Month: March 2011

Ryan Avent made it a couple days back, which prompted this dissent. Avent fires back: 

I always find it remarkable that people who live in a city that is perhaps the country’s best example of the value of density are so skeptical of the value of density. Yes, increasing the number of people who live in an area will generate some downsides. It will also generate benefits, to local residents and society as a whole. At some point the marginal downsides entirely offset the marginal benefits and it no longer makes sense to build in a given place, but there is no indication that New York is anywhere close to this level.

Megan complicates things:

[Adding significantly more people to NYC] requires not just changing zoning rules–as far as I know, there's already quite a lot of real estate in the outer boroughs that could accommodate more people, but it's not close to transportation, so it's not economically viable.  If you want to add a lot more housing units, you also need to add considerable complimentary infrastructure, starting with upgrading the rest of the subway's Depression-era switching systems (complicated and VERY expensive because unlike other systems, New York's trains run 24/7).  And ultimately, it's going to mean adding more subway lines, because short of building double-decker streets, there's no other way for enough people to move.

An orchestra of color:

The Speaker Orchestra from Ross Ching on Vimeo.

Grim news from American experts on the Fukushima nuclear plant:

Gregory Jaczko, the chairman of the commission, said in Congressional testimony that the commission believed that all the water in the spent fuel pool at the No. 4 reactor of the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station had boiled dry, leaving fuel rods stored there completely exposed. As a result, he said, “We believe that radiation levels are extremely high, which could possibly impact the ability to take corrective measures.”

If his analysis is accurate and Japanese workers have been unable to keep the spent fuel at that inoperative reactor properly cooled — covered with water at all times — radiation could make it difficult not only to fix the problem at reactor No. 4, but to keep workers at the Daiichi complex from servicing any of the other crippled reactors at the plant.

In making it, Jack Shafer offers an observation about offense in the age of social media:

Gottfried's "mistake," if you want to call it that, was to tell his vile and timely jokes in a venue that he thought was as safe as a dinner party with a friend. Before posting, Gottfried must have thought, Who but a lover of daring comedy would follow me on Twitter? But he was wrong. The new rules have made everybody—including edgy comedians—accountable in the public sphere for the things they says "privately" in social media spaces. (See also the school teacher who gets fired because somebody finds a Facebook page of her chugging from a bottle of vodka.) Would Michael Richards have suffered the same universal shaming if his off-the-wheels racist attack on a heckler at an L.A. comedy club hadn't been videotaped and posted to the Web?

We're all public figures now, whether we like it or not.

Kathy Ruffing explains them:

[A] new analysis by the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR) confirms that means-testing would yield very little in savings … unless we took benefits away not only from rich retirees, but also from many who are solidly middle-class.

The reason, as the CEPR analysis shows, is that there aren’t enough rich retirees — and they don’t collect enough in Social Security — to make much of a difference.  Only 2 percent of Social Security benefits go to retirees with other (non-Social Security) income of $100,000 or more each year.  … Only about 10 percent of benefits go to people with outside income of $40,000 or more a year — a figure that most of us would regard as middle class.

So let's see: we could reduce social security outlays by ten percent without harming the poor and needy. And we could reduce them even more by gradually extending the retirement age. Some combination of the two could bring the program back to long-term solvency. So why not?

A reader writes:

Yesterday's Mental Health Break was the curse of Sergio (from SNL, starring John Hamm) made real.

LOLing after the jump:

"Imagine this—what if there had never been a President George W. Bush, and when Bill Clinton left office he was immediately replaced with Barack Obama. Now imagine Obama had governed from 2000 to 2008 exactly as Bush did–doubling the size of government, doubling the debt, expanding federal entitlements and education, starting the Iraq war–the whole works. To make matters worse, imagine that for a portion of that time, the Democrats actually controlled all three branches of government. Would Republicans have given Obama and his party a free pass in carrying out the exact same agenda as Bush? It's hard to imagine this being the case, given the grief Bill Clinton got from Republicans, even though his big government agenda was less ambitious than Bush's. Yet, the last Republican president got very little criticism from his own party for most of his tenure. For conservatives, there was no excuse for this," – Rand Paul.

A-fucking-men.

And, in the telling, dramatizes the benefit of coming from a family of educated people as only he can:

As a 9-year-old, I recall having tremendous difficulty figuring out how long division worked. Before then, math was a pleasure, and I proudly told anyone who asked that my life goal was to become a “computer engineer,” a term I barely understood. But my battle with long division cured me of that, and I decided I’d instead spend my life traveling the world on a fast-moving yacht with my multiracial army of adopted karate-trained children, solving mysteries.

I did eventually figure out long division. My teacher, a dedicated and charismatic guy we all loved, tried explaining it to me after class, but he eventually gave up in frustration. He had plenty of students with problems bigger than mine, and I could hardly blame him. Fortunately, my oldest sister, a smart and patient high schooler at the time, walked me through it. Not every kid has sisters like mine, and that might be our central educational challenge.

Alas, the multiracial army of karate-trained detectives has not materialized, and the world remains full of mysteries.

Jonathan Bernstein fears "that the Republican Party now has stumbled into a situation in which there are strong incentives to lose elections":

When Democrats win, as they did in 1992 and 2008, apparently the first reaction of a lot of people is to become very, very easy marks for "conservative" scam artists. So ratings for talk shows skyrocket, and the best-seller lists fill up with anti-Obama and anti-Clinton and anti-liberal books. There's a lot of money to be made! At least, there's a lot of money to be made if you're willing to traffic in wild rumors, apocalyptic comparisons, and extremism of all varieties. But extremism (yes, including in 1994 and 2010) doesn't help politicians get elected.

The problem, of course, is that to the extent that politicians are self-interested, they face a major incentive to join in the gravy train and cash in by appealing to those easy marks rather than try to appeal to a majority of the electorate. That breaks, or at least threatens to break, the fundamental logic that makes representative democracy work: politicians try hard to govern well because their careers depend on election. When, instead, the road to career success involves making a lot of noise, pleasing the fringe, and retiring to a comfortable gig on Fox News, then financial self-interest is going to work against satisfying constituents.

A reader writes:

I was traveling in China in January and saw these t-shirts at a tourist stall in Yangshuo.  In this case, the market certainly wasn't tea party people.  More likely, the vendors had hyper-ironic, European hipsters or young Chinese people in mind.  I did, though, think how terrifyingly stupid it would be to see someone on the right make this comparison in the United States.