Month: September 2011

by Patrick Appel

David Brooks distills it after studying happiness research:

Buy experiences instead of things; buy many small pleasures instead of a few big ones; pay now for things you can look forward to and enjoy later.

Yglesias nods. J.L. Wall challenges Brooks' methodology. And Jonah Lehrer asks why we aren't better at following Brooks' advice: 

I’m genuinely puzzled by our failure to spend money properly. In general, human intuition improves with experience – it gets better as we put in those 10,000 hours of practice, so to speak. And yet, this doesn’t appear to be true when it comes to our intuitions about the pursuit of happiness. After all, we’ve all got extensive experience with pleasure. We know exactly what we enjoy. Nevertheless, this abundance of experience doesn’t lead to better purchases over time. Either psychologists can’t measure happiness or human beings with disposable income are very confused.

by Patrick Appel

He's the Tea Party's candidate of choice. Steve Kornacki connects Perry's rise in the polls to the hubris of the GOP:

Perry’s surge to the front of the GOP pack this summer shows just how different his party is today than it was when Bush set out to run. The Republicans of 1999 had been schooled by Bill Clinton over and over again and were mainly hungry for a winner. But the Republicans of 2011 are coming off of a monster midterm triumph. They have yet to be humbled, and they want more than a winner. They want purity. And right now, Rick Perry is giving it to them.

by Chris Bodenner

A reader writes:

I'm emailing in response to your recent VFYW contest on Amsterdam. Your picture was posted the same day I saw the pictures I am now sending to you. You can imagine I was a little stung by the irony.

This is the only Amsterdam I have ever known, which is Amsterdam, New York. The business, Carpetland, was started by my grandfather 67 years ago. It is still run today by his son, daughter (my mother) and their cousins. The Amsterdam location is the original store, but a second store and warehouse reside in Saratoga Springs, NY. So, although this building will probably be destroyed, the business itself will survive.

After I was born, my parents brought me home to the apartment above the store. My older sister and I spent much of our early years hanging out in the store, playing on the huge rolls of carpet, and begging my grandmother for dimes to get gum from the March of Dimes gum machine. When I posted news of the loss on Facebook, many of my friends wrote to me recalling their childhood memories of shopping in our store with their parents. It's just a little piece of history, from a little city in upstate New York, but it means a lot to all of us. 

I no longer live in Amsterdam NY, but the city and her residents are very much in my mind and heart.

Our reader captions the above photo: "Where the water was as of Tuesday, somewhat lower than at its highest level." By the way, for live-blogging coverage of the Catskills region, check out Watershed Post. From the reader who recommended the site:

This regional news blog is doing some great work in assembling all the available information on the Irene damage. Not only is it proving how a local blog run with passion and community expertise can run circles around larger outlets, it's also rocking several separate, town-specific live-blogs, collating reports from readers and other news outlets as well as interviews, etc. The main live-blog is run like a Twitter feed, which I don't absolutely love compared to the easier readability of an html/post format – but regardless, it's awesome to once again see a small staff of committed people really rise to the occasion. Would be interesting to see how many new local readers they still have several months from now …

by Patrick Appel

Derek Thompson defends vacations and workplace blog reading:

The bottom line is that breaks are better for our brains than overtime. Where you get your break — from an hour on blogs, a day in the park, or a week golfing at Martha's Vineyard — doesn't matter so much as that you get it. If you care about your own productivity, don't be afraid to goof off online. And if you care about decision-making at the national level, tune out the critics and root for your president's golf game.

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by Chris Bodenner

Running through the unambiguously bad details of the DOJ's "Fast And Furious" operation, David Rittgers finds that the reassignment of ATF chief Kenneth Melson is not enough:

If you’re a private citizen, this sort of thing gets you 30 years in prison. If you’re a whistleblower within ATF, you get terminated. If you’re a supervisor responsible for such a scheme, you get promoted reassigned to ATF headquarters.

This ATF scheme broke numerous firearm laws, possibly the Arms Export Control Act, and facilitated multiple murders. The end result this litany of crimes and persistent ATF and DOJ stonewalling congressional investigations cannot simply be Melson’s removal and replacement with a DOJ official who may also have been complicit in the gun-running scheme. … Melson’s departure is certainly warranted, but we’re a few indictments and many terminations short of justice, in my mind.

Issa's oversight committee is pressing forward.

by Chris Bodenner

A reader writes:

I am not sure what the quoted numbers represent (1 in 7 in the US, 1 in 122 in Europe).  Presumably the numerator is the number of people who died from a hospital acquired infection.  But what is the denominator?  Not all people (14% of Americans do not die from hospital acquired infections).  All hospital patients?  That seems way too high.  All patients who get an infection?  Maybe.  But this only says something about the lethality of infections in the US versus Europe, not the prevalence.  It could be the case that European hospitals are not sterile and so patients get lots of minor infections, and the same rate of deadly infections as US patients.  But, if US hospitals are effective in eliminating most minor infections, you would get the pattern in the data you quote. 

I am not saying this is what is going on (I have no idea), but I am not sure these data are telling us anything.  Country comparisons of health outcomes are useful, but hard to do.