The BP Disaster is mindboggling. Also in the news: Britain’s elections, the Iran nuclear non-deal and sanctions, Greece, Elena Kagan, Thailand, FinReg, Carbon cap ‘n trade, Rand Paul, Arizona’s Illegal Immigration Law.
The Top 5:
- The 2020 projected US budget (pdf by CBO, summary by Klein)
- A Math Curriculum Makeover (TED. 12min)
- The BP Disaster (photos – May 12, 2010)
- 10 things about Elena Kagan (SCOTUSblog)
- Not as easy as claimed: US Budget and Deficit Simulator. Douthat gives it a spin:
World
- What do you learn at terrorist training camp (ForeignPolicy)
- India’s Tampon Sanitary Napkin King (GlobalPost)
In 2006, Muruganantham, a high school dropout, perfected a machine for making low-cost sanitary napkins against all odds. Along the way he’d taught himself English, recruited local college professors to help him draft letters and surf the web for suppliers, worn panties (not to mention a sanitary pad and a football bladder full of blood), and spent many times the cost of his TVS Motors moped on laboratory analyses. He even invented an alter ego to get past the gatekeepers at the U.S. firms that supplied the pine wood-based cellulose — not cotton — that he discovered was the raw material he needed.
US Policy
- Staying healthy is more expensive than not? The answer lies in lifespan and nursing homes…
Our main finding is that although the current health care costs of healthy retirees are lower than those of the unhealthy, the healthy actually face higher total health care costs over their remaining lifetime. To illustrate, the expected present value of lifetime health care costs for a couple turning 65 in 2009 in which one or both spouses suffer from a chronic disease is $220,000, including insurance premiums and the cost of nursing home care, and 5 percent can expect to spend more than $465,000. The comparable numbers for couples free of chronic disease are substantially higher, at $260,000 and $570,000, respectively.
- The 2020 projected US budget (pdf by CBO, summary by Klein)
- Not as easy as claimed: US Budget and Deficit Simulator. Douthat gives it a spin:
I’ve successfully reduced our deficit to a relatively stable 60 percent of G.D.P. by the year 2018. All it took was means-testing Social Security and raising the retirement age to 68, keeping health care reform in place but slashing its insurance subsidies by 20 percent, increasing cost-sharing and premiums for Medicare and raising the retirement age to 67, passing tort reform, returning food stamp spending to 2008 levels, slashing subsidies for agriculture and biofuels, cutting the federal workforce by 5 percent across the board, cutting earmarks by 50 percent, converting the home-mortgage deduction to a smaller credit, replacing the tax deduction for employer-provided health care with a flat credit, increasing the gas tax by 10 cents a gallon, cutting foreign aid and military spending by $200 billion, drawing down troop levels in Iraq and Afghanistan to 60,000 in 2016, taxing life insurance benefits, letting the Bush tax cuts expire for high earners and partially phasing them out for the middle class, eliminating the state and local tax deduction, and cutting out a lot of smaller things as well.
- Barack Obama, the Healthcare Reform Campaign Manager (HuffPo)
- Who is Elena Kagan? (long, SCOTUSblog)
- 10 things about Elena Kagan (SCOTUSblog)
- The Climate Bill Proposals, side-by-side-by-side (Wonkroom)
- The BP Disaster (photos – May 12, 2010)
- America COMPETES: Science and Technology Funding fails to clear the House *facepalm* (The Hill, 5/19/10)
- Republican Games: Quick, what does science and technology funding have to do with porn? (Chait, The Hill, 5/13/10)
Democrats had labeled their COMPETES Act — a bill to increase investments in science, research and training programs — as their latest jobs bill. It was the only non-suspension bill Democrats brought up all week.
But the Republican motion to recommit the bill — a parliamentary tactic that gives the minority one final chance to amend legislation — contained language prohibiting federal funds from going “to salaries to those officially disciplined for violations regarding the viewing, downloading, or exchanging of pornography, including child pornography, on a federal computer or while performing official government duties.”
That provision scared dozens of Democrats into voting with Republicans to approve the motion to recommit.
- Financial Regulation: A mixed bag (Scheiber)
Science and Technology
- Tornados and Supercells (photos)
- Facebook “Privacy” (NYT, infographic)
- Cloud formations from space (Photos, Wired)
- Antivenom shortages imminent (popmech)
Wyeth kept up production of coral snake antivenom for almost 40 years. But given the rarity of coral snake bites, it was hardly a profit center, and the company shut down the factory that made the antivenom in 2003.
- Mechanical Butterfly
- A Math Curriculum Makeover (TED. 12min)
- The great beaver dam of Canada
Religion
- The New Atheists: a critique (Linker)
- Drum
Responds - Hart Responds
- Drum responds
Society
- Will Google save the news? (Fallows)
Now, having helped break the news business, the company wants to fix it—for commercial as well as civic reasons: if news organizations stop producing great journalism, says one Google executive, the search engine will no longer have interesting content to link to.
- I hate memes. (theonion editor)
Once an “enjoyable thing” becomes a “meme,” we stop enjoying the thing for its own sake, but consume and regurgitate our enjoyment of it as a symbol of hipness, as if to say: “I am aware of this thing’s popularity — therefore I, too, exist!”
…
(And if you’ve never had the unfortunate occasion to hear someone, forgetting that life is not a message board, yell “FAIL!” aloud, you are missing out on an exquisite kind of existential rage.) - Engrish around the world (176 in all, NYT)
- The cultural tyranny of New York
- Yes, Virginia, we are that vain: Wrinkles are scarier than skin cancer
“They’re not worried about skin cancer, but they are worried about getting wrinkled and being unattractive,” said June Robinson, a professor of dermatology at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine and senior author of a May 17 paper in Archives of Dermatology reporting the findings.
- Left behind: victims of the new economic reality (NYT)
For the last two years, the weak economy has provided an opportunity for employers to do what they would have done anyway: dismiss millions of people — like file clerks, ticket agents and autoworkers — who were displaced by technological advances and international trade.
- (not) Clarifying relationships with mathematic models
- New York’s evolution (4-shot image)
- A peek inside the Iron Man 2 suits
- Do men and women name colors differently? (xkcd)
- I, rearrangement servant (aka, internet anagram server)
- Why do Harvard kids go to Wall Street? (Klein, BaselineScenario)
Their (our) decisions are motivated by two main decision rules: (1) close down as few options as possible; and (2) only do things that increase the possibility of future overachievement. Money is far down the list; at this point in their lives, if you asked them, many of these people would probably say that they only need to be middle or upper-middle class, and assume that they will be.
Tags: christianity, economy, fun, healthcare, international, politics, science, scotus, society, STS, world