Ryan Cooper

It's my last crunch time at the Monthly , so here are some links to keep you busy: 1. A critical look at ADHD drugs . 2. Mitt Romney's Massachusetts heath care plan is a galloping success . 3. Radley Balko takes on the developing moral panic over prescription painkillers . For my money Balko is one of the ten best reporters in America, up there with Jane Mayer and Charlie Savage. I know where he's coming from, and disagree with a lot of it, but he's honest about his biases, focused on the right sorts of stuff, and does his homework. Great man. 4. Why we get the drunk-spins . 5. An old piece from Sports Illustrated  on Mitt Romney and the Olympics . 6. How do states behave when they get nuclear weapons ? 7. How Swedes and Norwegians broke the power of the one percent .

SMBC takes this XKCD way, way further .

Steve Randy Waldman has one of his typical long, subtle series ( one , two , three ) looking at the concept of opaque finance: Financial systems help us overcome a collective action problem. In a world of investment projects whose costs and risks are perfectly transparent, most individuals would be frightened. Real enterprise is very risky. Further, the probability of success of any one project depends upon the degree to which other projects are simultaneously underway. A budding industrialist in an agrarian society who tries to build a car factory will fail. Her peers will be unable to supply the inputs required to make the thing work. If by some miracle she gets the factory up and running, her customer-base of low capital, low productivity farm workers will be unable to afford the end product. Successful real investment does not occur via isolated projects, but in waves, forward thrusts by cohorts of optimists, most of whom crash and burn, some of whom do great things for the world ...

Locked myself out of my house like the idiot that I am. It wouldn't be nearly so frustrating if I hadn't done this once before and as a result become very paranoid about forgetting my keys, usually triple- and quadruple-checking to see if they're there. The one time I don't have them I stroll cheerfully out, probably thinking about some useless trivia. Then, of course, I just miss the train to go down and borrow my housemate's keys so I'm sitting here listening to Metro agitprop: "EXCUSE ME, IS THAT YOUR BAG?"

This metro stop is about a five-minute walk from my house: The background here is that a month or so ago they demolished an old house on a great big lot, probably the better part of an acre, right across the street from the Forest Glen metro station on the Red Line. You can't see, but if you zoom in on the picture the sign across the street says that they're going to be building some single-family homes soon. The natural question here is just what in God's name would make a developer or real estate agent think that single-family homes are the best use of vacant land literally ten steps from a heavy rail station. There are trainloads of money to be made, and good public policy to boot. One would hope if we're going to spend hundreds of millions of dollars of taxpayer money on public transport the logical thing to do would be to put up big-ass apartment buildings, or at least some townhouses, near the stops when possible. The answer, of course, is that if you look ...

1. Why is Type 1 diabetes rising ? 2. Google will now systematically collect all your personal information across its entire platform . Ugh. It's hard for me to imagine extricating myself from their tentacles. I'm using their browser, their email, Blogger, Android, Reader, and Docs just right now. 3. Excellent Cory Doctorow essay on the coming war against general computing . I'm not sure if I'm quite as pessimistic as he is. A lot of his case rests on peripherals like 3D printing, which would be a lot easier to control than computers. 4. Powerful New Yorker piece on the America's prison hell . 5. Ryan Lizza on the Obama memos .

Joe Biden was in Reno the other day, doing one of those stock vice president speeches where he made a bold call for high school kids to go to college, according to the Reno Gazette-Journal: Vice President Joe Biden spent time Thursday imploring Galena High School students to make some kind of post-secondary education a mandate upon graduation from high school. The whole thing would be utterly trivial if it weren’t for the fact that Nevada’s higher education system is starting to resemble something out of Cormac McCarthy. A blighted dystopian hellscape where the few surviving students wander aimless in the wastes. Ok, slight exaggeration. But Nevada’s higher education system has been hit hard since the recession. In Reno, state tuition is up almost 60 percent. Cuts for this fiscal year alone were 14 percent, coming on top of a 13 percent cut from previous years. Its six-year graduation rate is a lousy 40 percent . Don’t take my word for it. Listen to Nevada Higher Education C...

Kevin Drum ponders Mitt Romney's anti-China paranoia: Are we doomed to a future in which we are mere vassels to a burgeoning and aggressive Chinese hegemony? If you vote for Barack Obama, yes! In fact, according to Mitt Romney, he's actively working toward such future. But seriously. Are we? I don't think so. Sure, China is going to grow and there will inevitably be some shifts in influence as that happens, but if I had to make a 50-year bet on any region of the world, I'd pick the United States. Europe has demographic and growth problems; Russia is doomed once their energy resources run out; Africa will remain a basket case for the foreseeable future; India is starting from a poor base and I'm not convinced they have the governance or institutions to maintain rapid growth over the long term; and China — well, China has its problems, as I've noted multiple times in this space. Ok, whatever. My natural question when talking about stuff like this is: who cares...

Joe Wilcox provides a good roundup . These two points get to the heart of the issue: This is a software EULA which for the first time attempts to restrict what I can do with the output of the app, rather than with the app itself. No consumer EULA I've ever seen goes this far. Would you be happy if Garage Band required you to sell your music through the iTunes Store, or if iPhoto had license terms that kept you from posting your own photos online? It’s a step backward for computing freedom and we should resist it... Restricting use is what EULAs have traditionally done. This one does something different: it restricts what you can do with the output of the software after the software is closed and put away. If you make a document using iBooks Author, you aren't allowed to sell that document except through Apple, ever, for the rest of your life. And a bit about the legal background: Qualifying that I'm not a lawyer, I know a few things about copyrights, as someone who writ...

This was an inspired choice: Via Sullivan .

1. The big  NYT  piece on Apple's manufacturing that has everyone talking . 2. A heartbreaking piece from the same . 3. Are you an Afrikaner? Or do you know any? This guy would like a genotype for science . It's legit. 4. Apple's mind-bogglingly greedy and evil license agreement . Title pretty much says it all. 5. Some thoughts from Steve Randy Waldman on opaque finance . More on this later.

From this extremely encouraging post by James Wimberley: Take my three resources, together more than enough to meet all US energy needs. The overall picture is clear. Colorado has everything. South and West of Colorado has solar. North-East of Colorado (the Plains) has wind. The Rockies have geothermal. The Northeast has nothing apart from offshore wind (which generates temporary construction jobs but not rents). This map, in particular, ought to have Colorado politicians'— particularly those on the Western Slope—eyes bugging out of their heads: Ya-hoo! I'm smelling me a geothermal bonanza! A good time for, say, Scott Tipton to be lobbying for some tax credits. As Wimberley says: At present geothermal is is numerically insignificant. I put it in because I bet this will change. Geothermal is the Mercedes of renewable energy: it’s expensive but top quality. Íslandsbanki (the Icelanders are experts on this) give the capital cost per kw capacity at $4,000, against $2,600 for...

Arby's Customer: 'Look At All This Beef I Got!'

Check it out: Obviously not nearly enough policy-wise, but rhetoric-wise he's miles away from the drug warrior frame. From here it's only a short step to evidence-based, rather than punishment-based, drug strategy.

A great unreleased Deadmau5 track:

I'm considering a smallish project: trying to tease out the factors which make for South Africa's staggering unemployment rate— at last count 25 percent . I've been reading up on it a bit myself and soliciting questions from some random economist types (also, to see if there is any consensus at all). A further question is how it manages to survive with such a problem. That level of unemployment was a grinding, horrible crisis which shook the foundations of our democracy during the Great Depression, but South Africa has been dealing with it basically since 1994, when it could actually be called a real country. Stay tuned for further developments.

Phil Plait captions : "About 700 light years away sits the expanding death cry of a star: the Helix Nebula, a four-light-year wide gas cloud blasted out when a star that was once like the Sun gave up its life."

PROTECT IP / SOPA Breaks The Internet from Fight for the Future on Vimeo . CONTACT YOUR CONGRESSCRITTER TODAY . Tell them not to break the internet. I gave some poor Mark Udall staffer a extensive—though polite—rant. My idea for a tech company blackout—though clearly other more important people had the same idea—has been adopted today. Wikipedia is down. Reddit and Mozilla are down. Google, though it remains functional, has blacked out its banner in support. If I weren't a little uncomfortable with fiddling with my site code (and more realistically, if I had more than a dozen readers) I would do the same. For more, here's Julian Sanchez with SOPA: An Architecture for Censorship . Also, Dan Gillmor makes the important point that this really isn't about stopping piracy. It's about controlling information: So, why do [SOPA supporters] make unsupportable statements? Because they don't dare make an honest argument. If they were saying what they believe, i...

The translator is a bit distracting, but everyone should see this. Visit msnbc.com for breaking news , world news , and news about the economy Hard not to run howling down the street tearing out your hair.

Brokaw cracked with the back of an axe the shinbone on an antelope and the hot marrow dripped smoking on the stones. They watched him. The subject was the campaign. Polls say that people are disgusted with modern politics, said Fineman. Brokaw smiled, his face shining with grease. What right man would have it any other way? he said. The electorate does indeed count politics an evil, said Matthews. Yet there’s many people concerned about it just the same. It makes no difference what men think of politics, said Brokaw. The campaign endures. As well ask men what they think of stone. The campaign was always here. Before man was, the primary season waited for him. The ultimate trade awaiting its ultimate practitioner. That is the way it was and will be. That way and not some other way. He turned to Ignatius, from whom he’d heard some whispered slur or demurrer. Ah Davy, he said. It’s your own trade we honor here. Why not rather take a small bow. Let each acknowledge...

It's not comprehensive, but a truly amazing look at the rot that has taken root in Mzanzi's poorest slums. It focuses on the random mob murder of a Zimbabwean immigrant named Farai. I liked this graf in particular: At age 17, the Republic of South Africa is still young enough to be appreciated as a marvel. The “skunk of the world,” as Nelson Mandela called the apartheid state, has been peacefully transformed into a constitutional democracy. There are disappointments, without question. The optimism of the early years — the glorious idea that South Africa would be an inspiration of enlightened leadership — has long faded. The frail, 92-year-old Mandela may remain the most beloved and respected man on the planet, but during its years in power, the organization he championed, the African National Congress, has become, in the words of the historian Martin Meredith, “just another grubby political party on the make.” Check it out .

MS over at Democracy in America, talking about the new MLK memorial, suggests it's about the monuments: There are many culprits in the devolution of much of Washington into a cloddish, ugly, characterless city. And in some neighbourhoods the past 20 years have seen momentum in the opposite direction. But the relentless drive towards ever more memorials is definitely part of the problem. There hasn't been an interesting or culturally significant one built since the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in the early 1980s. The FDR memorial is weird. The second-world-war memorial is pompous, empty of ideas, and militaristic; if the other guys had won, they probably would have built something that looked very similar. Too true. Though I like a lot of the monuments and museums, the overall effect is lame. We could definitely stand to relax some of the insane restrictions on the style of new construction at the least.

Never seen a better orator. Better than Hitler, I think.

1. This is your brain on a really old-school drug . 2. Some intriguing finds in the Amazon . 3. Amazing pictures of a cruise ship sinking off the coast of Tuscany . 4. GAHHH ! 5. A new bill could strip citizenship from Americans accused of "hostilities" . I was vaguely wondering why they didn't quickly bash through something like this before they assassinated Al-Awlaki.

( Hey Pops, check this out! ) When I was back home it was unseasonably warm and dry, and I did a lot of mountain biking with my dad as a result. It's great fun, and good exercise. I'd like to think that I'm somewhat more than passably mediocre, but watching this I see how really, I'm only just out of training wheels: Sheesh. Ah well, can't let being way worse than the world's best at something interfere with the fun. Still the best cardio I can imagine.

SOPA supporter (the break-the-internet bill) Lamar Smith is a copyright violator : "I do not see anywhere on the screen capture that you have provided that the image was attributed to the source (me). So my conclusion would be that Lamar Smith's organization did improperly use my image. So according to the SOPA bill, should it pass, maybe I could petition the court to take action against www.texansforlamarsmith.com." He should clearly be convicted of a felony and go to prison for five years . And Arthur Laffer, famous supply-side bullshitter, is being sued : Fifty-two investors claim fund managers associated with supply-side economist Arthur Laffer took $3.1 million to prop up a Ponzi scheme, then said nothing as their money was "wasted with no reasonable expectation of recovery." Now if only Thomas Friedman's house could get ransacked by like Belgium or something.

Michael Mandel has a new piece (which I fact-checked) in the latest issue of the Monthly arguing that economic statistics are exaggerating the productivity of American workers. It's an interesting idea, and might be correct; I can't judge that. At the end, though, he dismisses the idea of more economic stimulus: For example, economists and journalists repeatedly say that the U.S. economy won’t recover and jobs won’t come back until the consumer starts spending again. That seems to imply that the U.S. needs another massive jolt of fiscal stimulus directed toward pumping up consumers. But which producers would really benefit from such a jolt? If U.S. manufacturers have cut back on factory jobs because of higher domestic productivity, then boosting consumer demand will indeed cause the factories to hire back American workers. But if cutbacks in manufacturing employment have come from increases in supply chain productivity, then giving Americans more money to spend on clothing a...

Cullen Murphy has a great, and horrifying, article that draws a straight line from the Dark Ages to today: The public profile of torture is higher than it has been for many decades. Arguments have been mounted in its defense with more energy than at any other time since the Middle Ages. The documentary record pried from intelligence agencies could easily be mistaken for Inquisition transcripts. One big difference—today, it's worse: The Inquisition, with its stipulation that torture and interrogation not jeopardize life or cause irreparable harm, actually set a more rigorous standard than some proponents of torture insist on now. The 21st century’s Ad extirpanda is the so-called Bybee memo, issued by the Justice Department in 2002 (and later revised). In it, the Bush administration put forth a very narrow definition, arguing that for an action to be deemed torture, it must produce suffering “equivalent in intensity to the pain accompanying serious physical injury, such as organ ...

Check this out: If you can't see, the water boiling on the stove is somehow making the pot vibrate on the burner. What's causing it? My hypothesis is that the burner and pot make for a barely-balanced system that can rock back and forth just a bit, and the bubbles coming up are prodding it such that it gets a harmonic oscillation going. Thoughts?

There's been some smoke in the lefty blogosphere over Ron Paul recently. Glenn Greenwald argued that, despite his many flaws (abjectly racist newsletters published under his name, for example), Paul is a valuable presence : But the point that she’s making is important, if not too subtle for the with-us-or-against-us ethos that dominates the protracted presidential campaign: even though I don’t support him for President, Ron Paul is the only major candidate from either party advocating crucial views on vital issues that need to be heard, and so his candidacy generates important benefits. Kevin Drum disagrees, saying that Paul's crankery is so thorough he's doing more damage than good : If you want to advance the cause of a less interventionist foreign policy, you need to find a way to persuade the American public to agree with you. Ron Paul doesn't do that. He's never done that. He's such a stone libertarian that he literally doesn't know the language to d...

Some good longform stuff from here and there: 1. Lakhdar Boumediene tells how he was wrongly imprisoned in Guantanamo . For seven years . Read it. 2. The psychology of procrastination . 3. The man who sailed his house . 4. Gangs in El Salvador . 5. Wikipedia and the death of the expert . 6. Inside the mind of an octopus .

My first one of these, check it out:

Flying back to DC today. Here's the lovely Ute Mountain Casino.

One of the most obnoxious things I run into as a fact checker is paywalled papers. Journals and places like JSTOR usually want you to pay an outrageous sum for a single paper—usually $25 or more. If you google around, you can often find the paper for free someplace, or someone with a lot of twitter followers will have mercy on you and get their followers to send it to you. It's still a pain though, and increasingly anachronistic. On another plane of outrage is this recent effort from Elsevier (another publishing cartel). The National Institutes of Health came up with a "Public Access Policy," mandating that all taxpayer-funded research should be public domain. Elsevier doesn't like this : But the policy has been quite unpopular with a powerful publishing cartels that are hellbent on denying US taxpayers access to and benefits from research they paid to produce. This industry already makes generous profits charging universities and hospitals for access to the biomed...

I made it back from Utah late last night, and didn't manage to get to sleep until 2. I'm packing it in early today, but for now here are some links: 1. Julian Sanchez annihilates some bogus statistics thrown around by media companies . 2. How the meth panic can impede good research . 3. I thought fish and chips were already popular in South Africa . 4. Why do humans have chins ? 5. A tyrannical theory of politics throughout society, or How to Be a Dictator . I'll be back tomorrow with some better stuff.

I'm heading over to my old Utah childhood hometown to help my dad with some roofing. Might be there won't be cell phone service, in which case I'll be back on Thursday.

Saw this guy on 60 minutes today: Freakishly, frighteningly badass. See here for more.

If it's Sunday, it's my dad's world famous omelettes:

Just hit it in my time zone, listening to Garrison Keillor sing Auld Lang Syne, feeling oddly melancholy. Hope all is well with you, and may next year be better than the last.