Moving and being in a wedding take up lots of time. Next update will have real content. Promise!
Things in the news: World Cup! Kagan, McChrystal, BP Oil Spill (slowly fading), Economic falterings, July 4th, and did I mention the World Cup? (Oh, I suppose Wimbledon as well. And the Tour de France. And the Lebron James Sweepstakes.)
Happy(?) Memorial Day, everybody. Lots of long articles worth reading this time, but you’ve got the rest of the night off, right? Big news is the BP Oil Spill and the failure of Top Kill. Will the leak ever end?
I really did try to get this out last week, Livia, really I did. But I didn’t, and now this post has become bloated in size just like all of the others. *sigh*
I didn’t know how to categorize this first link, so I’ll just let it stand alone above the cut.
There’s an inscription: “I’m sitting on the back of a man. He is sinking under the burden. I would do anything to help him. Except stepping down from his back.”
If you haven’t read the State of the Union and the Obama-GOP Q&A, go ahead and read them now. Otherwise, here’s the news of the past two weeks. As usual, highlights are in red.
Politics
Political corruption or political gratitude? Or just politics? (Rauch)
Consider Rep. Patricia Porker, a member of the Ways and Means Committee. She is running for re-election.
Consider, next, Marvin Moneybags. He is a wealthy individual with interests before Ways and Means.
Now consider two scenarios.
1) Porker calls up Moneybags and says, “Say, Marvin. I need about $300,000 to run campaign ads, but I’m not allowed to take donations that big. I know you’d hate to see anything happen to those tax credits I’ve helped you with. Just a thought: Go spend $300,000 on ads supporting my candidacy. You won’t regret it.”
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2) Moneybags is a friend and an enthusiastic supporter of Porker’s. Acting on his own, without consulting Porker, he spends $300,000 on “Vote for Porker!” ads.
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Why is Scenario 1 illegal and Scenario 2 legal?
So it’s been about a month since the last midweek plug, but I’m really excited about this one.
One of my good friends Livia (and her husband and her mom) is pledging to donate $10$20 for every person who donates to an organization working in Haiti and leaves a comment on her blog.
1. Please make a donation to Haiti relief efforts. You can donate to the American Red Cross by texting “HAITI” to 90999 (A $10 donation will be taken off your phone bill). Or, make a donation via their web page* or another charity of choice.
2. Leave a comment in this post noting that you made a donation. My husband and I will donate $10 to the American Red Cross for every donation listed in the comment section between now and the end of Thursday, up to a limit of $500 dollars.
We’re just going to go by the honor system here. Please do consider making a donation. Thank you!
Livia – neuroscientist/writer by day; philanthropist by night; all-around-awesome all-the-freaking-time.
A general guideline: Mark your donations for the general fund, not the Haiti fund. High profile disasters tend to pull in more money than they need (there are still a few billion dollars unspent from the tsunami), so general fund donations give the organizations the flexibility to put your money to the best use.
Advice on giving (from various development blogs): 1, 2, 3, 4
Way too much happens over the course of two weeks. It took me 2 hrs just to take all the links and clippings and format them >.< . But for now, here’s the news. Again, highlights are in red.
Haiti
Estimated death toll: 50,000 + rising. To put this into perspective, the 2004 tragic tsunami killed ~250,000 people in Indonesia (pop 240M), or about 1 in 1,000. Haiti has a population of 10M, meaning the earthquake killed about 1 in 200 (and possibly up to 1 in 50 (!))
Mr. Roth and others in the industry had discovered that liquefying the fat and extracting the protein from the trimmings in a centrifuge resulted in a lean product that was desirable to hamburger-makers.
The greater challenge was eliminating E. coli and salmonella, which are more prevalent in fatty trimmings than in higher grades of beef. …
Mr. Roth eventually settled on ammonia, which had been shown to suppress spoilage. Meat is sent through pipes where it is exposed to ammonia gas, and then flash frozen and compressed — all steps that help kill pathogens, company research found.
Untreated beef naturally contains ammonia and is typically about 6 on the pH scale, near that of rain water and milk. The Beef Products’ study that won U.S.D.A. approval used an ammonia treatment that raised the pH of the meat to as high as 10, an alkalinity well beyond the range of most foods. The company’s 2003 study cited the “potential issues surrounding the palatability of a pH-9.5 product.”
… Beef Products acknowledged in an e-mail exchange that it was making a lower pH version, but did not specify the level or when it began selling it.
Nearly 10% of a typical product’s price is for packaging.
The global packaging market is worth $429 billion.
Nearly 1/3 of Americans’ waste is packaging. Just 43% is recycled after use.
In 2007, Americans threw away 78.5 million tons of packaging—520 pounds per person. That’s a 71% increase from 1960.
A 2008 bill written by Rep. Anthony Weiner (D-N.Y.) would have required the EPA to find ways to reduce packaging waste by 30% in a decade. It died with no cosponsors.
Cell phone usage patterns across various cultures (economist)
The best way to grasp Japan’s mobile culture is to take a crowded commuter train. There are plenty of signs advising you not to use your phone. Every few minutes announcements are made to the same effect. If you do take a call, you risk more than disapproving gazes. Passengers may appeal to a guard who will quietly but firmly explain: “dame desu”—it’s not allowed. Some studies suggest that talking on a mobile phone on a train is seen as worse than in a theatre. Instead, hushed passengers type away on their handsets or read mobile-phone novels (written Japanese allows more information to be displayed on a small screen than languages that use the Roman alphabet).
What she discovered was another shocker: those who’d been spanked just when they were young—ages 2 to 6—were doing a little better as teenagers than those who’d never been spanked. On almost every measure.
There is no saving grace in being confined to an iron suit, cold and unforgiving. The pleasures of mental agility are much overstated, inevitably—as it now appears to me—by those not exclusively dependent upon them. Much the same can be said of well-meaning encouragements to find nonphysical compensations for physical inadequacy. That way lies futility. Loss is loss, and nothing is gained by calling it by a nicer name. My nights are intriguing; but I could do without them.
It’s been 64 years since the Crimson appeared in the NCAA tournament. But thanks to senior guard Jeremy Lin, that streak could end this year. Lin, who tops Harvard in points (18.1 per game), rebounds (5.3), assists (4.5) and steals (2.7), has led the team to a 9-3 record, its best start in a quarter century.
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Less than 0.5% of men’s Division 1 basketball players are Asian-American.
There’s even an official name for the Stokeses, along with three other households in Northern Virginia: They are Climate Pilots, guinea pigs in a Swedish experiment aimed at helping U.S. citizens understand that a lifestyle that curbs greenhouse-gas emissions is not necessarily oppressive, just different. Whether Americans are willing to follow their example is part of the political calculation lawmakers have to make as they consider imposing nationwide limits on emissions in legislation making its way through Congress.
The question was simple: Should the lending practices of auto dealers be regulated?
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The clerk called the roll, starting from the top. Senior Democrats roundly rejected Campbell’s amendment. It appeared as if the Democrats would beat back the effort and apply the same standard to car dealers that was applied to everyone else.
Then came the bottom two rows, the place where reform goes to die. Despite the disapproval of the powerful chairman and nearly every consumer group in the country, the Campbell amendment passed by a 47-21 margin.
Now nearly 12 percent of Americans receive aid — 28 percent of blacks, 15 percent of Latinos and 8 percent of whites. Benefits average about $130 a month for each person in the household, but vary with shelter and child care costs.
But in the case of anticancer drugs, a phenomenon known as omission bias appears to be at work. People tend to worry more about a low risk of harm from something they do (like taking a pill or a vaccine) than about a higher risk of harm from doing nothing.
In a seminal 1994 study of vaccination trends for whooping cough, researchers from the University of Pennsylvania found that parents gave far more credence to hypothetical concerns about side effects than about the very real danger of an unvaccinated child’s becoming severely ill with the disease.
A primer on the problems with healthcare and one solution proposal (Atlantic)
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.
There are a lot of spoof sites about placebos out there. This isn’t one of them! We actually sell placebos. Just click on the Buy Placebos button.
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We make absolutely no therapeutic claims for our placebos – they are made of sugar; they are not drugs – but we offer them, with love and with a sense of fun, as triggers and inspiration for the placebo effect.
Fun
Darth Vader Opens Wall Street…Surreal, but does anyone know why they open the market to such fanfare _every_single_day_ anyways?
Colbert on his White House Press Corp Dinner and Glenn Beck
Added Colbert: “We felt like we were throwing joke Molotov cocktails, and then the room burst into flames.”
