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Showing posts from November, 2011

Proposal: a general tech company strike

Taking a look at the execrable bills before Congress trying to quite literally destroy the internet as we know it, creating massive security holes at the same time, I was struck by a thought. The idea behind this bill—of a piece with the drug warrior mentality—is to seriously expand the reach and severity of legal punishment for downloading copyrighted material. Among other things, websites like YouTube and Twitter will be dragooned into policing their own users for fear of lawsuits, normal netizens will live in fear of criminal prosecution for infringing content (like singing a copyrighted song), and search engines will have to deal with the terrific headache of de-indexing a blizzard of infringing domain names, which will for obvious reasons pop up by the millions. Here's the thought. This would be a stupendous waste of money for all the big internet companies. What if they all went on strike? Say the bill passes Congress and it's headed for the President. The next day, G

The next round

After reading a lot about the 2008 crisis, I came to the conclusion that the fundamental issues that drove that crisis—too large, too interconnected banks, captured regulators, and a Wall Street culture that demands stupendous profits—were not only not resolved, they were even worse than before. Another crisis is in the offing, sooner or later. The answer may be sooner. If the Eurozone unravels, I think the safe bet is that all the big banks will be up to their nuts in it someway or another. MF Global showed how this might work, but mostly I just suspect that if there's a big shitpile out there somewhere the banksters would be making "aggressive" trades on it. Basically just laying down my gut feeling here rather than a detailed argument to see how it turns out.

Sign of the times

Still as true as it ever was:

Happy Thanksgiving!

This was the biggest gathering my family's had since I can remember, as well as the best turkey I've ever had.

Home again!

Took this picture on the way home from the airport.

Programming note

Apologies for the recent darkness here. I spent last weekend in Princeton visiting an old Peace Corps friend. This week I'm heading back to Colorado to have Thanksgiving with my family, so posting will probably be light.

The cowardice of Millennial men, ctd

Ellen Campesinos, who plays bass for Los Campesinos!, in an article explaining why ladies in popular bands apparently don't get any action: Having eliminated fans and support-band members, we're left with the guy hanging out at the bar whose friend has dragged him along to the gig. In a lot of ways, he's the most appealing choice. I want to hear that someone is not fussed about us. The thing is, this hypothetical guy normally throws me some glances, and I shoot some back, but he still won't talk to me. And I don't want to reduce it to status anxiety or a power issue, because obviously it's intimidating to talk to any stranger, let alone someone who was just performing. But why are there always attractive girls who talk to the male band members post-show? They have insights and they like books and they have no problems with light flirtation. Maybe it's because they're better at hiding their inner crazy fangirl, or maybe it's because some men worry t

Collected links

1.  More about the double standard in the justice system for rich and poor . The rule of law is dead. 2. Meet Gerry Sandusky, no relation to the Penn State guy . He's had a rough week. 3. Check out the vet pressing for marijuana to be approved for PTSD . 4. Greenwald vs. former drug czar John Walters on drug legalization . 5. Another debate: is technological innovation accelerating or stagnating ? 6. The face of modern slavery .

The new Greenwald

I got this one from the office, and I've been reading it in bursts to control my blood pressure. His central contention, that the rule of law is dead and buried in the United States, and the elite establishment is holding openly celebratory parties on its grave, is inescapably true. I was watching some old Carlin the other day. It's not really standup, a lot closer to ranting. Five years ago I would have said Carlin was about 50 percent right, but today I'd say closer to 80 percent.

Carl Sagan: The Gift of Apollo

Collected links

1. "Toxin" and "poison" are really nonsense terms these days. Mutantdragon brings the science . 2. Check out Thomas Jefferson's expurgated gospels . 3. Awesome piece on how Hispanics are saving small towns . ¡Andalé pues! 4. Hertzberg on Occupy Wall Street . 5. NBC just gave me a sweet job, and I didn't even have to interview ! Oh wait, I confused myself with the daughter of a former president. Well, at least she has hedge fund experience . At least I'm not like working for free and broke as shit.

How did Tom Brokaw write a book about national service without discovering Americorps?

AmeriCorps, as noted before here , is the largest national service organization in the United States outside the military. More than 80,000 people every year do service work in this program across the country for a pittance. Its support has historically been broad-based and bipartisan, with one consistent complaint. Despite the fact that today nearly three times the number of people have served in AmeriCorps than the Peace Corps, the latter is still far more well-known. As John McCain noted in the Monthly in 2001, the program’s profile is too low: But for all its concrete achievements, AmeriCorps has a fundamental flaw: In its seven years of existence, it has barely stirred the nation’s imagination. In 1961, President John F. Kennedy launched the Peace Corps to make good on his famous challenge to “[a]sk not what your country can do for you, but rather what you can do for your country.” Since then, more than 162,000 Americans have served in the Peace Corps, and the vast majority of

Quote for the day

"If the world succeeds in coming out through the other side of this crisis, you should expect to see even more countries joining the perpetual surplus brigades leading to even more demand for safe dollar denominated financial assets. That, in turn, means either big U.S. budget deficits or else some bold new innovations in financial engineering to meet the demand." -- Matthew Yglesias , in yet another reminder of the fact that for every creditor there is a debtor.

What do French ambulances sound like?

Bill Bailey explains: Probably funnier if you know French.

"I really needed that twenty-five dollars"

I found this oddly comforting: Because I, too, am broke as shit.

Pity party for straight dudes

Via Sullivan , check out this Dan Savage interview : ...heterosexual male identity — and in America I don’t want to get too pointy-headed about it, but it’s really this package of negatives. You know, to be a straight guy is not to be a woman and not to be a faggot and so it doesn’t really leave you much room to maneuver. If there’s anything about your interests or personality that can be remotely perceived as feminine or faggoty, you have to kill it or people won’t believe you’re straight or you’ll be tormented — you know, questions for the rest of your life. And it’s kind of sad to watch how hemmed-in straight guys are. That is surely true, but there's another aspect to this as well. Growing up as a straight boy, especially in a liberal environment, you are constantly bombarded by the ways men have treated and continue to treat women like shit. They are all absolutely true. Just the other day I read the most horrifying piece on the daily violent abuse to which female bloggers

Weekend links

1. Why American's won't work dirty jobs . Short answer: lousy pay. 2. A Kansas town fights a mercury-spewing plant and  the EPA . 3. Glenn Greenwald's new book looks good . 4. Who broke the Penn State pedophile scandal ? 5. Great review of Niall Ferguson's latest .

Science on the right

This is pretty funny, but also the most explicit, overt avowal of anti-intellectualism I have ever seen: The Daily Show with Jon Stewart Get More: Daily Show Full Episodes , Political Humor & Satire Blog , The Daily Show on Facebook "It should be up to the American people to decide what's true." That is a truly radical statement, spitting in the face of the last 2000 years of human progress. We used to burn witches, torture heretics, and believe the earth was at the center of the universe; the underpinning of nearly every development that has allowed us to move past those times is the idea that there exists an external reality independent of belief. It reminded me of this Krugman column from a couple years back: What I mean...is that know-nothingism — the insistence that there are simple, brute-force, instant-gratification answers to every problem, and that there’s something effeminate and weak about anyone who suggests otherwise — has become the core of Repu

Friday jam

Pogo does Pixar's UP :

The White Salmon is freed!

Check out this dam being breached:

Is There National Service in the Air?

George Clooney’s new movie, The Ides of March , about the shady backroom dealing of a presidential campaign, has been getting mixed reviews for its strong acting but weak plot, bad script, and " basic misunderstanding of politics. " But one scene is worth extracting, where Ryan Gosling, playing the candidate’s campaign manager, lays out a case for mandatory national service: On one level, this is astonishingly blinkered, substituting a cheap cynicism for real analysis. "Everyone over the age of 18 are past the eligibility age and will be for it. Why not?" As noted earlier here , age doesn’t seem to be stopping the Tea Party from rabidly opposing even AmeriCorps—a far more modest program. However, the idea of national service, mandatory or not, has still been coming up amongst American thought leaders across the media spectrum. A recent spate of items from across the media have been promoting the idea of national service. Tom Brokaw devotes a substantial portio

Carl Sagan autotuned

Awesome: He would have been 77 today.

Cormac McCarthy does restaurant reviews

Okay, not really. But this is absolutely spot-on : A rider wearing an elaborate mustache and carrying a Winchester onehanded nudged his quarterhorse toward the sheriff. Hell he’s right there sheriff. I know it. Im lookin at him same as you. What are we waitin for then. We caint touch him now deputy. They got their own way here. The riders watched as the women left their station wagons and strollers and encircled the outlaw. As if some ancient instinct united them. Silent as wolves and staring intently at the broken man standing there. He saw his mistake and called out to the riders reaching toward them with his one good arm but was struck down with a savage blow from a rolled yoga mat. That old boy done walked into the wrong parking lot, said the sheriff. The posse sat their horses and stood silent witness as the women swarmed over the outlaw’s fallen form and soon they could not see him but for the flurry of spandex and ponytails.

Meeting old friends

Apologies for the recent darkness here, but I've been working hard on some stuff for the magazine that I might turn into an actual magazine piece! Probably not, but who knows... I spent some time with the Editor-in-Chief Paul Glastris today going over the points, and then basically starting from scratch. It's a good kind of feedback though, and Paul is really good at striking the right balance of reasonable, honest criticism. I love this job. In other news, I met some old Peace Corps South Africa buddies for some drinks and greasy food after work today, and it was really, really great. Unexpectedly so. Though I think this will change once I process the experience, the whole Peace Corps service has been feeling bizarrely unreal, like it happened to someone else, and this was a nice reminder that no, it was all genuine. Plus, I missed those guys! It's nice to be able to laugh at the same kind of inside jokes and say "yebo" without having to explain yourself.

Portal 2

Finally got around to finishing this title. It came out when I was in South Africa, and I wanted it so bad I could taste it. This is one of the rare times when the game actually lived up to that level of expectation. It's been out for awhile, and everyone has dissected it much better than I could have anyways, but I'd just like to challenge the haters  who don't believe that video games can possibly be art to give this one a shot. Just stupendously good, and not in a video-gamey way.

Halloween lights dude meets LMFAO

Weekend links

1. The NYT doggedly keeps at the Somalia famine . Up to 750,000 people could die. 2. Matthew Yglesias on the ethos of hard work . 3. A look at a mysterious radioactive cargo container . 4. Apparently some anti-vaccine quacks see no problem putting viruses in the mail . The fight against woo never ends. 5. Occupy Wall Street and the future of journalism .

Feynman on beauty

Quote for the day

"It's perfectly fine for Mitt Romney to say that Barack Obama's record of killing terrorist leaders and extricating America from endless wars indicates a troubling lack of unthinking belligerence." -- Paul Waldman .

What it's like being a female blogger

Sometimes people point out how web journalism is an overwhelmingly white male phenomenon. Wonder why? This is probably part of it : I got my first rape threat as a blogger when I was on Blogspot, so new that I still had the default theme up and hadn’t even added anything to the sidebar. I can’t even remember the pseudonym I was using then, and I probably had about 10 hits on a good day, seven of which were me compulsively loading the page just to make sure it still existed, and the other two of which were probably my friends. I wrote a post about some local political issue or another, expressing my misgivings, and a reader kindly took time out of his day to email me. ‘You stupid cunt,’ he said, ‘all you need is a good fucking and then you’d be less uptight.’ I stared at it for a couple of minutes, too shocked to move. There it was on my screen, not going away. Someone really had thought it was appropriate not just to write this email to a complete stranger, a totally unknown perso

Journalism and bias

This is a bit of inside baseball, but I highly recommend this article by Conor Friedersdorf on a journalist named Caitlin Curran who lost her job for attending Occupy Wall Street and being photographed holding a sign. I think it's a bit of a tricky question, but ultimately Friedrsdorf threads the needle: To borrow a phrase, every editor who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice what is going on knows that propagating the myth of "objective journalism" is indefensible. A newspaper or radio program may try to hide or obscure the fact that the people responsible for its content have opinions, convictions, and biases. But it is impossible to function as a journalist without making subjective judgment calls about newsworthiness, relevance and emphasis, or covering issues about which you have an opinion. Pretending otherwise requires willfully misleading the public. An ethical journalist ought to be accurate. She ought to be fair. Her aim ought to be reporting

Say, this guy's good

Misallocated capital, ctd

The latest evidence that Wall Street has not changed  at all since the financial crisis comes from former Goldman Sachs CEO and former New Jersey governor Jon Corzine, whose company MF Global just went down. They were, of course, leveraged to the teeth (meaning they borrowed about $40 for every dollar of capital), but the kicker is they weren't even investing in  anything . Instead, they went all in on a Eurozone bailout : Over the past year, most investors have been fleeing the sovereign debt of Spain, Italy and other euro-zone basket cases. Not Mr. Corzine. The onetime chief executive of Goldman Sachs and former New Jersey senator and governor who has run MF Global since early 2010, was all in, buying up $6.3 billion worth of discounted euro-zone debt. As Azam Ahmed reported in The Times on Tuesday , Mr. Corzine appeared to be wagering that the European Union would come to the rescue of Europe’s troubled economies, averting a default. In other words, Mr. Corzine was betting o

Something that isn't said enough

Martin Wolf in the FT : Blessed are the creditors, for they shall inherit the earth. This is not in the Sermon on the Mount. Yet creditors believe it: if everybody were a creditor, we would have no unpaid debts and financial crises. That, creditors believe, is the way to behave. They are mistaken. Since the world cannot trade with Mars, creditors are joined at the hip to the debtors. The former must accumulate claims on the latter. This puts them in a trap of their own making. Three of the world’s four largest economies – China, Germany and Japan – are creditors: they run current account surpluses, in good and in bad times (see charts). They believe they are entitled to lecture debtors on their follies. China, an ascendant superpower, enjoys berating the US for its imprudence. Japan, a US ally, is more discreet. Germany’s ambitions are closer to home. It wishes to turn its eurozone partners into good Germans, instead... As the poet A.E. Housman wrote: “To think that two and two ar

Cartoon for the day

From my (probably) most loyal reader outside of my mother, here's a pretty spot-on  New Yorker cartoon: Even kinda looks like me.

Obama, AmeriCorps, and jobs

Back in the halcyon days of 2008, Barack Obama talked a lot about national service. He famously proposed a plan to double the Peace Corps and triple AmeriCorps.Though the Peace Corps didn't get quite that size a boost, AmeriCorps did: back in 2009 President Obama signed a bill to triple its size, though the requisite funds were never completely appropriated. Even before the Obama expansion, AmeriCorps was by far the largest national service program in the United States. It now employs around 80,000 people every year, at a bare-bones $10,000 or so each. It is curious that the president's jobs plan does not include anything on the program. If what the economy needs is jobs, AmeriCorps is about the cheapest and quickest way to get some. The program also provides community assistance at a time when state and local governments are slashing their public services—last year alone they cut 200,000 jobs . It was the National and Community Service Trust Act, signed by President Clin

All aboard!

TNC reports back from his decision to abandon flying in favor of trains: Last week, I began my attempt to opt out. I was scared I'd be bored to tears, but at the same time I didn't feel like I should be too entertained. I declined to install the Baldur's Gate saga on my laptop, and resolved to bring only my books and my writing. It's true I endured a few askance looks from my wife, but once I explained my thinking, she was in support. The train, in all aspects, was a superior experience. The first thing was the feeling of everything melting away, of someone else taking control. When flying there are generally so many rules to be obeyed, and times when specific things can happen that I generally feel like, as a passenger, I'm actually a co-pilot. Lights tell you when you can and can't move. Announcements indicate (because I use a lap-top and iPad) when it's safe to read, write or listen to your music. Food and drink are administered at precise times. All

Collected links

1. Hitchcock meets Angry Birds . 2. A Romney advisor was involved with what looks like a pretty nasty Lebanese militia . 3. The idiotic Texas assault on Planned Parenthood . One more chapter in the ongoing "conservatives don't care about the effects of their policies, only the social signaling they display" series. 4. The developing world is still doing okay . 5. DeLong on the ECB .