Year: 2013

Brian Beutler tracked him down:

Its origin can be traced back to the comments section of a blog. An American lawyer writing under the pseudonym Beowulf first explained the platinum coin concept in the comments section of a post titled "Repeat After Me: The USA Does Not Have A ‘Greece Problem’," written by Marshall Auerback and published on a blog called The Center of the Universe. His comments caught the attention of other writers, including management consultant Joe Firestone (.pdf), who pressured him to expand on the idea.

The Great Duck/Horse Debate

Readers tackle the critical duck/horse question:

I would take on the 100 duck-sized horses any day.  Horses are prey animals and their first instinct is to run from any danger so there would be little, if any, fighting involved as long as they were not cornered.  Horses also are very hierarchical, so if you can assert your dominance then they will give way to you. And asserting that dominance usually just means projecting confidence and fearlessness around them.

A horse-sized duck on the other hand?  I don't know much about ducks but I've seen some nasty geese that were very territorial.  Maybe they had a nest nearby but a large duck with a huge beak?  No thanks.

But another notes, "You can't distract a hundred duck-sized horses with a couple slices of stale bread." Another:

Those Obama staffers are crazy. I know they're busy, but have none of them played StarCraft? If I had art skills, I'd draw or photoshop a picture of a person surrounded by 100 duck-sized horses to scale; they might think differently. You can only deal with one, maybe two at a time. Meanwhile they're free to come at you from every direction. It just takes a few of them biting and charging your legs to knock you down, then you're screwed. Those tiny hoofs would hurt. 

The horse-sized duck? No hooves or teeth (ever been bitten by a duck?).

It could bite your head and maybe snap your neck, or trample you, or clock you with a wing. For your options, you can trap it somewhere or jump onto its back and snap its skinny neck. You can probably outrun it or outmaneuver it, or escape into a building or up a tree. Evade it and set a trap maybe – depends on where you are. I'm betting anyone with any martial arts or military hand-to-hand training could probably take it in close quarters. Unless I'm missing something, it's far less dangerous than 100 tiny horses.

Another disagrees:

Not to be a killjoy, but whoever came up with this duck-and-horse business clearly has never been close to a duck. I've raised ducks for years, and when they choose to they can wallop you with a wing so hard that it leaves a welt for days. A mother protecting her young will hit so hard she breaks not just the bones in your hand but those in her own wing. So a duck the size of a horse? It could kill a human in a single second with one blow, easy. Give me the 100 duck-sized horses any day.

Another duck expert weighs in:

Having grown up spending summers on my parents' farms, I can only conclude: the White House staffers who debated this question are not farm people.  The answer to the question, obviously, is "100 duck-sized horses."  And, just as obviously, not because you can stomp on them.  Have you been in close proximity to ducks? And have you paid attention recently to the size of your foot and the strength of your leg?  No, you grab a few of the closest ones, snap their necks, and then use them as weapons.  With their longish legs and their centered body mass, they'll function decently as equine-style maces. 

That horrible image aside, yes, I get the political metaphor.  The temptation in life is to think that there is the duck-horse just around the corner – one decisive battle (which you'll win) and then it's all over.  The reality, almost always, is the small set of annoyances that must be attended to in small batches.  And if they're ignored, they have a tendency to swarm.

Another:

Long-time reader, from Canada, also a redditor. I'm sure someone has sent you this already, but the reddit community was pretty much unanimous in agreeing that Preston Manning, founder of the Reform Party and leader of the official opposition during most of Prime Minister Jean Chretien's time in office, gave the best-ever answer to the "100 duck-sized horses or one horse-sized duck" question:

I prefer the horse-sized duck. I like horses, period. After subduing the horse-sized duck, I would then have an animal which I could fly as well as ride.

But that response is now rivaled by a Dish reader:

After reading your post, I couldn’t help but think of the terror of a Trojan horse-sized duck filled with duck-sized horses.

Sam Harris wouldn't want to live in one:

A world without guns is one in which the most aggressive men can do more or less anything they want. It is a world in which a man with a knife can rape and murder a woman in the presence of a dozen witnesses, and none will find the courage to intervene. There have been cases of prison guards (who generally do not carry guns) helplessly standing by as one of their own was stabbed to death by a lone prisoner armed with an improvised blade. The hesitation of bystanders in these situations makes perfect sense—and "diffusion of responsibility" has little to do with it. The fantasies of many martial artists aside, to go unarmed against a person with a knife is to put oneself in very real peril, regardless of one’s training. The same can be said of attacks involving multiple assailants. A world without guns is a world in which no man, not even a member of Seal Team Six, can reasonably expect to prevail over more than one determined attacker at a time. A world without guns, therefore, is one in which the advantages of youth, size, strength, aggression, and sheer numbers are almost always decisive. Who could be nostalgic for such a world?

He follows up:

There are, of course, other ways to stop a person with a knife. You can use a chair, a baseball bat, or any weapon that gives you a range advantage. To do this successfully, however—especially against someone who is determined to kill you—you should really be someone who is trained to fight with weapons, not a randomly selected elementary school teacher. The only thing that will reliably give the average person a true advantage over a killer with a knife, is a gun.

Congressman Dana Rohrabacher claims that the Chinese government doesn't just intimidate American journalists, it also effectively uses its state media correspondents as spies in the USA:

Of the hundreds of Chinese nationals sent to the United States every year, some may be real reporters, but many function as intelligence officers; they report on what's happening in the United States on issues of concern to Chinese leaders — including the movements of Tibetan activists and Chinese dissidents — and write secret cables accessible only to a select few.

Furthermore "the Ministry of State Security [A Chinese ministry roughly equivalent to the CIA and FBI] also makes extensive use of the news media covers, sending agents abroad as correspondents for the state news agency Xinhua and as reporters for newspapers such as the People's Daily and China Youth Daily."

James Temple lays out the debate surrounding "cloud brightening," a geoengineering strategy that may help combat rising global temperatures: 

It's clear that cloud brightening is possible. Satellites have observed "ship tracks," or whitened lines in marine clouds that large vessels have formed inadvertently by pumping out particles in their exhaust. Unknown is whether humans can do it purposely, on a large enough scale to matter, and without severely altering weather patterns elsewhere.

The World Economic Forum is pessimistic and included "rogue deployment of geoengineering" as an "emerging game changer" in its Global Risks 2013 report (pdf):

The problem is that incoming solar radiation drives the entire climate system, so reducing sunlight would fundamentally alter the way energy and water moves around the planet. Almost any change in weather and climate patterns is likely to create winners and losers, but determining causation and quantifying impacts on any given region or country would be a massive challenge.

They go on:

[T]his has led some geoengineering analysts to begin thinking about a corollary scenario, in which a country or small group of countries precipitates an international crisis by moving ahead with deployment or large-scale research independent of the global community. The global climate could, in effect, be hijacked by a rogue country or even a wealthy individual, with unpredictable costs to agriculture, infrastructure and global stability.

Previous Dish on geoengineering here, here, here and here.

(Image: The Australian Bureau of Meteorology recently added new colors to its weather forecasting chart to extend the range above 50 °C [122 °F]. Credit: Bureau of Meteorology via Sydney Morning Herald)

Alyssa previews Arrested Development's reprise:

[T]he two most interesting things that Mitch Hurwitz, Arrested Development’s creator, explained about the Netflix episodes had nothing to do with what story they’d tell. Rather, he said first that the episodes would each focus on a different character, that they could be watched in no particular order, and that events in each episode would become clearer as viewers watched more of them. And second, he explained that some of them were different lengths, though they are all roughly thirty minutes long.

How she understands these creative choices:

Up until these announcements, it’s really seemed like Netflix was simply chasing broadcast television, whether picking up its scraps of cancelled shows or chasing cable’s tone. But if the network can make its bones by truly taking advantage of the things that make it different from the networks and cable, then it might be able to truly make itself a destination for creators and viewers, the way that cable’s lack of content restrictions has done for it over the last decade and a half.

Megan Cohen looks back:

In [the Midde Ages], when the question of where to keep money arose, people didn’t typically have the option of a local bank. Instead, the answer oftentimes involved keeping their valuables in a vessel made of pygg. 

What was pygg, exactly? Pygg, a word with Old English origins, was a type of dense orange clay, popular in Western Europe for its use in the creation of a wide variety of containers, jars, and cups. The common name for these containers was "pygg jars." As the pygg jars were fairly ubiquitous, they were used for storing a variety of items, including money. 

(Photo: Children touch a giant model globe in the shape of a piggy bank, part of an art installation entitled 'Cool Globes,' about combating global warming and climate change in the Kongens Nytorv area in Copenhagen on December 8, 2009. By Adrian Dennis/AFP/Getty Images)

Ezra Klein is dead-set against it:

The argument against minting the platinum coin is simply this: It makes it harder to solve the actual problem facing our country. That problem is not the debt ceiling, per se, though it manifests itself most dangerously through the debt ceiling. It’s a Republican Party that has grown extreme enough to persuade itself that stratagems like threatening default are reasonable. It’s that our two-party political system breaks down when one of the two parties comes unmoored. Minting the coin doesn’t so much solve that problem as surrender to it.

The platinum coin is an attempt to delay a reckoning that we unfortunately need to have. It takes a debate that will properly focus on the GOP’s reckless threat to force the United States into default and refocuses it on a seemingly absurd power grab by the executive branch. It is of no solace that many of the intuitive arguments against the platinum coin can be calmly rebutted. It’s the wrong debate to be having.