Month: August 2012

by Zoë Pollock

With their "buy one, give one" campaign, TOMS shoes flooded the market with free shoes, making it hard for local businesses to survive. Lauren Bishop praises the hipster eyeglass supplier Warby Parker for improving the model:

Despite their tagline [“Buy a Pair, Give a Pair”], what the company actually does is donate money and glasses to partner organizations like the non-profit VisionSpring, which turns around and sells those glasses to people living on less than $4 dollars a day in Bangladesh, India, El Salvador, and South Africa. VisionSpring does this by training their workers in basic business skills and eye exams, then sending them out into their communities to conduct free vision screenings and sell the glasses donated by Warby Parker.

One reason this works: glasses are harder to come by than shoes:

A study (pdf) in Sub-Saharan Africa found that over 80 percent of people between the ages of 5 and 93 who need glasses have never had an eye examination. An impact assessment (pdf) conducted by VisionSpring and the University of Michigan found that reading glasses improved wearers’ productivity and income. In general, having glasses allows adults to continue working despite deteriorating sight and helps vision impaired children succeed in school. Shoes, on the other hand, are available even in the poorest corners of the world. In fact, many TOMS pictures and videos show children removing their own shoes to try on a TOMS pair.

(Hat tip: Lauren Jenkins)

by Gwynn Guilford

What plan? asks Brad DeLong, in his point-for-point takedown of this baldly disingenuous whitepaper by Romney's economic advisers:

There is no Romney program—a program is complete, coherent, and scoreable, Romney has repeatedly said that his statements are not scoreable. In order to estimate the economic effect of any program, you have to know what its pieces will do–you need to have it scored. … One of the most annoying things here is the partisan asymmetry: the rules of the game seem to be that Democratic proposals have to be scoreable and coherent, while Republican proposals don't. 

The entire piece is worth reading. Yglesias piles on:

[O]ne view is that we've done about as well as we could have, and another view is that we didn't have appropriately stimulative monetary and fiscal policies. The white paper's four authors seem to be trying to put a third hypothesis on the table, namely that as a giant cosmic coincidence the Obama administration put in policies that so severely crippled America's long-term growth potential as to prevent even short-term catch-up growth despite the presence of appropriately stimulative policies.

by Chris Bodenner

A reader does his best to get you psyched:

Re: The Sex Appeal Competition, Ctd: "In the winter, it's downhill, ski jumping, bobsledding, speed skating, and the like. Cross country? Biathlon? Eh, not so much."

Completely wrong.  Biathlon has been my favorite Winter Olympics sport for a decade, ever since the Eurosport coverage of the Salt Lake games was the only English-language TV programming in my Italian hotel room.  It's tremendously exciting once you understand the rules, and perfect material for a live television broadcast.

Biathlon is a combination of cross-country skiing and rifle shooting.  It used to be called military patrol and the basic goal is to be Simo Hayha.  Competitors sling a rifle over their back, ski a two-mile lap, arrive at the shooting area, fire off five shots at the target, sling the rifle back over their back and head out onto the course for another lap. Repeat five times or so.  

Granted, the skiing is boring, but the excitement comes at the firing range because racing and shooting are polar opposites and each cycle at the range shakes up the race order.

Cross country skiing is insanely aerobic; your lungs are taking in as much oxygen and expelling as much CO2 as possible with each breath and your heart is pumping every last red blood cell out the muscles to keep going.  When you arrive at the firing range, you heart rate has skyrocketed but to fire accurately you have to somehow settle down, regain control of your breathing and heart rate, relax and compose your focus to shoot accurately.  Added to that is the pressure to shoot quickly, so that you can get back out on the course for the next lap.  

Finally, there is the added risk that every miss means a 200 meter penalty lap around a short loop next the firing range. Get off all five shots quickly but miss two and you're paying for it by adding an extra quarter mile to your race.  Take too long and the guy who came into the range behind you may finish before you, get back onto the course first and jump ahead of you in the race standings, taking your medal with him.  The five minutes or so from when the mass of racers approaches the firing range, settles into their shooting positions, make their shots and then set off on the course again is hectic, tense and very exciting.

And from the television exec's perspective, those boring interludes during the skiing lap are perfectly timed for a commercial break. Just leave enough time before for the announcers to build up the drama to each round at the firing range and after for them to recap the jumbled race standings.

Update from a reader:

The reference to Simon Hayha might not resonant with non-history buffs.  He's the greatest sniper in history.  He was a Finnish soldier who killed hundreds of Red Army soldiers during the Finno-Russian War in 1939. He was known as "white death" because of the white winter suit he wore to bury down in the snow.  And he didn't even use a scope!  Didn't want it to cause a reflection in the flat northern light of a Scandinavian winter.

by Chas Danner

Last weekend, tech journalist Mat Honan faced the digital equivelent of a random act of violence when hackers, attracted to his three-letter Twitter username, picked him for an attack:

In the space of one hour, my entire digital life was destroyed. First my Google account was taken over, then deleted. Next my Twitter account was compromised, and used as a platform to broadcast racist and homophobic messages. And worst of all, my AppleID account was broken into, and my hackers used it to remotely erase all of the data on my iPhone, iPad, and MacBook.

In many ways, this was all my fault. My accounts were daisy-chained together. Getting into Amazon let my hackers get into my Apple ID account, which helped them get into Gmail, which gave them access to Twitter. Had I used two-factor authentication for my Google account, it’s possible that none of this would have happened, because their ultimate goal was always to take over my Twitter account and wreak havoc. Lulz. Had I been regularly backing up the data on my MacBook, I wouldn’t have had to worry about losing more than a year’s worth of photos, covering the entire lifespan of my daughter, or documents and e-mails that I had stored in no other location.

Honan's terrifying story has been the talk of the tech world this week, especially because the methodology of the attack, which Honan subsequently learned from one of the hackers, exposed massive problems with security protocols at both Amazon and Apple. While both companies have now closed those holes, there is still much that can be done to prevent being hacked, the very least of which is using separate, complex passwords for different services:

[E]veryone should still have a good password system set up. We've shown you how easy it is to hack a weak password, and if you use the same one everywhere—or even easy-to-crack variations—you're screwed. Remembering 100 different passwords can seem tough, but it's okay if you don't know them off the top of your head—in fact, it's more secure. Use a tool like LastPass (or one of these alternatives) to keep your passwords easily accessible from any of your machines, no matter how long or complex they are (but remember, multi-word phrases are actually the best password you can have).

And make sure your digital life is sufficiently backed up. Another measure is using two-factor authentication, when available, which requires both a password and a phone to access an account. Wired's guide to avoiding Honan's fate is here. Gizmodo's guide is here.

Elizabeth, New Jersey, 3.45 pm

by Gwynn Guilford

Suzy Khimm thinks not – or, at least, adds some sizable caveats to Obama's claim that Clinton-era fiscal and monetary policy will fix the economy:

[E]ven if a budget akin to Clinton’s 1993 package were passed, the U.S. economy isn’t necessarily poised to reap the same benefits, at least in the short term: Interest rates are already at rock bottom, and they still haven’t encouraged the kind of borrowing that low interest rates spurred during the 1990s.

However, Obama's policy of balance is the best one out there, she writes:

[A] balanced fiscal package could still boost the market and consumers in more intangible ways, avoiding the kind of drop-off that we experienced during the debt-ceiling debacle. That’s why [Moody Analytics' Mark] Zandi believes that a fiscal compromise of tax hikes and spending cuts ” is the most important thing the next president can do.” He explains: “There are a lot of parallels between 2013 and 1993: we need to address our long-term fiscal problems, and the only way we can do that is through spending cuts and increased tax revenue.”

Meanwhile, Bruce Bartlett debunks arguments that Clinton-era growth was a mere fluke – and considers the implications for the present day:

I would not argue that tax increases are per se stimulative. It all depends on circumstances. But it is clear from the experience of the 1990s that they can play a very big role in reducing the budget deficit and are not necessarily a drag on growth. And the obvious experience of the 2000s is that tax cuts increase the deficit and don’t necessarily do anything for growth. Those arguing otherwise need to make a much better case than they have so far.

by Chas Danner

The pushback continues on the Romney campaign's claim in the ad above that Obama is gutting welfare reform with a new waiver policy. While PolitiFact isn't exactly having a great week, they've deemed the welfare claim totally false:

Romney’s ad says, "Under Obama’s plan (for welfare), you wouldn’t have to work and wouldn’t have to train for a job. They just send you your welfare check." That's a drastic distortion of the planned changes to Temporary Assistance to Needy Families. By granting waivers to states, the Obama administration is seeking to make welfare-to-work efforts more successful, not end them. What’s more, the waivers would apply to individually evaluated pilot programs — HHS is not proposing a blanket, national change to welfare law. The ad tries to connect the dots to reach this zinger: "They just send you your welfare check." The HHS memo in no way advocates that practice. In fact, it says the new policy is "designed to improve employment outcomes for needy families." The ad’s claim is not accurate, and it inflames old resentments about able-bodied adults sitting around collecting public assistance.

Old friend Glenn Kessler agrees. Former president Bill Clinton has also gotten involved:

The recently announced waiver policy was originally requested by the Republican governors of Utah and Nevada to achieve more flexibility in designing programs more likely to work in this challenging environment. The Administration has taken important steps to ensure that the work requirement is retained and that waivers will be granted only if a state can demonstrate that more people will be moved into work under its new approach. The welfare time limits, another important feature of the 1996 act will not be waived. The Romney ad is especially disappointing because, as governor of Massachusetts, he requested changes in the welfare reform laws that could have eliminated time limits altogether.

Ed Kilgore is still pissed:

How did the Romney campaign’s response to this rather categorical rejection of the ad’s claims? It just repeated them. I swear, trying to engage these people in any sort of reasoned discourse is like looking into the eyes of a goat: nothing there but the determination to keep on keeping on, truth be damned. Team Mitt has a lot riding on this latest effort to tar (racial allusion intended) the president with the “welfare” meme, which unsubtly links repeated GOP claims that Obama is a wild-eyed socialist “redistributor of wealth” to the least popular and most racially explosive programmatic element of the New Deal/Great Society legacy. The welfare ad is going to be in heavy rotation according to Romney campaign sources, and no number of refutations of its central claims (by Clinton or by “fact-checkers” like PolitiFact, which quickly gave the ad a “Pants on Fire” designation) will stop them.

by Patrick Appel

Bob Wright compares the limited coverage of the Sikh temple shooting in Wisconsin to the wall-to-wall coverage of the Aurora massacre:

Some of this can be accounted for by the number of deaths–twelve vs. six–and maybe some of it by the theatricality of the Batman murders. But I think some of it has to do with the fact that the people who shape discourse in this country by and large aren't Sikhs and don't know many if any Sikhs. They can imagine their friends and relatives–and themselves–being at a theater watching a batman movie; they can't imagine being in a Sikh temple.

Wright makes some good points, but the coverage discrepancy also has a lot to do with the nature of the newscycle. News stories are like bush fires – they spread faster and burn brighter if time has passed since a similar event. The longer since pundits have had to chance to clear their throats on a particular issue the more likely they will feel compelled to speak up. After the most recent shooting, a few supporters of stricter gun control, like Fallows, reiterated their views, but most advocates and opponents of gun control had already said their piece after the Colorado shooting and stayed mum this time around to avoid redundancy. 

The Aurora shooting also occurred on a slow political news day and piggybacked on pre-planned coverage of the new Batman flick. The Wisconsin tragedy, by contrast, is buried under mounds and mounds of Olympics news.

by Patrick Appel

Mike Marqusee complains about it:

The Olympic boosterism treats competitive sport as something it is not and never should be – mandatory. 

Norm Geras rolls his eyes:

I've enjoyed quite a few events – the ones that interest me and some odds and ends casually watched – and ignored everything I didn't want to see or didn't have time for; I've read almost nothing from the daily press coverage. Just like that. Anyone who pleads they're overwhelmed by the hype is someone wanting to be annoyed.

Like the video above, Alyssa Rosenberg suggests ways to improve Olympic coverage.

by Chas Danner

CNN went through the facts behind yesterday's brutal new ad from pro-Obama Super PAC Priorities USA, in which former GST Steel worker Joe Soptic claimed his wife's cancer and subsequent death were related to Bain Capital shutting down his employer. Based on what they found the ad is clearly misleading:

Romney stopped his day-to-day oversight at Bain Capital in 1999 when he left to run the Salt Lake City Olympics, though he officially remained CEO until 2002. Bain Capital shut down GST Steel in 2001, costing Soptic his job. According to Mr. Soptic, his wife received her primary insurance through her employer – a local thrift store called Savers – and retained it even after his layoff. Soptic's policy through GST Steel was her secondary coverage.

In 2002, Mitt Romney formally left Bain. Sometime in 2002 or 2003, Mr. Soptic says his wife injured her rotator cuff and was forced to leave her job. As a result she lost her health insurance coverage and Mr. Soptic's new job as a janitor did not provide coverage for his spouse. It was a few years later, in 2006, that Ilyona Soptic went to the hospital with symptoms of pneumonia. She was diagnosed with stage four cancer and passed away just days later.

Zeke Miller passes along Soptic's history of involvement with the Obama campaign:

Soptic was featured in the controversial ad aired by the Obama campaign in May that called Romney a "vampire" — a charge that drew condemnation from Democrats, including Newark Mayor Cory Booker. Soptic has also appeared on at least one conference call for the Obama campaign, before taping spots for the officially sanctioned pro-Obama super PAC.

The longstanding relationship with Soptic strains the Obama campaign's evasiveness on the Priorities ad, in which aides have said they can't comment on it because they are unfamiliar with the facts. It also tests the fuzzy lines between super PACs and their affiliated, but technically uncoordinated, campaigns.