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Showing posts from May, 2012

Job!

So, I don't think I've mentioned this yet, but I've got an official job at the Washington Monthly. It's basically a handyman kind of job, where I keep the business side going on a daily basis, and do anything else that needs doing, like some guest-blogging. It's not exactly a well-paid job, and there aren't benefits, but given that it's the Monthly I think it's about as good as could be expected. Obviously there are a lot of opportunities here too, but I think the most important part is that I really like the place and the people. A lot of people I know these days are stuck in jobs making a lot more money than me, but doing things they hate with people they don't like. I'm young, with very low overhead, and I think the side benefits of having a job you really like in the right field is easily worth the low pay. I'll stay here for awhile, count my blessings, and try to get some more stuff published.

Burst DC Pipe a Glimpse at Our Rotting Foundations

Every once in awhile you get a look beneath the surface of things, usually when something breaks. Today it was a water main outside the Monthly office building, which meant that every building affected had to be closed by order of the fire marshal. You can see in the picture I took quite a lot of water was running down the storm drains, but that's nothing compared to the garage flooding nearby. Here's a little local news segment on it. Apparently the main was 65 years old, which is actually younger than the DC average of 77 years old. (In case you're bad at math, that means the average pipe was put in 1935 .) Some DC pipes are even older, dating back to the 19th century. As you might expect, this isn't the only time a pipe has burst--just by accident I found the story of another broken main in DC from earlier this month. Apparently, there are an average of 450 breaks a year. It's a nationwide problem, of course, due mostly to neglect, which is only getting w

Broadband Could Be Cheaper

Matt Yglesias says if American broadband sucks, we should blame the customers : But in this particular case, we're not really talking about innovation at all. What's galling—to those of us who are galled by it—about America's broadband infrastructure is that we don't need more innovation. The relevant technology has been invented. What we need are more holes in the ground so that we can fill them with fiber optic cables. This is an expensive proposition, and the basic problem here is that when Verizon dipped its toes into making the investment it turned out that customers didn't want to pay for it. People who write about tech policy on the internet for a living place an unusually high subject value on high-speed internet access, so the resulting situation is frustrating for us. But the problem is really with the customers rather than the companies. There simply aren't enough people who want to pay a premium price for premium service. An iPhone, which I don&

More on the FDA

One of the posts I did at the Monthly was on the FDA's approval process . Rand Paul got a proposal passed saying the FDA must accept science done in the EU and elsewhere in the developed world into their approval process, with the idea of speeding things along. Alex Tabarrok proposed that any drug or treatment approved in the industrialized world (meaning Canada, the EU, Japan, Australia, New Zealand, and South Korea) would receive automatic approval here in the US in 90 days, and I somewhat hastily agreed. The background here is that the FDA is notoriously slow about new drug and treatment approval; personally I'd like to see the artificial pancreas delivered as fast as possible for my father, who despite being a generally healthy, slim guy, developed type I diabetes a couple years back. Commenters on the post brought up thalidomide , which is surely worth considering. Briefly, that was a drug used for a short time in Britain, Australia, and elsewhere used to treat mornin

Blogtastic

Reflecting back on my stint blogging for the Monthly's Political Animal headliner blog, I have a few thoughts: 1) It ain't easy. Being able to crank out ~12 posts in a day is, when I think about it, an extremely strange skill. You've got to be a fast writer, a faster reader, and able to come up with a coherent point (little ones count) about issues extremely quickly. 2) I have some talent at it. Not to toot my own horn, but I think given that it was my first time I did a reasonable job. By the standards of, say, Matt Yglesias, I'd say it was pretty amateurish--I had some repurposed posts from this blog, and a couple posts that I knew were half-assed when I was writing them--but on the other hand, I thought I had a couple of solid ones too. That was by far the most blogging I've done in a single day, and adjusting for my lack of experience I'd give myself a B+. Give me a bit of practice and I think I could keep up with the big dogs. 3) Most importantly, I

Antietam

It seemed like a good idea for Memorial Day to go out to one of the Civil War battlefields, so we took a trip out to Antietam. A good time, but also practice for the future. Anyone know of some good, basic podcasts for the classic battles? Anything that gives social context and not just a dull accounting of who died where and how would be the best.

Private Equity and Extractive Institutions

Chris Hayes sparked a debate on Twitter last night with the following debate proposal: Resolved: Bain Capital is bad for America. Or Resolved: It would be better if there was no private equity industry. Which prompted Noah Smith to leap to private equity's defense : Anyway, I generally support private equity. Why? Because of Japan. Fact 1: In Japan, there is no big private equity industry , because it is very difficult to do a leveraged buyout of a company. The Japanese government allows companies to defend themselves from takeovers in ways that are illegal in America. Also, Japanese companies often hold each other's shares, a practice known as "cross-shareholding", which tends to prevent hostile takeovers . Cross-shareholding creates huge financial risks ; however, many of the Japanese companies that engage in cross-shareholding are big banks that are backed by the government (much as ours are here in the U.S., but more explicitly), so this risk is assumed b

Do Authors Have a Moral Right to Profit?

I'd like to come back to this post again, talking about copyright and author's right to sales. Since it's been awhile, let's establish again that it's a response to a point from Kevin Drum: I am, as always, speaking only for myself, but I think this is too cramped. The Constitution says that the purpose of patents and copyright is to "promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts," but the fact that the Constitution says this doesn't mean it's the only reason to grant patents and copyrights. There's another reason too: because creators have a moral right to profit from their works. In real life, pretty much everyone acts as if they believe this, and I suspect that for most of us it's the real underpinning of our support for IP law.  To which I replied: I don't think this works, though as a broke-ass writer I would much like it to be true. The act of writing, or making music, or whatever, is not an intrinsically worthy undertaki

Poor Man Blogging

Pardon a bit of poverty bitching. I had what might be a decent post all planned out for last night, but instead of writing I spent most of the evening trying to fix a leak in my crappy inflatable mattress which came with the basement. It's actually pretty good sleeping, by my standards anyway, but I like a firm bed and this one was getting saggy quick. I found the hole, but couldn't get one of the included patches to hold, so had to get up several times during the night to reflate. Anyway, here's a picture from some National Park-ing I did last weekend with friends. Be with you later.

"Of course we believe these things..."

Stumbled onto this little clip here, and it really stuck in my head. Obviously, it's pitch-perfect for current times, but it's interesting to watch the self-control that FDR could muster. Watch his hands tremble as he touches his nose, but how he keeps the grinning jauntiness going, just short of smug but not hitting it. He looks every inch the confident leader. Also funny how scathing folks could be with the sarcasm back then. Politics has never been for the thin-skinned.

Programming note

As much as I loathe low-density suburbs near heavy rail stations, it is sort of nice to walk around the quiet leafy streets near my house. Anyway, I'm visiting a friend in Virginia today, so regularly scheduled posting will resume shortly.

TED and Economic Inequality

The above TED talk, by Richard Wilkinson, is from October 2011, and it's all about economic inequality. There's quite a lot of buzz today about another talk on economic inequality which was recorded, then quashed by TED officials. You can check out the full transcript here , from National Journal . At first glance, this is quite a strange discrepancy. Both talks are on economic inequality, and they do differ a bit, but if anything the Wilkinson talk is more radical. The gist of his is that once a country has reached "developed" status, wealth doesn't much matter for the health of that society, broadly speaking (including things like longevity, mental illness, crime, prison population, poverty, etc). Instead equality is what matters. More equal societies are better. The censored talk, given by venture capitalist Nick Hanauer, makes a fairly banal point that starting a successful business depends entirely on having a populatio

Cowen Done Right

Lest you think I'm just about bitching how Tyler Cowen sucks, take a gander at this post . It's Cowen at his best: Another practical upshot is that you still can believe in labor market hysteresis, as presented by DeLong and Summers. Without some analysis like the above, the DeLong/Summers claims are otherwise contradicted by American post-Depression productivity once joblessness lifted. Where were the long-term scars? Well, they were fixed but it wasn’t easy. So the relevance of hysteresis can be saved, but we still are left with proper stimulus being very difficult to do, unemployment being quite sticky, and proper policy requiring lots of structural attention. The Great Depression is evidence for all of those views, not against them. Important things to be thinking about for the future.

The Good Thing About Uncontrolled Financial Panics

Matt Yglesias had some recent skepticism about the idea of breaking up too-big-to-fail banks: This all just backs in to the point that even though the phrase "too big to fail" has caught the public imagination, it's never been clear that size is relevant . The point of bailouts is generally to prevent panics where insolvency at one institution leads to a liquidity crisis at many institutions. If you have a larger number of smaller institutions, it's perhaps true that any given failure is less likely to spark panic but you're also more likely to have failure. He continued today : Contrary to myth, there's no such thing as a "small enough to fail" depository institutions in the United States nor are small banks immune to terrible decisions and bankrupting themselves. But what happens is that in the FDIC resolution process the depositors get the overwhelming majority of their money back, the stockholders get nothing, and the managers get fired. I

Tyler Cowen and Convincing People

There was a recent object lesson in the limits of Tyler's Delphic Oracle approach that I was talking about the other day. He was talking about austerity, and how the anti-austerity faction, broadly speaking, hasn't properly analyzed it: Going back to my initial post on European fiscal policy , there are many upset commentators but in general they are not grasping these points much less responding to them or showing some level of understanding which is deeper than my own.  I am more than willing to admit that there are deeper understandings yet than what I offer in this post, but we are not at them yet, not in this discourse at least.  I don’t wish to respond point-by-point to some of the writings in the blogosphere, but given the above, Ryan Avent also is not looking deeply enough . Both he and Brad Plumer did not see that the posts in question clearly distinguished between spending cuts and “austerity” (Brad did issue what is arguably a correction.) I admire both b

Robert Caro and History, ctd

On Twitter Alec MacGillis graciously responded to my previous post , making the appropriate point that I had not addressed Caro's support for the filibuster. Here's the quote, from a WSJ  profile : In 2004, when Senate Republicans were threatening to end Democrats' filibustering of judicial nominees by implementing "the nuclear option," Kennedy called Mr. Caro "out of the blue" and asked if he would come to Washington, D.C., and explain to the freshman senators the importance of preserving the filibuster. After their joint lobbying effort succeeded, Kennedy asked Mr. Caro to introduce him for a speech at the 2004 Democratic National Convention. I agree, that's a foolish speech in hindsight, but I'm not sure we can take this at face value. Here's the thing. Caro says his books are about power, and he is well known for having an extremely  realistic view of how power actually operates in this country. His portrayals of Johnson and Robert M

The Graveyard of the Colorado, Part II

Dead Horse Point, via Wikimedia [ This is part II of my dad's story about Cataract Canyon. Part I is here . ] We boatmen types were anxious to see the first rapid anyway, so we take off at a lope trying to catch a glimpse of the Moki boat going through, but it’s a half mile and hopeless. He’s gone. The rapid is a quarter mile long and has but two waves. Two tumultuous heaving Himalayan waves with whirling vortices of confused turbulence erupting on their surface and crests of foam and backlit amber water that built and broke from all directions and rolled down the looming face in rushing fronts the height of a man. It took your breath away. Our tallest Scandinavian boatman, Eric, rounded the last corner, raised his eyes to the spectacle, missed a step and twisted his ankle, big time. We cut him a crutch and went back to camp. Our first few minutes at Spanish Bottom hadn’t been all positive. Downstream prospects were nil. Eric was a functional monopod. Another boatman, Greg,

Robert Caro and History

Alec MacGillis is not a fan of Caro's attachment to the "great man" theory of history: But it’s also been clear to me for some time now that Caro’s exhaustive, colorful depiction of Johnson’s rise to power in Washington has not exactly been helpful when it comes to our country’s weakness for the Great Man Theory of politics and history. How many times in the past few years did you hear pundits and liberals lamenting that Barack Obama was unable to get more of his agenda passed because he lacked the strong-arm, big-cojones gumption of ole LBJ? Never mind that the Congress of LBJ’s day was vastly less polarized by party (Southern Democrats had not yet flipped to Republican) or that the filibuster was reserved for only certain matters (say, blocking civil rights legislation) rather than as a matter of routine. No, all this country needs is a true ball-busting leader to save the day. Reading Caro's books and listening to him talk, it's definitely the case that he

Glow Opera With a Helicopter

Robert Caro, Live

Here's the video of last night's event with Robert Caro and Mike Allen. It was very good, despite what were mostly insipid DC insider questions from the insipid DC insider Allen. Caro was so charming and genuine and took Allen's dumbass questions so seriously that there was a great discussion almost in spite of the moderator. It was interesting to me that despite Allen's self-conscious attempts to be clever and witty, Caro was by far the funnier participant. He has this great self-effacing genuineness that is hard to find these days. Anyway, that's one big benefit of living in an important city. Furthermore, I got a copy of the book signed by the author!

Collected Links

1. Could geo-engineering really prevent climate change ? 2. Why is there something rather than nothing ? 3. More Republican governance by hostage-taking . 4. How will the future change your politics ? 5. Fascinating story on infinite airline passes . 6. Decent profile of Mark Zuckerberg .

More on South Africa and Unemployment

Tyler Cowen very graciously links to my explanation of unemployment in South Africa: "I told him I would try to answer the question, but after a bit of research I don’t find myself getting much further than his suggestions." I take that to mean not that I've captured all the nuances, but that my (probably pretty half-assed) explanation at least hits most of the major points. For me, the important thing about South Africa in this regard is it's a gut check for how seriously one takes ideas. The place is a kind of a dark mirror of the United States, where the optimal policies really include  a lot of neoliberalism and Republican union-busting. (In moderation.) Exercises like that are important to avoid sloganeering and tribal groupthink.

"See these fists? They're getting ready to f*ck you up."

Today in vicious jackbooted thuggery comes via Reason , with a video of a swarm of cops tasing and beating a mentally ill homeless man, Kelly Thomas, into a coma (from which he  later died ) while he apologizes and cries for his father. I've watched this, and I warn you, it takes a strong stomach. I think it's important to realize how this thing went down, but I won't judge you if you don't watch. The beating starts about 15:00. It's another example of the rot in our elite institutions . Law enforcement are among the most powerful government employees--tasked with exercising violence in the name of the state. They should in a just society be among the most restrained and careful with that power, heavily trained to avoid confrontation and escalation, to use violence only when absolutely necessary. They should be professionals . Watch, if you can, the swaggering, swinging dick cop, who is clearly just looking for the tiniest excuse to pound the piss out of this

Bring Forth the Book of Genocides

I'm onto Kings II in the KJV, and boy it's nice to be past the worst of the bloodcurdling genocides : And Moses was wroth with the officers of the host, with the captains over thousands, and captains over hundreds, which came from the battle. And Moses said unto them, Have ye saved all the women alive? Behold, these caused the children of Israel, through the counsel of Balaam, to commit trespass against the Lord in the matter of Peor, and there was a plague among the congregation of the Lord. Now therefore kill every male among the little ones, and kill every woman that hath known man by lying with him. But all the women children, that have not known a man by lying with him, keep alive for yourselves. Not an original thought, surely, to read that passage and recoil in horror. Modern Christians have developed some elaborate rationales  to excuse God and their holy book. I think it's a worthy exercise--better by far to have an expurgated religion than a literal one, especi

The Science of Helicopters, ctd

Wall Street as Electoral Power Source

The big read today is Nick Confessore's  lovely piece in the New York Times Magazine  about the big Wall Street financiers who are deserting President Obama in droves: For the next hour, the donors relayed to Messina what their friends had been saying. They felt unfairly demonized for being wealthy. They felt scapegoated for the recession. It was a few weeks into the Occupy Wall Street movement, with mass protests against the 1 percent springing up all around the country, and they blamed the president and his party for the public’s nasty mood. The administration, some suggested, had created a hostile environment for job creators. [...] Obama far outraised his Republican rival, John McCain, on Wall Street — around $16 million to $9 million — and Goldman Sachs executives sent Obama more money than employees of any other company in the world. But four years, one recession and a host of battles — over financial regulation and the nomination of Elizabeth Warren, over Dodd-Frank and

Shep Smith Tells It Like It Is

Something Tells Me This Person Won't Be Subscribing