Caught Our Eye Archives

Assorted Links 11/05/09

How to sell a dollar for more than a dollar

• Writing for Government and Business: Critical Thinking and Writing, November 12, 2009
• Writing to Persuade: Hone Your Persuasive Writing Skills, November 13, 2009
• Capitol Hill Workshop, November 18-20, 2009
• Understanding Congressional Budgeting and Appropriations, December 1, 2009
• Congress in a Nutshell: Understanding Congress, December 2, 2009
• Congressional Dynamics and the Legislative Process, December 3, 2009
• How to Find, Track, and Monitor Congressional Documents: Going Beyond Thomas, with WiFi Classroom, December 4, 2009
• Advanced Federal Budget Process, December 7-8, 2009
• Advanced Legislative Strategies, December 9-11, 2009
• Research Tools and Techniques: Refining Your Online and Offline Searches, with WiFi Classroom, December 15, 2009

Prediction with game theory

• Limbaugh on Third Parties - "I too get frustrated with existing parties. As long-time readers know, I transitioned from voting Democrat during the 1970s. I wasn't happy with everything the Republicans did during the Bush 41 or 43 eras and supported McCain with reluctance. Nevertheless, as things stand now politically, I side with Limbaugh on the issue of third parties."
• What Kind of People Affiliate with Human Rights Watch’s Middle East Division? - "So there you have it. Among other Jews, Robert Bernstein, the founder, longtime president, and now critic of Human Rights Watch is not merely mistaken when he accuses HRW of anti-Israel bias, he is mistaken because he thinks Jews should be held to different, lower standards than everyone else because he thinks Jews are 'so "special."' Damn Jews just think they are better than everyone else, and should be exempt from the moral standards that the civilized Christian (Cobban is a Quaker) world adheres to. We’ve heard such sentiments before, but not generally from “human rights activists.” [And as for her bizarre reference to the 'allegedly "Jewish" state, Israel,' Noah Pollak notes that 'her writing is so sloppy that it’s impossible to discern what specific slander she has in mind.']"
• MA Gov. Patrick: Lower State Deficit with Red Light Camera Revenue - "National Motorists Association researcher John Carr said that introduction of the legislation as part of the budget process was a sign that Patrick’s primary concern is monetary."
• Mother of all Carry Trades Faces an Inevitable Bust - "Since March there has been a massive rally in all sorts of risky assets -- equities, oil, energy and commodity prices -- a narrowing of high-yield and high-grade credit spreads, and an even bigger rally in emerging market asset classes (their stocks, bonds and currencies). At the same time, the dollar has weakened sharply, while government bond yields have gently increased but stayed low and stable.
  . . .
  So what is behind this massive rally? Certainly it has been helped by a wave of liquidity from near-zero interest rates and quantitative easing. But a more important factor fuelling this asset bubble is the weakness of the US dollar, driven by the mother of all carry trades. The US dollar has become the major funding currency of carry trades as the Fed has kept interest rates on hold and is expected to do so for a long time. Investors who are shorting the US dollar to buy on a highly leveraged basis higher-yielding assets and other global assets are not just borrowing at zero interest rates in dollar terms; they are borrowing at very negative interest rates -- as low as negative 10 or 20 per cent annualised -- as the fall in the US dollar leads to massive capital gains on short dollar positions."
• Curious Meeting at Treasury Department - "Four of us had a drink afterward and none of us felt that we learned anything (not that we expected to per se; if the ground rules are “not for attribution” in an official setting, we are certainly not going to be told anything new or juicy). But my feeling, and it seemed to be shared, was that we bloggers and the government officials kept talking past each other, in that one of us would ask a question, the reply would leave the questioner or someone in the audience unsatisfied, there might be a follow up question (either same person or someone interested), get another responsive-sounding but not really answer, and then another person would get the floor. The fact that the social convention of no individual hogging air time meant that no one could follow a particular line of inquiry very far.
  
  My bottom line is that the people we met are very cognitively captured, assuming one can take their remarks at face value. Although they kept stressing all the things that had changed or they were planning to change, the polite pushback from pretty all the attendees was that what Treasury thought of as major progress was insufficient. It was instructive to observe that Tyler Cowen, who is on the other side of the ideological page from yours truly, had pretty much the same concerns as your humble blogger does."
• The Coming Collapse of the Municipal Bond Market - "A money manager friend showed me an interesting research report by Frederick J. Sheehan titled “Dark Vision: The Coming Collapse of the Municipal Bond Market. This is a product of weedenco.com and available only to subscribers, but I will summarize it here.
  
  Sheehan starts off by noting that a lack of panic by the ratings and government agencies does not indicate health for a financial market. He cites the fact that the Fed did not anticipate how bad the subprime collapse was likely to be and obviously the Moody’s and Standard and Poor’s ratings were ridiculous.
  
  Sheehan notes that “spending is rising and revenue is collapsing” for all levels of government. Pension fund losses will require governments to double their contributions to pension plans (see my blog posting on public employee pensions). Spending is rising, e.g., in New York City from an average of $65,401 in compensation per public employee in 2000 to $106,743 in 2009. The number of full-time employees in NYC grew as well, despite falling school enrollment. The number of state and local government workers grew from 4 million in 1955 to 20 million in 2008 (5x growth, against less than 2X growth in U.S. population). Those workers receive an average of 43 percent more pay and benefits than a private sector worker.
  . . .
  Barring some sort of miraculous boom in the economy and pension fund investment returns, state and local governments are headed for insolvency and default. This means that valuing a municipal bond becomes a matter for a legal expert rather than an accountant."
• The creeping power grab by the executive branch and Federal Reserve - "The power grab at the Federal Reserve is a topic I first broached back in February when the Federal Reserve was creating its alphabet soup of liquidity programs to pull us back from the brink of financial disaster. I was troubled about Fed policy then and I am still troubled today.
  
  I am equally disturbed by what is happening in shift in the balance of power to the executive branch. The Obama Administration seems to be following in the footsteps of the Bush Administration and making its own power grab and Congress has only just begun to wake up to this and start to push back.
  
  At the risk of making this post overly broad, I want to make a few general comments about how executive power in government operates before I take on the specifics of the cases at hand. Everyone who has studied political science is aware that dictators and oligarchies use crises to invoke fear that allows them to usurp power using the cloak of ‘national security’ as a Trojan horse to consolidate power."
• The Periodic Table of Finance Bloggers - "Everyone listed on The Periodic Table of Finance Bloggers has either inspired, educated or entertained me in some way, so I figured I’d return the favor. I should note that the numbering of these blogs is no way a ranking system (if it was, I’d have to decide whether or not my site goes on the top or bottom!)"

Palindromic Video

• Top 15 Franchise Failures - "One third are pizza restaurants. Hence, this wise advice:"
• Q&A: Thinking About Opening a Restaurant? Think Twice. - "I had somebody approach me who had a very good job with a major company and an MBA from a prestigious university. I looked at him and asked, 'Is your career in danger?' He said, 'No, but I’ve always loved food. I love to cook. I love to have parties.' I told him to invite 20 friends over, throw a great dinner party, and then take a stack of $100 bills and burn them one by one. It will be fun--and cheaper than opening a restaurant."
• 14 Ways a Notebook in Your Pocket Can Save You Money - "Aside from the fact that I’m able to use the notebook to write down my ideas -- my career’s bread and butter -- a pocket notebook constantly comes in handy for many other financial reasons as well. (FYI, I usually just keep a simple small Mead reporter’s notebook in my pocket, along with a good pen that doesn’t run out of ink.) Here are fourteen ways I use that notebook to directly save money."
• Dolphin markets in everything, Gresham's Law edition - "So how would dolphin bimetallism work?"
• Anniversary Celebration - "Anti-regime activists in Tehran chose the 30th anniversary of the US embassy seizure there to take to the streets:
  . . .
  Hope ≠ Strategy."

"Weird Al" Yankovic - Bob

Raving grace

• "Why Are Swedish Meatballs So Much Smaller Than Their American Counterparts?" - our favorite is # 14 of the parody
• Attracting Stares And Scares On The Peugeot BB1 Grand Tour - "Halloween may be over, but fright night has just begun in five European countries that are due for visits from the ghastly Peugeot BB1 electric concept. ... As much as it haunts our nightmares, we can’t fault Peugeot for an intentionally avant garde design that’s meant to draw attention to the future of electric cars. The car is a natural conversation starter, with its scooter-like steering mechanism, side-view cameras and an outward appearance that suggests a Smart fortwo that’s seen a few minutes in the microwave."
• Book of the Week - "Did you know that Mark Twain wrote a book on Joan of Arc, and that he considered it his best book? It was published first in serial form in 1895 and as a book in 1896. The full title is Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc, by the Sieur Louis de Conte."
• Three Retirement Questions for People in Their Twenties - "Here are three questions I’d encourage any twentysomething to ask themselves."
• Jesse Livermore’s 7 Trading Lessons - "Lesson Number One: Cut your losses quickly."

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Assorted Links 11/02/09

Rubber Bands
"The world is a jiggling mess."

• Writing for Government and Business: Critical Thinking and Writing, November 12, 2009
• Writing to Persuade: Hone Your Persuasive Writing Skills, November 13, 2009
• Capitol Hill Workshop, November 18-20, 2009
• Understanding Congressional Budgeting and Appropriations, December 1, 2009
• Congress in a Nutshell: Understanding Congress, December 2, 2009
• Congressional Dynamics and the Legislative Process, December 3, 2009
• How to Find, Track, and Monitor Congressional Documents: Going Beyond Thomas, with WiFi Classroom, December 4, 2009
• Advanced Federal Budget Process, December 7-8, 2009
• Advanced Legislative Strategies, December 9-11, 2009
• Research Tools and Techniques: Refining Your Online and Offline Searches, with WiFi Classroom, December 15, 2009

Paranormal Legislative Activity?

• Dollar Suicide - "It wasn't Colonel Mustard in the library with the candelabra. And contrary to recent press reports, it wasn't Prince Alwaleed in the desert with a cartel. It was, in fact, Dr. Bernanke in the temple with the printing press. And since Dr. Bernanke is, in effect, the dollar incarnate -- the walking embodiment of the soundness of our currency -- if the dollar does die, it will not have been murder. It will have been suicide."
• Oregon Tries Claiming Copyright Over Gov't Materials Again - "Yes. A government official claiming copyright over a document on the public record. Wonderful. Carl Malamud is trying to get the Attorney General to issue an opinion that such things will not be covered by copyright. But, again, can anyone provide any good reason why any government document should be covered by copyright?"
• Escape from New York (and California, Illinois, NJ, and Michigan) - "High taxes and housing costs, regulations and the growth of government at all levels in New York, California, and New Jersey have bankrupted these states not only of their revenues, but of their most valuable asset -- their people."
• A Graphic History of Newspaper Circulation Over the Last Two Decades - "we've taken chunks of data for the major newspapers, going back to 1990, and graphed it, so you can see what's actually happened to newspaper circulation."
• Cartoon: "Trying to Reinflate the Bounce House"
• Why Are Swedish Meatballs So Much Smaller Than Their American Counterparts? - "The Hansonian take is that meatballs are an important cultural symbol and the size of the American meatball is a signal. To understand Swedish meatballs, think ABBA with pork."
• "Cultural Values" - "Another attempted 'honor' killing, this time in Arizona. Two women in hospital, one with life-threatening injuries. Their crime? According to the younger girl's father, she was becoming too 'westernized'.
  . . .
  This would be a less ludicrous argument if Mr Almaleki hadn't run down his daughter in a Jeep Grand Cherokee. It's all a bit culture à la carte, isn't it? Infidel motor vehicles, fine. Infidel guarantees on individual rights, no way."
• All Falling Down . . . - "Integral to public debt are two eternal truths: a public demands of the state ever more subsidies, and those who pay for them shrink in number as they seek to avoid the increased burden."
• Cracks Appearing in Law Firm Associate Model: - "Or, as the headline in the Philadelphia Business Journal has it: 'Reed Smith’s New Personnel Policy Allows it to Ditch Automatic Pay Raises.' Now that’s getting to the heart of the matter!"
• Firebowls, Copyright And Crowdfunding (Oh My) - "So, without copyright, what can Unger do? Well, he's actually already doing it. He put up a site that points out that Wittrig copies him, get lots of attention for it, and a lot more people now know about these kinds of decorative firebowls. My guess is that Unger is suddenly selling a lot more than he was before -- and that'll be true whether or not Wittrig gets the copyrights tossed out. And, in the meantime, having Wittrig around as competition should be good for Unger, pushing him to continue innovating and coming up with new designs."
• The Lordlings - "The bipartisan urge to tax and spend has become an addiction. And amazingly enough, the addicted think the music will never stop."
• Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's Gmail Inbox - "With the Iranian nuclear scandal hitting the world press, we decided to take a look into Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's Gmail inbox. And this is what we found."

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
William Kamkwamba
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor Health Care Crisis

William Kamkwamba

• Friday's tax-funded presentation - "You might be interested to hear what happened at yesterday's Capitol Hill presentation of the political science study you paid for -- the one promoted as a way of helping your congressman boost his approval rating by up to 18 points using Internet town halls.
  
  The study, funded in part by the National Science Founation and conducted by a non-profit called the Congressional Management Foundation, drew mostly unremarkable conclusions. It found that Internet town halls are easy to hold and increase political participation. Most importantly, it found that they make voters more likely to agree with, like, and vote for their members after they participate in one.
  . . .
  I was not allowed to attend yesterday's presentation. When I tried, I was informed that it was for staff and members only. But a staffer who was there tells me over the phone that it was entertaining. For example, when asked whether his study had diverted National Science Foundation grant money away from the study of a cure for cancer, the presenter choked up and talked about his friend's daughter who has leukemia.
  
  When he was asked whether Internet town halls had any impact on politicians’ understanding of constituents’ points of view, the presenter admitted that the study had not even considered that question."
• Rotator cuff injury - "Rotator cuff injury symptoms may include:
  
  * Pain and tenderness in your shoulder, especially when reaching overhead, reaching behind your back, lifting, pulling or sleeping on the affected side
  
  * Shoulder weakness
  
  * Loss of shoulder range of motion
  
  * Inclination to keep your shoulder inactive"
• Quote of the Day: In The Long Run We’re All Dead Edition - "New GM’s October sales numbers are about to hit the screens, and it ain’t gonna be pretty. GM’s first full financial report will emerge thereafter; the hard numbers on the company’s cash burn will trigger major mainstream media alarms and raise fresh (stale?) questions about GM’s viability."
• Guest Post: Chairman of the Department of Economics at George Mason University Says Politicians Are NOT Prostitutes … They Are Pimps - "Specifically, as the chairman of the Department of Economics at George Mason University (Donald J. Boudreaux) points out:
  
  Real whores, after all, personally supply the services their customers seek. Prostitutes do not steal; their customers pay them voluntarily. And their customers pay only with money belonging to these customers.
  
  In contrast, members of Congress routinely truck and barter with other people’s property…
  
  Members of Congress are less like whores than they are like pimps for persons unwillingly conscripted to perform unpleasant services."
• "Strategic Defaults" a Mortgage Broker Comments on Fear and Shame Tactics - "I also tell them the consequences of walking away. Like the article said, a foreclosure will stay on your credit report for 10 years. However, if you walk away it will only be 3 years before you can buy a home again. (It used to be 2 years but Fannie, Freddie, and the FHA made it longer to discourage people from walking away.)
  
  I tell them if they choose to walk away they need to make sure they have a decent car, and at least one credit card. The reason for the car is that it may be hard to get a decent rate on a car loan for a while if they have a recent foreclosure, and the credit card is needed to help you re-establish your credit after the foreclosure. One of the biggest mistakes people make after a bankruptcy or foreclosure is not re-establishing their credit."
• SAPPHIC SAUDIS: A review of "Inside the Kingdom: Kings, Clerics, Modernists, Terrorists and the Struggle for Saudi Arabia," by Rovert Lacey - "On many levels Robert Lacey has written a highly accomplished book which should go into the bags of anyone who has to travel to the kingdom. It still did not make me want to go there."

Camorra assassin escapes as Naples looks the other way

• How to improve basketball - "fans seem to prefer basketball seasons with a dominant player (Jordan) or perhaps a dominant match-up (the old Lakers vs. Celtics rivalries). For the season as a whole, we don't seem to want too much suspense. Does suspense distract us?"
• Little X-Plane Pushes Bottom Edge of the Envelope - "Flight test programs at Edwards Air Force Base and NASA’s Dryden Flight Research Center usually are off-limits to outsiders, but we got a peek at one of its coolest programs, the X-48B, when the Air Force recently threw open the gates for an open house.
  
  The X-48B is the latest in a long line of experimental X-planes, and the joint venture between NASA and Boeing’s Phantom Works is unlike most that came before. The blended wing-body aircraft isn’t some sort of sierra hotel fighter jet, it doesn’t have a pilot on board and it’s not even full-size. Despite being an unmanned scale model, the test pilots who fly it say all the challenges of experimental flight are still there."
• How to Carry Your Office on a Stick (USB Flash Drive) - "As USB flash drives continue to get faster and provide increasing amounts of storage capacity, you can use them for more than just backing up files and documents. You can actually run a ton of applications right from your flash drive, which can come in handy when you’re on the road outside your office or home. There are some popular suites of flash drive apps, such as PortableApps, which we’ve covered before. There recently announced freeware portable apps for popular packages such as Google Chrome, Skype and even uTorrent. However, PortableApps is not the only game in town these days."
• Policy Lessons from the Great Depression - "I had wondered whether Keynes had had much influence on administration policies during the depression since The General Theory came too late. Even though he had earlier influential books, I gather not. My favorite part of Amity’s book was when she describes a meeting that Keynes had with President Roosevelt on May 28, 1934, lasting fifty-eight minutes, about the time of a class-room lecture. Both Keynes and Roosevelt indicated that the meeting did not go well."
• How you too can be a computer expert! - "Please print this flowchart out and tape it near your screen. Congratulations; you're now the local computer expert!"
• Anti-vaccine fear versus science - "Amy Wallace's Wired feature, 'An Epidemic of Fear: How Panicked Parents Skipping Shots Endangers Us All' looks at the life and times of Paul Offit, vaccine inventor and advocate, and the anti-vaccine pseudo-science he battles as he attempts to convince parents not to give in to fear and disinformation, and to follow the science that will keep their kids safe.
  This isn’t a religious dispute, like the debate over creationism and intelligent design. It’s a challenge to traditional science that crosses party, class, and religious lines.
  "
• One of the many reasons I couldn't have been a fashion designer - "'The 2009 International Best-Dressed List'. With an exception or two I think most of these get-ups are at best unattactive and at worse downright hideous. Mme. Sarkozy looks good."
• The Ph.D. Problem: On the professionalization of faculty life, doctoral training, and the academy’s self-renewal - "Since it is the system that ratifies the product--ipso facto, no one outside the community of experts is qualified to rate the value of the work produced within it--the most important function of the system is not the production of knowledge. It is the reproduction of the system. To put it another way, the most important function of the system, both for purposes of its continued survival and for purposes of controlling the market for its products, is the production of the producers. The academic disciplines effectively monopolize (or attempt to monopolize) the production of knowledge in their fields, and they monopolize the production of knowledge producers as well. This is why, for example, you cannot take a course in the law (apart from legal history) outside a law school. In fact, law schools urge applicants to major in areas outside the law. They say that this makes lawyers well-rounded, but it also helps to ensure that future lawyers will be trained only by other lawyers. It helps lawyers retain a monopoly on knowledge of the law.
  . . .
  In order to raise the prominence of research in their institutional profile, schools began adding doctoral programs. Between 1945 and 1975, the number of American undergraduates increased 500 percent, but the number of graduate students increased by nearly 900 percent. On the one hand, a doctorate was harder to get; on the other, it became less valuable because the market began to be flooded with Ph.D.s.
  
  This fact registered after 1970, when the rapid expansion of American higher education abruptly slowed to a crawl, depositing on generational shores a huge tenured faculty and too many doctoral programs churning out Ph.D.s.
  . . .
  It is unlikely that the opinions of the professoriate will ever be a true reflection of the opinions of the public; and, in any case, that would be in itself an unworthy goal. Fostering a greater diversity of views within the professoriate is a worthy goal, however. The evidence suggests that American higher education is going in the opposite direction. Professors tend increasingly to think alike because the profession is increasingly self-selected. The university may not explicitly require conformity on more than scholarly matters, but the existing system implicitly demands and constructs it."

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Assorted Links 10/30/09

Ask The Best And Brightest: Are Bad Drivers Born That Way?

• Writing to Persuade: Hone Your Persuasive Writing Skills, November 13, 2009
• Capitol Hill Workshop, November 18-20, 2009
• Understanding Congressional Budgeting and Appropriations, December 1, 2009
• Advanced Legislative Strategies, December 9-11, 2009
• The Black Conservative Tradition - "In the latest New Republic, historian Steven Hahn has a long and very interesting review of the recent Booker T. Washington biography Up from History. As Hahn discusses, Washington famously championed economic advancement and education over political activism as the key to black equality, an approach Washington perhaps best articulated in his 'Atlanta Compromise' speech of 1895.
  . . .
  Actually, the great Harlem Renaissance author and journalist George Schuyler--who was known as the 'black H.L. Mencken'--published “general rightist sentiments” long before Clarence Thomas came on the scene, including Schuyler’s unambiguously titled 1966 autobiography Black and Conservative. And the celebrated novelist and folklorist Zora Neale Hurston both endorsed conservative Sen. Robert A Taft in the 1952 presidential election and repeatedly attacked FDR’s New Deal, including this 1951 assault from the pages of the Saturday Evening Post: "
• Student Loans are the New Indentured Servitude - "This former student's debt is far from extraordinary. It is, in fact, tragically ordinary, as student loans have become the 21st century version of indentured servitude.
  . . .
  Now we are currently asking children, 17, 18 or 19 years old, to try and assess how much of a student loan debt burden they can handle vis-a-vis their future income over their entire lives. But, especially compared to their grandparents, uncertainty is so much greater now. The consumption smoothing line invokes a world where everyone with a college degree will get a stable, solid job with certainty (and your employer will, of course, pick up the health care tab)."
• Why [College Admissions] Selectivity Is Important - "There is, of course, a linkage between selectivity and funding. Politicians, alumni, and donors are far more likely to want to fund institutions that can show they're admitting and producing quality students. In this respect, the guidance that more poorly-funded institutions should take from Hoxby is doubly clear: do everything possible to increase selectivity and admit better students."
• Commercial-Real-Estate Crush: The Next Crisis Not to Be Wasted? - "The threat of multiple trillion-dollar commercial-real-estate write downs is just the kind of crisis that the folks in our government and at the Federal Reserve need to help them rob the American citizenry. Just think of it: irrational exuberance funded by the Fed and soon to be backed by the full faith and credit of the US government.
  
  If then-Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson and Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke could convince Congress to expose the taxpayers to several trillion dollars in the face of the residential-real-estate bubble and a handful of struggling (but too big to fail) companies, imagine the vast sums of currency Secretary Geithner may deem necessary to protect against this larger, looming crisis. Indeed, there is already evidence of the Federal Reserve team entering this game."
• Obama's Alpha Delusion - "Obama hates being compared to socialists, so I'll refrain and compare him to a communist. In the state published hagiography, Divine Stories About the Dear Leader, Kim Jong-Il is presented as someone excellent at golf, pistol shooting, technology, and battlefield courage. He's basically better than everyone at everything. For a communist state that belief is necessary, otherwise their system is too centralized.
  
  Obama and his experts are presumably more efficient than the market at allocating more resources to productive technologies. The idea that since the market won't provide funds, perhaps the informed expected return on battery investment is truly low, seems absurd: how could selfish oafs who run business know better than an articulate, caring, public servant? It's The Secret writ large: think it true, and it becomes so. No wonder it's a popular idea: would that it were true.
  . . .
  The Barak Obamas and Paul Krugmans, having excelled at Harvard or MIT, can more easily think they actually know more than everyone else, leading to the classic Fatal Conceit of planners everywhere."
• Testosterone Drops In Guys Whose Candidate Loses - "I'm setting aside 2 seconds while I write this sentence to feel sympathy for guys who become so invested in a political candidate that their testosterone drops if their candidate loses. Really, you should focus on achieving for yourself, not depend on political candidates to give you a feeling of power."
• Debating the future of Medicare and Medicaid - "The point was raised that this may be a case of younger generations being used as the country’s credit card, but Howard countered that argument by warning that we can’t afford to see the cost of health care continue to rise. Without reform, future graduates might be faced with the choice of saving for a mortgage or paying for health insurance."

Yikes!

• Libertarianism and Culture - "And of course, the big one: Why do women have more autonomy now than they did 100 years ago? Cultural libertarians might suggest that it’s the result of specific actions to increase the ability of women to have access to markets, as well as a greater recognition of women to have the recognized capacity of self-governance. Our Becker-ites would say that it’s simply the result of technology (the pill) and structural labor market adjustments (a move from manufacturing, benefiting men, to service, benefiting women)."
• Homebuyer Tax Credit - "Either way, the flood of sellers should temper sales prices."
• Thick, Sticky Rhetoric - "Everything about this debate has become so staged, such poorly painted stage construction, an illusion from both sides, that it is difficult not to be insulted at every turn. Are we supposed to just cave in here like comforted children?"
• The Palm Pre costs $1,250 less than the iPhone or Droid over 2 years - "If you are looking at an unlimited voice and data plan, you will spend $1,250 less over two years. There are still substantial savings even with more limited plans. The phones, on paper, have fairly similar specifications and capabilities and in terms of Network quality, speed, coverage ranking I would say Verizon, Sprint, AT&T in that order."
• Grasping At Straws - Attacking Android - "For many of us, we can get any of the apps we want for the iPod Touch. The Apple interface is great, the thousands of apps are great, and the ones that need Internet access can be handled with WiFi, which seems to be everywhere nowadays. In fact, for those of us with a portable router, and a Verizon USB stick modem, or for those of us with a MiFi portable router, it is. So, the Droid isn't an iPhone replacement. It is a replacement for whatever cell phone or smart phone we have been carrying."
• Ad Agency Claims It Owns The Right To Product Placement; Sues Competitors - "A few months back, we wrote about how ad agency Denizen wasn't just claiming to have patented product placement (check it out: patent 6,859,936) but was suing another ad agency, WPP, for violating the patent. Perhaps Denizen's next patents will be on claiming ownership of obvious ideas and suing your competitors, because it's still at it. The latest is that it's suing media agency Mindshare for incorporating the brand Vaseline into the TV show Maneater."

Balls of Steal (Aka Proud to be human)

• RIM and Apple top U.S. Smartphone market share - "The iPhone also ranked first in future purchases plans of those polled who did not currently own a smartphone, but plan to purchase one in the next 90 days. Also 36% indicated a preference towards the iPhone, 27% towards the BlackBerry, and 8% towards Palm."
• Hospitals are a hell of a place to get sick - "I laugh about this every time it happens: A patient gets hospitalized for whatever reason and the hospital staff see the supplement list with vitamin D, fish oil at high doses, iodine, etc. and they panic. They tell the patient about bleeding, cancer, and death, issue stern warnings about how unreliable and dangerous nutritional supplements can be."
• Fat acceptance in NJ Governor Race - "Asked if a governor needs to set a good example, Christie retorts, 'I am setting an example...We have to spur our economy. Dunkin Donuts, International House of Pancakes, those people need to work too.'"
• What If Mechanics And Nutritionists Switched Jobs? - "What kind of fuel are you using?”
  
  “Only the best. Whole grain cereals, potatoes, wheat bread, lots of fruit --”
  
  “Wo, wo, wo. So you’re stuffing the tank full of sugar?”
  
  “No, of course not! Whole grain cereals, potatoes-”
  
  “Same fuel, different name. It all turns to sugar in the tank, buddy. You got any idea what all that sugar does to the rest of the system? You’re working the blood sugar regulator to death. Half of what you’re eating is probably going straight into the ol’ storage tanks. No wonder you’re eating so much.”
  
  “But … uh … they always told me --”
  
  “Forget what they told you. They don’t know jack. You want clean combustion in the engine, stop putting sugar in the tank. Your engine needs oil, and I don’t mean the cheap synthetic stuff, either. I’m talking about real butter, olive oil, and lots of good quality saturated fat.”
• Bring Your Contacts Together and Keep Them Safe - "Gmail. LinkedIn. Facebook. Your phone’s address book. Your contacts may live in many places online, yet there’s always the possibility one of these places will disappear or crash, taking your information with it for good. Or perhaps you simply decide to close your account with the network.
  
  You should consider importing the contacts from these networks into your main address book app. We use these services to connect with people, update our statuses and play with whatever features they contain, but we don’t always remember that these resources have contacts that belong in our primary address book."
• Bachmann Grayson Overdrive: Time Miffed As American People Get Moments of Comic Relief During Bush-Obama Tragedy - "Hey Time, your readers are almost definitely poorer and less contented this year than they were last year. They're watching one of the biggest financial swindles in the history of the country unfold, and they're helpless to do anything about it. They've seen the national political leadership pass directly from incompetence to incompetence, and there are several actual wars going on. You may think your readers should be more worried about a couple of populist madcaps. But do you have to suck out even the tiny bit of joy people might get from having slightly easier and cheaper access to old-timey political theater?"

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Assorted Links 10/28/09

Vintage Cycle Chic from Denmark and Holland

• Writing for Government and Business: Critical Thinking and Writing, November 12, 2009
• Writing to Persuade: Hone Your Persuasive Writing Skills, November 13, 2009
• Capitol Hill Workshop, November 18-20, 2009
• Understanding Congressional Budgeting and Appropriations, December 1, 2009
• Congress in a Nutshell: Understanding Congress, December 2, 2009
• Congressional Dynamics and the Legislative Process, December 3, 2009
• How to Find, Track, and Monitor Congressional Documents: Going Beyond Thomas, with WiFi Classroom, December 4, 2009
• Advanced Federal Budget Process, December 7-8, 2009
• Advanced Legislative Strategies, December 9-11, 2009
• Research Tools and Techniques: Refining Your Online and Offline Searches, with WiFi Classroom, December 15, 2009

Global Perspectives: Steep Market Declines Coming
Here Comes the Monetary Expansion Bubble

What Happened on Flight 188? It's Not a Mystery. Right Now, It Looks More Like a Cover-Up - "Well, the three flight attendants certainly know something. The flight continued on for over an hour beyond the airport, with the cockpit unresponsive to calls from the ground, while emergency officials considered scrambling military jets. (And remember: An airline cockpit door is locked and supposedly impenetrable. So a flight attendant can't barge in and shake somebody awake if something goes really wrong.)

Unless the whole crew had been rendered temporarily unconscious by some kind of magical knockout drops that had no effect on the passengers, flight attendants (who generally don't miss a trick) certainly had at least some of the "situational awareness" that the pilots claim they misplaced during those strange 78 minutes in the cockpit. Yet we have not heard word one, as far as I know, from the flight attendants."

Health Care Delusions, Left and Right - "How both sides are misleading the American people

No matter how we 'reform' health insurance, there will still be close calls, where it's not clear that a costly procedure will actually do any good. There will have to be someone, either in government or in the private sector, to decide which operations and treatments should be covered and which should not. And there will be patients who will die after being refused. "

The United Not-States - "Josh Patashnik, at The New Republic's 'The Plank' blog, rushes to states' defense in a high-minded way, quoting Madison and Sandra Day O'Connor. Although he's sympathetic to centralization of power in Washington, he's sensible about the states' role in our system:"

The Art Just Won't Stop - "A little tidying up after the gala art contest from last week. Mixed in among the various bribe offers (including a case of Old Style, $33.17, Pinta pomegranate tequila, a Nobel Peace Prize, and two offers of sex - one possibly from a female) were a load of late entries which might have been strong prize contenders had their creators not been procrastinators. I offer them for your enjoyment herewith:"

Stuff Journalists Like: #219 being duped - "The relationship between a journalist and a source is not unlike the courtship between a self conscious girl and the guy in high school who drives a Trans Am and is as old as most of the teachers. The girl is so desperate for attention and can’t believe a guy who isn’t gay is talking to her that she’ll believe anything that guy will say -- including that thing about sex in water and not getting pregnant. If it’s not clear, the journalist is the chick.

Journalists by nature are a pretty skeptical bunch. If someone tells a journalist the sky is blue, a good journalist will go outside and look up. But even the best journalists gets the wool pulled over their eyes. Be it from a scorned employee, ex-wife, a certain balloon boy family, or a sheriff investigating a certain balloon boy family, from time to time, journalists are suckers and end up being duped. "

CapMark Eats Its Balance Sheet - Declares Bankruptcy - "We are watching a train wreck in slow motion, with the Fed and Treasury putting on a smoke and mirrors show to hide the gory details of perfidy.

Recovery without jobs, solvency, real consumption, or increased manufacturing is not a recovery. This is the corpse of an economy coughing up the remnants of its vitality in response to the Fed's monetary Heimlich maneuver.

And when it is done there will be nothing left, except a pile of markers and an unpayable debt, insolvency and default.

Oh, the dollar will surely stagger for a while, and do some turns and twists to confound the speculators, but its condition is worsening."

The three-year degree - "There’s no question that well-prepared students who know what they want to study can complete a degree in three years. That’s a huge cost savings for students -- and colleges save when their facilities are in full use over the summer. But many students lack the academic skills and the direction to finish in three years -- or four, for that matter. Perhaps colleges should use off-campus, online learning for students who need real-world time to clarify their goals."

Great moments in drug enforcement law - "Counting the weight of water in reaching for maximum penalties: 'The Minnesota Supreme Court, in a 4-3 decision, has now ruled that Bong Water (water which had been used in a water pipe) was a ‘mixture’ of ‘25 grams or more’ supporting a criminal conviction for Controlled Substance crime in the first degree.'"

Tips for Finding Females that Matter to You - "Julie Miller is a professional genealogist and a well-known speaker and author. She has written a newspaper article that should be required reading for all beginning genealogists."

Department of Uh-Oh, or mandates don't stay modest - "Now reread that last sentence and ask yourself how many different ways there are to do this and whether all of them will fail to pass."

How to shoot an anvil 200 feet into the air

• The Cubs Are Not Going Bankrupt - "When I wear my Cubs’ cap these days, somebody always stops me and says: 'Aren’t the Cubs going bankrupt?'"
• Nun Volunteering as Abortion Clinic Escort in Illinois - "A Dominican nun has been seen frequenting an abortion facility in Illinois recently - but not, as one might expect, to pray for an end to abortion or to counsel women seeking abortions, but to volunteer as a clinic escort. Local pro-life activists say that they recognized the escort at the ACU Health Center as Sr. Donna Quinn, a nun outspokenly in favor of legalized abortion, after seeing her photo in a Chicago Tribune article."
• E-book Echo: Welcome the Nook; Kindle on the PC, Android is King of E-book Readers - "Barnes & Noble lit a fire under Amazon with the introduction of its own e-book reader, the Nook. The Nook matches Amazon’s Kindle feature for feature, and adds a small color touchscreen. The Nook will take advantage of the e-book experience with the ability to lend e-books to friends for two weeks. Nook owners will be able to read any e-book for free while inside any B&N brick and mortar store. It is running the Android OS, which opens the possibility up for homebrew apps for the Nook."
• Adobe AIR App Breathes Cross-Platform Life into Google Voice - "Now that I have two mobile phones and no landline, Google Voice is part of my daily life. The service helps me manage my calls, regardless of which number people use to reach me. On my iPhone 3GS, I simply use the mobile Google Voice site to manage devices or listen to voicemails -- pressing play on a voicemail opens up the Apple Quicktime app so I can hear it. I use the free gDial Pro on my Palm Pre, which is nearly as good as the native Google Voice software on an Android device. It’s not perfect, but it meets my needs well enough."
• How to Get Kicked Out of Grad School Before You Even Start - "JD / MBA of the Day: Jonathan Eakman, With A Big FU to SMU"
• Why Apple Is Worth $80 - "Jim Cramer thinks AAPL (AAPL) is worth $300 and I think AAPL is worth less than $100. To borrow Jim Cramer's line, 'Where do I get this stuff?' I'll point it back at him and ask, 'Where does he get that stuff'? Perhaps all he did was multiply two numbers? I can multiply two numbers, I have a passion for the markets and I too am opinionated. Can I have a TV show too, please? Jon Stewart, would you like to multiply two numbers? You can do it too. I'll show you how. I'll come on your show and multiply them for you if you like."
• Dear Hollywood: Don't Be Idiots; Don't Delay Movie Rentals - "Sometimes you just shake your head at ideas that come out of some executives that are just so incredibly dumb, it makes you wonder how anyone ever took them seriously. There have been some hints about this latest one, though."
• Get Google Voice, Keep Your Mobile Number - "Mobile users who would like to switch their voice mail to Google voice can now do so, without losing their existing mobile number. Previously, 'Going Google' required using a Google-supplied telephone number."

Social Media for Lawyers

• Checklist for Buying a Laptop Computer - "Is the monitor large enough for your tastes? There's a big difference between the screen on a 7" netbook and a 12.1" tablet, and again from that 12.1" tablet to a 17.3" widescreen. What you gain in screen quality and size with the widescreen, you lose in portability."
• James Arthur Ray in Denver - "Tuesday evening in Denver I attended a free seminar featuring a self-help guru who is currently the focus of a triple-homicide investigation. That guru's name is James Arthur Ray. I had never heard of Mr. Ray until a couple weeks ago when reading news of deaths in a sweat lodge incident at a New Age spiritual retreat in Sedona, Arizona. That incident had resulted in 18 injuries requiring hospitalization and the deaths of two people. One of the injured lay in a coma at a hospital in Flagstaff due to multiple organ damage and would later succumb to those injuries for a total of three deaths."
• The truth about the disappearing honeybees - "although the current pollination crisis is largely mythical, we may soon have a real one on our hands."
• Look Ma, No Computer! The Pandigital Photolink One-Touch Scanner - "Flat bed desktop scanners are the most common method of scanning old family photographs and they do work well for that purpose. However, they are a bit large and awkward to carry. ... The Pandigital Photolink One-Touch Scanner is small and, best of all, does not depend on a computer."

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Assorted Links 10/26/09

Hans Rosling: Does your mindset correspond to my dataset?
See gapminder.org

• Writing to Persuade: Hone Your Persuasive Writing Skills, November 13, 2009
• Capitol Hill Workshop, November 18-20, 2009
• Research Tools and Techniques: Refining Your Online and Offline Searches, with WiFi Classroom, December 15, 2009
• Wretchard's Four Rules of Lying - "Most lying is small-scale, which might be what makes Wretchard's thoughts interesting: we seldom think about huge lies and the liars that speak them."
• Recognizing Goldman Sachs - "In recognition of Goldman Sachs' recent reporting of $3 billion in earnings for the third quarter of 2009, I give you this old tale."
• Three Tweets for the Web - "The relative decline of the book is part of a broader shift toward short and to the point. Small cultural bits--written words, music, video--have never been easier to record, store, organize, and search, and thus they are a growing part of our enjoyment and education. The classic 1960s rock album has given way to the iTunes single. On YouTube, the most popular videos are usually just a few minutes long, and even then viewers may not watch them through to the end. At the extreme, there are Web sites offering five-word movie and song reviews, six-word memoirs ('Not Quite What I Was Planning'), seven-word wine reviews, and 50-word minisagas."
• Living on $500,000 a Year - "What F. Scott Fitzgerald’s tax returns reveal about his life and times"
• From the people who brought us the swine flu vaccine shortage - Government-run health care! UPDATED - "President Obama's late-night declaration of a nationwide public health emergency last night shouldn't be allowed to obscure the most important lesson of the developing swine flu crisis - The same government that only weeks ago promised abundant supplies of swine flu vaccine by mid-October will be running your health care system under Obamacare."
• Tyranny and Obama: success or failure - "Tyrannies don’t always look exactly alike. In fact, they only resemble each other in very broad principles, such as the reduction of liberty and the spread of state power."
• Thanks for the ride - "I’d like to thank all my readers living outside of Portland for buying me a streetcar:" ht Neighborhood Effects
• Thoughts on the Whitehouse.gov switch to Drupal - "Of course, it's easy to imagine that the use of open source software will slash the government's IT budget. After all, this software is freely downloadable. I have a feeling it's quite a bit more complicated than that. First off, government has a huge number of special requirements (remember the flap over President Obama's blackberry?) Second, don't underestimate the difficulty of doing business in Washington. Procurement is done through a complex ballet understood by few open source companies."
• Open Source Intel Use Soars - "The IC has touted its new commitment over the last few years, with the Director of National Intelligence creating OpenSource.gov, a website open to federal and state government employees and cleared contractors, and the creation of open source offices in almost every intelligence agency including the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency (NGA). And the use of open source information is soaring, according to a panel here in San Antonio at the annual Geoint conference. Brian Magana, geospatial analysis branch chief at the Defense Intelligence Agency, said that his consumption of open source data for one area of analysis he was following rocketed upwards 600 percent."
• Peter Schiff Has the Best Rant You'll Hear All Week - "For your listening pleasure, fiscal hawk and U.S. Senate candidate Peter Schiff tells a harrowing tale of the death of the dollar. Your hackles will be raised, your eyes will bug out, you'll kill yourself just to get the gold out of your own fillings. I'm not sure where this speech is from, and I'd check it out, but I prefer to think this is a voicemail Schiff left on Larry Summers' answering machine:"
• Liberty in Context - "As I see it, Kerry’s claim is that many libertarians fail to adequately acknowledge the fact (and it is a fact) that people are embedded in and shaped by culture, and that, as a consequence, many libertarians fail to grasp the extent to which cultural norms and social structure can limit individual liberty or work to deny some individuals the opportunity to develop the capacities needed to meaningfully exercise their liberty rights."
• Is Levitt a Global Warming Denier? - "Freakonomics was a highly popular book that appealed to both liberals and conservatives. Therefore, it carefully avoided polarizing topics, and instead uncovered the shocking truth about sumo wrestlers and other issues that are worthy of a standard 20/20 television show. Fun stuff, not what I would call economics (see the more esteemed economist Ariel Rubinstein for support). So, this time they figured they would slay some fallacies in the Global Warming debate."
• 'More than ever before' now studying Sci/Tech in Blighty - "University admissions statistics reveal that more students than ever before in Blighty have enrolled on courses in science and engineering this year. Unfortunately this progress has been achieved at a grim cost, as far larger numbers of young people have as usual chosen to study law, business, management, psychology - and computer science."
• Weekly wrap: Frustration mounts - "In some of the states hit hardest by the recession, frustration among voters and in the media over the way state government works -- or doesn’t work -- seems to be boiling over. "
• 50 Years of Coasean Brilliance - "With respect to the FCC paper [by Ronald Coase, published in Vol. 2 of the Journal of Law and Economics in October 1959], it really is about how ownership rights work in practice to solve social dilemmas, and how when government control substitutes for exchange relations the decision process inevitably falls back on arbitrary rules which produce a misallocation of resources due to lack of knowledge, inflexibility and the influence of political pressure groups."

By a rough comparison with the number of news reports found by Google news search, Hans Rosling calculates a News/Death ratio and issue an alert for a media hype on Swine flu and a neglect of tuberculosis.

• Dining tips for Manhattan - "5. Two of my reliable stand-bys are Ess-a-Bagel and Shun Lee Palace, both in East/Midtown. They're both pretty tired in terms of concept but the quality still is excellent. I enjoy them every time I go. Shun Lee Palace would not count as dirt cheap, however."
• Property Taxes and Household Income - "People who live in New Jersey and New York already know that their property taxes are high. But they may not know just how high, that these two states have the highest property taxes in the United States, by various quantitative measures as described below."
• Brain Sex Differences In Gene Expression Start Early - "Do any ideologues still maintain that fundamental sexual differences in cognition are a product of social environment? The science doesn't seem like it leaves any room for a serious argument along those lines."
• Sorry Professor, I promise to mind my own business from now on - "But doesn’t it seem like if you post a headline that another professor is a lunatic, there a sort of implied obligation to not delete any of that professor’s responses to the comment thread? Unless they’re obscene of libelous? Just asking."
• The joys of vicarious travel - "These days, travel blogs seem almost as common as traveling. My favorite travel blogs are about big trips, in which someone challenges him- or herself with travel, and sometimes challenges the whole concept of travel. Over the past few months, I’ve discovered quite a few big-trip blogs that provide some fun armchair (or desk chair, maybe) travel."
• Tesla Totaled In Colossal Collision - "Got an email from Doug at Tesla Motors Club who says that’s definitely a Toyota Prius, not an Avensis, in the pic. (Commenters made the same observation.) The latest word is the Prius allegedly hit the Roadster, pushing it under the Touareg, and Doug notes there a piece of the Roadster jammed under the rear bumper of the Touareg."
• Comcast to enter 3G/4G cellular data market - "Comcast doesn’t make note of what cell provider(s) they’ve sold their soul to, but the coverage map is pretty impressive and it’s most likely using Sprint’s network. Combine that with a $69.99 monthly price tag for high speed cable interwebs for your home (15Mbps) plus unlimited 3G/4G cellular data (3 - 6 Mbps) while on the road, and we think Comcast may have something cooking here."
• Lawyers Discussing Business Models - "it still strikes me as odd to bring together four lawyers to have them discuss business models, when their expertise is not in business at all, but in the law."
• Tips and Tricks: Making the Most of Google Calendar - "The difference is that with Google Calendar, even the smallest tweak can change it from a simple list of appointments to a comprehensive business tool. Here are some ideas you can start with."
• Editorial: The Carless Kids - "But enough of my excuses; none of my peers ever seem in the least bit surprised to find out that I don’t own a car. After all, most of them don’t. I live in a city that is easily navigable by bicycle and public transportation, and I work from home. I’m not kidding when I quip that the future of transportation is telecommuting."
• From The “You’ve Got To Be Kidding Me” Department, Golf Cart Edition… - "I wish you could see the steam coming out of my ears right now. Apparently there is a tax credit of $4200 to $5500 for the purchase of an electric vehicle. Is it really so hard to sit for a few minutes and think 'Hm…what might we want to be careful to exclude so that we avoid paying for ridiculous items that make us look foolish?' Perhaps the politicians just all wanted their free golf carts.
  
  Now, maybe you’re thinking 'ok, that’s a little silly, but at least the demand for golf carts is putting people to work in that industry.' This is a true statement, but the reality of the matter is that taxpayer dollars are being used to artificially divert resources to making golf carts rather than making things that are objectively more useful. I’m now picturing a highway filled with golf carts, golf carts used in place of tanks, etc…and, while visually humorous, I don’t think anyone believes that that is the best direction for society to head in."

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PC headsets

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Assorted Links 10/1/09

Progress

• Speechwriting: Preparing Speeches and Oral Presentations, October 16, 2009
• Writing for Government and Business: Critical Thinking and Writing, November 12, 2009
• Writing to Persuade: Hone Your Persuasive Writing Skills, November 13, 2009
• The Story Behind the Story: Where to Meet the Mayor - "Before I went to Memphis for our September 2009 cover story on Shelby County, Tennessee, Mayor A C Wharton Jr., at least two people had told me where I could find him -- the Starbucks on Union Avenue in Midtown."
• Traveling the World’s Economic Bubbles - "Every possible passion seems to have a travel trend associated with it. So why not econotourism, for people who are interested in how the economy affects a local culture?"
• Trial lawyers lobby sinks $6.2M in debt - "The American Association for Justice, the most prominent group representing plaintiffs' attorneys, has seen a shake-up in its executive suite and has struggled to deal with what appears to be a mounting budget shortfall. To help it fight congressional efforts to make it harder for patients to sue doctors and lawyers, it recently sent out an extra solicitation to its members, asking them to fork over money for a lobbying campaign.
  
  The most striking evidence of its financial woes is a swift decline in income, which resulted in a more than $6.2 million deficit in its operating budget for the fiscal year ending July 31, 2008, the most recent year for which data are available."
• Nanny State Doesn’t Like Competition -- the English Version - "A previous post by David Boaz poked fun at bureaucrats in Michigan for threatening a woman for the ostensible crime of keeping an eye on her neighbors’ kids without a government permit. English bureaucrats are equally clueless, badgering two women who take turns caring for each other’s kids. The common theme, of course, is that bureaucrats lack common sense -- but the real lesson is that this is the inevitable consequence of government intervention (especially when politicians say they are 'doing it for the children')."
• Even the Professors Union Thinks David Horowitz Should be Allowed to Speak at Colleges! - "St. Louis University, a Catholic school, has stopped a David Horowitz appearance, claiming that the controversial speaker might offend Muslims:"
• Verizon: LTE rollout to be 'as close to all-at-once as possible' - "Historically, wireless rollouts have been miserably long, protracted affairs that take countless years to complete, but Verizon's talking in some really aggressive terms as it moves to LTE. The company wants to be at or near 100 percent overlay with its legacy CDMA footprint by 2013, but a ton of major markets will be covered and commercially well before then -- up to 30 in 2010."
• The Most Powerful Regulatory Agency in the History of the World - "Ladies and gentlemen, we give you the Environmental Protection Agency, which plans to regulate carbon dioxide emissions no matter what the elected, policy-making branch of government does."
• Gene Healy: The Imperial Presidency comes in green, too - "The Obama team appears to believe it has the authority to implement comprehensive climate change regulation, Congress be damned. Worse still, under current constitutional law--which has little to do with the actual Constitution--they're probably right. "
• Inflation Warning - "Most economic forecasters profess to see little inflation risk. They need to reconsider their forecasts in light of the inflation warnings from within the central bank."
• Put Down the Cold Pills, Grandma, and Come Out With Your Hands Up - "A few months ago, Sally Harpold bought a box of Zyrtec-D allergy medicine for her husband at a pharmacy in Rockville, Indiana. Less than a week later, she bought a box of Mucinex-D cold medicine for her adult daughter at a drugstore in Clinton. Isn't it sad that you already know where this story is headed?
  
  Early on the morning of July 30, Harpold and her husband were awakened by police banging on the door of their home. The officers hauled her away in handcuffs, charging the 'grandmother of triplets' (the Terre Haute Tribune-Star's descriptor) with a Class C misdemeanor, which carries a penalty of a $500 fine and up to 60 days in jail."

Michael Moore: Jesus Scholar

• The Last Days of the Polymath - "Isaiah Berlin once divided thinkers into two types. Foxes, he wrote, know many things; whereas hedgehogs know one big thing. The foxes used to roam free across the hills. Today the hedgehogs rule."
• Alive and Living in Argentina - "Hitler was born 120 years ago 20 April, so I doubt that he's likely to magically appear anytime soon in Munich hale, hearty and rarin' to start the Fourth Reich."
• The Housing Tax Credit and the Consumer Price Index - "According to the NAR, the 'first-time' homebuyer tax credit will lead to an additional 350 thousand homes sold in 2009. As I've mentioned before, this tax credit is inefficient and poorly targeted, costing taxpayers about $43,000 for each additional home sold. And where are those 350 thousand buyers coming from? My guess is most were probably renters (a few might have been living in their parent's basements!)."
• None Dare Call it Art - "After battling a head cold all weekend (with the old family cranberry juice and vodka remedy) I was delighted to discover my inbox runneth over with submissions for the prestigious Iowahawk Endowment for the Arts $33.18 Steel Cage Art Death Match."
• Dogs Better Exercise Companions Than Humans - "A good dog is a great professional trainer."
• Strategic Defaults - "Here’s an example where the high foreclosure rate is feeding on itself, leaving many more possible defaulters behind with high mortgage balances and little hope."
• Blowback - "So no, we don’t 'vote' for Hollywood stars. But we do pay them. And now Whoopi Goldberg has gone on record making the distinction between 'rape' and 'rape rape' in the case of a 13-year old girl that was unquestionably drugged, raped and sodomized by a middle age movie director. Deborah Winger has said that, oh, that was such a long time ago. As though the failure see justice done is not the fault of the child rapist who successfully fled justice.
  
  The list of those who would apologize for child rape goes on; Martin Scorcese, Woody Allen (!), David Lynch, Tilda Swinton and Monica Bellucci.
  
  And now the rest of us are forced to ask ourselves, who are these people? And what on earth can have compelled us to invite them into our homes? Why are we paying for this?
  
  And how do we get them out?"

Rotten Tomatoe's Best Reviewed Movies of All Time - # 3: The Wizard of Oz (1939)
"Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain."

• Students aren’t really feeling the Kindle love - "The Kindle DX might be a good e-book, but the consensus among students at Princeton is that it is a very poor replacement for real books. Very poor, sir."
• Pictured: The tiny kingbird that took a piggyback on a predatory hawk and lived to tell the tale - "In a bold move, the aggressive little bird launched itself at the fearsome red-tailed hawk and sank its talons into the larger bird's back."
• Can't Touch This - I'll Take The IPod Touch - "The debate keeps raging about whether you need an iPhone if you want the entertainment, productivity and other useful apps available in the App Store, along with iTunes. Regular readers know that I am an iPod Touch proponent. Who needs to pay AT&T for a substandard phone and network, when you get everything in the Touch except the phone? I do phone and email on a little Palm Centro that stays in my pocket or on my hip. For everything else, I have the Touch. iPhone proponents say, wait, we have access to all the web apps wherever we are, and you have to find a WiFi hotspot. Well, yes, unless you carry a portable router with mobile broadband access, like the Verizon USB 760, a tiny USB accessory that gives WiFi everywhere." Or the MyFi
• The French Paradox - "Compared to Americans, the French consume four times as much butter, three times as much pork and 60% more cheese. Their overall consumption of saturated animal fat is double ours. Since the experts have told us over and over that saturated fat will clog your arteries, the heart-attack rate in France must be higher than the Eiffel Tower, right?"
• Former markets in everything - "Might the Finnish portable sauna someday make a comeback?"

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Assorted Links 9/28/09

baby sign language

• Speechwriting: Preparing Speeches and Oral Presentations, October 16, 2009
• Understanding The Regulatory Process: Working with Federal Regulatory Agencies, October 20, 2009
• Effective Executive Briefings, October 23, 2009
• Writing for Government and Business: Critical Thinking and Writing, November 12, 2009
• Writing to Persuade: Hone Your Persuasive Writing Skills, November 13, 2009
• *Too Big to Save*, by Robert Pozen - "For the last two years I've been receiving requests -- email and otherwise -- for a readable, educating book on the financial crisis. And while various books on the crisis have had their merits, no one of them has fit that bill. Until now. Robert Pozen's Too Big to Save: How to Fix the U.S. Financial System is the single best source for figuring out what happened."
• Barack Obama, College Administrator - "If you are confused by the first nine months of the Obama administration, take solace that there is at least a pattern. The president, you see, thinks America is a university and that he is our campus president. Keep that in mind, and almost everything else makes sense.
  . . .
  Academic culture also promotes this idea that highly educated professionals deigned to give up their best years for arduous academic work and chose to be above the messy rat race. Although supposedly far better educated, smarter (or rather the 'smartest'), and more morally sound than lawyers, CEOs, and doctors, academics gripe that they, unfairly, are far worse paid. And they lack the status that should accrue to those who teach the nation’s youth, correct their papers, and labor over lesson plans. Obama reminded us ad nauseam of all the lucre he passed up on Wall Street in order to return to the noble pursuit of organizing and teaching in Chicago.
  
  In short, campus people have had the bar raised on themselves at every avenue. Suggest to an academic that university pay is not bad for ninth months’ work, often consisting of an actual six to nine hours a week in class, and you will be considered guilty of heresy if not defamation."
• Steward Brand, Slumlord - "Whole Earth Catalog founder and onetime Merry Prankster Stewart Brand is one of twelve thinkers asked this month by Wired magazine to contribute to a list of 'twelve shocking ideas that could change the world.' In this brief piece, Brand praises slums as good for the environment:"
• Lobbying - "So I'll ask a different question, as a form of a modest proposal to get the money out of politics. Why should it be legal to make a political contribution to a candidate who is not running for an office that represents you as a constituent? I do not think it should be. Imagine how different this senator's incentives would be if he could only raise money from the residents of Montana as individuals and not from organized interests."
• The Condo Glut - "But this is a reminder that new high rise condos are not included in the new home inventory report from the Census Bureau, and are also not included in the existing home sales report from the NAR (unless they are listed). These uncounted units are concentrated in Miami, Las Vegas, San Diego and other large cities - but as these articles show, there are new condos almost everywhere."
• House Value = 15 x Ann. Rent - "So what is residential real estate worth today? The answer to that question is, 'About 15 times the annual rent'."
• What would FDR do? - "In my Sunday Examiner column, I quoted from Barack Obama’s speech to the United Nations General Assembly last Wednesday, in a way that indicated a certain disapproval."
• Costco Fuel Settlement - "Costco, along with other fuel retailers, has been sued over the way it measures gallons of fuel in some states. The putative class plaintiffs have settled the case--for zero dollars for the class, and ten million dollars for the attorneys."
• You Have Two Cows... - "And lo and behold, there were 340,000 entries/versions under 'you have two cow jokes,' with entire web sites dedicated to them and entries dating back to early days of the internet. As a matter of fact, a web site tells us that 'You have two cows' jokes originated as a parody of typical 'Economics 101' examples, meant to show the limitations of economic systems and to point out flaws and absurdities in those systems."
• Congressman’s 72 Hour Rule Suggestion Is Inadequate - "In response to the growing support for a discharge petition to force a vote on the Read the Bill bill, Rep. Tim Walz is circulating a 'Dear Colleague' letter asking Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Majority Leader Steny Hoyer to enforce the already existing 72 hour rule."

Is Your Alarm Too Quiet? Hook Up A Pair Of 140-Decibel Horns!

• Vanity Fair's Disappearing Demographic - "One thing that interests me about the magazine is how often it features members of the Kennedy family. ... Still, I have the oddball notion that the Kennedys are pretty passé from the newsmaking standpoint, especially since Teddy has gone on to whatever reward he merits."
• My Rich Uncle - "With consumers and businesses not only cutting back but actually reducing debt, A Rich Uncle Is Picking Up the Borrowing Slack."
• Where Does Lost Luggage Wind Up? Terminal Man Finds Out - "False teeth, a hearing aid, hundreds of cell phones and iPods, and even Uncle Bob: These are the kinds of things that regularly turn up lost in a typical airport. ... Cell phones and iPods are frequent visitors to James’ office. 'On an average month, we’ll get anywhere from eight hundred to twelve hundred items,' he said. 'A large portion of those are cell phones.'"
• New Genetic Analysis Sheds Light on Origins of Indian Castes - "The research team analyzed the DNA of 132 individuals from India and neighboring regions, dividing them into 25 distinct groups based on geography, caste and language. They calculated how genetically ‘closed’ each of these groups were. In the caste system it is rare to marry someone from another class, making caste societies very closed, or ‘endogamous.’ If this endogamy continues over many generations, it will leave a behind a genetic signature for scientists to discover. Reich and his team found such a signature, indicating a long history of endogamy in several of the groups. In fact, the research team calculated that the DNA of six of the groups can be traced back to just a few individuals who lived anywhere from 30 to more than 100 generations ago. Assuming a generation time of 25 years, that establishes the existence of the caste system in the range of 750 to more than 2,500 years ago -- long before the British colonial era."
• AT&T, Google Spat Over Google Voice Blocked Calls Is Important... But Totally Misses The Point - "However (and this is important), the actual issue here is not net neutrality. The real issue is ridiculous regulatory setups in certain rural areas, that force unnaturally high connection fees on telcos to rural telcos, creating a massive arbitrage opportunity that the Free Conference call offerings making good (and profitable) use of in offering their services. Basically, every inbound call to these telcos requires massive per minute fees from the connecting service provider to the rural telco. It's so expensive that as long as the rural telco can offer a service (such as conference calls) at a cheaper rate, they make money on every inbound call -- but it's all due to outdated regulations that 'protect' those telcos."

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Assorted Links 9/22/09

Parkour on a bicycle

• Speechwriting: Preparing Speeches and Oral Presentations, October 16, 2009
• Understanding The Regulatory Process: Working with Federal Regulatory Agencies, October 20, 2009
• Effective Executive Briefings, October 23, 2009
• Writing for Government and Business: Critical Thinking and Writing, November 12, 2009
• Writing to Persuade: Hone Your Persuasive Writing Skills, November 13, 2009
• Socialism v. Capitalism - From an article by Svetlana Kunin: "In the USSR, economic equality was achieved by redistributing wealth, ensuring that everyone remained poor, with the exception of those doing the redistributing. Only the ruling class of communist leaders had access to special stores, medicine and accommodations that could compare to those in the West.
  . . .
  There is no perfect society. There are no perfect people. Critics say that greed is the driving force of capitalism. My answer is that envy is the driving force of socialism. Change to socialism is not an improvement on the imperfections of the current system."
• Museum of Communism - "It would be a great tragedy if Communism disappeared from the earth without leaving behind an indelible memory of its horrors. Communism was not essentially about espionage, or power politics, or irreligion. Rather it was a grand theoretical synthesis of totalitarianism... a theory which millions of people experienced as the practice of murder and slavery."
• Why Stimulus Spending Lags - "Stimulus projects are likely to come with a thick string of transparency and accountability requirements, along with potentially severe financial penalties and, in some cases, possible prison time. These conditions may be extended not only to U.S. government contractors, but to companies undertaking federally funded projects for state and local governments."
• It All Depends on What Your Definition of Tax Is - "As Katherine Mangu-Ward noted this morning, the president's attempts to narrow his pledge so that it does not include the taxes he ends up raising (such as the federal cigarette tax, raised a few weeks after he took office, or the proposed levies on Americans who fail to buy health insurance) recently prompted a testy exchange with George Stephanopoulos in which the ABC interviewer cited the dictionary definition of tax, which Obama saw as evidence that Stephanopoulos was 'stretching a little bit.'"
• The baked bean index and other economic indicators - "A bunch of odd economic indicators that I have read about recently."
• Clunk Confirmed: - "A new paper in The Economists' Voice concludes that the costs of the 'cash for clunkers' program exceed the benefits by approximately $2000 per vehicle. "
• CPSIA chronicles, September 20 - "At the Wall Street Journal, a letter to the editor regarding my op-ed of last week generally agrees with its thrust but claims that I '[err] when assigning blame to consumer groups' among others for the enactment. I find this charge baffling, since groups like Public Citizen, PIRG and the Consumer Federation of America 1) were routinely cited in the press during the bill’s run-up to enactment as key advocates of its more extreme provisions, 2) have loudly claimed credit for enacting those provisions and the overall bill ever since, 3) have been routinely cited this year in the press as key opponents of any effort to revisit the law in Congress. Why strive to excuse them from a responsibility that they gladly shoulder?"
• Maryland governor OKs ACORN investigation - "O’Malley’s announcement came in response to a request from Attorney General Doug Gansler to conduct an investigation into criminal allegations. Baltimore employees with the Association of Community Organizers for Reform Now (ACORN) were caught on video tape telling undercover investigators posing as a pimp and prostitute how they could sidestep tax laws and obtain illegal loans."
• Obama energy secretary to Americans: Stop acting like teenagers! - "When Secretary of Energy Steven Chu thinks of the American people, he apparently sees a bunch of unruly teenagers who need to be told how to act.

  Asked at a seminar on reconstructing America's electrical grid about the Obama administration's efforts to persuade people to conserve energy, Chu said 'the American public…just like your teenage kids, aren’t acting in a way that they should act. The American public has to really understand in their core how important this issue is,' according to The Wall Street Journal."

Tennis scene from Mr. Hulot's Holiday

• NFL player bankruptcy - "The 78 percent number (i.e., 78% of NFL players go bankrupt within two years of retirement) is buoyed by the fact that the average NFL career lasts just three years. So, figure a player gets drafted in 2009, signs for the minimum and lasts three years in the league: He will have earned about $1.2 million in salary."
• How (and Why) Athletes Go Broke - "Recession or no recession, many NFL, NBA and Major League Baseball players have a penchant for losing most or all of their money. It doesn't matter how much they make. And the ways they blow it are strikingly similar"
• Professional Athletes and the Prevalence of Bankruptcy - "Doing the math, and discounting $400,000 per year for three years, beginning at age 17 and entering the big leagues at age 21 (not likely), the expected value of a career in baseball is about $86. Who's likely to pursue that?
  . . .
  Making [it] to the pros for many athletes is like the person who lives in a trailer winning the lottery - they've never learned how to handle the wealth."
• 8 lottery winners who lost their millions - "Having piles of cash only compounds problems for some people. Here are sad tales of foolishness, hit men, greedy relatives and dreams dashed."
• 10 Ways Sports Stars Go From Riches To Rags - "Too much money in real estate; investments in Ponzi schemes; and poor financial advising have been exposed with the down economy. ... More than anything else, players appear to put too much money into real estate."
• American Efforts at Weisse Bier - "Surprisingly good, in fact excellent: Sierra Nevada 'Kellerweis' Hefeweizen. Much, much better than I expected. Looks and tastes just like wiessbier, in fact. Well done. My new favorite, #1 American beer."
• Unexpected effects of a wheat-free diet - "Wheat elimination continues to yield explosive and unexpected health benefits."
• An amazing note-taking tool for lawyers (and others) - "Hey, you know what’d be cool? What if you could use a pen that was (1) a recording device, but (2) also captured your writing, and (3) when you tapped it on an area in your written notes it would play the recording of what was being said at that time. That would be cool, but also totally impossible. Except it’s not. If you go to Amazon you can get this ‘smart pen’ for $129."
• Mobile Tech Minutes -- Evernote - "Evernote is a true platform agnostic, note taker / collector supreme. It runs on just about every mobile device out there and makes grabbing information a snap. I show the basic operation of the program and demonstrate how it makes it easy to find nuggets of information."
• Your Google docs: Soon in search results? - "Web 2.0 is great for interactive discovery of information. I have been reticent, however, to advise lawyers to put mission critical or client confidential information in the websphere, no matter the protestations of vendors about security. Users are not always going to make fine distinctions between 'Publish to Web' and other web terminology if they are creating documents and sharing them online. It is risky enough to send documents attached to emails. Mis-directed emails have gotten more than one lawyer or firm in trouble."
• “A new, hard test of our wisdom” - "Back in August, Terry Teachout suggested in the Wall Street Journal that those of us grappling with new media take a few lessons from the history of TV. Television succeeded for a number of reasons, he says, including its unanimous, unquestioning acceptance by the people. ... In a remarkable essay 'A Forecast of Television' (1935), Rudolf Arnheim wrote:"
• Parked Truck Gets 45 Automated Speeding Tickets - "Netherlands -- Dutch lumber merchant Martin Robben no longer believes the camera never lies. As reported by De Telegraaf, the man was falsely accused of speeding forty-five times on August 25 while his vehicle, a commercial truck, was parked on the side of the road in Oldeberkoop village. 'Sometimes there were only three seconds between the tickets,' Robben told the Dutch paper. 'That’s impossible . . . Nobody can be flashed dozens of times in an afternoon.'"
• Vandalised Gatsos - "To my knowledge this is the largest collection of wrecked Gatsos [speed cameras in England] on the internet, and its growing rapidly. So long as these cameras are robbing motorists of their cash they will continue to be destroyed."

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Assorted Links 9/19/09

The Devil Wears Fake Prada

• Capitol Hill Workshop, September 23-25, 2009
• Speechwriting: Preparing Speeches and Oral Presentations, October 16, 2009
• Understanding The Regulatory Process: Working with Federal Regulatory Agencies, October 20, 2009
• Effective Executive Briefings, October 23, 2009
• Writing for Government and Business: Critical Thinking and Writing, November 12, 2009
• Writing to Persuade: Hone Your Persuasive Writing Skills, November 13, 2009
• The Potency Of The Investigative Power Of Congress - "A request from Congress for an appearance or for documents should not be taken lightly. Let's say you're a major government contractor. I think it's just common sense that you should be aware of what's happening on the Hill with regard to the breadth of congressional investigations and how they could impact you and your company. The ramifications of a congressional investigation go far beyond the actual hearing itself and can threaten the reputation of a company, its CEO, and/or a product, and can cause serious harm to an individual's future employment as well as adversely impact investor confidence in a company. Everybody should be aware that Congress is going to be very active over the next two years and should act accordingly. When Congress comes calling, you'd better take it seriously."
• Measures of State Economic Distress: Housing Foreclosures and Changes in Unemployment and Food Stamp Participation - ht 13th Floor
• Sputum markets in everything - "South African saliva ... It seems to be a competitive market:"
• Taxes and Legitimacy - "A regime that depends on taxes to function and retain power will seek to assure that it retains legitimacy, by carrying out the necessary functions of governance. 'Legitimacy' need not stem from democracy; a stable authoritarian regime, like China, can have one without the other. But it does require that the government govern, as Samuel Huntington used to put it."
• Earmark Horse Hockey - "The report for the bill has the federal government sending $500,000 to the Pendleton Round-Up Foundation for 'reconstruction and construction needs of facilities which are critical to the local economy.' That’s right: The folks in Pendleton, Oregon want you to send them a half-million bucks for their 'critical-to-the-local-economy' rodeo ring."
• Rangel the roguish raconteur - "The trouble is, he also has a reputation for sloppy book-keeping. And this matters. The Democrats' agenda this year will cost a lot of money. They will struggle to persuade Americans to pay their fair share while people like Rangel are perceived not to. So no matter how entertaining and colourful a figure Rangel is, he should not be the chairman of the committee that writes America's tax laws."
• California Regulations On TV Energy Efficiency - "A geographically huge state can't generate all the electricity it uses? Why? The problem is not the vastness of California's needs. Let me reword: California's NIMBY regulations are so vast that the state prevents sufficient electricity generating capacity from being built within the state's borders. While I'm at it: California's regulatory restrictions increase transmission line losses by requiring generation capacity to be built far from its population centers and it increases odds of power outages due to failures in long distance transmission lines."
• Nonscientists Naive about Science - "When journalists talk about science in general this is usually a pretext for saying those who disagree with their favorite idea are wrong, because they are unscientific. Who can be against science? There isn't a formal anti-science movement because it's indefensible in principle. They then caricature their opponents, taking the most inarticulate advocates from the other side, and skewering their illogic. They then sit back and take take inordinate pride in their scientific pretensions, as if their selective discussion was objective. The fact is, most 'big' scientific issues do not conform to the scientific method, where one puts out testable hypotheses, rejecting ones that are falsified."

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
The Audacity of Hos
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor Healthcare Protests

Jon Stewart slams media for missing ACORN story: 'Where the hell were you!?'

• Is Mandatory Health Insurance Unconstitutional? - "In the The Politico's Arena, we are debating Rivkin and Casey's Wall Street Journal Op-ed that Jonathan notes below. While my take on this issue differs somewhat from his, in my contribution (here), I respond to this rather catty post by Washington & Lee law professor Timothy Stoltzfus Jost. This is what I wrote:"
• Profanity on the Court and the Trading Floor, from Ken Drees - "There are few things in life with less downside than good manners. No matter the field, no matter the situation."
• It was a foul, ref! Dive guide will help officials spot the cheaters from fair players - "These include clutching their body where they have not been hit, taking an extra roll when they hit the ground and taking fully controlled strides after being tackled before falling. Most tellingly they often make the 'archer's bow' position, holding up both arms in the air, with open palms, chest thrust out and legs bent at the knee. This would not occur in a natural fall."

Learning from Milton Friedman’s Rhetoric

• Dear Zagat A hearty thanks for your 30 years of service. Now go away. - "The Zagat guide turned 30 years old this year, and in honor of the occasion, I’d like to give founders Tim and Nina Zagat a hearty thanks for all their years of service to the restaurant industry. And, if I may, I’d like to offer some friendly advice, too: You can go away now."
• Remembrance of Zagat’s Past: The SNL Sketch
• Ouch - Do You Know Who Your Clients Are? - "On the surface, this is a simple case. A lawyer in a closing asks for photo IDs of his clients at the closing table. Husband provides his. Wife says she left hers at the restaurant. The closing proceeds, and the lawyer doesn't follow up. Lo and behold, the mortgage goes into foreclosure and it turns out that the 'wife' was an impostor. Now, lawyer is defending a grievance for not verifying the identity of the parties. Ouch."

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Assorted Links 9/16/09

No American Should Have to Choose Between Health Insurance and Getting Drunk

• Congressional Dynamics and the Legislative Process, September 17, 2009
• Capitol Hill Workshop, September 23-25, 2009
• Statistical Analysis: Yer doin' it Wrong! - "The study on the determinants of college graduation rates is making a big splash. However, its analysis is, with all due respect, crap. Correlation is not causation, there are generally multiple explanations for a correlation and it is not correct to simply pick one and assert its truthfulness."
• Swine Flu And Vaccines - "Per the Times, the swine flu is likely to peak this season in late October, before the vaccine has been made and distributed in vast quantities. Unless I utterly misapprehend the Congressional timeline, it follows that the non-timely government response will be in the midst of the debate over national health care reform."
• As Predicted: A Psychic Failure - "the fact is that nobody, no professional nor amateur psychic gave any indication that there would be a major terrorist attack in New York City or Washington in September 2001."
• Post Cash for Clunkers Sales Suck - "Any automotive analyst worth their salt could have told you--did tell you--that Uncle Sam’s $3 billion Cash for Clunkers program was going to suck the oxygen right out of the showroom. Really, this is one for Johnny Carson."
• "Too big to take a pay cut" - "We should stop using political favors as a means of managing an economic sector. Unfortunately, though, recent experience with health care reform shows we are moving in the opposite direction and not heeding the basic lessons of the financial crisis. Finance and health care are two separate issues, of course, but in both cases we’re making the common mistake of digging in durable political protections for special interest groups.
  
  One disturbing portent came over the summer when it was reported that the Obama administration had promised deals to doctors and to pharmaceutical companies under the condition that they publicly support health care reform. That’s another example of creating favored beneficiaries through politics.
  . . .
  In short, we should return both the financial and medical sectors and, indeed, our entire economy to greater market discipline. We should move away from the general attitude of 'too big to take a pay cut,' especially when the taxpayer is on the hook for the bill. If such changes sound daunting, it is a sign of how deep we have dug ourselves in. We haven’t yet learned from the banking crisis, and we’re still moving in the wrong direction pretty much across the board."
• No Bickering or Thinking: Just Do It: Understanding Obama's new health care agenda - "Those who claim that President Barack Obama's speech on health care this week wasn't a glorious success are fooling themselves. A Washington takeover of health care never sounded so enticing or fun.
  
  Just ignore the specifics, because when the president says he welcomes substantive new ideas, he means that if you have the nerve to offer any ideas--as Whole Foods' CEO, John Mackey, did in The Wall Street Journal last month--his allies will attempt to destroy your business and reputation."
• Three Myths about the Crisis: Bonuses, Irrationality, and Capitalism - "With a year having passed since the start of the greatest economic crisis in our lifetimes, you’d think we would know a lot more now than we did then about what caused it. Yet by the spring of 2008, a three-part conventional wisdom about the crisis had taken hold that still governs mainstream thinking about what happened and why--even though there was never any evidence in favor of the conventional wisdom, and there is now much evidence against it.
  . . .
  Contrary to popular belief, then, the crisis of 2008 is best described as a crisis of regulation--not a crisis of capitalism."
• Public Information and Public Choice - "If we’re going to be bound by the decisions made by regulatory agencies and courts, surely at a bare minimum we’re all entitled to know what those decisions are and how they were arrived at. But as many of the participants at the conference stressed, it’s not enough for the data to be available -- it’s important that it be free, and in a machine readable form."
• American Masculinity Redeemed - "Well, apparently, just when I thought the entire country was going to slink off into the shadows and let the gang wearing the black hats rape the schoolmarm and plunder the Farmer's & Mechanic's Bank at will, a righteous badass has stepped forth. (Stark but stirring theme music plays in the background). Today I read of his manly exploits in the NY Times:"

One Senator's Thoughts on the CPSIA
"You elected me to lead, not to read."

• Musical training may help the brainstem choose - "Those with musical training may be better at picking out an important or complicated sound in a room than those without."
• The Digital Lawyer Crosses the Border - "Many, if not most, lawyers who carry laptops have some form of a 'paperless' law practice and carry many client files on their laptops, hopefully encrypted or, at least, password protected. One of the nice things about having a laptop is using it as a desktop replacement to carry everything with you.
  
  That laptop probably can no longer travel across the U.S.border with you. Whether top military grade encryption protects your information from the Department of Homeland security or just presents a professional challenge for them is for you to decide.
  
  But, if you just need access to a few files and know you will have Internet access at your destination, you can always just e-mail them to yourself and leave them in your inbox. You could also use an online document repository or VPN or one of several other secure solutions for remote access to files.
  
  Bottom line: These rules probably give every law firm a great justification to buy a Netbook or two for overseas travel. Cleaning up every confidential file from a laptop used as a primary workstation before traveling overseas would be too big a pain and cost more in lawyer time than a Netbook."
• "Your Tweets They Are Belong To Us" - "I think all lawyers need to examine Twitter's NEW terms of service very carefully. As the author of this post points out, when Twitter can: 'use, copy, reproduce, process, adapt, modify, publish, transmit, display and distribute such Content in any and all media or distribution methods (now known or later developed)', I have to ask: 'Are you kidding me?'. I am an old dirt lawyer. In real property law, if you can enter on to the land, use it in any way you wish, stomp on it, dig out the minerals, and just generally fool around on it, You Own It."
• CPSIA (the Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act) - "I’ve got an op-ed in today’s Wall Street Journal on CPSIA (the Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act) and Congress’s unwillingness to reform it despite its calamitous and unnecessary impacts on the children’s product business, especially its smaller participants. If you’re new to this site, here are some pointers for further reading about the issues raised in the piece:"
• By me @ Wired: The Superconducting Super Collider - "Finally, my story about the Superconducting Super Collider, in Texas, makes it into the world. I first pitched this story to Wired in October, 2006, on the back of an interview I conducted with Johnnie Bryan Hunt.
  
  JB Hunt was a multimillionaire and former member of the Forbes 400, who I interviewed him for All The Money in the World, in 2005. If you live in America, I guarantee you have seen one of his white trucks, with a yellow-and-black 'JB Hunt' logo, on the road somewhere."

(see next link about parking on the wrong side of the street)

• File this under: Property rights problem, things that sound like - "Upon climbing into my car this morning, I found the following note under my windshield wiper, verbatim:
  
  Please park on your side of the street. No one from this side (block) parks on your side! Seriously, this has become a problem, park on your own side and be courteous to us as we are to you.
  Since the Steelers game was last night, I needed a nice pick-me-up this morning, and this note did the trick nicely."
• Gut Bucket Blues - "Johnny St. Cyr offered to start off with a banjo solo, an idea Armstrong liked. Then Armstrong, whose voice had been silenced on the hundreds of records he had made to this point, decided to make his personality immediately known by shouting encouragement to each member of the group during their solos. That's one of the reasons I've always loved this record; it's as if Armstrong could not possibly wait another session longer without letting his personality and natural ability as an entertainer shine though. 'Oh, play that thing, Mr. St. Cyr, lord. You know you can do it. Everybody from New Orleans could do it. Hey, hey!' It's a blast. No wonder it was chosen as the first Hot Five to be released...listen for yourself:"
• Dressmaking 101 - "The one body area a woman is most worried about is her hips, thighs and butt. Right? So why would a designer ever make a dress that specifically brings more attention, weight, and bulk to that area?"
• Top 10 Tactics for Protecting Your Stuff - "5. Erase your hard drives the permanent way. ... 4. Uglify gear you don't want grabbed. ... 2. Know where to hide your money"
• Canon VB-C500VD Vandal Resistant Mini-Dome Camera - "The VB-C500VD will have an MSRP of $999 and will be available in mid-October, just in time to protect your home against toilet paper and smashed pumpkins."
• PaperFix: Staple-free stapling - "The PaperFix that I've owned for all these years is silent in use, completely ecological, and the ongoing cost is zero. I reach for it at least a few times a day and with one firm press of the top can bind about 6 to 8 pages (depending on paper thickness) together."

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Assorted Links 9/13/09

Seven Ridiculous Ticket Camera Blunders

• Capitol Hill Workshop, September 23-25, 2009
• A comment on the Deficit and National Debt - "The time to concerned about the structural deficit was in 2001 through 2006, and hopefully again starting in 2011 or 2012."
• Life In (and After) Our Great Recession - "The defining characteristic of the middle classes has always been their orientation toward the future. The Depression ruined schemes for such baubles and pleasures as the new car and the winter vacation. But it also at best disrupted and at worst (and often) destroyed carefully wrought plans for so-called investments in the future: the substantial house in the stable neighborhood, the savings account, and, most important, what was then and remains the cynosure of American middle- and professional-class family life--a college education, or a certain kind of college education, for the children. Even today, that investment largely determines the opportunities parents seize or forgo, the towns they move to, the rhythm of a family’s daily life. The Depression rendered any careful planning for the future, an activity that depends on predictable conditions, all but impossible, or at least crazy-making."
• Junk Bond Defaults Worst Since Great Depression. So Why Is The Market Rallying? - "The corporate debt market is still in control, but we now have a warning sign from treasuries yields about the strength of the so-called recovery. This rally is extremely long in the tooth, but the fact still remains: as long as corporate bonds hold up, huge equity selloffs are unlikely."
• Anatomy of an Economic Ignoramus - "You could spend the rest of your life correcting drones and automatons who will never have an original or unconventional thought no matter how much you prod them. Their seventh-grade teacher, who was also the track coach, taught them what they know, and they're sticking to it."
• Is It Identity Theft Or A Bank Robbery, Part II: Couple Sues Bank Over Money Taken - "Last month, we posted an amusing discussion (and comedy act) concerning whether or not 'identify theft' was really a crime, or if it was really a bank robbery where the bank was passing off the liability for its poor authentication system onto the bank customer. Apparently, just such an argument is already playing out in the courts."
• General Motors Zombie Watch 17: May the Best Automaker Win - "General Motors is a nationalized automaker. But it can’t stay that way forever. Its federal taskmasters have decreed that GM must return to public ownership before the Congressional mid-term elections in 2010. Makes sense. If GM is still on welfare at election time, GM will be an enormous political liability. A symbol of Big Government gone bad. But GM can’t possibly achieve profitability within that time frame. Even if it had the brains, it doesn’t have the time or money to build what needs building, to fix what needs fixing. The new car market sucks and GM’s product planning, reputation and branding are in tatters. So New GM’s doing the only thing they can do: putting lipstick on the product pig and sending it off to market. This 'May The Best Car Win' advertising strategy will backfire. Badly."
• Luigi Zingales on threats to the Future of American Capitalism - "The distinction between a 'pro-business' agenda and a pro-market one is a crucial point that I have often emphasized myself (see here and here). Unfortunately, it is routinely ignored or misunderstood. For the reasons Zingales points out, business interests regularly lobby in favor of government intervention whenever they think it might protect them from competition or secure government-provided privileges."
• Where college dreams go to die - "Between the overmatched and the undermatched, it’s a miracle anyone earns a degree."
• Cheaper Health Care - "Here’s how the federal government can realize those savings:
  
  • Stop telling us what to eat, and admit that the earlier attempts to tell us what to eat were a mistake.
  • Stop subsidizing corn and other grains.
  These proposals would produce both short-term and, more importantly, long-term savings. The short-term savings are based on a principle of economics that’s so stupidly simple, even the average congressman can grasp it: if you stop spending money, you end up spending less."
• Europe’s First Farmers Came from Afar: New Clues Shed Light on Genetic Ancestry of Modern Europeans - "The research team, led by Barbara Bramanti of Mainz University, sequenced the mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) of just under 50 individuals unearthed from various prehistoric burial sites across central and eastern Europe. Half the individuals came from hunter-gatherer societies, and the other half from communities based around farming. As a comparison, they also sequenced the mtDNA of nearly 500 modern Europeans from the same parts of Europe."
• The Student Loan Market - "The furor over President Obama's trillion-dollar restructuring of American health care has left his other trillion-dollar plan starved for attention. That's how much the federal balance sheet will expand over the next decade if Mr. Obama can convince Congress to approve his pending takeover of the student-loan market."
• Quick Impressions of the D.C. 9/12 Protest - "I just came back from spending four-plus hours with the Don't-Tread-On-Me crowd at our nation's capitol. Expect a full Reason.tv report later, but my snap impressions: * Big crowd. * Nineteen out of 20 signs were hand-made. * Chants on the march included 'Shut down ACORN!' and 'Boot Charlie Rangel!' and 'Don't tread on me.' * The view on Obama and his administration ranged from a 'heading in the wrong direction' vibe to a 'we're not gonna take it much longer' edge."

Free Panfilo!

• Investor Beware - "Lately, there have been a number of inquiries about investing in real estate. Even though there is some frothy-ness going around, be careful! ... If you are thinking of buying at a trustee sale, buying a fixer, or 'stealing one from the bank', watch yourself - things can go wrong, very wrong. Assume that there is no 'built-in equity' and what seems like a simple repair job usually costs double."
• Google Working On Micropayment Scheme To Help Newspapers Commit Suicide Faster - "The problem with a paywall isn't that the technology doesn't exist to make it work -- it's that consumers won't buy into it. But, if the newspapers want to try -- and Google wants to provide the rope -- good for them. Update Seems like a bad time to point out that retailers are having serious problems with Google Checkout, huh?"
• Interview with Richard "Buz" Cooper, MD, Prophet of Physician Shortage and Challenger of Policymaker Assumptions - "Wealth is a source of health care creation; poverty is a source of health care consumption.
  . . .
  Regional variation is a product of regional differences in wealth, overlaid with differences in poverty. It’s not generally appreciated that health care expenditures for people in the lowest 15% of income are 50% to 100% greater than for people of average income. There’s also a difference at the high end. The wealthiest 15% also consume more, but only about 20% more. So there’s greater utilization at both ends of the income spectrum, but for different reasons and with different outcomes.
  
  More spending at the high end improves outcomes, not simply for a specific condition but across the board, because the care consists of a broader spectrum of beneficial services. More yields more. But among the low-income patients, outcomes are poor despite the added spending. In fact, the added spending is because of poor outcomes -- more readmissions, more care for disease that’s out of control.
  
  And these differences are exaggerated in dense urban environments, like Detroit, Chicago and Philadelphia. Now, when you blend all of this into 'regional' studies, which average rich and poor, urban density and ex-urban comfort, racial and ethnic groups, you get just what you’d expect. High costs with average outcomes in urban areas (the average of excellent and poor outcomes at different ends of the income spectrum).
  
  A good example is the Dartmouth study of academic medical centers. You find that one group of academic hospitals provide more care than another group. The Dartmouth folks say that Mayo is more 'efficient' in resources used per patient or in number of doctors devoted per unit of patient care than in LA, Philadelphia, Miami, Chicago, and New York City.
  
  But the so-called 'inefficient' hospitals are all in dense urban centers, while 'efficient' hospitals are all in smaller cities, often college towns liked Madison, Wisconsin or Columbia, Missouri, or in places like Rochester, Minnesota, where Mayo is located. Rochester is 90% Caucasian with low poverty. But in fact, Mayo is the most resource intensive center in the upper Midwest. Among peer institutions in similar socio-demographic environments, Mayo actually uses more resources. But you can’t compare Mayo to Los Angeles, where only 30% of the population is non-Hispanic white and where you have tremendous pockets of poverty.
  . . .
  But it all made sense when I learned that the new editor of Health Affairs, Susan Dentzer, is a Member of the Board of Overseers of Dartmouth Medical School, the former Chair of the Board of Dartmouth College, a former Trustee of Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center and winner of the alumnus of the year award from Dartmouth. She has a profound conflict of interest which she failed to reveal in her editorial -- an egregious ethical breach. So, it all made sense. And it all is rather remarkable. Fortunately, truth has a way of surviving, and the truth is that states with more health care spending and more specialists have better quality health care." ht Marginal Revolution
• State of Texas Forces Couple Into Nursing Home, Takes Over Their Finances - "Awful story from Texas, where elderly couple Michael and Jean Kidd were made wards of the state of Texas, then held against their will while the state took over their finances."
• "The Crisis No. I," by Thomas Paine - "THESE are the times that try men's souls.
  
  The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman.
  
  Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph.
  
  What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly: it is dearness only that gives every thing its value.
  
  Heaven knows how to put a proper price upon its goods; and it would be strange indeed if so celestial an article as freedom should not be highly rated.
  
  Britain, with an army to enforce her tyranny, has declared that she has a right (not only to tax) but 'to bind us in all cases whatsoever,' and if being bound in that manner, is not slavery, then is there not such a thing as slavery upon earth. Even the expression is impious; for so unlimited a power can belong only to God."
• Obama to Impose Tariff on Chinese Tires - "From the quiet shadows of the White House, at around 10 pm on Friday night, came word that President Obama will impose prohibitive duties of 35% on imports of Chinese tires.
  
  Well, we at Cato and elsewhere have warned repeatedly of the dangerous consequences of this outcome (June 18, July 24, August 13, September 9, September 11). Former Cato colleague and coauthor Scott Lincicome has an excellent analysis on the ramifications right here.
  
  The good news is that we now have clarity about where the president stands on trade. The bad news is that his stance reflects his isolationist primary election campaign rhetoric and not the post-election messages of avoiding protectionism and repairing the damage done to America’s international credibility by unilateralist Bush administration policies. Short of armed hostilities or political subversion, no state action is more provocative than banning another’s products from entering your market."
• If Free Trade Is Good, Why Are We Putting a 35 Percent Tariff on Chinese Tire Imports? - "for example, a nation like Canada can grow a lot of wheat, and then use their silos full of it in trade to buy the computers it needs from nations like Japan. That way both nations have computers, they are fed, and--and this is where it gets really exciting--it's possible for both nations to consume more of both goods than would be possible if they were living in isolation with no trade whatsoever, relying only upon their own workers to make all the goods they need."
• Parking lot striping business - "Parking Lot line stripping is a business that you can get started in almost immediately. It’s easy to do and has a low start-up cost."
• China alarmed by US money printing - "The good news is that someone is alarmed by U.S. monetary policy. The bad news is that it's a top member of the Chinese Communist hierarchy."
• Cornell Student Dies of Swine Flu - "A student from Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y., has died of complications from the H1N1 virus, according to a statement on its Web site. Warren J. Schor, 20, died Friday at Cayuga Medical Center."

Inflation, explained by Pete Smith - Vintage pro-inflation propaganda

• Is the Stone Beginning to Crack? - "We’re all working from different vantage points -- some closer than others -- but the ultimate goal is similar, if not identical: to show that the Conventional Dietary Wisdom of the last hundred years has done far more harm than good."
• Woodstock Farm Festival - "Woodstockers can now buy incredibly overpriced produce, bread and free range meat, at least during the warm weather months, at our once weekly market. 'Homegrown Blueberries - $4.00' a pint! The Karaoke Queen would bust a gut over that. Good thing she’s over in the Philippines for a couple of weeks. So, I guess that the surplus carbon produced by all those cars driving into town for the market is offset by all that carbon that is not created by folks taking a trip to Kingston to buy their groceries at Shop-Rite. It’s a wash."
• Department of Duh - "I liked the opening paragraph of the piece:
  
  'A driver has racked up dozens of speeding tickets in photo-radar zones on Phoenix-area freeways while sporting monkey and giraffe masks, and is fighting every one by claiming the costumes make it impossible for authorities to prove he was behind the wheel.'
  
  Monkey masks I can see. But giraffe masks? That's good enough for a markets in everything. Who, other than this guy, buys a giraffe mask? And how is this for governmental wisdom?"

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Business Etiquette, Dining Etiquette

What's wrong with this picture?

Caution: this is a professional actor. Do NOT attempt this at a business meal!

There are at least eight things in this picture that demonstrate bad business etiquette. The answers are below the fold.

Dining Etiquette - European vs. American Dining Style, with Kimberly Law

More Tips

• "Business Etiquette: Keys to Professional Success," with Jill Kamp Melton.
• Dining Etiquette Guide - from What’s Cooking America
• Dining etiquette Q & A - from Virgina Tech
• Lessons in the Art of the Meal - from The Wall Street Journal
• Business Etiquette -- More Than Just Eating with the Right Fork

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Assorted Links 9/8/09

Richard Feynman - Ode on a Flower

• Capitol Hill Workshop, September 23-25, 2009
• DC: Camera Ticket Overturned Over Accuracy Doubts - "Doubts over the accuracy of the speed camera equipment led to the dismissal of a Washington, DC photo radar ticket last month. The motorist, who requested anonymity, decided to fight the citation out of 'spite.' He arrived at the District’s Department of Motor Vehicles on August 17 unprepared with an argument that would beat the ticket. He fully expected to lose, but thought it was right to “cost the city more money” because he saw the photo radar program as little more than an illegitimate money grab. The motorist was surprised, however, when Adjudicator Stephen Reichert took one look at the ticket photo and noted that a second vehicle had been within the radar’s field of view. "
• Czars - "Others have pointed out that having offices called 'czars' is an odd naming choice for a democracy. But czars weren't just authoritarians. They were ultimately authoritarians who left their country far poorer than their more democratic counterparts, lost a world war, and of course paved the way for an even worse system of government. The label 'czar' thus doesn't historically connect to a model of strongman effectiveness -- it connects to a model of strongman failure."
• Conflicts - "And in Wisconsin, a current legislator (one account says his license was once suspended) blows a red light, striking a cyclist."
• An Ill Wind is Breaking For Our President - "If I gather correctly from my correspondence secretary, a few Topsider subscribers have taken umbrage to my previous encomiums to Mr. Obama as the nation's foremost voice of conservatism. Invariably, these missives will emphasize at great length the President's trillion dollar shopping sprees, diplomatic apologies and bank nationalization schemes, between explicit invitations to fornicate myself. It is apparent these slow-witted correspondents are incapable of seeing the plain truth: that these are merely brilliant tactical policy feints designed by Mr. Obama to appeal to the wide swath of sensible American moderates who, I am assured, are quite keen on unlimited credit and state ownership of the means of production. Once the proletariat is on board, I have every confidence that our intrepid young captain will deftly steer conservatism back to safe harbor. In saner times it would have been a quick fortnight's journey; instead he has been buffeted by the endless gales and squalls of self-styled 'conservatives' who have opposed him at every turn."
• Solution or Problem? - "What I'm getting at is structural: what does it mean that the supposedly left-of-center Democratic Party would be covertly working on behalf on entrenched business interests at what would appear to be the expense of the members of their own party? If you want an example from across the aisle, why would the Republicans be so eager to violate their oft-professed devotion to free markets in order to rescue the nation's largest banks, already the recipients of so many decades of corporatist non-level-playing-field government support?"
• Reclaiming The Power in the People - "Morley based his distinction between Society and State on the origins of the words. Society is derived from the Latin socius, a companion. Society and association are rooted in the voluntarism of companionship…Morley continues on to the word State, which is rooted in involuntary or forced association. He sees the absence of free choice and free contract as the basis of the word status, from which state is derived."
• Politicians Unclear on the Concept - "For anyone my age or older, with clear memories of the Soviet Union and 'Communist' China, did you ever imagine a day would come when the 'Commies' would (correctly) lecture us on the benefits of free trade and free capital flows?"
• Fat reprograms genes linked to diabetes - "A gene that helps muscle cells burn fat can be radically altered and switched off if the cells carrying it are exposed to fat. The finding suggests that the same process may occur when people eat too much fat-rich junk food, resulting in drastic changes to this 'fat burning' gene."
• Fruit and Nut: 1920 - "'Allen car, 1920.' And your little dog, too, on G Street Northwest in Washington, D.C. National Photo Company Collection glass negative." 1235 G Street NW, WDC
• Lobster Shoot Out in Maine - "This year, the lobstermen are having a very bad year (I can’t recall prices being this low, inflation adjusted, ever) which will make any bad situation worse."

Scan to Evernote: Fujitsu ScanSnap

• Obama to kids: Go to private school - "President Barack Obama will use his Sept. 8 speech to urge kids to go to private school so they can 'grow up to be like me,' writes Scott Ott (aka Scrappleface) in an Examiner column."
• 5 Things We Learned From the Gmail Outage - "1. Get used to outages. ... 4. Email is finally a utility."
• It's Official: Chinese Farmers Can Build Anything, Rarely Farm - "The rig cost Tao 30,000 yuan ($4,385) and two years to build, and includes a periscope and depth control tank. No mention of a sonar system, but knowing the Chinese farmers these days that DIY achievement has to be just a matter of time." From the comments: "Everyone knows that pot doesn't lead to other drugs, it leads to carpentry."
• About Teddy's letter to the pope - "Whether Teddy in fact repented is known to him and God alone (and, I repeat, the fact of repentance is not an issue in the decision to grant a manifest sinner an ecclesiastical funeral), but I wonder whether his letter might not, at the end of time, be seen rather like the arrogant but utterly lost driver who, after so many hours of driving the wrong way, finally pulls over and considers asking for directions."
• Massachusetts: Workers Exhausting Unemployment Benefits - "This is a story that will keep building as workers exhaust their extended unemployment benefits ..."
• The Flying Bug -- Army Style - "Here's another one for you, this time an exclusive video of the T-Hawk Class 1 UAV in flight and an interview with an Army UAV operator flying it."
• Unions in trouble on Labor Day - "The Gallup organization has been asking questions about unions since 1936, the year after the first Gallup poll was conducted. Over those 73 years the public’s response has been mostly positive. Now, with astonishing suddenness, it has turned mostly negative--in just eight months!
  . . .
  But it’s one thing to pass or support a bill when everyone knows it won’t become law and public opinion hasn’t given it a thought, and another thing when it’s entirely possible it will become law and people will have to live with it.
  . . .
  The lesson is that if you want to change the world in some major way, you need to muster support for that change from the general public. Just lining up a bunch of politicians’ endorsements may not be enough; politicians don’t always stay bought. They are entirely willing to welsh on their commitments if they think that’s necessary to save their political careers."
• Van Gone - "All of this reflects what Daniel Pipes calls the 'paranoid style' in American politics, and it is by no means limited to the black community. It can occur, in Pipes’ words, wherever one finds the 'politically disaffected and the culturally suspicious'. The hard right has its black helicopters and Oklahoma office buildings. The left has their grassy knoll in Dallas, TWA Flight 800 and just about everything ever written by Noam Chomsky. In many African American communities there are pernicious conspiracy theories about the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Malcolm X to go along with AIDS genocides and CIA sponsored cocaine habits. When it comes to the paranoid style, just about everyone has the Jews."

People Lie About Alpha

• How to Learn Mandarin Chinese Language - "Most recently I ran across the Rhythmic Mandarin series in iTunes. Most of what’s there is already part of my vocabulary, but I can’t help thinking this would be an ideal solution for anyone who wants to ramp up to learning to speak Mandarin quickly because it uses a fairly unique approach to language learning, based on The Third Ear by Chris Lonsdale."
• Surprisingly Skinny Mice Could Point the Way to Obesity and Diabetes Treatments - "Scientists who are studying mice with a mutation that makes them resistant to obesity even in the face of a high-fat diet may have identified a new way to treat both obesity and diabetes."
• Product Review: Turtle Wax Ice Clay Bar and Turtle Wax Black Box - "Aside from ICE wax’s impossible to open, heavy-gauge plastic packaging scratching my overly-anxious hands, Turtle Wax far exceeded my expectations. ... And considering its $22 asking price, if the Black Box works this well on the Stinkin’ Lincoln, it will work magic on newer, less abused black paint jobs. "
• Lingerie Football Sizzles in Season Opener - "Miami Caliente and Chicago Bliss prove they are more than just scantily clad females"
• Even More Research: Technology Is Making Kids Better Writers, Not Worse - "Every few months or so, we read about some freaked out reporter/columnist/pundit/politician complaining about how the internet and texting are destroying kids' ability to write. Yet, pretty much every study on the subject has found the opposite to be true. Study after study after study after study after study have all found that kids today are better writers than in the past."
• The passionate reporter: how Castro got his job through the NY Times - "The title of my post, 'Castro got his job through the NY Times,' is a reference to a William Buckley column on the subject that was famous in its time:"

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Wash Your Hands!

Wash Your Hands!

Staying Healthy:

• Wash your hands frequently with soap and water for 20 seconds or use a hand sanitizer.
  
• Avoid touching your nose, mouth and eyes as these spots allow the virus to enter your system.
  
• Cover your coughs and sneezes with a tissue, or cough and sneeze into your upper sleeve.
  
• Avoid shaking hands and, if you must, then be sure to wash your hands afterwards.
  
• Avoid sharing containers i.e. cups, utensils, plates, etc.

From the William & Mary Flu page

More

• Sorority Rush, Football Teams Spur College Swine Flu
• Swine flu goes to college: Here's what you need to know
• Rapping Through The H1N1
• Google Maps Swine Flu on College Campuses
• H1N1 Flu Google Map
• FluTracker
• Swine flu (H1N1 flu) - From Mayo

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Assorted Links 9/6/09

Rapping Through The H1N1

• Understanding Congressional Budgeting and Appropriations, September 9, 2009
• Capitol Hill Workshop, September 23-25, 2009
• Obama, the Mortal - "But forget the character witnesses. Just look at Obama's behavior as president, beginning with his first address to Congress. Unbidden, unforced and unpushed by the congressional leadership, Obama gave his most deeply felt vision of America, delivering the boldest social democratic manifesto ever issued by a U.S. president. In American politics, you can't get more left than that speech and still be on the playing field.
  
  In a center-right country, that was problem enough. Obama then compounded it by vastly misreading his mandate. He assumed it was personal. This, after winning by a mere seven points in a year of true economic catastrophe, of an extraordinarily unpopular Republican incumbent, and of a politically weak and unsteady opponent. Nonetheless, Obama imagined that, as Fouad Ajami so brilliantly observed, he had won the kind of banana-republic plebiscite that grants caudillo-like authority to remake everything in one's own image.
  . . .
  Obama fancies himself tribune of the people, spokesman for the grass roots, harbinger of a new kind of politics from below that would upset the established lobbyist special-interest order of Washington. Yet faced with protests from a real grass-roots movement, his party and his supporters called it a mob -- misinformed, misled, irrational, angry, unhinged, bordering on racist. All this while the administration was cutting backroom deals with every manner of special interest -- from drug companies to auto unions to doctors -- in which favors worth billions were quietly and opaquely exchanged."
• Labor's missing issue: right to work - "[O]rganized labor, despite having spent something like $400 million to elect Barack Obama and congressional Democrats, is not seeking what was once its number one goal, repeal of Section 14(b) of the Taft-Hartley Act which allows states to pass right-to-work laws. Those laws bar unions and businesses from requiring that employees join a union.
  . . .
  Currently 22 states have right to work laws, including every Southern state except West Virginia, plus several states in the Great Plains and Mountain West. Twelve of these states passed such laws in the 1940s, six more followed in the 1950s, one in the 1960s, one in the 1970s and one in the 1980s, according to the National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation (though it references Texas’s 1993 update of its right to work law rather than the original 1947 law). The most recent such law was passed in Oklahoma by a 54%-46% margin in a referendum in September 2001.
  . . .
  Since the 1960s right to work states have had greater economic growth and greater economic growth than non-right to work states. A convenient metric is the number of electoral votes of the right to work states in each presidential election starting in 1948, which shows that in the six decades since the proportion of electoral votes and population in right to work states has almost doubled. "
• Critically Underfunded Unemployment Insurance Plans - "Eighteen states have critically underfunded unemployment insurance plans. This issue has yet to come to a head, but it soon will."
• How Not To Do Things: Redskins Suing Over 100 Fans - "If you want a lesson in how not to treat fans, check out the Redskins."
• Not This Pig - "Our environmentally-correct czar believes that we were behind 9/11, that whites pollute poor neighborhoods on purpose, that American agriculture is pathological, that Republicans are 'assholes' and so on. He is the ideological version of the buffoonish Robert Gibbs. What do they teach at Yale (and Harvard) law school? Is admission there synonymous with graduation?
  
  The new Supreme Court Justice thinks that some judges are better than others based on their gender and race. The Attorney General (we are 'cowards' afraid to talk about race) wants to try agents of the CIA, not hunt down terrorists that plotted to destroy America. No wonder, in a past incarnation he helped to pardon terrorists from Puerto Rico for similarly careerist purposes."
• Is College a Scam? - "Career counselor Marty Nemko calls the bachelor’s degree 'America’s most over-rated product.'"
• The Tragic Flute - "Is the flute yours because you provided the materials (which were yours) and paid the kid who made it? If so, you can give it to anyone you want, or you can keep it. It’s yours! Did you steal it from the kid who made it? Then you should give it to the kid who made it. It’s hers! You’ve got no right to redistribute her flute.
  
  Anyway, I find this thought experiment, and the not uncommon practice of assuming away the relevance of property rights when considering questions of distributive justice, confusing. A settled scheme of property rights is the main solution to the problem of distributive justice."
• A Different Sort of Health Care System - "At any rate, learning from a country doesn't mean copying it wholesale. It means adapting the things it's doing right to a different social context -- by, say, reducing our reliance on insurance and eliminating our artificial restrictions on the supply of medical providers. There's an unstated assumption that the institutions that have grown up around the American and European medical systems are a cause of our higher standard of living. But what if they're a product of that wealth: vast bureaucracies that no nation needs but only the richest can afford? India is already a destination for medical tourists seeking more affordable care. If we could combine our wealth with Bangalore-style competition, they wouldn't need to travel: Prices would come down and doctors would be much more responsive to consumer demand, this time in a country where far more people can afford to participate in the medical marketplace."
• Swine flu goes to college: Here's what you need to know - "Influenza viruses are spread primarily through tiny respiratory droplets produced by coughing and sneezing. The best way to prevent the flu’s spread is to stay home when sick, cover coughs and sneezes with a tissue--or a sleeve or elbow if necessary--and washing your hands frequently for at least 20 seconds with soap and water, though hand sanitizer sanitizers such as Germ-X, Purell, or a generic store brand product with an alcohol content of at least 60 percent will do in a pinch.
  
  Once those respiratory droplets land on a surface, the flu virus can stay alive for hours. So frequently touched surfaces in common areas, including doorknobs, refrigerator handles, remote controls, keyboards, faucet handles, countertops, and bathroom areas, can also be a means of infection. Clean them often, especially if someone in your household is sick. Likewise, heavily trafficked areas, such as computer labs or classrooms, keyboards, desks, tables, and chairs may become infected."
• Simon Newcomb - "There is at the present day too great a disposition to regard the will of the majority as that of each individual of the community." ht MarginalRevolution

FCTP

• Smule + T-Pain + Antares + iPhone = madness - "If you haven’t heard about it when it was in the making, it’s basically a brilliant concept--transform the iPhone’s microphone into a mobile recording studio and get Antares’ Auto-Tune technology infused on top."
• America's Power System Is Powerless - "Why 'smart grid' technology is still dumb."
• Housing Bailouts: Lessons Not Learned - "The housing boom and bust that occurred earlier in this decade resulted from efforts by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac -- the government sponsored enterprises with implicit backing from taxpayers -- to extend mortgage credit to high-risk borrowers. This lending did not impose appropriate conditions on borrower income and assets, and it included loans with minimal down payments. We know how that turned out. Did U.S. policymakers learn their lessons from this debacle and stop subsidizing mortgage lending to risky borrowers? NO. Instead, the Federal Housing Authority lept into the breach."
• Tax Credit: Mercury News Advocates Taxpayers pay $60 Thousand per Additional Home Sold - "Do the math. $30 billion for an additional 500,000 sales equals $60,000 per house. Ouch. And forget the 500 thousand additional sales. The evidence suggests that interest is already waning (although there will be a flurry of activity at the end just like Cash-for-clunkers). My estimate is the program will cost taxpayers $100,000 per additional home sold."
• Lowest Cost Solar Power At Coal Plants - "Effectively this avoids lots of idle electric generator capital equipment at night."
• Books Are A Load of Crap - "Far be it from me to say no to a little Google Hate. But my initial experiences with Google Books have led me to say nothing but 'Thanks for this good if imperfect thing that never existed before in human history.' I mean, really, of all the things to worry about going into commie Labor Day Weekend. And yet, I just know I will be worrying about bad metadata all weekend..."
• College for $99 a Month - "The next generation of online education could be great for students--and catastrophic for universities.
  . . .
  Colleges are caught in the same kind of debt-fueled price spiral that just blew up the real estate market. They’re also in the information business in a time when technology is driving down the cost of selling information to record, destabilizing lows.
  . . .
  Colleges charge students exorbitant sums partly because they can, but partly because they have to. Traditional universities are complex and expensive, providing a range of services from scientific research and graduate training to mass entertainment via loosely affiliated professional sports franchises. To fund these things, universities tap numerous streams of revenue: tuition, government funding, research grants, alumni and charitable donations. But the biggest cash cow is lower-division undergraduate education. Because introductory courses are cheap to offer, they’re enormously profitable. The math is simple: Add standard tuition rates and any government subsidies, and multiply that by several hundred freshmen in a big lecture hall. Subtract the cost of paying a beleaguered adjunct lecturer or graduate student to teach the course. There’s a lot left over. That money is used to subsidize everything else.
  
  But this arrangement, however beneficial to society as a whole, is not a particularly good deal for the freshman gutting through an excruciating fifty minutes in the back of a lecture hall. Given the choice between paying many thousands of dollars to a traditional university for the lecture and paying a few hundred to a company like StraighterLine for a service that is more convenient and responsive to their needs, a lot of students are likely to opt for the latter--and the university will have thousands of dollars less to pay for libraries, basketball teams, classical Chinese poetry experts, and everything else.
  . . .
  Which means the day is coming--sooner than many people think--when a great deal of money is going to abruptly melt out of the higher education system, just as it has in scores of other industries that traffic in information that is now far cheaper and more easily accessible than it has ever been before. Much of that money will end up in the pockets of students in the form of lower prices, a boon and a necessity in a time when higher education is the key to prosperity. Colleges will specialize where they have comparative advantage, rather than trying to be all things to all people. A lot of silly, too-expensive things--vainglorious building projects, money-sucking sports programs, tenured professors who contribute little in the way of teaching or research--will fade from memory, and won’t be missed."

Sold Right Away: Zoomdoggle’s Buckyballs

• Design a Fiat, Even if Your Name Isn’t Bertone - "Fiat Brazil’s Style Center is crowdsourcing the design of the FCC III concept, the third concept from the company’s designers in that country. Far from a run-of-the-mill design contest, Fiat says that Mio is the first car designed under a Creative Commons license."
• “Resetting” State Governments - "How will state governments recover from the catastrophic collapse in revenues?"
• Extreme steel 'Velcro' takes a 35-tonne load - "A square metre of the new fastener, called Metaklett, is capable of supporting 35 tonnes at temperatures up to 800 ºC, claim Josef Mair and colleagues at the Technical University of Munich, Germany. And just like everyday Velcro it can be opened up without specialised tools and used again."
• Uninterrupted Power Supplies: Boring, but necessary - "Ever since I put any of my external drives and USB hubs on a UPS, I have not received a single delayed write error!"
• University of Oregon Football - "LeGarrette Blount, a running back at the University of Oregon, punched a player of the opposing team last night after Oregon’s loss on national television. Afterward, he pushed around teammates and tried to fight Boise State fans before being forced off the field by police. Upon hearing about this chain of events we went to Youtube to see what actually happened."
• Personal Media Players: The 5 Best Alternatives to the Apple iPod - "There are many reasons to look beyond Apple--perhaps you want features iPods don’t have, play files iTunes doesn’t support, or perhaps you just hate Apple--in any case, below is a list of alternatives that are actually pretty good."

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Assorted Links 9/4/09

Richard Feynman on the "Inconceivable nature of nature"

• Understanding Congressional Budgeting and Appropriations, September 9, 2009
• Strategies for Working with Congress: Effective Communication and Advocacy on Capitol Hill, September 11, 2009
• How to Find, Track, and Monitor Congressional Documents: Going Beyond Thomas, September 15, 2009
• Congress in a Nutshell: Understanding Congress, September 16, 2009
• Congressional Dynamics and the Legislative Process, September 17, 2009
• Capitol Hill Workshop, September 23-25, 2009
• Houses and Autos: The Cost of a Tax Credit per Additional Units Sold - "If Edmonds.com is correct, and total sales were 1.17 million (NSA) in August, then the tax credit only generated about 320 thousand extra sales. Of course some regular car buyers might have put off a purchase to avoid the rush in August, so this isn't perfect, but instead of costing taxpayers $4,170 per car (as announced by DOT), the cost to taxpayers per additional car sold was close to $7,200.
  . . .
  With 1.9 million first-time buyers, the total cost of the tax credit will be $15.2 billion. Divide $15.2 billion by 350 thousand, and the program cost $43.4 thousand per additional buyer. The actual number could be much higher if there were fewer additional first-time buyers than the NAR's estimate - or if the overall cost is higher (more buyers claiming tax credit).
  
  This is the actual cost per additional home sold. And since buyer interest will fade (like with the Clunkers program), the cost per additional house will increase sharply if the program is extended. "
• Michelle Goldberg argues against heated rhetoric while mentioning that she "hated Bush so much" and talks of the "blessed day" when Dick Cheney dies - "Goldberg is attacking what she sees as right-wing rhetoric that 'contribute[s] to a climate of incitement.' What struck me was how, in the course of the debate, Goldberg casually expresses her deep hatred for Bush and Cheney. At 64:20, she mentions in passing, 'God, I hated Bush so much.' And at 39:10 Goldberg refers to the 'blessed day' when Dick Cheney dies and says, 'I certainly wouldn't be shedding many tears if Dick Cheney dropped dead.'"
• The Real Reason the Government Wants To Tax Soda - "Vigna's amazement that the trillions of 'dollars' worth of stimulant hasn't been enough to stave off deflation is quaint, as is his assumption that we would now be experiencing horrendous deflation if not for the burial of all that Monopoly money. It's true that there's an apparent disconnect between the weakness of the dollar in international currency markets and its strength at your local Safeway. That's because the international markets are geared to respond to the sudden appearance of vast oceans of U.S. government debt. But since, among other things, this debt immediately gets bought by the Federal Reserve, no new money is actually printed.
  
  If, on the other hand, you are participating in the dollar-denominated economy -- if you are spending actual dollars and nickels and quarters and all those other trinkets that supposedly don't matter in this post-scarcity, long-now age of abundance -- you are not willing to pay more than a dollar and a half for a gallon of milk just because Ben Bernanke's friends are getting a lot of free virtual money. Even Americans aren't that stupid. "
• Budget cuts test state personnel policies - "Forced to dramatically cut payrolls, some states are finding low-cost ways to boost employee morale, even as they struggle to maintain basic human resource functions such as training, recruiting, hiring and regular performance reviews."
• Cut My Pay, But Please Give Me A Job - "If you think this is inflationary, you are not thinking clearly."
• New Study on Genetics of Ethnic Groups Reveals We May Not Be So Different After All - "Often two groups’ differences -- along with circumstantial factors -- lead to tension between them and sometimes violence. The Hutus and Tutsis of Rwanda, the Sunnis and Shiites of Iraq, and the Croats and Serbs of former Yugoslavia all illustrate how cultural distinctions -- like language and religion -- can contribute to tensions and conflict around the globe.
  
  But do these cultural and ethnic distinctions translate to biological distinctions as well? Exactly how biologically distinct are two ethnic groups living side by side? Anthropologist Evelyn Heyer and an international team of researchers set out to answer these and many other questions by studying the adjacent -- and culturally very different -- Tajik and Turkic speakers along the Silk Road of Central Asia. Their results are published in this week’s BMC Genetics."
• The Fatal Conceit - "Uh oh, the philosopher-kings have already made a mistake. Bertram confuses two notions of insurance."

Guiness World Record for most T-Shirts worn at one time

• Win, Hold and Lose - "Since the U.S.-led invasion that overthrew the Taliban government in late 2001, hordes of Western military and civilian personnel have been involved in everything from setting up schools to drilling wells to building roads. Although they avoid using the term nation-building, that is clearly what is taking place. Not only is Afghanistan an extremely unpromising candidate for such a mission, given its pervasive poverty, its fractured clan-based and tribal-based social structure, and its weak national identity, U.S. and NATO officials should also be sobered by the disappointing outcomes of other nation-building ventures over the past two decades. An audit of the two most prominent missions, Bosnia and Iraq, ought to inoculate Americans against pursuing the same fool’s errand in Afghanistan."
• The Gender Politics of Mad Men - "I like to watch Mad Men for the menswear and a sense of the superiority of my postmodern egalitarian consumption partnership. But that’s not inconsistent with the idea that lots of guys who like the show don’t get the point of it and like to imagine how sweet it would be to have women take care of all the annoying details of life and smoke at work."
• AMC Renews Mad Men for 4th Season - "AMC executives announced today that they have greenlit a fourth season of the cable network's hit series Mad Men."
• Brill Gets More Delusional: Now Thinks 10 to 15% Of Online Newspaper Readers Will Pay - "Earlier this summer, we noted that it was something of a pipedream by Stephen Brill to believe that 5 to 10% of online newspaper readers would pony up for a subscription to the online site. Having spent time looking at plenty of 'free' websites that have tried to charge, the numbers are significantly lower in almost all cases. We're talking 1% tops -- unless there's a really really good reason to pay, and then you're talking 2 to 3%. In many cases, the number is even lower than 1%. At the same time, I pointed out that Brill was making the classic mistake that makes any venture capitalist laugh you out of the room: 'if we just get x% of this market, we'll be huge!' But that's top-down thinking, and markets don't work that way. You need to be bottom up and explain not why x% will buy, but why the first person will buy, and the second person will buy and so on. "
• Human-Powered Helicopters Get a Bigger Carrot - "One exception to this rule is human-powered helicopters. It’s a small field to be sure, but one the American Helicopter Society wants to see thrive. Nearly 30 years ago it offered $20,000 to the first person to successfully fly a human-powered aircraft capable of vertical take off and landing. No one’s claimed it, so the Igor I. Sikorsky Human-Powered Helicopter Competition is offering a bigger carrot. A $250,000 carrot, to be exact."
• SNPwatch: Researchers Find Link Between Red Hair and Avoiding The Dentist - "Redheads might have a better excuse than the rest of us for avoiding the dentist.
  
  For several years now scientists have known that the same genetic variations that give redheads their fiery manes can increase the amount of general or local anesthetic a person needs in order to be properly put out or numbed up.
  
  New research suggests that the effect of these variations is strong enough, and hasn’t been addressed by dentists well enough, that the people who carry them are more than twice as likely as those who don’t to avoid going to the dentist altogether."
• What happens when there are no more world records left? - "In short, I expect entrepreneurs will always find ways around this problem. In chess the gaps between the top fifteen players have narrowed considerably, yet the public doesn't seem to have lost interest in the game."
• In a recession, is college worth it? Fear of debt changes plans - "For years, an article of faith in this country has been that college is the gateway to a better life. So deeply held is this belief that many students, such as Horn, borrow tens of thousands of dollars to attend prestigious public or private universities. But as the worst recession since World War II trudges into its 21st month, many graduates are discovering that the college payoff could be a long time coming -- if it comes at all."

721 claps per minute

• Sample Paint -- Who Needs That? - "I’ll freely admit I laughed at this recently when I saw the ad for sample 8 oz. cans of paint for just under $3 at the Depot. I should have known better; every time I scoff at something like that it winds up biting me in the rear."
• Arizona: Peoria Cameras Increased Accidents - "According to data released last week at a Peoria (Arizona) council study session, the number of traffic accidents doubled at locations where red light cameras were installed. City data also indicate that more recent changes in intersection yellow timing have reduced the number of red light violations. So far, the financial impact of the program has been substantial."
• Is AT&T losing its grip on the iPhone? - "If, as rumored, Apple is in discussions with Verizon Wireless about a CDMA iPhone next year, the Futurelawyer may find himself in a quandary. I love using the Palm Centro for phone calls and quick and dirty email, because it is narrow and fits easily in one hand. It also has a hard keyboard that I can manipulate with the thumb of the hand I am carrying the Centro in. However, I love the big screen and apps of the iPod Touch, and use it for many things."
• AT&T Windows Mobile phones to get free Wi-Fi starting September 14th - "AT&T has jumped in to reveal plans to add Windows Mobile-powered handsets to its free Wi-Fi pool. That’s right folks, starting Friday September 14th, AT&T’s WinMo smartphones will gain free access to each and every AT&T Wi-Fi hotspot."

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Assorted Links 9/1/09

Richard Feynman on "Social Sciences"

• Understanding Congressional Budgeting and Appropriations, September 9, 2009
• Strategies for Working with Congress: Effective Communication and Advocacy on Capitol Hill, September 11, 2009
• How to Find, Track, and Monitor Congressional Documents: Going Beyond Thomas, September 15, 2009
• Congress in a Nutshell: Understanding Congress, September 16, 2009
• Congressional Dynamics and the Legislative Process, September 17, 2009
• Capitol Hill Workshop, September 23-25, 2009
• The Inheritance of Education - "The effect for father's years of education is even larger; about a ten times larger effect on biological children than on adoptees. Similarly, parent income has a negligible effect, small and not statistically significant, on an adoptee completing college but an 8 times larger and statistically significant effect on a biological child completing college...."
• PACER Petition - "Law librarians from Georgetown and Stanford Law Schools are getting ready to deliver a petition from several hundred law libraries to the Administrative Office of the Courts, the group that administers the federal judiciary's PACER system. They have a goal of 1,000 signatures. If you have a few minutes, look over the petition and if you agree with it, I'm sure the organizers will appreciate your support. The petition asks for some pretty reasonable things from the federal judiciary: signatures on documents, copies of the dockets to federal libraries, and a better way to disseminate the data."
• Weekly wrap: Rising Medicaid bill a growing concern for states - "New Mexico may foreshadow a Medicaid crisis facing states next year as the federal economic stimulus money dwindles."
• Grasscutting, fertilizer, and healthcare - "My simple relationship with Jeff is, I believe, the healthcare model of the future. You manage your own cholesterol issues, your own basic thyroid issues, supplement and monitor your vitamin D levels, use diet to suit your needs, order blood tests when necessary, even obtain basic imaging tests like heart scans, carotid ultrasound, bone density testing. Your doctor is a resource, near by when and if you need him or her: guidance when needed, an occasional review of what you are doing, someone to consult when you fracture an ankle. What your doctor is NOT is a paternal, 'do what I say, I'm the doctor,' or a 'You need these tests whether you like it or not' holder of your health fate."
• FBI investigating laptops sent to US governors - "The U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation is trying to figure out who is sending laptop computers to state governors across the U.S., including West Virginia Governor Joe Mahchin and Wyoming Governor Dave Freudenthal. Some state officials are worried that they may contain malicious software." ht Bruce Schneier
• Bankruptcy Filings and Mortgage Delinquencies by State - There is a sortable table to find the data for each state.
• Fixing Health Care - "I won't do Mr. Goldhill the injustice of trying to inadequately summarize his proposals - but it's the first thing I've read (and again - I don't claim to have read all that much) about this issue that makes a damned bit of sense to me."
• Cleaned by Capitalism VII - "One of the most unheralded anti-pollutants brought to you by capitalism is the metal can. By significantly retarding the multiplication of bacteria in the foods sealed within them, cans make our foods cleaner -- less polluted -- and safer."

Hillary: The Movie
"More broadly, campaign finance regulation is thought control: it takes a position on whether money should influence political outcomes. Whether or not one agrees, this is only one possible view, and freedom of speech is meant to prevent government from promoting or discouraging particular points of view."

• Va. SPCA exec's dog dies after 4 hours in hot car - "An executive for an anti-animal cruelty group says her 16-year-old blind and deaf dog died after she accidentally left him in her hot car for four hours."
• Housing, Transportation, and the Politics of Path Dependency - "I’ve been long puzzled by the widespread libertarian preference for state-subsidized roads plus building regulations oriented around cars over state-subsidized trains and buses and building regulations oriented around them."
• Aim Your Windshield Washer Jets - "Klann’s Windshield Washer Jet tool will run you about $6 before shipping. Whether it’s worth the money when you can probably do the same job with a straight pin is your decision."
• South Dakota: Supreme Court Limits Roadside Searches - "The South Dakota Supreme Court has limited the ability of police to search and interrogate innocent interstate travelers absent a reasonable and articulable suspicion of wrongdoing. The court considered the unique case of a vehicle search not made pursuant to a traffic stop, but while the owner was being detained before entering his vehicle."
• Clunkers and August Auto Sales - "There is no question auto sales will decline sharply in September, but there is a pretty amazing range of estimates for August ... a couple of excerpts:"
• Make Free VoIP Calls from Google Voice - "Since we're extremely cheap, we'll start out with the Gizmo/Google Voice 1/2 combo, since you can use it to place and receive calls without spending a dime. If you're particularly partial to Skype, we'll demonstrate how you can integrate Gizmo, Voice, and Skype for cheaper Skype calls after we demonstrate how to get everything up and running with Gizmo.
  . . .
  If you're already set up with a Skype name and lots of contacts and you'd prefer to keep Skype as your go-to VoIP app, you can get Google Voice and Gizmo to route calls to Skype for notably less money than Skype charges for its call-out service. Alternately, if you only need to make the occasional Skype call and don't want to bother installing software and getting a user account, Gizmo and Google are available there, too." OR, you could just cough up the $60 per year for SkypeIn and Skype Out....
• Hey Poland, We Were Only Trying to Help - "For the real story of Nazi-Soviet collusion in the war against Poland, check out the 2008 documentary The Soviet Story which, as The Economist explains, reveals that 'Soviet radio transmitters guided German bombers in their attacks on Poland. A Soviet naval base near Murmansk helped the Nazi attack on Norway. The Soviet secret police helped train the Gestapo and discussed how to deal with the 'Jewish question' in occupied Poland.'"
• Nation's Unemployment Outlook Improves Drastically After Fifth Beer - "Despite ongoing economic woes and a jobless rate that has been approaching 10 percent, U.S. unemployment projections drastically improved Monday after the consumption of five beers.
  . . .
  Reports from those well on their way toward putting away a whole six pack suggested that unemployed Americans could look forward to increased job security and much higher salaries. In addition, many half-in-the-bag analysts said they foresee greater career satisfaction and massive quality-of-life improvements following the inevitable arrival of new employment opportunities."
• Dap 3.0 -- The Official Goo Of The 21st Century - "When I heard 'Dap 3.0' my mind immediately wandered into science fiction territory and I started to wonder if they’d stuffed nanobots into the goo, but alas, we’ll have to wait on that. No, Dap 3.0’s new formula sports a quick dry compound that can be exposed to water in just three hours and won’t wash out. That’s some damn good news to those who depend on sealant on the job or who, like me, use it like a ward against household evil."
• Howard Dean on Obamacare and med-mal reform - "Perhaps the most buzzed-about story while I was on vacation (I’m back now) was the frank acknowledgment by former Democratic Party chairman (and former physician) Howard Dean when asked why liability reform was omitted from the health care redesign"
• Things that are better than a New York City hot dog - "In response to a hyperbolic statement from a friend about the goodness of New York City hot dogs, Matthew Diffee compiles an extensive list of stuff that's better. A sampling:"

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Assorted Links 8/30/09

Darwin, Magic and Evolution

• Capitol Hill Workshop, September 23-25, 2009
• Fresh OLC Memos - "The Founders made an inherently inefficient form of government as a check against arbitrary use of the power of the state. The President doesn’t declare war, Congress does. When we allow the government to write itself a waiver to constitutional limitations that are part and parcel of its contract with the people, it’s time for the people to let the government know who the boss is in this employer-employee relationship."
• The National Endowment for the Art of Persuasion? - "Is this truly the role of the NEA? Is building a message distribution network, for matters other than increasing access to the arts and arts education, the role of the National Endowment for the Arts? Is providing the art community issues to address, especially those that are currently being vehemently debated nationally, a legitimate role for the NEA? I found it highly unlikely that this was in their original charter, so I checked.
  . . .
  In an attempt to recapture the excitement and enthusiasm of the campaign the organizers of this conference call have entered murky waters, a strait that the NEA cannot afford to swim. Previously shackled with the controversy over the Serrano and Mapplethorpe images of 1989 that escalated to a debate over its very existence, the NEA needs to stay far away from any questions of impropriety."
• If we don't recover, it's your fault - "The NYT is already referring [to] the 'legacy' of the recession, with this an example: 'Even as evidence mounts that the Great Recession has finally released its chokehold on the American economy, experts worry that the recovery may be weak, stymied by consumers' reluctance to spend.'"
• Ezra Klein's Confusion Over "Rationing" - "Klein evidently thinks that market outcomes that he dislikes mean that government should step in and impose outcomes that he does like. All right, let's admit it; the health insurance market and the rest of health care are royally screwed up as a result of decades of government interventions and mandates. Consequently we don't actually find the usual benefits of falling prices and improving products and services that we experience in normally operating markets where robust competition and choice reign."
• Can the FTC Regulate Lawyers As Creditors? - "It seems that the FTC did not learn its lesson. Once again it is trying to impose financial privacy protection rules on lawyers and law firms. This time, however, it claims it has such authority under the Fair and Accurate Credit Transactions Act of 2003. "
• Homeland Security Still Plans To Search Laptops At Borders With No Probable Cause - "On top of this, the other thing that's not at all clear is how far the 'search' can go. With a growing number of 'cloud' based services in use, many of which act as if they're local, can the border patrol search those as well? For example, I use Jungledisk, which gives me a virtual drive that shows up in my file system as if it were a local hard drive, even though it's hosted in some data center somewhere. It looks like a local drive... but it's not actually on my laptop. Would border patrol have the right to search that, even though the contents of that drive are not actually traveling across the border? "
• The president can fire the attorney general - "The attorney general serves at the pleasure of the president, and the president can determine that a prosecution would undermine the national security--a subject on which he has a wider perspective and a greater responsibility than the attorney general--and order that it not go forward."
• Twice Branded: Western Women in Muslim Lands - "But it is no coincidence that women who must submit to Sharia law find themselves in a very bad place, wherever those women and those places happen to be. This includes France, where only last year a court in Lille upheld the right of a Muslim man to hold fast to his faith and annul his marriage when he discovered his bride was not a virgin. And it includes Germany, where in Berlin in 2005 there were eight murders of young women of Turkish origin, executed by members of their own families. And Australia, where, after a group of unveiled Muslim women were raped, the succinct Mufti Taj al-Din al-Hilali explained away the crime as an attack on 'uncovered meat.' And it includes the United Kingdom, where Scotland Yard has probed 109 suspicious deaths of women, also likely slaughtered by relatives. Islam is an easy rider: it travels everywhere and often brings with it a lot of baggage.
  
  Bet let’s start with Islam as it affects women in their home countries. Last year, in a poll of 2,000 Egyptian men, 62 percent admitted harassing women: an activity most of those interviewed insisted was not really their fault as their advances, however intemperate and offensive to their victims, had after all been provoked by the women themselves.
  . . .
  In other words--and here is a telling paradox of life in much of the Islamic world--whatever devout Muslims are religiously prohibited from doing to women (and there are plenty of strictures listed in the Koran: a man must lower his gaze in the presence of a woman, for instance, and also guard her chastity) is in practice resolutely ignored, all the more so when it comes to foreigners.
  
  Why bother to observe prohibitions on a group so manifestly inferior? Eltahawy complains bitterly that the donning of the hijab, which she as an observant Muslim used to do, actually procures no real measure of safety for the wearer. 'I was groped so many times that whenever I passed a group of men, I’d place my bag between me and them,' she writes. But not wearing the hijab or a veil in Egypt is the sure sign of a foreigner--a word that has become synonymous with 'slut.' 'I was at a conference just recently which was attended by both Egyptians and Americans,' Eltahawy recalls. 'One researcher showed us clips from an Egyptian documentary in which men were interviewed: and it was always the same reaction from the men. ‘The Western woman is always easy prey. . . . All they want is sex . . .'
  . . .
  It is, of course, the women who don’t get to fly home to New York--or indeed leave any airport without their husbands’ consent--who truly deserve international attention. And yet these are the very women our Western politicians, media outlets, and academicians barely acknowledge because, as I was constantly advised by European and American diplomats in both Egypt and also the Sudan when I visited, 'We have no right to pass judgment on the customs and mores of other countries.'
  
  Here are just a few of those customs and mores: in Turkey, a nation often cited as 'moderate,' wife beating is so common that 69 percent of all female health workers polled (and almost 85 percent of all male health workers) said that violence against women was in certain instances excusable. In April, a new epidemiological study in the European Journal of Public Health revealed that one out of every five homicides in Pakistan is the result of a so-called honor killing. And in Mauritania, the age-old practice of force-feeding young girls--a life-threatening process that is intended to make them round and therefore 'marriageable'--has seen a renaissance. Girls as young as five are herded into 'fattening farms.' Those who resist are tortured."
• Unbearable - "Shorter Zorn: Privileged scions of politically powerful families ought to be given a pass on negligent homicide in the here and now because some day they might make up for it."

Misc: Cerberus, Flippers and Market

• The Truth About Cash for Clunkers (Again, Still): Buyers Paid More - "Binge and purge doesn’t work for dieters. It’s not going to work for the car industry either."
• Rise and fall of an ethically challenged attorney - "Not content with making more than $1 million a year through his [Minneapolis] injury practice, [David] Moskal also stole millions from clients. Even after his disgrace, he passed himself off as an attorney while working as a client liaison at a [Denver] spine-injury center."
• Can You Run Your Business from an iPhone? - "Reliability is an issue as well for Tony Nestor, CEO of Progress Technologies, Inc., and a software developer. Enjoy the benefits of connectivity, but remain a bit cautious, he advises. Back up data elsewhere and have an alternative appliance readily available."
• Video: UAV in a Firefight of a Different Kind - "Earlier this month in Alaska, a 40-pound Insitu Scan Eagle saw duty fighting wildfires after dense haze grounded conventional aircraft."
• Hitting the Big Time: - "I've now made it to the highest-circulation publication that I've ever written for -- more than three times the circulation of the Wall Street Journal, my previous record. That is, of course, Costco Connection, with a circulation of nearly 8 million."
• Massachusetts Loses Bid to Collect Taxes on New Hampshire Sales - "Massachusetts' highest court ruled Tuesday that the state can't collect taxes from a retail chain that sells tires to Massachusetts residents in New Hampshire."
• Old Tales That Still Seduce - "Western culture owes a debt to 'The Arabian Nights'"

Les Mille et une Nuits au TNT Show

• What do kids find worth fighting over? - From the comments: "It is not a wife who socializes a husband, it is a daughter."
• Great Moments in Faculty Meetings - "As chair, I have now been presiding over faculty meetings for fully 10 years. (Not one meeting. Just when we have meetings, I mean) Sometimes, a shining beacon of comedy gold breaks through the tedium, and there are moments of transcendent joy. Today was such a day."
• People Narcissistic And Boring On Facebook? - "I get much more out of reading my favorite blogs. The long turn trend in social networking seems to be more people talking and fewer listening."
• US Dems fill inboxes with 419 scams - "Scammers pumping out emails that try to trick recipients into parting with large sums of cash are getting a helping hand from the Democratic National Committee."
• Energizer Rips Off Customers With AA Batteries Disguised As D’s - "That’s right, if you tear open one of these batteries (I don’t usually recommend opening batteries, as it’s just a bad idea) you’ll find a something that resembles a AA battery inside a plastic case. Granted, the shape is a bit different, but the capacity is exactly the same. So for $25 you are essentially getting the same thing as a $6 pair of AA’s and a pair of cheap (we’re talking a couple bucks each) AA-to-D converters. For shame Energizer, for shame!"
• Vendy Awards names best [NYC] sweet street vendor finalists - "The non-profit Street Vendor Project on Thursday announced the finalists in the dessert category for the Vendy Awards, which will determine the city’s best street eats."

• Drobo Experience Report: Going strong after 18 months - "Verdict: Recommended!"
  

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Assorted Links 8/25/09

Back to the Future

• Understanding Congressional Budgeting and Appropriations, September 9, 2009
• Strategies for Working with Congress: Effective Communication and Advocacy on Capitol Hill, September 11, 2009
• How to Find, Track, and Monitor Congressional Documents: Going Beyond Thomas, September 15, 2009
• Congress in a Nutshell: Understanding Congress, September 16, 2009
• Congressional Dynamics and the Legislative Process, September 17, 2009
• Capitol Hill Workshop, September 23-25, 2009
• Open Science And Closed Science: Aren't Papers Supposed To Be A Part Of The Conversation? - "It's no secret that we've got some serious problems with the way the old school scientific journals work -- basically locking up scientific research rather than really living up to their mandate to spread scientific knowledge. Stephen alerts us to a separate issue with traditional journal publications: how they handle the followup discussion."

Richard Feynman 'Fun to Imagine' 6: The Mirror

• Answers to Common Excuses not to Travel Full-Time - "Oftentimes when folks hear what we’re up to -- we get the response of ‘You’re living my dream!’. To which we of course reply ‘Then why aren’t you doing it too?’. We are in process of compiling our responses to the common excuses that folks give us to that question, some very valid. We aim to share examples of others overcoming the challenges, our own stories and share resources to assist. This will be a growing series,"
• Carrier Wars: T-Mobile results, wrap up - "Let’s take a quick look at everything lined up nice and pretty:
  
  Average Download Speed
  
  1. Sprint: 1361kbs
  2. AT&T: 933kbps
  3. T-Mobile: 786kbps
  4. Verizon: 701kbps
  
  Average Upload Speed
  
  1. Verizon: 322kbps
  2. Sprint: 267kbps
  3. AT&T: 180kbps
  4. T-Mobile: 177kbps
  
  There you have it folks-- the final act of Carrier Wars is officially a wrap. While these numbers shouldn’t be considered absolute or scientific, they certainly give an accurate representation of each carrier’s 3G network speeds as experienced by our readers."
• The Small Business Guide to Wikis - "Streamlined communication, collaboration, and information sharing are all vital aspects to building a successful small business. You need to build ideas as a team, record past successes and failures, and have your employees keeping each other informed on their current work so your company can avoid overlap."

‘U.S. News’ Readers: FIRE's Red Alert List Exposes the Worst Violators of Campus Rights

• *Codes of the Underworld: How Criminals Communicate* - "it is the best applied book on signaling theory to date."
• Future trucks: Cleaning up the kings of the road - "While the average fuel efficiency of the US car fleet has almost doubled in the last 40 years, today's heavy trucks guzzle the same amount of fuel - roughly 30 litres per 100 kilometres - as they did in 1969."

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Assorted Links 8/23/09

Quote of the Day: Overstimulation Edition
"It’s just a mess, an absolute mess. There is a billion dollars of dealerships’ money on the road."

• Understanding Congressional Budgeting and Appropriations, September 9, 2009
• Strategies for Working with Congress: Effective Communication and Advocacy on Capitol Hill, September 11, 2009
• How to Find, Track, and Monitor Congressional Documents: Going Beyond Thomas, September 15, 2009
• Congress in a Nutshell: Understanding Congress, September 16, 2009
• Congressional Dynamics and the Legislative Process, September 17, 2009
• Capitol Hill Workshop, September 23-25, 2009
• What happened to the antiwar movement? Cindy Sheehan hits 'hypocrisy' of Left, Democratic allies. - "I asked Sheehan about the fact that the press seems to have lost interest in her and her cause. 'It's strange to me that you mention it,' she said. 'I haven't stopped working. I've been protesting every time I can, and it's not covered. But the one time I did get a lot of coverage was when I protested in front of George Bush's house in Dallas in June. I don't know what to make of it. Is the press having a honeymoon with Obama? I know the Left is.'"
• Rahm’s Grand Coalition - "Having rushed through an enormously expensive stimulus package that, so far at least, has failed to stimulate anything but the appetite for even more pork, the Blue Dogs have gazed into the trillion dollar abyss on health care reform and seen it staring right back into them in the form of future electoral defeat."
• The Nuclear Option For Pensions? - "A massive reduction in pension benefits will likely cause massive protests by union members, which means more social unrest.
  
  When I wrote that the pension crisis will define President Obama's legacy, I meant it. Those pension bombs that started exploding in 2008 have exposed the vulnerability of the nation's retirement systems.
  
  Politicians all around the world better pay close attention to global pension tension because a financial nuclear bomb was detonated in 2008 and its full effects have yet to be felt."
• It Started with Plato - "Plato's ideal republic was founded upon two primary assumptions: (1) that the community must be comprised of only two classes, those who govern and those who are governed (the latter owing implicit obedience to the former), and (2) that human qualities are mainly hereditary and therefore that rulers must beget future rulers."
• Bastiat's Nightmare - "A friend wants the government to start a 'Dollars for Dumps' program through which they will subsidize the destruction of his current house and the purchase of a new one."
• The autistic macroeconomist - "The cause of the Great Depression was too few pennies being made at the Philadelphia mint.
  
  If you think this speculation is far-fetched, go read the piece Krugman wrote in the NYR of Books right after Milton Friedman died. Krugman argues that Friedman and Schwartz’s whole argument relies on the assumption that the Fed had the ability to prevent a fall in M2, simply by printing more base money. . . . You find an aggregate that is correlated with NGDP, and then you argue that the Fed just needs to expand the base enough to keep that aggregate growing at a steady, non-inflationary rate. It doesn’t have to be money at all; it could be postage stamps.
  . . .
  So let me finally get to the point. I believe that the financial crisis of 2008 was the mother of all frame jobs. The commercial bankers were framed, when it was really the central bankers that created the severe recession."
• U.S. population distribution by age, 1950-2050 - best comment: "I can’t really say anything knowledgeable about looming health care costs, but I will say this: Stay off the roads in 2050--something tells me we’ll be seeing a lot more full-sized sedans and a lot less turn signals."
• My Qualm about Universal Health Insurance - "Just going by personal interest, I should be wildly in favor of universal health insurance. But as to the country at large, I worry about the rationing issue. To be clear, I'm not worried that there will be too much rationing, I'm worried that there won't be enough."
• Is ObamaCare Unconstitutional? - "Speaking of substantive due process, there may be other constitutional problems arising from national health care reform -- but not of the enumerated powers variety. While the federal government may be able to require national health insurance coverage, could it require all individuals to purchase plans that cover certain procedures? What if the guidelines for acceptable plans include contraception, abortion, and certain types of end-of-life care? Could the federal government require devout Catholics to purchase such plans for themselves?"
• Leviathan on the Move - "Something to keep in mind next time you see or hear a news report about state and local governments being strapped for cash:"
• Uncle Sam's Big Gamble on Derivatives - "In any case it's exciting to see my ideas in action, even though the Fed isn't really the government, just an old-fashioned bank run by simple folks."
• Initial Comparison of College Rankings - "The figure below plots the relationship between the USNWR rankings of Liberal Arts Colleges and the comparably modified Forbes/CCAP rankings of Liberal Arts Colleges. We can easily observe that there is a large degree of correlation between the two rankings (actual correlation value is p=.71), particularly at the top, although the two become increasingly disparate as you move farther down the rankings."
• US Blues & World Distort - "What brochures and websites can't do is allow you to interact. There is nothing that can replace the opportunity to walk, on your own two feet, across the grass of a courtyard positioned between a residence hall and an academic building at an institution you've been reading about for months. The chance to watch the class that's being held outdoors in that courtyard (cause it's a gorgeous fall day) and to hear the conversations between classmates immediately following the conclusion of the formal discussion. There's little that will replace the chance to hear from a student about what he loves and hates about the school (the second of those two things is often more telling)- and to watch his facial expressions as he talks to you. The chance to stop and glance at the bulletin boards in the student center getting a sense of what students might be doing this weekend, and what causes are most important to them. Eating a meal in a dining hall, observing a class, touring a recreation center... My list could go on, but I'm sure you get my point. Seeing what is current, engaging in real time, offering you personalities and character and heart. Synthesize it all with what you know about yourself and the type of environment you want to be a part of and you've got a much better sense of whether that school is a good fit. THAT is what a visit can do for you.
  . . .
  Colleges are not their rankings. They are people, traditions, buildings, spirit, culture, temperature, sounds, history, grass, bricks, mascots, energy... Don't let rankings get in the way of getting to know those things about a place"

Is It ID Theft Or Was The Bank Robbed?
"The problem isn't 'identity theft.' It's bad security and verification processes by a financial institution."

• A Litmus Test For Source of Sweetness - "At this week's American Chemical Society's 238th National Meeting, researchers from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign presented a study about a sensor that can accurately detect the presence of any of the common sweeteners used in food products. The business card size sensor has color spots that activate when particular chemicals are detected, and the color pattern as a whole identifies the actual sweetener in drinks and even solid foods."
• Q and A on Flat Fee Pricing - "What are the advantages of flat fee billing?"
• Libertarian Squishiness - "Libertarians have been more willing than traditional conservatives to oppose government-sponsored discrimination against gays and lesbians. Libertarians are also less likely to allow their religious views to dictate their public-policy preferences and are also less likely to presume that traditional practices should enjoy any presumption."
• A Last-Minute Dash for Tuition - "Weeks or even days before classes start, hundreds of thousands of college students nationwide still don't know whether they'll be able to cover their tuition bills this year."
• Apple loses students to netbooks and Windows - "When US students return to their classrooms this fall, few of them will be lugging along new Apple notebooks.
  . . .
  'Netbooks are affordable - some costing only $170.00. In contrast, Apple laptops start at $949.00. At a time when many people are experiencing economic hardship, having a new Apple laptop isn’t a necessity.'"
• Forget The Segway, The EniCycle Is One-Wheeled Fun We Could All Get Behind - " The EniCycle is an a prototype self-stabilizing unicycle from Slovenian inventor Aleksander Polutnik. Featuring a three-hour battery, gyroscope and a spring damper, Polutnik claims a 30 minute learning curve." includes video
• The rise of the $299 Wal-Mart laptop - "These computer have 2 Gigs of memory, 15 inch screens, full sized keyboards, 160 Gig hard drives, DVD-RW/CD-RW drives, wireless Internet, LAN ports, and Vista Basic. In other words, this is more computer than the average attorney or professional will ever need to get the job done."
• *The Inheritance of Rome* - "I have to count this tome as one of the best history books I have read, ever. The author is Chris Wickham and the subtitle is A History of Europe from 400 to 1000."

Circle Drawing Man

• URL shortener speed and reliability shootout - "So, by these two simple criteria, Ow.ly and Bit.ly tied for 'first place.'"
• Black Elk (1863-1950) - "Born to a medicine man who followed Crazy Horse, Black Elk witnessed the Battle of Little Bighorn in 1876 and the upheaval that followed the tribe's flight to Canada to join Sitting Bull. In 1886 he joined Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show. ... In 1904 he was converted by a priest to the Catholic faith and took the name Nicholas Black Elk."
• I'm forever blowing Zubbles! Inventor spent 15 years creating world's first colour bubbles that don't stain - "Tim Kehoe spent 15 years and an astonishing $3m (£1.8m) creating the world's first ever coloured blowing bubbles, which have now gone on sale."
• 13 Things a Burglar Won't Tell You - "1. Of course I look familiar. I was here just last week cleaning your carpets, painting your shutters, or delivering your new refrigerator."
• You Deleted Your Cookies? Think Again - "More than half of the internet’s top websites use a little known capability of Adobe’s Flash plug-in to track users and store information about them, but only four of them mention the so-called Flash Cookies in their privacy policies, UC Berkeley researchers reported Monday.
  
  Unlike traditional browser cookies, Flash cookies are relatively unknown to web users, and they are not controlled through the cookie privacy controls in a browser. That means even if a user thinks they have cleared their computer of tracking objects, they most likely have not."
• But What Keeps McDonalds From Charging $100 for a Big Mac? - "t’s amazing, given this logic, that McDonald’s doesn’t charge $100 for a Big Mac, given that there is no government competitor in that market. The reality of course is that the relationship works the other way around - Fedex and UPS keep the Post Office in check. Many of the Post Office’s most recent service offerings were copied from UPS and Fedex."
• Credit Card Issuers Reimposing Annual Fees in Response to New Card Regs - "More regulations go into effect next year, so look for more offsetting changes to your credit cards: more annual fees, higher interest rates, less-generous rewards, higher penalty fees, lower credit lines, and less access to credit."
• Iodine deficiency is REAL - "Make no mistake: Iodine deficiency is real. While most of my colleagues have dismissed iodine deficiency as a relic of the early 20th century and third world countries, you can also find it in your neighborhood."
• US Life Expectancy Up To 77.9 Years - "If you want to cut your own risks read my archives Aging Diet Cancer Studies and Aging Diet Heart Studies. A lot of the dietary factors heart disease risk reduction also slow brain aging. But you can also read Aging Diet Brain Studies for more ideas."
• Irwin Stelzer on Executive Compensation: - "The appeal is irresistible to a certain professional New Class but not exactly populist. The reason these 'populists' are stretched is from trying to make tuition payments to Sidwell Friends, National Cathedral School, or St. Alban's - all of whose annual tuitions, so far as I can gather, are slated to hit around $50,000 a year in current dollars by ten years from now. But what appeals to these technocrats is not devising a structure of incentives - it is the naked exercise of moralizing power over paychecks, one group of professionals, exercising political power in the political sphere, over another, the previously untouchable and in every way advancing, winner take all, professional class of financiers."
• Arlington Sues Virginia Over HOT Lanes - "The I-395 HOT Lane project, however, does not involve any new construction. An Australian tolling company, Transurban, will restripe and narrow the existing HOV lanes to include three lanes within the current space built with federal and state taxpayer dollars for two lanes. These lanes reverse depending on the time of day."
  
  From the comments: "Arlington is upset that the state found a way to avoid new construction in an attempt to prevent Arlington from using its normal 'don’t build anything anywhere' tactics of using the environmental process."

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Whoops! Official Argentine inflation just a tad off

We have posted in the past about how Argentina has been fudging their macro data (see here and here) by systematically under-reporting inflation, which is a very convenient thing to do when you have issued inflation-indexed bonds!

However, it seemed like the Kirchner governments were more or less getting away with it. Now, after a humbling electoral defeat, anti-corruption prosecutors are actually going after them for the funny numbers!

Economists say the official inflation rate of 8.5 percent in 2007 was really about 25 percent.

Hard Times for the Kirchners

Can you trust what you see?

What do you think when you're reading an interesting story and you come to a picture of a man with short hair and the journalist describes him as having a shaved head?

A "bump in the road"? I must be going blind? My lying eyes? His razor must be terrible? Oh, it's just a detail?

Or do you then begin wondering about the accuracy of other things the journalist writes in the story - things that you can't see in an accompanying photograph?

Scroll down to see the man with the "shaved head", Mike Austin:
"The New American Religion Behind the Growing American Rage."

Assorted Links 8/19/09

While I was away

• Capitol Hill Workshop, September 23-25, 2009
• Roubini Project Syndicate Op-Ed: A Phantom Economic Recovery - "So, the end of this severe global recession will be closer at the end of this year than it is now, the recovery will be anaemic rather than robust in advanced economies, and there is a rising risk of a double-dip recession. The recent market rallies in stocks, commodities and credit may have gotten ahead of the improvement in the real economy. If so, a correction cannot be too far behind."
• Drug Policy Debate Is Under Way in Latin America. What About the U.S.? - "A serious and open debate about the future of drug policy in Latin America seems to be underway. The question remains on whether Washington is paying any attention to this."
• New at Reason: Radley Balko on Bernard Baran, Wrongful Convictions, and Prosecutorial Misconduct - "What happens to prosecutors who withhold exculpatory evidence in cases that result in wrongful convictions? Not much. Senior editor Radley Balko reports on the case of Bernard Baran, a man who served 22 years in prison after he was convicted of molesting several children at a daycare center in Massachusetts. Evidence pointing to Baran's innocence was never introduced at trial, and the prosecutor who may have committed serious misconduct in winning Baran's conviction not only was never investigated or disciplined, he was soon promoted to judge, a job he has held for the last 20 years."
• We're Not Getting Older, We're Getting More Powerful - "For Congress to attempt to restructure one-sixth of the US economy prior to repealing the Law of Unintended Consequences is daunting to any reasonable person."
• Is Obamacare Constitutional? - "3. It violates Substantive Due Process, and interferes with doctor-patient medical decisions to a vastly greater extent than did the laws declared unconstitutional in Roe v. Wade."
• Our Ongoing Catharsis - "We must remember that America is a naturally rich country. We inherited a lavish infrastructure. Our Constitution is singular. We largely solved the problem of a multi-racial, multi-religious society not devolving into the Balkans, Rwanda, or Iraq. Our higher education in the sciences is superb. American individualism is a magnet that draws kindred spirits the world over. Our military is 19th-century in its patriotic outlook, and 21st century in its competence. So the fumes of America are strong and can keep us fueled for a long time.
  
  But like it or not, at some future date, we will lose what we inherited if we keep borrowing trillions. At some point racial identity politics will result in factionalism. No country can survive with open borders. An educational system that is therapeutic rather than knowledge-based will result in that terrible combination of an arrogant and ignorant electorate that becomes a mockery on the world stage."
• Rose Friedman Passes - "Rose Friedman, co-author of several books with her late husband and Nobel laureate economist Milton, passed away this morning. Rose and Milton co-wrote Free to Choose the wonderful book that formed the basis of Milton’s PBS television series, as well co-writing their joint auto-biography 'Two Lucky People.'"

Texting While Driving
Disclaimer: The video above contains graphic images and pulls no punches with the depiction of an auto accident. Gear Diary is in no way liable for any nightmares or post-traumatic stress syndrome caused after viewing this video. You’ve been warned…

• How Aware Are We of Our Own Distraction? - "One factor that promotes overconfidence in one’s ability to “safely” multitask while driving is the idea that we cannot often correctly monitor our own level of vigilance."
• Kirzner at FEE - "FEE has just posted the video of Israel Kirzner's opening lecture at the FEE Advanced Austrian Economics seminar from earlier this month. I have to say that to have at almost 80 years of age, Israel's energy and passion for ideas that he has talked about hundreds of times before is just stunning."

Economist Richard Vedder on Why College Costs So Damn Much!

• What are health care co-ops? - "I am in any case puzzled by the topic. If, say, rescission is a major problem, why do not health insurance customers seek out health insurance mutuals or co-ops, both of which offer the possibility of greater consumer control and thus less opportunism from the supplier."
• The Gypsy In My Soul - "'The Gypsy in My Soul' was written in 1937 by two graduates of the University of Pennsylvania, Moe Jaffe and Clay Boland. It was written for the 50th anniversary of UPenn's Mask and Wig show and according to sources, wasn't much of a hit at the time of its composition but over the years, it grew into something of a minor standard. Some jazzmen tackled it, such as Lester Young, Oscar Peterson and Barney Kessell, but really, it was a tune tailor made for the pop ilk such as Judy Garland, Sammy Davis Jr., Patti Page and Doris Day."
• Asus Eee PC 1101HA, 1005HA compared, contrasted - "There are three computers in the Asus Eee PC 'Seashell' lineup. The Eee PC 1005HA and 1008HA each have 10 inch displays, while the Eee PC 1101HA has a larger 11.6 inch display. It also has a higher screen resolution of 1366 x 768 pixels, and a slower Intel Atom processor that clocks in at just 1.33GHz."

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Assorted Links 8/17/09

Larry Reed's 3 Lessons of Freedom We Are In Danger of Forgetting
"1. Government can provide you with absolutely nothing except that which it has first taken from somebody else.
2. A government big enough to give you want you want, is big enough to take everything you have.
3. A free people are not economically equal, and an economically equal people are not free."

• Understanding Congressional Budgeting and Appropriations, September 9, 2009
• Strategies for Working with Congress: Effective Communication and Advocacy on Capitol Hill, September 11, 2009
• How to Find, Track, and Monitor Congressional Documents: Going Beyond Thomas, September 15, 2009
• Congress in a Nutshell: Understanding Congress, September 16, 2009
• Congressional Dynamics and the Legislative Process, September 17, 2009
• Capitol Hill Workshop, September 23-25, 2009
• Obama's Montana town hall not quite the 'Wild West' - "Barack Obama's town hall in the Bozeman, Montana area is not as 'bold' of a trip into the Wild West as described by Politico's Carole E. Lee this morning. Bozeman, Montana is a college town with many resident yuppies and is a home for multi-millionaires looking to buy their own piece of the West. [Montana's] Gallatin county was blue enough to support Barack Obama in the 2008 election and over 70% of voters supported Democratic Senator Max Baucus."
• Firefox extension liberates US court docs from paywall - "A new Firefox extension created by the Center for Information Technology Policy at Princeton aims to tear down the federal judiciary's PACER paywall. It uploads legal documents to a freely accessible mirror that is hosted by the Internet Archive."
• The worst health care reform ever? - "Perhaps Turkmenistan takes the prize:"
• FDIC Bank Failure Update - "The FDIC closed five more banks on Friday, and that brings the total FDIC bank failures to 77 in 2009. The following graph shows bank failures by week in 2009. The pace has really picked up recently, with the FDIC seizing almost 5 banks per week in July and August, and with 4 1/2 months to go, it seems 150 bank failures this year is likely."
• Coolest Map of Bank Failures You'll See All Day - "From The Wall Street Journal. You can really tell when WaMu went under."
• More Than 150 Publicly Traded US Banks Are In Serious Trouble - "This analysis by Bloomberg is based on some fairly modest economic assumptions. Most of the banks in question are state and regional banks that have not enjoyed the largesse of the Fed and Treasury like the free-spending, Wall Street money center banks, who are sharply curbing lending and raising rates on credit cards and other revolving debt aggressively even for customers with excellent credit and no history of non-payment.
  
  As you might suspect, even the worst of the banks with large percentages of non-performing loans all claim to be 'well capitalized' by regulatory standards. If as indicated more of the smaller banks fail, we will be left with a few, larger, more potentially lethal financial institutions."
• Boycott Obamacare. Girlcott Whole Foods! - "Dear Olivia Jane: You and many readers of Daily Kos are furious that Whole Foods CEO John Mackey expressed--in the pages of the Wall Street Journal--his opposition to greater government involvement in health care."
• How American Health Care Killed My Father - "Insurance is probably the most complex, costly, and distortional method of financing any activity; that’s why it is otherwise used to fund only rare, unexpected, and large costs. Imagine sending your weekly grocery bill to an insurance clerk for review, and having the grocer reimbursed by the insurer to whom you’ve paid your share. An expensive and wasteful absurdity, no?
  
  Is this really a big problem for our health-care system? Well, for every two doctors in the U.S., there is now one health-insurance employee--more than 470,000 in total. In 2006, it cost almost $500 per person just to administer health insurance. Much of this enormous cost would simply disappear if we paid routine and predictable health-care expenditures the way we pay for everything else--by ourselves.
  . . .
  The unfortunate fact is, health-care demand has no natural limit. Our society will always keep creating new treatments to cure previously incurable problems. Some of these will save lives or add productive years to them; many will simply make us more comfortable. That’s all to the good. But the cost of this comfort, and whether it’s really worthwhile, is never calculated--by anyone. For almost all our health-care needs, the current system allows us as consumers to ask providers, 'What’s my share?' instead of 'How much does this cost?'--a question we ask before buying any other good or service. And the subtle difference between those two questions is costing us all a fortune.
  . . .
  For fun, let’s imagine confiscating all the profits of all the famously greedy health-insurance companies. That would pay for four days of health care for all Americans. Let’s add in the profits of the 10 biggest rapacious U.S. drug companies. Another 7 days. Indeed, confiscating all the profits of all American companies, in every industry, wouldn’t cover even five months of our health-care expenses.
  . . .
  The net effect of the endless layers of health-care regulation is to stifle competition in the classic economic sense. What we have instead is a noncompetitive system where services and reimbursement are negotiated above consumers’ heads by large private and government institutions. And the primary goal of any large noncompetitive institution is not cost control or product innovation or customer service: it’s maintenance of the status quo.
  . . .
  Keeping prices opaque is one way medical institutions seek to avoid competition and thereby keep prices up. And they get away with it in part because so few consumers pay directly for their own care--insurers, Medicare, and Medicaid are basically the whole game. But without transparency on prices--and the related data on measurable outcomes--efforts to give the consumer more control over health care have failed, and always will.
  . . .
  By contrast, consider LASIK surgery. I still lack the (small amount of) courage required to get LASIK. But I’ve been considering it since it was introduced commercially in the 1990s. The surgery is seldom covered by insurance, and exists in the competitive economy typical of most other industries. So people who get LASIK surgery--or for that matter most cosmetic surgeries, dental procedures, or other mostly uninsured treatments--act like consumers. If you do an Internet search today, you can find LASIK procedures quoted as low as $499 per eye--a decline of roughly 80 percent since the procedure was introduced. You’ll also find sites where doctors advertise their own higher-priced surgeries (which more typically cost about $2,000 per eye) and warn against the dangers of discount LASIK. Many ads specify the quality of equipment being used and the performance record of the doctor, in addition to price. In other words, there’s been an active, competitive market for LASIK surgery of the same sort we’re used to seeing for most goods and services.
  . . .
  Technology is driving up the cost of health care for the same reason every other factor of care is driving up the cost--the absence of the forces that discipline and even drive down prices in the rest of our economy. Only in the bizarre parallel universe of health care could limiting supply be seen as a sensible approach to keeping prices down.
  . . .
  A wasteful insurance system; distorted incentives; a bias toward treatment; moral hazard; hidden costs and a lack of transparency; curbed competition; service to the wrong customer. These are the problems at the foundation of our health-care system, resulting in a slow rot and requiring more and more money just to keep the system from collapsing.
  
  How would the health-care reform that’s now taking shape solve these core problems? The Obama administration and Congress are still working out the details, but it looks like this generation of 'comprehensive' reform will not address the underlying issues, any more than previous efforts did. Instead it will put yet more patches on the walls of an edifice that is fundamentally unsound--and then build that edifice higher.
  
  A central feature of the reform plan is the expansion of comprehensive health insurance to most of the 46 million Americans who now lack private or public insurance. Whether this would be achieved entirely through the extension of private commercial insurance at government-subsidized rates, or through the creation of a 'public option,' perhaps modeled on Medicare, is still being debated.
  
  Regardless, the administration has suggested a cost to taxpayers of $1 trillion to $1.5 trillion over 10 years. That, of course, will mean another $1 trillion or more not spent on other things--environment, education, nutrition, recreation. And if the history of previous attempts to expand the health safety net are any guide, that estimate will prove low. "
• Health Costs Squeezing DoD Budgets - "As the body politic passionately debates the rising costs of healthcare and what to do about it, the country’s largest employer is already feeling the pain. Even though the Obama administration is spending record amounts on defense, DOD’s budget is being squeezed by rising healthcare costs that will increasingly crowd out funding for weapons systems, according to number crunching done by the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments."
• Obama Names Tyson “Townhall Healthcare Debate Czar” - "In keeping with his tradition of naming czars--individuals with extraordinary skill sets in their given field of expertise--to oversee crucial policy areas, President Obama has named former heavyweight boxing champion Mike Tyson as his new 'Townhall Healthcare Debate Czar.'"
• Giving Money to Poor People - "In theory, the $175MM given to New Yorkers ($200 per child) will alleviate malnutrition, perhaps pay for shoes, school supplies, a crock pot. In practice, videogames:"
• Cash for Clunkers Pays 10X Market Rate for Greenhouse Gas Reduction - "The Cash for Clunkers (a.k.a. C.A.R.S.) program is a car industry bailout dressed-up as a green initiative. The University of California’s put some numbers to the boondoggle. According to a study by UC Davis transportation economist Christopher Knittel, Uncle Sam’s taxpayer reach-around is paying 10 times the 'sticker price' to reduce emissions of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide. At least."
• The Treacherous Path for Housing - 42 Percent of California Mortgages with Negative Equity: $1 Trillion in Mortgages Submerged Underwater in California. $3 Trillion in U.S. Mortgages Underwater and Risking Foreclosure. - "$1 trillion in California mortgages are underwater and swimming in the Pacific Ocean. $3 trillion in U.S. mortgages are in a negative equity position. What this means is borrowers owe more than their home is worth. A few research papers have shown that the number one factor in determining potential foreclosure is being upside down on a mortgage (job loss is up there as well). "
• Armey: No Client Asked Me to Leave - "Former Rep. Dick Armey said he resigned from DLA Piper because 'I could see that this fight was bringing innocent people in harm’s way.' In an interview with The National Law Journal Friday evening on his way to give the keynote speech at an Atlanta rally against Democratic health care plans, Armey said he had been growing increasingly concerned by commentators who linked his campaign through nonprofit FreedomWorks to his work at DLA Piper."
• Stuff Journalists Like: #46 Stephen Colbert - "Stephen Colbert There is a rift dividing journalists, one that is threatening to rip the journalism world apart. No, it’s not Craigslist or hyperlinks. Those are doing more than just mere threatening journalism. For the most part, journalists live and think as a collective unit. They all prefer sans serif fonts, the Firefox browser and 100 percent voted for Barack Obama. But lately there is an issue that journalists can’t agree on: who they like more -- Stephen Colbert or Jon Stewart. Every journalist wishes he or she could get their own Colbert bump."
• CPSIA Update: Safe Vitamins Versus Safe Books and Baubles - "Today marks the effective date for the Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act’s lower standard for lead content in children’s products, dropping from 600 parts per million (ppm) of lead to 300 ppm as of August 14. (CPSC release, earlier post, more from Overlawyered. Good AP story.)
  
  However, as a number of Consumer Product Safety Commission votes on petitions for exemptions have shown (books, and beads and crystals) the ban really affects products that could conceivably permit 'any' absorption of lead. That makes the effective standard 0 ppm. As in zero.
  
  That’s right. Children’s vitamins may have tiny, infitesimal amounts of lead and still be safe and legal. The Food and Drug Administration in 2008 released a report, 'Survey Data on Lead in Women’s and Children’s Vitamins.'
  . . .
  So the FDA regards it as acceptable for vitamins to contain extremely small amounts of lead, vitamins that children actually eat.
  
  But products that children may occasionally touch with their hands must not have any lead in them---ANY---thanks to the Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act."
• Keynes and Penn Spread Teller's Wealth Around! - "Samuel Adams once expressed opposition to the redistribution of wealth stating: 'The utopian schemes of leveling, and a community of goods are as visionary and impracticable as those which vest all property in the Crown, are arbitrary, despotic, and, in our government, unconstitutional.'"
• Who’s Un-American? - "I also agree with Thomas Jefferson, who wrote that 'When the people fear their government, there is tyranny; when the government fears the people, there is liberty.' In my lifetime, I can’t recall our politicians ever really fearing the people. This past week is about the closest to genuine trepidation by our ruling class that I’ve ever witnessed, and a recent poll suggests that independent voters have more sympathy for the protesters than the politicians."

Retro-Nose: Cuckoo’s Nest II: The Housing Denial

• Teslas Look Sexy in Drag - "Four Teslas under the Christmas tree sounds like a gearhead’s episode of Sesame Street, but it’s just what we’ve found on YouTube. Grapevine murmurings and viral video of Roadsters hitting the dragstrip are emerging online, even though it seems like only yesterday when the balls-to-the-wall EV went into production."
• KozyFill - "Automatic bird bath filler"
• COOKING FOR ONE. - "I’m Al, filling in for Herb, who they tell me is responding to external stimuli again, so good job there Herb. We’re all about cooking things guys like to eat, and today we’ve got a real treat for you."
• The case against vitamin D2 - "Why would vitamin D be prescribed when vitamin D3 is available over-the-counter?"
• Weekly wrap: Florida's population shrinks - "Florida, which has always struggled to manage its growth, has stopped growing. University of Florida demographers said Friday (Aug. 14) that the state lost about 50,000 residents between April 2008 and April 2009. It was the first decline in 63 years."
• DOJ Doesn't Believe $80,000 Per Song Unconstitutional Or Oppressive - "First, what's stunning is that the brief claims the awards are perfectly constitutional because it is not 'so severe and oppressive as to be wholly disproportioned to the offense [or] obviously unreasonable.' Really? It seems that an awful lot of people find the idea of being forced to hand over $80,000 per song without any evidence that it was ever actually shared by anyone is severe and oppressive to the point that it's disproportionate to the offense and quite obviously unreasonable. I mean, this is a woman who wanted to listen to her favorite bands, and she now has to pay nearly $2 million. How can anyone claim that's not 'severe and oppressive' in relation to the actual 'harm' done?"
• How to stop bullies - "They recommend a strategy developed in Norway that engages the whole school community in identifying and suppressing bullying."
• New York Times op-ed urging "Getting Smart on Crime" - "Today's New York Times included this op-ed by Charles Blow titled 'Getting Smart on Crime.' Though the piece cover a lot of ground that should be familiar to regular readers of this blog, these excerpts (and the chart reprinted here) seemed worth emphasizing:
  
  Much of the rise in the prison population was because of draconian mandatory sentencing laws that are illogical -- sociologically and economically.
  
  On the sociological side, as the criminal justice expert Joel Dvoskin of the University of Arizona explained to me, data overwhelmingly support the idea that locking up low-risk, nonviolent offenders makes them worse, not better. "
• CPSIA: August 14 arrives - "On Friday several key provisions of the Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act of 2008 took effect [CPSC release]. The permissible amount of lead in products dropped from 600 parts per million to 300 ppm, ensuring that more zippers, rocks, brass bicycle parts and other harmless items will fail; the new tracking-label mandate went into effect for newly manufactured kids’ goods; and penalties went way up, from a maximum of $8,000 per violation to $100,000 per violation and $15 million overall. "
• A review of Douglas Jewell’s Roadtrip - "When he was 20 years old, Douglas Jewell made a life list. He had decided to live an unconventional life, unencumbered by the traditions of what he saw as a materialistic, consumer-oriented society. So he put pen to paper and came up with 10 ambitions, most dealing with life experiences that he wanted to have. Now 58, he has accomplished eight of these goals."
• Eight screens, one e-book: What’s the lesson here? - "Behold--the Kindle, Sony Reader, iRex and five other machines--all displaying the same book!"

Luxury REO Tour
"we’re not fooling around with subprime crackerboxes anymore"

• Print, beware! Publishers are "on the road" to pure digital - "Digital publishing and open access policies are changing the face of academic publishing, and many of the trends that develop here are likely to make their way into the larger publishing market. That's what made news that broke earlier this year so striking: a leaked memo suggested that the American Chemical Society's publishing wing was almost entirely abandoning print and would focus instead on digital publishing. Since then, however, the ACS said that it will continue printing 'condensed' versions of its journals for the time being."
• Coolest Stuff I Have Worked With In A While - "Electro-Luminescent wire."
• Print Isn't Dying, Serious Journalism Is - "It's a tired Silicon Valley drum beat: print is dying, blogs and Twitter are the future of news. Many in the business of blogging like to think that print ad revenues are declining and subscriber bases are shrinking because online media is vastly superior to those dinosaurs. This is one area where the evidence actually seems to suggest that the bloggers are justified.
  
  However, if you're not so full of yourself that 'citizen journalism' seems like a revolution, you can understand the real reason that print is dying: newspapers' shit is all retarded. "
• Plug that folds flat: Sleek new design for the laptop generation - "Over the decades, many of the appliances it powers have become slimmed-down, compact or flat. But the British three-pin plug has remained exactly the same size--very bulky. Until now, that is, as an enterprising design student has come up with a folding plug that tucks away snugly to a quarter of the size of a standard one. Its three pins can be folded flat and the sides turned-in."
• Netbook Roundup: 5 of The Best Netbooks On the Market - "We’ve done the research, and here is a look 5 of the best notebooks on the market."
• Netbooks With High-Res Displays--Are You Sure You Really Want One? - "I have used a lot of mobile devices with small screens, and I can tell you that using a small display with a high resolution screen can get tedious after a while."
• Debunking Netbook Myths and Misconceptions -- The Straight NetScoop - "I can’t recommend the NC20 more highly (other than the fingerprint magnet glossy case-- a pet peeve of mine)."
• Bridge The Spiral, Don’t Crush It - "A standard hose clamp doesn’t work very well for clamping a spiral hose such as that found in dust collection systems. It has to clamp over one of the coils which can make a less-than-airtight connection. To solve this problem you can use a bridge hose clamp which has an offset connector that crosses over the coil without crushing it."
• P2Peer Education: Bringing Elite Education to the Masses - "Like so many other industries, early attempts at delivering online education have generally consisted of making available the same content that’s found offline. While this is a good start, the key to online education is amplifying the way in which we learn when we’re at school -- from our peers."

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Assorted Links 8/15/09

New Aviation Films Show the Filmmaking Has Definitely Changed

• Understanding Congressional Budgeting and Appropriations, September 9, 2009
• Strategies for Working with Congress: Effective Communication and Advocacy on Capitol Hill, September 11, 2009
• How to Find, Track, and Monitor Congressional Documents: Going Beyond Thomas, September 15, 2009
• Congress in a Nutshell: Understanding Congress, September 16, 2009
• Congressional Dynamics and the Legislative Process, September 17, 2009
• Capitol Hill Workshop, September 23-25, 2009
• US Consumer Credit Shows Steepest Contraction in Over 5 Decades - "Thanks to Dave Rosenberg for the above series of 5 stunning charts that highlight the inflation/deflation debate. The key take away is those charts all show deflation. Indeed, in a credit based economy a better title for chart 3 might be 'Credit IS Inflation'."
• Deflation Hits Porn Industry, Canadian Grocery Stores, Newspapers, Firefighters, Lawyers, High Tech - "While nearly everyone is worried about inflation, deflation is hitting a wide gamut of white collar, blue collar, and no collar industries. Let's take a look.
  . . .
  Some voluntarily embrace frugality, others have frugality embrace them. The amazing thing to me is that people are harping about inflation with this hugely deflationary backdrop across a wide array of industries."
• Good Enough For You, Not Good Enough For Me - "President Obama just revealed at the New Hampshire "town hall" that he rejected Federal government supplied insurance for himself and his family when he was in the U.S. Senate, and instead of the government regulated stuff he took advantage of his wife's private insurance supplied via her $317,000 per year political fixer/politician's wife job with the University of Chicago Hospital."
• Anti-consumerist tracts: so many to choose from! - "Neal Lawson’s All Consuming -- yet another book that bashes the consumerist society -- sums up the flimsy intellectualism and elitist disdain for the masses that courses through the veins of today’s anti-shopping lobby."
• Calling the Police as Negligence - "Yesterday, I blogged about the silent alarm case: A store was being robbed. The safe was set up to trigger a silent alarm to the police station when it was opened (supposedly contrary to company policy). The police came. There was a shootout with the criminals, in which a patron died. The patron's family sued the store for negligence, on the theory that the store shouldn't have risked patrons' lives by triggering the silent alarm. The trial court granted the store summary judgment. The appellate court reversed the grant of summary judgment, holding that it was for the jury to decide whether silently calling the police was negligent."
• First-time Home Buyer Frenzy - "Expect a surge in existing home sales (and some new home sales) over the next few months. Expect prices at the low end to rise (simple supply and demand). Expect all kinds of reports that the bottom has been reached.
  
  Expect the frenzy to end ... "
• Diet Advice For Diabetics Falling On Deaf Ears - "Type II diabetes do produce insulin. In fact, they tend to produce lots of insulin-- but it’s not enough to keep their blood sugar under control. Why not? Simple: they’ve become resistant to the stuff. When the body’s insulin receptors are constantly flooded with insulin, they become damaged and stop working … just like the cilia in your ears can become damaged by too much noise. Worse, the beta cells in the pancreas can become overworked from constantly cranking out the insulin and burn out.
  . . .
  There is, of course, a natural alternative: stop forcing your body to smack down your blood sugar several times per day. Then you won’t need so much insulin. Many Type II diabetics have been able to stop taking insulin and any other blood-sugar medications simply by eliminating sugar and starch. That’s how it worked for Dr. Jay Wortman, the medical expert behind the wonderful documentary My Big Fat Diet."
• Science and Pseudoscience in Adult Nutrition Research and Practice - "Human nutrition research and practice is plagued by pseudoscience and unsupported opinions." ht ALD
• Misguided Worries About Inflation - "Indeed every week I have someone email me that 'We have inflation and deflation at the same time.'
  
  No we don't. It is not possible. The reason is falling prices are a symptom of deflation not a definition of it. Falling prices frequently accompany deflation, but they are not a necessary ingredient.
  . . .
  In Austrian economic terms inflation is a net increase of money supply and credit and deflation is the opposite, a net decrease in money supply and credit. In those terms we either have inflation or we don't. Prices simply do not fit into the equation.
  . . .
  The notion of inflation and deflation at the same time is a widely held belief based on brainwashing by the Fed about what inflation is. If everyone realized inflation involved money supply, the Fed and Central Bankers would not be able to lie through their teeth about being 'inflation fighters'.
  
  Once you realize that inflation involves money supply, you must come to the realization that the only source of inflation in the world comes from Central Bankers. Unfortunately, the media has bought the Fed's 'inflation fighting' mantra hook line and sinker by talking about inflation as if it was prices."

Domestics’ Share of Cash for Clunkers Sales Shrinks; Toyota Tops the Table

• A Short Walk Goes a Long Way - "'Those who increased their physical activity by even a small amount-- 60 to 119 minutes per week--showed similar reductions in liver enzymes compared to those who increased physical activity by about four hours,' the study says. In other words, they found no dose-response effective for an increase in exercise of more than 60 minutes per week.
  
  'I like the fact that 60 minutes a week is enough for NASH,' my favorite Certified Diabetes Educator wrote me. 'This should help get the depressed or skeptical NASH-afflicted couch potatoes to start moving around! That’s just 10 minutes six days a week!'"
• DesignYourDorm Takes The Guessing Out Of Moving In - "Just supply your school, residence hall, and room number during registration, and if you're lucky you'll get a 3D model of your room. The site doesn't have replicas of every room in every university in their database, but they allow users to add floor plans, meaning that in time it'll only get better. (If you don't want to add your floor plan, you can also just select a generic floor plan.)"
• Getting Things Done Explained for Students - "GTD is basically a 'workflow for life,' so if all you want to do is get papers in by their deadlines, it's overkill. Luckily, some of the GTD precepts work for the student workflow--so that's what I'll share here."
• Storage of your photos: Some ideas - "Well, here’s what I would recommend after thinking about this quite a bit myself (side note: I have over 60,000 digital images, most of them RAW photos, but at least several hundred digital abstract art pieces that I have created as well that total approx. 400 Gigabytes):
  
  Get a network attached storage device (NAS Array) that accommodates 4-5 hard drives and offers RAID levels 5, 6 or 10. Backup all of your photos, videos, etc. on a regular basis to this NAS Array. Plug into this NAS Array a single external 1.5TB hard drive and backup the array to that. Keep the external hard drive either in your car or your office or at your friend’s house. Use online backup as well if you want an extra layer of protection.
  
  Networked Attached Storage plugs directly into your network router and is/should be accessible from every computer in your house and from your network-enabled PlayStation 3 or Xbox 360 (real men use Xbox 360s :) ).
  
  If you buy a Drobo, Thecus, Qnap or Buffalo NAS (all of which I have researched and can recommend, though I lean towards the Thecus and Qnap because of speed of data transfers and the fact that the Drobo, strictly speaking, doesn’t offer network connectivity [even with its optional 'Droboshare' add-on, it transfers data from the network through an RJ45 connection to the Drobo via a USB 2.0 connector]), and set them to RAID 5, you have pretty good protection."

Health care: the government is the problem

• The economics of the secret Chinese menu - "Especially for immigrants, restaurant life is often about ambience, social contacts, and feeling you have a space to call your own. A restaurant cannot be all things to all people and the #1 best way of judging a restaurant is to look at its customers."

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Assorted Links 8/10/09

If Obama has his way, his health care plan will be funded by his treasury chief who did not pay his taxes, overseen by his surgeon general who is obese, signed by a president who smokes, and financed by a country that is just about broke.
What possibly could go wrong?

• Capitol Hill Workshop, September 23-25, 2009
• Birmingham, Alabama: National Guard Needed After Budget Cuts? - "The sheriff of Birmingham, Alabama warns he may need to call the National Guard to maintain order after this week’s Circuit Court ruling that Jefferson County leaders can proceed with plans to slash $4.1 million from the sheriff’s budget.
  . . .
  How did Jefferson County end up close to earning the title of 'biggest municipal bankruptcy in U.S. history?'
  
  To finance a $3.2 billion sewer cleanup, six years ago, after consluting with J.P. Morgan, the county issued floating interest rate debt instead of the typical fixed interest rate debt. It was meant to save taxpayers money. But the collapse of the subprime mortgage market drove up variable rates and has left Jefferson County hemorrhaging red ink, with unexpected debt payments of $7 million a month. "
• NODs Increasing, Foreclosures Decreasing - "Really these underwater 'homeowners' are more renters than owners, and many will still have negative equity when the interest rate increases again. Perhaps we should call the modification programs Single Family Public Housing."
• Shame On Executives For Flying Private Jets… - "…only those of us in Congress get to fly private jets."
• We just need a sugar daddy! - "Ironically, instead of using US taxpayer money to help finance universal health care in the US, our Government used US taxpayer money to help finance universal health care in Western Europe, by paying so much $$ for the defense of the region!"
• US Consumer Demand Off a Cliff as the Crisis Deepens - "The big story is the collapse of the US consumer, unprecedented since WW II, and possibly the Great Depression. This is apparent in the numbers despite the epic restatement of GDP having just been done by the BLS in their benchmark revisions. If the Fed and Treasury were not actively monetizing everything in sight, we would certainly be seeing a more pronounced deflation as prices fall WITH demand. And if they continue, we may very well feel a touch of the lash of that hyperinflation that John Williams is predicting."
• How the link economy benefits Reuters - "My feeling, however, is that the way that Reuters will benefit most from the link economy won’t show up in Ahearn’s P&L at all. The Reuters news product is primarily monetized through terminal sales, not through ad sales on reuters.com, and that’s how we’ll make our money from the link economy too: insofar as Reuters becomes a central hub of the link economy, it will increasingly be a must-have product for the financial-market professionals who pay $1,000 a month* for their terminals. Could those professionals, in theory, find the same content online for free? Yes. But not nearly as quickly or as conveniently as they can find it on their terminal, where it’s pushed to them with ultra-low latency and long before the story in question finally gets put up on our website. As Reuters becomes increasingly authoritative and important online, largely through all the inbound links it gets, it will become that much easier for us to sell those terminals and make lots of money doing so"
• Restating the case for human uniqueness - "despite the very small difference in the gene coding sequence between humans and chimps, some of the important genetic differences are in genes that regulate a whole host of other genes. So a small change can make an immense difference. The genetic difference between us and chimps may be much greater than the 1.6 per cent figure implies, as our uniqueness is based on a powerful network of gene regulation, [Jeremy Taylor] argues [in 'Not a Chimp: The Hunt to Find the Genes That Make Us Human']."
• Four Days in North Korea - "There is no Internet access in North Korea—the Pyongyang elite use an intranet to listen to music and watch movies. There are three TV channels, and North Koreans usually go to telephone booths when they need to make calls.
  . . .
  From our first moments in the country, it was obvious that some North Koreans receive special treatment. The train for Pyongyang had 15 cars, but only the three "international compartments" had fans to fight the sweltering heat. Well-dressed North Koreans took up the majority of seats in the compartment. The women wore silk blouses, nice skirts, and high heels, and the men were decked out in good T-shirts, which sometimes showed off their big bellies.
  
  They were the only fat North Koreans that I saw on the trip. The people in the streets of Pyongyang and Kaesong were often downright skinny. In Pyongyang, I had my picture taken with two elementary-school boys in Kim Il-Sung Square, and I could clearly feel their ribs when I put my hands on their backs. "
• Health Care Reform and the Golden Rule - "As for Obama’s motivation in pushing healthcare reform? Just guessing, but so far Obama’s administration has been so corporatist in handing over aid and comfort to specific industries that it makes me wonder if he views instituting something like universal healthcare to be a bone to throw at the ordinary Joe, who may have begun to resent exactly how rigged (in favor of the big-ticket investors) politics in the U.S. has proven during the current downturn. If that line of thinking starts to proliferate, something bad could happen to the big ticket brigade. "
• Everybody wants to go to heaven - "A mean conservative Newt Gingrich argues: 'we need a new federal resolve to truly defeat Alzheimer’s. As America’s largest generation ages, we have no time to lose.' On the empathic left Ezekial Emanuel (brother of the gentle soul, Emanual): 'Conversely, services provided to individuals who are irreversibly prevented from being or becoming participating citizens are not basic and should not be guaranteed. An obvious example is not guaranteeing health services to patients with dementia.'"
• You don't have to go to school - "Here is the story of a Russian woman's experience with pulling her three children out of school that I thought would provide some valuable perspective to people in the States who are confronting the same decision, so I translated it."
• Quelle Surprise! Hank Paulson and Goldman CEO Talked to Each Other a Lot! - "At this point, the New York Times story reporting that Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson and Goldman chief Lloyd Blankfein spoke frequently during the crisis is close to a 'dog bites man' news item. After Goldman was the only Wall Street player involved in the discussions of what to do about the rapidly unravelling AIG, and Goldman then turned out to be the biggest beneficiary of the dubious credit default swaps unwinding, any other cases of undue attentiveness to the needs of Paulson's former firm are likely to pale. The amusing bit is that the public is looking for more signs of behind the scenes winks and nods, when what is in the open is so blatant that there really wasn't much need to do things in a covert fashion."

The Real Clunkers in this Deal: Why "cash for clunkers" is a terrible idea

• Ten things we don't understand about humans - "4. Teenagers: Even our closest relatives, the great apes, move smoothly from their juvenile to adult life phases -- so why do humans spend an agonising decade skulking around in hoodies?"
• Mini-magnet test makes things sticky for TB - "TUBERCULOSIS can now be diagnosed in just 30 minutes, using magnetic nanoparticles which identify Mycobacterium tuberculosis in sputum, even at very low concentrations."
• What Kinds of Girls Are Upper Tier Colleges Looking For? - "Selective schools are not interested these days in girls who like English and history, like to read and are able to write clearly and well. Those skills fill the bell curve for smart girls ... Selective schools have absorbed the folk myths of bobo culture. So cool girls are math smart, genetically destined to be hackers, risk takers, and into competitive sports."
• Vive la Difference! A New Approach to College Rankings - "The most exciting dimension of this year's Forbes/CCAP rankings of colleges is a revolutionary new concept --the do it yourself ranking, available here. You first determine the region where you want to go to school, and the size of the institution. After that, you indicate which of 12 factors you think are important --and how important. Those factors include admissions selectivity, average freshman SAT scores, the student-faculty ratio, the four year graduation rate, crime rates on campus, student evaluations of their instruction (and instructors), incidence of listing in Who's Who in America, average post-graduate salary data, whether students or faculty won nationally competitive awards, average student debt loads, and net tuition costs. Then the screener gives you the top 20 schools, given your tastes and preferences."

Richard Hammond's Honda Fireblade vs... a rocket and a golf ball?

• iStubz - The Dumbest Idea I’ve Ever Wholeheartedly Endorsed - "I wouldn’t go as far as to call these iStubz replacement sync/charge cables for the iPod and iPhone genius or anything, I mean they’re just shorter versions of the ones Apple gives you, but 9 times out of 10 I only need 7cm of cord. I’ll happily suck it up that one time I need a bit more slack if the rest of the time my desk isn’t a cluttered cobweb of white cables."
• Feds at DefCon Alarmed After RFIDs Scanned - "It’s one of the most hostile hacker environments in the country -- the DefCon hacker conference held every summer in Las Vegas.
  
  But despite the fact that attendees know they should take precautions to protect their data, federal agents at the conference got a scare on Friday when they were told they might have been caught in the sights of an RFID reader.
  
  The reader, connected to a web camera, sniffed data from RFID-enabled ID cards and other documents carried by attendees in pockets and backpacks as they passed a table where the equipment was stationed in full view.
  
  It was part of a security-awareness project set up by a group of security researchers and consultants to highlight privacy issues around RFID."
• LG’s THX-Certified LED HDTVs are Now Available in the U.S. - "Hear that? It’s the trademark THX sound you hear before movies. Now you can watch those movies on LG’s new THX-certified LH90 series of LED-backlit HDTVs that have finally arrived on U.S. soil. The trio of 1080p HDTVs, which are the first to receive the THX certification here in the US, feature TruMotion 240Hz technology."
• GearDeal: Prepaid cell phone cards – $50 refills only $44 at Target - "Some providers such as T-Mobile even let you keep your minutes for a full year if you fill them with $100 at a time. Target has all brands of prepaid cellular refill cards on sale this week. Spend $44 and get a $50 card. Choose Virgin Mobile, Boost, T-Mobile, AT&T or Verizon Wireless. Available in store only."

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Assorted Links 8/8/09

Is Your iPod Unpatriotic?

• Understanding Congressional Budgeting and Appropriations, September 9, 2009
• Strategies for Working with Congress: Effective Communication and Advocacy on Capitol Hill, September 11, 2009
• How to Find, Track, and Monitor Congressional Documents: Going Beyond Thomas, September 15, 2009
• Congress in a Nutshell: Understanding Congress, September 16, 2009
• Congressional Dynamics and the Legislative Process, September 17, 2009
• Capitol Hill Workshop, September 23-25, 2009
• Foreclosures: One Giant Wave, Still Building - “To say there is a second wave implies the (current) wave has receded,” [Sam Khater, senior economist, First American CoreLogic] “I don’t see that the wave has receded.”
• E85 Boondoggle of the Day: 2100 Gallons of Water Per Gallon of E85? - "Corn-based ethanol took another blow from the scientific literature this week. University of Minnesota scientists published an article revealing that corn into E85 could require three times as much water as previously estimated."
• The Obama/Joker Poster Is Racist, Says a Washington Post Article by the Newspaper's Culture Critic - "Joker = 'urban' = 'inner city' = black. True, he's white, Heath Ledger is white, but ... But what exactly? All references to white 'urban' criminals are actually secretly to blacks? The references to William Ayers were, too?"
• Prairie-Fire Anger - "There is a growing sense of a 'we’ve been had', bait-and-switch. Millions of moderate Republicans, independents, and conservative Democrats--apparently angry at Bush for Iraq and big deficits, unimpressed by the McCain campaign, intrigued by the revolutionary idea of electing an African-American president--voted for Obama on the assumption that he was sincere about ending red state/blue state animosity. They took him at his word that he was going to end out of control federal spending. They trusted that he had real plans to get us out of the economic doldrums, and that he was not a radical tax-and-spend liberal of the old sort.
  
  Instead, within days Obama set out plans that would triple the annual deficit, and intends to borrow at a record pace that will double the aggregate debt in just eight years.
  
  He not only took over much of the auto- and financial industries, but also did so in a way that privileged unions, politically-correct creditors, and those insider cronies who favor administration initiatives. On matters racial, his administration is shrill and retrograde, not forward-looking. It insists on emphasizing the tired old identify politics that favor a particular sort of racial elite that claims advantage by citing past collective victimization or piggy-backs for advantage on the plight of the minority underclass.
  
  In other words, the Obama swing voter thought he was getting a 21st-century version of pragmatic, triangulating Bill Clinton--and instead got something to the left of 1970s Jimmy Carter."
• Regulation Is Almost Always Anti-Competitive - "I can see the effects of this right here where I am sitting, out near the end of Cape Cod. Zoning and business regulation here is enormously aggressive - its is virtually impossible to start a new retail establishment here, particularly on virgin land. As a result, every store and restaurant here feels like it is right out of the 1950s. You’d hardly know there has been a revolution in retail or service delivery over the past few decades, because businesses here are sheltered from new entrants."
• MoD Minister: This is the last generation of manned fighters - "In a bizarre repeat of history, a British defence minister has given it as his opinion that we are currently witnessing development of the final generation of manned combat aircraft. The comments made last week by Quentin Davies MP echo those made in a 1957 government white paper by the then Defence minister, Duncan Sandys."
• A $191 Million Question - "Raymond said it is common practice for contractors to bolster their chances of winning a deal by providing information that helps to shape statements of work. 'It happens all the time . . . They disguise it as a white paper,' he said.
  . . .
  'The game around this town is you put résumés of people who are well known,' Raymond said."

Stand-Up Economist: The world’s first and only stand-up economist

• You just can’t make this stuff up - "Seriously, I propose an emergency meeting of the AEA to resolve this issue once and for all. We should not wait for the January meetings in Atlanta, as by then a whole new group of EC101 students will have been mis-educated in the fall semester."
• USAF’s C-5 Galaxy Gets Modern Upgrades With…GPS! - "Believe it or not, one of the things pilots are enjoying the most in the new cockpit is the GPS navigation. The older C-5s still relied on inertial navigation which can be less than ideal on long trips. With the new glass cockpits, the pilots can finally enjoy the same convenient navigation the military first started using more than 20 years ago."
• How good is the post office really? - "For obvious reasons, an inefficient quasi-monopolist might run high costs and overinvest in public relations. Some of the world's worst post offices have pretty stamps and the guy behind the counter really does smile like grandpa."

Revolt is brewing among AARP members against AARP leadership

• Panoramic Windshields - "By 1961, wrap-around windshields were gone. Fords returned to traditional A-pillars in 1960 and General Motors followed for its 1961 line as can be seen on this Buick. The windshield glass curves both horizontally and vertically, but there is no significant wrapping. The A-pillar has returned to its traditional backwards slant. This situation prevails nearly 50 years later, strongly implying that wraparound windshields weren't such a great idea."
• 7 Reasons Not to Ditch Your iPhone - from the comments: "I will ditch my iPhone for the next gen iPod Touch (comes out in September) plus the Verizon Mifi. This allows me to retain the iPhone apps and functionality while freeing myself from AT&T (which is the main problem for me)." We agree that this combination has the potential to be a game-changer.
• Why you don't drive in fog - Three dead following collision on Interstate 81: "The wreckage of the passenger car and third tractor was recognizable only because both vehicles' tire rims and the tractor's exhaust pipe were visible. Debris littered the highway under the trailer, in which chemicals burned throughout the day." Video slide show here
• Organic food and unhealthy snobbery - "People don’t eat organic for its nutrients, but because they want to distinguish themselves from the junk-scoffing hordes.
  . . .
  As Professor Ottoline Leyser of York University says: ‘People think that the more natural something is, the better it is for them. That is simply not the case. In fact, it is the opposite that is true: the closer a plant is to its natural state, the more likely it is that it will poison you. Naturally, plants do not want to be eaten, so we have spent 10,000 years developing agriculture and breeding out harmful traits from crops. 'Natural agriculture' is a contradiction in terms.’"
• Is The Post Office So Bad? Yes, and Try Eating More Kiwi. - "Consider, this story from today about USPS's $1.1 billion loss in the 3rd quarter. The USPS's primary business is transportation. You give them something, they give it to someone else, oftentimes within a mailbox or two of the address you ask of them. If you are sending a small, light, paper envelope, within the U.S., then you will get a rate of $0.44.
  
  Visit the grocery store and price Kiwifruit, and depending on the time of year, the weather conditions of the growing season, and where you are located relative to major distribution points, you will get quoted a price in the ballpark of 40-50 cents."

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Assorted Links 8/6/09

Not going so well in PA.... Hmm, read the bill - that's novel!
"Is it representative government when your representatives don’t read the bill?"
Democrats Decline to Listen to Unhappy Constituents, Decide to Label Them Nuts Instead

• Understanding Congressional Budgeting and Appropriations, September 9, 2009
• Strategies for Working with Congress: Effective Communication and Advocacy on Capitol Hill, September 11, 2009
• How to Find, Track, and Monitor Congressional Documents: Going Beyond Thomas, September 15, 2009
• Congress in a Nutshell: Understanding Congress, September 16, 2009
• Congressional Dynamics and the Legislative Process, September 17, 2009
• Capitol Hill Workshop, September 23-25, 2009
• A tale told by an idiot - "'The Sheriff at the Gates: A Farce in Three Acts’"
  Act One
  
  (A street in Cambridgeham. Most Exalted University Professor HENRY LOUIS GATES, freshly returned from the Land of the Asian Khan, is rattling the door of his keep. Enter a WENCH.)....
• What Does This Sad Story Say to You? - Uh, don't look for jobs in bars? (See Out of Options, photo 9)
• My Father The Dope Dealer - "I loved the car trips I took with my mom as a kid. In 1986, we climbed into a rented motor home and bolted south Florida for the mesas of New Mexico, seeing cousins and digging for Indian arrowheads in my aunt's yard. Later we toured New England, New York, and the Southeast, my mom taking advantage of the long hours behind the wheel to grill me about my grade-school crushes and playground fights. I thought we were just bonding and visiting family. Years later, I would learn that the trips had another aim: to hunt down cash and valuables my dad had stashed during his days as one of the biggest suppliers of high-quality marijuana in the Northeast."
• Lobbying: A Booming Business in a Politicized Economy - "Lobbying expenditures are up in the second quarter of the Obama administration, reports the Center for Responsive Politics. Well-connected Democratic lobbyists like former House majority leader Richard Gephardt and Tony Podesta, the brother of Obama transition director John Podesta, did especially well. Given the administration’s focus on nationalizing health care and energy, it’s no surprise that health care and energy companies were the biggest spenders.
  . . .
  As Craig Holman of the Nader-founded Public Citizen told Marketplace Radio the last time such a report was issued, 'the amount spent on lobbying . . . is related entirely to how much the federal government intervenes in the private economy.'"
• Does this Congress have transparency problem? - "The same problem exists in the Senate, where the committee on Health, Education Labor and Pensions (HELP) passed its health care bill on July 15. We still don't have a copy of that text"
• OMB v. CBO in the "First Battle of the Blogs" - "Washington policy battles usually play out in person in the Oval Office and in the offices of congressional leaders. On Saturday, July 25, Washington witnessed the first 'Battle of the Blogs.'"
• Pricing Transit - "This analysis acknowledges that as the price of Boston public transportation rises, people at the margin will substitute other means of transportation, reducing the number of riders. This may seem obvious to those commuters who realize that demand slopes downward, but oftentimes those involved in setting prices for public transportation do not acknowledge that changing fares leads to a movement along the demand curve for their service."
• Office Volume Down 50% to 91%; Industrial Space at Decade Low; Retail Vacancies at 7.5% - "Retail, office, and industrial real estate are all suffering to various degrees."
• The Bottom Hasn't Arrived for Commercial Real Estate - "for the vast majority of small banks who didn't play the sub-prime mortgage game, but are hip deep in commercial construction loans, the plunging of commercial real estate values may spell the end of their existence."
• Hot Waitress Economic Index - "In New York, we have our own economic indicators, often based on the degree to which people are being thwarted by the lack of opportunity. An old standby is the Overeducated Cabbie Index. The Squeegee Man Apparition Index is another good one. There’s also the Speed at Which Contractors Return Calls Index: within 24 hours, you’re in a recession; if they call you without prompting, that’s a depression." ht Marginal Revolution
• Our Enemy, the State - "It is unfortunately none too well understood that, just as the State has no money of its own, so it has no power of its own. All the power it has is what society gives it, plus what it confiscates from time to time on one pretext or another; there is no other source from which State power can be drawn. Therefore every assumption of State power, whether by gift or seizure, leaves society with so much less power. There is never, nor can there be, any strengthening of State power without a corresponding and roughly equivalent depletion of social power."
• Andrew Sullivan: Opposition to Cash-for-Clunkers Shows GOP Not Serious About Limited Government - "What about the estimated 12 percent of Americans aged 15 years and above who don't drive, period? What about all the adults who live in the 8 percent of households that don't have a vehicle? What about half the residents of Manhattan, who took transit planners' decades-old dream to heart and 'got out of their cars'? What about those who are too poor to drive? The answer: All of these people are subsidizing whoever turns in an SUV or crappy old $800 K-Car like the one I used to drive. Not only that, but what do you think happens to the $800 car market when the guvmint is handing out $4,500 checks to have the things destroyed? I'll go ahead and state the obvious: It shrinks, making it more expensive for the truly poor people, the ones who want to make that daring leap from the bus system to an awful old bucket of rust."
• GOP Senator: White House Encroaching on First Amendment - " A Republican senator is calling for the White House to suspend a new project that asks members of the public to flag 'fishy' claims about President Obama’s health care plans, arguing that it raises privacy concerns and will serve to chill free speech.
  
  Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, is sending a letter to the White House today asking the president to 'cease this program immediately' -- or to explain how Americans’ privacy will be protected if e-mails are forwarded to the White House as requested."

New at Reason.tv: Sending Our Fishy E-Mails to the White House!

• Lawyer hid millions from IRS - "Most creative of his dodges? Entering into a sham child support agreement."
• High Sensitivity C-reactive Protein - "This blood test measures a marker for inflammation, thought to be involved in plaque formation. It's often elevated when a person is overweight, out-of-shape, and on the road to diabetes. Many doctors routinely do this blood test nowadays and it can be combined with Framingham risk factors to give you what's known as a Reynolds Risk Score. Research shows it provides more accurate information about heart-disease risk than Framingham and can tell you your heart attack risk out to 40 years and your risk of other heart conditions like strokes. "
• Reynolds Risk Score - "If you are healthy and without diabetes, the Reynolds Risk Score is designed to predict your risk of having a future heart attack, stroke, or other major heart disease in the next 10 years."
• Apolipoprotein- B But not LDL Cholesterol Linked to Artery Calcium Build Up - "Dangerous LDL comes in small particles which are prone to attach to arteries. Very large fluffy LDL molecule tends not to bond to your arteries. The LDL calculation apparently gives something like the total volume of your LDL, so if, like me, you have a modest number of very large fluffy molecules the formula gives an extremely high LDL figure while someone with a lot of very small dense LDL may be told they have a low, misleadingly comforting LDL number.
  
  This is one reason why fully one half of people who have heart attacks have "normal" cholesterol--because just measuring the amount of cholesterol is worthless. You have to know how many cholesterol particles you have to better understand risk since small dense LDL does correlate with your risk of having cholesterol clog your arteries.
  
  So while it isn't new that your APO B value is a useful indicator of risk, the new Diabetes study is useful because it finds that APO B is the only LDL test result that provides useful information to people with Type 2 diabetes."
• OpenHouse NY releases early site list for '09 free tours - "Come October, the non-profit openhousenewyork will again pull back the curtain at hundreds of seldom-seen spots around the city, allowing free public access to the Apollo Theater, the abandoned 1844 railway tunnel under Atlantic Avenue, the Thaw Conservation Center at the Morgan Library and Museum, and the 'Model Museum' showcasing the designs of architects Richard Meier and Partners."
• The Forbes/CCAP Best Buy College Rankings - "we have prepared a list of 100 Best Buy American colleges and universities, after both institutional quality and the typical cost of tuition after average discounts are considered (e.g., scholarships). While the Best College top 100 is dominated by private schools, a large majority (61 percent) on the Best Buy list are public institutions--because, on average, public institutions are less expensive to attend than private ones."

Sand Animation: "WWII as experienced in the Soviet Ukraine. A story told with sand and hands..." ALD
The artist is Ksenia Symonova

• Fiber gets nimble: small telcos weaving fiber web - "Fiber to the home is associated with Verizon, but half of the rural telcos around the country are installing it, too, a few hundred lines at a time. The strange result: Bemidji, MN gets fiber but Chicago does not."
• Google Voice offering active serviceman and women instant invites - "In an effort to help assist deployed servicemen and women in the United States Military, Google is allowing anyone with a .mil email address to sign up for a Google Voice invite and get pretty much instantaneous access."
• Where Are All the Funny People? - "Chief among the myriad problems infecting this junk heap [Funny People movie] is that the funny people in the title are simply not funny. Of course, it doesn’t help if you are allergic to Adam Sandler and an aberration called Seth Rogen in the first place. This grim duo is about as funny as two kidney stones.
  . . .
  If there is anyone more repulsive than Adam Sandler and Seth Rogen, it is Jason Schwartzman, who also provided a musical score that makes construction-site jackhammers sound like Debussy’s 'Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun.' Between batteries of blood tests and treatments, we get routines guaranteed to bore a kindergarten at recess. There is even a scene in which everybody takes turns rubbing peanut butter on their face and the dog licks it off. Talk about wasting time to drag out a movie by covering up the fact that there is no movie!
  . . .
  There is nothing cute or cool or liberating about almost two and a half hours of X-rated excreta by criminally unfunny people feigning to be pros." ht The Browser
• 3 ways to save on college textbooks - Rent, buy digital, buy used.
• The Omnivore’s Delusion: Against the Agri-intellectuals - "Critics of 'industrial farming' spend most of their time concerned with the processes by which food is raised. This is because the results of organic production are so, well, troublesome. With the subtraction of every 'unnatural' additive, molds, fungus, and bugs increase. Since it is difficult to sell a religion with so many readily quantifiable bad results, the trusty family farmer has to be thrown into the breach, saving the whole organic movement by his saintly presence, chewing on his straw, plodding along, at one with his environment, his community, his neighborhood. Except that some of the largest farms in the country are organic--and are giant organizations dependent upon lots of hired stoop labor doing the most backbreaking of tasks in order to save the sensitive conscience of my fellow passenger the merest whiff of pesticide contamination. They do not spend much time talking about that at the Whole Foods store.
  . . .
  Biotech crops actually cut the use of chemicals, and increase food safety. Are people who refuse to use them my moral superiors? Herbicides cut the need for tillage, which decreases soil erosion by millions of tons. The biggest environmental harm I have done as a farmer is the topsoil (and nutrients) I used to send down the Missouri River to the Gulf of Mexico before we began to practice no-till farming, made possible only by the use of herbicides. The combination of herbicides and genetically modified seed has made my farm more sustainable, not less, and actually reduces the pollution I send down the river.
  . . .
  Most of the critics of industrial farming maintain the contradictory positions that we should increase the use of manure as a fertilizer, and decrease our consumption of meat. Pollan would solve the problem with cover crops, planted after the corn crop is harvested, and with mandatory composting. Pollan should talk to some actual farmers before he presumes to advise a president."

. . . . . . . . .

Assorted Links 8/4/09

Barney Frank, on the Road to Socialized Medicine
Also see: Uh oh...

• Advanced Legislative Strategies, August 5-7, 2009
• Capitol Hill Workshop, September 23-25, 2009
• Cash-Strapped Zoo: "Give Us Money or the Gorilla Gets It" - "Massachusetts lawmakers provided $6.5 million in their latest budget to help fund the Franklin Park Zoo. That figure represents about half the zoo's annual budget."
• Affirmative Actionocracy - "Countless pundits have debated whether the Henry Louis Gates Jr. brouhaha is about race or class. In truth, Barack Obama’s maladroit but heartfelt interjection of his own prejudices into the controversy stemmed from a quite precise intersection of race with class."
• The Mask Comes Off - "Congresswoman Maxine Waters on what she'd like to do with the oil industry "
• Desperate Times: Arizona Leases State House - "Arizona faces its own catastrophe. Its budget shortfall, while at $3.4 billion not as large as California’s, represents 30 percent of its $10.7 billion budget. After months of wrangling over how to meet the shortfall -- program cuts versus tax cuts -- a possible solution was reached this week, four weeks into the state’s new fiscal year: the lease of 32 government-owned properties including the State House, a prison, and a state hospital."
• Here They Come - "About 1 in 10 Californians with a home loan is now in default, and there’s growing evidence that the mortgage meltdown is spreading to commercial real estate.
  . . .
  The staggering number of home mortgage defaults probably will lead to large numbers of foreclosures through at least this year, housing experts say."
• Tiered House Prices for Several Cities - "My feeling has been that house prices are probably close to the bottom in the lower priced bubble areas with heavy foreclosure activity (Lawler's 'de-stickification'). Inventories are very low in many of these areas, and activity has been fairly high as first time buyers and investors buy distressed properties.
  
  However it appears there are more foreclosures coming, and the level of inventory will be the key to future price declines.
  
  My view is that mid-to-high priced bubble areas - with far fewer distressed sales than the low-to-mid priced areas, and much higher inventory-to-sales levels, and few move-up buyers - will see continued real price declines, although the pace of price declines will probably slow."
• 'Too Big to Fail' Cause of Current Community Bank Failures - "we have seen a tremendous increase in bank closures over the past 7 months. In fact, the closure rate is alarmingly high and accelerating every month. To date we have had 69 banks fail in 2009 which is 276% more banks than last year and at the current rate it will double by the end of the year. Keeping in mind that in July alone we have had 24 banks closed by the FDIC which is almost 100% of all of last years closures.... This should trouble you as it has an impact to the availability of credit in smaller communities."
• Copyright Cops Go After Town For Creating Little Mermaid Statue - "It's hard to believe that this one artist, whose been dead for fifty years, should have total control over statues of mermaids, but that's what today's copyright law gives us. Isn't it great?"
• Digital Wretches - "The decline of urban print newspapers is sparking local replacements online."
• It Won’t Be So Bad: A Q&A With the Author of $20 Per Gallon - "That said, civil engineer and Forbes reporter Chris Steiner argues that prices will rise precipitously over the next few decades."
• How they laugh in Hell - "Anyone who doesn’t think that government bureaucracy eventually destroys all it touches should read this solicitation by the U.S. Department of the Treasury for consultants to provide 'two, 3-hour Humor in the Workplace programs.' You’ve never seen, I promise you, a more humorless treatment of humor."
• F.A. Hayek and the Fatal Conceit of Barack Obama - "Members of Congress lecture car manufacturers and mortgage lenders on how to do their jobs. Politicians keep taking on more and more responsibility for the U.S. economy, as each industry appears to be getting its own 'czar.' Unfortunately, more czars will not produce better cars, or health care, or mortgages, or much of anything else.
  
  The belief that one person or group, no matter how smart, can know how best to allocate resources is a classic example of what the Nobel Laureate economist F. A. Hayek called 'the fatal conceit.'
  
  In Hayek's view, what enables businesspeople to make good decisions about the allocation of resources is not that they are smarter than other people. Instead, two other factors are key.
  . . .
  Imposing a vision of how an industry 'should' work and how it should produce and deliver its products from the top down is the height of political hubris."
• More Exhaustees Coming - "The details on exhaustees -- the people have used up their total Unemployment benefits-- are pretty daunting. I mentioned this to Doug Kass last week, who referred to our prior post in one of his recent missives.
  
  Now, the Sunday NYT looks at the same issue prospectively, to guesstimate how many more exhaustees there will be in the next few months.
  
  Short answer: 1.5 million."
• A Little Inflation Now Might Help --- Really? - "Hume told us that in designing governmental institutions we must presume all men to be knaves. Smith told us that political power was nowhere as dangerous as in the hands of a man who thought he had the presumption that he possessed the knowledge and the power to impose 'correct' policy for the good of society. Ideal policy design, in other words, must be 'robust' policy design that takes into account the fact that government can be, and will be used by some to benefit themselves at the expense of others. This is true of Congress and public spending, and it is true of the Fed and monetary policy.
  . . .
  An omniscient eunuch is not in charge of monetary policy."
• Iran’s Stalinesque Show Trials - "Stalinism was dropped even by the Soviet Union when the murderous Joseph Stalin died, but it has never disappeared completely. North Korea, for instance, mimics the bizarre personality cult promoted by the Soviet dictator. Now Iran appears to be adopting the Stalinesque tactic of staging show trials, with 'confessions' from the obviously brutalized accused."

They all fall down: Mattress dominoes world record attempt

• Would You Pay $5 For A Truly Great Slice Of Pizza? - "Di Fara's, the pizza place 12 blocks from my ancestral home in Brooklyn, N.Y. and one of the absolute best places for pizza by the slice in New York City (hence anywhere in the universe), is now charging $5/slice...and getting it! I completely understand why."
• Charles Atlas: Muscle Man - "How the original 97-pound weakling transformed himself into Charles Atlas and brought the physical fitness movement to the masses."
• I went wheat-free and I . . . - "I believe we can conclude from this casual exercise that, as a simple strategy, wheat elimination is surprisingly effective. "
• I was Corner Man in a Poison Frog Ceremony, from Bo Keely - "The talent of Dow-kietl, the shiny green frog that exudes Sapo or frog sweat to paralyze the biting jaws of predator snakes, was hidden from the western world until Peter Gorman introduced the 'death experience' to the N.Y. American Museum of Natural History in 1986, and then to Amazon outward bounders. Last night I witnessed three people cringe under cigarette burns on their biceps, the yellow viscous Sapo dabbed on exposed mesoderms, and I sat back to watch them 'die'."
• What Can You Eat When You are Cutting Carbs? - "If you are trying to cu