Month: June 2012

"Politics in Britain … is far cleaner and more effective than in America. In the UK, the Prime Minister is responsible for public policy; in the United States, no one is," – Jesse Norman, the Times of London (paywalled).

We don't know for sure. But we do know, thanks to Pro Publica, that Obama officials have issued a string of off-the-record numbers which simply cannot all be true. Interactive graphic here.

Here's an attempt by Jeffrey Goldberg to figure out which religion is the weirdest. He can't:

What Mormons suffer from more than any other major religion is proximity. The foundation stories of Mormonism took place in the age of skeptical journalism, and they took place in the U.S. Most Christians believe in a Second Coming. Mormons believe the Second Coming will be in Missouri. Many Muslims believe that Muhammad ascended to heaven from Jerusalem on a winged animal, which has the ring of something mystical and transcendent. If Muhammad had departed for heaven from Tenafly, New Jersey, well, that would open up Islam to some level of derision.

He's right, of course. Time makes everything look less ridiculous. I have a few non-doctrinal yardsticks to think about the question of how legitimate a religion is. 1. Does it have secret, sacred places that are sealed off from outsiders? 2. Is there some kind of esoteric teaching involved known only to those high up in the faith? 3. Is it easy to leave the church, i.e. is apostasy without serious consequences? 4. Does it enforce tithing effectively?

Felix Salmon is a big fan of variable pricing:

The masters of variable pricing, of course, are the airlines, and while people are often resentful that they paid five times more for their ticket than the person sitting next to them did, the fact is that they would be much more resentful if they regularly tried to buy air tickets and found that all the flights were sold out. And conversely, of course, the airlines would lose even more money if they regularly wound up flying half-empty planes. Without variable pricing, one or the other would certainly happen.

During intense exercise:

[Physiologist Tim Noakes] proposed that the brain is wired to protect itself by pre-emptively shutting down your muscles before any part of your body reaches total failure. If your muscles are being depleted of oxygen and your heart is working too hard; or if you are becoming dangerously dehydrated; or if your core temperature is rising excessively; or if you are climbing a mountain and the amount of oxygen reaching your brain drops significantly — in all of these situations, a "central governor" in your brain acts to slow you down or stop you before you do irreversible damage. You stop not because you can’t physically go any farther, but because your brain thinks you shouldn’t.

Some ultra-endurance athletes can override this.

Adam Ozimek and Noah Smith make the case for high-skilled immigrants:

What voters and policymakers need to realize is that we are standing at a unique moment in our history, where both the supply of High-Skilled Immigrants and the need for them are at historic highs. Salaries for software engineers have doubled, signaling high demand. And the number of educated immigrants clamoring to move here from countries like India is extremely high. The only thing keeping employers from employees is the U.S. Border Patrol.

But this opportunity may not last. As countries develop, high-skilled people can earn decent salaries at home, or start businesses more cheaply than in America. Already, a growing number of high-skilled Chinese people are choosing to return to China after going to graduate school in the U.S.

We still have a window of opportunity to grab HSI from India and Southeast Asia, but that window will not be open forever.

In a follow up post, Ozimek defends lower-skilled immigration.

NYC wants a private company to manage its parking spaces. In response, Matt Taibbi rants against mayors leasing or selling parking meters to private companies: 

In Chicago’s case, Mayor Richard Daley sold 75 years of meter revenue – worth an estimated $5 billion – for $1.2 billion. So he gets 20 cents on the dollar for the city’s parking meters in 2008, and then in 2009 the city still has a budget problem that’s now worse, because there’s no parking meter revenue anymore, ever. Meanwhile, a bunch of private investors rounded up by Morgan Stanley – these bankers go on road shows here at home and abroad to places like Geneva and the UAE to hawk discount American infrastructure to foreign billionaires and sovereign wealth funds – get to enjoy the fruits of raised rates. In some Chicago neighborhoods, the meter rates went from .25 cents an hour to $1 an hour in the first year of the deal, and then to $1.20 after that.

Mark Bergen counters Taibbi:

What sunk Chicago is not the handing over of pricing controls, but the one-off exchange:  the lease handed over 75 years of meters for a billion and change in city budget fillers. The deal severed parking revenues for the city, and almost certainly failed to properly discount future cash flows—by $11 billion, give or take. (Hints are trickling out, around here, that Mayor Emanuel is searching desperately for a way to undo this arrangement.)

On this point, New York is also promising the very opposite.

The rise of the Starbucks container store:

More than $15 billion worth of coffee is exported each year. That makes it the second most traded commodity in the world, behind only oil. The majority of this coffee grows between the Tropics of Cancer and Capricorn, but most of the world’s coffee is consumed in countries located well beyond beyond that stretch of the globe often referred to as The Bean Belt. Wherever beans may be sent after cultivation, they’re almost surely shipped in the nigh-ubiquitous, intermodal, internationally-standardized shipping container. These corrugated steel boxes have been used to ship coffee around the world since the 1950s. More recently, they’re also being used to sell coffee.

Starbucks has recently gotten a lot of attention with a new prototype retail store in Tukwilla, Washington known as "The Reclamation Drive-Thru," a 450-sq-ft drive-thru and walk-up store built from four refurbished shipping containers. Inspired by the view from their Seattle headquarters, which looks out onto a yard of unused shipping containers, Starbucks salvaged old containers from the scrap heap to create their much buzzed-about new temporary structure. It is one of the first projects designed by the retailer specifically to explore new options in sustainability and it represents their dedication to making every element of their business more sustainable.

The monopoly mindset: 

The business model that the owners of the metro dailies gravitated toward in the decades after World War II was this: 1) establish monopoly, 2) milk that monopoly. The monopoly was on the delivery of printed advertising messages into homes in a given city or (better) metropolitan area: department store ads, supermarket ads, car dealer ads, and, most of all, classifieds. Notice that I didn't mention news. That's because, once a monopoly was established, the editorial content of a newspaper had no detectable impact on its financial success.