Month: September 2010

Remember this?

Building off of a Leonhardt column on housing, Felix Salmon warns:

[I]ncomes are the final shoe to drop in this recession. We’ve had a nasty fall in GDP, and in the stock market. We’ve had a large rise in unemployment. But we haven’t had any kind of decline in real wages — quite the opposite, in fact. Leonhardt says that “housing does not rank with unemployment, the trade deficit, the budget deficit or consumer debt as one of the economy’s biggest problems.” But what effect does he think that those big problems are going to have on incomes, over the long term, in a world which is globalizing inexorably and where Americans in general get paid far more than their peers doing similar jobs in foreign countries?

Heather Boushey explains a new trend:

[Y]oung women are earning more than young men because young women are acquiring more skills than the men are. Good for them. But this doesn't mean that they're being treated the same way in the workplace. When you do the apples-to-apples comparison that the AAUW did, young women still earn less than comparably skilled men. What has changed is that there are more women with higher levels of education. Among women aged 22 to 30, a third (34 percent) have some college education and a third (35 percent) have a college degree or more. Among men in that age group, less than a third (30 percent) spent some time in college, and just over a quarter (28 percent) have a college degree. If one group (women) has more workers with more education, then they should outearn the other group. That's what the Reach Advisors study shows—that because there are more young women with college degrees, women now outearn young men.

Thomas P.M. Barnett reports:

The most exclusive party on the planet this week won't take place on some former senate candidate's yacht or even in a celebrity's backyard. It will take place — well no one knows where it's going to be, really, except somewhere in North Korea. What is for sure — and what everyone beyond diplomatic circles should know full well — is that the impending conference of the Workers' Party, which is supposed to happen every five years but has taken thirty in this kind of upside-down country, will have implications the world over. Dangerous ones.

The Stalinist party's agenda is to elect its "highest leading body," which is to say formally hand over to Kim Jong Il's third son — a twentysomething as obsessed with Jean Claude Van Damme and drinking as he is with military might and Pyongyang's nuclear pride — the keys to his Hermit Kingdom. The idiot son, Kim Jong Un, is perhaps the most mysterious and pathetic world-leader-to-be since his own father, and yet the more people I talk to in Washington about him, the clearer and more serious the international concern appears. Even as Hillary Clinton considers at the highest levels a reboot of North Korean talks, one former top official at the State Department predicted "things getting weirder, less predictable, and messier," primarily because "this guy's got no source of legitimacy."

Play the lottery!

Beth Boyle Machlan is hurting for money:

The concept of credit is based on a future brighter than the present; it assumes that your ship will come in. I can sit behind Fairway and scan the harbor until my eyeballs dry, but at this point I'm pretty sure none of those boats are mine.

And so she plays the lottery:

Part of the appeal of scratchies is the illusion of control. There's a ritual to them. Choose the vendor, choose the ticket, choose the private place to scratch (as when scratching your ass, you don't want anyone you know to see you), choose the coin with which you'll dig a tiny pile of gray dust to find, almost always, that you've lost again. But that's the thing—you haven't lost, not really, because other than pocket change nothing you had is gone. In the odd logic of lottery players, we can only win.

Of course, not all tickets are created equal. To a scratchy addict, playing Megamillions or Powerball seems boring, even fiscally conservative. Yes, the jackpots are bigger, but the chits are thin and colorless and the wait until the drawing interminable—more like planning for retirement (yawn) than playing a game. Scratchers need the right now, the feeling of mastery that comes with choosing and defacing the surface of what could be a whole new world.

Damien Ma looks at electric vehicles in China. More generally on the Chinese auto industry:

Consumer demand for autos continues to be robust in China, even after certain subsidies were peeled back. And having a personal car symbolizes something more than just the abstract notion of entering the middle-class. To the average Chinese, a car is a definitive emblem of private ownership in a country where the state still owns the land on which one's home sits (in one recent newspaper poll, 60% of respondents said they planned to buy a car in the next five years).

Today on the Dish, Feisal Rauf urged peace; and Leon Wieseltier closed the books on the Mosque with the most beautiful response yet. We parsed Petraeus's comments on Koran–burning; and honoring 9/11 got pretty pricey with Palin and Beck.

The Iraq war via Wikipedia was bound; Castro had lunch with Goldberg; and Pakistan's problems weren't going anywhere. Andrew promised a response on the Iran-Israel article soon; Greece might default on its debts; and we argued over isolationism.

Boulder was burning, America faced fiscal collapse; and the housing hangover was just beginning, but peak oil didn't scare Reihan. Andrew warmed to redistribution rather than soaking the rich and Manzi outlined the hard work ahead on education and immigration. We assessed the GOP's anti-debt rhetoric and the budget behind Obama's proposal; and Conor kept at the Heritage Foundation over Addington. American novelists were in decline according to Time; Santorum had a Google problem; and emergency rooms didn't always fit our schedule.

Karl Smith wrote a pessimist's manifesto; the Chesterton fetish was called into question; and "jumping the shark" may mark the "end of the beginning rather than the beginning of the end." Humanity thrived while the earth died; erotic capital still ruled the beauty premium; and magic mushrooms could help the terminally ill. We watched Tom Hardy work out; and we wanted the sex ads back on Craigslist. Quote for the day here; VFYW here; MHB here; FOTD here; and email of the day here.

Joaquin Phoenix was a mountain-top-water-drop and this woman sacrificed sex for the occasional sherry.

–Z.P.

Patrick May, September 2 1964 – September 8, 1995.

His ex-boyfriend texted me today with words that at first meant nothing: fifteen years. And then it dawned on me what anniversary this is. The day went by, blogging, emailing, grabbing some eggs for breakfast, walking the dogs, playing with my iPad, checking in with Aaron, a visit from a friend … and then this afternoon, for no apparent reason, I glanced out the window and something just snapped and I found myself sobbing so hard I had to lean against the wall to hold myself up. It was like a vomit. And my body wouldn't stop convulsing for ten minutes as I grabbed the phone to find my friend, the one who was there, the one who still knew and still felt, the one who is still there.

Is this still grief? Does it lie buried all along? When you think it's over, when you've paid your respects, written a book to remember him, and "moved on", and survived, and thrived, and found love and even marriage, does it come back again suddenly like this? Even worse? Like that proverbial truck we always joked could always run you over one day, just as AIDS ran over so many lives and hearts and still does for so many?

I think we are in rats' alley
Where the dead men lost their bones.

'What is that noise?'
        The wind under the door.
'What is that noise now? What is the wind doing?'
                    Nothing again nothing.
                                        'Do
'You know nothing? Do you see nothing? Do you remember
'Nothing?'
I remember
Those are pearls that were his eyes.

Joe Romm attacks Obama for prioritizing healthcare reform over climate change. E.D. Kain defends the president:

While certainly there is work to be done on the climate change front, the potential side effects of global warming are still a ways down the road, while the side effects of being uninsured are immediate. Similarly, the costs of future global warming are hard to predict, while the costs of not reforming our healthcare system are relatively easy to predict. In other words, climate change is something we are still on some levels unsure about – we know it’s happening, we know we’re contributing to it, but we don’t know exactly what will happen in the end and for most Americans, it’s still a fairly vague, abstract fear in any case. If you get really sick and don’t have insurance – that’s immediate. If you can’t get health insurance because you have health problems or you’re too old (but not old enough for Medicare), that’s a problem for the here and now. That’s a problem you can sink your teeth into. If you have a large carbon footprint, well, you’re probably not doing too bad.

Ezra Klein thinks Obama would have done climate change first if he had the votes.

Simon Roughneen reports from Sindh, Pakistan:

Authorities have … struggled to cope with a growing number of cases of severe diarrhea and malaria caused by dirty water that offers a perfect breeding ground for insects and disease. More than 500,000 cases of acute diarrhea and nearly 95,000 cases of suspected malaria have been treated since the floods first hit, the U.N.'s World Health Organization said Tuesday.

The big fear is a cholera outbreak, given that little or no capacity is in place to deal with what could be a devastating epidemic. Cases have been reported in Sindh province in recent days, but the Pakistani Government has not yet officially announced anything. Cholera can kill within 48 hours if not treated, and is highly contagious. Once identified it can be treated quickly, usually with basic rehydration treatments.

(Image: A Pakistani girl sits on an evacuation boat as navy officials rescue flood survivor from Dadu district's Gozo on September 8, 2010. By Asif Hassan/AFP/Getty Images.)