Year: 2013

Waldman puts 2012’s turnout under the microscope:

Last year’s turnout was right in the middle of the 17 elections presented in this chart—better than eight, but worse than eight. It was a bit down from that of 2008, which at 61.6 percent was the highest since 1964. And it’s important to remember that there’s a huge variation in turnout among the separate states. The friendly and civic-minded people of Minnesota always have the nation’s highest turnout, and this year an admirable 75.7 percent of them came to the polls. At the other end, four states came in below 50 percent: Texas, Oklahoma, West Virginia, and Hawaii, bringing up the rear at 44 percent.

Yglesias asks whether “providing subsidized mail delivery to low-density areas is really a key national priority”:

Without the monopoly/universal service obligation, it’s not as if rural dwellers wouldn’t be able to get mail, it’s just that they might need to pay more in recognition of the fact that it’s inconvenient to provide delivery services to low-density areas. Nostalgia-drenched Paul Harvey Super Bowl ads aside, it’s not the case that rural Americans are unusually hard-pressed economically or are disproportionate contributors to the economy. They are, rather, the beneficiaries of numerous explicit and implicit subsidies, of which the Postal Service’s universal service obligation is one.

Mataconis is open to the idea:

There’s no economic rationale for this kind of policy. Indeed, it exists nowhere else almost nowhere else in the delivery business right now. If you want to send a package via USPS, you are generally going to pay based on where you’re sending it to. UPS prices its delivery services in much the same manner.

Previous Dish debating the USPS here and here.

Today on the Dish, Andrew pondered how much longer America will trail her fellow democracies in delivering marriage equality and insisted that only fairness and equality will solve the Boy Scouts’ problems. He kept watch on the anti-prohibition bills in Congress, logged another day of self-sabotage for the right-wing media-industrial complex, and fired back at critics of the supposed oppressive regimes of Pret A Manger and TGI Friday’s. Elsewhere, Andrew mused on the life and legend of Shakespeare’s nastiest hero and England’s most infamous monarch, talked Catholics and conscience in today’s episode of Hitch & Sully, and explored the potential of television to blend further with independent projects found online.

In home news, he placed the Dish in the sweet spot between old and new media, updated readers on the first week of our independence, and continued to broadcast reader feedback on matters from the layout to potential merchandise.

On the political beat, Bouie disputed the openness of Silicon Valley, Brooklyn College’s chair of polisci gave his take on the BDS uproar, and Shafer brainstormed who might’ve slipped the DOJ white paper to the press. We discovered how far the government traveled to outsource torture, Nate Rawlings tallied up the bill for shipping our military gear back from Afghanistan, and Evan Osnos tracked the miscarriage of justice for China’s battered women.

While Catherine Rampell tried to pinpoint what kind of worker could take a hit from increased immigration, Michael Clemens argued that any reform hinges on making immigrants easier to hire in the first place, and Laura Entis nudged at the boundaries of the 8-hour work day. Meanwhile, Yglesias proposed a congestion charge for the metropolis, , Ambers assessed Hillary as quietly poised to pounce, and libertarians in Idaho tried to assign their state some dreary reading.

In assorted coverage, Jon Brodkin debunked the rumors of the coming universal Wifi-paradise while we learned how to send a text built to self-destruct, and wondered if e-cigs will lead to e-joints. America’s young readers discovered the fruits of curiosity as we found out what it’s like to proofread a genius. Aaron Carroll reexamined what makes healthy weight loss, Eric Zorn spotted the unique pitch of the ad-free Dish, and Reid Mitenbuler reported the life of Frederic Tudor, who kept the world chill as modernity took hold. Watched the sun set in Bigfork, Minnesota for the VFYW measured climate change on the skating rink and spun a hardcore record for the MHB.

–B.J.

Memo to Andrew Sullivan (@sullydish): Call me “condescending” if you must, but “fawning” is not an American virtue. newrepublic.com/article/112345…

— Timothy Noah (@TimothyNoah1) February 6, 2013

In his latest riposte to my response to his visceral disgust at being fawned on by employees at a fast-fresh-food restaurant, he says I’m endorsing some kind of Tory aristocracy that is anti-democratic. The lower classes should fawn before their class superiors, I allegedly believe. Yeah, that’s what I love about America: the replication of Downton Abbey in Pret-A-Manger. Please. Even Tim knows that’s not exactly my style.

All I’m saying is that no one has to work at Pret-A-Manger and no one has to buy anything from there. There is a difference between the government and private companies. This liberal distinction evades his leftist critique and allows Tim to write things as nutty as “Pret keeps its sales clerks in a state of enforced rapture through policies vaguely reminiscent of the old East German Stasi.” Seriously? A police state you could not escape from and a fricking sandwich shop? Only a Marxist …

https://twitter.com/drgrist/status/298925908687998976

Jamelle Bouie makes the case that “an implicit network, not overt racism” discourages African-American and Latino-American participation in tech writing:

The roots of this problem lie in more fundamental racial disparities that are found across American life. “Careers and career paths in technology are often integrated in a kid’s DNA to some respect,” says Kee. “Having a mom and dad that have gone to college, being exposed to the workings of technology — not just the consumption and purchase of it — all help contribute to an interest in ‘tech’ as a career. As it stands, black kids are still less likely to have those influences.” … If Bill Gates had been born black in the Seattle of 1955, Microsoft might never have been founded.

Jason Calacanis dismisses Bouie’s concerns as “unfounded”:

This idea that Silicon Valley is in some way a closed, secret society is laughable. Ninety percent of the people in Silicon Valley were not born there — they moved there. The industry is driven by investment and investment is driven by metrics, not where you went to school.

Anthony Ha weighs in, agreeing that there is racism in the tech industry, “even if it’s usually subtle and non-malicious.” Rebecca Greenfield brings gender into the discussion:

Silicon Valley likes to think that it exists as some paradigm for equality, rewarding intelligence and hard work over class, race, sex, and pedigree. But that’s not quite true. … Money and an important (Stanford) education can buy access. Also, think about all the Harvard people Mark Zuckerberg hired to work at Facebook and then think about what it takes to get in to Harvard. Meanwhile, the notable lack of female and black faces out there suggests that other barriers — not hard work and smarts — have limited entry of minorities and women.

Calacanis and Bouie continue the discussion with others on Twitter.

Evan Osnos profiles Kim Lee, an American who divorced her abusive Chinese husband, Li Yang. A Chinese court “granted a divorce on grounds of domestic violence, an issue widely overlooked in China, and the court issued a three-month restraining order against her husband that the state media described as unprecedented”:

She took Li to court, and ignited a national conversation about domestic abuse. On the street, she encountered men who cursed her; in perhaps the clearest sign of what she was confronting, her husband’s lawyer, Shi Ziyue, disputed that the abuse constituted “domestic violence” because, he said, “Domestic violence is when a man hits and injures his wife frequently over a long time but has no reason, but my client did that because he had conflicts with his wife.

Another case, of a Sichaun woman who killed her husband in self-defense, is gaining attention. Lijia Zhang zooms out:

These two high-profile domestic violence cases are far from isolated; in fact, they are part of an epidemic. Traditional wisdom in China is to deal with domestic violence as something “best kept inside the house”. In September 2011, when Lee first broke the silence by posting the pictures of her battered face on the internet, her husband and like-minded male observers accused her of “airing the dirty laundry”. He also argued that it was “no big deal,” and that domestic abuse was part of Chinese culture. But now Lee has become an unlikely hero for having the courage to speak out.

Ryan Gallagher praises a forthcoming iPhone app that could revolutionize confidential file-sharing:

The technology uses a sophisticated peer-to-peer encryption technique that allows users to send encrypted files of up to 60 megabytes through a “Silent Text” app. The sender of the file can set it on a timer so that it will automatically “burn”—deleting it from both devices after a set period of, say, seven minutes. … It’s a game-changer that will almost certainly make life easier and safer for journalists, dissidents, diplomats, and companies trying to evade state surveillance or corporate espionage. According to [Silent Circle CEO Mike] Janke, a handful of human rights reporters in Afghanistan, Jordan, and South Sudan have tried Silent Text’s data transfer capability out, using it to send photos, voice recordings, videos, and PDFs securely.

Joseph Volpe details Janke’s plans to keep Silent Circle free from government influence:

[T]he company [has] pledged to not cooperate with surveillance requests from law enforcement, nor will it compromise the service’s integrity by introducing a “backdoor” for the FBI. That’s a mighty strong stance to take against Uncle Sam, but Janke’s not concerned. If the United States government does eventually prove an impediment, he’s ready to move Silent Circle’s shop to a locale that understands “…every [citizens’] right to communicate… without the fear of it being… used by criminals, stored by governments, and aggregated by companies that sell it.”