smiling. I remember saying, ‘His big bright eyes have just grown the size of saucer plates. He’s never seen anything like this in his life, and he never will again.’"

• The Magisterial Goal - "[Soccer announcer Ray] Hudson made his career first as a soccer player--for Newcastle United in England, and later for various teams in the defunct North American Soccer League. But he is best known for announcing the modern game for GolTV. Commentary for a soccer match, more so than in any other sport, is like the musical accompaniment to ballet. Therefore as a broadcaster, Hudson is comparable to the conductor of an orchestra playing in the pit beneath a stage of dancers; he adds context and emotion to the drama. No wonder, then, that he often likens footballers to beautiful women. 'I’m telling you man,' Hudson once said of FC Barcelona’s seventeen-year-old striker, Bojan Krkic, 'this kid could be the best thing on two legs since Sophia Loren.'
  
  Unlike most American sports, soccer is a fluid game, with frequent changes of possession and few clear, numeric statistics to evaluate. Soccer is improvisational, whereas American football is regimented. In football, plays are designed then executed, to greater or lesser success. In soccer, players practice formations and then improvise within a spontaneous framework. Therefore soccer, whose action is as constant as light, requires a reactive, jazz-like call."
• Student Protest Forces Yuba College Board To Rescind Chancellor's Raise; Tuition Soars Everywhere - "Inquiring minds are asking 'Why is tuition soaring?'
  
  One of the answers is can be found in the first article: School boards are stacked with greedy pigs voting to give administrators $30,000 raises in spite of everything going on in the economy.
  
  However, the big reason is student loan guarantees.
  
  When government guarantees student loans, there is every incentive for the greedy school boards to give themselves and all the administrators big fat raises on top of their already bloated pensions.
  
  It should be no surprise to find that is what they have done year in and year out. To pay for it, they have to jack up tuition every year."
• Save Cash, Buy a Clunker - "Just when you thought that America’s supply of cheap cars fell victim to Cash for Clunkers, a new website specializing in heaps costing less than $1,000 showcases prime examples of automotive detritus -- some of which are still capable of highway travel.
  
  Cars for a Grand is the brainchild of online entrepreneurs Chris Hedgecock and Jorge Gonzalez, the same guys behind Zero Paid. The site allows for individual users to post cars for sale, and scours eBay and classified ads for the best buckets of bolts. To promote the site, the founders bought a 1974 Pontiac LeMans for $900 and drove it across the country last summer."
• Wheat Ridge High School Class of 1970 - "The reonion committee is working away planning the 40th reunion the weekend of August 13-15, 2010. Wheat Ridge, Colorado WRHS1970.com"
• Common Market Food Co-op - "Common Market Food Co-op was a 'new wave food co-op' located at 1329 California Street in Denver, Colorado, from 1975 - 1980. It started as a buying club at the University of Denver in the late 1960s, and for a few years prior to moving to the old Safeway at 13th and California Streets, Common Market operated out of a small storefront on Champa Street."
• Tough Guy Challenge 2010 - "The 24th annual Tough Guy Challenge took place last weekend, on Sunday, January 31st, on South Perton Farm, near Wolverhampton, England. Despite being billed as 'the safest most dangerous taste of physical and mental endurance pain in the world', this year's race still attracted over 5,000 men and women - all of them signing a disclaimer saying 'It's my own bloody fault for being here'. About 600 racers did not complete the course this year - the winner being Paul Jones of Oswestry, England, completing the course in one hour 18 minutes. The Challenge is annual event to raise cash for charity with funds going to the Mr. Mouse Farm for Unfortunates. Special thanks today to photographer Mike King, who was kind enough to share 16 of his great photographs of the 2010 Tough Guy Challenge below. (31 photos total)"
• Flight 1549 - time lapse of recovery of crippled Airbus A320 aircraft - impressive salvage job
• Comcast CEO Argues Rules Will Protect Customers In Merger, While Comcast Lawyers Argue Rules Are Unconstitutional - "I have to say that I'm not particularly concerned about Comcast and NBC merging. I'm all for it. If two companies that poorly run are getting together, it's pretty much guaranteed to be a disaster. We've seen this game before, and it was called AOL-Time Warner. While it's difficult to think that anyone could screw up that badly again, if anyone can, it's the folks at NBC Universal."

"In The Loop"

• It's the phenome and not the genome: put your money on mortal flesh - "But the fact remains that for most of us, the genotype is much less relevant than the phenotype. What is phenotype? It is the things we can see, the outward or observable physical or biochemical characteristics and they are determined by both your genetic makeup and environmental influences. Your blond hair, your weight, your strange nose, green eyes and that funky shaped little toe of yours --all examples of phenotype.
  
  So what do I mean when I say phenotype is more relevant than genotype? Well, let's say a new patient, a male, walks into my office and he is in his fifties. Let's say he happens to have the outline of a pack of cigarettes showing in his front pocket. As a male he already has one risk factor for coronary artery disease--just being male, alas. The cigarettes tell me that he is four times more likely to have a heart attack than his peers who don't smoke. His risk of sudden death is at least doubled. Let's say I notice he happens to be carrying more than 30 pounds of extra poundage above the belt line: that allows me to predict he has a higher chance of being at risk for diabetes, if he is not already frankly diabetic. Let's say that I notice too the pale outline of a recently-removed wedding ring (I can't help it, my eyes are always looking at the body as text--even when I am out of the hospital), then I know that his risk of death as a recently divorced man can be double that of his married peers."
• The People's Historian? Howard Zinn was a master of agitprop, not history - "Eggers is right about that. I'm sorry to sound a discordant note about this 'great' man (The Guardian), this historian and activist of 'limitless depth' (RT, who ceded hours of its coverage to the 'American mahatma'). But while Zinn might have been an effective activist and a man of great modesty, he was an exceptionally bad historian.
  
  It's a mystery how A People's History of the United States, which has sold over a million copies and currently sits at number fourteen on the Amazon bestseller list, has become so popular with students, Hollywood types, and academics. It is a book of no original research and no original ideas; a tedious aggregation of American crimes (both real and imagined) and deliberate elisions of inconvenient facts and historical events.
  
  Much of the criticism of Zinn has come from dissenters on the left. Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. once remarked that 'I don't take him very seriously. He's a polemicist, not a historian.' Last year, the liberal historian Sean Wilentz referred to the 'balefully influential works of Howard Zinn.' Reviewing A People's History in The American Scholar, Harvard University professor Oscar Handlin denounced 'the deranged quality of his fairy tale, in which the incidents are made to fit the legend, no matter how intractable the evidence of American history.' Socialist historian Michael Kazin judged Zinn's most famous work 'bad history, albeit gilded with virtuous intentions.'
  
  Just how poor is Zinn's history? After hearing of his death, I opened one of his books to a random page (Failure to Quit, p. 118) and was informed that there was 'no evidence' that Muammar Qaddafi's Libya was behind the 1986 bombing of La Belle Discotheque in Berlin. Whatever one thinks of the Reagan administration's response, it is flat wrong, bordering on dishonest, to argue that the plot wasn't masterminded in Tripoli.
  . . .
  But it is clear that those who have praised his work do so because they appreciate his conclusions, while ignoring his shoddy methodology."
• Is the iPad the New Edsel? - "In the parlance of the wise Dr. McCracken, Apple sorely needs a Chief Culture Officer. The iPad is a technological marvel, and surely goes about delivering on user needs like nobody's business, but just as we mortal men are not mere economic units, so must a device aspire to be a complete emotional experience. What pains me here is that Apple is the leader in this arena, the ace purveyor of seamless, compelling experiences. I can only assume they had no intention of becoming the New Edsel, so how did we get here?"
• Free-Range Kids and the Economic Way of Thinking - "I just finished reading Lenore Skenazy's Free-Range Kids (subtitle: 'Giving Our Children the Freedom We Had Without Going Nuts with Worry') and I cannot recommend it highly enough. Her basic argument is that many parents have totally misjudged the real dangers to their children and have chosen to focus on the most unlikely of danger scenarios, with the result that kids are more or less bubble-wrapped through childhood and adolescence, and do not learn self-reliance and how to navigate the world, and are not resilient in the face of failure.
  . . .
  I am not willing to argue causality about this next point, but I do think it says something about the zeitgeist that many parents are cushioning their kids from failure at the same time we've entered the world of the Permanent Bailouts."
• Jon Stewart Destroys, Disembowels, Mauls, Hammers, Rips, Slams & B***** Slaps Bloggers - "I didn't know that I did that."
• Supply and Demand - "The sex ratio on many U.S. campuses is around 60/40 and rising. The NYTimes has an excellent piece on the predictable consequences for dating."
• kululua Airline’s Rebranding Is Like Aviation 101 - "[South Africa’s kulula airline's] recent rebranding will leave every passenger with a basic knowledge of aviation and aircraft." (4 photos)
• Bus Saturday Finale: Scenicruiser Design Inspiration Discovered - "The Greyhound Scenicruiser was iconic, and set off a rash of imitators world-wide. Based on a design of Raymond Loewy supposedly inspired on an earlier patent by Roland E. Gegoux, it was hailed as a stylistic and practical breakthrough. But it was anything but new or original, as this 1937 Kenworth bus illustrates quite well. It was used in the north west for a number of years."
• My Austin WiMAX Experience Was Good, But Not Good Enough - "I spent the last few weeks roaming around Austin with a dual-mode WiMAX modem from Sprint in order to see how well it works here. The verdict: It’s not strong enough to be a wireline replacement, but if I didn’t have a contract to fulfill on Verizon I’d ditch my MiFi and pick up the Overdrive 4G/3G personal hotspot and use that as my primary data connection."

. . . . . . . . .

February 7, 2010 10:37 AM   Link    Comments (0)

Assorted Links 2/3/10

Avatar Review: Part 1

Part 2

• Congress in a Nutshell: Understanding Congress, February 10, 2010
• Congressional Dynamics and the Legislative Process, February 11, 2010
• Strategies for Working with Congress: Effective Communication and Advocacy on Capitol Hill, February 18, 2010
• The President's Budget, February 23, 2010
• The Defense Budget, February 26, 2010
• Capitol Hill Workshop, March 3-5, 2010
• Speechwriting: Preparing Speeches and Oral Presentations, March 12, 2010
• TARP Inspector General: Government Programs "risk re-inflating bubble" - "We've been discussing this for some time, and there is a good chance that house prices will fall further as the government support is withdrawn since house prices appear too high based on price-to-income and price-to-rent ratios."
• The First Year of Obama's Failed Economic Policies: The Worst May Yet Be Avoided - "In response to the next leg down, Bernanke will monetize debt at an even more furious and clever pace, perhaps in alliance with the Bank of England and Bank of Japan. The ECB resists, and all who balk will be chastised by the monied powers and their demimonde, the ratings agencies and global banks. This is modern warfare of a sort.
  
  We do not expect the corruption of the world's reserves to be so blatant that the inflation will immediately appear, except in more subtle manner. At some point it may explode, especially if Ben is particularly good at concealing its subtle growth."
• Roubini Sees ‘Dismal’ Growth as Summers Rues ‘Human Recession’ - "'The headline number will look large and big, but actually when you dissect it, it’s very dismal and poor,' Roubini said in a Jan. 30 Bloomberg Television interview following a U.S. Commerce Department report that showed economic expansion of 5.7 percent in the fourth quarter. 'I think we are in trouble.'
  
  Roubini said more than half of the growth was related to a replenishing of depleted inventories and that consumption was reliant on monetary and fiscal stimulus. As these forces ebb, the rate will slow to 1.5 percent in the second half of 2010."
• At work, part II - "Although the global economic downturn no longer appears to be heading off a cliff, signs of stability or recovery are still sporadic and tenuous. As news stories look for signs of of the direction of economic indicators, photographs fill the wires of people working from all over. Once more, I've collected some of these disparate photos over the past couple of months, composing another global portrait we humans at work around the world. (45 photos total)"
• Name that Blip Redux - "Even though I'm more skeptical of Tiebout competition than almost any economist I know, I still think that without federal subsidies, tax competition between states and localities would have kept their governments a lot smaller than the ones we see today. And I still can't figure out whether the current spending spike is a blip, or just a return to long-run trend."
• Ethics Expert on Global Warming... - "Mike Treder, Managing Director at the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technology, notes that ALL those who disagree with him that Global Warming is going to kill billions unless we invest more in wind farms are either stupid or evil. One would think such a manichean understanding of a complex system would only be found in rural bars were everyone has a chain attached to their wallet."
• Real Homes of Genius -- Culver City Home selling for $744,500 but Neighbor Home is Renting for $2,250. The Rent versus Buy Analysis and 40 Years of Mortgage Data. - "How do you know if a home is priced at a right level? We have various metrics that we can use including common sense which seems to run in short supply. That is how we spotted the epic California housing bubble years ago while the real estate denial cheerleading crew thought that prices would simply continue to go up. In these mid-tier markets underlying incomes do not support current prices. It really is that simple. What is happening in these markets is this; homes are building up in the shadow inventory since fewer homes are actually selling but defaults are still rising as many Californians are unable to make their payments.
  . . .
  You can see the home we’ve been talking about highlighted above in red with the $744,500 listing price. I’ve circled the other home on the same street that is currently a rental in this market. The rental listing has the place at 2 bedrooms and 2 baths. Only a few houses away and 1 bedroom less. What is the monthly rental price? $2,250. You can rent two of these places for the price of the mortgage on the other place!
  
  This is the kind of metrics that scream housing bubble. And keep in mind rental prices are more sensitive to monthly data because you are paying this amount out of your net income. No tax breaks, toxic mortgages, or any other gimmick. One simple rule when evaluating real estate is trying to figure out a home price based on rental income. One I use is the following:"
• Complaint: Amazon.com should charge tax for sales in Va. - "When Amazon.com sells a book for $10 or a television set for $1,200 to Virginia consumers, the retailer charges no sales tax.
  
  Amazon.com Inc., based in Seattle, operates a fulfillment center and a data center in Virginia. According to federal and Virginia law, a company with a physical presence or 'nexus' in the state must collect sales tax on purchases there, even if the business has headquarters outside the state."
• The Other Side of the Coin - "Marriage is a monopoly in that my wife and I have both forsworn allowing others to compete with us to supply the other with love services. (That is 'love' services, not just sexual services.) I don't have to come home to see a line of men vying to provide my wife attention and gentleness and offer to take her to dinner and the ballet. Neither does she have to deal with a line of women vying to do the same for me (except the ballet part). Like any good monopoly then, you can expect to receive a lower quality product at a higher price."
• *The Cleanest Race* - "This is a very interesting book about the ideologies behind North Korea. The author is B.R. Myers and the subtitle is How North Koreans See Themselves -- and Why it Matters. Excerpt:
  . . .
  I also recommend the new book Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea, by Barbara Demick. Excerpt:"
• A Nation of Racist Dwarfs - "Here are the two most shattering facts about North Korea. First, when viewed by satellite photography at night, it is an area of unrelieved darkness. Barely a scintilla of light is visible even in the capital city. (See this famous photograph.) Second, a North Korean is on average six inches shorter than a South Korean. You may care to imagine how much surplus value has been wrung out of such a slave, and for how long, in order to feed and sustain the militarized crime family that completely owns both the country and its people.
  
  But this is what proves Myers right. Unlike previous racist dictatorships, the North Korean one has actually succeeded in producing a sort of new species. Starving and stunted dwarves, living in the dark, kept in perpetual ignorance and fear, brainwashed into the hatred of others, regimented and coerced and inculcated with a death cult: This horror show is in our future, and is so ghastly that our own darling leaders dare not face it and can only peep through their fingers at what is coming."
• U.S. Judge Grants Political Asylum to German Homeschoolers - "For one German family, it turns out that the U.S. - despite our own draconian education regulations - has served as a place for asylum. Last week, a judge granted this family this status as a means of protecting their essential human rights. 'Homeschoolers are a particular social group that the German government is trying to suppress,' said Immigration Judge Lawrence O, Burman. 'This family has a well-founded fear of persecution...therefore, they are eligible for asylum...and the court will grant asylum.'"
• “How Do You Fix a Bill that Hasn’t Been Passed Yet?” - "Some House Democrats seem prepared to pass the Senate health care bill if the Senate will use the reconciliation process to amend the health care legislation. Yet there’s a catch. Some House Democrats want the Senate to go first, and as the Plum Line reports, congressional parliamentarians are not quite sure how to do this."
  
  From the comments: "Imagine, one set of politicians refusing to trust another set, from their own party, no less. You’d think they know each other pretty well. I’d say that in this season the voters have come to know them that well, also."
• Teaching remedial writing - "Jack Miller sees a 'wide' but not a 'rich' diversity in his remedial writing students at a Minnesota community college. Though they come from different backgrounds, most 'have little understanding of grammar . . . and see it as a set of arbitrary ‘rules’ concocted by sadistic pedants harboring grudges against the young.'
  . . .
  About 20 percent don’t know how to behave in a classroom, he writes."
• Former lobbyists in senior Obama administration positions - "Although Barack Obama promised lobbyists would not serve in his White House, and issued executive orders restricting former lobbyists, more than 40 ex-lobbyists now populate top jobs in the Obama administration, including three Cabinet secretaries, the Director of Central Intelligence, and many senior White House officials."
• Inside Obama's Hologram (Reason, March 2010) - "The fact is, Obama has presided over the biggest spending increase since World War II after promising a 'net spending cut,' enacted multiple taxes after multiply promising not to, kept deliberations secret after vowing 'unprecedented transparency,' and intruded into private industry to an extent not contemplated since the collapse of communism." (Review of "Inside Obama's Brain" by Sasha Abramsky.).
• Presidential Promises and Pretenses - "The day before President Obama delivered his State of the Union address last week, The New York Times reported that 'aides said he would accept responsibility, though not necessarily blame' for failing to deliver on promises he made during his campaign. If you accept responsibility for something bad, aren’t you accepting blame by definition? Not if you’re Barack Obama, who has a talent for accepting responsibility while minimizing and deflecting it.
  . . .
  The president is even less forthright when it comes to the fiscal responsibility he keeps promising. On Monday he declared, 'We simply cannot continue to spend as if deficits don't have consequences, as if waste doesn’t matter, as if the hard-earned tax money of the American people can be treated like Monopoly money.'
  
  Yet somehow he manages to do so. Obama's much-ballyhooed spending 'freeze' would affect just one-eighth of the budget, would not begin until 2011, and would be accompanied by continued increases in outlays on the president's pet projects.
  . . .
  In his SOTU address, Obama bemoaned 'a deficit of trust--deep and corrosive doubts about how Washington works that have been growing for years.' He blamed the public's 'disappointment' and 'cynicism' on powerful lobbyists, reckless bankers, highly paid CEOs, superficial TV pundits, and mud-slinging politicians. Conspicuously missing from the list: a president who breaks promises while pretending he isn't."

Welcome to North Korea by Peter Tetteroo and Raymond Feddema / Documentary Educational Video

• Clash of the titans - "But if publishers themselves are selling digital versions of their books, and all that's needed to liberate them is a little hacking, the calculus changes. Hacking is fun in a way that proofreading is not. Let us pause here and observe a moment of silence for the death of the idea that book pirates, more literary and therefore more moral than their peers, will somehow prove honorable, stealing from the rich and giving to the poor. To the contrary, the pirate interviewed by the Millions said that he deliberately avoided stealing the works of the most successful authors, because they can afford lawyers. Instead he limits his purloining to the work of less commercial writers, such as John Barth, whom he calls 'someone who no longer sells very well, I imagine.' Such nobility! 'From those who have nothing, even what they have will be taken away.' If electronic reading devices catch on, the threat of piracy to book publishers--and to authors, at all income levels--is very real." ht Marginal Revolution
  
• Bayonets Hit the Mark - "Well, a little Googleing and low and behold it turns out that bunch of maniac Scots from the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders got ambushed by about 100 Mahdi militiamen near Basra, fought it out, and when they ran low on ammunition, fixed bayonets and went to town.
  
  Based on an after-​​action report found at this link, the intimidation factor of the bayonet and the surprise such a charge caused among the enemy used to engagements at a distance were pivotal."
  
• On What Freaking Basis? - "Ooh, how can I overcome my embarrassment? Look, I don’t think I have ever argued that Phoenix Light Rail was run poorly or didn’t have pretty trains. And I don’t know if moving 18,000 round trip riders a day in a metropolitan area of 4.3 million people is a lot or a little (though 0.4% looks small to me, that is probably just my 'pre-web' thinking, whatever the hell that is).
  
  The problem is that it is freaking expensive, so it is a beautiful toy as long as one is not paying for it. Specifically, it’s capital costs are $75,000 per daily round trip rider, and every proposed addition is slated to be worse on this metric (meaning the law of diminishing returns dominates network effects, which is not surprising in this least dense of all American cities).
  
  Already, like in Portland and San Francisco, the inflexibility of servicing this capital cost (it never goes away, even in recessions) is causing the city to give up bus service, the exact effect that caused rail to reduce rather than increase transit’s total share of commuters in that wet dream of all rail planners, Portland. Soon, we will have figures for net operating loss and energy use, but expect them to be disappointing, as they have in every other city (and early returns were that fares were covering less than 25% of operating costs)."
  
• Wheat Ridge High School Class of 1970 - "The reonion committee is working away planning the 40th reunion the weekend of August 13-15, 2010. Wheat Ridge, Colorado WRHS1970.com"
  
• Common Market Food Co-op - "Common Market Food Co-op was a 'new wave food co-op' located at 1329 California Street in Denver, Colorado, from 1975 - 1980. It started as a buying club at the University of Denver in the late 1960s, and for a few years prior to moving to the old Safeway at 13th and California Streets, Common Market operated out of a small storefront on Champa Street."
  
• Love Means Never Having to Say 404 Error - "A New Jersey inventor unveiled a $9,000 sex robot at the Adult Entertainment Expo in Las Vegas earlier this month, and it’s hard to say who should be more concerned: hookers, man’s best friend, or Elvis impersonators. With her silicone boobs and silicon brain, Roxxxy could eventually put them all out of business."
  
• Lentz: Don’t Like The Gas Pedal Fix? Insist On Replacement! - "In an interview with Toyota’s Jim Lentz yesterday evening, NPR asked why Toyota was using a redesigned pedal for new production, but only offering the shim fix to existing customers. Lentz insisted that the repaired pedals would be as good as the redesigned pedal, that the costs of repair and replacement were about the same, and that the main reason Toyota was repairing rather than replacing recalled pedals was the desire to 'get customers back on the road… as quickly as we possibly can.' That’s when NPR went for the jugular."
  
  Hmmm. Back on the road as quickly as we can may not have been the best choice of words....
  
• An Electric Boost for Bicyclists - " One barrier to wider adoption of electric bicycles in the United States and Europe may be the culture of cycling. Bicycle riders have long valued cycling as a sport and a form of exercise, not simply as a utilitarian means of transportation, and many of them look down their noses at electric bikes.
  
  'To the core cyclist, it’s cheating,' said Loren Mooney, editor in chief of Bicycling Magazine. 'Marketers understand this, and it’s why some have put e-bikes in mass retailers like Best Buy, rather than engaging in the uphill battle of trying to sell them in bike shops.'" Sniff, sniff.

Unipartisan PAYGO Lite




New Orleans coroner’s race ad

• Jobs calls Adobe lazy, calls Google on the their “bullshit” - "On the subject of Google, Steve said that their avowed policy of 'Do no Evil' is 'bullshit.' He called the release of the Nexus phone a direct attack on the iPhone, and stated that he won’t let them win.
  
  Google wasn’t the only target of Jobsian ire, Adobe took their lumps on the subject of Flash. Steve called Adobe lazy, and said that while they have the potential to do interesting things, they don’t. He said that the reason Apple doesn’t support Flash is because it’s so buggy, and whenever a Mac crashes it’s most likely because of Flash. Steve also predicted that it won’t be long before everyone leaves Flash behind as the standard moves forward to HTML5. "
• Why not fix doctoral programs in length? - "And instead of a dissertation require one good published article."
• ATM Skimmers, Part II - "According to Doten, the U.S. Secret Service estimates that annual losses from ATM fraud totaled about $1 billion in 2008, or about $350,000 each day. Card skimming, where the fraudster affixes a bogus card reader on top of the real reader, accounts for more than 80 percent of ATM fraud, Doten said."
• My NASA budget - "People, it's exactly 0 dollars and 0 cents. If I was king, getting rid of NASA would be one of the first things I would do. Instead, President O has found room somewhere in his newly announced 3.8 trillion dollar austerity budget to bump NASA's funding up to 19 billion dollars."

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February 3, 2010 09:07 AM   Link    Comments (0)

Assorted Links 1/31/2010

President to Call for Big New Ed. Spending. Here’s a Look at How that’s Worked in the Past
You may be wondering: "What did we get for that huge increase in spending?" The answer is: a lot more public school employees. The next chart adds an extra trend line to the one above: the number of public school employees divided by the number of students enrolled. This ratio of staff to students has gone up by 70 percent since 1970, swelling the ranks of the public school employee unions to about 4.5 million people.

• Congress in a Nutshell: Understanding Congress, February 10, 2010
• Congressional Dynamics and the Legislative Process, February 11, 2010
• Strategies for Working with Congress: Effective Communication and Advocacy on Capitol Hill, February 18, 2010
• The President's Budget, February 23, 2010
• The Defense Budget, February 26, 2010
• Capitol Hill Workshop, March 3-5, 2010
• Speechwriting: Preparing Speeches and Oral Presentations, March 12, 2010
• Obama’s Swipe at High Court Sparks Debate - "There were days when judges stayed out of politics,' said Senate Judiciary Chairman Patrick J. Leahy of Vermont. 'It would be nice to go back to those days.'"
• Why Is Senator Kirk Still Voting on Legislation? - "The main question here is: why is former Senator Kirk still voting on these legislative pieces? According to Senate rules and precedent, Kirk’s term expired last Tuesday upon the election of Scott Brown."
• Haiti: an all-singing, all-dancing, celebrity disaster - "There’s nothing like a disaster in a land populated by black people to bring out the rescue instinct in celebrities. In the two weeks since a 7.0-magnitude earthquake struck Haiti, celebs on both sides of the Atlantic have tweeted, sung, danced, signed cheques and even hand-delivered aid.
  . . .
  Because, just like with past causes célèbres, such as Ethiopia and Darfur, the earthquake in Haiti has quickly become as much about well-to-do Westerners as about catastrophe-struck Caribbeans. It is a news story that allows celebrities and politicians alike to keep a flattering spotlight on themselves (always making sure they wear casual clothes and little makeup, of course)."
• How the Washington Post Covers Education - "Yesterday, the president proposed yet another big increase in federal education spending. The Washington Post quoted 'senior White House officials' as saying that the spending would boost 'the nation’s long-term economic health.'
  
  I sent the story’s authors a blog post laying out the evidence that higher government spending hasn’t raised student achievement, and that if you don’t boost achievement, you don’t accelerate economic growth.
  
  Today, there is an updated version of the original WaPo story. It no longer mentions the stated goal of the spending increase. It doesn’t mention that boosting gov’t spending has failed to raise achievement, and so will fail to help the economy."
• GDP Mirage - The Last Hurrah - "Digging beneath the surface there is nothing to cheer about in the GDP numbers. Moreover, this weakness is in the face of the largest stimulus measures the world has ever seen, not just in the US, but globally. Money supply in China is growing at 30% and housing bubbles are likely to pop in Australia, Canada, and the UK. Problems in Greece, Spain, and Iceland continue to mount.
  
  GDP is a mirage of sand blowing in the wind. So is global growth. It is a mistake to believe government spending can possibly provide a solid foundation for a lasting recovery."
• Massive Homeopathic Overdose Leaves Hundreds of Scientists 0.0000000000000001% Dead - "Scientists in Mourning"
• Paying More, Buying Less - "Excluding the cost of the wars, the 'base' Pentagon budget has also gone up dramatically: 25 percent, or over another Trillion dollars. What we have gotten for that huge increase illuminates the disturbing nature of our decay. The Navy and Air Force are both smaller and equipped with major hardware that is, on average, older than at any point since the end of World War II. The Army and Marine Corps have seen increases to a few combat formations but are only marginally above their post-​​World War II lows. A gargantuan increase in spending has brought forth major decay in two military services and insignificant up-​​ticks in two others.
  
  Where did the added money go? According to the Government Accountability Office almost $300 billion went into mismanagement in the form of cost overruns for hardware. (Expect a new GAO report this spring finding the cost overruns have grown.) Much of the rest of the money for acquisition went into 'successful' hardware programs that were so much more expensive to buy and maintain than what they were replacing that we literally shrunk the force with more money, while simultaneously spending more to support this new equipment at lower operating and training levels."
• Nevermind All Those Opposition Solutions; Obama's Opposition Has No Solutions! - "The second point, though, is that it's more than a little irritating to see Obama speak so well of Ryan's plan and say that it's the sort of thing that deserves 'serious discussion.' Problem is, throughout the health care debate, Obama didn't want to have that discussion. He didn't want to talk about any plans to significantly reduce entitlement spending, or severing the links between insurance and employment.
  
  Indeed, not only did he make almost no effort to incorporate opposition ideas into his legislation, he wasn't willing to recognize the existence of legitimate opposing ideas at all. Instead, he chose to caricature his opponents as having "no solutions." That's not true now. It wasn't true then. But Obama's approach to most policy and political debates has been to reiterate the notion that his way was not simply the best way, but the only way--or at least the only legitimate, acceptable, reasonable way. His conversation today with Rep. Ryan, I think, is a tacit admission that that's just not the case."
• Karl Rove’s Spending - "Mr. Rove’s columns are usually very interesting, but I’d like to see him accept at least some of the blame for the exploding size of government during his tenure at the White House."
• By the Way, Free Markets Are Free - "A free economy is one that is -- how to say this? -- free. It is free of cronyism, favoritism, handout-ism, protectionism, or anything else that amounts to using the state as a means of living at the expense of others. If paupers or billionaires need help, they're required to get it without picking the pockets of others."
• Quicker "Non-Judicial" Foreclosures and Evictions Coming to Florida - "The only open question is whether or not this bill would encourage more to walk away. If so, would that necessarily be a bad thing? The quicker bad debts are written off, and the quicker home prices bottom, the better off everyone will be in the long run."
• NPR: To Stay Or Walk Away - "NPR's Alex Blumberg and Chana Joffe-Walt interview Arizona attorney Mary Kinsley. She describes how a couple years ago homeowners would call her, in tears, trying desperately to save their homes from foreclosure.
  
  Now homeowners call, their voices calm, and ask her the best way to strategically default - and in some cases how to get the banks to take back the houses they've been delinquent on for over a year. Pretty amazing. She thinks this is just the beginning of 'walking away'."
• HELOC Study - "One of the largest issues in the mortgage market is that modifications, as presently designed, are not working. It is clear that at some point, it will be necessary to write down principal to raise the modification success rate.
  
  However, one obstacle to writing down principal of a 1st mortgage is the presence of a 2nd mortgage or subordinate lien. Lien priority dictates that the 1st mortgage cannot be written down until the 2nd is extinguished."
• You're an idiot of the 33rd degree - "In November of 1905, an enraged Mark Twain sent this superb letter to J. H. Todd, a patent medicine salesman who had just attempted to sell bogus medicine to the author by way of a letter and leaflet delivered to his home. According to the literature Twain received (p1,p2,p3,p4), the 'medicine' in question - The Elixir of Life - could cure such ailments as meningitis (which had previously killed Twain's daughter in 1896) and diphtheria (which had also killed his 19-month-old son). Twain, himself of ill-health at the time and very recently widowed after his wife suffered heart failure, was understandably furious and dictated the following letter to his secretary, which he then signed.
  
  Transcript follows."
• Folks Who Know Stuff - "Whether it's a general male trait or simply my normal sloth, it seems that most of the guys I meet and socialize with nowadays are husbands of friends of my wife. And of those husbands of my wife's friends, the ones I tend to get along with best and for the longest visits are guys who Know Stuff."
• If Music Be the Food of Love, Maestro Obama, Play On - "40 years later, on the floor of the House, Mr. Obama proved himself heir apparent to the Wizard of Altamont. Coiling, menacing, prowling, our Jumpin' Jack Flash-in-Chief worked the majority side of the hall into a frenzy, like some beautiful petulant electric cobra panther in a Brooks Brothers 3-button suit. And when he unleashed his climactic campaign finance j'accuse at his Republican foes and the assembled Supreme Court, I was fully expecting a House member to beat Justice Alito senseless with a tire iron. Sympathy For the Devil, indeed."

Living Large

• My predictions about the iPad - "The story here is one of new markets, not cannibalization or even competition." See the comments.
• iPad vs EtchASketch - "Which one will get Flash first? And who’s kidding who about ten hours of battery life? Are you going to wait for version 2, the MaxiPad?"
• One paragraph plus a sentence - "The rest of the Salinger obituary, interesting throughout, is here." See the comments.
• What Salinger Read - "Speaking of reading preferences, what were Salinger's?"
• Wheat Ridge High School Class of 1970 - "The reonion committee is working away planning the 40th reunion the weekend of August 13-15, 2010. Wheat Ridge, Colorado WRHS1970.com"
• Common Market Food Co-op - "Common Market Food Co-op was a 'new wave food co-op' located at 1329 California Street in Denver, Colorado, from 1975 - 1980. It started as a buying club at the University of Denver in the late 1960s, and for a few years prior to moving to the old Safeway at 13th and California Streets, Common Market operated out of a small storefront on Champa Street."
• Stephen Fry In America: Fifty States And The Man Who Set Out To See Them All - "In 1831, French politician and thinker Alexis de Tocqueville visited the still growing United States, traveled widely and took copious notes. He assembled those notes in two volumes, published five years apart, titled 'Democracy in America,' that are still studied and quoted today. The title 'Stephen Fry in America' echoes de Tocqueville's classic, but also puts the reader on notice that the ambition here is scaled back. This isn't an attempt to understand America, Mr. Fry says, as much as to experience it. And it's supposed to be as much a window into the author as subject.
  . . .
  This reviewer's favorite bit comes from Mr. Fry's visit to Ukiah, Calif., for the comic cultural contrasts. Mr. Fry is scheduled to fire handguns for the first time. At the police shooting range, Mr. Fry tells the patient sheriff that the town's name is haiku spelled backwards, badly bungles a witticism ('Just as well you aren't called Traf.' 'How's that?' 'Oh never mind.'), and lets the officer instruct him how to fire a Glock pistol. He takes aim, manages to hit the target on his first try, and is instantly though briefly 'transformed from Stephen Tut-Tut, the wise and sensible anti-firearms abolitionist into Stephen Blam-Blam.'
  
  The sheriff then asks him, 'Now that you can handle firearms, how'd you like to take part in a drug bust?' and isn't joking. We see a picture of Mr. Fry with a Kevlar vest strapped to him and scenes from the drug bust as proof of this."
• Weight Watchers - "I’ve known a handful of people who joined Weight Watchers at least once -- all women, by the way. They all lost some weight. And they all gained it back, usually with a few extra pounds as a going-away present.
  
  Given what Weight Watchers believes constitutes a good diet, I’m not surprised. Their entire program is based on the belief that the federal government’s nutrition guidelines are actually based on something resembling science. So Weight Watchers preaches the same guidelines: fat is bad, a bit of protein is okay, and carbohydrates are wonderful.
  
  I never joined Weight Watchers, but before I knew better, I did try living on their low-fat Smart Ones meals (along with Lean Cuisines and other diet meals I could nuke.) By the end of the day, I’d be famished. Eventually I’d give up and then, like most dieters, blame myself for not having any discipline. Now I understand the problem wasn’t a lack of discipline; it was a lack of good nutrition."
• Anti-Vaccine Scientist Acted “Dishonestly and Irresponsibly” - "Claims that childhood MMR vaccines cause autism are unfounded and irresponsible. As Ron Bailey notes, 'study after study has debunked' the claim that MMR vaccines are linked to autism, and there are credible allegations that the study that prompted the initial scare was faked. As the BBC reports, British medical authorities have also concluded that the primary researcher promoting such claims, Andrew Wakefield, acted 'dishonestly and irresponsibly' in conducting and promoting his research."
• For Businesses That Accept Cards, Tips for Cutting Fees - "When it comes to credit-card fees, bigger companies have more clout with issuers than small ones. (See related story, How Merchants Deal with Rising Credit-Card Costs.) But there are ways to minimize costly processing fees, from negotiating to shopping around. Here are eight tips."
• Small-Business Cards Now Carry Sizeable Risk - "Banks can list your company's debt alongside your personal debt--lowering your credit score and loan worthiness."

Obama Decries Divisive Rhetoric, Says Healing Can Happen if Opponents Stop Being Such Effing D-bags

• Guest post: Top Trivia! - "The winning entry came from Andrew J Speirs, with his great Ten Facts About Playing Cards. I have taken the liberty of editing them a bit, but here we go with ten things you probably didn’t know about playing cards……"
• Electronic Flight Bag - "Garmin’s top-of-the-line handheld/bolt-on is the GPSMAP 696 model, with weather, moving maps, approach procedures and terrain avoidance - but it retails for nearly $3000, while the iPad starts at $500.
  
  Which is, oh - wait: A whole lot less.
  
  There’s no technical reason why the iPad - I really hate that name - can’t do all the tasks of an EFB while providing GPS tracking, live weather updates and terrain avoidance. Once you’ve landed on your cross country, you can email home, browse the web, read a book or work on your presentation. Which, just try that with your MX20."
• Apple iPad vs. Amazon Kindle - "I’ll save readers the suspense: I don’t believe that iPad will be a a Kindle-killer. It will capture a noticeable portion of the eReader market but I find it highly unlikely for it to even become #2. Here’s why:"
• Life Without Feminism a sack - " As a matter of fact, in between killing fascists, being an iron worker 40 stories above the streets of Manhattan, and raising a family of four kids, he probably didn’t take two milliseconds to give a rat’s ass about what anyone thought of him.
  
  …And now, in the year 2010, the poor little darlings in the Men’s Movement are all atwitter and feeling faint because a woman might say something mean about them.
  . . .
  For the undescended-testicles-set, though: please, keep worrying about what other people think and telling us about how you’re so opressed by social conventions."
• Antigua: American Woman Murdered in 4th Major Incident in Two Years - "All of these incidents are a reminder that safety cannot be assumed, and precautions should always be taken, especially if in unfamiliar territory."
• The iPad is the iPrius: Your Computer Consumerized - "The iPad is Steve's Minitel terminal.
  
  Just for the heck of it, imagine for a minute that the MacBookPro was locked up like the iPad. The apps that run on the iPhone have been mostly trivial. One person for a few weeks is probably the average effort. Eugene Lin may be willing to build apps on spec and hope for the best after they are submitted, but will Adobe? Imagine when Adobe invests $X millions building Lightroom for a year only to have it rejected because Apple launches Aperture the same week."

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January 31, 2010 11:17 AM   Link    Comments (0)

Assorted Links 1/28/2010

Paying Zero for Public Services

• Update on The 111th Congress, 2010, January 29, 2010
• Congress in a Nutshell: Understanding Congress, February 10, 2010
• Congressional Dynamics and the Legislative Process, February 11, 2010
• Strategies for Working with Congress: Effective Communication and Advocacy on Capitol Hill, February 18, 2010
• The President's Budget, February 23, 2010
• The Defense Budget, February 26, 2010
• Capitol Hill Workshop, March 3-5, 2010
• On the jury, Gene Weingarten didn't believe the D.C. police's eyes - "Last week I was a juror in the trial of a man accused of selling a $10 bag of heroin to an undercover police officer. At the end of the two days of testimony, I concluded that the defendant was guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. I also concluded that he should be acquitted.
  
  In my mind, it came down to a simple, unsettling question: Is it worse to let a drug dealer go free, or to reward the police for lying under oath?"
  
  Police lie? Whoccodanode!
• Capitalist Fools - "ew places in New York are less likely to inspire grand dreams than Stuyvesant Town and Peter Cooper Village, the twin housing projects that sprawl across 80 acres of the Lower East Side. Built by MetLife in the 1940s, the project encompasses block after block of boxy brick apartment buildings and stolid public spaces, entirely barren of inviting corners or eye-catching detail. The critic Lewis Mumford dubbed it 'the architecture of the Police State'; a slightly kinder motto might have been 'What do you expect for $68.50 a month?'
  
  Yet when MetLife spruced up the complex and put it on the market in 2006, real-estate moguls jetted in for the sale. A joint venture put together by Tishman Speyer and BlackRock carried the day through its willingness to, as The New York Times noted, 'pay up--way up--to unlock future profits in the sprawling Manhattan properties.' At $5.4billion, their winning bid made the sale the most expensive real-estate deal of all time.
  
  Three years later, however, those profits were still securely locked inside the property’s 11,232 apartments--many of which remained rent-controlled, despite strenuous efforts to convert them to upscale market-rate rentals. With net income well under projections, the partnership started spending down its reserves. Then, in October 2009, a court ruled that the partnership had improperly decontrolled the rent for thousands of apartments, and would have to return them to their original status. As of this writing, analysts are predicting default in a matter of months unless the partnership’s debt of $4.4billion can be restructured--a shaky prospect, given that the owners may owe tenants of formerly rent-stabilized apartments as much as $200million in rent overcharges and damages. Stuyvesant Town might soon set another record: the biggest real-estate default in history.
  . . .
  Game theorists often speak of the 'winner’s curse': the tendency of auctions to be won by the people who are the most delusionally overoptimistic. It’s an apt description of what seems to have happened. Not just to the Tishman group, but to America.
  . . .
  The best explanation for the calamity that has overtaken us may simply be that cheap money makes us all stupid."
• Robbing Taxpayers to Pay the Bondsman - "While the bail bondsmen’s lobby generally receives little attention, they are using political clout to further their interests at great expense to taxpayers across the country.
  . . .
  However, the program in Broward County, Florida was severely cut back after the bondsmen’s lobby pressured the commissioners to protect their profits:"
• Obama’s Spending Freeze - "Here’s the important point: a very large part of the 2009 spending spike of $699 billion will be sloshing forward into 2010 and later years. (As illustrated by my fancy arrow in the chart). The new CBO budget estimates (Table A-1) show that only 18 percent of authorized stimulus funding will be spent in 2009, with the rest sloshing forward.
  
  Obama is 'freezing' the budget only because he already has a large amount of cash floating around from the stimulus bill that he can spend on all his favorite big government projects in 2010 and beyond. In budget-speak, federal spending measured in 'outlays' will be far from frozen.
  
  Finally, a president’s proposals for discretionary spending beyond the current budget year are meaningless. Obama will be back with a new budget in February 2011, no doubt with a whole new set of assumptions and priorities."
• How Is This Different From Citizens United - "Remember, the Patriot Act was used far more for drug and child porn cases than it ever has been for terrorism -- it is very, very hard to circumscribe new police powers, particularly when police so desperately want to keep and hold those powers."
• Best Line I’ve Heard Today - "I’m at a conference in south Florida with Paul Rubin, a superb scholar of law and economics. Paul just observed that whenever there’s a corporate scandal, it’s typically blamed on an increase in greed, but when there’s a sex scandal, it’s never blamed on an increase in lust."
• S&P500 Sector Trivia - "Have a look at the table of S&P 500 sectors -- the only one that has outperformed in each of the past three decades is health care. No, Medical and pharmacy inflation was not in your imagination."
• US Cattle Herd Drops to 1958 Levels - "Ranchers are culling the herds as corn prices soar and wholesale prices for beef and milk drop."
• It's Really Business As Usual - "What is interesting, if not stunning, about some of the Bacon's Rebellion commentators is that they really see Obama as a kind of Trotsky, when, in fact, he is propped up by exactly the same club of advisers that propped up Clinton and Bush. The truth is that Obama's is non-intrusive and rather limp when it comes to the kind of federal oversight these smart and greedy people really need. Despite the whining from the right, one year into his presidency, there hasn't been one solid and successful step to reign in the financial sector.
  . . .
  The curious thing about Obama is that he seems to be getting economic advice from the same old, same old that advised all presidents, Democrat or Republican, since 1992. Since Obama has close ties to the University of Chicago, one wonders why he hasn't picked up some of the free market magic that evolved from there, Uncle Milton Freidman and all that.
  . . .
  This is one of those rare areas of agreement between liberals and free-market conservatives. The liberals distrust Wall Street, the conservatives distrust government, and both sides have reached the point where they distrust Wall Street AND Washington!"
• Don't Bogart that Hopium - "My reporter's plate is full of stories this week, but the last thing a portly columnist needs is to eat gargantuan portions of so much rich food.
  
  We've got President Barack Obama's big speech Wednesday night, and so the Hopium pipes will be burning brightly in editorial board rooms across the land. Also, a reputed top mobster for the Chicago Outfit faces sentencing in a federal tax evasion case that could become a tsunami. And later this week, a local mayor will be sentenced on corruption charges.
  
  So how about a few small bites instead?"
• The State of the Union Speech - "So in summary, though we are still in bad shape remember George Bush caused that problem. We are fixing things now in little ways, but we’ll soon get to the big ways. We’ll bring the banks to heel, create jobs, give you health care, keep you safe. Don’t you believe those who say differently, because they’re just getting in the way. We have the largest majority in decades. We won. And we are going to stay the course."
• Obama: You liked my speech? Please send money. - "About an hour after the end of his State of the Union address, in which he called for an end to the partisan conflict that has plagued his first year in office, President Obama sent out a political fundraising appeal through his permanent campaign organization, Organizing for America."
• Open Access Publishing Hits the Big Time - "The Econometric Society which publishes Econometrica, one of the top 4 academic journals in Economics has taken under its wing the fledgling journal Theoretical Economics and the first issue under the ES umbrella has just been published. TE has rapidly become among the top specialized journals for economic theory and it stands out in one very important respect. All of its content is and always will be freely available and publicly licensed."
• The Friendliest Place on Earth? - "I recently got a press release that trumpeted, 'Malaysia Ranks 5th Amongst World’s Friendliest Countries.'
  
  The first thing that struck me was how un-American it was to tout being fifth at anything. When was the last time you heard a crowd chanting, “We’re number five! We’re number five!” But ranking fifth among all the countries in the world is pretty good, I’d say. So, go Malaysia!"

Justice Alito's 'You lie' moment?

We Must Amend the Constitution to Help Donna Edwards Stay in Office




Bring Out Your Dead

• Al Gore As God - "Do I detect a mellower side to the Jewish Robot’s latest educational cartoon?"
• Are You an ''Exclusive Scholar''? Just Sign Here - "The New York Times reports today on a new marketing gimmick for colleges seeking to boost applications during this recession-plagued time when every tuition-paying body in a classroom counts: the fast-track application form that allows some high school seniors seeking admission to bypass the usual fees of $50 or so, the tedious filling out of information, and perhaps most significantly, the dreaded college essay.
  
  Taking a lead from credit-card marketers, the express forms, typically packaged in a brightly colored envelope marked 'Exclusive Scholar Applications,' 'Distinctive Candidate Application' or something similar, come already filled in with the student's name and other information (bought from College Board lists) so that all the applicant need do is affix a signature and head for a mailbox.
  . . .
  Fast-track college application forms may or may not be a good idea (although many high school students seem to prefer them, according to the New York Times), and they may or may not be a harbinger of death throes for beleaguered small colleges desperate for tuition payers. Yet the fact that they imply that it's not worth admission officers' time in most cases to bother reading college essays suggests a healthy trend that allows potential college freshmen to be evaluated on the basis of their solid academic achievements--grades and test scores--rather than slick expository packaging largely put together by the adults in their lives."
• Fifty Dangerous Things - "The idea of this thin book is that danger is something kids need to learn to handle by experience. The 50 small experiments in this book can potentially cause a minor injury (although they are unlikely to), but are never really seriously dangerous. In fact most of them aren't dangerous at all, but at least they are fun. There are no special techniques, secret formulas or exclusive knowhow here that everyday knowledge or a quick internet search would not turn up. The activities are the kinds of things kids will sometimes do on their own -- at least in the past."
• Wheat Ridge High School Class of 1970 - "The reonion committee is working away planning the 40th reunion the weekend of August 13-15, 2010. Wheat Ridge, Colorado WRHS1970.com"
• Common Market Food Co-op - "Common Market Food Co-op was a 'new wave food co-op' located at 1329 California Street in Denver, Colorado, from 1975 - 1980. It started as a buying club at the University of Denver in the late 1960s, and for a few years prior to moving to the old Safeway at 13th and California Streets, Common Market operated out of a small storefront on Champa Street."
• Radically improving sales for high priced products with 3 characters and a misspelling - "But over the years, there were two critical techniques I discovered that basically was the difference between success and failure."
• I Don't Know Why - "First of all, I don't understand why Pat Robertson doesn't understand that earthquakes are caused by shifts in plates below the earth, not pacts with the devil. Cracks in the earth's crust, known as "faults", shift. The magnitude of the earthquake is measured by how much they shift and how long it takes for them to resettle. Specifically, the Haiti quake was caused by what is called a "strike split" fault, where the two plates move horizontally. That's the same kind of quake we have here in California on the San Andreas fault.
  
  Duh.
  
  I can't understand how he got the idea that some Haitians actually got together and had a meeting with the devil. Did someone get a picture of that on their Iphone? Was the guy that shot the Rodney King video over at the devil meeting?
  
  The Haitians did get together and do something remarkable, but it wasn't a sit down with the devil. They rose up out of slavery with no help from anyone. Does Pat Robertson imagine that the only way they could have done that was with an arms shipment from Beelzebub? Ye of little faith.
  
  But your question wasn't 'why is Pat Robertson so stupid'? I can tell you that he is not the brightest bulb. Years ago, I saw him introduce a guest. He had clearly never heard of this man and spent the long introduction marveling at the man's list of musical credits in a way that belied the fact that he thought the list to be a fantasy. 'He wrote songs made famous by the Beatles!' ('and yet, I've never heard of him?')
  
  Even I know about Little Richard. He is a very famous person. Now he may have actually had a pact with the devil at some point.
  
  Your question is about why some people don't think Catholics are Christians. Or why they think Catholics are lesser Christians.
  
  I don't know why. Perhaps they are as dumb as rocks, like Pat Robertson. All the Christian kindness in the world won't make someone smarter than they are. Some people just are not bright enough to pound sand, poor things."
• Google Routes Around App Store On The iPhone... Others Can Too - "I was just recently suggesting that the massive focus on 'apps' and 'app stores' may be a red herring, as eventually many of those apps can be built via the web (especially as HTML 5 moves forward), without having to go through any kind of app store approval process."
• Low Carbo Diet Lowers Blood Pressure - "The lead author recommends a low carb diet for those both overweight and with high blood pressure.
  . . .
  The two diets yielded equal weight gains. They also improved blood cholesterol and glucose by about the same amount. But the low carb dieters did better on blood pressure control."

Bugatti Owner Vanity Plate Only Bested By Frame

• On how Google Wave surprisingly changed my life - "There was a time just a few months ago when I did not have google wave. I think of that time with horror - because that epoch was marked with conflicts, total chaos, money was being lost every day, fights were happening between me and my collaborators. Google wave came in, and within a couple of weeks, a heavenly peace had descended on my business."
• The Possibility of the Happy Parasite - "I conclude that 'parasitism' (i.e., living off of the proceeds of a system of state coercion) is compatible with virtue and happiness. All it really takes, I think, is believing sincerely that the system is just and that you’re doing a good thing. As long as you think you’re supporting your life 'neither by robbery nor alms' and not deriving your happiness 'from the injury or the favor of others,' you’re probably fine as long as the system of robbery, alms, injury, and favor is more or less stable, which ours is."
• Headline Magic! News on Great Tits.... - "So, here's the headline: 'Flashier Great Tits Produce Stronger Sperm!' Now, I expect that's right, on the merits."
• Thoughts on the iPad -- Just Push the Buy Button, Says Apple - "Kevin did a good job summarizing the specs of the iPad, which is basically a 9.7-inch iPod Touch. Or an iPhone without the phone call bits.
  . . .
  It’s too early to predict how successful Apple will be selling the iPad. It’s pricier than other solutions, and it may not be an easy sell to non-geeks. That said, Apple is going to make millions off the iPad. Hundreds of millions."
• Recession Snows Tahoe Under - "Today those 'other things' involved driving down to South Lake Tahoe/Stateline to buy a few needed groceries. While there, I checked out the commercial scene.
  
  Two or three years ago, the place was doing well, if appearance was any guide. Now, that same casual yardstick suggests that times are hard. In the 'village' by the big Marriott on the main drag, something like half the retail spaces are vacant.
  . . .
  For what it's worth, what I've been seeing here is the strongest evidence of the recession that I've experienced thus far. On the other hand, I haven't visited Detroit and similar places since before the 2008 crash."

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January 28, 2010 09:37 AM   Link    Comments (0)

Assorted Links 1/26/2010

Che: The Other Side Of An Icon.

• Word Workshop: Writing for Government and Business: Critical Thinking and Writing , January 28, 2010
• Update on The 111th Congress, 2010, January 29, 2010
• Congress in a Nutshell: Understanding Congress, February 10, 2010
• Congressional Dynamics and the Legislative Process, February 11, 2010
• Strategies for Working with Congress: Effective Communication and Advocacy on Capitol Hill, February 18, 2010
• The President's Budget, February 23, 2010
• The Defense Budget, February 26, 2010
• Capitol Hill Workshop, March 3-5, 2010
• Is the Cult of Che Guevara on its Way Out? - "Che Guevara is one of the few communist leaders who still has a broad following in the West. Go to any college campus or hip neighborhood and you’ll see plenty of Che T-shirts, Che posters, and even the occasional Che cell phone message. This is extremely unfortunate, since Che was in fact a brutal mass murderer and terrorist, as I explained in this post. Reason editor Nick Gillespie points this out as well, but also cites evidence suggesting that Che worship may be declining:
  . . .
  Ultimately, the Cult of Che is deplorable less because of what it says about attitudes towards him than because it is the most blatant manifestation of our much broader tendency to ignore or downplay communist crimes."
• U.S. enables Chinese hacking of Google - "Google made headlines when it went public with the fact that Chinese hackers had penetrated some of its services, such as Gmail, in a politically motivated attempt at intelligence gathering. The news here isn't that Chinese hackers engage in these activities or that their attempts are technically sophisticated -- we knew that already -- it's that the U.S. government inadvertently aided the hackers.
  
  In order to comply with government search warrants on user data, Google created a backdoor access system into Gmail accounts. This feature is what the Chinese hackers exploited to gain access."
• Thong-in-cheek advice for Dorothy Brown's campaign - "Despite a recent Tribune poll showing she's fading fast in the race for Cook County Board President, Dorothy Brown could win this election -- and my vote -- if she just follows my plan.
  
  Brown, the Cook County Circuit Court clerk, has already suffered through several cash-related controversies.
  
  There was the Cash for Dorothy's Birthday controversy, in which employees developed the purely voluntary practice of giving her cash gifts on her birthday just because they love her.
  
  And recently, there was the Cash for Jeans issue, in which her workers kicked in cash so they could wear jeans at work. Some good government types who just don't understand Chicago politics thought this was reprehensible, but Brown said it was all about 'boosting morale' and charity.
  . . .
  I would never go out of my way to malign a great program involving county officials accepting cash from their underlings. That's the Chicago Way.
  
  But her morale-boosting initiatives, like Cash for Dorothy's Birthday and Cash for Jeans -- and let's not forget another of her favorites, reported in the Tribune months ago: Dorothy's Cash for Christmas -- have given me an idea that will win her the Feb. 2 primary.
  
  Here's the plan, Dorothy Brown:
  
  Cash for Thongs. "
• Front Running the Fed - "I had a friend from the old neighborhood who was Comptroller of a major casino in Las Vegas in 1970-80s, where I also was married in 1981. Only lasting win from there, ever.
  
  According to this dour son of Italy the way he could spot a problem, besides the more aggressive methods of observation and detection, would be to examine the returns on a table basis. In the short run they will vary, but in the longer term each game will provide a statistical return that rarely deviates from the forecast, unless someone is cheating. We would walk through the casino, and he would point to a table game and say 'at the end of the month, this table will bring in xx percent.'
  
  It was he who introduced me to Bill Friedman's book, Casino Management, which is a useful read if you wish to learn more about that end of the speculative business from the house perspective.
  
  Attached is some information from a reader. I cannot assess its validity, not being in the bond trading business. But it does sound like someone has tapped into the Fed's buying plans to monetize the public debt and is front running those buys, essentially 'stealing' money from the public. Its what they call 'a sure thing.'"
• NASA’s Puffin Is Way Cooler Than a Jetpack - "The engineers at NASA have combined every one of our geeky transportation dreams into a single little vehicle called the Puffin. It takes off like a helicopter and flies like a plane. It can cruise at 140 mph and, with a boost mode, hit about twice that. Oh -- and it’s electric.
  
  If that sounds too good to be true, it is -- for the moment. But give it time. NASA unveiled the concept today at the American Helicopter Society meeting in San Francisco.
  
  The tilt-rotor Puffin has a flight system similar to the V-22 Osprey, but instead of carrying a bunch of Marines and their gear, the Puffin carries one person in the prone position. The rotors are nearly 7.5 feet in diameter and the aircraft has a wingspan just over 13 feet. Thanks to carbon composite construction, the Puffin weighs in at less than 400 pounds including the lithium phosphate batteries."
• Taxpayer-owned General Motors spent $1.48 million on lobbying in fourth quarter - "General Motors, owned mostly by the U.S. taxpayer, spent $1.48 million on lobbying in last year's fourth quarter, a recent lobbying report shows. The failed automaker lobbied for highway funding, climate-change legislation, corporate tax credits, 'R&D Funding for Cellulosic Ethanol and Renewable Fuels, Hydrogen, Fuel Cells, Advanced Batteries,' and many other issues.
  
  The $1.48 million includes the company's in-house lobbying shop, as well as $155,000 spent on four different K Street firms. Here are the outside lobbying firms funded by your tax dollars."
• Scott Brown is More Liberal Than Olympia Snowe, and Now He's Pivotal, Too - "Boris writes, regarding the recent U.S. Senate election (in which moderate Republican Scott Brown narrowly beat liberal Democrat Martha Coakley in usually reliably-Democratic Massachusetts:"
• Money and Speech - "People continue to characterize the Court’s campaign finance decisions as resting on the theory that money is speech. And of course money isn’t speech.
  . . .
  The problem with restrictions on independent spending on campaign speech -- a problem recognized by Justices Brennan and Marshall and not just by today’s conservatives (though Brennan and Marshall would have allowed more such restrictions than today’s conservatives do) -- isn’t that money is speech. It’s that restricting the use of money to speak, like restricting the use of air travel or computers to speak, interferes with people’s ability to speak. One can debate whether this interference is justified. But mocking the pro-constitutional-protection position as resting on the notion that 'money is speech' strikes me as quite mistaken."
• The "spending freeze" - "If you are surprised by this Obama announcement, that is indirect evidence that some of your other policy preferences are incorrect."

The Boom and Bust Rap</font>

• Friday Fun Link: City Too Busy To Hate Is Too Gay For School - "I hate to second guess here, but I lived for many years in New York and San Francisco and spend a lot of time in West Hollywood, and I gotta tell you: The gayest city in America is Washington, DC. It just doesn't show up on these lists because pleasureless, closeted self-hatred is still a done thing in the nation's capital, where even straight romance comes infused with shame, anxiety and paranoia -- and not in a good way. That's why Advise and Consent, even though it was written in the 1950s before homosexuality was even invented, will always be the great DC novel."
• Conan's Exit Interview, and a Ken Burns Special... - "Let's never forget...."
• Homeless Chic - "What does it mean that high fashion is (claiming to be) inspired by the homeless? What is going on when models trying to appear homeless are paraded up and down catwalks and photographed?
  
  We’ve seen it on America’s Next Top Model, we saw it in W, and now we see it at the Milan Fashion week with Vivienne Westwood’s collection.
  
  Models were not only dressed to look homeless. Their clothes were deliberately made to appear dusty and mismatched. Their messy hair and dirty faces were made up to look as if they were covered in frost. Some seemed to have been dressed so as to appear crazy.
  
  They walked, sometimes less than gracefully, a catwalk covered in cardboard boxes. Sometimes they emerged from boxes and pushed shopping carts or carried sleeping bags or bedrolls.
  
  Here’s what it looked like (comments below):" ht Cheap Talk
• Wheat Ridge High School Class of 1970 - "The reonion committee is working away planning the 40th reunion the weekend of August 13-15, 2010. Wheat Ridge, Colorado WRHS1970.com"
• Common Market Food Co-op - "Common Market Food Co-op was a 'new wave food co-op' located at 1329 California Street in Denver, Colorado, from 1975 - 1980. It started as a buying club at the University of Denver in the late 1960s, and for a few years prior to moving to the old Safeway at 13th and California Streets, Common Market operated out of a small storefront on Champa Street."
• Would You Have Spotted the Fraud? - "Pictured below is what’s known as a skimmer, or a device made to be affixed to the mouth of an ATM and secretly swipe credit and debit card information when bank customers slip their cards into the machines to pull out money. Skimmers have been around for years, of course, but thieves are constantly improving them, and the device pictured below is a perfect example of that evolution."

Killer Chic: Hollywood's Sick Love Affair with Che Guevara

• Why You Can Yawn Over Monday’s Home Sales ‘Shock’ - "Memo for Monday morning: Don’t get excited.
  
  The National Association of Realtors is due to release its monthly report on existing home sales at 10 a.m. Monday, and it’s likely to look lousy. (What’s with this 'existing' home sales bit? New homes don’t exist? Let’s call it home resales.) Analysts are predicting a sharp drop from November’s level. The knee-jerk reaction probably will be: Oh, no, the housing market is in free fall again!
  
  In reality, housing stats tend to bounce around erratically from month to month, and one month’s numbers rarely mean much."
• LA Times says: No More Room on the Bench! - "This jobs gap is even more problematic given the rising cost of tuition. In 2008, the median tuition at state schools for nonresidents was $26,000 a year, and $34,000 for private schools -- and much higher in some states, such as California. Students racked up an average loan debt in 2007-08 of $59,000 for students from public law schools and $92,000 for those from private schools, according to the ABA, and a recent Law School Survey of Student Engagement found that nearly one-third of respondents said they would owe about $120,000.
  
  Such debt would be manageable if a world of lucrative jobs awaited the newly minted attorneys, but this is not the case. A recent working paper by Herwig Schlunk of Vanderbilt Law School contends that with the exception of some of those at the best schools, going for a law degree is a bad investment and that most students will be 'unlikely ever to dig themselves out from' under their debt. This problem is exacerbated by the existing law school system.
  
  Despite the tough job market, new schools continue to sprout like weeds. Today there are 200 ABA-accredited law schools in the U.S., with more on the way, as many have been awarded provisional accreditation. In California alone, there are 21 law schools that are either accredited or provisionally accredited, including the new one at UC Irvine."

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January 26, 2010 10:17 AM   Link    Comments (0)

Assorted Links 1/24/2010

If You Prick a Corporation, Does It Not Bleed?

• Word Workshop: Writing for Government and Business: Critical Thinking and Writing , January 28, 2010
• Update on The 111th Congress, 2010, January 29, 2010
• Congress in a Nutshell: Understanding Congress, February 10, 2010
• Congressional Dynamics and the Legislative Process, February 11, 2010
• Strategies for Working with Congress: Effective Communication and Advocacy on Capitol Hill, February 18, 2010
• The President's Budget, February 23, 2010
• The Defense Budget, February 26, 2010
• Capitol Hill Workshop, March 3-5, 2010
• A Victory for Fiscal Sovereignty and Human Rights - "This battle is part of a broader effort by uncompetitive nations to persecute 'tax havens.' Creating a tax cartel for the benefit of greedy politicians in France, Germany, and the United States would be a mistake. An 'OPEC for politicians' would pave the way for higher taxes, as explained here, here, and here.
  
  But this also is a human rights issue. Look at what happened recently in the thugocracy known as Venezuela, where Chavez began a new wave of expropriation. The Venezuelans with money in Cayman, Miami, and Switzerland were safe, but the people with assets inside the country have been ripped off by a criminal government. Or what about people subjected to persecution, such as political dissidents in Russia? Or Jews in North Africa? Or ethnic Chinese in Indonesia? Or homosexuals in Iran? And how about people in places such as Mexico where kidnappings are common and successful people are targeted, often on the basis of information leaked from tax departments. This world needs safe havens, jurisdictions such as Switzerland and the Cayman Islands that offer oppressed people the protection of honest courts, financial privacy, and the rule of law. Heck, even the bureaucrat in charge of the OECD’s anti-tax competition campaign admitted to a British paper that 'tax havens are essential for individuals who live in unstable regimes.' With politicians making America less stable with each passing day, let’s hope this essential freedom is available in the future."
• The Reality of Politics - "Lamenting that Democratic politicians up and down Pennsylvania Avenue have lost their enthusiasm for radical health-care ‘reform,’ Paul Krugman today maintains that 'politics is supposed to be about achieving something more than your own re-election.'"
• Open Source Democracy: Are bloggers the new legislative watchdogs? - "If Barack Obama wants to save the government a few million dollars and spare himself a headache or two, he’d be wise to hire Jerry Brito. With the help of web developers Peter Snyder and Kevin Dwyer, Brito created and now runs StimulusWatch.org, an interactive website that allows users to track tens of thousands of stimulus projects across the nation."
• The relative advantage of prediction markets (over conventional means of forecasting, namely polls and statistical models) is remarkably… SMALL. - "In a new study, Daniel Reeves, Duncan Watts, Dave Pennock and I compare the performance of prediction markets to conventional means of forecasting, namely polls and statistical models. Examining thousands of sporting and movie events, we find that the relative advantage of prediction markets is remarkably small."
• The Next Crisis for Obama? - "Since taking office, Barack Obama has had to deal with an economy in free fall, a self-generated health care 'crisis' and his attempt at 'reform,' and a rising Taliban insurgency in Afghanistan. So far, Iraq has been quiet enough that many in the media and public have redirected their attention to the wars du jour of Afghanistan, Yemen, and Somalia. The relative peace (punctuated by an occasional violent attack) in Iraq may be about to evaporate and cause yet another crisis for the president.
  
  The Iraqi Accountability and Justice Commission dispenses neither, operates in secret, and is headed by Ahmed Chalabi, a suspected Iranian agent who duped the overly receptive Bush administration into invading Iraq, and Ali Faisal al-Lami, who was detained for terrorism. The commission has disqualified more than 500 candidates for the upcoming parliamentary elections in March. The candidates were mostly Sunni, and the disbarment could very well re-ignite a Sunni insurgency or Shi’ite-Sunni civil war."
• Unofficial Problem Bank Lists Increases to 584 - "This is an unofficial list of Problem Banks compiled only from public sources. CR NOTE: This was compiled before the 5 bank failures today. There was a 'timely' Prompt Corrective Action issued against Charter Bank, Santa Fe, NM and the bank was seized today!"
• Words of wisdom - "But then I read that the FHA is about to set much tougher standards for FHA mortgages—they plan to require borrowers with a 590 credit score to put down at least 3.5% downpayments. As Tyler Cowen recently argued, you knew Congress wasn’t serious about global warming when they refused to make Americans pay more for gasoline. And I would add that you can be sure that the populists who want to 're-regulate the banking system' aren’t serious when all they can do is talk about 3.5% downpayments for bad credit risks. It is so much more fun to bash big banks."
• Andy Kershaw: Stop treating these people like savages - "And they are there again this week, rightly outraged, in huge numbers and, no doubt, mostly well-intentioned. But many of these new arrivals -- aid workers, journalists, diplomats, politicians and soldiers -- are in Haiti for the first time. They cannot be blamed for not having been there before but their inexperience of the country and their unfamiliarity with Haitians seems to be contributing to the catastrophe, rather than easing it.
  
  The crisis, for more than a week now, has been not about the shortage of donated food, water, fuel and medicines but the distribution of those essentials that are piling up, obscenely, at Port-au-Prince airport. On Monday evening's Channel 4 News, Jon Snow, at that same airport, interviewed the head of Oxfam in Haiti. Snow remarked that he and his team had been to areas around the capital that had not had any NGO visits, never mind material aid. The Oxfam woman spoke authoritatively, but emptily, about how her teams were all over the city conducting 'assessments'.
  
  I'm certain every thirsty Haitian (water is a far more urgent priority than food) is much-comforted and reassured that armies of clerical teams from a leading NGO are all across town filling in forms."
• Student: ‘Beating So Bad Thought I Was Going To Die’ - "Police charged Jordan Miles, 18, with assault and resisting arrest Jan. 11 because, they said, he fought with the officers who thought a 'heavy object' in his coat was a gun. It turned out to be a bottle of Mountain Dew.
  
  Miles said he resisted because he thought the men were trying to abduct him and didn't identify themselves as police.
  
  Miles' family and attorney said he was hit with a stun gun and hospitalized after the violent Homewood struggle during which a chunk of his hair was yanked out and a tree branch went through his gums."
  
  Hmm, where was the SWAT Team?

Making the DMV Experience Even Worse

• The Government Should Have Less Power to Tax and Spend, Not More Power to Regulate Speech - "Money is no more an evil in politics than it is in life generally. Some people may not like mud-slinging attack ads, but some people also don’t like SUVs, the Super Bowl, the Jay Leno Show, and many other things that people spend money on--including donations to Cato, the ACLU, the NRA, etc. The problem with money in politics isn’t the money, but rather the politics. So long as the government is powerful enough to dole out tax breaks, subsidies, stimulus funds, regulations, earmarks, and a whole host of other goodies (and baddies), those that stand to benefit (and lose) will spend money on the political process. The way to get rid of this behavior and spending--which is constitutionally protected in a whole host of ways: freedom of speech, freedom of association, the right to petition the government for redress of grievances, etc.--is to reduce the government’s power to affect so many people’s lives and transform economic incentives for businesses big and small. Reduce the size of government and K Street will melt away."
• What Do "Kojak" And "NCIS" Have In Common? - "But regardless of the reason, and even though I started watching only recently, whenever I have watched 'NCIS' there has always been something almost eerily familiar and deja vu-like about the show.
  
  It finally hit me last night: 'NCIS' is the same show as 'Kojak,' the police drama that aired on CBS in the 1970s with Telly Savalas as the lead character."
• The Self-Help Psychologist Is In - "Many of us who try to live an examined life find something lacking, though usually nothing so serious that it requires professional help. This has given rise to an entire genre of books aimed at indulging our urge to open up our own psyches and tinker with the wiring. But the genre’s lack of scientific rigor drives University of Hertfordshire psychologist Richard Wiseman to distraction.
  
  'If you apply [the standards of self-help publishing] to the drug store,' Wiseman says, 'you go in and say ‘Oh, I’ve got a headache, and ah well, none of this stuff is tested, but what the hell, I’ll just try the green one and see if that works,’ people would think that’s utterly absurd and unacceptable.'
  
  So Wiseman has written a self-help book of his own, a collection of techniques built on findings from academic research in psychology."
• Wheat Ridge High School Class of 1970 - "The reonion committee is working away planning the 40th reunion the weekend of August 13-15, 2010. Wheat Ridge, Colorado WRHS1970.com"
• Common Market Food Co-op - "Common Market Food Co-op was a 'new wave food co-op' located at 1329 California Street in Denver, Colorado, from 1975 - 1980. It started as a buying club at the University of Denver in the late 1960s, and for a few years prior to moving to the old Safeway at 13th and California Streets, Common Market operated out of a small storefront on Champa Street."
• Rich Men Swindled on Millionaire Site - "Millionaire match-making sites seem custom-made for scamsters. Just ask the site owners themselves.
  
  Mr. Smith was speaking in response to the latest online millionaire swindle, where a man posing as model Bree Condon is alleged to have swindled tens of thousands of dollars (and maybe much more) from members of SeekingMillionaire.Com."
• Nikkei: Toyota Recall Ruins Reputation - "Note: Audi’s 'unintended acceleration' set the brand back by nearly a decade in the USA, never mind that the NHTSA concluded that the majority of unintended acceleration cases were caused by driver error. A truly sticky accelerator can have more serious consequences, especially in the current environment, in which everybody fights for his own survival."

Join in the great shirt debate!

• Top Baseball Prospect Retires to Enter Priesthood - " As a top prospect for the Oakland Athletics, outfielder Grant Desme might've gotten the call every minor leaguer wants this spring.
  . . .
  A lifelong Catholic, Desme thought about becoming a priest for about a year and a half. He kept his path quiet within the sports world, and his plan to enter a seminary this summer startled the A's when he told them Thursday night."
• White House nightmare persists - "By leaving the scripting of the details of the healthcare bill to Democratic leaders on Capitol Hill, the White House openly courted the risk of chaos. Tellingly, in his victory speech in Boston on Tuesday, Scott Brown, the new Republican senator, cited voter disdain for the sight of lots of 'old men' on Capitol Hill bickering over healthcare reform at a time when their priority was jobs."
• Farewell Jeeves, Hello Alice - "Even though the wealthy are cutting back, there are some things they simply can’t live without: like household staff.
  
  Yet rather than employing the high-price armies of the boom times--the chef, maids, chauffeurs, gardeners, security guard. household managers, estate managers--the wealthy are combining the jobs. Jeeves and Mr. Belvedere are out. 'Alice,' from the Brady Bunch is in."

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January 24, 2010 12:07 PM   Link    Comments (0)

Assorted Links 1/22/2010

"No, leave it on" - Two videos: compare and contrast.




If We Can Put a Man on the Moon: Getting Big Things Done in Government




The First Anti-Ted Kennedy Tea Party: Boston's Anti-Busing Brigades, 1974

• Word Workshop: Writing for Government and Business: Critical Thinking and Writing , January 28, 2010
• Update on The 111th Congress, 2010, January 29, 2010
• Congress in a Nutshell: Understanding Congress, February 10, 2010
• Congressional Dynamics and the Legislative Process, February 11, 2010
• Strategies for Working with Congress: Effective Communication and Advocacy on Capitol Hill, February 18, 2010
• The President's Budget, February 23, 2010
• The Defense Budget, February 26, 2010
• Capitol Hill Workshop, March 3-5, 2010
• Five Reasons Why Libertarians Shouldn't Hate Government - "When we tell our limited-government friends that we have written a book titled If We Can Put a Man on the Moon: Getting Big Things Done in Government, about how government can better accomplish what it sets out to do, the reaction is often horror.
  
  'I don’t want to make government work better, I want it to go away' is the typical response. Government, in their view, is the enemy.
  
  This way of thinking is deeply misguided, a troubling blind spot that keeps libertarians on the fringe of many policy debates. If you reflect only scorn for government, it’s hard to get anyone who hasn’t already drunk the Kool-Aid to take your opinions on the topic seriously.
  
  This is not to disparage the argument that government is too large, for which the case is strong. But holding government in sneering contempt is a misinformed corruption of that sentiment.
  
  Our Founding Fathers, fondly quoted by limited-government advocates, didn’t view government as evil, but as a flawed institution with some important jobs to do. They studied how government worked and they served in office, not because they viewed government with disdain, but because they knew the importance of good government."
• Who will take the lead in Haiti? - "Max Boot asks the question: will the United States take the lead in reconstructing (constructing?) Haiti? The prospects are daunting, as Boot explains. He leans toward giving the lead role to Minustah, the French acronym for the Brazil-led United Nations stabilization. In effect this means having Brazil take the lead."
• Double Down - "The Politico reports its sources indicate that President Obama will up the ante if Scott Brown wins the Massachusetts Senate seat. There will be no retreat, no watering down of the agenda.
  . . .
  Governance will probably be a low priority in the coming year. The fundamental theme of 2010 will be a struggle for power. If it is already evident that unemployment numbers are not going to decrease and that the New Year will be more challenging than 2009 then the strategy of pushing the Promised Land into a future where Republicans have been eliminated from the scene is a viable one. It is also a semi-revolutionary one."
• Specter tells Bachmann to "act like a lady" - "The deeply odd couple of Sen. Arlen Specter (D-Penn.) and Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.) appeared together on a Philly radio station yesterday -- and things got ugly in short order." (hint: that's what Senators think of Representatives.)
• Musical Predictions - "There's an interesting new paper on how the brain makes sense of music by constructing detailed models in real time. The act of listening, it turns out, is really an act of neural prediction. Here are the scientists, from the University of London:" ht The Browser
• Why we started growing grain: "Did a thirst for beer spark civilization?" - "Drunkenness, hangovers, and debauchery tend to come to mind when one thinks about alcohol and its effects. But could alcohol also have been a catalyst for human civilization?
  
  According to archaeologist Patrick McGovern this may have been the case when early man decided to start farming. Why humans turned from hunting and gathering to agriculture could be the result of our ancestors’ simple urge for alcoholic beverages." (See "All Grain Home Brewing" video below.)
• How the court's campaign finance ruling hurts Wall Street favorite Chuck Schumer - "Now, set free of from Congress's speech regulations, non-profits and corporations might not rely so much on these indirect means of political influence. That means less campaign cash coming into [Sen. Charles] Schumer, fewer corporations courting Schumer's staff, and less sucking up to Schumer by lobbyists."
• The Harder They Fall - "think about what was known long ago in the days of Greek theatrical tragedies and surely long, long before that. Namely, success reinforced by adulation can make the almost inevitable fall harder than it might have been otherwise.
  . . .
  Media coddling helped make golf star Tiger Woods' recent windshield splat an 80 miles-per-hour affair rather than a 10 MPH matter. I haven't paid much attention to Woods, but from snippets I've read, he was a far rougher character than his media image suggested. Moreover, this was known in the professional golf fraternity for a long while. Woods' name is Mud for the short run. His golf skills probably will not harm his career on the links, but his 'clean' image is destroyed and income from endorsements will probably be diminished for years. Perhaps Woods would be better off today if his public image had been more in synch with reality."
• Democracy Will Survive Citizens United - "Relax. Half of our states, states like Virginia, have minimal campaign finance laws, and there’s no more corruption in those states than in states that strictly regulate. And that’s because the real reason we have this campaign finance law is not, and never has been, to prevent corruption. The dirty little secret -- the real impetus for this law -- [is] incumbency protection. "
• Corporate Rights and Property Rights are Human Rights: Why it’s a Mistake to Conflate a Right with the Means Used to Exercise it - "It’s true, of course, that a corporation is not a person. But the people who own and operate it are. 'Corporate speech' is really just speech by people using the corporate form."
• Antonin Scalia vs. John Paul Stevens - "This section of [Stevens'] dissent purports to show that today’s decision is not supported by the original understanding of the First Amendment. The dissent attempts this demonstration, however, in splendid isolation from the text of the First Amendment. It never shows why 'the freedom of speech' that was the right of Englishmen did not include the freedom to speak in association with other individuals, including association in the corporate form. To be sure, in 1791 (as now) corporations could pursue only the objectives set forth in their charters; but the dissent provides no evidence that their speech in the pursuit of those objectives could be censored....
  
  The [First] Amendment is written in terms of 'speech,' not speakers. Its text offers no foothold for excluding any category of speaker, from single individuals to partnerships of individuals, to unincorporated associations of individuals, to incorporated associations of individuals--and the dissent offers no evidence about the original meaning of the text to support any such exclusion. We are therefore simply left with the question whether the speech at issue in this case is 'speech' covered by the First Amendment. No one says otherwise."
• Goldman Expects to Keep Cake, Eat Same, Stick Public with Tab - "Dick Bove says that Obama's proposal will be good for Goldman Sachs because it will take away the prop trading from banks that have deposits, but will not affect Goldman Sachs who will once again eliminate more competition.
  
  So buy the stock. Hard to imagine anything short of Armageddon that would cause the word 'sell' to emanate from his bloviateness when he is talking his book.
  
  And Goldman Sachs says that it is 'unrealistic' to take away their place at the Fed's teats as a subsidy sucking bank holding company."
• This is Too Easy - "Given the sudden change in the winds, observers might even be tempted to point out that between Edward, Joseph II and John Jr., Kennedy bucks operating heavy machinery have managed to kill three woman and paralyze a fourth in just three short decades. (That's three easy installments of one fatality and .33 spinal injuries every ten years, but Marilyn doesn't count, obviously). But then, recollections that tend to upset the reality distortion field that surrounds and protects the Kennedys are not generally spoken of in polite company.
  
  Notice how even reading these facts about the Kennedys in print on this very blog tends to make you uncomfortable with respect to a topic that normally glides easily under the eye and out of mind when found instead in the daily crime blotter. The brain has been conditioned somehow to reject the co-existence of the two spheres [Kennedy|Negligent Homicide] in the same paragraph. This is an absolutely astounding bit of marketing. This is an amazing bit of politics. This may actually go a long way to explaining the habit Massachusetts voters seem to have adopted for repeatedly and mindlessly checking boxes next to Kennedy names over the last several decades.
  
  In fact, when wading through the lionizing even deifying miasma of Edward's ongoing and seemingly never ending eulogy, it is easy to forget that Massachusetts elected to office nine times, and thereby granted a forty six year tenure in the United States Senate, a reckless driving, alcoholic, womanizing, Harvard expellee who couldn't muster the energy to best the dauntless political juggernaut that was Jimmy Carter's campaign in a 1980 primary challenge.
  . . .
  What faces the Legislature, the Executive (and perhaps even the Judiciary) in the months and years to come is going to be anything but easy. The days of pouring deficit spending into housing, public employees, defined benefit plans, state subsidies and any other problem that manages to show its head above water for a sufficient interval are numbered. Someone is going to have to face the sorry task of explaining to the American people that, when you actually add it all up, the debt comes to almost $550,000 for each and every household in the United States, and that successive Comptroller Generals of the United States have been trying to get people to pay attention for five or ten years.
  
  In an environment where even discussing shifting social security age eligibility by a few months can bring down the angry fist of voter wrath with such violence that even the CBO looks for cover, how are leaders today going to break the news that there is simply no water-boarding procedure severe enough to torture Social Security math past the point where it gives up enough money to pay for even a substantial fraction baby boomers? When something as trivial as a $1 trillion dollar health plan results in the forfeiture of god-given progressive birthrights like 'The Kennedy Seat,' what sort of effect might $30+ trillion in unfunded Medicare have when the bill comes due and remains unpaid?
  
  Sure, it is nice to fantasize that the latest 'republican revolution' means something in the grand scheme of things, but if American politics are "played inside of the 40 yard lines," then neither party is anywhere close to possessing the testicular fortitude to handle real fiscal reform. Balancing the budget today (which does nothing except stop the hemorrhaging for a while) would require no less than 35% across-the-board cuts in government spending- and this totally ignores the massive off-budget items that have become so fashionable to spin off. To say that Obama, who despite his Chicago machine pedigree couldn't seem to fix the Olympics RFP even with Oprah batting clean-up, isn't up to the task is stating the matter mildly."
• Recent Graduates, Teens Hit Hard In Miserable Jobs Market - "The downturn in jobs is miserable nearly everywhere you look but things are especially hard on teens and recent college graduate.
  . . .
  While education is a good thing, the cost of education certainly is not. Kids are graduating college hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt, with no job and no way to pay it back. Moreover, student debt is a never ending albatross in that student debt cannot be discharged in bankruptcy.
  
  I do not advise students going hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt to get an education. Most will be trapped for decades attempting to pay that back.
  . . .
  Indeed students have been screwed by "student aid". So called "aid" to nearly anyone, helped drive up the cost of college education. Students are now reaping the "benefits" of that aid: no job but hundreds of thousands of dollars of debt.
  
  Government needs to get out of the aid business. It screwed up housing with 'affordable housing' programs and it screwed up education with student 'aid'."
• Down, but Not Out, in Brooklyn: a Daughter's Story - "When our then-22-year-old daughter told us in the fall of 2008 that she intended to move out of our house and live in New York City on her own, we told her it would be tough.
  
  She didn't believe us.
  
  Mariana proved us wrong. She not only lived in New York on a salary of less than $30,000 from a publishing-industry job, she managed to save $5,000 over the course of a year. On top of that, she stashed about $1,000 in her 401(k) account.
  
  How was that possible in one of the most expensive cities in the world?
  . . .
  While I'm proud of Mariana's thrift, I'm not trying to hold her up as a model for the masses. She came out of college with no debt, thanks to some big scholarships and help from Mom and Dad. Many youths can only get through by borrowing money, and it means they have to earn more money when they graduate."

"President Obama gave Republicans Their Marching Orders"

• Do You Have Any Legal Right To Privacy For Information Stored Online? - "The paper does a good job separating out the thinking here, and explaining why the Fourth Amendment absolutely should apply to information you store online. As it notes, while the Smith case said that phone numbers dialed might not be private, that did not extend to the contents of the phone call itself. And that's key. The reason that the phone company gets the phone numbers dialed is because that information is key to it delivering its service of connecting the phone call. So you can make a reasonable argument that while such information (the information needed to initiate a service) might not be subject to privacy protection, everything else communicated or stored via that service still deserves those protections."
• Digital File Cabinet You Can Bring With You Anywhere - "What if you could collect, in one well-organized, searchable, private digital repository, all the notes you create, clips from Web pages and emails you want to recall, dictated audio memos, photos, key documents, and more? And what if that repository was constantly synchronized, so it was accessible through a Web browser and through apps on your various computers and smart phones?
  
  Well, such a service exists. And it's free. It's called Evernote."
• The 4 Big Myths of Profile Pictures - "In looking closely at the astonishingly wide variety of ways our users have chosen to represent themselves, we discovered much of the collective wisdom about profile pictures was wrong.
  . . .
  All of the above subjects get far more messages than average, and yet none of them have outstanding profiles. The pictures do all the work: in different ways, they pique the viewer’s curiosity and say a lot about who the subject is (or wants to be)."
• Wheat Ridge High School Class of 1970 - "The reonion committee is working away planning the 40th reunion the weekend of August 13-15, 2010. Wheat Ridge, Colorado WRHS1970.com"
• Common Market Food Co-op - "Common Market Food Co-op was a 'new wave food co-op' located at 1329 California Street in Denver, Colorado, from 1975 - 1980. It started as a buying club at the University of Denver in the late 1960s, and for a few years prior to moving to the old Safeway at 13th and California Streets, Common Market operated out of a small storefront on Champa Street."
• "Why is there so little money in U.S. politics?" - "The bottom line is that today's Supreme Court decision probably matters less than you think."

All Grain Home Brewing (1 of 8)

• Air America declaring bankruptcy - "The station, best known as the home of Rachel Maddow and Al Franken, never really found its financial footing, but had struggled through with the help of left-leaning financiers."
• Media Wars: FNC Keeps Rising, Air America Crashes - "On the same day Neilsen reported competition-dwarfing numbers for Fox News's coverage of the special election in Massachusetts on Tuesday night, Air America radio declared bankruptcy and will cease live broadcasts immediately."
• Special 2-Credit Class about Party Polarization, Spring 2010 - "This course is a unique opportunity for W&M undergraduates to be directly exposed to the views of leading scholars on perhaps the most central feature of contemporary American politics – the striking polarization that exists between the two political parties. The course will be structured around six recent scholarly books about the causes and consequences of party polarization."
• From A Sow’s Ear? - "A recent study published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition concluded that consuming saturated fat is not associated with cardiovascular disease. Never mind the usual problem of noticing an association and then confusing it with cause and effect … these researchers say there’s not even an association:
  . . .
  The once high-flying theory that fatty diets cause heart attacks and low-fat diets prevent them has been shot down over and over by the evidence."

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. . . . . . . . .

January 22, 2010 09:47 AM   Link    Comments (0)

Assorted Links 1/18/10

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
Clusterf#@k to the Poor House - Wall Street Bonuses
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor Health Care Crisis

• Word Workshop: Writing for Government and Business: Critical Thinking and Writing , January 28, 2010
• Update on The 111th Congress, 2010, January 29, 2010
• Congress in a Nutshell: Understanding Congress, February 10, 2010
• Congressional Dynamics and the Legislative Process, February 11, 2010
• Strategies for Working with Congress: Effective Communication and Advocacy on Capitol Hill, February 18, 2010
• The President's Budget, February 23, 2010
• The Defense Budget, February 26, 2010
• Capitol Hill Workshop, March 3-5, 2010
• How to guarantee your luggage won't be lost or stolen next time you fly: - "Most of the time travelers are on the short-end of TSA regulations. In this instance, however, you can use travel rules to your advantage. If you're traveling with equipment you would prefer it locked up and watched more closely than your run of the mill luggage, you can pack a firearm with the equipment or luggage."
• Why Many Investors Keep Fooling Themselves - "What are we smoking, and when will we stop?
  
  A nationwide survey last year found that investors expect the U.S. stock market to return an annual average of 13.7% over the next 10 years.
  
  Robert Veres, editor of the Inside Information financial-planning newsletter, recently asked his subscribers to estimate long-term future stock returns after inflation, expenses and taxes, what I call a "net-net-net" return. Several dozen leading financial advisers responded. Although some didn't subtract taxes, the average answer was 6%. A few went as high as 9%.
  
  We all should be so lucky. Historically, inflation has eaten away three percentage points of return a year. Investment expenses and taxes each have cut returns by roughly one to two percentage points a year. All told, those costs reduce annual returns by five to seven points.
  
  So, in order to earn 6% for clients after inflation, fees and taxes, these financial planners will somehow have to pick investments that generate 11% or 13% a year before costs. Where will they find such huge gains? Since 1926, according to Ibbotson Associates, U.S. stocks have earned an annual average of 9.8%. Their long-term, net-net-net return is under 4%."
• Mike Rustigan Has His Head on Straight - "Mike Rustigan has an excellent op-ed in the LA Times hammering away at American society's ill-conceived obsession with academic education, something that I am dismayed at daily. There are many people whose skill sets are just not cut out for academics, but have skills that would prove very valuable in a number of vocational trades. Yet, the 'intellectuals' of society have stigmatized those who make a living in such professions as inferior beings, creating the notion that college is the only path to success. We need to alter this public perception and encourage our youth to pursue careers that will help them improve their standard of living and make needed contributions to society - we all need car repairs, plumbers and electricians on occasion."
• Obama’s Other Massachusetts Problem - "When Obama campaigns for Martha Coakley, he is really campaigning for his health plan, which means he is really campaigning for the Massachusetts health plan.
  
  He and Coakley should explain why they’re pursuing a health plan that’s not only increasingly unpopular, but also appears to have a rather high cost-benefit ratio."
• Health Reform: A Political Mistake? - "Premier political analyst Charlie Cook argues today that Obama made a serious error in plunging into health reform until the economy had fully recovered. He says that Obama should have focused like a laser beam on the economy pretty much to the exclusion of all else. If unemployment is still high in November, as it probably will be, Democrats will be very vulnerable to the charge that they took their eye off the ball to pursue a longheld ideological goal that may have been worthwhile but was not by any means time-sensitive."
• “No Trial By Jewry” - "Oddly enough, Siddiqui was quite willing to get a Ph.D. from Brandeis."
• interview with a Chicago school economist - "Q: But Fannie and Freddie’s purchases of subprime mortgages were pretty small compared to the market as a whole, perhaps twenty or thirty per cent.
  
  A: (Laughs)
  
  Italics mine."
• Interview with Eugene Fama - "I don’t know if these are even the big issues of the time. I think that what is going on in health care could end up being more important. I don’t think we are going down the right road there. Insurance is not the solution: it’s the problem. Making the problem more widespread is not going to solve it."
• Look like Jimmy Stewart - "'This diet works great," Don declared. "But I think I've lost too much weight.'
  
  At 67 years old and 5 ft. 11 inches, Don began the program weighing 228 lbs (BMI 31.9). Because of high triglycerides, high blood sugar, high c-reactive protein, and excessive small LDL, I instructed Don to eliminate all wheat products from his diet, along with cornstarch and sweets. His intake of lean meats, eggs, vegetables, oils, raw nuts, etc. was unlimited.
  
  Don now weighed 194 lbs, down 34 lbs over 6 months (BMI 27.1). Triglycerides, blood sugar, blood pressure, and well-being had improved dramatically; small LDL, however, had dropped only 30%--still room for improvement.
  
  ''My friends say I'm too skinny. They ask if I have cancer!'"
• No time for crushing despair as soccer will soon fill the air - "I'm just a soccer newbie, having been brought to the game by watching my sons play youth soccer. The boys begged me not to ask de los Cobos anything, just to sit at the Fire news conference and keep my mouth shut, lest I embarrass the family name with my lack of futbol knowledge.
  
  They figure my practical knowledge of the game comes from playing FIFA Soccer 2010 on their Xbox, and they may be right. But I'm trying to learn, which is like attempting to solve a puzzle of passionate human geometry. On a soccer field, I think I'm beginning to see fascinating triangles forming and reforming, the angles of the triangles constantly changing, the ball flowing to the points, forward and back."
• Straining to Defend Martha Coakley - "Broadly speaking, LeBlanc's also right that 'hardly anyone ever fails to be elected becasue they were too hard on criminals.' But I don't know of a single incident in which a prosecutor suffered bad publicity or was attacked politically for failing to fight the release of an innocent person. 'Tough on crime' positions on parole, sentencing, the death penalty, and so on are policy positions on which reasonable people can disagree. Obstinacy in the face of overwhelming evidence of someone's innocence is a moral failing, regardless of motivation.
  
  Moreover, Coakley's also being criticized for failing to bring charges against a man who sexually assaulted his young niece with a curling iron. Coakley's successor put him away for two life terms. Why would Coakley--so aware of the political pressure to be tough on crime, so protective of her own ambition for higher office, and who carefully cultivated an image for herself as a defender of children--not throw the book at a man accused of raping a toddler with a curling iron? I'm just guessing here, but it may have something to do with the fact that Keith Winfield was also a police officer. That suggests a blind allegiance to law enforcement that we should find troubling in a U.S. Senator who will be making and voting on criminal justice policy.
  
  There's a broader point here, too. Even the left--even the far left--seems to find it difficult to hold bad prosecutors accountable, at least when they happen to be Democrats. So long as prosecutors are rewarded for aggressiveness and never punished when they overstep, we'll continue to see the very sort of behavior LeBlanc claims to find troubling."
• As the Economy Recovers, State Budgets Continue to Worsen - "Present state budget crises will likely seem mild compared to what they will face in F Y2011. In order to comply with their constitutionally mandated balanced budgets, many states relied on one-time gimmicks to pass their FY 2010 budgets and must now turn to even more drastic measures."
• Part 1: Answers on Fafsa and Financial Aid - "To help readers of The Choice navigate this maze, we’ve enlisted Mark Kantrowitz of the Web sites Finaid.org and FastWeb.Com (a scholarship search site). You can submit questions about the Fafsa to Mr. Kantrowitz by using the comment box on our original post, or the box below. His answers are scheduled to continue through Friday, Jan. 22."
• It's Not about Interest Rates Yet - "Incoming data continue to support expectations that the Federal Reserve will hold rates at rock bottom levels for the foreseeable future - likely into 2011. But interest rates should not be the focus of policy analysts. The Fed will manipulate policy via the balance sheet long before they fall back to the interest rate tool. The question is whether or not the slow growth environment is sufficient to persuade the Fed to hold the balance sheet steady or even expand the balance sheet beyond current expectations. And there always remains the third option, favored by a minority of policymakers - withdraw the stimulus now that growth has reemerged. At this point, I suspect the Fed will stick with the hold steady option."
• Compare and Contrast - "It's likely that I will watch the latest day of 24, although after recently observing Sherlock Holmes take down a somewhat more plausible cabal than the one Jack Bauer's late brother and father were involved in, I'm compiling a list of reasons Sherlock Holmes would be a better counter-terrorism agent than Jack Bauer."
• Prison Escape Artist - "Clever ruse"
• "Obama's policy on the war he once opposed is not similar to Bush's: It is identical" - "Reacting to my current column, plenty of Obama-loving liberals are angry at me for pointing out the obvious--that on the one issue that most defined Obama's candidacy and the Bush presidency—the two men are indistinguishable."

The Colbert Report	Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c
The Word - Honor Bound
www.colbertnation.com
Colbert Report Full Episodes Political Humor Economy

• What Questions Do You Ask Before Signing a New Lease? - "It's easy to get excited when you've found the perfect place to rent, but you don't want to lose your head before signing the lease. Home blog Apartment Therapy suggests 10 questions to ask before signing, and we want to know yours."
• How many ancestors do we have? - "If we double the number of ancestors in each generation, 2 parents, 4 grandparents, and so on, we can see that by the time we are back 10 generations, we have the potential for 1024 ancestors. But is this true? If we were to go back to the time of Charlemagne, we would find we had the potential for 281 trillion (YES!) ancestors all living at that one moment in history. This is statistically impossible! So where did our ancestors go?
  
  It is estimated that 80% of the marriages in history were between second cousins. Why? Because the population base was smaller, people lived in small communities and migrated within those same small communities. The theory in genealogical research is that our family trees are actually shaped like a diamond, not a pyramid as shown below. Tracing back a few generations gives a wider shape. Keep going and you find the shape narrowing, eventually, the theory holds, converging to only a few ancestors."
• Why Do We Have Taxpayer Subsidized State Universities? - "What is the rationale of state government subsidized universities? One is that allegedly universities provide some positive spillover effects to society, a somewhat dubious proposition in our view after researching the issue for many years. The second goal is the egalitarian goal ---rich kids can afford private schools, so state schools are designed to provide a low cost option (that is a laugh these days!) for those otherwise unable to attend college. Increasingly, the flagships are emulating the prestigious private schools. They restrict supply, turning decent if not spectacular students away. They say, 'go to lesser, inferior schools.' This rather haughty attitude is inconsistent with the egalitarian ideal, which is one reason why the prestige-seeking state universities are losing state support (Jim Duderstadt, former U of Michigan prez, told me last week that only about 5 percent of U of M funding now comes from the state)."
• Wheat Ridge High School Class of 1970 - "The reonion committee is working away planning the 40th reunion the weekend of August 13-15, 2010. Wheat Ridge, Colorado WRHS1970.com"
• Common Market Food Co-op - "Common Market Food Co-op was a 'new wave food co-op' located at 1329 California Street in Denver, Colorado, from 1975 - 1980. It started as a buying club at the University of Denver in the late 1960s, and for a few years prior to moving to the old Safeway at 13th and California Streets, Common Market operated out of a small storefront on Champa Street."
• Catholic scholars who aren't Catholic - "In an editorial eulogizing the late Mary Daly, the Boston Globe lets the cat out of the bag. Daly 'came to describe herself as a ‘radical lesbian feminist’ and a ‘post-Christian,’' the Globe notes. How, then, did she justify her position in the theology department at Boston College: a nominally Catholic school?
  . . .
  Like all too many of her colleagues in Catholic theological circles, Daly used her academic post not to build up the faith but to tear it down--or, to be more accurate, to exploit it for other purposes."
• Marines Embark For Haiti - "The Marines are sending the 22nd Marine Expeditionary Unit, along with three large amphibious assault ships loaded with heavy lift helicopters, trucks and earth movers to support relief efforts. Despite having just returned from a six month deployment as theater reserve for Central Command, the 22nd MEU out of Camp Lajeune, NC., is packing up and will tomorrow for Haiti and expects to arrive early next week. Marines were recalled from post-​​deployment leave two days ago and immediately began crisis planning, said Marine Capt. Clark Carpenter, speaking to reporters by telephone."
• Candy-ass vice-principal calls the bomb squad over an 11-year-old's science project, recommends counselling for the student - "A San Diego school vice-principal saw an 11-year-old's home science project (a motion detector made out of an empty Gatorade bottle and some electronics), decided it was a bomb, wet himself, put the school on lockdown, had the bomb-squad come out to X-ray the student's invention and search his parents' home, and then magnanimously decided not to discipline the kid (though he did recommend that the child and his parents get counselling to help them overcome their anti-social science behavior)."
• Doctors, Targeting Prostate, Mistakenly Remove Man's Prostrate - "Doctors, performing prostate surgery on a man in Minneapolis, mistakenly removed his prostrate, leaving the man with his diseased prostate and, now, without a perfectly healthy prostrate.
  
  The patient, Leonard Gold, 67, was outraged and expressed as much when, from his hospital bed, told of the medical error, he shouted, 'What!? Are you f**king kidding!!?'
  
  Wikopedia is reporting this as the first documented case of surgeons confusing the prostate with the prostrate (although anecdotal reports of the surgical mistake exist)."
• Vitamin D And Calcium Reduce Bone Fractures - "Across a wide range of ages both vitamin D and calcium supplements cut the incidence of bone breaks."