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
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.”
…
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.
…
Why is Scenario 1 illegal and Scenario 2 legal?
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
Happy New Year, everybody! I’ve highlighted my top 3 4 reads.
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.
Environment
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.
Science
Society
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.
Jeremy Lin: The ABC basketballer (time)
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.
…
Less than 0.5% of men’s Division 1 basketball players are Asian-American.
Development
Economy
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?
…
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.
Healthcare
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 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.
Wow, what a deal! $15 for 700 Placebos!
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.
…
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
Added Colbert: “We felt like we were throwing joke Molotov cocktails, and then the room burst into flames.”
Scott Inoue and Barrack Obama, 1969
Photos
The policy was flying fast and furious this week, what with Copenhagen and Health Care on the docket
World
Policy
Kaiser Health on health care reform(Cohn)
Pictures are worth 1000 words (more – Cohn)
Another 1000 words (Yglesias)
5 Cost Controls in the health care bill (Klein)
And finally…a big summary chart
What he identifies here is nothing less than a Green Lantern theory of the presidency in which all domestic policy compromises are attributed to a lack of presidential will. … Rather than learning from, say, the stimulus vote that Obama faces severe constraints in the Senate, liberal GL proponents have created a narrative in which all failure and compromise is the result of a lack of presidential willpower.
Filibuster over the years
…a poll released last week by the Program on International Policy Attitudes at the University of Maryland which stated that 75% of Americans believes that the US spends “too much” on foreign aid, and 64% want foreign aid spending cut. Apparently a cavalier 11% of Americans think it’s fine to spend “too much” on foreign aid. Respondents were also asked, though, how big a share of the federal budget goes to foreign aid. The median answer was 15%; the average answer was 18%; the correct answer is less than 1%. A question about how much would be “too little” produced a median answer of 3%–more than three times the current level of foreign aid spending.
Yglesias (cynically) adds
What if Barack Obama and John Kerry stood shoulder-to-shoulder and announced that “in light of massive deficits and a poor job market here at home, we’re proposing to slash foreign aid to slightly less than three percent of the federal budget.” Available evidence suggests that the majority of the public thinks this would be a large cut and even thinks it might go too far in terms of cutting back on what we spend helping others. In reality, it would be a giant increase.
Tax rates over time
I think we should simply give up trying to redistribute income on the tax side and accept that it can only be done meaningfully on the spending side. This would require both the right and left to give up some of their pet ideas. The left would accept that the only purpose of the tax system is to raise revenue and the right would accept that a fairly extensive social welfare state is here to stay. In essence, conservatives would raise the revenue and liberals would spend it.
When you are around her you are constantly struck by her charisma, her vitality, her confidence. Everywhere she goes people tell her that she is prettier in person. It never ceases to amaze her staff. “People think it’s a compliment,” says one aide. “And then when they walk away, she’s like, ‘Well, what did they think before they met me?’ “
Think
The “All Else Equal” Fallacy: Assuming that everything else is held constant, even when it’s not gonna be.
More to the point, the very existence of drunk driving as an option can put you in the situation where you and you car are 10 miles from home, you’re drunk, and the most convenient option is to get in the car and try to make it back.
Business
…the conglomerate structure forced managers to think of their firms as a collection of financial assets, where the goal was to allocate capital efficiently, rather than as makers of specific products, where the goal was to maximize quality and long-term* market share.
Yglesias adds
What’s declined is not manufacturing, but manufacturing jobs: … our manufacturing has gotten much, much, much more efficient.
That doesn’t make communities devastated by the loss of manufacturing jobs any less devastated, or change the fact that recent decades have seen wages for working class men stagnate or even decline.
Photos
Fun
What would be the citizenship of a baby born to astronauts on the way to or from Mars (or on the Moon)? Let’s make it extra-complicated and presume the parents are of different nationalities.
Suppose you’re sitting at your desk and viewing a real-time beach scene on a Webcam set up 2,000 miles away. And you’re watching somebody get assaulted. Do you call your own 911 number to report it, or what’s the next best thing to do?
Are there really special agents like ’s Jack Bauer working for the U.S. government? Just total badass muthas who can basically do anything? Or are Navy Seals and Army Rangers the toughest we’ve got?
What could humanity possibly be like, or possibly have evolved into, if we as an entire species never discovered and/or harnessed the power of fire?
Egads, so much good material this week. All of the videos are worth watching (not all could be embedded, sorry!) and the photo galleries are beautiful and fascinating. Obama’s Nobel Speech is worth a read. Definitely try to make some time to watch the Frontline expose on the credit card industry and the Global income vs Health vs Time videos. Or at least have them playing in the corner of your screen while you do your other web browsing =b.
(Update: Oh, and if you’re up late tonight (sunday) and lucky enough for it to be clear out, catch the geminid meteor showers!)
Data Visualization
Environment
Refining tar sands requires two to three times as much energy as refining crude oil. The companies exploiting them burn enough natural gas to heat six million homes. Alberta’s tar sands operation is the world’s biggest single industrial source of carbon emissions. By 2020, if the current growth continues, it will produce more greenhouse gases than Ireland or Denmark. Already, thanks in part to the tar mining, Canadians have almost the highest per capita emissions on earth, and the stripping of Alberta has scarcely begun.
Business / Finance
“The industry is just a giant wealth transfer mechanism from poor people to wealthly people. The profits from below (subprime) serve to subsidize the interest rate and rewards cost of people in the ’super prime’ category.”
My back of the envelope calculation says that we need to add around 18 million jobs over the next five years, or 300,000 jobs a month. This puts last week’s employment report, which showed job losses of “only” 11,000 in November, in perspective. ~Krugman
If we exclude these immigrants from the calculus, however (as domestic policymakers are naturally inclined to do), the small net gain that remains after subtracting US workers’ losses from US employers’ gains is tiny. And if we account for the small fiscal burden that unauthorized immigrants impose, the overall economic benefit is close enough to zero to be essentially a wash.
Where does this leave policymakers?
US Budget
Healthcare
Politics
the minority party has a continual stake in Congress not really working … it’s bad for Congress and bad for democracy. It means power devolves from the legislature and towards unelected, unaccountable organizations like the Federal Reserve, the EPA … or the courts.
In 1992 the end strengths of our military forces were:
Army 610,450
Navy 541,883
Marines 184,529
Air Force 470,315In 2000 the end strengths of our military forces were:
Army 481,669
Navy 373,692
Marines 173,371
Air Force 354,321
Christianity
Our Christian faith recognizes violence, harassment and unjust treatment of any human being as a betrayal of Jesus’ commandment to love our neighbors as ourselves. As followers of the teachings of Christ, we must express profound dismay at a bill currently before the Parliament in Uganda. The “Anti-Homosexuality Act of 2009″ would enforce lifetime prison sentences and in some cases the death penalty for homosexual behavior, as well as punish citizens for not reporting their gay and lesbian neighbors to the authorities.
Photos
Funny
I’m going to try really hard to not constantly linkspam. However, I come across way too many things worth reading/watching, so you’ll probably be subjected to these linkdumps on a somewhat regular basis. I’m also always looking for new perspectives or new topics, so if you come across anything interesting, please send it my way. Hope you enjoy =)
Climate Change
Politics
Science
Fun with Data Visualization
Business
Society
Christianity
Back when I was in college, I stumbled across the webpage of Ze Frank, man of 100 dance moves and the best dating tips ever.
It was to my surprise (and delight) when I found his new video series on time.com That Makes Me Think Of…: News served up stream-of-consciousness style with a dash of humor, a pinch of weird facial expressions, and a refreshing glass of appreciation for complexity.
Additional Videos at time.com
