Your head drops back. The snow crunches softly in your ear. In the minus-35-degree air, your core temperature falls about one degree every 30 to 40 minutes, your body heat leaching out into the soft, enveloping snow. Apathy at 91 degrees. Stupor at 90.
You've now crossed the boundary into profound hypothermia. By the time your core temperature has fallen to 88 degrees, your body has abandoned the urge to warm itself by shivering. Your blood is thickening like crankcase oil in a cold engine.
Dr. John Grohol sums up the findings of a new (not very robust) study about online dating. It seems that we aren't very good at evaluating thousands of profiles:
The more our brains have to search through, the more difficult it...becomes to ignore irrelevant information. A person is also more likely to be distracted (or attracted to) attributes that were not initially relevant or pertinent to their original search...The findings will likely ring true to many who have spent a lot of time on the popular online dating websites. While browsing through a million profiles may sound like heaven to some initially, it’s possible that it’ll result in making poorer choices than if you had a much smaller number of profiles to search through in the first place.
In the United States, as in many other countries, our anti-drug policies focus primarily on the supply-side: we go after growers, traffickers, dealers and users. And the United States is especially quick to incarcerate anyone who possesses narcotics, even for relatively minor offenses. The results are almost certainly worse than the problem itself: our policy helps enrich drug lords and make it possible for them to destabilize whole governments, as they are now doing in Mexico and Afghanistan.
Kassia Krozser is tired of the publishing industry not realizing the change that books are undergoing. She reports from SXSW:
At the after-party, one panelist told me that “this is all new to us”. Give. Me. A. Break. It’s only new for those of you who’ve been pretending change is something you get from a dollar bill. Now you’re wondering how to interact with blogs? Now you’re learning that there’s an entire conference devoted to change in the industry?
I’m so sorry, but it must be said. The future of publishing is already happening. People are doing it and they’re doing it really well. If you’re still worried about engaging bloggers, you are worrying about the wrong thing.
If any industry deserves to go under, it's the publishing industry.
Incentives matter. Ideas matter. And all of this war rhetoric and anything-goes policies from elected officials has undoubtedly affected officer psychology, and poisoned the relationships between many police departments and their communities.
This is where Stuntz’s own rhetoric is unhelpful. Chicago isn’t Baghdad. U.S. cities aren’t battlefields, and the cops who patrol city streets aren’t soldiers. Residents of high-crime areas aren’t potential insurgents or enemy combatants. They’re American citizens with constitutional rights. Cops and soldiers have decidedly different missions, and it’s dangerous to conflate them.
Tyler Cowen highlights the most compelling paragraph in an article by Jakob Nielsen about the Kindle:
Letting customers read a book's initial pages for free is a great Kindle innovation and makes good use of the digital medium's ability to dissolve the print requirement to bundle chapters. (Thus, this is a better-than-reality feature.) The innovation will no doubt sell more books — particularly for fiction, where people will want to see what happens next once they're gripped by a story. In fact, for mystery novels, Amazon could probably give away the first 90% for free and charge the entire fee just for the last chapter.
Private prisons are booming, even as prisoners are ailing:
“The more we looked into the situation the more we realized it was a systemic problem,” said [Deborah] Golden, [an attorney with the DC Prisoners Project]. “I suspect that it’s a pattern all over. When you try to run prisons as money makers what you do is cut back on the most expensive thing you can, which is medication and medical care.”
I have a parallel career as a professional
musician and as a piano teacher, and the difference between the two
couldn't be more pronounced.
As a musician, I've gone from playing
maybe five or six gigs a week, and frequently playing two or three
gigs in one day -- in restaurants, bars and at weddings, as well as the
occasional jazz club and concert hall -- to doing one or two a week at
most. It seems to be getting worse too; not counting holidays,
last week was the first time in 7 years that I haven't played a single
gig all week.
On the other hand, with my teaching, I've never been so
busy.
There are plenty of examples of American companies that are making creative use of the crisis. The New York Times had an excellent article on talent scouts on Sunday. But there are equally depressing examples of America bailing out old companies and allocating talent to make-work jobs in the public sector. America's comparative advantage has always lain in its superior ability to make creative use of disruption; if the Chinese are mastering that art, while the Americans are losing their taste for it, then the country really is in trouble.
What I learned from the piece are the limits of Tocquevillian analysis for China, as the recession creates what would normally be a perilous moment for a regime whose legitimacy rests on rising expectations. And yet China is not eighteenth century France:
5. I bought a Times subscription -- even though I already pay for the
print edition -- because the convenience of having the Times
permanently loaded on my Kindle seemed well worth an extra fifteen
bucks. Haven't started paying for blogs yet, but I can imagine with
one-click simplicity that I'll do that as well. If micropayments for
content ever takes off -- the whole iTunes for News model -- I suspect
it'll come in through the back door of the Kindle.
Here's one of the first dog photos ever taken - actually a daguerrotype from the 1850s, to be auctioned off at Sotheby's on March 30:
And here's a stunning series of photos by Dutch photographer, Maarten Wetsema, that shows that some things change, and others definitely do not. My fave after the jump - Jacob in a beanbag.
They're a crude tool with many unintended consequences, as Drezner notes:
Peter Andreas looks at the consequences of the multilateral sanctions directed at the former Yugoslavia during the 1990s and finds a disturbing legacy. Economic sanctions, it turns out, can unintentionally contribute to the criminalization of the state, economy, and civil society of both the targeted country and its immediate neighbors. By trying to evade the sanctions, private entrepreneurs and public officials are encouraged to disregard the rule of law. This fosters an unhealthy symbiosis among political leaders, organized crime, and transnational smuggling networks. These criminal networks can persist even after sanctions are lifted, contributing to public corruption and undermining governance.
Rob Inglis finds problems with nuclear waste reprocessing, i.e. turning radioactive waste into other useful products. The economic snag:
Matthew Bunn calculates that the price of uranium would have to go higher than $360 per kilogram before reprocessing becomes cost-competitive. The current price of uranium is about $100 per kilogram—far below the level at which reprocessing could compete. What's more, Bunn thinks that this price has been significantly inflated by short-term production bottlenecks and is likely to drop in the future.
Here's an interesting discussion of internet porn and the women who engage in it for free:
In the long run online life becomes more pervasive and exciting than
real life, and this causes a fracture. You are spending so much time
online that you are neglecting other aspects of your life. You realize
that it’s increasingly difficult to do both, so you have to decide. You
have to make a choice and leave part of you behind: are you going to
choose your family and your community, or are you going to chose your
expanded, never ending potential to be whoever you want to be? Either
way, it’s damaging and I think it’s particularly damaging for women who
still find themselves in more stringently defined social roles. For
them to choose to abandon those roles, or to choose to decide that they
will give up on online life because of how much it is taking away from
their ‘real life’, both decisions come with significant and often very
painful consequences.
Brains, a puppet from the '60s British TV series Thunderbirds (one of the inspirations for Team America), tries to sell bottled water. In the original, the puppetry was much, much worse and therefore much, much funnier. But there's something very gripping about this - like an Atlantic intern at a rave:
The opening sequence for the original TV series is after the jump. Yours truly collected every single rocket. And, yes, I identified with Brains (and a little bit with Lady Penelope), but what are you going to do? I was eight, gay and living in East Grinstead.
Think of a nationalist Chinese version of Little Green Footballs and you get the picture:
忿青 fen qing * - "angry youth" - is the term given to Chinese Netizens
of a self-righteous and aggressively nationalist tendency. They are
mostly young males with nothing better to do with their time than hang
out online. They infest the blogs and bulletin boards of the Chinese
Internet. And some of the ones with slightly better foreign language
skills stalk the foreign China blogs, looking to pick a fight whenever
somebody dares to make an observation that appears to be "critical" of
China, or challenges the 'orthodox view' on hot topics such as - well,
you know, "The Three T's". If you visit The Peking Duck, one of the
most popular laowai China blogs, you will often find its comment
threads overrun with these dingbats.
It's
stupid, and probably unconstitutional, sure. But it's great because it
gets us past what is, in the big picture, a trivial issue. If the bill
becomes law, Americans can feel like the government did something to
get their money back and we can move on to dealing with real problems.
A lawsuit challenging the bill will follow, and in a year or two, it
will get struck down, and no one will care, because we'll either be on
our way to a recovery, or so deep in shit that we'll have much bigger
problems on our mind.
A correction is required: the American Jewish Committee no longer publishesCommentary. I missed that change which occurred two years ago. The AJC has taken a clear and admirable stand on waterboarding.
[Obama] should be ignoring the Dow. The index has fallen about 50 percent from its closing peak of 14,164 on Oct. 9, 2007. (That was the week the Fox Business Channel debuted. Coincidence? I report, you decide.) Everything about the markets has been chopped in half—their value, their moral authority, and hence their claim on Washington's attention. Having deprived Americans of so much of their wealth, the market is today like Rush Limbaugh: an unpopular loudmouth prone to emotional outbursts.
Dead babies, mothers weeping on their children's
graves, a gun aimed at a child and bombed-out mosques - these are a few
examples of the images Israel Defense Forces soldiers design these days
to print on shirts they order to mark the end of training, or of field
duty. The slogans accompanying the drawings are not exactly anemic
either: A T-shirt for infantry snipers bears the inscription "Better
use Durex," next to a picture of a dead Palestinian baby, with his
weeping mother and a teddy bear beside him. A sharpshooter's T-shirt
from the Givati Brigade's Shaked battalion shows a pregnant Palestinian
woman with a bull's-eye superimposed on her belly, with the slogan, in
English, "1 shot, 2 kills."
Mourners console each other following the funeral of Sapper Patrick Cengiz Azimkar outside the Royal Military Chapel at Wellington Barracks in London, on March 20, 2009. The funeral was held Friday of a second British soldier shot dead in Northern Ireland in an attack that raised fears of a return of violence in the province. Sapper Cengiz 'Patrick' Azimkar, 21, was gunned down outside the Massereene Barracks in Antrim, northwest of Belfast, on March 7 in an attack claimed by a dissident republican group. By Adrian Dennis/AFP/Getty Images.
The government has dictated that nobody at anybody of these companies is deserving of incentive-based compensation, unless their household income is less than $250,000 per year.
Just think about some of the implications of this. A senior engineer at General Motors, who shepherds the production of a new hybrid vehicle that will turn out to be a best-seller, shouldn't get a bonus for that. Really?
This was bad analysis, bad policy, and terrible politics. This administration, elected on the promise of change, has already managed, in an astonishingly short time, to create the impression that it’s owned by the wheeler-dealers. And that leaves it with no ability to counter crude populism.
...in every crisis I’ve ever seen, the (banking/corporate/government) insiders responsible for major problems always want to stay on - arguing that they have unique skills and can sort things out better than anyone else. Countless times around the world I’ve heard some version of, “it’s very complex, no one else can figure it out, and you’ll lose a lot more money unless you keep us on.”
Yet, whenever possible, it’s better to clean house and bring in new talent at all levels to wind down bad business and more generally clean up/recapitalize/reprivatize the financial sector.
I'm taking the path of least crankiness in the early days of this new Administration. Sure, I'm worried that Obama isn't dealing decisively enough with the banking crisis--but, on the other hand, this is uncharted territory and maybe a cautious, case-by-case strategy will prove to be the right one. And yes, I'm worried that Obama is deferring a bit too much to the snails and toads (of both parties) in the Congress--but, on the other hand, savvy aides like Joe Biden, Rahm Emanuel and congressional liaison Phil Schiliro will focus and massage the legislative packages that will be forthcoming. It is entirely possible, as this magazine surmised last week, that Obama has taken on too much, too soon. Or maybe not.
Any attempt to predict the success or failure of the last two administrations at this point in their terms would have been wrong. I'm watching but refusing to pounce. They deserve a little time and a little patience.
In response to your recent post, "Prohibition Withers," let me preface this by saying that I am not a doctor, but a 21 year old medical researcher and biochemistry student. With regard to marijuana, I hold no abject feelings toward its use. I personally do not use it, but have had many friends that do and my response is a resounding, "Meh." It doesn't bother me. I am all for the legalization and taxation of marijuana. While it is not without adverse effects, they seem to me to be no worse than tobacco and alcohol, if not less so.
That said, as a Michigan resident, I opposed the medicinal marijuana law for a few reasons.
"The fact is, the marijuana law in the U.S. is a big lie. It's racist and
classist. White rich people can smoke marijuana with impunity and poor black
people get a record, can't get education, can't get a loan, and all of sudden go
into a life of desperation and become hardened criminals. Why? Because we've got
a racist law based on lies about marijuana.
There's 80,000 people in jail today for marijuana. We arrested 800,000 people
in the last 12 months on marijuana. Even in my rich little white suburban
community of Edmonds, Wash., 25 percent of police action is marijuana-related.
Everybody knows it's silly. I'm not saying I'm pro-drug. I'm just saying it's
parallel to alcohol prohibition. When they rescinded the laws against alcohol,
nobody said booze is good, they just said it was stupid to make it a crime, that
you're creating organized crime and people are dying," - Rick Steves, broadcaster and travel guru.
...there should be no new regulatory measures until the depression reaches bottom and recovery begins (not that there can be certainty about when that point has been reached--there were several false bottoms in the 1930s depression). Any regulatory initiatives at this time will simply increase the already great uncertainty in which the financial industry is operating; and as Keynes pointed out, anything that increases uncertainty in a depression causes hoarding, which can in turn precipitate a deflation likely to deepen and protract an economic downturn.
A lot of people, myself included, spent a lot of time in 2007 and 2008 observing that a lot of the old gaps inside the progressive camp had narrowed or vanished since the 1990s. But I think the Panic of ‘08 is tending to reopen a new gap. On the one hand you have people basically inclined toward [Michael Hiltzik’s opinion] that a lot of the people making the big bucks for the past 10 years are basically scammers who lucked into the ability to siphon tons of money out of the economy without really doing anything useful or valuable, and between people who think that they’re genuinely smart hard-working people who just happen to deserve to pay somewhat more in income taxes than they currently do.
In other words, was Madoff really a black hat among honest businessmen, or was he just one unusually crude player amidst a rotten crowd?
Like most Dish features, this one was inspired by readers. Rod Dreher likes the feature and offers a few of his own anecdotes. And otherwebsitesare starting their own recession projects. The Atlantic's tech department tells the Dish team that these items are consistently among the most trafficked on the blog - so if you send us your reflections, know they are being spread far and wide. And thanks for sharing the pain.
Within academia (or at least, for graduate students), this recession has been brewing for a LONG time.
I received a Master’s in political science (Dean’s Citation, no
less) from a big state school in 2007, with hopes of either getting
into a PhD program or going to work for the US government or an NGO. I
was turned down from every school I applied to, despite a 1500+ on my
GRE and a 3.9 GPA at my Master’s program. Moreover, no one was hiring
for entry level positions anywhere. I took to temping and part-time
teaching to get by. I tried to be frugal and keep out of debt, but it
was very difficult with a wife who was unwilling to hold on to a job.
A divorce later, I’m deeply in credit card debt and accruing more student loan debt (at a professional Master’s this time) ...
Jonathon Taylor finds a 1947 short story in the New Yorker that depicts a British policeman in Libya, who waterboarded a prisoner:
And, after an episode with a gruesome technique using "what looked
like a pair of handcuffs," described with clinical expertise by the
narrator, produced no results,
Captain Westcott told one of the guards to get some water.
When the policeman returned with two bottles of water, the prisoner was
stretched out on the floor, face up, with one guard holding his feet
and another on each of his arms. The guard with the water tipped the
Arab's head back and began to pour water down his nose. The man
thrashed and gagged, and then retched. He was literally drowning.
Westcott told the men to stop. The guards pulled the man to his feet. He
nodded his head when the Captain asked if he was ready to confess.
James Maxwell's book was reviewed by Anatole Broyard in Commentary - back when the American Jewish Committee despised torture, rather than embracing it in the era of the Podhoretz dauphin.
Last night the Dish updated its blogroll to include new voices and cleared out the deadwood (dormant blogs). Due to current events, special attention was paid to economic bloggers.
If you are new to these here internets, it's not a bad place to start. The box is called "Blog Love" and it's down there on the right.
"Let’s get back to what I regard as a fundamental issue here. I
know it’s politically unpopular, politically incorrect. I know it goes
against all of the populist indignation that’s out there right now.
But you can’t really, it seems to me, expect that these Wall Street
companies are going to be run well by a bunch of people who don’t make
more than $250,000," - CNBC host, Mark Haines.
I'd buy this argument if these very well-paid individuals had shown minimal ethics or competence. Or does that require even more money?
Who would I like to see in the Kristol slot? Actually, Kristol. I was
livid when they gave him the job, but he was perfect: a dull, complacent
apparatchik who set forth the Bush line in all its fact-free glory. His
columns were like press releases--you could hardly remember them two
minutes after reading them. But his presence on the page reminded
readers that David Brooks is not really what Republicanism is all about.
I feel the same way about the tax even if it only applies to bonuses, because then it is preposterously easy to get around (just raise base salary) and will be almost equally bad for the companies (pay will no longer will pay have anything to do with performance, and the best folks will still leave.)
I need to come up with a new term for the straight guys who are now more comfortable with homosexuality than many gay ones. You have any suggestions? Hobros? Paul Rudd - who is as attractive as he is unfunny in my book - sure qualifies:
"We want someone nerdy. Bookish. Probably wears Chuck Taylors. Can make jokes about the fact that he's listening to the new Fleet Foxes CD. Maybe a little fey. I love straight guys that seem gay. I'm a little like that."
You realize again from this speech just how utterly different the rationale was for the war at the start than it is now: to "defend the world from grave danger." There was no grave danger. How the US government could have been so incompetent in making such a serious charge remains bewildering to me. How I was so credulous still shames me.
Simon Johnson and James Kwak want some transparency:
If A.I.G. wants to argue that complex transactions, hedging positions and counterparty relationships require employees who are intimately familiar with those trades, it should at least provide evidence that the arguments for doing so are sounder than the ones made in Indonesia in 1997, when leading bank-owning conglomerates claimed that only they understood their financing arrangements, which certainly were complex. Or the Russian bankers in 1998 who were convinced that only they and their friends could possibly close the deals that they had taken on. We heard variants of the same idea in Poland in 1990, Ukraine in 1994 (and in the Ukrainian crises subsequently), and Argentina in 2002.
Any grain of truth in these arguments must be weighed against the costs of allowing discredited insiders to manage institutions after they have blown them up.
March 15, 2009 - March 21, 2009
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