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Mass transit is neither cost-effective nor green. Per passenger-mile, it costs more to operate and generates more green-house gases than private automobiles. But don't believe me. Check out what the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, The Atlantic, and others have to say about it.

http://www.stlouisfed.org/publications/re/2004/c/pages/light_rail.html

Based solely on dollar cost, the annual light-rail subsidies could instead be used to buy an environmentally friendly hybrid Toyota Prius every five years for each poor rider and even to pay annual maintenance costs of $6,000. Increases in pollution would be minimal with the hybrid vehicle, and 7,700 new vehicles on the roadway would result in only a 0.5 percent increase in traffic congestion.3 And there would still be funds left overâ"about $49 million per year. These funds could be given to all other MetroLink riders (amounting to roughly $1,045 per person per year) and be used for cab fare, bus fare, etc.

http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/197910/197910

The received wisdom on this topic is easily stated: 1. It is self-evident that public transportation is vastly more energy-efficient than automobiles; 2. It is self-evident that investing money to improve transit facilities will attract many more passengers. Therefore, the national energy policy ought to give major attention to building new transit systems and revitalizing old ones. Unfortunately, both of these "self-evident" premises turn out to be false.

http://www.templetons.com/brad/transit-myth.html

Particularly disturbing were the numbers for some of the worst transit systems, including the light rail in San Jose, which I sometimes ride. That system takes twice as much energy per passenger than private cars do. It's not even the worst -- that's Cleveland, which also is part of a grid more dependent on fossil fuels than San Jose.

http://www.gregburch.net/cars/plans.html

From a purely utilitarian point of view, it would be cheaper to simply buy compact cars for the poorest of the poor, or even subsidize some kind of taxi cab service for poor people. But that idea is too "way out there" - much stranger than ripping up our cities for years and years while the planners implement their expensive dreams.

First off, you should read Why I ban laptops in my classroom and the professor vs laptop article that recently appeared in the Chronicle of Higher Education and then Paul Graham's Disconnecting Distraction and then Is Google Making Us Stupid? in The Atlantic. If Paul Graham finds the Internet ceaselessly distracting, what hope do ninth graders have?

Secondly, I've read some of the pro-laptop comments, and while I sympathize with their points, paternalism is not *always* a bad thing. Sometimes it's a necessary component of developing discipline and other positive traits. Banning laptops might be one, as it could help one develop the ability to focus for a sustained period of time and not get lost in class, particularly during discussions about complex material.

I went to law school for a year by accident, where virtually everyone had laptops in every classroom. They were used for taking notes, yes. But they were also used for Facebook, and checking out bar happy hours, and IM, and IMing about the incompetence of the person speaking, and checking the score, and a variety of other things. I know, the jokes are coming: you must've been a dumb law student, gone to a bad school, had bad professor, etc. Maybe: but I think the bigger problem is that letting one's attention temporarily wander is made so much easier by having a laptop and Internet connection is almost overwhelming. Sure, you can stay on a diet with a chocolate cake sitting on the counter in your living room. Sure, you'd never lie on that mortgage application about your income--but, you know, you really want that McMansion, and no one is going to check it, and you just have to inflate it a little... The problem is that laptops made distraction so easy. They make continuous partial attention more likely than deep engagement.

Students in universities succumb to the Beer and Circus mentality, and if they do, what luck will middle- and high-school students have? I teach freshmen English now at the University of Arizona and ban laptops because they're likely to be used for Facebook, and IM, and everything else but taking notes. I know: if you're not a compelling enough teacher to keep their attention, they deserve to use laptops to get around you. But what if you can't get their attention in the first place? What if you're trying to impart something important but that doesn't have the immediacy of Perez Hilton? Then give them the Cs they deserve when they write bad papers. And then they whine to you about the grades they got. You, the Slashdot commenter, would be such a strong writer or coder or mathematician that you could get by: congratulations. But the other 24 people in the classroom probably can't.

All this is to say that laptops can very easily and quickly become more a burden than benefit. But they aren't necessarily a burden: I could see wanting them for programming classes, for math classes that could use advanced visualizations, for blogging, for exchanging immediate responses among a group, for editing papers on the fly, the moment you get feedback on them. But not every lesson will call for them and not every teacher will want to use them. "Here's the dilemma -- how much freedom do you give to students?" you ask. The answer depends too much on the instructor to give a firm answer, but I give the answer above in part because so many of the initial responses tend towards "let them do whatever they want." Sure: and throw someone into an ocean a mile from shore and see what happens. If the teacher wants them to conduct a textual analysis of a Facebook profile, let them.

The case of New York is particularly interesting because premeditated policy decisions may have exported crime to surrounding areas:

In some places, the phenomenon is hard to detect, but there may be a simple reason: in cities with tight housing markets, Section 8 recipients generally can't afford to live within the city limits, and sometimes they even move to different states. New York, where the rate of violent crime has plummeted, appears to have pushed many of its poor out to New Jersey, where violent crime has increased in nearby cities and suburbs. Washington, D.C., has exported some of its crime to surrounding counties in Maryland and Virginia.

http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200807/memphis-crime

I am firmly on the CCW side but even I do not believe that is a general solution to high crime rates. It is very effective given the cost but the total effect is relatively small. It is cost effective enough anyway that the best analysis I have seen show that states implementing shall issue CCW laws would benefit even if they payed to arm the CCW holders at thousands of dollars each every year. Most states of course charge a significant amount for licensing.

No, we do have a pretty good idea what happened

No, we don't. Last I checked there was only on-the-record sources for that story. So no, we don't have a good idea of what happened at all.

and we know that Bush was deeply involved

Again, no, we don't know that. We only know one person implied that.

It was certainly illegal, at least according to James Comey

Yes, based on details he won't share.

But more importantly, the plan Ashcroft was supposedly ready to resign over was, from all appearances, not the one that was actually implemented.

Wrong again. See above. The program was already running, and they were trying to reauthorize it.

Who said it was a mere reauthorization? The reporter. Did Comey say that? Not that I see. And even if he did, all we know is that there was an order -- we don't know what it said, or whether it was significantly different from a previous one -- and that he wouldn't sign it and that changes were made.

You're right. The original program was obviously much worse.

Since you have a habit of saying you know things you obviously don't, I am unsurprised you'd make such an assertion. Obviously, Ashcroft and Comey thought the one in the original authorization that wasn't signed was worse, but we know nothing more than that.

>Not much, first, since I don't even believe those stories entirely. Usually stories like that are way overblown. We don't know what happened with Ashcroft.

No, we do have a pretty good idea what happened, and we know that Bush was deeply involved. It was certainly illegal, at least according to James Comey:

"Mr. Comey, the former No. 2 official in the Justice Department, said the crisis began when he refused to sign a presidential order reauthorizing the program, which allowed monitoring of international telephone calls and e-mail of people inside the United States who were suspected of having terrorist ties. He said he made his decision after the department's Office of Legal Counsel, based on an extensive review, concluded that the program did not comply with the law."

>But more importantly, the plan Ashcroft was supposedly ready to resign over was, from all appearances, not the one that was actually implemented.

Wrong again. See above. The program was already running, and they were trying to reauthorize it.

>because what the "hero" leaked to the press was NOT what made them "freak out like that."

You're right. The original program was obviously much worse.

why are diamonds still considered precious?

don't we have the technology to make them cheap?

sure, there's all the convoluted diamond market, debeers monopoly explanations, but that's like saying no one can buy marijuana because its illegal

if i want to get a diamond, why can't i pay $5 and go get one the size of my fist? its just carbon. that i can't do that right now, seems absurd to me, and even more absurd, that we should still be digging this stuff up and considering it valuable

Diamonds are precious because about 70+ years of marketing by DeBeers has made popular opinion think they are valuable. All those "Diamonds are forever" type of ads you see? Marketing. And not just any diamond, they had to be big, beautiful expensive diamonds, not the cheap ones people used to buy in the early 1900's. And not only that, but marketing to convince people they need to keep buying diamonds.

And yes, we can make them artificially - either vapor deposition, or large pressures and high temperatures, or probably a ton of other methods. Look up for industrial diamonds (they're quite useful in industry).

It's basically all DeBeers marketing - DeBeers basically bought up all the diamond mines and established a complex network of distributors that effectively took over all cosmetic diamond sales. These diamonds were then effectively rationed to make their price go up. When some shrewd business practice causes potential losses in the value of diamonds, DeBeers puts some control that effectively disrupts the practice. (DeBeers has tried hard to quash any sort of thing that might disrupt the price of diamonds and collapse its monopoly). The price of a diamond is artificially inflated, and kept that way. And marketing ensures that you can't get away with some low-quality diamond, you must buy a nice expensive one for your significant other.

In fact, the resale value of diamonds is quite poor, so as investments, you can do better elsewhere.

Here's an interesting read on how DeBeers turned a relatively cheap gem into something desirable, and managed to keep tight control over production in order to keep value up.

http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/print/198202/diamond

Googling the phrase "drive off the lot" returned the factoid that "With a hybrid car, buyers do not always immediately lose that 30 percent of the value the minute they drive off the lot." People who aren't extolling the virtues of hybrids quote slightly lower numbers, some 10-15%, some 15-20%. Still, do you really think that there is that much mechanical wear associated with driving 500 feet?

It's just like diamonds. Ever tried to resell a diamond before for more than 10% of it's value?

I can't believe that some people care more about which MP3 player he uses than what policies he's going to implement.

Excuse me? How does having an interest in trivia preclude interest in the Big Stuff? I just spent 5 minutes writing this post on The Great MP3 Scandal. Before that, I spent 45 minutes watching PEBO talk about Iraq, Afghanistan, Mumbai, Pakistan, the economy, and his dogwhistle appointment for Secretary of Veteran Affairs. I spent a lot of time (probably more than I should) googling for the latest news and opinion on the new administration. Does the 5 minutes I spent on trivia render meaningless all the time I spend doing serious reading about Obama's plans and policies?

Besides, as I say in my previous post, Obama's choice of an MP3 player isn't that trivial.

Please don't invoke the fire-in-a-crowded-theater argument. It is most often inappropriate to do so. Shouting "Fire!" isn't really even speech. It is just the raising of an alarm, similar to pulling a fire alarm. Just because it is spoken does not raise it to the level of "speech" in the context of freedom of speech. Most people don't know or understand the origins of this argument and thus over-use it in inappropriate places. See this excellent analysis by Alan Dershowitz: http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/89jan/dershowitz.htm

The more appropriate response is to talk about "time and place" restrictions and mitigation of "clear and present danger" caused by certain types of "speech", such as incitement to riot. But even then, one has to be very careful that the motivation is avoiding imminent, needless harm and not just suppressing speech we don't like. I personally tend to think that most hate speech laws lean more toward the latter than the former.

There are a number of arguments against meat and whatever other cruelty to animals, but most of them center on the audience regarding animal cruelty as wrong. Without that basic level of common ground, no further rational argument is possible. Lucky for PETA, many people do have problems with cruel treatment of animals, and with the fact that much of the cruelty is not for any good reason. The question is where to draw the line, and I think that's the only question. PETA and I draw it pretty far back, others will trade lots of animal cruelty for some physical pleasure, stopping I guess just short of bestiality.

So PETA is in the awkward and unenviable position of reminding people of their own moral standards. Not PETA's standards, but the audience's. Most people avoid information about the cruel and inhumane treatment of their meat products. The only explanation I have for this is that they lack the willpower or perhaps the technical knowledge to make the decision they believe to be right. However, I know that slashdot has a ton of tough guys who pride themselves on having absolutely no compassion. Maybe they'll chime in on this post, overcompensating for their meat guilt by describing how little they care and how much they enjoy meat. I already see some of it in the thread, and they're making my point for me.

Over the years, after being asked to defend being vegetarian, I understand PETA's position pretty well. People ask, idly, "why" and expect an answer related to cholesterol or "energy" or some shit. That's not my reason at all. I was raised vegetarian, being from South India, so it's pretty easy for me to be all self-righteous and you can see some of that in this post too. It used to be a lot worse. At some point, how you were raised is not enough of an explanation, and you have to either figure out the real reasons independent of your parents or just shrug it off and start eating meat. So as soon as I even mention pain and suffering, people start the handwaving and cut me off because even though they asked, I'm the jerk for actually telling them. They don't want to make the decision independent of how they were raised, I guess. In fairness, I don't know if I could either.

PETA is, obviously, more militant than I am. Conscience can be like that. As always in these meat posts, I refer the reader to Hard To Swallow, which makes these points in a better way.

...that just spent US$73 million dollars arguing over Proposition 8 - should there be same sex marriage in the state of California.

I'm not American, or gay, but it fucking shits me when I see this sort of money being thrown around - in the middle of this epic credit crisis, no less - over something as utterly trivial as whether or not gay people can get married, when there's actual, serious, important things all over the world that get practically no funding.

I don't know how much money came from where but the AP article I read indicates that (unsurprisingly) lots of it comes from various religious organisations, including the Mormon Church which various sources say have raised between US$8 million and US$17 million alone.

Pretty sad state of affairs, really.

"The sad truth is that we humans throughout our existence have have had a major, negative impact on nature. Just compare the diversity of species in areas where no humans live, with what we find in cultivated fields."

That may be true of the modern period of biosphere-delinked craziness, but not necessarily of human civilisation as a whole.

For example, http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200203/mann

I can't vouch for the science, but the idea that pre-European / prehistoric humans may have not just lived in harmony with the Amazon jungle but proactively *created* it fascinates me.

McCain's part with regards to technology.

McCain is not a technophobe or a retrograde — his campaign is using technology quite a bit and has posted its share of YouTube videos (a very cheap way to get once message out). It is not as techno-cool as Obama's, but no less so than Hillary Clinton's or Biden's own campaigns were. Indeed, Bill Clinton — everybody's favorite bubble-creator — has sent a whopping two e-mails during his 8 years in office.

What keeps McCain himself from a computer — as has been repeatedly pointed out since Obama's revolting attack — are the injuries sustained in Vietnamese prison, where his torturers were twisting his broken arms (waterboarding is for wussies). The man can't lift his arms above his shoulders to this day — I wonder, why Obama has not ridiculed his inability to comb his hair by himself...

And if you want to look forward, Sarah Palin — McCain's choice for a vice-president — is an avid e-mail user and has even come under criticism, as she found a creative solution to get around the law, with which the lawmakers aim to infringe on their executive's domain. How good, do you think, is Biden with computers?

I like these. On the one hand the dude is being kind of an ass. On the other, sometimes it takes an ass to get people's attention.

I'm not too paranoid about the imposition of a facist state, but I do think the average citizen needs to take more ownership for this sort of thing. Make federal and state agencies understand that when they overstep their bounds, the citizenry will rise up and punish them with legislation that restricts their ability to operate.

We need to take responsibility for our own freedoms. And when we decide that being stopped by border patrol, or suffering through almost totally ineffective airport security checkpoints isn't something we're willing to tolerate, we need to stop it.

Government for and by the people, bitches! (Look for that t-shirt on cafepress any day now).

"But most politicians don't want to do that; things like wars or other massive deficit generating activities would be much harder to fund if you had to actually tax citizens as opposed to tax them through inflation. The power of the state to control the value of money is simply too tempting for them to let go of it."

You seem to be under the mistaken impression that we finance our deficits through printing money. The US government has not done that since the Civil War. We actually pay for our deficits by issuing bonds and paying them back slowly over time.

"Why should banks be allowed to risk depositors money at all? If depositors want return on their money, they are free to lend the money out by investing in bonds themselves."

I'm sure that at some point, one enterprising depositor will decide to work full time on scouting for good bond opportunities. At that point, other people might decide to give their money to him to invest for them, perhaps in exchange for a percentage of profits. Then, he might even buy a nice building in the center of town to centralize dealing with his clients. He might even call it a bank...

"As long as the whole foundation of the economy, the currency, is inherently unsound and leveraged,"

I had thought that the foundation of our economy was our workers, schools, offices... But no, apparently a large pile of green paper forms the foundation of our economy

" any regulation of the system above that is meaningless."

Sure. If you don't include the massive draconian restrictions on risk-taking as "regulation", then indeed, no regulation would be necessary.

"Because what needs to be done is quite easy; move to 100% reserve requirements and market based interest rates."

I can guarantee that such a move would cause unbelievably catastrophic decreases in living standards, to the point were neither of us would have the ability to argue on Slashdot.

And while you can sit and advocate a Neo-Hooverite prescription of pain , I want to remind you of something: People die because of economic downturns. The resulting economic downturn would kill millions of people in developing countries from starvation, to say nothing of the wars born from the resulting political instability. If you are willing sacrifice them in the name of ideological consistency, be my guest.

But that's the moral site of things. See here [theatlantic.com] for a better economic rebuttal than I could write.

http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/print/200811/airport-security

i found my attention span has gone to dogs since the advent of the internet and each year it gets worse

You're not the only one...

Krugman predicts doom in 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007...

"What's the one time that Paul Krugman didn't forecast a recession? That would be when we actually had a recession. It just wasn't a recession that could be blamed on George Bush."

"Barack Obama is not a real progressive." -- Paul Krugman

"Iâ(TM)d give up the whole first page of my Google Scholar listing to have written 'The Queen and the Soldier.'" - Paul Krugman

What's not to like about Paul Krugman?

Krugman predicts doom in 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007...

"What's the one time that Paul Krugman didn't forecast a recession? That would be when we actually had a recession. It just wasn't a recession that could be blamed on George Bush."

"Barack Obama is not a real progressive." -- Paul Krugman

"Iâ(TM)d give up the whole first page of my Google Scholar listing to have written 'The Queen and the Soldier.'" - Paul Krugman

What's not to like about Paul Krugman?

Krugman predicts doom in 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007...

"What's the one time that Paul Krugman didn't forecast a recession? That would be when we actually had a recession. It just wasn't a recession that could be blamed on George Bush."

"Barack Obama is not a real progressive." -- Paul Krugman

"Iâ(TM)d give up the whole first page of my Google Scholar listing to have written 'The Queen and the Soldier.'" - Paul Krugman

What's not to like about Paul Krugman?

Krugman predicts doom in 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007...

"What's the one time that Paul Krugman didn't forecast a recession? That would be when we actually had a recession. It just wasn't a recession that could be blamed on George Bush."

"Barack Obama is not a real progressive." -- Paul Krugman

"Iâ(TM)d give up the whole first page of my Google Scholar listing to have written 'The Queen and the Soldier.'" - Paul Krugman

What's not to like about Paul Krugman?

A recent Atlantic article laments the fate of human intelligence as we do more and more of our reading and thinking on the Web. The basic idea being that the *way* we read influences *how* we think and ultimately our intelligence. http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200807/google With that in mind, I was wondering if we are making the Turing Test easier each year as the minds of the judges themselves approach hyperlinked machine ways of thinking. In other words, it becomes harder to distinguish between machine and human not only because the machines are becoming more complex, but *also* because the humans are becoming less so. Thoughts?

Saddam hated Osama as much as he hated the Kurds.

If you bothered to follow the link I posted, you would've seen:

1. How al Qaeda's tensions with Taleban got pretty high too.
2. How the eloquence of the al Qaeda's leaders (including that of bin Laden himself) patched it up.

Saddam Hussein strived for legitimacy and prestige among Arabs. That he started as a secular, rather than religious, leader was not that important in the face of stiffening world animosity. Stalin (Saddam's hero, BTW), also changed tack dramatically, when the Germans appeared only miles from Moscow.

Al Qaeda would've provided him with the legitimacy in exchange for whatever biological, chemical, or even nuclear know-how (or even actual weapons) they were seeking (see article). It would've been a good match...

He diverted resources from the former to invade the latter?

There was no need there for tanks, artillery, or more than a few bombers, which is what largely went to Iraq.

If you're supposed to be looking for a needle in a haystack, people will wonder when you move all your metal detectors to the cotton bale next door.

People will always "wonder", but the move was not unreasonable. First of all, the "cotton bale next door" had its own, unrelated, shards, that had to be taken out — long ago.

And second, it was quite reasonable to believe, that the crafty needle would quietly move from the haystack to the cotton bale. Although Saddam's and Osama's distaste for each other was known, what was not as publicized, was Osama's earlier tensions with Mullah Omar. We only learned of it in 2004, when The Atlantic's journalist published his story:

The Arabs' general contempt for the backwardness of Afghanistan was not lost on the Taliban, whose leaders grew annoyed with Osama bin Laden's focus on public relations and the media. Letters found on the computer reveal that relations between the Arabs and the Taliban had grown so tense that many feared the Taliban leader, Mullah Muhammad Omar, would expel the Arabs from the country.

Kicked out from Afghanistan by the US and its allies, Osama could very well have patched up his differences with Saddam, and begin a mutually-useful cooperation.

And then, of course, there was a question of moral high ground. Despite the howls of jealous "international disapproval" and the internal opposition (angry not so much at the war, as at Bush's earlier tax-cuts and reforms of the education system), ridding the world of an asshole of Saddam Hussein's caliber was a Very Good Thing (TM).

That the post-war efforts to rebuild the country were mismanaged and are only getting back on track now, is not an argument against it.

The Atlantic recently had a very good article comparing the philosophies of road design in North America versus in Europe.

In brief: lots of road signs (1) micromanage drivers, (2) make drivers complacent to an individual sign's importance, (3) cause drivers to pay more attention to the side of the road in search of signs and less attention on actual road conditions, and (4) condition drivers to not think for themselves (e.g. driver slower than the limit in poor visibility or in rain).

The suggestions mentioned in TFAS seem to be an extension of this philosophy.

Meanwhile, the reason seniors are so isolated when they don't have cars is because North American cities tend to be built as a series of urban islands. With more liveable communities and better-connected public transit, it wouldn't be quite as bad for people of any age to not drive a car when it is not safe for them to do so.

- RG>

(crossposted from Blacknell.net)

Sad.1 David Foster Wallace2, along with perhaps only William Gibson, had a reader in me for everything he wrote. So dedicated was I to his Infinite Jest that I carried it in planes, trains, and autobuses over three continents.3 If you've never read any of his work, maybe you could start with this brilliant 2005 essay on political talk radio.4

1And I say sad in some weirdly personal sense that comes from both finding his writing deeply compelling in itself, and identifying his work with a period of time in my life which is not missed, but stands out as significant in recollection.

2David Foster Wallace (or DFW, as he is popularly known among fans) also provided (albeit completely unknowingly) some of the reason that Blacknell.net exists today. The blog that inspired me to start my own was written by an alumnus of the law school I had just started in. He, in turn, had been motivated to write online (in a format once known as an "online journal") while he read Infinite Jest (nb. This same author once had an essay published in the same collection as DFW). An early autobiography of this online journal community is available here (it is amusing to consider how much energy was expended on the subject of diary v. journal, only to have blog become the accepted appellation).

3 A massive tome of a book with 1200 pages of writing to be relished and consumed (in addition to being read) I took two years to complete it, taking it to Panama, Venezuela, and Britain. I've since reread it (in sections, while it wasn't lent out).

4Even though it isn't entirely representative.

(Ah, for want of a superscript tag . . .)

For a better presentation of the moral failure, read "Hard to Swallow" by B. R. Myers.

The incidence of Mad Cow Disease in humans is just what Malcolm X would call "chickens coming home to roost."

It's very interesting to see so much moral outrage in defense of an industry that engages in heinous acts daily. The argument for eating meat is that the pleasure humans derive from animal flesh is more important than the pain and suffering caused by the methods used to obtain it. Survival is no longer relevant to the discussion. Maybe people see no moral issue there, but it's more likely that people see the moral issue and ignore it. I've talked about this with a great many people, and the vast majority simply stop me with, "oh I'd rather not know about that because then I'd feel bad about eating meat." I'm paraphrasing. This after they bring it up and ask me the questions. I never bring this shit up anymore, in real life.

Right. And if you read anything about the internal dissension on her campaign, she appears to have managed it quite badly. I can't recall where I read the article - I think it was this month's Atlantic Monthly (and it's available on-line at http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200809/hillary-clinton-campaign) and the internal backbiting and bickering were documented in a number of emails. These were her own teammates, and they were telling tales on each other, leaking unflattering stuff about dissension to the media, and pulling the campaign into various different directions. She changed her manager mid-campaign, and sort of pulled her media adviser then got him back, which infuriated the other staff. As the article states, Clinton campaigned on competency and experience, and then proved she couldn't put together a cohesive team, or stick to a single strategy. One wonders what a shambles she would have made of her cabinet.

I just wonder where this reputation of competency comes from. She made a hash of her medical insurance plan, she claimed not to know her husband was cheating on her, etc. Her campaign was constantly in financial trouble. What exactly has she done?

China has a reputation of getting things done at any cost. It does not matter to them how the task is accomplished. This is in contrast to the Japanese.
http://jamesfallows.theatlantic.com/archives/2007/11/the_way_vs_a_way_japan_v_china.php

Jim Fallows Translates: http://jamesfallows.theatlantic.com/archives/2008/08/on_the_ages_of_the_female_chin.php " These are Chinese charts that show name, sex, date of birth, place of birth. The name in question is ä½åæ£, and one of the lines where it appears says: 618,"ä½åæ£","å¥","1994.1.1","æ-åOE--" (# 618, He Kexin, female, Jan 1 1994, Hubei) "

A) You're splitting hairs in the first answer.

Not at all. You obviously do not understand what I wrote. I was attacked as hypocritical because, the poster said, I attacked him for being partisan, while I am also partisan. But I did not attack him for being partisan, I attacked him for being hypocritical.

B) You're contradicting yourself

I don't see how anyone would think so.

There simply isn't another way to read that than as an "I'm older and know better than you" speech.

There simply isn't any way to read that as an "I'm older and know better than you" speech.

Obama was chastising people for spreading debunked rumors. McCain was saying "I'm older than you, so listen up!"

McCain did no such thing.

Quote for me what you think he said that supports your representation of it. I can't find what you're saying anywhere.

he's not very good at picking advisers (failed CEO of HP as an economic *and* tech adviser!?)

First, she is a fantastic advisor. Carly Fiorina, despite her flaws, is very sharp and knows what she's talking about.

Second, come on: Obama has had even more problems with advisors than McCain.

at party organizing (he has what? 3% of Obama's organization on the ground)

That is not party organizing, it's campaign organizing. Different things. But I get your point, and would only point out that Howard Dean had by far the most people on the ground right up until the time he got killed in Iowa. Obviously, Obama supporters are more excited than McCain supporters. And equally obviously, this doesn't tend to be a deciding factor.

at computers

Granted, though not sure why I should care too much. I'd rather have a lack of experience with computers than a lack of experience with Russia, Europe, Iran, the Middle East, etc.

or at remembering where other countries are (is this NOT considered part of 'foreign policy' experience? or are they just 'senior moments' as if that made it better?).

Oh please. Obama has had at least as many "senior moments" of his own, including not knowing WHERE HIS OWN STATE IS. Obama attributed Clinton's lead in Kentucky to the proximity of that state to Arkansas, despite the fact that Kentucky borders HIS home state of Illinois, and does NOT border Arkansas.

Given that barely graduated in the military

That is untrue. Being low in his class DOES NOT imply that he "barely" graduated.

But he should *already* know this stuff, especially the difference between Sunni & Shiite.

I have had the same dogs for 10 years and I still get their names wrong, even though I know exactly which one is which. People switch names all the time. Ted Kennedy switched "Obama" and "Osama" (something I also unintentionally and embarassingly do on occasion). Almost everyone switches "Iran" and "Iraq." Anyone who actually thinks he doesn't know the difference between being "Shiite" and "Sunni" is just being stupid, just like people who actually think Obama believes there are 57 states in the U.S. are being stupid.

Seriously, if you want to compare "senior moments," I don't think Obama will win.

This Atlantic Magazine article (which is pretty old...1/1995) has some very interesting ideas. It suggests simplification of vehicle manufature (and by etxention, vehicle service) and a very different model for that manufacture. I find it as interesting and relevant today as when I read it years ago. I'm pretty surprised no one has run with the ideas in the article.
http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/96apr/oil/wheels.htm
Summary:
"New ways to design, manufacture, and sell cars can make them ten times more fuel-efficient, and at the same time safer, sportier, more beautiful and comfortable, far more durable, and probably cheaper. Here comes the biggest change in industrial structure since the microchip
"
Enjoy!

Self-made rich people often engage in conspicuous consumption, however, because, if they came from modest origins, they may feel they have more to prove, particularly if they are identified with a group that is traditionally not wealthy:

See this for an explanation, in a Freakanomcs vein.

Doesn't really make sense to me that a gov't so paranoid about what people do on the Internet would allow encrypted tunnels outside of their country, though.

There was a whole Article about how to circumvent the great chinese firewall in the Atlantic recently which also explains why they allow VPNs:

A VPN, or virtual private network, is a faster, fancier, and more elegant way to achieve the same result. Essentially a VPN creates your own private, encrypted channel that runs alongside the normal Internet. From within China, a VPN connects you with an Internet server somewhere else. You pass your browsing and downloading requests to that American or Finnish or Japanese server, and it finds and sends back what you're looking for. The GFW doesn't stop you, because it can't read the encrypted messages you're sending. Every foreign business operating in China uses such a network. VPNs are freely advertised in China, so individuals can sign up, too. I use one that costs $40 per year. (An expat in China thinks: that's a little over a dime a day. A Chinese factory worker thinks: it's a week's take-home pay. Even for a young academic, it's a couple days' work.)

As a technical matter, China could crack down on the proxies and VPNs whenever it pleased. Today the policy is: if a message comes through that the surveillance system cannot read because it's encrypted, let's wave it on through! Obviously the system's behavior could be reversed. But everyone I spoke with said that China could simply not afford to crack down that way. "Every bank, every foreign manufacturing company, every retailer, every software vendor needs VPNs to exist," a Chinese professor told me. "They would have to shut down the next day if asked to send their commercial information through the regular Chinese Internet and the Great Firewall."

(emphasis mine)

I have this impression of China that everything there is done as cheaply as possible without regard to safety or double checking, etc. It reminds me of one of my favorite blog posts showing the difference between the way the Japanese and the Chinese refuel a plane. Notice that the Chinese guy is starting the siphoning of the fuel with his mouth. The owners of this restaurant were too cheap to pay some English-speaking Chinese kid a hundred yuan to translate it for them. At least we get some laughs out of it.

There is probably more English done right than wrong in China, and the truth is that these people are using english not to inform, but to add some level of flair to their "marketing".

Most importantly, it isn't targeted at english speaking people.

The Atlantic article mentioned the elaborate lie that "unfettered" access to the Olympic Village really is:

The first thing theyâ(TM)ll probably notice is that Chinaâ(TM)s Internet seems slow .... partly it is because of the delaying cycles imposed by Chinaâ(TM)s system that monitors what people are looking for on the Internet, especially when theyâ(TM)re looking overseas. ...

Theyâ(TM)ll likely be surprised, then, to notice that Chinaâ(TM)s Internet seems surprisingly free and uncontrolled. ....

In reality, what the Olympic-era visitors will be discovering is not the absence of Chinaâ(TM)s electronic control but its new refinementâ"and a special Potemkin-style unfettered access that will be set up just for them, and just for the length of their stay. ... the very existence of Internet controls is almost never discussed in public here, apart from vague statements about the importance of keeping online information "wholesome."

The bottom line is that traffic is monitored and people are punished if they get out of line. The goal is to smear people who would look outside of the state for information as unpatriotic and criminal. It's a lot like how people in the US who want internet privacy are labled "pirates" or pedophiles. If it can work here, imagine how well it works in a place like China.

I have this impression of China that everything there is done as cheaply as possible without regard to safety or double checking, etc. It reminds me of one of my favorite blog posts showing the difference between the way the Japanese and the Chinese refuel a plane. Notice that the Chinese guy is starting the siphoning of the fuel with his mouth. The owners of this restaurant were too cheap to pay some English-speaking Chinese kid a hundred yuan to translate it for them. At least we get some laughs out of it.

James Fallows already did in The Great Firewall. The short version: China is worried chiefly about controlling its own people and setting bad internal precedents. It's not as worried about the rest of the world. In addition, the Chinese authorities are somewhat inept, as he explains here. Because neither can be excerpted effectively, you'll just have to follow the links.

James Fallows already did in The Great Firewall. The short version: China is worried chiefly about controlling its own people and setting bad internal precedents. It's not as worried about the rest of the world. In addition, the Chinese authorities are somewhat inept, as he explains here. Because neither can be excerpted effectively, you'll just have to follow the links.

What's even more interesting to me is that you then post a story that has less to do with race and more to do with poverty.

No - what the article has to do with is race and CRIME.

Memphis is a hoodlum town, run by a bunch of hoodlum families like the Fords.

In re the original story which prompted this thread at Slashdot, the whistle-blowing blogger is trying to "blow the whistle" on these hoodlums, and Godwin is responding by leveraging the courts to deny the blogger his 1st Amendment rights [both freedom of speech and freedom of the press].

If you were a real "liberal", then you'd be all over these violations of the 1st Amendment like, ah - may I say it? - white on rice.

PS: You also said I think you should be modded flamebait instead of interesting, which is exactly how leftists always respond to speech that they don't like it: Deny it, suppress it, extinguish it, eradicate it, and pretend that it never existed in the first place.

http://images.google.com/images?safe=off&q=larry+godwin

And, again, to infuriate the libs at Slashdot even further, if the sentences are grammatically correct and if the spelling is correct at the blogsite, then the blogger is almost certainly Caucasian.

So, in reality, this is probably a racial matter which is being disguised a privacy/right-to-know controversy.

And if you want to read about the disastrous state of racial affairs in the town of Memphis, then check out this lengthy expose from the Atlantic:

American Murder Mystery
Why is crime rising in so many American cities? The answer implicates one of the most celebrated antipoverty programs of recent decades.
by Hanna Rosin
July/August 2008 Atlantic Monthly
http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/print/200807/memphis-crime

...Janikowski began working with the police department in 1997, the same year that Barnes saw the car with the bullet holes. He initially consulted on a program to reduce sexual assaults citywide and quickly made himself useful. He mapped all the incidents and noticed a pattern: many assaults happened outside convenience stores, to women using pay phones that were hidden from view. The police asked store owners to move the phones inside, and the number of assaults fell significantly.

About five years ago, Janikowski embarked on a more ambitious project. He'd built up enough trust with the police to get them to send him daily crime and arrest reports, including addresses and types of crime. He began mapping all violent and property crimes, block by block, across the city. "These cops on the streets were saying that crime patterns are changing," he said, so he wanted to look into it.

When his map was complete, a clear if strangely shaped pattern emerged: Wait a minute, he recalled thinking. I see this bunny rabbit coming up. People are going to accuse me of being on shrooms! The inner city, where crime used to be concentrated, was now clean. But everywhere else looked much worse: arrests had skyrocketed along two corridors north and west of the central city (the bunny rabbit's ears) and along one in the southeast (the tail). Hot spots had proliferated since the mid-1990s, and little islands of crime had sprung up where none had existed before, dotting the map all around the city.

Janikowski might not have managed to pinpoint the cause of this pattern if he hadn't been married to Phyllis Betts, a housing expert at the University of Memphis. Betts and Janikowski have two dogs, three cats, and no kids; they both tend to bring their work home with them. Betts had been evaluating the impact of one of the city government's most ambitious initiatives: the demolition of the city's public-housing projects, as part of a nationwide experiment to free the poor from the destructive effects of concentrated poverty. Memphis demolished its first project in 1997. The city gave former residents federal "Section8" rent-subsidy vouchers and encouraged them to move out to new neighborhoods. Two more waves of demolition followed over the next nine years, dispersing tens of thousands of poor people into the wider metro community.

If police departments are usually stingy with their information, housing departments are even more so. Getting addresses of Section 8 holders is difficult, because the departments want to protect the residents' privacy. Betts, however, helps the city track where the former residents of public housing have moved. Over time, she and Janikowski

However, I would say that waaaay more than two pictures are needed in order to compare air quality.

I agree. That's why you should take a look through his blog. He's been posting pictures for a while now. Some days the air is clear such as in the photo at the bottom of this post.

I've been reading this guy's blog off and on because he's posting pictures of the air quality. Compare this picture with this one to see what difference is being made.

I've been reading this guy's blog off and on because he's posting pictures of the air quality. Compare this picture with this one to see what difference is being made.

I've been reading this guy's blog off and on because he's posting pictures of the air quality. Compare this picture with this one to see what difference is being made.

have the DOJ gone after IBM (the IT powerhouse of the 80s)? Because last time i checked you had to do something illegal before they could sue your ass.

Not true at all

Anyone, or any legal entity such as a corporation can be sued at any time for any reason. I am not accusing Google of doing anything more than gaining predominant market share, like Intel, for example, and getting sued for it.

As for the utility of antitrust suits, here's an interesting view.

After I saw an NT beta at COMDEX in the 90s, I speculated that Microsoft would be sued for antitrust by the end of the decade. I thought NT would be successful enough to get the competitors bent out of shape, and sure enough, that is what happened. Don't forget how much Unix cost back then. A low cost 32 bit OS was a disaster for Unix vendors. The huge mistake Microsoft made was to not settle with the DoJ.

Google is not likely to make the same mistake, but ultimately it will come down to which competitors or other interests have better lobbyists than Google, and how politically popular it will be to sue them. On that score, Google is more vulnerable, since they are doing so much tracking of what might be considered personal information. <tinfoilhat>Now imagine there is a future Nixonian US president, one who decides that forcing Google to give up some personal information might be very useful. That would be a good to time for that president to tell his or her AG to threaten Google. The "plumbers" will think: "it got us inside Microsoft, right?</tinfoilhat>

oh man, i tried reading that article and got bored and did something else.

actually, and honestly, i did - and i ended up posting this. hmph... maybe the writer of your linked article has got a point.

*annoyed*

oh man, i tried reading that article and got bored and did something else.

actually, and honestly, i did - and i ended up posting this. hmph... maybe the writer of your linked article has got a point.

*annoyed*

Apparently it's Google's fault. Anybody in for some class action? :)

Right: and now we'll a) stop driving pickup trucks and start driving Priuses and b) coalesce into denser population centers that require less driving, provided we're smart enough to have land use controls that do so. Granted, big coastal cities aren't that smart, but maybe inner America will do better.

Given our record with rail, which exacerbates the size problem you noted, this seems unlikely. But if gas prices rise enough, what seemed unlikely becomes much more palatable, despite people who want to support their lifestyle instead of recognizing the trade-offs inherent in social and political decisions.