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Showing posts from March, 2012

Collected links

1. Check out this sweet solar-powered plane, about to make its longest flight yet . 2. Diagnosing the Republican brain . 3. Peter Beinart responds to the critics of his new book (which calls for a boycott of Israeli settlements). 4. Colorado is already on fire!?  Better get used to it, I guess. 5. Economists need to get over their physics envy .

*Freedom and Fairness*

I read this one on the advice of Tyler Cowen, and quite liked it. As Cowen says , it's an excellent introduction to New Zealand history, and worth reading for that alone. Kiwi history is actually really interesting, and the parallels were quite surprising at times. Here are the main things that jumped out at me: 1) Ideas matter. The way in which colonists of each country treated their native populations is instructive. In America, the Indians were treated with unconscionable viciousness and cruelty, up to and including genocide. In New Zealand, while relations between colonists and the Maori were strained, and at times deeply unfair and bloody, they were far, far more decent than here. Fischer explains this, convincingly, as the progress of Enlightenment ideals. New Zealand was founded about 200 years after America, and it made a huge difference. 2) The book could have used some more quantitative economic explanation. The US has a much higher GDP per capita, but also vastly

The Rise of Lysenkoism on the Right

Chris Mooney pulls out the following figure: The figure basically says it all. The upgraded picture is swiped from Kevin Drum. UPDATE: A reader asks me to explain the word "Lysenkoism." Lysenko was a Soviet pseudo-biologist who rejected the ideas of Mendelian genetics in favor of some cockamamie baloney about acquired characteristics. Lysenko's doctrine, supported by Stalin, became enforced party doctrine, and Soviet biology was set back a generation. The Wikipedia summary is remarkably apt: Lysenkoism is used colloquially to describe the manipulation or distortion of the scientific process as a way to reach a predetermined conclusion as dictated by an ideological bias, often related to social or political objectives. Conservative beliefs on evolution and climate change (among others) quite obviously fit this description.

Resolved: I Will Write More About Climate

David Roberts was quoted the other day by Harold Pollack: For climate change, there are very few Jonathan Cohns, Ezra Kleins, and Merrill Goozners – very few in that non-government, non-NGO middle tier who combine serious knowledge of policy with the ability to write for the general public. The level of policy knowledge on cap-and-trade is abysmal. That goes for the journalists, pundits, and pols just as much as the public. Something clicked when I read this. I've been feeling recently that I'm sort meandering in my purpose here, that I need to find a bit of a specialty and settle down some. Not that I won't keep publishing lots of random crap, but that I should focus a bit more. Energy and climate make a lot of sense to me. I've got the science background. I'm a committed environmentalist--Edward Abbey is probably my favorite writer, even today. I know a bit about the policy, and the basic economic logic of externalities, but I don't have the policy de

Hunter S. Thompson on 9/11

Check it out : The towers are gone now, reduced to bloody rubble, along with all hopes for Peace in Our Time, in the United States or any other country. Make no mistake about it: We are At War now — with somebody — and we will stay At War with that mysterious Enemy for the rest of our lives. It will be a Religious War, a sort of Christian Jihad, fueled by religious hatred and led by merciless fanatics on both sides. It will be guerilla warfare on a global scale, with no front lines and no identifiable enemy. Osama bin Laden may be a primitive “figurehead” — or even dead, for all we know — but whoever put those All-American jet planes loaded with All-American fuel into the Twin Towers and the Pentagon did it with chilling precision and accuracy. The second one was a dead-on bullseye. Straight into the middle of the skyscraper. [...]  We are going to punish somebody for this attack, but just who or what will be blown to smithereens for it is hard to say. Maybe Afghanistan, maybe P

Peace Corps Article Background

I've been meaning to put this up for ages. But here is some background on my Peace Corps article--things that I referenced, or things that got left out of the article. 1. Read about the group that got the ball rolling on that 20/20 report . The group is called First Response Action, and it's dedicated to improving the situation of Peace Corps volunteers who were victims of rape and sexual assault. It was founded by another South Africa volunteer named Casey Frazee, who I have since met online. I've always supported that group wholeheartedly. I wanted to put a nod to them in the article, but couldn't find a good spot for it. 2. Read about the law FRA got passed in November . This was a big step forward for rape and sexual assault, certainly, but didn't completely address the general oversight issue. I again wanted to stick that in the article somewhere, but couldn't find a good spot. 3. Read the post that got me kicked out of PST . 4. Finally, if you'

Failure

Since I've arrived in DC last September I've been scraping by, living in a basement off scraps and charity. I've applied for around 200 writing jobs and been rejected from every one, even the corporate hack work I tried for in a fit of desperation. Today I add to that list of failure probably the best job so far: the American Prospect   writing fellowship . It always was a Hail Mary longshot—it's probably the most highly-coveted entry-level job for lefty magazine writing—but it still kinda smarts getting rejected from your dream job. What I'm realizing now is that journalism is a really tough business. I knew it before, I suppose, but it's only sinking in now. It's insular, competitive, nepotistic, in the midst of a painful paradigm shift, and most importantly, there are vastly, vastly many more people who want to do it than could possibly be paid for it. The only solution, of course, is to keep plugging away, and prepare for a lot more  rejection. Likel

Harnessing Vanity

Old man Coates had an interesting thought the other day about reading, riffing off a piece about not finishing books: I think Tim Parks--even as an aside- marks the border between a young reader and a mature one...It's often true that books improve as you delve in. But I don't think there's anything wrong with never making it through Ulysses . I think this is, strictly speaking, correct. Some books, even (especially?) highly lauded ones just don't work for everyone. I slogged through Ulysses  and felt, in the end, that most of Joyce's masterful technique was simply lost on me. I had one of those decoder ring books that explains what the fuck is happening, as well as a sample of the allusions and symbolism, etc., and while it was interesting to see how much work Joyce had gone through, and often his writing was delightfully good, in the end I was mostly just bored and confused. And yet, and yet. I've been recently appreciating what powerful motivators van

RTDH, ctd

A common experience writing on the internet is mulling over an idea in your head, putting down a sketch of your thoughts, checking your RSS feed, and finding that someone has done your idea better than you could have. Steve Randy Waldman pulled one of those on me this morning. He also read Ryan Avent and Matt Yglesias back-to-back, and had very nearly the same thoughts that I did about their theses, but more detailed and smarter. I looked for some grafs to expropriate, but really you should read the whole thing.

Opinion Survey

My father and myself have had a plan cooking for awhile: bundling up a few of our best stories as an ebook, and selling them on the usual platforms for $3-4. On the plus side, it would be a kind of cute book idea, father son thing, which could help sales. On the minus side, he has a lot more good stories than me, and it might seem like I was just trying to piggyback off his writing. On the plus side, it would still be a good impetus to get his stories put together, regardless of me... I could go on like this for some time. What do people think? Would you shell out a couple bucks for some really good stories? Should I just put my dad's together and sell those alone? Your input would be much appreciated.

New Madeon!

Huzzah!

Quote for the Day

From Michael O'Hare : "In Florida you may kill anyone who’s not in an iron lung machine, or comatose, at will, as long as you do it with no-one else around and you are willing to say you were scared of your victim at the time." Also see this excellent Gail Collins column . I'm not a big fan of gun control, but it looks like its time for some lefty pushback just to give the NRA something to fight against.

Mea Culpa

I should take another look at this post from yesterday. I saw this post by Conn Carroll and was exercised, rightly I think, by the howling errors contained therein. Obamacare's costs have doubled, he argues, by comparing summations of costs which included not only different sets of years in which the program was active, but also just different numbers of years. It wasn't just an apples-to-oranges fallacy, it was different numbers  of apples and oranges. A more elementary error would be hard to imagine. Energized by the old Someone Is Wrong on the Internet juice, and the correct possibility that I might get some traffic from the liberal healthcare wing, I banged out a quick bit of lefty snarking, calling Carroll all sorts of nasty names. In my hurry, I included not only the above critiques, but a comment about how a $1.76 trillion "gross costs" figure he mentioned did not appear in the CBO report. I was wrong about this. Not only was the figure in the report, it

Generational Warfare

Jamelle Bouie reports on the new Paul Ryan budget (which is only slightly less insane than the last one): For the last two years, Republicans have tried to defend the prerogatives of the elderly and near-elderly—opposing health care reform and anything else that would redistribute income to young people—for the sake of preserving their political coalition and providing benefits for the wealthy. The “makers” aren’t just rich people—it also includes the elderly people who feel entitled to the benefits they receive. If you forget how this is quite blatantly dividing the country, the obvious problem with this is that old people tend to die, and young people like myself will be mighty pissed if Ryan's cut-the-rope, devil-take-the-hindmost plan comes to pass. Relying on the forgetfulness of the voting public has seldom caused electoral problems, but I sense real anger if the Tea Party actually succeeds in gutting the welfare state. UPDATE: Yglesias slices up Ryan's blath

Collected links

1. I think we should just start assuming that every single electronic communication of any kind is being read by the NSA . 2. Brainstorming is bullshit . 3. Matt Taibbi goes after Bank of America . Fun piece. 4. In favor of OTC birth control . Count me in. 5. The New Yorker  on Tyler Clementi's suicide . Disturbing, but important. This case is much more complicated than people thought at first.

Tesla Coils Put to Their Original Purpose

Science is awesome: Nikola himself would be proud.

Conn Carroll Can't Count

Conn Carroll has an amazingly duplicitous post over at the Washington Examiner, titled " Yes, Obamacare's Costs Have Almost Doubled ." Here he is: New York Magazine 's Jonathan Chait, The New Republic 's Jonathan Cohn, and The Washington Post 's Ezra Klein all wrote posts have all written posts denying that Obamacare's costs have doubled since it became law. Below are the gross cost tables from both: 1) the March 18, 2010 CBO Obamacare cost estimate; and 2) the March 2012 Obamacare cost estimate. $1.76 trillion is not double $940 billion, but it's close. Throw in one more year of full implementation ($265 billion in 2022) and the real ten year gross cost of Obamacare is north of $2 trillion. Questions about the cost of government programs often involve time periods. Social Security, for example, has one cost over a single year and a different cost over five years, or 20 years. Looking at different numbers in this way allows us to think about h

Not Cynical Enough

In my Why Nations Fail  review I mentioned that their vision of elites is a bit cynical sometimes, even for me. Something I should add is that sometimes, it isn't cynical enough. Elites can be wholly self-interested, yes, but sometimes they are also straight-up  stupid and cruel , even in ways which step on their own interests.

Quick Trip to Space

Someone put some cameras on the solid rocket boosters of the shuttle:    What fascinates me about this is the sound. The quotidian creaking and whooshing make it seem so much more real.

Collected links

1. Prison makes you crazy . 2. Good piece on partisanship in churches . 3. Why we should care more about blowback . It used to be uncontroversial to think that people might be driven mad when our government blows up dozens of innocent civilians. 4. The online privacy debate is also about power . This is a great way of looking at the issue. Each person is not giving up all that much, but together, we are ceding corporations astounding influence. 5. Why 4G and 3G are bogus terms .

Political decay watch

Witness this awesome graf in Ezra Klein's latest Wonkbook: This is a bad time to do a half-measure on infrastructure. We have literally trillions of dollars in unmet infrastructure needs. We have massive unemployment in the construction sector. Materials are unusually cheap because of a depressed global economy. Borrowing is unusually cheap because we're one of the few safe havens left in the global financial market. And it's cheaper to repaid an aging bridge today than rebuild a crumbled one 10 years from now. So waiting to do the bulk of our infrastructure passing a half-measure on infrastructure investment later is like waiting till after the big sale ends to buy your groceries. It's just bad financial planning. Things are not working on the most fundamental level.

*Why Nations Fail* and George Carlin

I've just finished Why Nations Fail , and before I get into the argument, I'd like to sound a note (imagine a low D on a baritone sax) in favor of their deliciously cynical view of human leadership. It's not far from this (NSFW): Acemoglu and Robinson (A&R) would disagree that Carlin's description applies to America, but it's a remarkably apt summary of their view of failed states. (Really!) Even for successful countries, they don't credit individual morality at all , at least on the elite level. In their scheme, every leader of every country can be treated as interchangeable greedy assholes wholly concerned with their own interests. Or as Carlin might say, elites are interested in "their own power, keeping it, and expanding it wherever possible." Anyway, the book is about institutions . The book says there are basically two kinds in countries: extractive, and inclusive. Extractive ones are as you might expect, where the elite pins everyone d

Not All Evildoers Are Murderous Sociopaths

Jeremy Scahill had an excellent piece in The Nation  a couple days ago about how, according to Scahill and his sources, President Obama is leaning on Yemen to keep a journalist named Abdulelah Shaye imprisoned there because he had been reporting on things that Obama would have rather kept quiet, like revealing that US had killed civilians with cluster bombs, and interviewing accused terrorists like Anwar Al-Awlaki. Kevin Drum doesn't buy it : Everything that Shaye reported in 2010 had long since been common knowledge. Obama has suffered, as near as I can tell, literally zero embarrassment from this episode. The al Majala attack got a small bit of media attention when it happened and has been completely forgotten since. So what kind of person would pressure the Yemeni president to keep an innocent journalist in prison over a slight so tiny as to be nearly nonexistent? Almost literally, this would be the act of a sociopath. The U.S. government insists that Shaye is no mere jou

Goldman Sachs is not a trading company

The big news in financial circles is one Greg Smith's scathing exit memo on departure from Goldman. According to Smith, as Matt Taibbi pointed out all those years ago, Goldman really is a morally bankrupt con operation that makes money by screwing its clients. Matt Yglesias theorizes that this is about a change in business strategy for them: Translating out of indignationese, point c) is that trading is now the focus of the business. Points a) and b) are indicating that the client-advising side of the business is now compromised for the sake of the trading side. If that's true, then Smith is probably correct that clients will gravitate away from Goldman in the long term. But his claim that that spells death for the bank is wrong, that would just mean a further transformation of the focus of the business away from advising clients and toward trading. Yglesias appears to be badly mistaken here. On a tip from one of his commenters (ht: shubik), I checked out Goldman's late

More on overpopulation

Here's some more evidence  from Yglesias for the thesis that overpopulation is not a critical environmental issue: ...the most important point about global population growth is the point David Brooks makes today—it's slowing down almost everywhere and the global trend is clearly toward birthrates that are below the replacement level. Because of "demographic momentum" and rising life expectency, relatively few countries are poised for falling population in the short-term but Russia is already there, Japan will be soon, Spain and Italy will follow, and while China is difficult to predict they're looking at the sharpest cliff. You hear a lot that if everyone lived like Americans then we would need five Earths ' worth of resources to support everyone. That's true, but the converse is that if everyone lived like Ethiopians we could comfortably support 10 billion people or more. You might respond that would eat up all the available land, but if everyone in

Where taxes can be raised

So Kevin Drum is in the midst of an argument with Ezra Klein over his latest New Yorker  article. Ezra says the president isn't that good at convincing people, while Kevin disagrees somewhat. I think they both make good points, but I was struck by this passage from Kevin: Before 1980, it was possible to raise taxes both locally and at the federal level. After 1980 it became virtually impossible, and after the early 90s it became very nearly literally impossible. In Congress and at the polling place, where it really matters, public opinion was loud and clear: higher taxes were a killer. Mesa Verde, the Cortez economic support system I completely agree when it comes to the federal level (obviously), but I immediately thought of my old rinky-dink hometown of Cortez, Colorado , population ~8500. It's a pretty conservative place--our representative is the ur-shmuck  Tea Party hack Scott Tipton. You see, a few years back people had the idea that the local government should buil

Collected links

1. A great piece from GOOD  on the service jobs where my generation works . 2. I'm skeptical, but it looks like the MEK shills might get in some trouble . 3. The solar system is real big . 4. RIP otter foster mom . 5. Ezra Klein hits the even bigger time . 6. Before and after pictures of Japan and the tsunami damage .

Guest Post: Intoxicated

[ This is a column from the old man. ] We’ve all enjoyed those entries in the “Crime Wave Continues” section of this paper, where someone’s misadventure with law enforcement can be trace to being in an “intoxicated” state. The toxin, in most, cases is alcohol. An “intoxicated state” is being poisoned beyond the point you can function normally. Our laws cite a level of precisely 0.08% alcohol in your blood as what it takes to be legally intoxicated, but different substances are toxic at different levels and virtually anything can be toxic at some level of concentration. Excessive drinking of water, for instance, can cause an electrolytic imbalance called hyponatremia which can be fatal. Water is poisonous, but it takes a lot of it. Botulism toxin, the world’s deadliest known poison, is lethal at a dosage of 40 to 90 nanograms, which means it would take about five pounds of it to kill everyone on earth. Grain alcohol, or ethanol, the toxin we drink as a beverage, is generally prod

Department of WTF, terrorism bureau

Greenwald waxes righteous on the case of well-paid Washington insiders shilling for designated terrorist groups: How reprehensible is the conduct of Fran Townsend here? Just two years ago, she went on CNN to celebrate a Supreme Court decision that rejected First Amendment claims of free speech and free association in order to rule that anyone — most often Muslims — can be prosecuted under the “material support” statute simply for advocacy for a Terrorist group that is coordinated with the group. And yet, the minute Fran Townsend gets caught doing exactly that — not just out of conviction but also because she’s being paid by that Terrorist group — she suddenly invokes the very same Constitutional rights whose ersosions she cheered when it came to the prosecution of others. Now that her own liberty is at stake by virtue of getting caught being on the dole from a Terrorist group, she suddenly insists that the First Amendment allows her to engage in this behavior... The background here:

Department of WTF, helicopter bureau

Holy crap: I had no idea that was possible. Upside-down hovering with a helicopter? WTF?? And the outro music is pretty good too: <p><a href="http://ashellinthepit.bandcamp.com/track/17-polecat">17 - Polecat by A Shell in the Pit</a></p>

Springtime!

The blooms are coming out!

Collected links

1. Read the Derrick Bell short story that has the Brietbart swamps screaming racism . It's not too shabby, if a bit un-subtle. Racist, though? Not in the slightest. 2. A co-founder of Facebook just bought The New Republic. This is good news . 3. Some really interesting statistics on watchers of porn . 4. Carl Zimmer's latest piece on amateur biologists and mutant viruses . 5. The lunar orbiter has an amazing blog . High-res pictures of the moon landing sites!

An online education model?

A loyal reader pointed me to this piece by David Platt: At the source of the coming revolution is this simple fact: The inflation-adjusted price of college has quadrupled since 1982 (source: cnnmon.ie/bApHLC ). Has the value of that education quadrupled, or even doubled? Not that I can see. That artificial price increase has created an academic bubble like the stock and real estate bubbles we’ve encountered recently. Now combine disruptive technology (ubiquitous fast Internet) with the worst economy in living memory and you spark off cataclysmic structural change. The bubble is about to burst. [...]  Imagine taking the world’s 10 best teachers of freshman calculus and paying them each a million dollars for a video. Put them all online at $100 a pop, including exams and problem sets. Capture just 3 percent of the roughly 4 million college freshmen in the United States, and you’ve recouped your investment in the first year. Wouldn’t students prefer that to paying $12,500 (one-fourth of

Quote for the day

Hendrik Hertzberg on taxes and climate change: The sensible, if at present unachievable, solution would be (a) to impose a whopping great gasoline tax, as part of a whopping great tax on all carbon-dioxide-emitting fossil fuels, and (b) to rebate the proceeds to the American people and the American economy by cutting or eliminating the payroll tax. 

New urbanism, environmentalism, and RTDH

Matt responds to my review and defends the Sun Belt: Obviously the Sun Belt is doing something right. And what they're doing right is that they actually want to add people. And that's how cities grow. Public officials and thought-leaders down to grassroots people in the community take a kind of pride in growth that leads you to sit down and say we want to work this out so that lots of houses and infrastructure get built here. Lots of American cities—particularly the smaller, cold ones with declining industrial bases, your Buffalos and your Clevelands—face the very serious problem that people don't really want to live there. But Washington, D.C. and its environs are absurdly squandering the fact that there's high demand to locate things in and around our city. I don't think that's a point that's best emphasized by highlighting the aesthetic failings of cookie cutter Sun Belt subdivisions. Fair enough, but that's not really what I was getting at, though

FIST PUMP

My journalism career is now officially launched, with my first paid piece , published in the March/April issue of the Washington Monthly. Huzzah! I am now officially a freelancer! Now that I'm famous, ten more years of grinding poverty await.

*The Rent Is Too Damn High* part 1

I just pounded this thing (it's not long, maybe an hour or two's read). I actually finished awhile ago, but I've had a few things at work to do first. I won't do a full-scale review here, rather a series of posts on things I find worth mentioning. Anyway, it's good stuff. It's solidly written and very well-thought out, though sometimes his penchant for hyper-literal argumentation makes things a little stale. Yglesias builds paragraphs like an engineer building a basement out of cinderblocks--it's solid, and functional, but hardly elegant. This is a minor quibble, and surely better than the converse. As far as the actual thesis, for long-time fans there's not much new, but the various parts of the argument have a new power all brought together in one place. It's well worth a read. The first thing I'd like to highlight is the section on sprawl. Basically, the argument is that the more expensive the urban core becomes through restrictions on de

*The Rent Is Too Damn High*

Matt Yglesias' new book is out today, yours for only $4. (Note that though it is an ebook, you can still read it on a computer if you like.) I haven't finished it yet, but I'd like to point out the dramatic improvement in title and cover design from his last book. Here's the first one: It's not a bad book, but I can't imagine what they were thinking there. Yeesh. But here's the new one: Not bad!

Collected links

1. Pretty . 2. Krugman with another wide-scale diagnosis of what went wrong in economics . 3. When innocence isn't enough . 4. What are your most captivating books ? If you've got some, by all means post suggestions. 5. Inside Japan's nuclear meltdown . Yikes.

Karl Smith, DFW, and meta-arguments

Here's Karl Smith, talking about the Eurozone endgame: Regular reader know my long standing policy advice that averting disaster for now – kicking the can down the road – is the essence of success. In part, I want to use this example to highlight why this makes sense. There are more things on heaven and earth than are dreamt of by any policy maker, or blogger. Few people know how the medium and long term will actually unfold and I hope I am not waxing to Hanson-esque to say that arguments about the long term are really arguments about the arguers status. If we actually want to help the world, we focus on details and that usually means the short term. Things we can see closely and understand the nuances of. In short, we Stop Disaster. Now, Karl is obviously a sharp guy, and I don't have the background to quibble with his economics, but this kind of pop-psych declaiming about the appropriate scope of arguments is one of his most annoying habits. He just casually rules out

Let Iran have nukes

Via Fallows , that is the title of a refreshingly realistic piece in the upcoming Washington Monthly . The casual talk about war with Iran that I've been hearing over the past few weeks is astonishingly boneheaded and irresponsible. This essay lays out what you might expect—that Israel already has a nuclear deterrent, that Iran's leaders are just garden variety authoritarians, not suicidal madmen, and that a war with Iran would be a catastrophic disaster. This is one of those times, I'm afraid, for those with the spark of life to stand up and be counted. Go read , and we'll think about other things we could do if things get worse.

I like this guy

Some redneck physics. And I mean that in a good way.

Monetizing free operating systems

Yglesias has a pretty amazing graph : He was also emphasizing the other day the issues with Google's "give stuff away free" business model: Gmail is great, and it's free. Google Search is great, and it's free . Google Maps is great, and it's free . Android is not my favorite smartphone software, but you've got to admit it's impressive that Google went through the trouble of creating it and then gave it away for free . But of course Web services actually have a lot of costs associated with them. You either need to engage in a lot of fundraising, à la Wikipedia, or else you need to sell ads à la Google. There is an important exception to this. Google did not develop Android from scratch. Let's back up a bit, and read a bit of that classic Neal Stephenson essay "In the Beginning Was the Command Line," and his great car analogy for the big operating system companies: Imagine a crossroads where four competing auto dealerships are situat