Abe Tries Again

On No-Brainers

2011-11-04T22:13:00.000-07:00

"Can anyone seriously deny that our political system is being warped by the influence of big money, and that the warping is getting worse as the wealth of a few grows ever larger?" - Paul Krugman, Oligarchy, American Style

Most Americans agree we should tax the wealthy. The evidence from economics is overwhelming: they can afford it, we need the money, having such a distorted income distribution is bad for the democracy we say we care about. So why do the people who say otherwise get taken seriously without having any real evidence?

Laziness among reporters really can't be the explanation: most reporters work their asses off. They hustle getting stories, getting clicks, reading and writing about what's going on day in and day out. They're some of the most informed people I've ever met.

It's not fear of controversy, either. The media loves controversy, because when people are talking about you they're talking about you which means reading you which means seeing the ads that pay your salary. FOX News has demonstrated pretty clearly that you make more money by taking a stand than you do by refusing to. And why would it be bad for business to take up with the more popular side of the debate?

I really don't believe it's fear of losing advertisers. Those folks want their ads to be seen, that's their entire occupation. They've never shied away from advertising heavily to conservatives, precisely because doing so makes them money. They'd make money from a well-run, popular liberal outlet; in fact, many probably already do.

Are businesses and advertisers afraid of what would happen if people were exposed to a default consensus that skewed to the left? Perhaps, but they don't seem thrilled with the direction a conservative consensus is taking us. These are (allegedly) pragmatic businesspeople, they know the costs of ignoring the environment and their bottom line is getting hammered by the recession. Granted they love their tax breaks, but their love for the GOP isn't infinite.

So why is the default consensus that raising taxes on the rich is, at best, controversial (instead of a no-brainer)? I think it's ultimately about a very human logical fallacy: if two people I know to be opposed to each other tell me something, I know that they both have an incentive to lie and so I'll just assume the truth lies somewhere in the middle. But that only helps me find the truth if both sides are wrong.

Occupy Storify

2011-11-04T00:11:00.001-07:00

#occupythenews - http://storify.com/storify/occupied-storified

Xavier Damman (@xdamman), Storify Technology is not enough. People who can make sense of all these voices.

In the house: Deborah Petersen (@DeboraPetersen), SJ Mercury News/BA News Group How we use socme to deliver to our readers. Love Storify; also use FB but don't find it "as timely"; love tumblr. Trying to use G+, much better for biz reporters than general audience b/c of population of users on it.

Tasneem Raja (@tasneemraja), Mother Jones How mojo uses storify to cover #ows. "Game-changer" for us. Storify is like real-time notebook for reporters; what would have stayed in their pages is now available to anybody. Problem w/OWS: leaderless, planned/executed on the fly, independently, tons of cities in real-time, no pr flacks (ok not a problem), tons of journos on ground...storify helps you do journalism "asynchronously". Surprised how much I've been talking on the phone to our reporters.

Angela Woodall (@angelawoodall), Oakland Tribune Storify allows us to use their words (meaning subjects of reporting who previously saw bias in reporting). Standards are same for us in Storify as in print.

Ellen Cushing (@elcush), EBExpress

Susan Mernit (@susanmernit), Oakland Local Pros who publish 3-5 stories/day plus huge outpouring of community writers. Printed occupy page

Carly Schwartz (@carlicita), HuffPo SF

Ian Hill (@ianhillmedia), KQED Why are you involved in socmed X? You just are, and can struggle to justify that to managers who don't get it. 18 newscasts a day! News orgs in this area? WORK WITH THESE STARTUPS! Nobody in the country has better access to cooler tech companies to partner with!

How do you verify? You just do, if something in the pit of your stomach feels wrong, don't do it. You have to do some; twitter is great but call the guy at the Port and ask him to confirm. There's no substitute for experience.

"Hello, I'm Andrew Fitzgerald, from Twitter; quick question..."

A Serious Proposal

2011-04-06T13:40:00.000-07:00

Here's the Democratic plan to save America from fiscal ruin. Unlike Paul Ryan's plan, it adds up, doesn't make insane assumptions about < 3% unemployment, and would be good public policy to boot:

1. Institute a carbon tax. Would raise a ton of money and help fight climate change, while making American energy policy more rational (since it prices an externality) and making American clean energy companies more viable.

2. Allow the government to negotiate prescription drug prices. RX prices are one of the costliest parts of Medicare/Medicaid, and the only reason the government can't negotiate for better prices is because drug companies have expensive lobbyists.

3. End the Bush tax cuts. This would cut the projected future deficit in half at once, and return us to the fiscal insanity of the last decade in which we balanced the budget and created a ton of jobs, while shifting a small portion of the burden for paying for government back to the people who can afford to pay for it.

4. Cut defense spending dramatically. We don't need to spend more than every other country on earth combined, and yet we (almost) do. That's absurd, insane, wasteful and encourages all kinds of abuse, fraud and waste in the defense industry.

So, media: you now have a Democratic plan that is at least as "serious" and "bold" as the Ryan plan, but that actually addresses a variety of other long-term challenges we face, and on top of which probably saves more money while not impoverishing seniors. Feel free to report on it.

No credit for the easy answers

2011-01-25T23:02:00.000-08:00

The execrable Joe Lieberman is retiring, thank God. This comes soon after his hard work on the right side of repealing Don't Ask, Don't Tell, which is causing some liberals to wonder if he deserves his awful reputation among the left. They argue that Lieberman has actually voted with Democrats much more often than he's voted against them, and that his demeanor and not his substantive positions are the cause of most of the hatred his critics display.

Giving him credit for his votes on climate change, gays in the military and the stimulus is a bit like praising someone for voting against a bill that would legalize beating the elderly with baseball bats for sport: it's great that he got it right, but getting a vote like that right is kind of the basic test that any reasonable adult, let alone a member of such an august body as the Senate, ought to be able to pass. Climate change, gay rights and the stimulus are not "tough" votes. They may be "controversial" issues, but there really isn't any actual controversy to speak of: there are people with facts on one side, and people with bigoted and/or misinformed and/or corrupt opinions on the other.

The fact that our political culture is in the midst of a years-long debate about whether climate change is real (or whether gay people should be allowed to die for their country, or whether government spending in a recession is a good idea) does not in any way alter the reality of climate change (or gay rights or stimulus.) We can debate it all we like, but that doesn't give both sides equal legitimacy. I may dispute that the Bears lost to the Packers last weekend, because I desperately wish it were not true; but that does not make it untrue, and you should not give my opponents any credit for being right on this issue.

Of course it's convenient that I believe the political positions I hold are the objective truth, at least in the three cases cited above. I'm sure a conservative could easily be found who would believe the opposite of what I do, and with equal certainty. But that's irrelevant: I'm right, and that person is wrong. Unless you believe Derrida was right, at some point there must be things that are objectively true, in politics as in anything else. Find me one cogent argument against the reality of anthropogenic climate change, or the rightness of depriving gay people their civil liberties: there is none, and the conservative movement has never even attempted to provide one. The stimulus debate is a bit more uneven, I'll concede, but even USA Today admits that "Eighteen months later, the consensus among economists is that the stimulus worked in staving off a rerun of the 1930s."

One might object that, nevertheless, there was political controversy surrounding many of the votes that Joe Lieberman got right. But what was at risk for Lieberman if he picked the less popular side in any of those votes? He'd probably make more money after he left office, and besides, isn't the whole point of sending representatives to Washington that they're going to make tough decisions that we as a populace wouldn't make? Have our standards sunk so low that we're willing to praise the guy who did the absolute bare minimum that we asked of him?

Actually, the answer to that one is probably yes. But I'll retain my scorn for Lieberman anyway.

Strange loop

2011-01-06T12:30:00.000-08:00

The President's old Chief of Staff left to run for Mayor of Chicago. The President's new Chief of Staff is the brother of the current (and longest-serving) Mayor of Chicago, son of the second-longest-serving Mayor of Chicago, and would easily be the frontrunner to be the next Mayor of Chicago if he wanted the job.

SQUEEEEEEAL

2010-12-28T11:03:00.001-08:00

EZRA KLEIN RETWEETED ME!

This post will make no sense to me when I reread it in 20 years.

How WikiLeaks could lead to a more transparent state

2010-12-01T12:35:00.000-08:00

Unusually for Ross Douthat, he makes some pretty compelling points in his blog post on the retrenchment of the secret security state post-WikiLeaks. Everything that he says is pretty plausible, and it's something I've been struggling to come to terms with myself: I think WikiLeaks is incredibly important, Julian Assange is a hero, and this kind of disclosure is long overdue for a purportedly open, democratic state like ours.

However, it's certainly the case that the easiest reaction to this will be to clamp down on internal document security, making it harder and less likely for future leaks to occur. So you could credibly argue that WikiLeaks actually makes the US government less transparent in the future, not more.

The problem with that argument is that it sacrifices the good on the altar of the perfect: what would Douthat, or any of WikiLeaks' critics, do to actually improve the state of government transparency? Would we even be having this debate? Would the idea that the federal government needs to stop classifying everything in sight be on anyone's radar right now? And doesn't that mean that it's even more likely that transparency will wither and die in a world without organizations like WikiLeaks, to keep us focused on the real problems with overclassification?

There's really no way we can design a system of transparency and openness that won't eventually be corrupted by the elites we put in charge of our national security. The best we can do really is to keep making this a public priority, keep talking about it, keep worrying about it, and keep doing whatever we can to encourage governmental transparency. Criticizing WikiLeaks for making a future government clampdown on embarrassing documents more likely is misguided, because it implies that that government clampdown isn't already happening.

In other words, Ross Douthat: Don't just tut-tut about the naivety of Julian Assange, without proposing something better. Otherwise you sound even more unaware of the world around you than you claim Assange is.

For all his faults...

2010-11-14T09:05:00.001-08:00

I'm still incredibly proud that we elected Barack Obama:

Occam's Elections

2010-11-03T14:44:00.000-07:00

On election day, two worlds collide: the tiny, Plutonian rock made up of people who care about issues, politics, policy, parties and what happens in Washington smacks straight into the Jupiterian gas giant of actual voters who just don't know that much, and whose behavior is often fairly straightforward to predict.

The first dirty little secret of campaigns is that campaigns don't actually matter. By extension, all the political posturing surrounding them - "should we stage a vote on this bill, in order to force the other party to defend it in November? Is the election a big defeat for Democrats, a big victory for Republicans, or both?" - is also meaningless. This renders the lives and occupations of thousands of influential pundits, politicians, consultants and staffers irrelevant - which is why you never hear this point of view in the media. The media is heavily invested in the idea that political coverage is "serious" and so they take great pride in it, but the reality is that nobody watches it (look at FOX or MSNBC's ratings if you disagree - FOX was the 5th most-watched cable network a few weeks before an election; MSNBC, the second most popular news network, came in 24th, 12 places behind SYFY).

Sure, campaigns matter in individual races - Angle lost in NV even though a standard-issue Republican almost certainly would have won, and I'm sure you can find instances of a particularly well-run campaign winning a close race that they should have lost. But as Matt Yglesias points out, American elections (particularly Presidentials, but also the broad outcomes of midterms (instead of individual matchups)) are really pretty predictable. Typically, even if your staff is pretty smart and your tactics shrewd, the other side has a pretty smart staff and pretty shrewd tactics as well.

Think of it like baseball's Value Over Replacement Player (VORP): in a competition, all that matters is the difference between you and your opponent. At the highest levels, both of you are pretty formidable competitors, so most of your individual greatness cancels out. So the significance of, say, that amazing get-out-the-vote drive you're so proud of isn't that you registered 2 million voters; it's that you registered 100,000 more than would have otherwise done so.

The second dirty little secret of campaigns is that most voters don't know much. Voters, in the aggregate, are morons. Consider that 2/3 of voters thought either bankers or the GOP were responsible for the sorry shape of the economy, and yet Republicans won more House seats than they have since at least the 1940s. Those who said bankers were to blame voted 11% more for Republicans - the party of, by and for bankers. In California, Democrats ran the table by more than 10 points in every major statewide race - except Attorney General, where Steve Cooley and Kamala Harris are less than 1% apart. That means there had to have been hundreds of thousands of voters who voted largely Democratic, except for Cooley - a strident conservative. This doesn't make any sense at all, unless you assume that voters are stupid.

This might sound harsh, but it's been proven to be true in every single election ever: here's some more recent evidence. California's proposition system is also submitted for your consideration in this regard.

Most voters (whether or not they know it) are low-information, whose voting behavior is highly predictable in the aggregate and therefore more or less entirely independent of anything Democrats or Republicans actually do. That's why the second half of last week's This American Life is so painful to listen to - this guy is getting so worked up over the kind of small-bore tactics that just don't matter, and an election that was essentially decided the day after Obama was elected. Keep that in mind as you watch pundits, Republicans and conservative Democrats draw "lessons" from the results of last night.

EDIT: Yglesias feels me.

Last Night

2010-11-03T10:34:00.000-07:00

While they were definitely disappointing, let's also not make too big a deal of the Democratic defeats last night: Republicans were always going to do well, and two successive Democratic "wave" elections meant there were a lot of Democratic seats that really had no business being Democratic. Couple that with a typical midterm slump, ridiculously high unemployment and not much to excite the Democratic base, and it's no surprise what happened.

Three of the last three elections have now been "wave" elections, and at some point that term has to stop meaning something. It's pretty clear that at this point, Congressional elections have been highly nationalized - if Democrats are doing well, Dems will win a ton of seats without regard for much of what's happening in those individual districts. That might be a sign of something, or it might just be noise.

It's also sad to see Prop 19 go down, and particularly because it doesn't look like it really brought a high level of young voters to the polls, which had been my hope. But 2012 will be a very different election, with Obama back on the ballot and hopefully a reinstatement of gay marriage as well, so the electorate voting in California in 2012 will be vastly more predisposed to legalize marijuana than this one. 46% is a great place to build from, and considering this was our first bite at the full-legalization apple in decades, and considering there was basically no money behind this proposition until the very end, I'd say we're in pretty good shape.

Hah!

2010-10-25T14:11:00.000-07:00

Glenn Greenwald is the best political writer in the Americas today

2010-10-22T13:35:00.000-07:00

"And then there's the more amorphous but arguably more significant self-justifying benefit that comes from condemning "Muslims" for their violent, extremist ways. I'm always amazed when I receive e-mails from people telling me that I fail to understand how Islam is a uniquely violent, supremely expansionist culture that is intrinsically menacing. The United States is a country with a massive military and nuclear stockpile, that invaded and has occupied two Muslim countries for almost a full decade, that regularly bombs and drones several others, that currently is threatening to attack one of the largest Muslim countries in the world, that imposed a sanctions regime that killed hundreds of thousands of Muslim children, that slaughters innocent people on a virtually daily basis, that has interfered in and controlled countries around the world since at least the middle of the last century, that has spent decades arming and protecting every Israeli war with its Muslim neighbors and enabling a four-decade-long brutal occupation, and that erected a worldwide regime of torture, abduction and lawless detention, much of which still endures. Those are just facts."

It's the politics, not the policy

2010-10-22T08:09:00.000-07:00

The controversy over Don't Ask, Don't Tell is a perfect illustration of what the Obama Administration has gotten right the last two years, and where it still falls short. To begin with, they're absolutely correct on the policy merits: DADT must be defended vigorously by the Justice Department, unless there is no conceivable case for its constitutionality. While I believe it's definitely a bad policy, and quite possibly unconstitutional, I concede that an argument could be made against the latter. To therefore refuse to defend the policy, or to give it a halfhearted defense, would be an abject rejection of why Obama's election seemed so important: defending DADT while attempting to repeal it in Congress is the mature, adult, responsible, pragmatic and long-term-oriented decision.

Not only would refusing to defend a potentially-constitutional policy be a terrible precedent (what future constitutionally-valid policies would you like to see a Republican president fail to defend, if you disagree?), it's not just about precedent. One of many reasons our government is so broken is that it operates with a complex system of unwritten rules, and when those rules are violated, the country becomes harder to govern. For instance, while it's been possible to mount a filibuster for a century, it's been rare up until now because of those unwritten rules, and the current despicable Congress is a direct result of abandoning that system of genteel restraint. Presidents defending laws with which they disagree, while seeking to repeal them, is likewise a very important part of that tradition.

Perhaps more significantly for some, it makes much better long-term sense to repeal DADT through Congress. Doing otherwise would further entrench the notion that democracy is being subverted by an activist judiciary. It would leave DADT on the books, just waiting to be reinstated by a single judge who decided that, oh look, it actually is constitutional after all. It would keep GLBT soldiers in a much more precarious situation, knowing that if they disclose their sexuality, all that stands between them and discharge is a single federal judge, somewhere in the country. It would waste an opportunity for the public to express its will that Don't Ask, Don't Tell no longer should be the law of the land. It would violate what I imagine is the deal Obama made with the military, to work towards repeal and not do it overnight. And ultimately, as a law passed by Congress, the most appropriate way to reverse it would be for Congress, which initially created the injustice, to do it themselves.

What I find so illustrative about this situation, however, is that the Obama Administration is doing the right thing, and doing it in such a way as to send the biggest "fuck you" possible to its base at the same time, without even attempting to ameliorate the damage and for no good reason. I think the policy merits of this approach are something the left generally could be completely convinced to believe, if anyone in the Obama Administration had made the slightest attempt to do so. Instead, they've hunkered down and complained, as always, that their base - which currently believes it's getting reamed yet again by the Administration they elected - is whiny. This is just a stupid reaction, and the fact that they're doing it yet again just unnecessarily increases the frustration on the left, a week and a half before the midterm elections. This is such a huge unforced error that it beggars belief.

Compounding the situation, the person the Administration has sent to defend the policy is perhaps the person in the White House least suited to do so right now. Valerie Jarrett, who just last week referred to a dead gay teenager as having made a "lifestyle choice", has a serious credibility problem on this issue at the moment. Being gay is as much a "lifestyle choice" as being white or black, and to use that term as the Administration's senior GLBT outreach advisor is completely tone-deaf. To then send her out to defend the Administration's DADT policy, a policy they had to know would be extremely unpopular with a community that they have gone out of their way not to do any favors for since being elected, is just stupid. To so aggressively attempt to undermine any enthusiasm for Democrats among a substantial portion of their base a week and a half before the election hurts my brain.

But at this point, it's no surprise to see this White House get the policy right and the politics wrong. And frankly, after having spent the previous 8 years doing the exact opposite, I guess I can live with this arrangement.

Best political ad since...

2010-10-21T21:36:00.000-07:00

Despite disagreeing wildly with the content, this really is one of the best political commercials of the decade:

In fact, I can't remember an ad I liked more than this one. As James Fallows notes, it evokes a foreign menace so pitch-perfectly, not as a threat in themselves but as the beneficiaries of mistakes we make ourselves, that it's remarkable for that fact alone. But it's also the production values, the art direction, the vision of the future 20 years from now (I want a future iPad!)...

Seriously, what was the last political ad this great? I really can't think of one, and I suspect that's because of Citizens United - CAGW was able to spend God knows how much money on it, and what they got was expensive, high commercial art. Since money's always been such a tight constraint on political organizations, they've always had to get cheapo commercials, with tacky, unoriginal visuals, cheesy music and voiceovers, and no imagination.

The artistry of political ads is, of course, not quite worth the further corporate capture that Citizens provided our democracy. But I guess it's a nice side benefit.

Boxer - Fiorina Liveblog

2010-09-01T19:20:00.001-07:00

Got here a little late, but looks like this one is going to be bloody! Boxer takes a swing at Fiorina's "making no sacrifices" by taking $100M from HP while laying off thousands.

And now here's a question from a former HPer! SNAP!

7:21 - Fiorina pivots and makes the question about what she'll do to compete with China, Brazil and Texas. Well done.

7:22 - Now a pay-for-performance question about her $21M severance after HP's stock got killed. Nice! Fiorina claims "every dollar [I received] was tied to performance," and throws out some nice stats, but I don't think she can save this one. Boxer gleefully tries to jump on it and completely whiffs. Boxer is trying so hard to make this about jobs, and she's got some substantive points but they just don't land.

7:23 - Why did you say something mean to a general? WTF? I guess the question makes her sound a bit arrogant and elitist, but it's kind of left-fieldish. Her answer's ok, but the question is strange. Fiorina doesn't really know what to do with the question, so Fiorina tries to get mad about Boxer "using" HP as a "political football" - that makes no sense (isn't Fiorina only running because she was HP's CEO? Doesn't that make it just a little bit relevant?)

7:28 - Prop 8 question. Fiorina defends DOMA. Jerk. The voters "were quite clear" on Prop 8, and for that decision to be overturned by "a single judge"...yeah man, she's right! Fuck separation of powers! Fuck the Constitution! Especially when it means that two dudes can get a marriage license!

7:31 - What do you disagree with Obama on? Come on, Babs, hit him from the left! So far so good...Afghanistan exit strategy, Elizabeth Warren appointment. Fiorina again with the "only 4 bills" argument - that's pretty hard to believe, it's gotta be a bunch of procedural junk.

7:37 - Over 100 "Boxer provisions" on her website! Well then! And now she's on to Schoolhouse Rock.

7:40 - Fiorina FINALLY makes it about unemployment - what the hell took her so long?

7:42 - Yeahhhhh! Fiorina wants more money for Berkeley! Locavore weed for all! Wait...

7:43 - Do you support Prop 23? *HEM**HAW**HRM* You mean AB 32? I guess my opponent is kinda used to creating jobs in China. SNAAAAAAAAAAAP!

7:48 - Soooo...Carly Fiorina's explanation for why she wants to allow people on the no-fly list to have guns is that she pals around with terrorists?

First-to-market with Democracy

2010-08-04T08:28:00.000-07:00

People like Wilbur Ross, who argue America is about to become a "second-rate country," are wrong. It's not that the United States is slipping into mediocrity; rather, America's failure has become more interesting than America's success. In reality, the United States is the most prosperous nation on the planet, and that's unlikely to change anytime soon.

So why do people constantly make this argument? Aside from the fact that it's always easier to see your own flaws than anyone else's - that's the "grass is always greener in China" argument - the reason is simple: America has been so successful for so long that American success isn't fun to talk about anymore. People prefer reading about some young upstart working their ass off to steal first place than they do reading the same story about the frontrunner maintaining their lead.

In a sense, America has been the frontrunner for a very long time - you could date it all the way back to our founding at the end of the century. As the first large-scale democratic country, we've been the model for countries and revolutions for three centuries now. We weren't the richest or most powerful country on earth for the first two centuries of our existence, but we were always the first democracy. And that was both a blessing (then) and a curse (now).

As George Packer's recent New Yorker article demonstrates, our governing institutions are largely operating under rules that have been in place for, literally, centuries. When we were competing with countries ruled by kings, that was less of an issue. But now, other countries have remade themselves in our image, decades and centuries after we first did, and were able to take our best ideas while discarding our worst. In essence, they're running more recent upgrades of our democratic operating system, while we're still running the original version with some patches here and there - a system that was state-of-the-art 200 years ago, but that is beyond showing its age today.

There are many examples of these phenomena in today's technology industry, where change happens with a rapidity that seems like history on fast-forward. Microsoft, for instance, was first to market with a cheap personal computer operating system. They minted money for decades, but the initial blessing of being first-to-market became a burden, as they remained tied to decisions made in the 1980s - or at least to perceptions formed of them at that time. They continue to mint money today, but are struggling with a corporate culture that's become ossified and a series of products that have all sorts of legacy problems baked into them. If they could start over from scratch today, without any of their dominant positions in software but also without all the strategy taxes and legacy issues that plague a company that's been releasing products for decades, they'd be a totally different institution.

There's another similarity between Microsoft and the US: Microsoft has an ungodly amount of money, and is bringing in ridiculous amounts even today. The technology press loves to write stories about their demise, and has largely written them off, but in reality 99% of companies in America would absolutely love to be in the position Microsoft is in. In Microsoft's case, the story that's fun to read and write isn't the same as the story that resembles reality, however dull.

The same is true of Google (my employer). As the first company to really make money off the Internet, Google was a really great story for years - a fast-growing, hungry tech wunderkind that could do no wrong. But after a while, the sheen wore off, and the same company that inspired such glowing press started inspiring legions of articles about how it had lost its edge, was being supplanted by competitors like Facebook and Twitter, and just wasn't cool anymore. And yet, Google makes tons of money, and 99% of American companies would love to be Google.

So it is with the United States. We're an enormous country, operating on a scale matched only by China and India, but we're also totally industrialized and extremely prosperous. Demography alone guarantees that our economy will be the biggest in the world for at least another decade or two, and unless we totally melt down, we should be the biggest for longer than that. But people love to write about our decline, because it's so much more interesting than our maintenance of a dominant position. You can't be the young upstart forever - we were once, but are no longer, and until we have another revolution and become reborn, we're only going to be getting older and older (until we have a "second act" and briefly become sexy to write glowingly about.)

They had our backs; let's get theirs!

2010-03-22T14:41:00.000-07:00

Last night, Congress made history by passing the most comprehensive health care reform in nearly 50 years. For some representatives, a "yes" vote meant they were standing up for 32 million uninsured Americans in the face of a tough re-election fight. Health Care Reform was passed with only 3 votes to spare, which means every single one of those votes was essential - but it could cost these representatives their jobs.

They did the right thing anyway, and that's exactly why they need to be sent back to Congress for another term. We can help make that happen, by giving just a few dollars to any or all of them - they're going to need every penny. No matter how little you can afford to give, it'll make a difference by showing them, their constituents and the media that this was the right thing to do. Their opponents are going to make literally millions of dollars in contributions off of these gutsy votes. Let's get their backs, like they just got ours.

Here's the list of the most vulnerable Democrats to vote yes, from FiveThirtyEight.com (list was compiled before the vote; Space voted no). And here's the roll call vote from last night.

Donation pages for the 20 most vulnerable Democrats voting Yes on Health Care Reform:

Betsy Markey - CO 4th
Suzanne Kosmas - FL 24th
Earl Pomeroy - ND At Large
Brad Ellsworth - IN 5th
Tom Perriello - VA 5th
Baron Hill - IN 9th
John Spratt - SC 5th
Mark Schauer - MI 7th
Chris Carney - PA 10th
John Boccieri - OH 16th
Alan Grayson - FL 8th
Kendrick Meek - FL 17th, running for Senate
Mary Jo Kilroy - OH 15th
Paul Hodes - NH 2nd, running for Senate
Harry Mitchell - AZ 5th
Carol Shea-Porter - NH 1st
Allen Boyd - FL 2nd
Joe Sestak - PA 7th, running for Senate
John Salazar - CO 3rd, running for Senate
Bill Foster - IL 14th

Even if you can only spare a dollar, pick a candidate (from the top, ideally) and show your support!

Yet another health care post

2010-03-16T08:13:00.000-07:00

I'm sick of them too, but this is the most important domestic policy debate we've had since 9/11, so it's worth getting a little sick and tired of talking about.

Matt Taibbi, who I ordinarily quite like, posted a note this morning expressing his skepticism that this health care bill is going to get us anywhere close to the kind of systemic fixes our health care system requires. I disagree, to the great shock of anyone strange enough to still be reading this blog, and posted a comment that I kind of liked, so I'm reposting it here:

Matt, it doesn't suck. Here's why.

First, in exchange for the massive "subsidy", insurers are going to be forced to stop screening for pre-existing conditions. This is a massive, massive win for the public, and the only way to make it possible (without moving to single-payer, which would be better but wasn't on the table) was to mandate coverage. You're a smart guy, you've heard this before, so I'm curious why you don't think it at least balances out.

Second, insurance companies aren't really the problem. They're a problem, but probably not the biggest. This American Life did a show on health care a few months ago that made a pretty compelling case that hospitals are at least as much to blame as insurance companies, who often have little leverage and get by by denying coverage (something this bill dramatically cuts back.)

Ultimately, the real problem is that we have a decentralized health care system - it relies upon thousands of hospitals making deals with hundreds of insurance companies, all over the country, and there are few if any efficiencies of scale, so we have to pay all kinds of transaction and opportunity costs. If we had a more centralized system - in the extreme, one nationwide "insurance" system paying one nationwide system of hospitals and doctors, and negotiating prescription drug prices - we'd save a ton of money and sacrifice little if anything in the way of care or benefits. This legislation moves us unambiguously closer to that, not just in terms of the system we'll be getting, but also by reorienting the political center around a more-progressive health care system. Ten or fifteen years from now, a sensible centrist will find nothing at all problematic in the idea of universal health care, or in the idea that the government has a role to play in making that possible. And that's how we move to a better system overall.

What's Right with Lost

2010-03-03T23:21:00.000-08:00

As Lost enters its final season, it's become clear that there is no better show on network TV (not that I watch basically any other network TV, so how would I know...) Although the final season is structured quite differently from all those that have come before it, it's still turning out to be an enthralling apex for the show to go out on, for at least three reasons:

First, it's ambitious as hell. The whole show has basically become an extended discussion of the concept and nature of fate, free will and causation. It's had a sideline into time travel, and alternate universes, and that sideline is still going, and somehow the show still works! There has never once been a character on the show whose motives weren't ultimately clear and understandable, and yet at the same time, basically every character appears to be driven by motives that, until they're explained, are a total mystery. I have no idea how they manage to strike this seemingly insane balance.

Second, the fundamental mystery that drives the show remains satisfyingly unanswered. Think about it: what's the deal with the island? At the heart of the show, this question above all others remains unanswered. The two demigods, the lighthouse, the cave, the temple...all the recent additions to the mythology of the island have explained a ton, but at the same time left the basic question unanswered.

Third, each week is just a solid hour of gripping television. All of the above would be beside the point if each episode weren't packed with action, intrigue, mystery, good writing, solid acting, beautiful (if workmanlike) cinematography, and just pure fun. It's just a fun fucking 45 minutes, every episode, and that makes the whole magilla work.

What's Wrong with Lost

2010-03-03T23:00:00.000-08:00

I think there are three big problems facing the show right now. I'm still going to watch every episode, of course, but they need to resolve these problems fast or the final season just won't be that great:

First, there's no mission. The first few seasons, this was obvious: get off the island. But now, some of them have been off, and nobody (Sawyer excepted) really seems to give that much of a shit whether they stay or go. In fact, none of them really seem to care about anything understandable, beyond survival or finding someone else. Without that driving force, the show is dramatically inert.

Second, there's no mystery. They've revealed too much, and at this point, the only thing we know we don't know is who exactly Locke is, and what his plan is. But pretty much everything else of consequence has either been explained or dropped (what happened to Charles Widmore?) Previously, everything we cared about knowing was unknown - what's the deal with the island, who are the Others, why is there a polar bear, what's the smoke monster, etc. Now, there are a few new characters whose identities or motives are mysterious, and that's about it. Even if there are many new surprises awaiting us, we don't KNOW that we don't know them.

Third, there are no stakes. Too many people have died and come back to life for the audience to really believe anyone dies on this show. The whole parallel universe thing means that even if something truly awful happens on the island, the characters we love will still basically be ok. And there just seem to be so many deus ex machinae that we can't take any bad thing at face value.

Hacks and Hackers: The future of personalized news

2010-02-18T22:38:00.000-08:00

The Hacks and Hackers meetup group had a panel tonight on the future of personalized news. I live-Buzzed my notes, though the app seemed to be fighting me a bit - I had to keep Saving/Editing in order for my updates to be posted to one URL; I guess I could have just put them in as comments to the original post. Maybe I'll do that next time.

The buzz is pretty long, so here are the highlights.

This post is going to appear in my Buzz extremely fast

2010-02-09T23:25:00.000-08:00

Does PubSubHubbub and social aggregation (Buzz, Friendfeed, etc) mean that blogging could become as real-time as IM? Did I just use like 90 buzzwords in one sentence?

The future is now.

At some point, a pattern emerges

2010-02-06T11:00:00.000-08:00

Before you read this post, you should head over to the unparalleled Capitol Fax blog to understand what I'm referring to. If you can't bring yourself to read the last several days of posts (and if you're reading this blog, you're probably the kind of person who would love every one of them, but whatever) then just check this one out. And if even this is too much effort for you, then just know that Illinois Democrats, in last Tuesday's primary, nominated for Lieutenant Governor a man named Scott Lee Cohen, a pawnbroker from the Chicago suburbs who, um...allegedly attacked his prostitute ex-girlfriend with a knife, injected anabolic steroids, is behind on child support payments to his ex-wife, and has a long history of violence and harassment towards women.

Pretty vile stuff, and the Democratic nominees for Governor, Comptroller and Attorney General (my old boss!) have all distanced themselves from Cohen, more or less calling for him to get off the ticket. It looks like he might do just that, although he argues that he disclosed all of this months ago, and indeed he did.

But we've been down this road before. They're still filing new charges against our last governor, Rod Blagojevich, who among other crimes attempted to extort a bribe in return for appointing someone to fill Barack Obama's Senate seat. The governor before Blagojevich, George Ryan, is currently in jail following his conviction for corruption (he profited from the sale of drivers licenses while Secretary of State). Before Ryan, then-former Governor Dan Walker was convicted in an S&L scandal in the 80s. And before Walker, Otto Kerner, another former Governor, was convicted of accepting bribes as a federal judge in the 70s. In other words, since 1961, Illinois has had 9 governors, counting the current one. 4 have been convicted, or will soon be convicted, of federal crimes. Not to mention the other 76 elected officials in Illinois, Cook County or Chicago who were convicted between 1972 and 2006.

So there's clearly a pattern here. The question is, why does Illinois persist in electing criminals? The answer isn't just the state's peculiar political culture; while it's true that we take a joking pride in our track record, typically these scandals end the careers of their subjects. So once we know they're dirty, we don't often elect them.

You could argue that there are always whispers surrounding these politicians while they're actually running for office, before the convictions come, and that voters knowingly elect them. But the voters of Illinois don't typically hear those whispers, confined as they usually are to a tiny political class (perhaps a larger one than in comparable states, but still tiny relative to the state's population and voter base.)

And it's not just the case that corruption breeds corruption. Certainly that plays a role, especially at the Chicago City Council level. But statewide? Blagojevich probably didn't learn to be as dirty as he is (though he's the son-in-law of a powerful Chicago alderman, I don't think Dick Mell taught him to be this brazen). I don't think Ryan did either, and I don't know much about Walker or Kerner, but I don't think a "culture of corruption" explains them either.

Honestly, and I know this is a lame answer: I think it's bad luck. The City Council is a different story - it once was a filthy cesspool where the only way to get ahead was to play a certain game run by people too powerful to worry about getting caught - but I just don't see that much that connects our four felonious governors. And political scandal is hardly unique to Illinois: Louisiana, New York, New Jersey and Michigan all come immediately to mind, though we may well be the worst. But, recent events notwithstanding, it's hard to see our run continuing - it's getting harder and harder to get away with corruption in high-level American politics, as too many people are paying attention, and information is more freely available than ever before. And the Cohen debacle is just going to mean that the press will be even more hungry for any morsel of scandal going forward; no more long-shot Lite Gov candidates will be able to sneak under the radar with such easily-discoverable notoriety.

And even though that's probably a good thing, it does make me a little sad. There's something romantic about corruption on the scale Illinois has endured over the decades.

Doing things is hard, and other thoughts

2010-01-26T07:43:00.000-08:00

I remain optimistic that House Democrats are going to pass the Senate version of Health Care Reform. They're making all kinds of unfortunate noises about taking a break from the health care debate, but at the end of the day, they've already voted for a more-liberal version of the plan anyway, so I can't see any upside to voting against this one. If they do, they'll have all the same electoral liabilities they would have if they pass the plan, PLUS a base that would spit in their face sooner than knock on a door on their behalf.

The problem I'm worried about is, what happens once they pass the Senate bill? Since the pressure is overwhelmingly coming from the Left, and since Members apparently regard this as some sort of difficult vote, Congressional Dems will want to argue that now they don't have to do anything big that liberals like, since they'll have already stretched their necks out for us and now they need to protect their moderate/conservative flank.

That would be beyond galling, as the Senate plan is vastly inferior to what liberals wanted, but what's even worse than that is that the only reason we're even in this predicament is because Congress took so damn long to come up with legislation in the first place, and then took so damn long to get any votes on it to happen at all. Really, Democrats in Congress need to be embarrassed and ashamed, afraid of what's already happening to their base, rushing to pass this bill and looking for ways to make it up to us.

Instead, they're going to make us force them to grudgingly pass what we all know to be a terrible bill, and then hold that over our heads whenever we try to get them to do anything else they should be doing in the first place.

It's all very frustrating, but I'm beginning to think it's inevitable for a political movement like contemporary American liberalism: since we're the ones identifying societal problems, we're the ones who actually want to do new things, which are always harder to do than old things. As an example: a national mandate to purchase health insurance from a private insurer is literally without precedent. Nothing like that has ever happened before in the US. Since it's never been done before, everyone's afraid of it, it sounds really weird, there are all sorts of institutional impediments to doing it and, since it's without precedent, it's unclear whether it's even constitutional (for the record, it almost certainly is; but "without precedent" means what it says, so who knows what the Supreme Court will hold.)

This is a general problem facing the party of action. In any debate, if one side says "We need to change X" and the other side says "We need to stop changing things like X", the latter always has the easier burden of proof. Most people remember the past fondly, and in the past we didn't have X and everything worked out fine, so do we really need it after all? And since we've never tried it before, isn't there some risk it could lead to catastrophe? We know we've been ok going without X; but maybe, doing X will tip us over the edge into socialism/fascism/totalitarianism/vegetarianism/somethingbadism. It's always harder to do something than to not do anything.

Should we be happy Coakley lost?

2010-01-19T20:29:00.000-08:00

I hate knee-jerk "counterintuitive" posts as much as the next person, but hear me out. Had Coakley won, Democrats would've been in the same position we were in a month ago: on every major issue, we'd need to get that 57th, 58th, 59th, 60th vote in the Senate. We'd need to make substantial concessions to so many centrists, let alone such repugnant excuses for humanity as Evan Bayh and Joe Lieberman, that every bill we tried to pass would be at least as flawed as the health care shitpile that finally oozed out of the Senate.

Actually, it would be worse than that. In the last month, Coakley's collapse has fed the narrative that the country is backlashing against Democratic overreach. With midterm elections coming up in 2010, getting conservative Democratic senators to vote for controversial legislation would have been even harder. In other words, the difference between 60 and 59 isn't really all that great.

But the very fact of having 60 votes has forced Democrats to govern like milquetoast centrists that only stand up for what they believe in until someone mentions the word "filibuster". Then they need to get all hands on deck, throw out any remotely controversial provision of legislation they're debating, and feed the narrative of weaklings too scared to stand up for what they believe in. This perception, combined with the fact that they've achieved so little to actually defend, means that the only way marginal Dems can defend their seats is to run even further to the right, and against the "excesses" of Washington.

An alternative exists, though recent history doesn't make me optimistic it'll be taken. But if Democrats decided that, rather than scraping even harder to get 60 votes for worse legislation, they'd rely on their still-historic margins in the House and Senate to pass legislation that they actually like, and that is actually popular with voters, their prospects would improve. If they forced Republicans to the mat on issue after issue, they'd win a lot more respect, stand up for better legislation and even get some surprises to go their way. They'd lose a bunch of votes, but it would be because Republicans were voting against popular, good ideas - not a bad way to go down. The base would be more energized, the media would have to write stories about Democrats fighting for their ideals, and good legislation would stand a better chance of passage.

So the Republicans have 41 votes in the Senate? Make them filibuster everything! Make them grind the Senate to a halt, and make them own it! Call for up-or-down votes! Let the country see who's really paralyzing the process!

How bad is a corporate Internet?

2010-01-18T10:10:00.000-08:00

The Internet's future as a place for (near)-universal free expression is threatened by the increasing dominance of corporate actors online, according to Dave Winer. This is an important debate to have, and though I disagree with the argument, I absolutely want people continuing to make it: the balance of online power is not fixed, and it could easily shift much farther toward corporate centralization than it has so far. If that happens, I want people calling it out, and I hope I'm one of those people.

However, at this moment in time, I think it's not really the case that, as Winer says, "Your Internet presence is owned by corporate media as much as the newscaster on NBC Nightly News, or a reporter on All Things Considered, or the Public Editor of the NY Times." In fact, he's completely wrong about that.

The key difference between a reporter for a mainstream media organization, and you or I (assuming you are not a reporter for a mainstream media organization) (and leaving aside for the moment that I work for a large corporation myself) is that there is basically nothing compelling us to say anything other than whatever we feel is the truth. We have personal blogs and twitter accounts and, though the properties are owned by corporations, what we say on them absolutely isn't. We face zero recriminations for what we post, beyond a few corner cases (I can't leak trade secrets, and you probably don't want to see what happens if you publish Nazi propaganda). The fact that the medium is owned by corporations in no way impedes my ability to say whatever the fuck I like. If one corporation changes its policies and restricts my speech, I'll simply switch to another platform, and nothing about the architecture of the Internet impedes my ability to do so.

It is the case that corporations are trying to dominate the Internet by originating and controlling content that appears on it, but the Internet is made richer by that action. The more quality content there is online, the more people will come to seek it out, and the higher the likelihood is that they'll stumble across more independent voices in their travels than would otherwise be the case. The alternative for those seeking entertainment right now is the closed-off world of TV, or movies or newspapers or magazines or books - every one of which represent at their best a pale shadow of a small fraction of the amount of free expression that can be found online when you type two or three words into a search engine.

Winer also goes off on Wikipedia for some reason (kinda the antithesis of corporate-controlled media, I would think) and comes off sounding like he's got more axes to grind than valid arguments about why it's a degenerate force. He's concerned that Wikipedia squelches dissenting voices, and that's valid, but Wikipedia has a relatively robust tolerance for debate on its site. To the extent that articles don't reflect that debate, that's as it should be: people will dispute facts for all manner of illegitimate reasons (say, objecting to the theory of evolution for political gain) and I don't want those debates coloring what Wikipedia has to say at all. In cases where legitimate debate exists concerning a given fact or facts, I think Wikipedia does a pretty good job of either discussing the debate, or leaving out the fact until it can be resolved.

There are a number of other sentiments I object to in Winer's post itself, but to an extent that doesn't change the fact that I'm glad he wrote it. The Internet needs people to be over-vigilant when it comes to independent, free expression. The fact that what they say can be annoying or wrong is a feature of their perspective, not a bug.

Sarah, Failin

2010-01-14T13:03:00.001-08:00

Glenn Beck interviews Sarah Palin for AN HOUR. Dear God almighty.

"Sarah, I want to read to you what I wrote last night in my journal. Because it's about you."

And so it begins...

Thank You, Harold Ford, For Clarifying

2010-01-13T17:39:00.000-08:00

I do shoot [guns], and I shoot them at things that can’t shoot back. And will continue to do that. And by that, I want to be clear, I don’t mean children.

Screw the flying cars

2010-01-13T09:27:00.000-08:00

I know this is a point that's been made ad nauseam, but it still continues to blow me away.

When I was born (and I'm not that old):

Music was stored on huge platters that could only hold about 4 songs at a time (and which couldn't be rewritten (and which skipped if you so much as jumped in another corner of the room they were being played on))

If you needed to look up a fact, you basically had to go to an encyclopedia. The more facts you wanted to have on hand, the larger the number of shelves you had to have to accommodate them.

If you wanted to watch a movie, you had to go to a movie theater. If you were lucky, you had a limited collection of VHS or Betamax tapes that you could only watch a handful of times before their quality degraded substantially.

If you wanted to play an arcade game, you could pay a lot of money for the ability to play glorified Pong on your huge, heavy, low-resolution tv.

If you got lost, you either had to have a map of wherever you were, or ask someone for directions. If it was dark out (so you couldn't tell where you were) and there was nobody around, you were screwed.

If someone wanted to get ahold of you, you had better be near your home phone (or possibly your office phone).

If you wanted to get ahold of someone else, you needed a quarter and a dime and to find a working pay phone.

If you wanted to listen to the music and you weren't at home, you listened to the radio.

If you wanted to look at porn, you had to spend a ridiculous amount of money to buy a magazine from someplace kinda shady. If you were underage, you had to convince someone else to do this for you.

Today:

The device in my pocket that's about the same size as, but a bit lighter than, my wallet, can do all of the above, infinitely better in every single instance, often by connecting to a global network that represents basically all of human knowledge, most of it 100% free.

Sometimes, you just have to say wow.

Noam Chomsky says "Love Thy Teabagger!"

2010-01-10T23:58:00.000-08:00

And he makes a lot of sense...

So take right now, for example, there is a right-wing populist uprising. It's very common, even on the left, to just ridicule them, but that's not the right reaction. If you look at those people and listen to them on talk radio, these are people with real grievances. I listen to talk radio a lot and it's kind of interesting. If you can sort of suspend your knowledge of the world and just enter into the world of the people who are calling in, you can understand them. I've never seen a study, but my sense is that these are people who feel really aggrieved. These people think, "I've done everything right all my life, I'm a god-fearing Christian, I'm white, I'm male, I've worked hard, and I carry a gun. I do everything I'm supposed to do. And I'm getting shafted." And in fact they are getting shafted. For 30 years their wages have stagnated or declined, the social conditions have worsened, the children are going crazy, there are no schools, there's nothing, so somebody must be doing something to them, and they want to know who it is. Well Rush Limbaugh has answered - it's the rich liberals who own the banks and run the government, and of course run the media, and they don't care about you—they just want to give everything away to illegal immigrants and gays and communists and so on.

It's not that hard to understand. Living standards and socioeconomic opportunity have been generally increasing for most demographic groups for the last several decades, but all that positive movement has been coming at the expense of the few heavily-privileged demographic groups (i.e., white people, especially white males). Their (our) cultural hegemony was so absolute for so long that it could go in only one direction, and it shouldn't be a surprise that they're not all thrilled about it.

Something similar is true of Americans who grew up in a world where American dominance was nearly absolute: culturally, militarily, economically, ideologically. As that dominance erodes, you'd expect such people to feel threatened, angry, and/or sad about the whole thing. But their kids, for whom such erosion is the norm, will have a totally different reaction to it: not necessarily happier about it, but more at peace with it.

The point is, it's an understandable reaction and it doesn't make the people who have it morons. Even if sometimes they say moronic things.

Held captive at walletpoint

2010-01-04T08:51:00.000-08:00

Upon reflection, this article didn't piss me off nearly as much as it should have. Perhaps the nadir comes when one anonymous, bailed-out banker whines that salaries of well over $500,000 in cash were necessary because "A lot of our folks have second and third homes and alimony payments..." Who are these people that think like this? That work for banks that have literally brought the world economy to its knees with their greed and incompetence, that see headlines about record foreclosures and evictions every day, and still feel comfortable arguing for their massive salaries because, God forbid they have to sell one of their three homes!? What country do they think they live in?

Perhaps Chris Lehmann is right, and it really is time for us to clean out the cash-swollen gutters of Wall Street, but I can't help but be pessimistic. Not because I'm worried about retribution leading to a talent drain - one Wall Street lawyer quoted in the piece says, "If people in these industries — which are a main American export — see that Congress can jerk them around whenever they want, they’re going to stop going into these businesses, just the way people have stopped becoming doctors." and I can't help but hope that he's right (also, by the way? You people are waaaay less essential to society than doctors. Fuck you. Seriously.) But because they've got us by the throat, and they know it:

Why obsess over $20 million or $30 million in extra payouts at businesses that have billions in other expenses and where the government had billions at risk? What if some of those people really did leave? Even if replacing them would just cause a hiccup or two, the risk wasn’t worth it.

Conservatives once again condescend to the intelligence agencies

2010-01-01T22:26:00.000-08:00

No, Erick Erickson, this is not "the greatest and potentially the deadliest of Obama's screw ups so far". Or perhaps it is, in which case you have a surprisingly favorable impression of the administration.

Erickson refers to the recent suicide bombing in Afghanistan that killed 7 or 8 CIA officers, the deadliest day for the Agency in decades. He specifically criticizes the Obama administration for publicly acknowledging the tragedy, and mourning the loss of life. In so doing, he alleges, al Qaeda and the Taliban are gifted a major propaganda victory, and Obama's relations with the CIA are seriously undermined, while doing further damage to the Agency's morale.

Even if all of this is true - and I grant none of it, since Erickson doesn't even come close to describing a single source in his post, beyond "members of the intelligence community," (which only narrows it down to about 100,000 people) - it says infinitely more about the incompetence and unprofessionalism of the American Intelligence Community (IC) than it does about the Obama administration.

For one thing, I thought these people had rather important jobs. It surprises me to learn that they're so easily distracted from their work by press releases from the White House. I would have thought they wouldn't let so important a task as national security be imperiled by their hurt feelings and grumpy moods. Certainly, Republicans, who've spent decades telling us just how serious, professional and dedicated the members of the IC are, aren't alleging that they make decisions about whether or not to protect the country based on whether they're annoyed with the President.

For another, what has the Obama administration actually done wrong here? The information about the bombing victims leaked out well before Obama made any sort of statement, so the essence of the Taliban's propaganda victory was already out there before the White House did anything. Maybe there's some super-secret IC rationale for not saying anything once the cat is clearly out of the bag, but I can't really see it.

Finally, to the extent that the CIA was licking its wounds already before this attack took place (and therefore deserve to be treated with kid gloves right now), I call bullshit. America spends far too much money ($50 billion/year or so) for the level of performance we get from these folks. We have the right to demand they do a better job, and to criticize them when they screw up, which happens repeatedly and on pretty major issues (WMDs in Iraq sure were a "slam dunk," huh?) I'm sure they've saved us from thousands of attacks and saved tens of thousands of lives over the years, but that shouldn't earn them any special immunity from criticism: that's their job! That's why we pay them $50 billion a year! And it does them no favors to treat them like fragile children who can only be reassured that they're doing a great! job! all the time, lest their feelings get hurt.

Chicago defends its title: Best political town in the US

2009-12-31T12:14:00.000-08:00

Perhaps you are ignorant, and believe that DC or even New York have more interesting political cultures than Chicago. This isn't really forgivable, but I'll let it slide, since it's New Years Eve. Let me simply make the case, based on this article by Fran Spielman in the Sun-Times over the weekend.

In Chicago in 2009, Mayor Daley reached 20 years as mayor of the city his father had governed for 21, marking the imminent demise of his father's title as longest-serving mayor in the city's history. Despite running the city so ruthlessly that he's never once had a serious challenger since being elected in the first place, it's still possible for reporters to write sentences like, "[Richard M. Daley] responded by showcasing a political resiliency that has long been underestimated." If you run any other city in America for two straight decades, and never once face serious electoral opposition, nobody will underestimate your political resiliency. But such is the mark that his father left on the city (titles of books about him include "American Pharaoh", "Boss", "Himself!", "Clout" and "The Last Boss") that Richie may never fully emerge in his own right, despite being a fairly fascinating character himself.

In Chicago in 2009, the City privatized its parking meters for the next 75 years, earning $1.5 billion and blowing it all almost immediately to shore up a massive budget deficit. The City's Inspector General concluded, shortly after the deal went through, that taxpayers would have been nearly $1 billion better off over the 75 years, had the City retained the rights to the meters.

In Chicago in 2009, a 14-year-old talked his way into a police uniform and even got to drive a squad car, before it was discovered he was a) 14 years old and b) not a member of the police force. Daley was not pleased with this development.

In Chicago in 2009, the head of the city's schools left to become US Secretary of Education, triggering a cabinet shuffle involving the head of the city's transit agency and the Aviation Commissioner, which preceded another cabinet shuffle involving a dozen of the mayor's top advisers and commissioners.

In Chicago in 2009, Al Sanchez, the former head of the outrageously clout-heavy Streets and Sanitation department and the nearly-equally-clout heavy Hispanic Democratic Organization (Southeast) was convicted of hiring fraud. Two weeks ago, a judge ordered the case be retried, ensuring embarrassing testimony will be replayed.

In Chicago in 2009, police officers marched around City Hall chanting "Daley sucks!" during the International Olympic Committee's final visit to the city before giving the Olympics to Rio. The cops were mad because Daley rescinded a promised 16% pay increase (that they had already been critical of for being too small) as a result of the ongoing budget crisis.

In Chicago in 2009, the mayor's nephew was forced to drop out of a deal involving $68 million in city pension funds, following a wave of federal subpoenas. Daley publicly criticized the nephew, an event entirely without precedent among the Daley family.

In Chicago in 2009, the International Olympic Committee, after having extracted from Daley a promise to guarantee basically any expense the games incurred in Chicago (which he'd earlier, repeatedly, promised taxpayers he wouldn't grant), gave the games to Rio de Janeiro instead.

In Chicago in 2009, a well-connected alderman under investigation for accepting $40,000 in shady payments from a developer (yawn), agreed to wear a wire, which has just begun to yield indictments.

In Chicago in 2009, the President of the Board of Education was found shot in the head beside the Chicago River, an apparent suicide. It's not clear why he would have killed himself, but he had been subpoenaed by a federal grand jury following a scandal regarding admissions to elite city high schools (like my alma mater, whose principal - my old principal! - was forced to testify.)

In Chicago in 2009, Oprah announced she was leaving the city in 2010, and Michael Jordan was inducted into the Basketball Hall of Fame.

Up in the Air

2009-12-30T23:34:00.000-08:00

If you haven't seen it, you really should. There's a lot to like about it, but I've noticed that the critical consensus has focused on the slickness of it, the vacuum-packaging. Many critics see this as an aesthetic flaw, but I think it's one of the elements that makes the movie so insightful.

Up in the Air is about the late 2000s in a way that few movies are ever "about" the era in which they're made. Plenty of movies get made about epochs after they're over, but more often than not, they're nostalgia pieces that use the scenery and images of the time as pure eye-candy. Many other movies get made at a certain point in time, and make no attempt to disguise their origin in that time, but never really attempt to capture anything essential about it.

The mechanically warm quality of Up in the Air is absolutely essential, as it's a story about travelers moving through environments that have been created in labs to simulate coziness. At one point, George Clooney's main character, Ryan Bingham, points out how, when he swipes his credit card to pick up his ticket at the airport, the system prompts the agent behind the counter to say, "Welcome back, Mr. Bingham" - as though he's a regular she's seen dozens of times before, even if they're total strangers.

The movie is constantly noticing the ways in which our environments are created and designed, rather than allowed merely to come into being. It does this without judgment: not only does Ryan prefer his environments mass-produced, the movie almost convinces you to see the wisdom of his approach. After dozens of elegiac shots of airport windows and hotel rooms far more inviting than his own apartment, you begin to see the beauty in the everyday.

Of course, the plot of this movie centers around Ryan's job, which is to travel around the country firing people. Any movie "of the moment" has to engage fully with the economic realities of life in the worst depression since the Great Depression, and this one does so, but there's so much more going on here. Anyone can make a movie about a recession, after all, but it's much harder to tell a story about a time that perfectly captures that time, right in the midst of that time.

Glenn Greenwald doesn't want to tax the rich

2009-12-29T09:33:00.000-08:00

I'm going to give Glenn the benefit of the doubt, and engage with him on the substance of his recent post about why the Senate health care bill should be rejected by progressives. He spends most of the post pretending that the only progressives who support the (Senate) health care bill work for the New Republic, and that their only defense of the bill is that its opponents are unserious lefty hippies. This is insulting and obviously untrue - to take just one example, Ezra Klein (who I'm sure Greenwald dislikes, but who doesn't he dislike?) has written tens of thousands of highly substantive words making the progressive case for the health care bill.

Anyway, the main point Greenwald's post makes is that today's Cadillac plans will be tomorrow's Chevy plans. As health care costs rise, this tax will hit more and more middle-class people, who'll be subjected to a seriously increased tax burden, and what looked at first like a tax on the rich will become a tax on the middle class, a la the AMT.

MIT economist Jon Gruber responds (a day ahead of Glenn's post) by arguing that what looks like a tax isn't actually a tax, it's an incentive to restructure the health insurance market in a way that keeps costs low - most employers will, he asserts, switch to plans that cost less than the threshold that triggers the tax, and pass the savings on to their employees. This seems a bit naive to me, but he claims something similar happened in the late 90s, when health insurance premiums stopped rising and wages started to go up, in real terms, for the first time in a while. When premiums started to rise again, real wages fell.

The other point he makes is that this new tax simply offsets a tremendous loophole in existing tax law. Right now, an employee's wages get taxed, but her insurance premium paid by her employer doesn't. In other words, if she makes $50,000, she pays taxes on that. But if her employer also pays $25,000 a year for her insurance, that never gets taxed. If another company pays the exact same wages, but only buys a $15,000 a year health plan, then the existing law is giving the first company a massive tax break, only because the first company didn't do a very good job of shopping around for efficient insurance plans. That doesn't sound like the right system of incentives to me, nor does it sound like a very progressive situation.

Gruber sums up the argument better than I ever could:

So in the end, we have a policy that provides the necessary financing to pay for subsidies to low-income families; induces employers to buy more cost-effective health insurance, lowering U.S. health-care spending; offsets a bias in our tax system that favors more expensive insurance; and raises wages by $223 billion over 10 years. To put a twist on an old saying: The Senate assessment on high-cost insurance plans doesn't walk like a tax or talk like a tax -- because it is not a tax. It is an innovative way of financing the health reform we so desperately need.

We talk about politics like we're all morons

2009-12-29T07:53:00.000-08:00

This is hardly an original insight, but it's particularly disturbing when the top story in the day's New York Times contains such aggressive stupidity:

In one of her Sunday appearances, Ms. Napolitano had said the system worked once the attempted bombing occurred, meaning that the government responded by increasing security and alerting other planes.

But on another show, she did not make clear she was referring only to what happened after the incident, making it sound as if the system as a whole worked — an incongruous conclusion given that the suspect was allowed to fly to the United States on a valid visa without extra screening even though he was listed in a terrorism database, bought a one-way ticket with cash and checked no luggage.

Why does the Paper of Record think this is important enough to spend several paragraphs on (including 2 before this quote, and one after)? It's pretty obvious that Napolitano does not actually believe that the system as a whole worked - she explicitly was talking about the reaction to the attack, not the procedures that allowed it to happen.

Over the course of multiple live interviews, the Secretary at one point might have misspoken (they refuse to quote her appearance on the second show, noting only that she "[made] it sound as if the system as a whole worked", and of course she didn't misspeak at all on the first show) and now we're spending two days talking about it, and we're probably not done yet. In whose paranoid imagination does this constitute news, let alone news of such importance that it merits five paragraphs in the New York Times story of the day?

But it gets worse:

The visual contrast of a president on vacation while there was anxiety about air travel also drew fire. Although aides issued statements describing conference calls with counterterrorism advisers, pictures of passengers enduring tougher airport screening were juxtaposed with reports of the president picnicking at the beach and playing sports.

Are. You. Fucking. Kidding. Me.

An asshole tries to light a bomb in his crotch on Christmas, and the President is supposed to drop everything and...um...do what, exactly? I thought the whole point of fighting terror was that it wasn't supposed to dictate how we live our lives, but now some marginal schmuck gets through airport security in Amsterdam, and it's supposed to be a Grave National Crisis? This isn't Katrina, where a whole city was wiped out and the President partied on: nobody was injured, it took days to determine for sure that al Qaeda was even involved, and the guy's trying to spend a few relaxing Christmas hours with his family. How is this a problem?

The more noxious aspect of this allegation is that it reveals how thoroughly some people want us to capitulate to terrorists, and drop everything in response to their slightest provocation. Rep. Peter King, for instance, is quoted as saying "We’re now, what, 72 hours into this and the president’s not spoken, the vice president’s not spoken, the attorney general’s not spoken and Janet Napolitano has now told two different stories in two days."

Obviously, this would be a different type of story had the bomb actually gone off, but it didn't, and the entire executive branch getting in front of news cameras and reassuring the public isn't likely to make us all calmer about the whole situation; quite the opposite. What we need to do is treat these incidents with extreme, and quiet, seriousness that ensures public safety while not handing al Qaeda massive propaganda victories every time they try to mount an operation.

Thank God, at least the National Review cares about the poor

2009-09-18T12:04:00.000-07:00

What the Left really cares about, these readers tell me, is setting up a Vanguard Party — comprised of them, of course — which will tell the rest of us, including the t.m.s ["toiling masses"], how to live, and whack us if we don't obey.

Which is why the Left is telling the "toiling masses" who they can and cannot marry, what form of health insurance they can have (or more likely, not have) and what they can and cannot put into their bodies.

And of course, thank God for the Right, which is currently embarking on one of the biggest plans to give health care to the poor this country has ever seen; which didn't spend the last 8 years establishing a police state that criminalized dissent; which hasn't spent the last 30 years throwing more people in jail per capita for minor drug possession (of which they were themselves guilty, in substantial numbers).

The media continues to make the case for its own demise

2009-09-18T10:19:00.000-07:00

Once again, conservatives attack health care reform, and once again, a major media outlet (Reuters, this time) impassively transcribes their attack and calls it "news", without actually asking them any questions:

"The idea that the healthcare plan takes away choice and freedom, people see their liberties at risk," said Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council, the conservative Christian lobby group organizing the summit of self-styled "values voters."

The Family Research Council also claims "Obamacare" will lead to federal funding for abortion -- an allegation hotly disputed by the president and his supporters -- and Perkins told Reuters on the sidelines of the conference that this issue went "beyond the ranks of the pro-life movement."

Those 10 words, enclosed in em-dashes, are the only stabs at reportorial skepticism in the entire piece. At no point was the question asked, "How do subsidies for health insurance 'take away choice and freedom', or put 'liberties at risk'?" This is basically the entirety of the conservative attack on health care reform, and nobody ever bothers to ask them for specifics or details.

Aaaaaand we win.

2009-09-09T21:02:00.000-07:00

Sorry, Republicans. You put up a good fight there, with your....well, ok, you put up a shitty fight, with your death panels and your townhall disruptions and your childish disruptionism (epitomized so perfectly by this joker tonight).

But you played the hand you were dealt: you couldn't defend the current indefensible system that sends thousands of people to their unnecessary deaths every year. And you couldn't endorse the Democratic proposals in the House and Senate, because you'd be handing the Democrats a victory they'd spend the next two decades beating you over the head with. The only way you could win, politically, would be if nothing passed, or at least nothing very big. So, you threw every turd you had against the wall, hoping some of it would splatter far enough when it hit that it'd cover some Democrats, and that the resulting chaos would somehow keep the Dems from passing important legislation that would help America.

Well, it didn't work, and President Obama's speech tonight (God, I'll never get tired of typing those words) just made your victory impossible. Now, all you can do is fight over the details, but you've lost the big game: as Obama mentioned, about 80% of the proposed reform is uncontroversial and will have no trouble passing through Congress. The remaining 20% was just explained and defended very well by a charismatic media rock-star President, and you looked like 218 childish, petulant (white, male) teenagers who were mad that Dad wasn't letting you drive the Mercedes anymore.

Have fun in the political wilderness you spent the last decade working so hard to earn for yourselves. Come back when you have some big-boy and big-girl ideas about how to fix the country.

Right where he wants us

2009-09-08T20:03:00.000-07:00

This is either going to look really stupid or really prescient, starting tomorrow, but I feel comfortable saying that Obama's going to win big on health care reform. The end game begins with his speech to a joint session of Congress tomorrow, and the end game ends when he signs a $1 trillion+, massive expansion of coverage, some form of public option, iterative overhaul of health care reform.

Why do I feel so confident? Partly because the Baucus Bill being circulated was always going to be the worst-case scenario (i.e., there's no way nothing will get passed, so something has to, and the Baucus-led Gang of Six was expected to, and has, produced the least-objectionable bill out of any of the relevant Congressional committees.) And it turns out that the Baucus Bill, which will only be improved (from a liberal perspective) isn't even that bad. $900 billion and a massive expansion of coverage would have been an overwhelming victory for the Left in any of the last several decades.

But even more than that, I'm confident because I've been here before. All through the campaign, the same pattern repeated itself: Obama campaign ignores the day-to-day; looks distant and absent from the political arena; conservatives win short-term victory after short-term victory; liberals get more and more anxious with Obama; and then, boom! When it actually matters - on primary days, late in the Fall of 2008 and then on November 4th - the plan that the Obama folks carefully prepared, above the shrieking din of the daily press riot, comes to glorious, victorious fruition. And the exact same thing is happening now: it couldn't matter less what happens in August of an off-year. But it does matter what happens now, and all the way up until a bill, the bill, is voted on.

And so now, to pardon the sports analogy, we have the star player coming off the bench, his team maybe down a point or two but still very much in it without the help of the greatest player in his generation, getting ready to play for an arena that will determine the fate of his entire career, his legacy, and we should be worried that he's not gonna pull it out? When the Bulls were down by 2 at the end of the 3rd quarter, did anyone say, "Sure, they've got Michael Jordan coming off the bench, but it's too late - they're fucked?"

Or did they say, "It's over - you've got to be leading by more than that when MJ gets back in the game."

I didn't know this, but apparently I'm lost

2009-09-03T13:37:00.000-07:00

According to the State of Israel, anyway. This seems like a bad idea for an ad campaign - "Hey, half-breeds! It's not too late to atone for your parents' evil race-mixing ways and become really Jewish!" In particular, it seems like a bad idea for a state that pretty explicitly acknowledges its racial/religious-supremacist ideology, and uses that ideology to commit war crimes and illegally occupy territory.

I'm not particularly anti-Israel. I think Middle Eastern politics and history are too complicated for me to really be "anti-" anyone, since at this point everybody involved has a complex history and set of circumstances they're reacting to. And Israel does a lot of things right, much more so than basically any other state in the Middle East, with a few small potential exceptions. But it clearly has a "dark" side, one that's just as anti-Democratic, racist and frightening as any other state in the region, and ads like this make that unfortunate aspect of Israel quite clear.

A band of hearty, hardy, heart-y gentlemen

2009-08-31T20:33:00.001-07:00

Not that any of you conceivably cares at all, but my fantasy football team for 2009 is as follows:

QB - Jay Cutler (woooooooooo!)

RBs - Brandon Jacobs, Larry Johnson

WRs - Roddy White, Kevin Walter, Steve Breaston

TE - Greg Olsen (wooooo!)

W/R/T - Visanthe Shiancoe

Bench - Chad Pennington, Michael Crabtree, Correll Buckhalter, Anthony Fasano

K - Jason Hanson

Bench - Josh Brown

Defense - Pittsburgh

Bench - Seattle

Is America in decline?

2009-08-30T09:14:00.001-07:00

Typical of a lot of the recent wave of America's-days-are-numbered articles is this piece in San Francisco Magazine, about the growing number of Indian immigrants who've built up Silicon Valley into the capital of the world's high-tech industries, and are now moving back home to make India the next dominant player. This article is perhaps more measured than most, but it still harbors most of the same problematic, unexamined assumptions that plague the genre.

To begin with, it doesn't really address the real reason for America's ascent and descent. Briefly: we have, by far, the world's largest economy. We have the world's third-largest population. Given those two factors alone, you'd expect us to be in the global driver's seat, and neither of them is going to change anytime soon.

Even with the rise of India and China, does it make any sense at all to think that a country with a GDP the size of Japan+China+Germany+France is going to cease being highly, highly relevant? That a country with 300 million relatively well-educated, prosperous consumers is going to stop driving global demand? That such a country, which boasts (for the well-off) one of the highest standards of living in the world, along with some of the most desirable living spaces on the planet, will stop attracting foreign tourists, immigrants and job-seekers?

The foundation of most of this "India/China is the new America" worrying somehow assumes that, in the future, people will stop wanting to live in New York and San Francisco and Los Angeles and Chicago, and instead want to live in Mumbai and Bangalore and Beijing and Shenzhen. For people who grow up in India and China, that's a reasonable assumption, but having visited one of those countries (and supposedly the easier one for an English-speaker to get around in) I can tell you it's still a pretty huge leap to make for a non-native.

So why does it feel like "America's moment" is passing? Well, because it is. Our days of being the only dominant economic power in the world are coming close to their end - but is that a bad thing? Much of China and India remain desperately poor places, where human suffering and misery is vast and at a level nearly unimaginable in most of the United States. Safe water and sanitary living conditions are far from the norm for millions and millions of people in these countries. So wouldn't it be a good thing if they built more companies that started raking in some of that juicy foreign currency that could help them provide basic services to the poorest among them?

And as China and India become more middle-class and moneyed, isn't that a good thing from an American perspective? Millions and millions more consumers for our companies, our culture and our values. Millions fewer poor, unemployed young men for whom radicalism appears to offer the only way out of grinding poverty. Eventually, a higher standard of living that puts an end to the sweatshops and Dickensian factories, and reduces the salary gap that makes it so attractive to outsource American jobs.

But more than anything else, the rise of the Indian and Chinese economies simply means less suffering for millions of people, and frankly, thank God for that.

Apparently, CIA officers hate America (or at least, are pretty meh about it)

2009-08-29T22:15:00.000-07:00

Chris Hayes has a fantastic article in the Nation, and you should go read it.

Done? Good. There's not much I can add to it, but there is one idea I wanted to focus on a bit: This notion that oversight of the CIA (and FBI, and NSA, and the rest of the apparatus of the National Security State) is a bad idea, because it will "demoralize" the secret services, make them too hesitant and timid, and put us at risk of attack.

Richard Clarke nails it in the piece:

"What bothers me," he says, "is the CIA's tendency whenever they're criticized to say, If you do your job, if you do oversight seriously--which Congress almost never does--then we'll pout. Some of us, many, will not just pout; we'll retire early. Our morale will be hurt." And if morale is hurt and the agencies are gutted, they argue, the country will be exposed to attack. In other words: "If you, Congress, do oversight, then we'll all die. Can you imagine FEMA or the agricultural department saying we're all going to retire if you conduct oversight?" Clarke asks in disbelief.

First of all, these are people that we expect to risk their lives for their country, when circumstances compel. But we think so little of them that we can't say, "Hey, you should stop torturing people" without worrying that these fragile little violets will get all sad, and stop giving a shit if their country gets obliterated by a terrorist-planted nuclear weapon?

Second of all, these are professionals. Professionals in every other occupation on the planet expect their superiors to oversee their work, so what makes our spies so different?

Third of all, it's been pretty clear for a while now that we don't actually have a particularly effective intelligence community. Which is not to say that they haven't stopped many thousands of evil plots against us, or learned reams and reams of valuable information. But we pay more for their services every year than our next several competitors combined, and have for the last couple of decades. And yet, we routinely get outmaneuvered by every other intelligence service we ever deal with. If we didn't have all our fancy spy satellites and wiretaps and other whiz-bang gadgetry, we probably wouldn't be able to tell you who the Chancellor of Germany was. So maybe it wouldn't be the worst thing in the world if we shook these guys up a little bit.

Does "political capital" make sense?

2009-08-29T21:42:00.001-07:00

Back when I was on my high school debate team (so young and innocent, falling asleep every night to visions of nuclear warfare sparked by an ill-timed revision of Native American blood-quantum policy), one of the ideas we fixed on time after time was that of "political capital": the thought that a President has a limited and discrete amount of influence over Congress and the broader political debate. The more... things a President does, the more political capital he or she uses up, until none remains and no further action is possible.

Now that I'm a few years out of high school debate, most of the formulations on which we used to rely appear overly simplistic and not particularly applicable to the real world. Not so "political capital": Google News records over 900 mentions of it in just the last month. Last week, the New York Times argued that Afghanistan could derail the Obama Presidency by sucking away his political capital, and noted:

George W. Bush learned first-hand how political capital can slip away when an overseas war loses popular backing. With Iraq in flames, Mr. Bush found little support for his second-term domestic agenda of overhauling Social Security and liberalizing immigration laws. L.B.J. managed to create Medicare and enact landmark civil rights legislation but some historians have argued that the Great Society ultimately stalled because of Vietnam.

Just like in high school debate, this reading of events massively oversimplifies reality and, in so doing, totally fails to explain anything helpful. Yes, Iraq (among other things) probably made it much harder for Bush to impose his domestic agenda on the country. But that's not because he expended too much political capital in order to fight the war; it's because the war was perceived as a disaster for which he was entirely responsible, and the litany of failures, scandals and corruption that dogged his presidency made it hard for the public to trust him when he tried to reform the White House easter egg hunt, let alone such political third rails as Social Security and immigration.

The LBJ comparison is somewhat more helpful, since Johnson inherited a conflict that ultimately sucked all the oxygen out of the room and made it impossible for him to enact what would have been fairly popular social reforms (popular in the long run at least, if not immediately). Of course, Vietnam was as divisive as it was in large part because of the draft, whereas a small fraction of Americans today are directly impacted by military service in their family.

But the real stupidity of the "political capital" concept is that it attempts to explain an extremely complex system by focusing on only its most trivial, horse-racey elements. If the idea made any sense at all, we'd not only already have single-payer health care reform, we'd have EFCA and a more robust stimulus and aggressive MPG requirements and the entire state of Nevada would be one massive solar farm. Why? Because who can you possibly imagine with more political capital than a young, charismatic, attractive, articulate, hyper-intelligent and beloved President taking office immediately after one of the most unpopular administrations in American history? A President who raised jaw-dropping amounts of money during his election campaign, who mobilized entire swaths of the electorate that had never been engaged before, and who presumably has more resources to lend to vulnerable members of Congress than any President since George Washington? A President who has a large majority in the House, and 60 fucking Democratic votes in the Senate? Oh, and also he's the first black President, and the media treats him like a cross between Bono and Jesus. Who could possibly have more fucking political capital than that guy?

And yet, we don't have health care reform, and the best we're likely to do is a weak public option. We don't have EFCA, and won't. We might get decent environmental legislation, but I'm not holding my breath.

And why not? Because the world is way more complex than one simple-minded idea. Because there are a million tiny little factors that matter in the real world, like Teddy Kennedy (RIP) being too sick to come to work, and they don't fit neatly into this one overarching artificial construct.

Abraham-men

2009-08-24T21:20:00.000-07:00

Wikipedia is full of such ridiculously interesting tidbits. For example, did you know that in pre-Victorian England, there was a class of beggars called "Abraham-men" who went around pretending to be escapees from the insane asylum at Bedlam? They got their name from the ward they pretended to have escaped from, the Abraham ward:

The author of O Per Se O (1612) reported that Abram-men made marks on their arms with 'burnt paper, piss and gunpowder' to show they had been in Bedlam Hospital: "some dance, but keep no measure; others leap up and down". The phrase Abraham-men also appears as a disguise for Edgar in King Lear (1604-05) and John Fletcher's Beggar's Bush. They were called anticks or God's minstrels, and later Poor Toms, from the popular song "Tom of Bedlam". John Aubrey the antiquary said they were common before the English Civil War, and wore a badge of tin on their left arms, an ox horn around their necks, a long staff and fantastical clothing.

It's not just that every detail of these guys (and I assume they were all men) is beyond hilarious (they wore urine, gunpowder, burnt paper and, apocryphally, a tin badge, an ox horn and "fantastical clothing" and carried long staffs: isn't that kind of overdoing it?). But what an obscure fucking subject, and Wikipedia not only has a wealth of information on it, including a link to an outside source, but it's 100% free! And it costs Wikipedia next to nothing to generate and host all this information, so there's practically speaking no limit on the amount of information it can have on just this one type of pre-Victorian crazy person.

It's truly a wondrous age in which we live.

You should go see Inglourious Basterds

2009-08-23T19:07:00.001-07:00

I don't want to say too much about the movie itself, since I've read so many reviews of it that give away little bits of the joy the movie offers (and really, movie critics who give away twists of films they're reviewing ought to face some sort of punishment; that shit happens all the time, and I can't count how many great scenes in movies have been ruined because a show-off critic just couldn't help him- or herself). But I will say that Basterds has to rank up there with the best Tarantino has done so far. He makes entertaining movies that are more fun, more fucking delightful and mesmerizing, than anyone else, and by that measuring stick, Basterds is as good as he's done. Pulp Fiction is my favorite Tarantino, but I'm really not sure that Basterds isn't just as strong (time will have to tell, since I just got out of a showing and am still a little buzzed from the experience).

I should also point out that if you're worried about seeing this because you think it's too gruesome, don't be; there is some gore, because that's the kind of director Tarantino is, but there's probably a lot less than you're expecting, and unless you're really, really squeamish, you're denying yourself a fantastic moviegoing experience by not going to see this.

One last point: if you're going to see it, see it in a movie theater. This isn't just a movie about World War 2, it's a movie about movies, and waiting for it to come out on DVD is just fucking wrong. Plus, I'm thinking it looks a lot better on a big screen, sounds a lot better on a big sound system, and is a lot better when seen with dozens of other souls in the room.

A theory of fantasy football

2009-08-23T14:44:00.000-07:00

I'm about to put together my fantasy team for this season, and this will be the first time I've really given much thought to it, so I'm still pretty new and uninformed about how it works. I've come up with what I think is the optimal way to build a team, but if anyone reads this who actually knows what works, I'd appreciate it if you'd leave some better advice in the comments. I'm laying this out to see if anyone knows of a better approach, or a serious problem with this one:

Since there's not really any interaction between the different players on your team, it makes sense to focus your attention on the positions that typically result in the most points. Not sure what the best order is here, but it seems likely to be the case that this reflects the major skill positions (QB, WR, RB, CB, etc). So it should be the case that there's an ordering of positions that makes the most sense - i.e., you want to draft a QB first, then a RB, then a WR, whatever.

There are probably also an extremely small number of players who, irrespective of their actual positions, tend to rack up a lot of points, so if there's an opportunity to get one, they should be gotten.

From there, since FF is about making predictions, you should focus on 1) individual player skill; 2) fitness of a player to their team (a fantastic WR isn't going to get you much if he has Rex Grossman throwing to him, sadly); 3) strength of opposition (but I'd expect that this is so hard to predict that it should be the last thing to be taken into account.)

A good starting place would also seem to be something like nfl.com/rankings, which appears to just straight-up rank players by their FF scores (I presume based on last season). Is this site to be trusted? It's the official NFL site, so...I wonder.

We need more, and better, filters

2009-08-23T14:25:00.001-07:00

The problem of information is no longer too little access; it's now too much. As more content is generated in ever-diminishing sizes (from books to magazines to newspapers to blogs to texts to tweets to...?), and as more of it gets put online and made instantly available, the existence of information in usable form becomes more and more useless. What good is the latest awesome article on global warming, if I never see it because it gets buried beneath a thousand new RSS items a day?

While this might be a pretty obvious idea, it has yet to really become a mainstream feature of most major information-consumption tools:

Google Reader will either show me every new item, or only those from an individual feed or feeds, but it won't actively filter anything out (or add to my feeds). The result is thousands of feeds of seemingly equal importance, when in reality I only want to read a small number of them.
Facebook shows me every update from every one of my friends, but unless I want to spend forever sorting all my friends into groups and explicitly telling it who I want to see updates from, I'll see everything from everyone. My best friend's pictures of his new apartment are, to Facebook, just as worthy of presentation as an inane application invite from someone I barely know. Since Facebook is, to me, primarily useful as a way of finding out what's going on in my friend's lives, this lack of a filter has rendered the site entirely useless for me, and as a result I never use it.
Twitter just shows me every tweet from everyone I follow, ordered chronologically. If one tweet has been retweeted a million times, and another one has never been retweeted, Twitter won't make the distinction. The result is that Twitter seems to be tough to scale beyond a few dozen follows at once; I don't know how people who follow hundreds or thousands of others manage to keep up.
Gmail, and every other email client, only understands how to order my inbox by recency. Thank god for the personal-level indicators (two arrows for emails sent only to me, one for emails cc'ed to me), but there's got to be more that could be done here.

The point of a filter is to make information useful. I can learn more about what's going on in the world from one minute scanning the front page of Google News (which I work on) than I could from an hour with Reader, Twitter or Facebook. Until those services take advantage of the power of filters, they'll be little more than dumb interfaces for random blobs of text.

Is this an empty life?

2009-08-23T12:57:00.000-07:00

What's the point of everything? That's a pretty classic question, asked as long as people have existed, and I doubt there's ever really been a great answer to it. And the mere fact that it's been asked for all of human history probably means that the answer to my question is the same as it always has been: no more and no less so than anyone else's.

Our culture (and here I refer actually to the very specific subcultures I inhabit, thinking in no way that my experience is representative of any larger American gestalt) emphasizes the importance of certain types of achievement, either in one's career or one's social life (or ideally, both). One can be a doctor or a civil rights lawyer or a humanitarian, and directly and positively impact dozens, hundreds, thousands of lives. One can create art, and inspire and touch and motivate and provoke an audience. One can start a family, have a ton of friends, build a long and successful relationship, or spend every night and weekend in a glorious worship of Bacchus.

But what if one doesn't do very many of those things? What if one's career is relatively unimportant and unimpactful; if one has a very small social circle and interacts with that circle irregularly at best; if one has no children and no party life (but does, at least, have a partner to share important things with)?

I don't think that makes one (at this point, obviously: me) a failure, but it does create an empty feeling, a sense of pointlessness. Exacerbated by all the people on the planet, or even in my neighborhood, who seem to have a point.

But at such depths of self-pity, I begin to remember that the universe is billions of years old, that the Earth is just a few less billions of years old. That multicellular life on Earth has existed for a billion years, that humanity has existed for 200,000 years and that 175,000 of those years were the age of the neanderthals (all credits Wikipedia).

In other words, if I live to be 100 my entire lifetime, compared to that of the universe, will be roughly equivalent to 30 seconds of my own life. If the universe were a person, I would be born, grow up, live, love, learn and die all in less time than it takes that person to download a new episode of Weeds.

This is to say nothing of the billions of lives that have already been lived, and will be lived, by other humans on this earth. Which is in turn to say nothing of the potential billions more lives that have been lived by sentient beings on other worlds about which we know nothing. Which is itself nothing compared to the trillions of lives that have been lived by non-humans on this, and other, worlds.

In other words, my existence will be meaningless, no matter what I do. It will be over in the time it takes the universe to visit the bathroom, but with much less impact. And if that's the case, why does it matter what I do with my fantastically short time to exist? The best I could possibly do would still be utter insignificance, and futile emptiness, even if it might "feel" better. Likewise, the worst I could possibly do would still be insignificant (and so in a sense I have no free will, since I have no ability to impact the universe, but that's another discussion).

This might be a bit of a downer to someone else, but to me it's uplifting. The pressure's off. While it would still obviously be better to do something than nothing, to improve the planet for others in some way (rather than make it worse, or have no impact at all), the stakes are low. I'm not supposed to feel much different than I do, because all of our existences are empty, pointless and fleeting. That being the case, we should seek to enjoy our time as much as possible, to live in the moment (since we can live nowhere else) and to spend as little time as possible worrying about our significance, because we have none.

Phew.

California's struggles don't implicate the "blue state" model

2009-08-03T08:54:00.001-07:00

Ross Douthat and David Leonhardt pile on poor, sickly California today in the NYT. Douthat uses California as his chief example of the "blue state basket case[s]" while Leonhardt argues that "liberals have yet to really grapple with" the implications of California's failure. This follows Joel Kotkin's piece, "The Blue-State Meltdown," last month, and the Economist's cover contrasting California's struggles with Texas' successes.

The Kotkin piece is relatively impressively-argued, though it goes dramatically off the rails by the end. The "Chicago model" of patronage/machine politics has been gutted in the last few decades, as anyone who knows anything about the city will tell you, and that's been accomplished largely by a liberal consensus that's moved past the stale and increasingly-irrelevant ethnic politics that characterized the city for most of the 20th century. People like Obama and Axelrod actually represent the newest iteration of the movement that has seen Chicago go from the capital of the Rust Belt in the 70s - a bigger Cleveland, in many ways - to one of the most vibrant, entrepreneurial and green big cities in the country. Kotkin writes this off to gentrification alone, which has certainly taken its toll - whole neighborhoods have entirely changed character, and the city has become much less affordable - but while the Chicago story is complicated, it would be impossible to live there and think the city even remotely a "failure".

I'd also like to point out that, while blue states certainly have their troubles, the economies of the red states don't exactly represent a way forward - heavily tilted towards agriculture which basically exists entirely due to federal subsidies, they comprise about 94 million people in a country of over 300 million. Using outdated 2004 figures (no time to do the current math), 79% of the states that receive more than they give the federal government in taxes voted for Bush in 2000. 69% of those that give more than they receive voted for Gore.

But this post wasn't supposed to be about Kotkin, it was supposed to be about Douthat and Leonhardt and the general tendency to assume that California's problems represent a failure of blue-state economics. In reality, the opposite is true: the chief cause of California's problems represents one of the conservative anti-tax movement's holiest of holies, Proposition 13. Prop 13 severely restricted property tax receipts for California, to the extent that the income tax in California provides nearly half of state revenue. As a result, the California budget gets hit hard in even the mildest economic downturn, let alone in one of the worst economic catastrophes to hit the country in generations.

But that's not all Prop 13 does. It also requires legislators to pass tax increases by a 2/3 supermajority (in addition to a previous requirement that budgets be passed by a 2/3 vote), which makes it practically impossible to raise taxes by even a penny. Conservative Republicans are therefore given a stranglehold over the state budget, California's "blue" reputation notwithstanding. Their intransigence and irresponsibility is what has brought California to this precipice, and the opportunism of a Republican governor intent on using this crisis to do even more damage to California's social contract threatens to push us over the brink.

In short, to blame California's problems on its "blue" economic model is to willfully ignore every salient fact of California's present condition. Republicans hold the purse strings hostage, and now Republicans and their friends in the conservative media gloat that California can't pay for its liberal policies. That makes about as much sense as blaming Obama for George Bush's economic collapse. Oh, wait...

Happy Sunday

2009-08-02T15:34:00.000-07:00

Sitting in one of my new favorite cafes in the Bay Area, with "Irina's" netbook (downloading Ubuntu Netbook Remix), 1300 pages of the complete Bone, Kemper's pop and delicious mochas...finished the (interesting parts of the) Nation yesterday and read a ton of the Economist today...savoring the plane tickets we bought for Bali yesterday...seeing Phish on Wednesday with Joel, saw a cool opening at the YBCA yesterday with Irina, Lenny and Luba.

My life just might be egregiously comfortable. What the hell kind of dues did I ever pay (or, scary thought, will I at some point have to pay) for all this?

I need to blog more, if only because I kind of like typing on this thing.

This can't be the whole story

2009-07-17T09:32:00.000-07:00

Slate published a potentially-interesting article asking 6 of the "Most Important Questions...About the CIA's Targeted Killing Program". I label it "potentially" interesting because it appears, to me, to have a gaping blind spot, ignoring the most obvious and "important" question of all. It's one that almost all the coverage of the story that I've seen seems to ignore, as well (although to be fair, I haven't had the time to read a ton about this yet, so maybe this is getting asked somewhere.)

But not only does it fail to ask the question, it goes so far as to note that the answer is obvious to "even the daftest political observers". I suppose being called "daft" by Slate is a badge of honor, but I'd prefer it if they actually addressed the question, rather than assuming its irrelevance.

The question in question is, "Why is this a big deal?"

Note that this isn't the same as asking, "Was this program illegal?" I think it probably was basically illegal, but the CIA does illegal stuff all the time. In fact, it has a whole branch of operators whose entire purpose is to perform tasks in such a way that the United States can't be identified as behind them. Sure, sometimes there are political and not legal reasons for that, but you'd have to be totally insane to think that everything the CIA did, while attempting to be as covert as possible about it, was ok under national or international law.

But getting back to the original question, why wouldn't this be a big deal? Well, for starters, because we already do this openly! Predator drones launch missiles targeted at individual al Qaeda leaders in Afghanistan and Pakistan all the time! If the only difference between that program and this one is that this one is done with bullets instead of missiles, by people on the ground instead of in a trailer in Nevada, well, it's hard to see what the big deal is. And so far, that appears to be the only difference.

Why is this relevant? Well, the whole reason this story is blowing up right now is because VP Cheney allegedly ordered the CIA not to disclose the very existence of this program to Congress. Now, that is flagrantly and obviously illegal, even to a guy accustomed to shooting his friends in the face with a shotgun, and I don't think he would've done that to protect a program that was so minimally different from what we already openly acknowledge doing, and that was never even operational. Not to mention, I find it hard to believe that such a program would, upon discovery by CIA Director Panetta, be shut down immediately and rushed into a briefing to Congress the very next day.

So what else don't we know about this program? Because this can't be everything.

Should liberals opt into the public plan, even if they already have insurance?

2009-07-15T07:49:00.000-07:00

Yesterday, the 3 House committees responsible for health reform released a joint bill - the American Affordable Healthy Choices Act - that probably represents the most liberal version of whatever health reform legislation the country ultimately receives. Notably, it includes a public option, though one that the Congressional Budget Office expects to enroll only 10 million Americans by 2019.

So I've been wondering: do liberals who believe in some form of single-payer have an ethical obligation to enroll in the public plan, regardless of whether they already have health insurance, and in particular, regardless of how good that insurance is? I'm tempted to say yes, since the whole point of the public option is to compete with private insurers. If we believe that the country should have one dominant public insurer, it would seem hypocritical not to enroll in it when it comes into existence.

So now my question is: since I already have employer-provided health insurance, if I enroll in the public plan, will I have to pay my premiums out-of-pocket?

Why it doesn't matter that you can't run Photoshop on ChromeOS today

2009-07-10T11:19:00.001-07:00

The more I read about ChromeOS, the more excited I get about it. I think there's a lot of potential, but I keep hearing one argument against its significance that I'd like to address.

"I'm not interested in ChromeOS, since it won't be able to handle heavy-duty programs like Photoshop."

That might be true today, but it won't be true forever (or even for long). Here's why:

The first computers were programmed by directly writing instructions to the CPU - take this bit here, do this to it, send it there, etc - and all of that coding was done by hand, which is extremely difficult and tedious work. Even today, if you want to write fast code, that's what you do - write directly to the metal (typically using an assembly language, which is basically semi-readable machine code).

But what most people who want something pretty fast (like Photoshop) do is write in C/C++, which gets compiled into that same machine code. It runs a bit slower than if it had been written directly in machine code or assembly, but the tradeoff is it's insanely easier to write and debug. And as compilers get better, it becomes almost as fast as straight machine code.

It wasn't always that way, however, and when C came along, it wasn't nearly as fast as assembly; and when C++ came along, it wasn't nearly as fast as C.

Eventually, Java was introduced, and for years, the C/C++ folks argued that nobody who wanted to write a powerful application would ever do it in Java, because it would be too slow. That's because everything in Java has to get run inside of a virtual machine, which sits on top of your actual machine, and so it just adds this other layer of stuff that has to get executed. Initially, that made Java really slow. But the virtual machines got better and better, and today, Java is basically as fast as C/C++, and many high-performance applications are written in Java.

It's important to note that minor speed differences remain among all these languages, but those differences are completely overwhelmed by how much faster CPUs, hard drives, RAM, graphics cards, etc are. So it's still true that running a virtual machine beneath a Java app is slower than if you didn't need the VM at all, but the speed penalty is at this point extremely small (I'm sure there are language pedants on both sides of the C++/Java divide who would take issue with this, but for this discussion, I think it's a fair point to make).

And so today, faced with a new layer of abstraction - Javascript running in a browser written in C++ on top of a kernel, also written in C++ - people are saying, "No way could you write a web app that would perform as well as a C/C++/Java app." And today, that's true.

There's really only one main reason for that (plus a few small implementation quirks): browsers, which can be thought of as the new Java virtual machines in this story, are slow, and both HTML and Javascript aren't considered "fast" or even particularly pleasant to program in. But that's changing: HTML5 is a substantial improvement on HTML, and Javascript is becoming more and more powerful every day. And browsers - Chrome, Safari, Firefox and even Internet Explorer - are getting faster and faster at running HTML/Javascript apps. In a few years, they'll be fast enough that the performance of web apps will only be a little worse than that of C/C++/Java apps. And CPUs, and every other piece of hardware, will be faster, so it won't matter that much.

In addition, there are a number of projects that already aim to make it even easier to write high-performance code for the web - nativeclient and O3D being just two (Googley) examples.

So yeah, as of right now, you can't and wouldn't want to run Photoshop in a browser. But by the time ChromeOS ships next year, that may be less true. And a year or two after that? Mmhm.

Called it

2009-07-10T11:03:00.001-07:00

I just want to point out that my very first post on this blog, over a year ago, is made way more relevant and credible with the introduction of ChromeOS. I cannot wait for that little number to make it onto one of my machines!

An even better parking meter

2009-06-30T12:08:00.000-07:00

Chicago recently privatized its parking meters, ripping out the old coin-operated ones that stood at each space with a smaller number of centralized, coin-and-credit card-fed boxes that print out receipts to put in your windshield. I think they could have done a much better job:

First, instead of paper receipts, regular parkers should have little RFID badges, perhaps that plug into cigarette lighters to recharge. This way, meter maids can just walk down a street and tell without even looking if a car has gone over its limit.

But the real benefit of the RFID badges would be that they'd make for a much more interesting, targeted payment system. For one thing, you could enable people to pay for parking remotely. Instead of having to walk to their cars to feed the meter every 2 hours, they could do it online or over the phone.

But part of the reason you wouldn't want this functionality would be that you don't want people to hog spots all day. So, in exchange, you'd raise the prices, perhaps substantially. (They should probably be generally much higher than they are now anyway). That would both raise more money, and enhance the quality of life for people who frequently don't have any choice but to park in a metered spot for a long time.

Now, this type of thing often has the unfortunate side effect of making life a lot more expensive for the poor and lower-middle class, so you could create a variable pricing system tied in part to individual income, deduced from the state income tax receipts. You could also make the pricing somewhat dynamic, based on demand.

This idea has a number of potential pitfalls, but it would a) raise more money; b) make parking much more convenient for people; c) be much better calibrated to individual income levels; d) make enforcement much easier and e) generate boatloads of interesting and useful data about who parks where and when.

Is $18 a better price than free for culture?

2009-06-29T11:01:00.000-07:00

I'm in Chicago for the next few weeks, and yesterday I briefly walked through Renzo Piano's new $300 million Modern Wing of the Art Institute. It's easily one of the most gorgeous spaces I've ever been in, a fabulous complement to an already-great museum, and it somehow manages to make Millenium Park even more stunning than it had been. As part of the effort to pay for it, however, the Art Institute had to raise its admission price, from $12 to $18.

The Art Institute is a world-class museum, in a world-class space, at a world-class location, and by some measures, $18 is a more than fair price for access to its collection of thousands of pieces that represent some of the finest artistic creations in human history. In addition, it's free for any resident of Chicago that checks out a pass from any library in the city. It's free for the entire month of February. It's free Thursday and Friday nights in the summer. And it's free on sporadic other days throughout the year.

All of which is wonderful, and of course $300 million doesn't come cheap these days, so money must be raised somewhere. Why not on the backs of tourists and the middle and upper classes, who can afford to pay $18 per person for the privilege of visiting whenever they like, and enjoying smaller crowds when they do?

The problem I have is that too many Chicagoans have no experience of, or connection to, the Art Institute. For them, downtown is a rare destination, or merely a place of business to which they're not welcome, unless a floor needs mopping or a bathroom, cleaning. The city needs to make more of an effort to bring its citizens together at temples of culture and learning, such as the Art Institute.

Part of this has to include reforming admission fees for museums, and making it more economically attractive for families living far away from downtown to make the trek. As this intriguing article from the American Association of Museums (from 2007, alas, so it's a bit out of date) points out, high admission fees represent a real barrier for poor and lower-income families, but the revenue from these fees make up only 5% of the operating budget for the average American art museum.

These families are kept away in part because of the perception that a trip to the museum is expensive, even when that's not necessarily the case. In 2006, the Art Institute switched from a "suggested" $12 donation to a mandatory one, but didn't see much change in visitor demographics (although the data wasn't fully in at the time of writing). Although one could argue that this indicates price isn't the real obstacle for families, since they weren't coming even though it was free to do so, I would disagree. In my experience, there's long been the perception that the Art Institute is an expensive place to go, and I wouldn't be at all surprised if many families were unaware that, before 2006, the AI was actually "free".

Families are also kept away in part because, even if the museum itself is free, the trip is definitely not. Imagine you're a family of four living an hour's train ride away from the Art Institute. Even if you think a visit would be valuable for your family, you have to pay for two train rides for each person (these days, that's $18 altogether); you have to pay for food ($10-15 at the very rock bottom); and you have to go far out of your way, which might be pretty difficult for working families. Even if the desire to visit the museum is there, getting there and paying for everything else is tough.

I think one solution might be "Neighborhood Days": instead of having free evenings during the summer, reach out to neighborhood organizations. Use the money you budget towards a free day (plus corporate/city/philanthropic sponsorship, natch) to pay for buses to take kids and their parents from their neighborhood into the AI. Have some guided tours, and let them explore on their own a bit. Give them dinner. If the parents can't make it, have some chaperones present too. Rotate from neighborhood to neighborhood every week. It's basically a field trip program, but no longer in a school context. If you do it often enough, you might get some kids and parents hooked who wouldn't otherwise have visited the museum. Offer participants free semi-membership, so they can come back whenever they want.

True, it'd be a bit expensive. But we're talking about a museum with $300 million to drop on a new building, and more besides to buy incredible works of art from around the world. Buy one fewer Matisse in the next few years, and use that money to get thousands more kids and their parents from underserved neighborhoods to visit the museum.

Trust me, you won't have to become a vegan

2009-06-24T08:24:00.001-07:00

Irina and I saw Food, Inc. over the weekend, and I really, really recommend it. The wall between what we eat, and what we know about what we eat, has never in human history been so high or so rarely-penetrated, and that's a real problem. I was a little nervous going into it, because I like what I eat and didn't want to learn that it was all awful and disgusting and I was going to have to become a vegan.

That didn't happen - and even if it did, being an adult means knowing things that are important to know, even if one doesn't want to. I walked out with the sense that it's important to eat more pure foods, like fresh fruits and vegetables, ideally organic but that's not always an option (and it's certainly expensive). Not exactly rocket science, and I knew it already, but sometimes knowing something to be true, and understanding the real truth of it (and the implications of that truth) are different things.

That's even more true when it comes to agriculture policy, which for me was the real importance of this movie. While it'd be great if I ate more fruits and vegetables, that'll only make me healthier, and have a very marginal impact on a handful of the companies and farmers that feed me. What would have a tremendous impact is if we rethought the way we subsidize food, and made it as inexpensive as possible to eat a healthy, balanced diet instead of one loaded with corn byproducts, heavy on cheap, industrial meat and washed down with 6 liters of Coke that cost the same as three heads of broccoli.

This is why I love sports

2009-06-21T13:15:00.001-07:00

Going into today, the US was in dead-last place in its group of 4 teams in the Confederations Cup - it had lost to Brazil and Italy, and was playing Egypt. It was the only one of the 4 teams that had yet to win a game, and had only scored 1 goal - on a penalty kick. During the ESPN intro for the Italy-Brazil game, the announcers ripped (rightly) into the US side, noting that they had as much chance of advancing as Jon and Kate did of staying together. They joked that it would take longer to explain the convoluted scenario in which the US advanced than it would to play the 90-minute games. They aired an interview from yesterday with Oguchi Onyewu, one of the US defenders, where they asked him all kinds of questions about what went wrong (and to his credit, he took the questions fairly and answered introspectively and thoughtfully).

45 minutes later, Brazil was up 3-0 (all 3 Brazilian goals came in the space of 15 minutes, and the last was a shameful own goal) and the US was up 1-0. All of a sudden, what had seemed like a ridiculous long-shot was 2 US goals away from a reality, and that second half of the US-Egypt game got WAY more interesting! Michael Bradley got a nice feed from Landon Donovan in the box, and then they were 1 goal away. And then...free kick from Donovan (I think), Clint Dempsey got a diving header to find the back of the net, I started screaming, got that rush of excited happiness that you only get when your team comes from behind to win, and MAN. Do I love sports sometimes.

I also thought it was a great sign that, as evidenced in the pre-game, the US sports media was now treating the US men's soccer team like a real side, equals with the great teams of the world. They'd lost, after all, to the two greatest national teams in men's soccer (not necessarily the best teams from each country's history, but Brazil and Italy are perennially the titans of world soccer). A few years ago, the questions would have assumed that the US would have lost those games; now, they assume only that the US enters international competition with the expectation of success.

This has to already exist, right?

2009-06-20T20:22:00.000-07:00

Is there a good way to see what movies are playing near me?

Now, obviously, there are like a zillion different services that do this. But here's what I want:

Work only from a list of my favorite theaters. Because in practice, I only care about what's playing at the X theaters that it's remotely convenient for me to get to (and geographic distance is NOT THE SAME THING AS THIS, since I don't own a car)
Email me every week with new releases - tell me synopsis, a few reviews, RottenTomatoes score, showtimes at theaters on my list, trailers, IMDB info.
Ask me: "What do you want to see tonight?" Let me respond with a genre (Comedy, horror); a level of quality (RT score would suffice); some set of attributes (foreign film, oscar winner, re-release, "classic", color/black-and-white, etc); or a time (What's playing at 9pm tonight?); in addition to film title and theater.
When I go to the front page, just show me what's playing today at my favorite theaters, along with one-sentence synopsis and showtimes for each.

I'm just whining because it's always kind of a pain to figure out what looks good on a given night, and this seems like a problem the Internet was fucking designed to solve.

How does this end?

2009-06-20T15:18:00.000-07:00

Riots in Iran protesting the stolen election continued for the 8th straight day today. The crowds are staying large, the Basij are staying brutal but not massacring large numbers, the army is holding back, communications with the outside world remain spotty and, as always, it remains unclear what happens next.

These days of street protest, countered by helicopters spraying a chemical agent on demonstrators, by Basij militiamen beating people with electric batons, and by Revolutionary Guard shooting into crowds and killing dozens of people, are fatally damaging the credibility of the Iranian regime. Even if they come out of this still in control, it's hard to see Ahmadinejad or Khamenei making a public appearance in any large city without drawing throngs of opposition protesters. Their legitimacy, and particuarly Khamenei's, is on the line, and the best outcome for them is that they don't lose it altogether.

But one of Andrew Sullivan's commentators makes an excellent point: what can the regime do? They've closed off communications with the outside world, but they can't keep that up forever. They're committing violence against the demonstrators, and losing their moral authority as a result, but they're not stopping anything. The more they clamp down, the more resistance they'll encounter. But if they ease up, the opposition will have a better time finding its voice. They're stuck, and they probably know it, and they have everything to lose, and all that makes them very dangerous. And for a regime brought into being in part due to protests against the killing of protesters, the use of force could as easily backfire as succeed.

And while I'm at it, Andrew Sullivan's done an amazing job of chronicling these events over the last several days. He's become the clearinghouse for information being generated by individuals all across Iran, and the world really, and he's demonstrating the power of new, user-generated media. The historically unprecedented amount of information that's leaked out from what a supposedly closed society during this upheaval is going to be studied for a long time to come, and this is one of the events that will forever mark the establishment of the Internet as a force for journalistic excellence.

I really wish this story were true

2009-06-17T18:26:00.000-07:00

This morning, I saw this article at Bloomberg, about two Japanese men arrested in Italy, attempting to cross the Swiss border by train, with $134 billion in US Treasury Bonds. The men were carrying enough US government debt to make them our 4th-largest creditor, just behind Russia ($138 billion). They were carrying 249 $500 million notes, and 10 $1 billion notes, in a suitcase with a false bottom. Turns out the notes were fake, but how fucking awesome (not to mention scary) would it be if they were real?

A glorious cacophony for a monotone age

2009-06-17T13:56:00.000-07:00

I came across this article today in a conservative online publication ("The American Thinker" - what a terrible name), called "Why Liberals Bleed". It's by a formerly-liberal psychotherapist in Berkeley, who's contemplating buying a gun. The article itself isn't particularly remarkable, nor is the subject (Guns good! Liberals weak! Berkeley silly!) What struck me were some of the comments, but really, they're not remarkable either.

One of the things I really don't like about the Internet is how easy it becomes to only hear what you want to hear. RSS feeds, personalized sections and selected individuals to follow on Twitter all contribute to an environment where only one set of perspectives gets filtered to each individual. What's great is that it can be a completely different set for everyone, but the problem is that we tend to pick only those voices that don't challenge us. (At least I do, but I don't think I'm alone.)

Which brings me back to the article above and its comments: nothing about either were well argued or well written, but reading such a chorus of similar opinions so vastly different from my own was a bit unsettling. It made me aware of how infrequently I hear from that side of the room.

It makes me realize that there's a real need for a publication, print or online, that brings together a sharp set of dissenting voices, and makes for compelling reading by people of widely divergent viewpoints. To be clear, I don't mean a publication that features lame watered-down forced moderation; I mean the exact opposite, with writers who loathe everything the other writers stand for, but can't stop reading each other because they're so good at what they do. I guess that could be accomplished with a good set of different RSS feeds, but I think there's a real place for an actual such publication.

(Disclaimer: I work on Google News, which aims to do something similar to what I described above - bring together voices from across the spectrum of whatever issue is under discussion.)

What to do about Iran

2009-06-16T21:32:00.000-07:00

While it appears that the unrest in Iran continues, it seems to have died down a bit from previous days. It's beginning to seem possible for an armchair analyst to make some predictions about what's going to happen.

Before guessing about the future, let's correct the record about the present: the temptation to use the word "revolution" has to be ignored. The protesters in Iran aren't trying to overthrow a government; they're trying to get their votes counted. The candidate they support isn't some wild-eyed radical; he's a former prime minister who's been a fixture in Iranian politics for a long time. He was an early supporter of the nuclear program and the taking of American hostages in 1979, and was a protege of the founding theocrat of modern Iran.

It's also worth pointing out that, for the moment, President Obama is taking exactly the right course of action. Anything he says in praise of the opposition will be seized upon and exploited by Ahmadinejad's supporters, and will help discredit Mousavi as just a Western puppet. Imagine what would have happened in 2008 if bin Laden had endorsed Obama, and you get a sense of how much good the President is doing by keeping relatively quiet.

Now, when paroxysms of anger hit the streets, they usually follow one of three distinct paths: they escalate; they simmer; or they die out (or get crushed). At the moment, it appears that the protests are getting smaller, not larger, and the Iranian government is doing relatively little to inflame them. True, they've killed some protesters and continue to suppress contact with the outside world, but there haven't been any large-scale clashes, and they've mostly had the Basij militia commit some small-bore acts of violence and vandalism. Bad all around, but not the kind of attempt to crush the protesters that either succeeds, or fails spectacularly.

This would all seem to suggest that the resistance will neither be crushed, nor explode into something that takes down the regime (which isn't even something the protesters want). It's possible it could die out over time, especially if some large chunk of the protesters are mollified by the Guardian Council investigation and recount. I don't think they will be, directly, but if the regime continues to make similar minor concessions, and bides its time until the anger in the streets mostly subsides, I think they could ride this out. The key test of this strategy will come over the next few days: if the rallies keep getting smaller, the diminution will feed on itself. On the other hand, if something major or at least iconic transpires, to give new life to the protests, that would be dangerous. A few days of protests is one thing; a few weeks is an entirely different story.

But for now, let's operate under the assumption that the regime doesn't do anything dramatic, that protests continue to dwindle, and that a few weeks from now, the anger in the streets will be replaced with a far more benign opposition to Ahmadinejad. In that scenario, how should the United States deal with Iran?

First, by attempting to engage with Ahmedinejad (and, perhaps, with Ayatollah Khomeini, who's really in charge) and offering an easing of international sanctions in return for IAEA inspections of Iran's nuclear facilities. An Ahmedinejad weakened by days or weeks of mass protest in support of a candidate who pledged to create better relationships with the West should be more willing to make a deal.

Second, by making clear that the United States has no problem with Iran's development of nuclear technology, so long as it exists under international supervision and acts consistent with its obligations under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) to which it's a signatory.

Third, by organizing a regional security conference to which Iran would be a key invitee. It's important to remember that Iran is bordered by Iraq on one side, and Afghanistan on another, and Pakistan (where America is bombing Taliban targets semi-covertly) on yet another. Iran has a real (and justified) feeling of American encirclement, and its efforts to develop a nuclear weapon are in large part due to the rational supposition that, were it to possess such a device, it wouldn't be next on the invasion list.

Ultimately, the reality is that there's not a lot that the United States can do to positively impact Iran's internal affairs. We're too high-profile, and too much of a villain, to be able to take that approach. We need to soften our image, establish what relationships we can, and largely stay out of the way of Iranians interested in solving their own problems. As the events of the last week demonstrate amply, Iran is the opposite of a monolithic society, and the elements more favorable to a less hostile engagement with the West are, at the moment, on the ascent. The best thing we can do for them is not make them look like our puppets.

Fuck Yeah.

2009-06-15T21:03:00.000-07:00

This is what a revolutionary looks like.

Barack's busy day

2009-06-15T16:44:00.000-07:00

Iran, Health Care, Israel. And I think he's doing a great job on all three. Man, what a difference from the last 8 years...

Obama makes the case for Obamacare

2009-06-15T13:51:00.000-07:00

Today, President Obama gave a speech to the American Medical Association (video here; transcript here). I was very impressed with it, and want to highlight a few key points:

If we fail to act, one out of every five dollars we earn will be spent on health care within a decade. And in 30 years, it will be about one out of every three -- a trend that will mean lost jobs, lower take-home pay, shuttered businesses, and a lower standard of living for all Americans.

And if we fail to act, federal spending on Medicaid and Medicare will grow over the coming decades by an amount almost equal to the amount our government currently spends on our nation's defense. It will, in fact, eventually grow larger than what our government spends on anything else today. It's a scenario that will swamp our federal and state budgets, and impose a vicious choice of either unprecedented tax hikes, or overwhelming deficits, or drastic cuts in our federal and state budgets.

I hadn't heard some of these stats before, and I think they make the case for action better than almost anything else. As expensive as some form of universal health care will be, we can't afford not to do it.

[Electronic medical records] will reduce medical errors, it's estimated, that lead to 100,000 lives lost unnecessarily in our hospitals every year.

I really have a hard time believing this statistic. I've heard some variant of it before - and this CBS piece presents a compelling scenario in which electronic records would literally be life-saving - but Obama's overselling a bit here. Electronic records not only won't stop every simple accident from occurring, but it's not hard to imagine mixups occurring specifically due to electronic records: what happens if a system is down, or there's a typo somewhere, for example? Still, I think the basic point is valid, even if 100,000 is a bit inflated.

Despite what some have suggested, the reason we have these spiraling costs is not simply because we've got an aging population; demographics do account for part of rising costs because older, sicker societies pay more on health care than younger, healthier ones, and there's nothing intrinsically wrong in us taking better care of ourselves. But what accounts for the bulk of our costs is the nature of our health care delivery system itself -- a system where we spend vast amounts of money on things that aren't necessarily making our people any healthier; a system that automatically equates more expensive care with better care.

Now, a recent article in the New Yorker, for example, showed how McAllen, Texas, is spending twice as much as El Paso County -- twice as much -- not because people in McAllen, Texas, are sicker than they are in El Paso; not because they're getting better care or getting better outcomes. It's simply because they're using more treatments -- treatments that, in some cases, they don't really need; treatments that, in some cases, can actually do people harm by raising the risk of infection or medical error.

And the problem is this pattern is repeating itself across America. One Dartmouth study shows that you're less likely -- you're no less likely to die from a heart attack and other ailments in a higher-spending area than in a lower-spending one.

Right on, Barack! He's referring to this article that I posted about recently, and I only heard about it because Obama had been passing it around the West Wing, so it's no surprise to see it in this speech. But still, I was skeptical that the specific issues raised in the article would get as much attention as they did in this speech, and that's great to see.

Now, if you don't like your health care coverage or you don't have any insurance at all, you'll have a chance, under what we've proposed, to take part in what we're calling a Health Insurance Exchange. This exchange will allow you to one-stop shop for a health care plan, compare benefits and prices, and choose a plan that's best for you and your family -- the same way, by the way, that federal employees can do, from a postal worker to a member of Congress.

...

And I believe one of these options needs to be a public option that will give people a broader range of choices -- (applause) -- and inject competition into the health care market so that force -- so that we can force waste out of the system and keep the insurance companies honest. (Applause.)

I'm really glad to see this in the speech, as well. The AMA isn't a public option-friendly organization, and in order to actually get a public option passed, Obama's going to have to make the case for it, and do so to hostile audiences like this one.

Indeed, it's because I'm confident in our ability to give people the ability to get insurance at an affordable rate that I'm open to a system where every American bears responsibility for owning health insurance -- (applause) -- so long as we provide a hardship waiver for those who still can't afford it as we move towards this system.

This is excellent! His plan during the campaign famously didn't mandate that individuals have health insurance, which I and many others on the left found to be one of its biggest weaknesses. And while I'd prefer that, instead of a "hardship waiver", we just provided care for free to those who couldn't afford it (a la Medicaid), I'm glad to see movement here.

Let me give you an example of what I'm talking about. We need to end the practice of denying coverage on the basis of preexisting conditions. (Applause.) The days of cherry-picking who to cover and who to deny, those days are over. (Applause.) I know you see it in your practices, and how incredibly painful and frustrating it is -- you want to give somebody care and you find out that the insurance companies are wiggling out of paying.

Awesome. Fuck that pre-existing bullshit. Cover everyone for everything they need.

Now, there are already voices saying the numbers don't add up. They're wrong. Here's why. Making health care affordable for all Americans will cost somewhere on the order of $1 trillion over the next 10 years.

...

That said, let me explain how we will cover the price tag. First, as part of the budget that was passed a few months ago, we put aside $635 billion over 10 years in what we're calling a Health Reserve Fund. Over half of that amount -- more than $300 billion -- will come from raising revenue by doing things like modestly limiting the tax deductions the wealthiest Americans can take to the same level that it was at the end of the Reagan years

...

But we can't just raise revenues. We're also going to have to make spending cuts, in part by examining inefficiencies in our current Medicare program. There are going to be robust debates about where these cuts should be made, and I welcome that debate. But here's where I think these cuts should be made.

First, we should end overpayments to Medicare Advantage. (Applause.) Today, we're paying Medicare Advantage plans much more than we pay for traditional Medicare services. Now, this is a good deal for insurance companies. It's a subsidy to insurance companies. It's not a good deal for you. It's not a good deal for the American people. And by the way, it doesn't follow free market principles, for those who are always talking about free market principles. That's why we need to introduce competitive bidding into the Medicare Advantage program, a program under which private insurance companies are offering Medicare coverage. That alone will save $177 billion over the next decade, just that one step. (Applause.)

Second, we need to use Medicare reimbursements to reduce preventable hospital readmissions. Right now, almost 20 percent of Medicare patients discharged from hospitals are readmitted within a month, often because they're not getting the comprehensive care that they need. ... That will save us $25 billion over the next decade.

Third, we need to introduce generic biologic drugs into the marketplace. (Applause.) These are drugs used to treat illnesses like anemia. But right now, there is no pathway at the FDA for approving generic versions of these drugs. Creating such a pathway will save us billions of dollars. We can save another roughly $30 billion by getting a better deal for our poorer seniors while asking our well-off seniors to pay a little more for their drugs.

So that's the bulk of what's in the Health Reserve Fund. I've also proposed saving another $313 billion in Medicare and Medicaid spending in several other ways. One way is by adjusting Medicare payments to reflect new advances and productivity gains in our economy. Right now, Medicare payments are rising each year by more than they should. These adjustments will create incentives for providers to deliver care more efficiently, and save us roughly $109 billion in the process.

Another way we can achieve savings is by reducing payments to hospitals for treating uninsured people. ... But if we put in a system where people have coverage and the number of uninsured people goes down with our reforms, the amount we pay hospitals to treat uninsured people should go down, as well. Reducing these payments gradually, as more and more people have coverage, will save us over $106 billion. And we'll make sure the difference goes to the hospitals that need it most.

We can also save about $75 billion through more efficient purchasing of prescription drugs. And we can save about $1 billion more by rooting out waste, abuse, fraud throughout our health care system so that no one is charging more for a service than it's worth or charging a dime for a service that they don't provide.

...

Now, for those of you who took out your pencil and paper -- (laughter) -- altogether, these savings mean that we've put about $950 billion on the table -- and that doesn't count some of the long-term savings that we think will come about from reform -- from medical IT, for example, or increased investment in prevention.

Not bad. The big knock on the recent health care proposals is that there wasn't any good way to fund most of it. And while there's a decent amount of hand-waving here, the distance between what we'll be paying, and what we can afford, looks reasonably small (especially considering the long-term benefits).

My great-uncle Roger died recently

2009-06-15T13:44:00.001-07:00

And my uncle Jeff has done an outstanding job of eulogizing him.

My grandmother, Audrey, moved from England to the United States with my grandfather, Bernie, just after World War 2. Ever since, Audrey's kids and grandkids haven't had much interaction with the rest of her family, save for occasional trips across the pond in either direction.

As a result, I never knew Roger, and have only met a handful of the rest of my grandmother's family. Which is sad, because reading Jeff's account, I'd very much like to get to know that side of my own family better.

But it's also amazing to me, the difference between my grandmother and myself. If I'd have lived through what she did, I'd never stop telling anyone who'd listen about it. In contrast, Audrey has only ever briefly discussed the subject with me, and doesn't ever seem to be too excited to go into it. Which is perhaps because, unlike me, she's known real hardship first-hand, and that kind of thing is always much more exciting and glamorous in one's imagination than in reality.

The voice in my head is more eloquent than the one in my throat

2009-06-15T13:36:00.000-07:00

I was walking over to Building 40 to get lunch this afternoon, and my iPhone died, so I was forced to listen only to myself think for a few minutes. My life has become so media-saturated that that's actually a fairly unusual circumstance, and after a bit, I decided to see what would happen if I just started talking out loud.

One thing that I noticed was that I had a hard time exactly translating the thoughts in my head into words. I'd get the gist out, but in my head, perfectly-formed phrases and subtle insights bounce just out of my grasp, uncatchable by my voice.

I realized that this might be due, in part, to the fact that I've done a lot of self-censoring over the years; that not everything I think ever gets said (and probably most of it doesn't). Over time, that mechanism probably became somewhat automatic and so now, even when I want to turn it off, it's not quite so easy.

In addition, there's probably inevitably some lossiness in the translation between media - thought to speech and thought to text - just like how some English phrases don't have French equivalents, and vice-versa.

Which all means that most people are probably more eloquent in their heads than they are when they speak, and one shouldn't be quick to assume something about a person's relative level of intelligence, based solely on their ability to efficiently funnel their thoughts to their throat.

The Internet covers Iran

2009-06-14T17:38:00.000-07:00

The disputed Iranian election and its aftermath over the last few days are a pretty major story, of course. But one aspect that I find interesting is how well the various parts of the Internets are doing at helping us understand what's been going on.

One claim often made by entrenched members of the media establishment is that, without them, we'll lose our ability to get coverage of events in foreign countries - "When I went to Baghdad, I didn't see a Huffington Post bureau or a Google bureau", in the words of NYT editor Bill Keller (near the end of this clip):

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart

Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c

End Times

www.thedailyshow.com

Daily Show
Full Episodes

Political Humor

Newt Gingrich Unedited Interview

True enough, but that of course kind of misses the point. First, it's not like the (American) mainstream media does a spectacular job of covering world events already - CNN, for instance, has been a massive disappointment in covering the Iran story, even if they're playing catch-up now.

Second, one of the strengths of the Internet is precisely the ability it gives to anyone to speak about something. If what they have to say is interesting or useful, it gets linked to and spreads, and the result is the mass dissemination of dozens of different takes on a given story, as opposed to the suffocating uniformity of the MSM - is the difference between ABC, CNN or MSNBC really that great? And how about the Washington Post vs the NYT? There are some differences, but nothing remotely like what happens on the Internet. And the result is that a lot of great, otherwise-obscure, information comes to light.

For example, Juan Cole's amazing posts that draw on his enormous expertise in the region. On the Internet, he gets to write as much as he wants about the subject that is his passion. If he were on TV, he'd get a 2-minute interview where he'd get to regurgitate the most basic parts of his theses. He'd do better with an editorial in a newspaper, but not much better - a few hundred words on one day, and that'd be it. But on his blog, he gets to go into detail about the specific irregularities that appeared in the voting patterns disclosed by Iran's Interior Ministry, which provide extremely compelling evidence that the election results were rigged. The next day, he put up a post challenging the assumption that Ahmedinajad's victory was only a surprise because Western reporters were spending too much time in upper-class parts of the country.

(I'd also like to mention Jim Cowie's post analyzing, and debunking, the claim that Iran's Internet access was cut off from the outside world during and after the election, which goes into a level of detail you'd just never find in any mass media outlet.)

Finally, the Internet enables entirely new forms of communication to arise and spread. For example, the challenger has a Twitter account, which he's used to communicate within Iran and, most especially, to get his message out.

But as cool and sexy as Twitter is, for Iran, blogs appear to be the chief method of expressing revolutionary dissent:

IRAN: A Nation Of Bloggers from ayrakus on Vimeo.

This is such a beautiful, true paragraph

2009-06-11T20:06:00.000-07:00

De Botton not only captures the longing inherent to modern life, but he explains, with stunning accuracy, the ways that longing becomes encoded in specific objects and places. "[N]o quayside can ever appear entirely banal, because people will always be minuscule compared to the great oceans," he writes, "and the mention of faraway ports will hence always bear a confused promise of lives unfolding there which may be more vivid than the ones we know here, a romantic charge clinging to names like Yokohama, Alexandria and Tunis -- places which in reality cannot be exempt from tedium and compromise, but which are distant enough to support for a time certain confused daydreams of happiness."

From Salon's review of Alain de Botton's The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work.

2009-06-09T21:56:00.000-07:00

The New Yorker has an excellent article by Atul Gawande, about why health care in the US is so expensive. So excellent, in fact, that President Obama made it required reading for his staff.

I don't know what specifically Obama liked about it, but I think it does a great job of explaining what "regional difference in cost of health care" looks like, and (possibly) why it happens in the first place. I worry, however, that the subtle nuances Gawande gets to explore at length in a few thousand words for the New Yorker will get totally ignored when the discussion shifts to newspaper articles and op-eds, YouTube videos and TV commercials. You can see this beginning in the NYT piece:

"There is too much uncertainty about the Dartmouth study to use it as a basis for public policy," said Senator John Kerry, Democrat of Massachusetts. "Researchers can’t explain why some areas of the country spend more on health care than others. There are many reasons spending could vary: higher costs of living, sicker people or more teaching hospitals."

Sure, but this conveniently sidesteps the real issue: overprescription of medicines and procedures, which is both expensive and, quite probably, harmful to patient health. Fix the overprescription problem and you save a substantial amount of money, everywhere across the country, while improving patient health outcomes. It's too intriguing an avenue of exploration to not use as a basis for public policy.

It seems a little unlikely that what Gawande calls for - a series of government-incented local experiments into how best to remove the profit motive from doctor decision-making - will be forthcoming. Nothing like it really appears in the latest draft bill from the Senate, although it's too early for this one article to have had that kind of dramatic impact on the legislative process. And it's not like the Senate is where we should look for innovation. As this really interesting process piece from the NYT notes, the Senate (to steal from the NBA) is where craven happens:

Some House Democrats I talked to have already begun to wonder audibly why they’re the ones who always have to surrender in Emanuel’s middle-of-the-night negotiating sessions. They accuse Reid and his lieutenants of repeatedly placating Republicans to avoid a filibuster, rather than taking a stand on principle now and then. Why not force centrist Democrats to vote against their party and let Republicans filibuster the agenda on national television?

The health care ad I'd like to see

2009-06-09T08:54:00.000-07:00

Blank screen, a la Mac/PC ads. 2 people walk in, from the left and right.

LEFT: Hi. I'm a public health insurance plan.

RIGHT: And I'm a private health insurance plan.

LEFT: I cost you less money, and don't leave 46 million Americans uninsured.

RIGHT: And I'm the efficient, free-market solution.

LEFT: I cover more procedures, and won't deny you coverage for a pre-existing condition.

RIGHT: And I'm the efficient, free-market solution.

LEFT: I don't make you call me from your hospital bed, to make sure your life-saving procedure can be approved.

RIGHT: And I'm the efficient, free-market solution.

LEFT: I spend almost no money on administration, meaning you get lower rates, and more care for your dollar.

RIGHT: And...I'm the efficient, free-market solution?

Call your Congressional representative, and tell them that you've had enough: It's time to give Americans real health care we can all afford.

Obama's presidency is about to begin

2009-06-08T13:41:00.001-07:00

I'm just about to start reading this, but one or two paragraphs in and it's already dawned on me that Barack Obama has yet to actually be President.

I started to think this during a conversation with my friend Lenny yesterday - we were debating Obama's Cairo speech, and his various accomplishments to date. Lenny was pretty pleased so far, and I was much more skeptical (though somewhat optimistic). We both had our reasons, but ultimately, the picture is too unfinished.

I have a problem with Obama's failure to really stand up for gay rights, his decision to continue to abuse the State Secrets privilege and his mishandling of the bank bailouts.

Lenny saw the Cairo speech as a dramatic and impressive reframing of the War on Terror. He thinks the bailouts and the civil liberties issues are strategic decisions to not waste political capital on the small issues, when what really matters is health care.

I totally agree that if Obama manages to get meaningful health care reform through Congress, every capitulation, trade-off and half-measure he's employed so far, or will ever employ, will be secondary. Health care will be the measure of his Presidency. If he can get it, not only will his legacy be secured, but he'll accrue so much goodwill from the public, from liberal interest groups and probably from Congress, that he'll be able to get whatever else he wants. If he can't get it, he'll be badly wounded, and the cornerstone around which he based his campaign will be lost, leaving the rest of his edifice in precarious shape.

Health care really is the game. It's everything, and it's just about to get started. Judging the Obama Presidency without knowing what happens in the next year is like judging the FDR Presidency without knowing how WW2 ended (which, of course, he didn't.)

Because of the above, the temptation will be strong to claim a half-victory as a full one. But that won't cut it. What counts as a real win for Obama? To me, it's: affordable and universal coverage, with a public option and a dramatically reduced role for insurance companies, or at least an empowered counterweight to their influence.

P.S. I really hope nothing in that long NYT article makes a really elegant case against any of the above :) One of the perils of having an actual job is not being able to read everything I'd like to...

Is the enemy us? Or is we the solution?

2009-06-04T18:47:00.000-07:00

How to interpret the above video? It's obvious what it depicts: ignorant young American Jews in Jerusalem, with strong convictions entirely unjustified by any actual knowledge (I could watch, over and over and over, the part where the poli sci major who claims to "know [her] shit" fails to recognize the name of the Prime Minister of Israel [though of course she can be forgiven, since he's only been a major figure in Israeli politics for literally her entire lifetime.])

But what does it mean (,man)? At first, I reacted pretty strongly to it: it's hard to watch people who look like me, sound like me and have so much in common with me (or at least my background) say such noxious shit. And I began to think that it hinted at a larger truth: that my generation, coming of age and becoming politically relevant for the first time in our lives, was more ignorant and reactionary than I'd previously realized.

But as I talked it over with Irina and Eric, who pushed back somewhat strongly against my hastily-drawn conclusions (which were really the worst kind of Friedmanesque talk-to-the-cab-driver-and-conclude-something-moronic-about-the-World-Today delusions) I started to think something different.

In particular, while it's apparently not too difficult to find young American Jews in Jerusalem who'll say stupid shit at 2am to a guy with a video camera, it's also not too difficult to find many more young American Jews who'd disagree with everything they say. Not only does it appear that young Jews are less attached to the notion of a Jewish State in Israel than they once were, they also appear to be, as they long have been, overwhelmingly liberal, Democratic and anti-hardliner.

What is definitely true is that my generation is losing the luxury of having its opinions not matter. We're getting old enough to not just vote, but contribute to causes, enlist in armies, pressure our governments and work to achieve what we believe. Our ignorance about the world around us is now just as salient a fact, just as impactful, as our lack of ignorance: whatever we know, or think we know, will necessarily help shape our reality. The world isn't going to wait for us to learn remedial Middle Eastern Affairs before it begins to expect to hear what we have to say. Let's just hope the voice that we find is more eloquent than any of the voices in that video.

Two amazing gadgets

2009-06-03T22:13:00.000-07:00

I want both of these things. Now. I want to not be typing this post, but rather playing with these beautiful looking toys (I mean, functional tools for today's information economy!)

First up, the Palm Pre. Looks gorgeous, and Javascript apps are exciting. A number of cool UI innovations (like keeping apps open in cards, and allowing seamless switching between them) make it seem pretty neat. All in all, when my AT&T contract is up, as it should be soon, I'll be seriously considering getting one (my iPhone is kinda busted up at this point, so it's time :) I'm probably gonna go with an Android phone - gotta support the home team, and I'm genuinely excited about the app possibilities - but the Pre is gonna get a serious look.

But what's really got me excited is the CrunchPad. And in particular, it's the bottom image on that page (and also the "couch computing" picture). That is what reading on the Internet should be like. That looks so much nicer as an experience than the best laptop I've seen. I worry that the battery life is going to be terrible, since it'll be driving that huge, beautiful display, but since I'd imagine a lot of its use will be in the home, that might not be such a big deal.

It's hard to laugh at what used to be funny

2009-06-02T20:28:00.000-07:00

Conan O'Brien debuted as the host of the Tonight Show last night. I've been watching Conan since early high school, probably only a year or two after he got his own show, and I used to adore him. My best friends and I worshiped Conan, much like we did the Simpsons: because they were hilarious, but also because they took risks with their mainstream platforms.

This is before the Internet became the entertainment fixture it is today, and so it literally was a different age, in some ways more similar to the Major Network era of the 50s and 60s (ABC, CBS, NBC and nobody else) than to the media landscape of today. True, there was cable, but that really only meant that the number of corporate-controlled outlets for entertainment was somewhat larger; it didn't mean anything was really different.

(To give you an idea of what I mean: I was watching a few episodes from the first season of the Simpsons the other night, and in the audio commentary of one, they mentioned that FOX flagged their use of the word "groin" as being potentially offensive. Imagining, in this post-Family Guy/South Park world, that the word "groin" was problematic so recently really makes me marvel at how quickly social mores can change.)

Anyway, what we loved about Conan back then was that he used his mainstream platform to make a different kind of show. He had recurring characters like the Masturbating Bear, for instance, which was just a guy in a bear costume pounding away at his crotch while wearing a diaper. Or the Potato Judge: an actual potato that fought in Vietnam and came back home to administer some hard-edge justice in a court of law (like sentencing a kid to life in prison for stealing a bicycle). Conan couldn't be compared to anything else on television back then.

Except for the Simpsons, and Monty Python reruns. The Simpsons was also totally different: an animated show that didn't talk down to anyone, that wasn't afraid to be totally absurd ("McBain to base: Under attack by commie Nazis!"), and that, quite often, wasn't funny (it's not a risk if it never fails...) All of the above applies equally to Monty Python, which I have to believe laid the groundwork for the Simpsons and Conan (who used to write for the Simpsons, of course).

And the thing about a risky, groundbreaking show is that, a few years down the line when the ground has been thoroughly broken and what was once risky is now tame and cliche (or worse), it just isn't as funny. Watching Conan last night, I smiled a few times, and maybe laughed out loud once. And watching these early Simpsons episodes (and I know it gets better after the first season, so I still have hope) I'm more amused than rendered helpless with glee, as I once was.

I'll always love Conan, the Simpsons and Python for being there, taking risks and doing something truly different just when my sense of humor was being forged. I can't think of a better time to grow up than during the golden age of one of the greatest TV comedies of all time (if not the greatest). But, as I inevitably rewatch those shows over and over, I'm sad to think that what once provoked laughter will now only inspire bemused smiles.

When is it right to do wrong?

2009-06-01T09:30:00.000-07:00

The murder of George Tiller is, to me, an obvious and reprehensible crime. But what's intriguing is that not everyone sees it that way (and not just the person who pulled the trigger). Which got me thinking about something I've always wondered: what separates legitimate resistance to a societal evil, from an evil crime committed against a legitimate societal practice?

Put differently, why is George Tiller's murderer a criminal, and John Brown a martyr? Tiller's killer murdered one person out of religious conviction, and was presumably convinced he was saving lives. Brown and his men killed a dozen people out of religious conviction, in an attempt to end slavery.

To a lot of people, merely asking that question is offensive - slavery is an unquestionable evil, but abortion is a woman's legitimate right should she choose it. I believe both of those things, but I wonder about what history will believe. I'm pretty sure the slavery question is settled, but abortion is still a fluid and controversial issue, and the people who oppose it consider it a form of genocide.

While I'm confident that abortion isn't evil, and should be permitted - safe, legal and rare - a lot of practices that didn't seem barbaric at the time come to look that way in hindsight. It's possible that we'll one day look upon abortion clinics (and slaughterhouses, in our vegetarian potential future) the way we currently do human sacrifice or cannibalism.

The future has been demoed

2009-05-28T09:46:00.000-07:00

Google Wave was just announced at our annual I/O developer's conference. You can read more about it at Techcrunch or O'Reilly Radar, but I'd like to specifically address the Search Engine Land liveblog, which is much more reserved, and doesn't get what the fuss is about.

Wave is one of those things that doesn't necessarily seem that amazing, until you use it. Now, that's a total cop-out and pretty unfair besides, so let me take a crack at explaining why I think it's so amazing.

First, it's a total rethinking of a fundamental communications tool. Even in its most sophisticated current incarnations, email is still the same basic technology that it was when it was created 38 years ago. Even instant messaging isn't really that sophisticated, from a technological standpoint (of course, implementations and add-ons and all the rest are very complicated, but the underlying technology is old). Wave is different - it's a system that is only technologically possible because of the cloud concept, it literally couldn't have existed a decade ago (even though the cloud is a very old idea, of course).

Second, it's so open. Read more in our blog post about what I mean by that - open source, on top of an open platform and an open protocol. In order for this to get any kind of mass adoption, let alone take advantage of the productive chaos of millions of developers and thousands of great ideas, it needs to be this open. But making great things open isn't always something companies are comfortable with, and I'm glad to see Google is.

Third, it's designed from the ground up to be as collaborative as possible. Here's why you'll actually love using it. Let's say I'm a speechwriter working in an office.

Phase One: Email and locally-hosted documents. Every time I update a draft of a speech, I email a copy to seven different people. Each one reads it, marks up their draft and sends it back. I have to manage EIGHT copies of the same document, merge changes as I see fit, and send it back out. For them to mark up again and send back. For me to merge.

Phase Two: Email and cloud-hosted documents. Now, everybody's working from the same draft. But let's say there's a paragraph that contains a controversial position. We still have to email back and forth, eventually come to a consensus about the language, and then insert it into the document, where we can all mark it up. Better, but what if the document gets updated during the email discussion? Since the two things - email and document - are separate, they can fall out of sync very easily. And god forbid you try to add anyone to the discussion after the fact - they'll have to scroll all the way up to the top and read each email in sequence, while consulting the most recent draft and keeping track of the difference.

Phase Three: Wave. I write a speech as a wave, and add my 7 contributors to it. They make changes directly in the wave, which everyone else sees instantaneously - while the changes are being typed. If someone doesn't like a paragraph, they can add a comment directly under it, and a discussion springs from that comment. If someone makes a change to the paragraph, everyone can see it immediately. If someone comes in late to the discussion, they can just hit the replay button and see the conversation and the speech evolve.

There's a whole lot more to Wave, and I'll be happy to talk more about it later. But I'm really excited about it, and I can't wait for everyone to be able to use it and get as excited as I am!

This post is a metaphor for an interesting observation.

2009-05-27T22:22:00.000-07:00

If you're like me, in school you learned that the difference between a simile and a metaphor is that a simile has "like" or "as". That always seemed pretty arbitrary to me: why only those two words; what's the point of having both types of comparison; why use one and not the other? It wasn't until a BART ride with Irina tonight that the implication, the subtle distinction between the two, occurred to me.

A metaphor asserts something to be true that isn't literally so, while a simile merely compares two unlike things. A simile is true, and a metaphor is a lie:

Baseball is like chess. A 100% true statement, and typically, the statement is followed by an explanation of why this is so.

vs

Baseball is chess on grass. No, not really: chess on grass is chess on grass, literally.

But more than being literally untrue, a metaphor literally creates an entire alternate, fictional universe whenever it's invoked. Along the way, interesting aspects of one or both things being compared are illuminated, and some work has to be done by the reader - unlike with a simile, the meaning of the comparison isn't always provided by the author.

The dull glow of the laptop screen stared back at me, daring me to complete the blog post. I turned away, but the low whirr of the internal fans taunted me, calling my name incessantly until finally I turned back to finish the piece. Here, the reader imagines the scene, giving a face to the screen and a voice to the fans, neither of which exist in reality. Strictly speaking, this section is fiction, but it's much more evocative than a straight description. Not only does it describe the scene, it hints at the fact that the writer has been spending too much time with the laptop, and is beginning to think of it as a real person.

vs

The dull glow of the laptop screen was like a face staring back at me, daring me to complete the blog post. I turned away, but the low whirr of the internal fans was like a voice taunting me, calling my name incessantly until finally I turned back to finish the piece. The "like"s interrupt the flow, keep the reader from fully imagining the scene and maintain the strict division between truth and fiction. The blurring of lines that reveals interesting possible truths is totally prevented.

Of course, both simile and metaphor can be used nearly interchangeably (which is why they're taught with so few distinctions). But just because they can be used interchangeably, doesn't mean they ought to be.

I recognize this is all probably pretty obvious, but what are blogs for, if not pointing out the obvious?

I know the word "racist" gets thrown around a lot, but...

2009-05-27T10:40:00.000-07:00

It's almost as though some of Obama's critics on the right...actually are racist! I know, I know, it's crazy, but hear me out.

I really believe that most prominent conservatives aren't racists, at least, not by any definition of the word that I'd accept. I think the Left uses that word too often, and diminishes its power. I think we always need to keep in mind that these are people who feel as strongly as we do, but who simply disagree with us. And just as our passions get aroused by politics, so do theirs, so we should always give the other side the benefit of the doubt.

But sometimes, you really have to wonder if there isn't some actual, honest-to-God racism taking place [pause while you gasp in astonished horror]

Take, as an example, this piece in the Weekly Standard by Michael Goldfarb. He excerpts a 35-year-old op-ed by Justice Sotomayor, in which she accuses Princeton of ignoring its heritage by refusing to hire enough people of Puerto Rican or Chicano descent. A pretty fair point, and I can only imagine how much more fair it would have been 35 years ago, at one of the most prominent Ivy League institutions - an old (white) boys club if ever there was one.

Goldfarb's response? To note that Obama is using the same logic in nominating Sotomayor that she used in excoriating Princeton - that he's elevating experience and background, that he's giving her this position because of her ethnicity (a charge that, on its merits, could not possibly be more full of shit. It's not like she went to Princeton and Yale, or has served on the federal bench longer than any justice appointed in over 100 years.)

That would be bad enough, but what really moves Goldfarb over the line from "opportunist asshole" to "this guy is probably an actual racist" is this bit:

on the issue of diversity, Obama seems to have the views of a 21-year-old Hispanic girl -- that is, only by having a black president, an Hispanic justice, a female secretary of State, and Bozo the Clown as vice president will the United States become a true "vanguard of societal ideas and changes."

Wow. "21-year-old Hispanic girl", as though she were a teenager with no valid argument, instead of an adult student at one of the most prestigious institutions on the planet. The overt argument that Obama's commitment to diversity clearly stems only from his superficial belief in a Benetton rainbow for a cabinet. The implicit argument that a white male president, justice and secretary of State would be so much more serious, not some flaky tableau with no real substance.

That sentence could not be more dripping with condescension for Justice Sotomayor, nor a more blatant attempt to trivialize her intellect or her concerns.

What a racist asshole.

Why didn't Wired become Boing Boing?

2009-05-27T08:24:00.000-07:00

There's a fascinating discussion going on over at Boing Boing Gadgets, where current and former Wired staffers debate What Went Wrong. True, Wired is very much still around, in print and online (at one point in the discussion, the current editor, Chris Anderson, claims the magazine just had a record year for ad revenues, and other sales metrics are equally robust). But there's no question that Wired missed its moment, and financially, it's struggling (as is everyone else).

For me, what's interesting about this is that Wired should have been perfectly positioned to capitalize on the emergence of web culture: it's been covering the geek beat since 1993, and had the circulation, history and street cred to serve as the tribune of the Newest Age. I spent the first dot com boom in my Chicago high school's computer lab, so I don't really know if Wired was considered essential by those involved at the time, though I suspect it was (at least, it was more essential than it is now).

So the fact that Wired has faded into near-irrelevance during an explosion of geek culture so unimaginably huge that even the most Kool-aid-intoxicated Wired editorial of 1995 could never have predicted it is rather ironic. But why did it happen? Why did it miss its moment so utterly?

From reading the above thread, one reason might be the split between the print and online divisions, with a "Berlin Hall" running between them. Is it better to split the two groups, since writing for the web and writing for print are entirely different activities? Or would it be better to unify the two and benefit from a shared editorial voice, and a shared level of access to new and exciting information (not to mention a shared set of resources for the poor pixel-stained bloggers to take advantage of)?

A lot of blame also apparently goes to Conde Nast (unsurprisingly), for still failing to appreciate the value of online ad impressions, saddling the site with an ancient CMS and a baroque subscription process.

But neither of these explanations feel satisfactory to me. The split that some of the online folks are complaining about might not be ideal, but far better for an emerging media group to have the freedom to experiment and try new things, than to constantly have to apply for permission from an organization that doesn't understand it. And a bigger budget is always nice, but many of the online success stories about which Wired writes have zero budget and are run by volunteers. DailyKos didn't get to be so big by paying its writers hefty sums or laying out a ton of money for fancy graphic design.

Ultimately, I wonder if a big part of the reason has nothing to do with Wired at all. The early web is dominated by fads, and even a site like Slashdot that really did get it and really was essential for a while didn't last forever (it, like Wired, is still around but its influence is a pale shadow of what it once was). The internet is simply fickle, and not much that was popular a decade ago online is so today.

Part of why this might be so can be seen in the headlines of any random tech blog on any particular day (which probably attracts Wired's core audience). Internet culture has become a relentless pursuit of the new, with every new service being heralded as the "killer" of a preexisting one, and with every new fad needing to be digested, exploited and run into the ground as soon as possible, until the source of those fads becomes so rife with reporters seeking story ideas for the newest meme that there's no room left for the people who made that place so interesting in the first place.

EDIT: The NYT tries to get it right: Memo to staff on the hiring of a "social media editor".

RSS, Twitter, Facebook are dying - what's next?

2009-05-21T22:05:00.000-07:00

Steve Gillmor's deeply half-wrong TechCrunch piece about the end of RSS got me thinking about how I consume content online, and what I think is changing. His basic argument is that RSS used to be his essential method of reading content online, but now he doesn't use it anymore and has moved on to Twitter. I think that's an interesting observation, but I only think he's got it partially right.

RSS does need to change:

There's no built-in filtering mechanism, and the most popular RSS reader (Google Reader, but I assume this is true of other major readers) doesn't do a very good job of filtering at all. This is essential, because subscribing to any more than a handful of feeds means that your reader will quickly be totally overwhelmed by new items, and you'll have to do so much picking and choosing that you're spending as much time manually filtering as you are reading, and it's a giant hassle. This is an insanely tractable problem, but I haven't seen any promising attempts to solve it yet.

It's too one-way. There's no standard mechanism for incorporating comments from your friends, or random strangers, or replying to an item and having it be visible by the author or anyone else.

There aren't any interesting or useful social or discoverability aspects. If I want to see what my friends are reading, I can't - Google Reader is making headway here with shared items and bundled feeds, but not nearly enough people I'm friends with use these things to make them worthwhile. And if an item is created somewhere, but I don't subscribe to whatever feed(s) it appears in, I'll never see it, even if it's really similar to stuff I've previously starred or shared.

Gillmor thinks Twitter and, to a lesser extent Facebook, are going to replace RSS. But they have their own share of problems:

Twitter is basically a subset of RSS, feature-wise. Posts are too short to be anything more than headlines in a normal RSS reader. To the user, "following" someone is exactly the same as subscribing to their feed, except it uses a proprietary service. Why can't I simply have all the people I'm currently following appear in my RSS reader? No real reason. Once that happens, why do I care about Twitter, exactly? If RSS and Twitter merged in some way, as they really ought to, then both would be greatly improved - an interactive RSS feed would be very interesting and fun to read.

Links, @replies, RTs and other metadata take up too much of the 140 character limit. Twitter's great for pithy remarks, but it's exactly as much fun as non-fulltext RSS feeds for anything substantive.

Twitter does a great job of being open, but it's still a proprietary service, and if the Web has shown us one thing, it's that Open beats Proprietary almost every time.

The other part of Gillmor's equation, Facebook, also seems (to me) to be in trouble. It's still a very useful tool, and given how much data it now has, I think it's likely to be relevant in some way for a while. But I've used it less and less for a while now, and I've heard anecdotally from many other people that they use it less often as well:

The Newsfeed is too Twitterish - it's filled with stuff I don't care about from people I don't really know. The only filtering available requires me to do too much work.

Applications are a massive disaster that FB can't go back on. The only app that was ever useful was Scrabulous, which they had to take down. Other than that, not a single one that I've seen (which is an admittedly small number, and I'd love it if someone proved me wrong, but I know that nobody will) has been useful or interesting: it seems like they're basically all quizzes at this point, and that got old a couple months ago. Everyone's profile is now way too cluttered with meaningless app detritus, and it makes the site both way less useful and way uglier. It's become Myspace. But apps are too big a bet, and too much a part of the site, to remove now.

At bottom, FB has done almost nothing interesting to take advantage of the fact that they know who all my real life friends are. I find that fucking amazing. They're sitting on a ridiculously valuable set of data, and I'm sure they're banging their heads against the wall trying to come up with a new way to take advantage of it, and they've got bupkus. The move to become an OpenID relying party was genius, but that's not really the same thing, and it doesn't make me want to use FB itself any more than I already do (which is almost never, aside from reply to very occasional messages and invites).

So what really replaces Facebook, Twitter and RSS? I think it's got to be some combination of the three - and that's probably Friendfeed, although I just logged in for the first time in a while, and it's clearly not there yet (it doesn't actually bring in your tweets or your RSS items, unless they're from a friend of yours, which greatly limits its utility.)

Here's what I envision: One site that knows who all my FB friends are, and allows me the option of following their news feeds. If I want, I can follow a random other person's news feed as easily as I can with Twitter, but they don't get automatically added to my "friends" list unless I ask. I have a merged news/RSS stream that I can read, and it gets annotated with interesting items from outside sources similar to those I've expressed some interest in previously (say, by reading the full text of, or starring, bookmarking or sharing).

In other words, a site with three lists of acquaintances: Friends (see all their contact info and updates about them if I navigate to a certain page); Short News (Twitter-style updates); and Long News (blog posts, news articles, etc). One mega-feed that can do all kinds of fancy filtering. And all on an open platform so that I can interact with this service using the web or desktop app of my choice.

Want!

Why we're in this mess: Stupid California propositions (that actually passed!)

2009-05-19T08:05:00.000-07:00

Today's Election Day in California, which means you should probably go vote. If you're curious how to vote, I have some suggestions (as does Calitics.com, who actually know what they're talking about).

But since we're voting on a bunch of bad ideas today whose passage or failure will equally guarantee California's continued ungovernability, I thought it would be appropriate to take a look back. This isn't the first time that Californians have been presented with a bunch of stupid ideas that we get to put RIGHT IN OUR CONSTITUTION. What other crummy notions have we seen fit to enshrine in our most important legal document?

Prop 16 (1922)
Regulated chiropractors. A worthy goal, sure, but why is this in the state Constitution? (Because of this proposition, future changes to chiropractor regulation have to be run past the voters first, which is kind of unwieldy for such a specialized profession.)

Prop 13 (1978)
This is one of the big ones: Reduces and limits the property tax, and requires a 2/3 vote in the Legislature to increase any taxes. Why doesn't California have any money? Pretty much, because of this proposition. An all-time bad idea.

Prop 4 (1979)
Another big, stupid legacy of the anti-tax movement. This one limited state expenditures to only slightly above what they were the previous year, which sounds kind of reasonable but has the practical effect of choking off spending for important programs and enshrining ugly budget battles in the state Constitution.

Prop 38 (1984)
Called for voting materials to be in English only. Because the last thing we want our citizens to be able to do is to understand who or what they're voting for.

Prop 63 (1986)
Designates English as the official language, and allows citizens to sue state or local governments if they diminish or ignore "the role of English as the common language of the State of California."

Prop 163 (1992)
In part, exempted candy, snack foods and bottled water from state and local sales tax. So that our children can finally have access to the abundant supply of Little Debby snack cakes that our soldiers have fought and died for! Seriously, it's not like there was about to be an obesity epidemic or anything. Come on, 1992, help us out a bit.

Prop 187 (1994)
Prevented illegal immigrants from receiving public services. Glad to see the American Dream is alive and well!

Prop 184 (1996)
Three strikes and you're out! Or, in jail for life. Because nothing demonstrates the seriousness with which we take criminal justice better than applying arbitrary baseball rules to determining punishment.

Props 195 and 196 (1996)
Made 4 more types of murder eligible for the death penalty. I guess I just have a philosophical objection to a state, which has to hold a referendum whenever chiropractor license renewal dates need to be changed, having the power to kill its citizens.

Prop 6 (1998)
Ban on eating horses. Because we the people find horses too cute to be eaten?

Prop 8 (2008)
Prevented same-sex couples from marrying. At last! Marriages are safe, once again!

All of this data comes from the super-invaluable ballotpedia.org! (Ballotpedia doesn't have individual pages for all amendments, so where it doesn't, I'm relying on a document from the Initiative and Referendum Institute.)

On a deserted island

2008-09-05T18:22:00.000-07:00

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Labor Day weekend was spent in a way I've never spent a weekend before: camping, along with about 25 other people, on a deserted island 60 miles off the coast of LA (a 5-hour boat ride one way). The island - San Miguel, part of the Channel Islands National Park - is remote, desolate, windswept and fucking amazing. The only thing even remotely paved is the short airstrip the Ranger and park biologists use to enter and exit the island, and it's basically a dirt road. There are a few buildings on the island, but not even a pier - unless you fly, in order to get to it, after taking a 5-hour boat ride, you have to get in a small skiff and basically raft ashore.

But once you land (and once you lug your gear, including all the water you'll be drinking and cooking with, a mile uphill to the campsite) you're somewhere else entirely. The ground - alternately sand, scrub and spiky trees - looks almost alien, as in fact you, the visitor, are (an alien). There's not a lot of animal life on the island, except for a few foxes, some crows, and some mice (which carry a hantavirus (ebola is a subspecies of hantavirus)).

Oh, and about 26,000 sea lion pups.

San Miguel Island is in fact comparable to the Galapagos Islands in terms of pupping activity, and is one of the most diverse pupping locations on the planet, since it's also home to seals of several different varieties.

TODO: pictures, what we did.

Book Club Part II

2008-07-30T23:07:00.000-07:00

The first 20 or so pages of Eric Hobsbawm's The Age of Extremes: A History of the World, 1914-1991 constitute probably the greatest summary of the 20th century I've ever read. It's the kind of thing that I hope I remember to print out and make my children read, once they're old enough; the kind of dizzying intellectual accomplishment that makes you stop and re-read every paragraph because there's just so much packed into every sentence. It's a performance, an expertly-maintained running gag of distilled analysis that, were it a comedy routine, would have you crying and red-faced but instead, just keeps making you think, "Wow."

He begins by breaking apart the Short Twentieth Century (1914-1991; important to note that the book was written in 1992-93) into three parts, "a sort of triptych or historical sandwich." First comes the Age of Catastrophe, 1914 to 1945, in which the world cannot stop being at war with itself. Then comes a Golden Age, lasting until the early 1970s, followed by "a new era of decomposition, uncertainty and crisis - and indeed, for large parts of the world such as Africa, the former USSR, and the formerly socialist parts of Europe, of catastrophe."*

This has the effect of declaring the "Golden Age" of the 50s and 60s to be the real anomaly of the 20th Century, instead of the mean to which Western society will inevitably revert. An interesting thought, for someone who grew up essentially in a post-Communist world, a second Golden Age of the 20th Century (for a middle-class American, anyway).

From there, Hobsbawm moves on to perhaps his trippiest argument: International Communism, which took root in countries that covered 1/6th of the world's land mass, and which contained 1/3rd of its people, was able to become so dominant only because of the failure of the Capitalist system in the Age of Catastrophe. And yet, Communism (which had been created by Marx and Engels in explicit contrast to bourgeois Capitalism, and which was now succeeding because of the failure of that system) would be what ensured the survival and dominance of the Capitalist system. After all, in 1939 the ultimate triumph of democratic Capitalism was by no means assured, as fascism and authoritarianism spread. But had the Red Army not fought against the fascists (not that Hitler gave the USSR much choice), it's far from certain that Germany would have lost the war.

In discussing the general impact of the Golden Age, Hobsbawm moves on to point out, literally as an aside, that "A ... case can be made for saying that the third quarter of the century marked the end of the seven or eight millenia of human history that began with the invention of agriculture in the stone age, if only because it ended the long era when the overwhelming majority of the human race lived by growing food and herding animals."

That, for me, was one of those "Wow." moments wherein a simple, straightforward, obvious-in-hindsight argument gets made for the first time and in a split second, completely alters the way one understands the world. To say that the 20th Century is "exceptional" is not, itself, an exceptional statement. To say that it overturned eight millenia of human history is, um, pretty amazing. And, as far as I can see, completely true.

Hobsbawm's final bit of knowledge-dropping is just how extreme the moral depravity of the 20th Century really was. He notes that, with 187 million people killed in war, or 10% of the world population in 1900, this was probably the bloodiest century in human history, as well as its most progressive. And how many of those victims were civilians, bombed or nuked or tortured or terrorized (all methods of killing that, basically, hadn't even been invented (and certainly not perfected) until the last century rolled around.)

*I think it was probably only possible to thusly describe the 20th Century this way in the early 90s (which is when Hobsbawm was writing this.) Brad DeLong has a pretty harsh review of the book, which I've only skimmed (since I haven't read the book itself yet) but I think it misses this key point. DeLong basically accuses Hobsbawm of being too pessimistic about the future, and the latter part of the 20th Cent., because he's too caught up in being sad about Communism's decline. DeLong finds reason for optimism at the extinguishing of the political philosophy that produced 2 of the 3 great mass murderers, of the 20th Century.

But the unique time at which Hobsbawm and DeLong were writing encompassed the largest transfer of arms in history, the swift descent into criminal anarchy of one of the world's two major powers and the vacuum in world affairs that resulted from the end of the Cold War, the invasion of Kuwait, the conditions immediately preceding the Rwandan genocide, a war and genocide in Bosnia... In other words, I think the thesis of a 3-part Short Twentieth Century is a little on the tidy side given the events of the final decade of the literal 20th Century, but I'd say there was ample reason for pessimism at the outset of the 90s, and given the story Hobsbawm wants to tell (which, at the time of writing, really was the whole story) his structure still makes sense.

Book Club

2008-07-21T23:00:00.000-07:00

I recently began reading Edward Luce's In Spite of the Gods: The Rise of Modern India, and even though I've only gotten through a chapter so far, it's been extremely interesting.

I think partly this is because I'm just "ready" to read a good book that explores India's recent history and current affairs - it's something I know woefully little about, I'm going back to the country relatively soon and just came back from it relatively recently, and it's just a really interesting place, textured like no other part of the world I've ever been to (an admittedly low bar.)

But it's also because the book is really engaging, and presents some facts of which I was simply unaware, and are of the kind that make one go "Hm...maybe the way I previously thought about X was simply incorrect." For example:

Less than 10 percent of India's dauntingly large labor force is employed in the formal economy...[That] means that only about 35 million Indians [out of 470 million employed] pay any kind of income tax...Of the roughly 35 million Indians with formal sector jobs, ... 21 million are direct employees of the government. This leaves just 14 million people working in the private "organized" sector. Of these, fewer than 1 million - that is, less than a quarter of one percent of India's total pool of labor - are employed in information technology, back-office processing, and call centers. ... Fewer than one million Indians produce annually more in IT and software export revenues than several hundred million farmers earn from agricultural exports.

So in other words, the IT sector that I had kind of always assumed was the main reason for India's prosperity, especially over the last decade or so, employs less than one out of every 400 people with a job?! And the truly staggering thought is that (I haven't really done the research to back this up, but) I might not be wrong about IT being India's main economic engine. Which would imply that the division of people into the haves and have-nots is taking place in India to an absolutely outrageous extent. Those 435 million Indians employed in the "informal" sector, after all, are probably not raking it in, and while the 35 million with "formal" jobs are doing pretty well by comparison, not all of those jobs are exactly creating millionaires either.

Not to mention, the Indian government employs 2/3 of all formally-employed persons in India! WTF!? I thought China was the communist country, and India was the free-market liberal democracy...although I had recently heard that Indian Railways (the state-owned railroad) is the world's largest non-military employer, with over 1.6 million employees (i.e. almost twice the size of the entire IT sector).

As but one example of something tangentially related: At one point during my trip to Delhi, Sarita and I needed to go to the main train station so that she could get some tickets for a trip she was planning on taking (or something; the exact details are a little fuzzy.) We had to go to the foreigner's office, because the government maintains a ticket quota for foreigners on some trains (and buying tickets reserved for Indians when you're not an Indian is, owing to substantial subsidies, a pretty bad and probably illegal idea.) So we went, and after some looking around the busy station, we found the office, in a sleepy second-floor corner. It was the kind of place where you expect a solitary fan to be droning on, back and forth across the quiet, dingy room (I can't remember if there was one, but it was that kind of place.) Everything had to be filled out (literally) in triplicate. Along the back wall were dusty, overflowing, ancient filing cabinets and accordion folders, packed with 3 identical copies of thousands of foreigner applications for tickets to Jaipur and Jabalpur and Agra. In front of the cabinets were middle-aged men in no hurry, whose ancient computer terminals were similarly lackadaisical.

I still shudder to think at the armies of people it must take to process all that people, and then file it away into oblivion, and then very occasionally sift through it all to retrieve the one or two important documents contained within. As someone who's spent the last year working in a very nearly paperless office, this manner of conducting business felt even more retrograde.

But then again, and this is I think the most important point to always keep in mind (not that it's too difficult), India's just so freaking big. Any small or medium-sized country can go from "forms in triplicate" to "forms in HTML" relatively quickly and painlessly; but try doing that when you have a country of over a billion people, only 65% of whom are literate. There simply aren't many fair comparisons one can make.

I found this sentence funny

2008-07-20T12:01:00.000-07:00

"It is estimated that more than 10 million people have been 'rickrolled'." - The Guardian

In which I play sports after work, and something interesting happens

2008-07-17T18:59:00.000-07:00

The omens were mixed. On the one hand, I'd forgotten my shorts, so I had to play in jeans. On the other, I discovered during warmups that I had suddenly learned how to throw forehand. My game literally got 50% more versatile!

Not to mention, I'm kind of in shape for the first time in about a decade (if not more), and I was wearing contacts for the first time during a game (previously, I'd take my glasses off, and play half-blind. This was not a competitive advantage.)

The game started off well - I didn't make any mistakes on defense, was in decent position and caught a few key throws. I was feeling pretty good about this whole ultimate frisbee thing...and these after-work games are usually really competitive, since most of the Googlers that care enough about frisbee to play right after work are really pretty good, and have been playing for a while. So they know all the lingo, strategies and techniques, are in good shape, etc. Intimidating if most of your frisbee experience has been on a cement playground with like three other people in high school.

And then...disaster! Playing deep, a throw got dropped in the end zone, and as by far the nearest player to the disc, I had to throw it out. Into the wind. With someone totally guarding my backhand. I was forced forehand, my teammates (who up till then probably thought I was an ok player) assumed I had a forehand and didn't give me any choice. I knew it was going to be bad the instant before it left my hand, but by then it was too late.

The most humiliating forehand I've ever thrown flopped around in the wind helplessly before falling, limply, to the ground about a foot out of our own end zone. Everyone groaned and ran back to score/defend the unbelievably short distance.

In the event, I managed to knock down the throw (decisively; I slapped it down with the full force of my humiliation) and save the point, so I felt a little better. But not much, and my confidence was pretty shaken.

Plus, I was getting pretty winded. My stomach was kinda starting to hurt. And I've had this bruise on my shin that aches when I run on it - not much, just enough to make me think twice about putting my foot down from time to time.

So I sat out for a little bit, and debated whether or not to rejoin the game. Eventually, I decided, probably not. Didn't want to get sick or anything.

"Hey, guys," said a nasal voice from behind me. It took about a half second to comprehend, after turning around, that it was Sergey (who, hilariously and I suppose unsurprisingly, outranks Sergey Prokofiev on a Google search of his first name.) "Anybody wanna throw?"

I sure didn't, but I decided instantly that I wasn't going to leave until I'd played at least one point while he was in the game. I shouldn't need to explain why I felt that way.

At that point, for some I'm sure unrelated reason, it got a lot harder to join the game. (A brief digression: we were playing 6 on 6, lights vs darks, and since we had well over 12 players, after every point, the first 6 people who arrive in one of the two end zones play that point.) So it took me a while to get in a game with our billionaire founder.

But then, success. We stood next to each other in the end zone, waiting for the disc. When it arrived, we all trotted out, Sergey and I not really paying much attention, not expecting the throw to come to us. We turned to look at the thrower, who lofted a short slow one right in between both of us.

It hung in the air, slowly moving toward us but not picking him or I, until it was almost on the ground. Neither of us called it, or pointed at the other one, we just kind of watched it. Finally I dove, snagged it just before it sliced the tips off the blades of freshly-cut grass, and rolled in my jeans, clinging desperately to the frisbee that had just guaranteed I'd be writing this post.

"Thanks," he muttered, or something like that. I couldn't really tell. But he definitely said it TO ME! Squeal.

From that point on, we actually exchanged several passes (thrilling!) We kept occupying pretty similar parts of the field, usually we were the only two people open, and at one point he hustled back to give me an option that I gratefully forehanded directly to him.

This is so nerdy. Whatever. Anyway.

From that point on, I actually had a really solid game. Even if the net worth of all the players hadn't been about 2-3 orders of magnitude higher than any other game I've ever played, I had one of the better games of my life (especially considering how good everyone else was.) I had two sweet defensive plays, one coming about because I hustled and caught the other team being lazy (and I would've gotten a point with my resulting throw if the wind hadn't taken the disc, which wasn't really my fault but I guess kinda was). And I got one awesome point, running flat out into the back of the end zone (I mighta been out, but they gave it to me anyway)

So, bottom line, maybe this whole exercise and contacts thing is kinda working. I mean, I didn't really feel much different from how I normally do, but I definitely played a way better game than usual.

Also, Sergey's really good. He loves to throw it long, and has a pretty sweet throw with a cool spin. He runs hard, though he's not super-fast. And he's pretty modest and quiet, which is neat.

Finally, this video is hilarious. Watch it.

Once more, onto the beach

2008-06-23T21:57:00.000-07:00

On June 28th, Irina and I'll be going to an odd little beach resort in Michigan to spend the week of July 4th with my Dad's family. We've (or at least I've) lost count over the years, but this will probably be close to the 20th year in a row we make this trip. There's very little in my life that I can say I've been doing consistently for the last two decades, so I thought I'd try and come up with a list of moments that I remember from the last 20 summers.

This list grows the longer I dwell on it; for now, I'm restricting it to what I remember best, or what had the strongest impact on me. But at some point, I'd like to expand it to include what other people in my family remember - I have a pretty bad and incomplete memory, and some of the most remarkable times I've had in South Haven have come when I learned something about my family that I didn't know.

*But I have to start with the one thing that will make this summer very different from the many that have come before. The whole reason that we ever went up to Sleepy Hollow in the first place was that Grandmother's paramour, Bob, had a summer house up there, and encouraged us to come. And now, for the first time since we began going there, he won't be with us. Bob was, as we all one day will be, of a different era: something inside him had literally been forged into a hard, unbending metal rod, even as his exterior became softer with age. He jogged, and repaired the house, and took care of the grounds, years after he should have stopped, and every once in a while I was able to catch a glimpse of the rebar, when he'd call Grandmother "Audie" and something in his face would shift.

But to me, he was always incredibly nice, immensely delighted by his jokes that weren't always that funny but were universally delivered with a sweetness and, I swear to God, a gleam in his eye. For a while, I think he thought I was going to become some sort of mathematician, and he constantly hounded after me to investigate a non-trivial geometric proof that he, earlier in life, had originated. I obviously never stayed on the mathematical track, and I'm sure some part of him was disappointed by that, but he never showed it. Months before he died, we were in some concert hall in Chicago, and I pressed him on his work on the Manhattan project at the U of C; he seemed genuinely glad to be telling me about his work on the chemical properties of nuclear materials.

I never got to know him better than when I saw him in South Haven, and the thought of no longer hearing the screen door slam on his sunporch, of no longer playing bocce on his lawn, of no longer almost falling into the comically deep gutters of Mount Pleasant, of no longer riding the funicular down to the beach that always smelled like dead fish, is a sad one. Of never again being asked, "Now Abraham, on a scale of 1 to 5..."

*Speaking of Bob's, one of my more unique memories of Sleepy Hollow comes from the playground near his house. Located in a subdivision of summer homes, there were usually a bunch of other families in the area when we were there, and particularly when I was a kid it seemed like getting a basketball game together wasn't too hard. I don't think it could be done now, but it was a semi-regular feature of those trips. I never played, but I still remember the pride I felt watching my family beat the living shit out of the neighbors at some roundball. The neighbors, as I recall, were actually pretty athletic, and I don't remember the scores, but I definitely remember the feeling of watching my cousins and uncle and dad kick some ass (even if it didn't happen entirely as I remember it now...)

*As for my own sporting memories, none stand out more than the delirious joy of a good long game of capture the flag in the afternoon with the other kids. There were, at the height, probably 20-30 of us, darting in and out of the trees and benches, forming jailbreak strategies, always on the lookout for the daring ones, occasionally breathlessly charging onto the other side, sliding into the flag area and scraping a knee with the utmost pride. I've always loved running all-out for a purpose, and other than running bases, capture the flag is probably the purest expression of that form. And when you can get a ton of willing kids together, for as long as your legs can hold out, on a big field with plenty of natural obstacles, literally steps away from both a pool and a lake...that's living the High Life, my friends.

*For a long time, one other aspect of the perfect Sleepy Hollow week eluded me. The running around with a dozen or two other screaming kids was never hard to get (Ghost in the Graveyard would satisfy our fix when the sun went down), but it took me a while to be able to share the experience with someone special. I felt some of my first romantic stirrings in Michigan, playing truth or dare with cute girls, making s'mores with them and watching them swim, and wondering about what would happen if we took things to the next level. Knowing that we'd be leaving in a few days, and that I wouldn't see them again for another year at best, for some reason always heightened the romantic tension that existed in my mind and nowhere else. But I never got anywhere. At all. No matter how many girls I crushed on, no matter how badly I wanted it to happen, it never did.

Of course, never say never. This is already going to be Irina's third trip to Sleepy Hollow (!), which is something else I'm really looking forward to. We've been exploring, we've taken long walks on the beach, and we've just hung out. She's seen the Eptons at our most Eptony, spending several days at a time with us, carving out a well-earned chunk for herself in our family tree.

*Sleepy Hollow is also where I first bore witness to truly Eptonic displays. Being my father's son, and not particularly nosy, meant that I never got involved in any of the debates, and never had the backstory. Even to this day, Sleepy Hollow usually means a chance to learn about some juicy aspect of the family history. I've spent many fascinating nights in Jeff and Marrianne's cabin, learning the ins and outs of who did what to whom and so forth. The kinds of insidery details that would be completely uninteresting to an outsider, and are fascinating when they concern one's own aunts and uncles and cousins.

*Not that it's related to the last paragraph, but Sleepy Hollow also saw one of my most advanced attempts at "learning" how to drive. Nate and I drove around in his car (or was it his pickup...?), on the back roads of Mt. Pleasant, and it was kind of fun. I felt like I was actually getting better, and as I haven't driven that many times in my life yet, I still remember most of the individual instances. Plus it was cool to hang out with Nate - a little QC with my tallest cuz (in other families, that would be a backhanded compliment, but in ours...)

*Reaching back a bit, there was this kid (I think his name was Jeremy?) that I hung out with pretty regularly, but only at Sleepy Hollow. We played Magic: The Gathering (back when Magic was cool (or at least, back when I was a huge(r) nerd)), hung out in his place, played sports with a bunch of other kids, and had really nerdy conversations about math and computers and stuff. This was back in the early 90s, when computers were just becoming what they are today, and they had a totally mystical aura to me. They were fascinatingly incomprehensible, and I never would have imagined that they'd be capable of anything like what they are now - the relentless march of technological progress wasn't anything I was aware of - but I did know that you could play some seriously awesome games on them, and they seemed to be almost winkingly more powerful than anything I'd done with them. Anyway, going back that far, I don't remember many details, just vague feelings - the joy of running around, the mystery the future held even then, the suspension of time that seemed to occur for that one week a year...

*There is one detail that I do remember, though. Jurassic Park came out in the summer of 1993, when I was 10. I was hugely into dinosaurs, and that movie of course thrilled me beyond anything I'd yet experienced in a movie theater; it was my first real filmic event, and it was awesome. But what really got me about Jurassic Park wasn't the dinosaurs. It was - and this was even more true about the book - the computers (GOD I'm a nerd :) At one point, in order to save the day, one of the little kids has to crack into a Unix system on an SGI terminal and restart the security systems. The scene is hilariously implausible for like a billion reasons, not least of which is that, in 1993, a Unix system (even one being run on an SGI terminal, which were known for their adva...ok, I'm done here.

*Of course, Sleepy Hollow offers more than just cinematic delights. It's also the place where I got high for the first time. Mike and I smoked, got milkshakes, and went down to the beach. So far, so TOTALLY AWESOME - it was incredible (and I'd waited for a while to get to this point; I think I was like 19). So we headed down to the beach, and met up with Nate and Julie and Jess, and got a little bit more baked, and everything was going great. I think I was a little surprised that my cousins got high - I'd never suspected a thing - but I wasn't as surprised as I would be at what came next. Two more family members came strolling along the beach, one a generation older than me, one a generation younger. "Oh shit!" I thought, and we all made an effort to hide what we were doing. They came up to us and the younger individual played with us for a bit, before heading off to the water. As soon as the youngster had left, the adult asked for a hit.

As high as I was at the time, I don't think I've ever been more blown away by anything in my entire existence. I hadn't even suspected my COUSINS indulged...this was a whole new level of amazement. That week, I came to learn that my family does a lot of things when we all get together. We argue, we reminisce, we drink, we make jokes, we enjoy each others' company, and some of us, contra Bill, do inhale.

*Which is quite nice. But what really makes Sleepy Hollow so pleasant is the series of little moments it provides. Every year, without fail, even if the weather doesn't cooperate, at some point I make it out to the sandbar a dozen or two yards off the beach. Sometimes I'm on a raft, sometimes I'm swimming. Sometimes I'm alone, sometimes I'm with my Dad or Irina or anyone else. And I just sit there, bobbing up and down, gazing at the tall, iconic staircase leading up from the beach, surrounded by sand and trees and grass, and even though I'm only two hours away from the place I spent most of my life, I might as well be on another world. And that's one hell of a vacation.

Dammit, Barack

2008-06-21T13:47:00.000-07:00

This is pretty annoying. The FISA fight in general is one of those pretty clear instances where there's a right answer, and a corrupt answer, and there really isn't much in-between. And for Obama to take the position he did is, to say the very least, unfortunate.

I'm not a huge fan of Glenn Greenwald - I think he only met Subtlety once, so he could stab it in the face with an icepick - but I totally sympathize with his anger here. And much of what he says is true.

But. I think a couple points are worth making here.

1) It's not clear to me that Obama could have won this fight, at least in the House. He would have needed to flip 83 Members, and even for St. Barack F. Roosevelt Christ, that's a lot. Maybe if he'd spent the last month or so going all-out on this, he could've done it, but even then it's pretty questionable. And it makes a lot of political sense for a candidate in Obama's position - having just clinched the Democratic nomination, getting a shit-ton of good press and polling numbers that are just. fucking. insane. - to not pick a fight he knows he's going to lose badly. (And of course, the more capital he invests in that losing fight, the worse off he'll be.)

2) He hasn't actually given up on the fight, it would appear. The statement he put out notes that he plans to try to strip telco immunity from the bill, which is by far the worst part of it (more on why in a second.) And if Reid is serious about trying to hold a separate vote on that provision, Obama could still pull this one out for the good guys. (Of course, Greenwald pretty strenuously disagrees with this interpretation, but if the votes aren't there to just strip immunity, I don't know why he thinks they might be there to stop the whole bill. Obama's team is smart enough to pick fights they think they can win, and they're a little more aggressive than most Dems, so if they thought they could pull this out, I bet they'd be trying harder.)

So why is immunity the worst part of the bill? Because it's the only part that couldn't be reversed once Barack's in office. I'm pretty confident that, once he's President and has more comfortable majorities in Congress, and a mandate to roll back a lot of Bush Administration damage, the most objectionable parts of this legislation will go away - I really don't think Obama's serious about needing this for the long term. And while it's not exactly a great idea to give Bush even more executive authority than he already has, he won't be President for much longer, and as I said above, there may not be any other choice.

But immunity is different from everything else in this bill because, unlike everything else, it can't be rolled back once it's signed into law: the telcos will be permanently immune from lawsuits. So the damage here wouldn't be reversible.

3) All of the above said, there absolutely needs to be a political price for this kind of bullshit, or it'll just keep happening. So I'm probably going to hold off on contributing to Barack for awhile, and if you care about this issue you should too. If the campaign sees a substantial drop in contribs over the next month or so, or if the amount is short of what they're expecting (since Clinton just conceded, so even with a significant protest movement they'll still raise a lot more this month than last) I think that'll send a pretty strong message about not doing this shit again.

This is awesome

2008-06-20T14:59:00.001-07:00

Requiem for a Day Off - I think Kronos can make almost anything sound creepy. But now I want to watch this movie again...

David Brooks Sucks

2008-06-20T14:50:00.000-07:00

I do have a hard time getting it up for David Brooks. As a writer whose output covers the whole range from blandly unintelligent, all the way over to simply bland, I'm sure that, were he to return to whatever Ivy League school he surely graduated from (he's simply too uninspiring to be worth a quick trip to wikipedia), most of his columns would probably not be rejected outright from the school newspaper. But for a decidedly non-shitty outfit like the New York Times to give him a regular forum is pretty annoying.

Especially when he turns in moronic bullshit like this. Jesus Christ, David, how lazy can you fucking be? "Fast Eddie" Obama? God in heaven, that's terrible.

Not to mention that, on the substance, you got pretty much everything wrong. I can't believe I'm about to do this, because you really don't deserve my lunch break, but your column recycles a lot of arguments currently making the anti-Obama rotation, so I guess I might as well.

I guess we can start by noting that, even as Brooks calls Obama "the most split-personality politician in the country today," John McCain is giving opposite speeches on immigration depending on the crowd; demonstrating his commitment to the environment by calling for offshore drilling and a gas tax holiday; seeking to make permanent the Bush tax cuts that he earlier "[could not] in good conscience support"; seeking (and defending) the endorsements of people he called "agents of intolerance" just a few short years ago; and flip-flopping on the windfall profits tax for oil companies, the legality of warrantless wiretaps, social security privatization, the estate tax, judicial litmus tests, habeas corpus and torture for terrorists...and on and on and on. So it's pretty comical to call Obama "the most split-personality politician in the country today;" he's not even the most schizophrenic politician about to be a major party's nominee for President!

You have to go five paragraphs into Brooks' piece before he even makes an argument, and when you do, it's telling in its stupidity. He goes after Obama for the 130 "present" abortion votes in the IL State Senate. Boy, thanks for breaking that story, David! It's not like this wasn't discussed and dismissed ad nauseam in the primary, and it's sure not as if those present votes were actually common legislative strategy, at times cooked up by the Illinois pro-choice movement itself!

Moving on, Brooks cites the Jeremiah Wright defense-and-then-sacrifice. Fair enough, I guess, though most observers were surprised Obama held out in defense of his former pastor for as long as he did. But ok, I guess he did say one thing and then, when the circumstances changed, said something different. Gee whiz!

Brooks makes a few other points so ineffectual even he realizes it, and moves on to the main event: the campaign finance debate! It's here where his effervescent moronicity, so ferocious and unabated it could wash the dirt off of a million dentures, really takes center stage.

Now yes, it is true that Obama has defended the public financing system in the past (although to call it "the primary cause of his life," as Brooks does, is beyond hyperbole.) Unfortunately for Brooks, no other argument that he goes on to make is true or relevant, so this is pretty much his only leg to stand on. And it's not an especially compelling one; so what if he's defended the system in the past? Why does that obligate him to enter into it now?

Brooks mostly hammers Obama for going back on a pledge he made to accept public funding if his Republican opponent did the same. However, what Obama always pledged, as a Washington Post Fact Checker post makes clear, was to "pursue an agreement...to pursue a publicly financed general election". Maybe two or three election cycles ago, that would have been a pretty straightforward pledge: you accept public funding, and so will I. However, that's not what Obama's "pledge" actually says, and for good reason: today's presidential campaigns see substantial financial activity from outside groups, so any agreement that ignores those activities isn't really doing the public financing system any favors.

And of course, McCain, who will benefit substantially from the activities of outside groups (i.e., 527s) had no intention of suppressing them. After all, if they stopped producing blatantly offensive commercials and distributing them virally, the McCain campaign itself would have to do that, and that would be...awkward.

Brooks tries, and fails, to address this concern, writing "Obama blamed the (so far marginal) Republican 527s." That's it - his only acknowledgement of the core concern the Obama folks had with a public financing agreement.

First of all, even if the 527s had so far been a marginal factor, that's no reason not to be concerned about their future activity - the primaries just ended! OF COURSE the REPUBLICAN 527s haven't yet become a major force!

Second, this sentence ignores the incredible impact 527s of both parties had in 2004 - that election season was filled with articles like this one, decrying their anti-reformist and shady influence on the election, being able to raise large amounts of money with few controls and spend it directly on the election. One of the most famous groups was the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, whose devastating and long-unanswered (and, of course, factually incoherent) attacks most observers concede tipped the election in favor of Bush. So in other words, we're only talking about the tiny little issue of the type of activity that DETERMINED THE COURSE OF THE ELECTION.

Third, by staying out of the public system, Obama gains the leverage over his donors, and the financial freedom, to discourage them from giving to the 527s - in effect, shutting them down, as MoveOn.org is now doing. Meanwhile, because he's opting in, McCain has no ability (or frankly, desire) to control the 527s on his side. In other words, by staying out Obama's doing more to support the cause of public finance than McCain is by staying in.

Finally, it's pretty hard to call Obama's fundraising "private" in any historical sense of the word. With 1.5 million donors making 3 million contributions, and an average contribution (by April) of $96, Obama's not raising historic amounts of money because he's hosting elaborate fundraisers for rich people, a la McCain. He's doing it because ordinary people are giving what they can.

It's probably also worth pointing out that the only reason McCain hasn't been found to be in violation of the campaign finance laws he helped to write is that the Federal Elections Commission hasn't been able to field a quorum of commissioners to decide the matter. But it's pretty obvious that McCain's doing a lot more damage than Obama is to the cause of campaign finance reform.

Guess we can add that to the long, and growing, list of politically expedient reversals McCain's engaged in. And Obama's the two-faced one?

Where this is all going

2008-06-20T14:49:00.000-07:00

There are a lot of things you won't have twenty years from now. You won't have anything you'd recognize as a computer: it won't have a monitor, it won't have a hard drive, it probably won't have a recognizable CPU. It won't have any familiar input devices - no mouse, no keyboard.

You won't have much software that's all that similar to what you have today, but the changes there will be somewhat less dramatic. You'll still have a web browser, it just won't look like any you're currently using. But that "browser" will essentially be your operating system, a layer between your hardware - what hardware you'll still have - and your files (though you won't really think of them as discrete files) and the Internet at large.

You won't have a website, because there won't be a Web (it'll still exist, but mostly as a repository of dead content, kind of like Geocities.)

You won't have a phone. You won't have a TV, nor will you have any type of media player - because you won't have any physical media.

So what will you have? Essentially, a modem with one or two projectors attached to it. One projector will be the display - in 3D if we're lucky, but we probably won't be, so it'll have to be on some kind of surface, or at the very least be 2D. The other will project a context-aware input scheme, some combination of multitouch (currently seen on the iPhone) and a keypad.

Such a device will have many remarkable properties. It'll be small and extremely portable. It'll have no moving parts. It'll be equally well-suited to the office, the home and the road. It'll be cheap (a modem and two small projectors, all mass-produced, won't be very expensive). It could easily be made to replace coin and paper currency as a payment mechanism.

Everything you need will live, to use the current metaphor, "in the cloud." Your data will all be there, making your actual physical device inconsequential. All processing will take place there, except for the small number of tasks (largely related to control of the input device) that are more efficiently performed locally.

The concept of the filesystem will have advanced to the point where files will no longer appear, to the user, to exist. They'll be replaced by chunks of data that exist in more or less discrete ways.

Consider photos - when you access an album, instead of looking at a list of filenames, you'll look at a wall of images similar to CoolIris' piclens. They'll be so easy to manipulate, rearrange and Photoshop that the server you store them on may consider it just as efficient to build out the scene depicted in the photos, in some cases, as to actually display them.

For example, if you take several photos of a party, the server will know who was there; where it took place; and a great deal about the conditions at the time of the photographs. Through a combination of facial and scene recognition, and metadata, this information will be available - the photos, when taken, will (as they do already) contain the GPS coordinates of their origin, and the server (since it'll be storing millions of other, similarly-tagged photos) will know even more about how the room looks, and how the other people in the scene look. If you want to reposition the camera to get a better shot, or adjust the lighting conditions, this will be trivial.

If this seems extreme, keep in mind that, twenty years before this piece was written, the year was 1988. Most of what you're familiar with, as far as computers, either didn't exist or was completely unknown to most people at the time. And since then, the pace of innovation has increased dramatically - just a few years ago, video on the web was a promised future that would have to await what seemed like drastic infrastructure upgrades; today, YouTube alone serves billions of videos a month, and 10 more hours of video are uploaded to the site every minute.

Also keep in mind that these are old ideas. The concept of the "thin client," around which this essay is based, is not new to computer scientists, who have long been interested in the idea.

Finally, to address the inevitable privacy concerns. It should be noted that our concept of what privacy means, and how important it is, is all a cultural construction. In twenty years, the culture will have changed, so our standards and norms will inevitably be radically different.

However, storing all your data on one or (more likely) several extremely interconnected servers doesn't have to mean an abrogation of all personal privacy. The simple reason for this is encryption - crypto strong enough to safeguard anything you want for an extremely long time, and easy enough to use that you'll be able to merely point at what you want to protect and have it safeguarded, is already basically here. Although computers will continue to get faster and faster, there will remain some problems that they'll be unable to solve in a time shorter than (say) the whole existence of the universe, from the Big Bang to today. Taking advantage of these problems to protect your data will only get easier, and once it's easy enough, you'll be able to protect anything you want, no matter where it is.