Month: October 2010

Gryphen spotlights a Glee-themed spot from the Illinois gubernatorial race:

Tired of political ads? Who isn't? But some are actually pretty fun to watch. Here is an example.

Fun, maybe, but not very effective. Brady is way ahead in the polls.

Spencer Ackerman and Adam Rawnsley continue to dig through the Wikileaks document dump. In this post they focus on the techniques and tools of Iraqi insurgents:

Insurgents didn’t necessarily trust the people they rigged to explode. In November 2006, a U.S. military report warned that some explosive-lined vests were equipped with cameras broadcasting imagery back to insurgent cells and a “secondary detonation device” that could be activated remotely. The idea behind the camera, first unearthed by the Guardian, was to ensure that the suicide bomber had satisfied his superiors that he’d reached a position of maximum potential damage before blowing up. And if he lost his nerve, the report warned, “the observer can detonate the device remotely.” Some of these contraptions were constructed out of U.S. military surplus uniforms.

Virginia Postrel goes in search of a fashionable helmet:

In my article, I briefly mention Yakkay, a Danish startup that offers stylish helmets with changeable covers. "If you make a stylish bicycle helmet you don’t need legislation," says CEO Michael Eide, "and in YAKKAY we wanted to make a helmet people actually want to wear." Now sold in Europe and Canada, Yakkay helmets will be available in the U.S. beginning next spring.

Taking a more radical approach is the Hövding (Chieftain), developed by Swedish designers Anna Haupt and Terese Alstin. An airbag disguised as a collar, it is, as Ariel Schwartz reports on Fast Company.com, "the complete antithesis of the hard-shelled helmets that cyclists have become used to." Six years in development, it will be available next year.

Above is a video of the Hövding in action.

Loyal Democrat Mickey Kaus airs an unusual idea at his new blogging digs:

Call it Instant Recall voting. No longer would you be stuck with the two turkeys picked by the highly polarized primary electorates of the Democrats and Republicans. Voters could reject them both without having, at the same time, to settle on the candidate they actually wanted. Do you have to have a new boyfriend in order to break up with your old boyfriend? I didn't think so. Faced with the unappetizing choice of Angle or Reid, the electorate could just push back from the table. "Waiter, bring me something else."

I can see two ways of implementing a Ratigan Instant Recall. The conventional approach would put "none of the above" on the ballot with the other candidates. If "none" won, then the other candidates would lose. There'd have to be another election. The somebodies who got beat by nobody could be banned from that second election.

Being Mickey, he runs through various permutations on the idea here.

Choire Sicha looks at magazine sales on the iPad:

As things are currently set up, people with iPads who want to buy a magazine on their shiny device have to go searching for it. There's no magazine rack, or what have you. Still, I'm not sure you can put that sunny a face on the figures for sales of magazines on the iPad, as reported by Ad Age. Wired at least started extremely strong, at 100,000. Now they do about 30,000 an issue. Still pretty good!

People is doing 10,000 an issue (and that includes free digital issues to print subscribers). Vanity Fair does about 9000 an issue. Other magazines are doing even fewer sales; many are doing about 1% of newsstand sales. There were 4.19 million iPads sold in the third quarter of this year; some say there's about 7.5 million iPads sold in total, though some estimate it's just 5 million. So at most, and the very most conservatively, at one point for Wired, during the to-date best-selling moment for magazines on the iPad, 1 in 50 iPad owners bought an issue. That number dropped to about 1 in 150. What are the other 149 people doing with their iPads is what I want to know.

Maybe their kids took them.

Andrew Sprung joins the debate:

I'm not sure that the various goods under discussion can be placed hierarchically.  With that caveat, I"m not sure that preservation of "thought, conscience and speech" is the primary good of democracy. In my view, democracy is essential because it holds governments accountable, and gives the people the power to throw the bums out, and so allows for course corrections when government policy is leading to disaster or when it allows those in power to steal all the wealth.  An elected president who curtails freedoms, but nonetheless allows for an unrigged election — if such a thing has ever existed — would be preferable in my view to an enlightened despot who hands absolute power to an inheritor of unknown disposition.

Joel Wing explains how the Wikileaks report is playing in Iraq:

After WikiLeaks released its cache of U.S. military war logs, Iraq’s political parties were quick to put them to work in their internal struggle to form a new Iraqi government. Iyad Allawi’s Iraqi National Movement said that the documents gave proof that Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki should not stay in office. They claimed that under his rule Iraqi security forces tortured prisoners, and that was a sign of Maliki’s abuse of power. They went on to say that having all the decision-making and security forces in the hands of one man was what led to the mistreatment in Iraqi prisons. In response, the prime minister’s office issued a statement saying that the timing of the WikiLeaks release might have been politically motivated, and that there was no proof of abuses under Maliki’s rule. The problem with playing this card is that almost all of the parties that have been involved in the government have committed acts of torture.

Fallows does it eloquently:

In their current anti-NPR initiative, Fox and the Republicans would like to suggest that the main way NPR differs from Fox is that most NPR employees vote Democratic. That is a difference, but the real difference is what they are trying to do. NPR shows are built around gathering and analyzing the news, rather than using it as a springboard for opinions. And while of course the selection of stories and analysts is subjective and can show a bias, in a serious news organization the bias is something to be worked against rather than embraced.

Tim Fernholz says Google is betraying its "don't be evil" motto by minimizing its tax bill:

It's one thing to take advantage of legitimate tax law, but exploiting these loopholes for the sole purpose of paying less tax violates the spirit of the law, if not the letter. That would be fine if Google was content as a typical business, relentlessly pursuing profit with no thought to the public interest. They simply shouldn't pretend they're somehow better than the Exxons and Goldman Sachs of the world.

This seems to imply that the typical business is evil. But even a corporation that wanted to maximize the money it spends on public goods unrelated to its industry would be better off paying as little in taxes as possible and then giving the savings to the charity of its choice. Money funneled through Washington DC is spent partly on things like ethanol subsidies, foreign wars, and interest on the national debt.

It's hardly evil to imagine that putting your dollars to different uses is a better investment in the public interest than feeding our inefficient federal system.

Says Kevin Drum:

There are, obviously, some tax dodges that are egregious enough to qualify as pretty close to evil. But declaring revenue in whatever country gives you the best tax treatment? No matter how many clever names we make up for this, the fact is that virtually every company with foreign operations does this. It's just routine. Google's motto is "Don't Be Evil," not "Don't Be An Idiot."

More generally, I think that taking full legal advantage of tax laws is rarely unethical. We all do it. I think that the mortgage interest deduction is bad policy, for example, but I never miss an opportunity to declare it. Ditto for any other deduction I can get away with, regardless of how I feel about it from a philosophical point of view. I'd be happy to see the tax code changed, but in the meantime I certainly don't feel bad for refusing to be a high-minded sucker while everyone else follows the actual existing law.