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Mr Obama decided to "inform" BP that it must put adequate funds to meet all compensation claims into an escrow account beyond its control, although he has no authority to do so. Nancy Pelosi, the speaker of the House of Representatives, instructed it not to pay a dividend until all claims tied to the spill are settled. Her fellow Democrats in Congress are trying to raise BP's liability retroactively--the sort of move America's courts rightly frown on. Mr Salazar, on even thinner legal ice, suggested that the government would hold BP accountable not just for the harm directly done by the spill, but also for the jobs lost in the oil business thanks to the freeze on oil drilling in deep water that he himself has imposed.

The magazine frowns upon all these things and it makes some sense. If, as The Economist suggests, BP's value has already dropped by $89 billion and that's "far in excess of all but the most dire forecasts of the ultimate costs of the spill," what is to be gained by all this backlash against the oil industry but a bunch of political posturing?

News flash: The United States is still inexorably reliant on its oil industry. If the Obama administration wants to do something about future oil disasters, maybe it should think more seriously about that and what can be done about it. Also, had government done a better job of regulating the oil industry in the first place, BP's shoddy practices might not have gone unchecked and this disaster might never have happened.

Polish children have the worst teeth in any OECD country; a 12 year old has nearly four teeth that are missing, decayed or have a filling. American adults are renowned for having perfect sets of pearly whites, but each child has one decayed or missing tooth. Britain's children (along with Germany's) have the healthiest teeth, if not the straighest or whitest in later life.

Simply put, health and viability are not necissarily correlated with cosmetic appeal.

Note: The proportion of GDP devoted to health care has grown from 5% in 1962 to 16% today. Rising health-care costs appear to have suppressed wages, as firms seek to make up for the expense. America spends 53% more per head than the next most profligate country and almost two-and-a-half times the rich-country average..

There is a systemic problem in the US that is well document: that of wrong incentives in the system (over-testing by doctors because of bad payment models, lack of litigation protection, etc). Not easy to fix.

The Economist's review doesn't necessarily answer your question, but I would say it's more informative overall.

I was convinced I couldn't concentrate thanks to Toxoplasmosis... But I guess if I managed to get through an entire Economist article, I can't be doing *too* bad. Maybe it's just hypochondria?

I got curious as to how Foxconn's suicide rate compared to other groups. The United States' suicide rate is 11.1 per 100,000 people. Foxconn employs somewhere around 800,000 people(!) which means by the end of the year, you'd expect a death count by suicide of around 90 people.

If the current rates holds, there'll be 50 more Foxconn employees alive at year's end than there will be Americans from a comparably sized city.

Dammit, and here I was all excited that I could get a 20% raise if I could convince 13 coworkers to kill themselves.

From the economist*:

The toll (a dozen this year) is lower than the suicide rate among the general population in China. But the deaths have raised questions about working conditions in electronics manufacturing in general and in particular at Foxconn, which keeps its customers secret, rarely opens its plants to outsiders and routinely ignores press inquiries.

What is the suicide rate at other companies? I'm truly curious. I would like to understand why everyone is up in arms about this. And what about Dell and HP and any number of other companies that also use Foxconn?

source

I got curious as to how Foxconn's suicide rate compared to other groups. The United States' suicide rate is 11.1 per 100,000 people. Foxconn employs somewhere around 800,000 people(!) which means by the end of the year, you'd expect a death count by suicide of around 90 people.

If the current rates holds, there'll be 50 more Foxconn employees alive at year's end than there will be Americans from a comparably sized city.

Indeed! Identifying what proxies (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proxy_%28statistics%29) to use is one of the trickier aspects in the soft sciences and statistics. If you read the Economist, you'd see proxies for just about everything (e.g. http://www.economist.com/markets/bigmac/), and a lot of research is required just to show what a given proxy measures.

I think it's a great idea to take a year off after high school and work as a welder if you feel like it.

But I also think college is a great mind-expanding experience, and that everyone should have the opportunity to go to a 4-year college if (and when) they feel like it too. How good a welder can you be if you don't understand basic physics and chemistry? What happens when the welding jobs disappear (as they did in Germany)? What happens when she gets tired of welding?

And everybody should go to a 4-year college without going into debt. Talk about the road to serfdom. $20,000 in debt that you can never discharge in bankruptcy, and that will accumulate exhorbitant interest for years, sounds like serfdom to me.

Up to the 1970s, America used to be a land of opportunity. Free access to college education was a big part of that. Now America is turning into a two-class society. http://www.economist.com/world/united-states/displaystory.cfm?story_id=15908469 People in the middle will move up or down, and most of them will move down.

Traditionally, a college degree has been the way out of poverty, and the great equalizer. If these economists have data that it doesn't work that way any more, I'll look at it carefully. That's what I learned how to do in my 4-year college. But I wouldn't accept a major reversal of a long-established social goal based on a couple of associational studies.

We just spent $3 trillion on the war in Iraq (according to Nobel-prize winning economist Joe Stiglitz). That's about $10,000 for every American. So we can certainly afford to spend $20,000 or so for a college education for anybody who is capable of it. And the rich are doing extremely well. We can tax the rich to pay for the poor. There's more of us than there are of them. All we have to do is vote.

If you're middle-class in America today, you're taking a crap shoot, according to The Economist. You might move up. And you might move down. In the European social democracies, you don't have that risk of moving down.

In the 1960s, John F. Kennedy committed us to the goals of sending a man to the moon and eliminating poverty. We sent a man to the moon but we didn't eliminate poverty. There's no excuse for that. The Scandinavian countries have basically eliminated poverty. We have whole cities where people can't get out of poverty. If you don't want to just transfer a lot of money from the rich to the poor, the other way to eliminate poverty is to give everyone a good education, and a free college education is a centerpiece of that.

These economists are trying to talk us into giving up on the goal of eliminating poverty and educating our population the way the wealthy European nations do. I don't buy it.

I remembered reading a few years ago about splitting water just using heat rather than electricity. Doing a quick search, it looks like the research has changed direction a bit and is focused on liberating magnesium from seawater, with hydrogen being a useful byproduct when the magnesium reacts with water later.

http://www.economist.com/science-technology/technology-monitor/displayStory.cfm?story_id=15939644

But objectively, it's very very unlikely that a majority of Hispanic citizens support the law. Hispanics are overwhelmingly democrats, and Democrats mostly support amnesty. And frankly, if we didn't support it because of the Hispanic wing of our party, what other interest group in the Democratic party would make it a priority?

See http://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica/2010/04/polls :

"In the September poll Goddard had a 3 point lead with white voters, but he now trails Brewer by 8. At the same time he's increased his lead with Hispanic voters from 20 points to 46. There are a lot more white voters in the state than Hispanic ones so from a cynical, purely political perspective Brewer's actions last week probably did her some good"

Who would want to buy a self inducing debt system?

I think the Chinese and Indians would go for it.

Don't consider it a debt, but an investment. As long as it's male.

The Economist

A return to the 28-year copyrights of the Statute of Anne would be in many ways arbitrary, but not unreasonable. If there is a case for longer terms, they should be on a renewal basis, so that content is not locked up automatically. The value society places on creativity means that fair use needs to be expanded and inadvertent infringement should be minimally penalised.

Interest? No credit card charges interest if you pay the balance promptly every month.

And if your bill is several thousand bucks more than you budgeted for, because some company overcharged you 20 times?

And how difficult can it be to get a credit card? I had one in college when I had no regular source of income.

Were you asleep all of last year?

http://www.economist.com/surveys/PrinterFriendly.cfm?story_id=15793116

"Parents must now give their consent before their children under 21 can get a card. "At a time when our economy is in a crisis and consumers are struggling financially, credit-card companies are gouging them," said Chris Dodd, chairman of the Senate Banking Committee.

Noxious as some of the card-companies' practices were, they did allow many more people to hold credit cards. Bankers say the new restrictions may cut the number of credit-card holders by up to 45m. That is almost certainly an exaggeration, but there is bound to be a drop."

If I get hit with a fraudulent charge, they just cancel my card and waive the charges, and issue me a new one. In the meantime, I keep using my other cards. If it's Visa, I might have to sign a declaration listing the fraudulent charges. If it's Amex, they just take my word for it.

Fine - until the person at the other end had a shitty day and they tell you to get bent.

Copyright and wrong
Why the rules on copyright need to return to their roots

Apr 8th 2010 | From The Economist print edition

WHEN Parliament decided, in 1709, to create a law that would protect books from piracy, the London-based publishers and booksellers who had been pushing for such protection were overjoyed. When Queen Anne gave her assent on April 10th the following year—300 years ago this week—to “An act for the encouragement of learning” they were less enthused. Parliament had given them rights, but it had set a time limit on them: 21 years for books already in print and 14 years for new ones, with an additional 14 years if the author was still alive when the first term ran out. After that, the material would enter the public domain so that anyone could reproduce it. The lawmakers intended thus to balance the incentive to create with the interest that society has in free access to knowledge and art. The Statute of Anne thus helped nurture and channel the spate of inventiveness that Enlightenment society and its successors have since enjoyed.

Over the past 50 years, however, that balance has shifted. Largely thanks to the entertainment industry’s lawyers and lobbyists, copyright’s scope and duration have vastly increased. In America, copyright holders get 95 years’ protection as a result of an extension granted in 1998, derided by critics as the “Mickey Mouse Protection Act”. They are now calling for even greater protection, and there have been efforts to introduce similar terms in Europe. Such arguments should be resisted: it is time to tip the balance back.

Annie get your gun

Lengthy protection, it is argued, increases the incentive to create. Digital technology seems to strengthen the argument: by making copying easier, it seems to demand greater protection in return. The idea of extending copyright also has a moral appeal. Intellectual property can seem very like real property, especially when it is yours, and not some faceless corporation’s. As a result people feel that once they own it—especially if they have made it—they should go on owning it, much as they would a house that they could pass on to their descendants. On this reading, protection should be perpetual. Ratcheting up the time limit on a regular basis becomes a reasonable way of approximating that perpetuity.

The notion that lengthening copyright increases creativity is questionable, however. Authors and artists do not generally consult the statute books before deciding whether or not to pick up pen or paintbrush. And overlong copyrights often limit, rather than encourage, a work’s dissemination, impact and influence. It can be difficult to locate copyright holders to obtain the rights to reuse old material. As a result, much content ends up in legal limbo (and in the case of old movies and sound recordings, is left to deteriorate—copying them in order to preserve them may constitute an act of infringement). The penalties even for inadvertent infringement are so punishing that creators routinely have to self-censor their work. Nor does the advent of digital technology strengthen the case for extending the period of protection. Copyright protection is needed partly to cover the costs of creating and distributing works in physical form. Digital technology slashes such costs, and thus reduces the argument for protection.

The moral case, although easy to sympathise with, is a way of trying to have one’s cake and eat it. Copyright was originally the grant of a temporary government-supported monopoly on copying a work, not a property right. From 1710 onwards, it has involved a deal in which the creator or publisher gives up any natural and perp

I was actually quite shocked when the Economist site went free. Beats me why - those were high-quality articles I was willing to pay for. As in, pay to access the site.

Huh? They still charge for complete access - they've had partial free access since I first got a print subscription however many years ago, similar to Consumer Report's site and the Wall Street Journal.

well one may wonder about security services involvement - see here

Well it is not only content of mails that went to wrong people but contact names too - so Chinese governement has surely hands in it.

The idea of raising money to invest explicitly in creating patents is not new, Mr Myhrvold notes: that is what Thomas Edison did. But firms such as his will seek to institutionalise the process so it is not dependent only on a single inventor. Intellectual Ventures has 650 employees, not all of them patent attorneys, and as well as buying patents it develops ideas in-house. In 2009 it applied for about 450 patents for its own inventions—more than Boeing, 3M or Toyota—putting it among the world’s top 50 patent-filers.

Read more in the Economist article.

Instead of clicking through to the patent blog, here's the economist article that started the debate.

I read a story about this in a recent issue of The Economist. The article focuses more on the other direction -- how quantum dots can be used to enhance LEDs to create more pleasing/efficient/versatile lighting. But it also mentions how they can be used to read light, too; for example, to make better solar panels.

See, it's comments like that that get you written out of history.

For those seeking more background on the general insanity of this story and "sexting" in general, see Slate.com's Textual Misconduct and the Economist on America's unjust sex laws: An ever harsher approach is doing more harm than good, but it is being copied around the world. The latter is tangentially related to the main issue but nonetheless useful.

Well, as recent events in Texas have demonstrated, a minority conservatives think it's better to change reality to suit their ideology than to change their ideology to suit reality. Which was exactly the same motivation for Conservapedia.

If everything under this when it goes off is a military target, then you can get shock and awe without collateral damage:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ua3nLmE7Kow

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VorUEF4A0so

Ignore the ignorant/bullshit reporting about the CBU 105 being "indiscriminate" - esp since the clips of it in action show nothing of that sort.

The CBU 105 is not one of those huge big bombs that wipe out a whole area. It does wipe out a lot, but it's far more targeted than a dumb cluster bomb.

See this: http://www.economist.com/sciencetechnology/displaystory.cfm?story_id=15391218

"While falling, the CBU-105 bombs popped open, each releasing ten submunitions which were slowed by parachutes. Each of these used mini rockets to spin and eject outward four discs the size of ice-hockey pucks.

The 80 free-falling discs from the pair of bombs then scanned the ground with lasers and heat-detecting infra-red sensors to locate armoured vehicles. Those discs that identified a target exploded dozens of metres up. The blast propelled a tangerine-sized slug of copper down into the target, destroying it with the impact and the accompanying shrapnel. The soldiers in the 70 vehicles farther back in the column surrendered immediately."

So it's not that bad. But the OP I was replying to did mention "strategy" and not just "tactical".

The actual problem is the set-asides imposed by referendums.

Indeed, California is suffering from too much democracy. It is especially easy to get well-meaning things (or at least things that sound well-meaning) on the ballot. People vote for them because they sound nice and the voters don't have to try to balance the state budget. This commits money to all sorts of things and prevents the government from fixing the budget. The Economist recently did an article on this topic that is very enlightening. As bad as politicians may be at budgeting, the voters are far, far more dangerous

The demand for gasoline is pretty price inelastic. Maybe europe could tax it to the point that people would give it up, but if the US did that, the country's economy would completely dry up.

• From iMarketNews.com, "EIA's revised outlook is for global liquid fuels consumption to grow by 1.2 million bbl/d in 2010 and 1.6 million bbl/d in 2011 after showing annual declines in 2008 and 2009".
• From "New York Times", Prices and gasoline demand, "Given time, however, higher prices could lead to a repeat of the 70s-80s experience, when the US auto fleet became a lot more fuel efficient."
• From The Economist, "Small cars, big question
  Can Americans learn to love small cars? The industry's future depends on it
• Cross-Price Elasticity of Demand VIII
  "For Christy LaBadie, a sophomore at Northampton Community College, the 30-minute drive from her home to the Bethlehem, Pa., campus has become a financial hardship now that gasoline prices have soared to more than $4 a gallon. So this semester she decided to take an online course to save herself the trip--and the money...." "Many institutions say their online summer enrollments have jumped significantly, compared with last summer's, and that fuel prices are a key factor in the increase. The Tennessee Board of Regents, for instance, reports that summer enrollment in online courses is up 29 percent this summer over last year."

That was quick, if I spend more tyme I can find more. Unfortunately I keep getting interrupted, even by my brother-in-law who's a Certified Financial Planner and keeps calling me. Still want to say if not believe "The demand for gasoline is pretty price inelastic"? Quite simply when gas prices go high people buy less gas.

Falcon

http://www.economist.com/businessfinance/displaystory.cfm?story_id=15464481

We have computers that can keep track of those variables, and what lacks then is just a business model. And the one that is being invested heavily in (above link) is that of renting the batteries, while owning the car.

Swapping out the batteries is faster (according to the live tests) than filling your tank. You won't get any duds as they will likely be caught during charging at the station, and even if it were to happen you can just exchange it later. (It's rented, after all)

1. USA

2. Europe

3. Japan

Here, "relative" means dividing (1) the annual income of the chief executive officer by (2) the average annual income of the employees who are not part of the management structure.

Table 2 on page 6 of an interesting document analyzing the financial compensation of American CEOs is instructive. For the sake of this discussion, we can reasonably assume that figure in the aformentioned category #2 is approximately the same throughout the West.

Table 2 then, in effect, gives us the relative compensation of the CEOs in the West. The typical American CEO in 2003 received annual compensation that is worth $2.2 million. The typical European CEO received $700,000. The typical Japanese CEO received $460,000.

Was the American CEO worth his pay? American neoconservatives answer, "Yes." They say that such compensation enables American companies to be top-notch competitors in high-technology.

On 2009 November 5, "The Economist" issued a startling report. It asserts, with plenty of evidence, that Japanese companies are the sole manufacturers of numerous components that are critical to the operation of high-technology devices ranging from tiny disk drives to huge nuclear reactors.

So, who is telling the truth? American neoconservatives or the "The Economist"?

The Economist carried an article to that effect recently: "Hormones, not sexism, explain why fewer women than men work in banks"

Also, one should take note of the following considerations about how different variance in willingness to take risks can explain the effect and why we should start to also look at the bottom of the society.

I read about events that happen on the internet in short headlines to get an idea of what is happening.

When my Economist comes to my door on Monday I read the articles for the commentary which is usually quite good compared to the drivel I find on the internet.

If I cant wait I can also log into their pay website and read things on my computer screen.

The problem is newspapers don't offer insightful analysis.

The Economist actually offered a very good piece on network effects and how newspapers have been shaped by them.

http://www.economist.com/businessfinance/displaystory.cfm?story_id=15108618

If you study the history of the newspaper you will see that the propagation of news was slow in the 1800s. To make up for this, newspapers were heavily based on analysis, prediction, and opinion to pull in readers. Of course, over time this process has been reversed slightly but the trend has left its mark.

The internet is simply sorting through the newspapers that offer quality analysis and chucking the rest.

I no longer need someone to find out facts that the internet finds for me! It is simply a machine doing the job that a person used to do.

When you improve efficiency in production you often cut jobs. (think robots doing human work)

When you improve efficiency in news reporting you often cut news sources!

It is a very simple parallel and I cannot stand the constant claims of entitlement by the industry.

You are not special, adapt or be destroyed.

So please, improve the content of your paper or go off into a corner and die quietly. I am certain that the newspapers that deserve to survive this transformation will!

My personal prediction is that the weekly newspaper will maintain its position while daily newspapers will be all but forgotten in the future. Probably a biased view since I get most of my news from a weekly source but I do believe that it is the perfect balance.

Instant simple facts from the internet with insightful commentary that I pay for on a weekly basis. Throw in a weekly/monthly science magazine and you are set!

Well they do know that their government is like that, the placing of flowers outside Google China offices and the popularity of Avatar (because of unintentional references to China) show that.

They aren't stupid, you know.

Why would I pay for content that I can get for free anywhere else?

That's the whole point of the New York Times model - they do provide original content and in-depth reporting. Columnists, sure, but that's not really the value for most readers. What you typically find on "news aggregator" recycle-AP-news-endlessly sites is a basic "what happened" account. The NYT hires many of the best reporters in the business and gives them the time and resources to write longer analysis pieces that seek to provide context, explain what's happening behind the scenes and what it may mean in the longer term. That's the kind of NYT-exclusive reporting which gives them a differentiated value but which is expensive to produce.

That being said, I personally find the NYT's content worth reading but not worth paying for. (I have discretionary budget for one news source that I find really valuable, so that will continue to go to a subscription to The Economist.) So the NYT will lose me as a reader, but I wasn't making them much money anyway so I doubt they'll care much. The bet they're making is that they will get more money in subscriptions than they will lose on ad impressions from people like me. Their bet may be wrong but it's their content to decide what to do with. Time will tell.

If profit isn't present then I think you'll see the quality of the health care system go down.

According to most sources I've seen, those evuhl soshurlist snail munchershave better healthcare than the US - and it costs less to boot.

What do you think motivates many people to get into medicine?

I often wondered why there weren't any doctors in England, France, Canada ... let's cut it short and just say the rest of the developed world.

I wish I could find the article where Grove admits to doing some things to damage Motorola and AMD and other startups that were making chips - and he said it with pride because he was a "tough" competitor.

It's really hard to google it when several thousand puff pieces and public relations propaganda pops up - googling for info really sucks sometimes.

Ah, here it is - sorry, you have to be an Economist subscriber.

The big draw of E-Ink is that it only uses power when doing a page change.

This was my understanding as well. So maybe someone who owns a Kindle or a Nook can answer me something that has bugged me for a while: Why on earth do these things appear to have screensavers? By changing the image when the machine is idle, doesn't a screensaver actually drain the battery where normally there would be no drain at all? Does an e-ink screen really need to be "saved" (i.e. will it burn out/burn in)?

As for the competitors, they are all designed to use very little power. At least one functions in a dual mode, where it can either be an e-ink type monochrome screen or a backlit color screen.

Here's another article, from The Economist.

"technology" at least is still something that is largely created in Western countries and Japan.

Of the 40 new semiconductor fabs now under construction around the world, 35 of them are in Asia. Clue: The technology to build these next-generation fabs is not coming from "Western countries and Japan." Even if it were, the west could not design the next generation, because it will have had no experience operating and optimizing the present generation -- and none of its profits to reinvest.

When I was in graduate school in 1981, at a major US state university, I was one of four graduate students out of 102 in the electrical engineering department that were born in the US. A coworker attended the same university department in 1990, and was the only doctoral candidate who was a US citizen, out of almost 200 students. I begrudge my fellow foreign students nothing at all -- I knew several of them well, and it's a tough life; they had and have my respect -- but it was quite clear even 20 or 30 years ago that the nexus of new technology development was not going to stay in the US. And while this university was somewhat of an extreme case, the trend nationwide is clear. Very clear. Open a random IEEE technical journal -- Journal of Solid State Circuits, for example -- and look at the authorship of the papers. Globalization, which I support, has a corollary, and that is that no one nation or region has a monopoly on research and development.

I think you do not realize how much inovation comes from the military.

Not any more.

Hmm. I'm on Google search page 40 and there's been only one mention of how cell phone radiation may make rats more susceptible to the "ooh, shiny..." phenomenon. I did however manage to find articles on:

• How the cell phone is driving health IT innovation in the developing world
• How mobile phones are the most cherished thing to come out of the Iraq war
• Stanford has a mobile phone orchestra
• 20 Ways to tweet on my mobile
• Someone is making a rather disturbing "When cell phones attack..." type movie.
• They make cell phones for your pet

I'm not dismissing you entirely but if you're going to make specific claims it'd be a good idea to include citations. Doing a more specific search will net a number of hits but the best you can say from them is that a number of groups are looking at the subject and while some preliminary results are in with some very vocal advocates, there are conflicting data and definitely no consensus.

P.S. you must have a pretty sucky search engine as I got 387,000,000 results.

If you'd like a very good answer to that question, go here:

http://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica/2009/12/trust_scientists

Now imagine some guy whose family pissed Stalin off, spending his fifth year at a weather station in the middle of a Siberian winter with nothing but some half-rotted potatoes, a still, and the collected works of Fyodor Dostoevsky for company. What could possibly go wrong?

They see, somebody laying out refuting the points of the AGW crowd, which then responds with basically "U STUPID", that isn't going to gain any more fans.

Here's the problem: the Economist article actually responded to the various claims by checking out sources, while Mr Eschenbach's reply ignores the informative responses to his questions from scientists and he doesn't actually show the statistics were bad (he just claims it's obvious they must be). YET, Mr Eschenbach continue to spout out his claims.

So what now? Should the scientists continue to repeat the same thing over and over again back to Mr Eschenbach until he finally decides to spend a few weeks/months/years of his time actually trying to understand the issue? If they do keep responding, then it suggests there's real debate going on here. There isn't. The debate ended when Mr Eschenbach couldn't respond with actual science.

Before everyone starts putting down the author for being anonymous, please observe that this is The Economist. For those of you not familiar with that particular publication, one of its distinguishing traits is that it does not publish bylines. Ever. Editorials in The Economist are backed by the reputation of the editorial staff of The Economist, not of any individual writer.

FTA

I don't understand that formula. I don't have the math for it. The paper goes on to reject the Trewin formula for reasons which, again, I don't have the math to understand. This is academic-level statistics. Scepticism's limits

WTF The Economist's editorial staff doesn't understand math? I can easily understand that they may not understand why a formula may be rejected in a particular context but to not understand the formula itself! I think their reputation just FUBARed.

The text you quote says

"Show the Briffa et al reconstruction through to its end; don't stop in 1960. Then comment and deal with the "divergence problem" if you need to. Don't cover up the divergence by truncating this graphic. This was done in IPCC TAR; this was misleading (comment ID #: 309-18)"

Whoever wrote that described truncating the graphic as 'misleading', not fradulent or sinister. The author also implicitly agreed with the premise of questioning the data, at least, by suggesting that the data in question be commented on for clarification.

The divergence problem itself is explained here - in short, tree-ring data used is used as a proxy for temperature but data for North America 'diverges' from other readings around the middle of the 20th century. And though I have no idea how reliable that blog is, it seems like it is the same issue referred to in this article in The Economist, where that (sober and well informed) newspaper states

Hence the eagerness with which bloggers fell on one of the stolen e-mails, sent in 1999 by Phil Jones, the CRU's director: "I've just completed Mike's Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (ie from 1981 onwards) and from 1961 for Keith's to hide the decline." Trickery associated with Dr Mann was catnip to the sceptics. But Dr Jones has clarified that "The word trick was used here colloquially as in a clever thing to do. It is ludicrous to suggest that it refers to anything untoward." The "hiding" concerned the decision to leave out a set of tree-ring-growth data that had stopped reflecting local temperature changes. That alteration in growth pattern is strange, and unexplained, but eliminating it is not sinister.

Got anything else?

When we import any thing, some number of dollars leave this nation. If a corresponding number of exports be it in commodities such as grain or coal, or brain share such as banking services or designs (or legal fees), is not made, we end up owing the nation from which we imported the good from.

That is only half the story. Even the Chinese want their iPhones, which don't have to be exported or imported and Apple still gets paid. Some of that money comes back to the US. Technically while the US isn't exporting the iPhones it does have money coming back in.

That reminds me of the British and the Opium Wars. With the British importing so much tea from India, they wanted to balance their trade deficit. So what did they do? They bought opium in South Asia and exported it to China, and thus were able to pocket the profits. However opium was illegal in China so the Chinese government tried to stop it. When they did the British military intervened on the side of the opium dealers. Which is why Lyndon LaRouche and others called the British crown a drug dealer.

Falcon

Face it, you are a nation of consumers with no real manufacturing left.

The US still has manufacturing though much of it is hidden and you have to look for it. Check out Etsy, the place to buy and sell hand made things. Makezine and Craftzine are American zines for American makers and crafters. The US still has spinners who spin and create their own threads. Some of whom will go on to make their own cloth, others sell their threads to those who will make cloth. Then they will make or sell to those who make clothing. Only a few blocks from where I am typing this there's a workshop for hand bound books. Actually Minneapolis has a few places that custom bind books.

And this isn't particularly a dig at the US ... I think all Western economies will go the same way, as the governments and people all have the same short-sighted attitude. Pretty soon the only things left will be service jobs and tech jobs in the West, all manufacturing and production will be done in China and the surrounding ASEAN nations.

Ah but those other nations will become like the West too. The beauty of freer markets is that they improve everyone's lives who are allowed to participate. Your sweatshop is their employees' good life. Even Chinese want their iPhones.

Falcon

Maybe the author of TFA could also analyze who makes th eprofits off the many counterfeit iPhones mfg'd in China:

"Illicit phones comprise a staggering 40% of Chinese firms' production, and 13% of the world's, according to iSuppli, a research firm. It reckons China will produce 145m of them this year, up by almost half since 2008. This has hit sales of legal phones."

I refuse to believe that imaginary property is an acceptable replacement for real manufacturing capacity.

http://www.economist.com/

Even with solar being taken seriously, you'd be using up a lot of land (hopefuly not arable) to be able to provide enough to satisfy household + industrial need.

Just as almost everyone else does, you're concentrating on the One Big Energy Source instead of looking at what sources can be harvested in different locations. The "Economist" has the article A new look at solar power about a solar farm in the Mojave Desert in CA. Both it and the article Sunny Outlook: Can Sunshine Provide All U.S. Electricity? says it produces 350 megawatts of energy, enough to power 90,000 homes. According to the SciAm article using the technology available in 2006 building solar farms on a piece of land 92 miles squared in Nevada, that's just 10& the Bureau of Land Management's land, would produce almost all of the electricity of the US.

That's just solar power. The Wind Energy Resource Atlas of the United States details the wind potential of different regions of the US. The Rocky Mountains alone contain enough potential wind energy to supply all of the 48 continuous states with electricity. Then there's geothermal, which is a baseload provider, hydroelectric, and tidal power sources. One geothermal power plant on Hawaii's Big Island provides 25% of the island's electricity. Geothermal generated 13 terawatts hours of electricity in California. Combine these with a rebuilt smart national electric grid, which needs to be done anyways, and almost every coal, Natural Gas, and Nuclear power plant can be closed. Until the bulk energy storage problem is solved some plants can be kept running for more of the baseload.

Falcon

It seems too convenient that the one moment where Obama was openly critical of Chinese leadership occurred during the only public venue which was not broadcast on live television. Those admonishments of Chinese censorship were intended more for us back home than the repressed Chinese people; a political stunt to appear as if he cared about human rights abuses without paying the associated political price of taking such a stand. If you doubt this, ask yourself this: why didn't he make such statements during his two earlier live broadcasts just days earlier?

So continues the Obama Administration's strategy of trying to have its cake and eat it too. It's almost as if a PR firm was elected President instead of a leader. ("Now with more Change(TM)!") On every major policy issue he has tried to split the difference until what remains is an unrecognizable mess, like cooperating with the Chinese to censor his criticism of their... censorship...

He is fast becoming a joke, a self-parodying symbol of a broken political system. Some examples:

• The war in Iraq. Barack Obama made a name for himself by condemning the invasion of Iraq. As a primary candidate, he soon became THE "anti-war" candidate. He promised a complete withdrawal from Iraq within 18 months after election. His solution after becoming president? A "residual force" of more than 50,000 troops which will remain indefinitely. Well, so much for that...
• Financial Regulation. Publicly, the Obama Administration has been very critical of the banking industry and its fraudulent practices which led to the financial collapse of 2008. At the center of the industry's dysfunction is the clear conflict of interest between Savings Banks operating as Investment Banks, which basically allowed these institutions to make bets with other people's money. This was made possible through the repeal of the Glass Steagall Act. The very first step to preventing future bubbles would be to the modest and completely logical reinstatement the Glass Steagall Act. That option, however, is completely off the table, because it would be too disruptive of valued democratic campaign contributors like Goldman Sachs. So, instead, the Obama Administration has artificially supported the flawed banking industry by throwing an approximate 23.7 Trillion dollars, or 170% of annual GDP at it without requiring ANY substantial reforms. Of course, the administration claims reforms are coming, but what leverage is there now? Now invigorated with an infusion of public money, these firms have dramatically increased their lobbying and campaign contributions to prevent any reforms from taking hold.
• Cap and Trade. Publicly touted as a beginning step to limiting carbon emissions, the Obama Administration's Cap and Trade legislation is nothing more than a massive government handout to polluting industries. So watered down with loopholes and handouts, there are serious questions as to if it will even accomplish its stated purpose of decreasing carbon emissions at all, let alone in the next few years.

The list could go on and on including: comprehensive Healthcare Reform (i.e. Medicare for All with Prescription drug price negotiations), limiting lobbyist influence (in his own administration, even!), repealing Don't ask, Don't tell, etc.

All of this, of course, is textbook post-Clintonian Democratic political strategy. The only problem is: this isn't the 90's. The public winds have changed. The information sources have changed. The problems are too big to be swept under the rug. I don't think even Barack Obama understood just how much his talk of transformative change and real progress resonated through the hearts of a disillu