Sunday, October 26, 2008
Saturday, October 25, 2008
Looking up
I really like how the taller kid seems to be carrying himself--not boyish at all, well-dressed, holding his ground. I like to think that some day he'll grow up to be someone important--maybe even President--and he will have this remarkable photo of himself intersecting with history.
(PS: the website, Yes We Can (Hold Babies), is pretty hilarious...thanks Lisa for pointing it out to me.)
Friday, October 24, 2008
It reminds one of T. Herman Zweibel
Additional note, about carbon pricing
This is why carbon pricing--i.e., factoring the ecological cost of products into their price via a tax--is such a beautiful idea. What you do is target a few key carbon producers way "upstream" in the chain of production, so that the increased cost of carbon filters down into the price of everything. For example, say you were to slap a carbon tax on barrels of oil sold. This would result in higher prices--and less demand--not just for gasoline, but, say, for a toy manufacturer that transports stuffed dolls halfway around the world in a fuel-ineffecient fleet of boats and trucks. If you slapped a carbon tax on energy, then suddenly everyone's electricity bills would rise and you would see alternative energy sources like solar, wind, gas, and nuclear start to become competitive with coal. Competition in the free market--rather than arbitrary government grants and subsidies--would then determine which alternative energy source becomes dominant. Shopping at the market, you would have to look no further than the price tag to compare the ecological impact of different foods; if a food is very carbon intensive, then this will naturally be reflected in a higher price.
As it is right now, the costs of climate change end up being socialized, because it is tax-payer backed governments that fix (or in the future will fix) the damage. These costs should not remain external to the market, but should instead be internalized into the market, via a carbon tax, so that the costs are distributed proportionately to those who are causing the problem.
Thursday, October 23, 2008
More data
(You may need to click the image to read it without squinting.)
Now, I'm not any kind of trained statistics person but I'm pretty sure that by "normalization by X" they mean the greenhouse gas (GHG) output expressed as a rate of "CO2-equivalent emitted per X". So for example, the second dataset means that red meat results in about twice the amount of GHG per dollar as chicken/fish/eggs--i.e., $5 worth of red meat has the same footprint as $10 worth of chicken/fish/eggs.
I imagine the measure we ought to be most interested in is the GHG per kCal figure (third dataset), since we are trying to figure out how to lessen the GHG impact of our diets regardless of cost and, er, food weight. Viewed this way, cows are definitely the biggest culprit: red meat looks to be about 2.5 times more GHG-intensive per kCal than chicken/fish/eggs, and dairy is slightly worse than chicken/fish/eggs as well. So the biggest gains, it seems, can be had by replacing most of our red meat with white meat or vegetables, and replacing dairy with...not dairy.
(Note: some greenhouse gases affect the climate more than others--hence the generic unit of measurement "CO2e", or CO2-equivalent.)
Anyway, in case all that wasn't very clear, here's the abstract to give you the main idea:
Despite significant recent public concern and media attention
to the environmental impacts of food, few studies in the
United States have systematically compared the life-cycle
greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions associated with food production
against long-distance distribution, aka “food-miles.” We find
that although food is transported long distances in general (1640
km delivery and 6760 km life-cycle supply chain on average)
the GHG emissions associated with food are dominated by the
production phase, contributing 83% of the average U.S.
household’s 8.1 t CO2e/yr footprint for food consumption.
Transportation as a whole represents only 11% of life-cycle
GHG emissions, and final delivery from producer to retail
contributes only 4%. Different food groups exhibit a large range
in GHG-intensity; on average, red meat is around 150% more GHG-
intensive than chicken or fish. Thus, we suggest that dietary
shift can be a more effective means of lowering an average
household’s food-related climate footprint than “buying local.”
Shifting less than one day per week’s worth of calories
from red meat and dairy products to chicken, fish, eggs, or a
vegetable-based diet achieves more GHG reduction than buying
all locally sourced food.
Wednesday, October 22, 2008
Where does he get those wonderful charts?
As you can see, the first three colors--the ones that cover the greenhouse gas impact of the transportation of the food from the farm to the supermarket--are just a small sliver compared to the amount of greenhouse gases emitted during food production. In fact, according to this report, a mere 11% of greenhouse gases emitted because of food consumption are attributable to the transportation of the food. And so this whole "locavore" movement, while tasty, does not have much of a ecological impact.
If you really want to cut back on the ecological impact of your diet, you'd do well to keep cows out of the picture, as they account for about half of all greenhouse gases emitted from food production:
So all you vegetarians out there, this is your free pass to take longer, hotter showers.
Ok that got weird.
EDIT: Eric sensibly asks how much of the total greenhouse gas emissions are caused by food. The report says: "For perspective, food accounts for 13% of every U.S. household's 60 t share of total U.S. emissions; this includes industrial and other emissions outside the home." So food transportation accounts for 11% of 13%, or 1.4% of every U.S. household's emissions.
John Hodgman, member of reality-based community
The thing that I find so compelling is that right now Obama's whole campaign strategy is simply [to] speak to people as though they were adults and trust that the truth of the world situation will be evident to them.... So much of the past eight years in politics, whether you're a Democrat or a Republican, you have to acknowledge is based on what the Bush people to themselves have described outside the reality-based community. That the words they were speaking had no basis in reality and they felt no compulsion to exist in a real world. They were creating a world of their own imagining. They were writing their own book of fake trivia and that's a fine way to make a living, but I don't know that it's a very productive way to run a country. And I think we are seeing the results of that right now. So from a very selfish point of view, I'm enchanted by the idea that a politician can come along and speak simply and clearly and truthfully to an electorate as though they are grown-ups and to feel the electorate respond to that. I've found that to be astonishing and especially now that we are in the end game and you see basically the McCain campaign has nothing left but conspiracy theories to throw at Obama. It really has become a fight between fantasy and reality, and although I don't make my living off of it, I endorse reality.The "reality-based" community concept comes from this famous quote from a Bush aide in the political glory days following 9/11, which appeared in a New York Times Magazine article by Ron Suskind:
In the summer of 2002, after I had written an article in Esquire that the White House didn't like about Bush's former communications director, Karen Hughes, I had a meeting with a senior adviser to Bush. He expressed the White House's displeasure, and then he told me something that at the time I didn't fully comprehend -- but which I now believe gets to the very heart of the Bush presidency.Creepy--and so, so wrong. Has any President been spanked harder and more repeatedly by reality than George W. Bush?The aide said that guys like me were ''in what we call the reality-based community,'' which he defined as people who ''believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.'' I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. ''That's not the way the world really works anymore,'' he continued. ''We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.''
Captcha breaks auto-complete
Tuesday, October 21, 2008
Mac tonight
Tonight, I bought a MacBook--my first Mac ever. So far, so good. Probably the most interesting innovation from a UI standpoint is the buttonless touchpad, which many people fail to realize is itself one big button. It takes a moderate amount of force to push the thing down, but I imagine I'll get used to it soon enough (and if it were too sensitive, that would be really annoying).
Anyway, I certainly see the benefits, from a design perspective, of vertical integration. Everything fits and works together seamlessly, and the machine and OS are gorgeous. And I can readily see how some features, like Spaces and the multi-touch gestures, offer tremendous improvements over Windows.
I'll let you guys know if I come across any issues.
Monday, October 20, 2008
USA #1
Via Warren Ellis (yes, that Warren Ellis).
Our man Rogers
Coolio breaks free. He expands to new territories. He crashes through barriers. Painfully, maybe even.. dangerously, but and...well, there he is.
What the creators of the show didn't realize is that... Coolio can open doors.
EDIT: Via Ezra Klein.
Progressive capitalism
Credit freeze is...melting? So we're starting on a...credit meltdown? Wait
This is good, because the lack of affordable credit (or in some cases the lack of any credit at all) is the actual problem underpinning the financial collapse. Krugman attributes the improvement to the bank recapitalizations by governments around the world, spearheaded by Gordon Brown.
So, if all goes well, Depression II will be averted, and we will undergo a mere run-of-the-mill recession--which sucks, yes, but is better than a whole bunch of people having to live in their cars.
Sunday, October 19, 2008
How can we win when fools can be king? Don't waste your time or time will waste you
And, yes, I will use a fancy-pants Latin phrase whenever the opportunity arises. And, yes, I realize that this is the intellectual equivalent of being one of those guys who wears a hat--i.e., that it doesn't work, it impresses no one, and should be stopped--but I just don't want to face reality on the matter. I obstinately fold my arms and say "qua" thus.
Say hebbo
It's from the Look Around You guys, I believe.
The importance of "intellectual vigor"
One thing I find very interesting is Powell's emphasis on Obama's intellect: his "intellectual curiosity", his "intellectual vigor". Powell cites these things as key because he knows, more than most, that a President that lacks these qualities is one who can be easily manipulated by a small cadre of advisers with sufficient presidential access. This is, in fact, precisely what occurred in the Bush White House during his tenure as Secretary of State.
Let me relate to you an excerpt from the (excellent) book I'm reading, Jane Mayer's The Dark Side, and you'll have an idea of what I mean:
Afghanistan, like the United States, had signed the Geneva Conventions, but the President's lawyers argued that this was of no conern because the country was now a "failed state".So what happened is George W. Bush was given some very radical and unsound advice from a select group of advisers--Dick Cheney, John Yoo, and a few others--and acted on this advice before even seriously entertaining any dissenting arguments. Had Bush taken an interest in the Geneva Conventions or read about them, or had he been pro-active about making sure he has heard all sides of the debate on the issue before issuing a decision, it may well be that the United States never would have abandoned the Conventions.
...
At the State Department, Powell and his legal adviser, William Howard Taft IV [!], fought a rear-guard action against Bush's lawyers and lost. This fierce fight took place almost entirely outside the public's view. In a confidential forty-page memo to [Office of Legal Council lawyer] John Yoo dated January 11, 2002, Taft argued that Yoo's analysis was "seriously flawed." Taft told Yoo that his contention that the President could disregard the Geneva Conventions was "untenable", "incorrect", and "confused." Taft disputed Yoo's argument that Afghanistan, as a "failed state", was not covered by the Conventions. "The official United States position before, during, and after the emergence of the Taliban was that Afghanistan constituted a state," he wrote. Taft also warned Yoo that if the United States took the war on terror outside the Geneva Conventions, not only could U.S. soldiers be denied the protections of the Conventions--and therefore be prosecuted for crimes, including murder--but President Bush could be accused of a "grave breach" by other countries, which would mean he could be prosecuted for war crimes.
...
Taft sent a copy of his memo to [Alberto] Gonzales, hoping that his dissent would reach the President. Within days, Yoo sent Taft a lengthy rebuttal.
...
But Taft's access to the President was no match for that of Cheney, who, as an administration source put it, "always got both the first and last bite of the apple." It remains unclear, in fact, whether anyone ever fully explained the countervailing arguments to President Bush before he signed off on the plan. According to top State Department officials, Bush decided to nullify the Geneva Conventions on January 8, 2002. This was three days before Taft sent his memo to Yoo. Evidently, the State Department was too far out the loop to catch up. [Emphasis mine.]
...
After losing the battle to uphold the Geneva Conventions, Powell concluded that Bush was not stupid but was easily manipulated. A confidant said that Powell thought it was easy to play on Bush's wish to be seen as doing the tough thing and making the "hard" choice. "He has these cowboy characteristics, and when you know where to rub him, you can really get him to do some dumb things. You have to play on those swaggering bits of his self-image. Cheney knew exactly how to push all his buttons," Powell confided to a friend.
Colonel Wilkerson, Powell's chief of staff, was more scathing. "You can slip a lot of crap over on someone who doesn't read a lot or pay attention to the details if you have no scruples," he said.
[Mayer, Jane. The Dark Side, pp. 122-125.]
Undoubtedly, Colin Powell sees Barack Obama's deliberative way of coming to decisions and now-legendary insistence on hearing all sides of an argument as insurance that a President Obama's powers will never be hijacked by a radical faction within his administration. And, just as certainly, he must see John McCain's volatile temperment and impulsive decision-making as antithetical to a properly-functioning Presidency.
PS: Extra props to Powell for going out of his way to reiterate that, not only is Barack Obama not a Muslim, but it is wrong--and un-American--to think that there would be anything wrong with him if he were a Muslim. Also, his story about the Muslim mother weeping at the grave was very powerful, and one I hadn't heard before.
Thursday, October 16, 2008
A time to spend
It’s now clear that rescuing the banks is just the beginning: the nonfinancial economy is also in desperate need of help.It's somewhat counterintuitive but true: federal deficit spending is good in a recession, because it gets money flowing in the economy. Moreover, since lenders have lost confidence in the private banks, they all want to lend to the federal government--even if it means lending at an interest rate of a fraction of a percent. So the government essentially has a credit card with a hyper-low interest rate of, like, 0.15% that it can use to get money flowing in the economy in various ways: by increasing unemployment benefits, by cutting taxes, and by investing in infrastructure improvements. The idea is that you keep spending until the economy recovers, at which point tax revenues also recover and you can balance the budget and pay down the debt.And to provide that help, we’re going to have to put some prejudices aside. It’s politically fashionable to rant against government spending and demand fiscal responsibility. But right now, increased government spending is just what the doctor ordered, and concerns about the budget deficit should be put on hold.
Monday, October 13, 2008
"Guest Week"?!
But what I want to know is, on Friday when the xkcd guy guest-authors--will Alex and Nimesh's heads explode??? Or will they simply think that the strip is of medium quality?
Sunday, October 12, 2008
Reporting the vector
This, I think, contributes to the pendular nature of campaign reporting, where you will get a week or two of coverage that seems to favor one candidate, followed by a subtle shift in positive coverage to the other candidate for a time. At work is a positive feedback loop, similar to the one that drives the booms and busts of a speculative market: positive motion gets reported as positive news, and positive news in turn drives positive motion, and so on, creating a sort of media bubble. But the higher that bubble wafts, the more routine and expected--and not-newsworthy--it becomes that the candidate will do well, thus causing the engine that drives the bubble upward to run out of steam. In the meantime--and because of the zero-sum nature of campaign coverage in a two-party system--expectations for the other candidate will be so low that any modest improvement results in a large vector of movement, which will result in significant positive news, in turn causing more positive motion, etc., until this other candidate becomes the one propelled by a bubble effect.
This process, though, only seems to occur in the absence of hard information that would otherwise be driving each candidate's fortunes. As bloggers like Ezra Klein and Matt Yglesias often observe, what decides elections is not this or that gaffe or campaign ad, but rather external events, like financial collapses or terrorist attacks. But this, again, is similar to what we see in markets: a speculative market occurs when there is uncertainty: people start using the behavior of others as a proxy for real information, piggy-backing on their presumably sound analysis, and the result is a herding effect. But when some real information emerges, the market reacts to it and prices quickly snap to reality. In this campaign, there has been an abundance of "real information" generated by the unfolding economic crisis, and so voters are responding to this rather than piggy-backing on the analysis of campaign reporting. As a result, the fortunes of the candidates has been marked not by the boom-and-bust cadences of campaign reportage, but by the performance of the stock market (which for many is the de facto barometer of economic health), which this chart from Ezra Klein strikingly illustrates:
It is worth mentioning as an aside that all of this explains why the McCain campaign is desperately--and futilely--trying to change the subject away from the failing financial system. So long as the election is determined by outside events, the McCain campaign is powerless to help its candidate win.
Saturday, October 11, 2008
Through the looking glass
Now, though, the whole thing is being taken a step further, because Palin has agreed to do a guest-spot on SNL a week and a half before the election. So the whole thing is sort of upsidedown--as if in the early 90s, Dana Carvey had appeared as George H.W. Bush, but on Meet the Press. Or something.
Friday, October 10, 2008
Thursday, October 9, 2008
Sometimes, America doesn't make any sense
At one point, he had doubted that Obama stood a chance in Glouster. “From Bob and Pete’s generation there are a lot of racists—not out-and-out, but I thought there was so much racism here that Obama’d never win.” Then he heard a man who freely used the “ ‘n’ word” declare his support for Obama: “That blew my theory out of the water.”
In an election between a black man and a white man, even the racists are undecided. Now that's a testament to the weakness of Republican policy proposals.
Showing a little leg
At the town hall debate Tuesday night, Mr. Obama largely stuck to facts, figures, and programmatic detail as he talked about the economy and domestic issues. He didn’t take advantage of the town hall format to show a bit of leg, humanity-wise.
Yeah, Obama should really be showing off those gams--empathy-wise.
Wednesday, October 8, 2008
Debate commentary peeve
Just looking at Sullivan's debate reax summary, we can see a couple of examples:
No heavy punches landed. The format scarcely helped. In fact it helped snuff out any threat of life or spark or conflict or, damn it, interest. And so, because of that, Obama, leading in the polls, won. (Alex Massie)
Gah! If the debate was a tie then it was tie, and nothing about anyone's positions in the polls is relevant to that. What Massie ought to be saying is that Obama's position in the polls makes it the case that a tie is favorable outcome for Obama. One more:
At this stage in the race, a tie goes to leader, and this was not a tie. (Fallows)
Bah! My Philosophy BA is rolling in its grave.
Tuesday, October 7, 2008
Powerful tools
And if you go to their site and use their custom Flash player, you will see that they put the transcript text right along side the video. Moreover, since the transcript and video are synced to the same time line, you can actually search the text and then jump to the corresponding part of the video. It's pretty damn neat (but still Beta--I couldn't get it to work in Firefox but it's fine in IE).
(The video above is tonight's debate, in its entirety.)
EDIT: There is also this curious "time line" view--obviously in need of a real UI--that seems to let you view smaller segments of video. You can link to each segment, but there is no option to embed.
When the economy just stops
Monday, October 6, 2008
Labor pains
(Oh, and while on the topic of baseball: how 'bout them Dodgers? I guess it just goes to show that one team's billy-goat curse is another team's billy-goat blessing.)
Friday, October 3, 2008
Why Bill Simmons continues to hold Most Readable Sportswriter title
Also, I like the idea of going to an IHOP in LA and being like, "Dude, is that Bill Simmons writing a column? Hey Bill, fuck the Celtics!" It would be great.HERM EDWARDS (-3) over the Unintentional Comedy Scale
Did you see the Hermster in the locker room after K.C.'s upset of Denver? If you missed it and want to get a feeling for what happened, scream the next two sentences at the top of your lungs and see how everyone else at work reacts ..."Let's build on that! LET'S BUILD ON THAT!!!!!!"
THE IHOP ON SUNSET & MANSFIELD (+9) over the IHOPs everywhere else in Los Angeles
Right now, I'm writing this column and eating corn pancakes at -- you guessed it! -- the IHOP on Sunset and Mansfield. Two strippers are sitting 10 feet away from me, discussing their next month of gigs and occasionally sneaking me those "If you have enough money on you right now, we might add you to the list of gigs" looks. A group of five hungover guys in their 20s are sitting behind me and recapping last night on the town, which included a bedroom story so over the top that I don't think I could have even printed it on my old Web site. Two tables over, an old lady complained that she ate too much and started coughing/retching, then her nurse provided her a plastic bag and the old lady threw up in it for three solid minutes. If that's not enough, "Even the Nights Are Better" by Air Supply is playing on the jukebox. Top that, every other IHOP in L.A.! Let's build on that! LET'S BUILD ON THAT!!!!!!"
Oh nos
Without credit, people cannot buy cars and houses, and businesses cannot cover operating expenses during a slow period, purchase expensive equipment, or expand (and, of course, entrepreneurs cannot get the loans they need to start new businesses). Ultimately businesses are forced to lay off workers, and consumer spending goes down--which in turn causes businesses to fare even worse and lenders to become even more tight-fisted--a vicious cycle that, if left to go past the point of no return, lands us in a bad recession or even depression.
Hopefully the government's $700 billion investment in the financial system will instill confidence in lenders that their loans will be repaid, and there will be enough affordable credit available to break that vicious cycle before it really gets going.
Wednesday, October 1, 2008
When it's all said and done, you have to admit: Bill Clinton is good
(Hat tip: Coates)