Month: January 2011

Seconding Avent, Yglesias chips in:

There’s often a tendency to get distracted by rates of change when levels are in many ways more relevant. China is a dynamo and Greece is a basket case, but Greece is much richer than China. Rapid Chinese progress does in part reflects the skill and wisdom of Chinese policymakers. But in large part it merely reflects the madness of a previous generation of Chinese policymakers—the people who left the country at such a low level in 1980 from which it’s so rapidly been growing. If you look at the economic success of Chinese people in Taiwan or Hong Kong or Singapore or diaspora communities around the world, the striking thing about the PRC is how poor it still is. 

These before and after pictures of a demolished Afghan town are making the rounds. They are courtesy of Paula Broadwell, who defends the military strike and praises the rebuilding efforts.  The town was apparently "laden with IEDs and homemade explosives ." Mark Thompson summarizes the basic facts:

Last October, U.S. and Afghan forces destroyed the Taliban-infested village of Tarok Kolache in the Arghandab River Valley with 25 tons of bombs. The good news: no civilians died, according to the U.S. military. The bad news: the U.S. will spend up to $1 million to rebuild it and several other nearby villages wiped out in an effort to wipe out the Taliban. The unknown news: how this kind of thing goes over with the locals in the long run.

Ackerman sheds some light on the local reaction:

As Broadwell tells it, the villagers understood that the United States needed to destroy their homes — except when they don’t. One villager “in a fit of theatrics had accused Flynn of ruining his life after the demolition.”

An adviser to Hamid Karzai said that the 1-320th “caused unreasonable damage to homes and orchards and displaced a number of people.” Flynn has held “reconstruction shuras” with the villagers and begun compensating villagers for their property losses, but so far the reconstruction has barely begun, three months after the destruction.

“Sure they are pissed about the loss of their mud huts,” Broadwell wrote on Facebook, “but that is why the BUILD story is important here.”

Lt. Col. David Flynn, the commander of the unit that bombed the village and the commander in charge of rebuilding, responds to criticism from Josh Foust. 

Frum outlines their dilemma:

If I were working for a 2012 Republican presidential aspirant, I’d be preparing now for this debate question: “Governor/Senator: Do you believe that the federal government should ensure that all Americans can buy an affordable health-insurance policy?”

It’s a tough question. If you answer “no” — well you are putting yourself pretty clearly on the wrong side of public opinion.

Americans may be divided on the Democrats’ recent health reform. They don’t like taking money out of Medicare; they don’t like the idea of the government making health decisions for them. (I know those two positions sound inconsistent, but hey: I’m reporting, not judging.)

But on the specific question I just asked, the American public expresses itself more than 70 percent in favor, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation. 

Richard Florida analyzes the work of demographer William Frey:

It's abundantly clear that the economic crisis and Great Reset have caused mobility, which has long been a hallmark of the American economy, to stall, making it harder for both individual workers and local economies to adjust to new economic conditions. This has affected all types of Americans, including young, college-educated ones. And, according to Frey's research, it is shaping a noticeable and significant shift in the landscape of migration and talent flows.

It appears to have stymied or at least slowed the long-running flow of people, including younger people and college grads into the Sunbelt, tilted the playing field of talent attraction toward larger cities and metros, and reinforced the position of tech centers and quality-of-place destinations like Austin, Raleigh-Durham, Seattle, the Bay Area, Denver and Portland, among others. But one of the subtler and perhaps more important trends brought on by the Great Reset is the improved and improving performance of older Rustbelt metros from Pittsburgh, Cleveland, and Buffalo to Milwaukee and St. Louis, which appear to have turned the tide in terms of their ability to attract and retain young adults and college grads.

Howard Kurtz profiles Rebecca Mansour:

A Lebanese American who grew up in Michigan, Mansour, who is in her mid-thirties, is a former Hollywood screenwriter who felt so strongly about Palin—whom she’d never met—that she founded the website Conservatives4Palin. Originally hired to help with Palin’s famous Facebook page, Mansour says on her Twitter feed that she is speaking only for herself. But she whacks Palin’s detractors with such thumb-in-the-eye passion as to make her boss seem downright diplomatic.

There are the “puppy-kickers” and “porn producers” at Politico. The “liar” at the Associated Press who said Palin provided no press access on her visit to Haiti except for Fox News. The “semi-literate buffoons at MSNBC.” The “mouth-breathing loon” Aaron Sorkin. The Maureen Dowd column that chided Palin for shooting a caribou on her TLC show that was “so stupid I thought it came from The Onion.”

A reader writes:

I can pick up my smart phone and within two minutes order flowers for my Mom, give money to a charity, make a dinner reservation, and start downloading a movie. While I am "facilitating my own personal mirth," there is no doubt that my burst of economic activity reached far beyond me as the end-user of the technology.

Another writes:

Your reader who commented that "over the past 20 years, much of our technology has been focused on facilitating our personal mirth via iPods, Facebook, widescreens, etc." is really just demonstrating that he or she is neither expert in technology nor business.

Of course, the past 20 years would be 1991-2010, which includes the rise of the Internet (rather significant for worldwide productivity), but let's be kind and assume that only since 2000 was meant. The greatest development, and the one which Facebook's success is a consequence of, is the wireless and mobile Internet. And the business power of the mobile Internet surely is represented by the Blackberry rather than the iPod – but it's present elsewhere too: in the capability for streamlined inventory management and shipping, in the flexibility to both simultaneously wait for a plane in an airport and work as if one were in the office, and, yes, to use one's social network to promote products and services via word of mouth. All of these applications are good for consumers and business alike.

The idea that we're in some late-Roman decadent epoch where we have simply turned our technological prowess to onanistic ends is laughable.

Another:

Take the widescreen. The benefits of advances in display technologies are well beyond entertainment. For many industries, their workforces are more productive because cheap, large, bright, and easily re-positioned display screens have replaced what was once a single, monochromatic, bulky and heavy tube monitor taking up a lot of space and almost impossible to move. For anyone who works with computers, this is a tangible improvement that has improved many different things, from carpal tunnel to the use of office space. There's no doubt that larger and sharper screens improve productivity for a variety of computer tasks. In public spaces such as airports and train stations, where these flat-screens have become ubiquitous, the flow of information and passengers has greatly improved. When it comes to computing, the smallest increase in productivity may not even be noticed by the individual, but it has a large impact in the aggregate.

Another:

I worked for Apple in New York City for a little over a year. Does the company want to push product? Yes. Does it want to make a profit? Of course. BUT it also has created life-changing technologies, particularly for those with disabilities.

There are voice-over features for those with vision issues, notepads and video communication features for those with hearing disabilities. I remember selling an iPhone to a woman who was blind and teaching her how to use the voice-over features and it was extraordinary. She is now able to be a part of this new wave of communication and inter-connectedness. I also remember a group of deaf men looking to upgrade their iPhones as well. Their fingers were flying across the screen as they were using the Notepad app to communicate with me (as someone not fluent in ASL). For many people these aren't just frivolous technologies, they truly change the way people are able to connect within our able-centric society. They create simple linkages where before there was frustrations, disadvantages, and impossibilities.

An insidiously catchy tune gets a South Park remix:

Cartoon Brew provides context:

Fans of Warner Bros. Animaniacs series are quite vocal in their devotion to the old episodes and their desire to see the series return. The Animaniacs Revival Project is a group on Facebook devoted to trying to convince Warner Bros. and Spielberg to produce more episodes. To that end, here’s the opening to Animaniacs re-animated in South Park’s cut-out animation style, created using Flash 8, by UK animaniac “Dr. Toonhattan”.

Well it worked for Betty White.

Tim Lee says that despite their complaints, libertarians are on an impressive winning streak over the last several decades. I think he's dead-on:

Income tax rates are way down. Numerous industries have been deregulated. Most price controls have been abandoned. Competitive labor markets have steadily displaced top-down collective bargaining. Trade has been steadily liberalized. Simultaneously, the intellectual climate has shifted to be dramatically more favorable to libertarian insights. Wage and price controls were a standard tool of economic policymaking in the 1970s. No one seriously advocates bringing them back today. The top income tax bracket in the 1950s was north of 90 percent. Today, the debate is whether the top rate will be 35 percent or 39 percent.

He goes on to note that "what’s happened is that liberalism in general has internalized key libertarian critiques of earlier iterations of liberal thought, with the result that a guy with a largely Friedmanite policy agenda can plausibly call himself a liberal. And actually, this shouldn’t surprise us at all, because Friedman called himself a liberal too." The fact that Brink Lindsey and Will Wilkinson are no longer afforded the platform of the Cato Institute doesn't mean their ideas won't win out in the end.

The truth is: the Thatcher-Reagan revolution endured because their critiques of welfare-liberalism and foreign policy drift had real cogency. But the flipside is that to recreate the passion of the 1970s today is to fail to acknowledge one's own successes. It is to see libertarian ideas as an ideology, not a useful way to critique excessive and counterproductive government intervention, when appropriate depending on the circumstances. Again, Reagan did not say "government is the problem," he said, "In our present crisis, government is the problem." The present crisis of 2010 is not the present crisis of 1981. And the failure of the conservative imagination in understanding this is one of the right's deepest current problems.

In a Fortune profile of John Roberts, Roger Parloff reports that the Chief Justice has a lesbian cousin. Michael Petrelis perks up:

If it had been reported before that the chief justice of the Supreme Court has a lesbian cousin, I'm almost sure I would have filed that factoid. Googling for any gay or lesbian references to Podrasky didn't turn up much, but she worked in the 1990s at the Servicemembers Legal Defense Network. BTW, the transcript of the hearing at which Roberts introduced his cousin shows he made no mention of her being a lesbian.

While I can understand Podrasky not chatting up her influential cousin about cases that might soon come before the Supreme Court, I would still hope that she would talk to him about the real-world impact of his decisions and the affects they have on gay people.