March 2013 – Page 86

Money-Losing Profit Makers

Gopnik identifies the limits of markets:

Not only are there things that the market is not well suited to fixing—the best thing to enable the private market to make a profit is often public services that operate at a loss. Seeing a postal worker trudging through snow with her packages might make us reflect gloomily on the illogic of public policy. The post office lost fifteen billion dollars last year (though a good part of that was due to a disastrous bookkeeping requirement imposed by Congress); eliminating Saturday mail delivery is part of its plan to “return to profitability.” Almost everyone agrees that it can’t sustain losses indefinitely. But are these losses really losses, or are we looking at the wrong unit of analysis? Lots of things are unprofitable if you narrowly consider outlays and income—including most of our roadways. To say that the post office runs at a loss is to say that it subsidizes a system of conveyance and communication. This in turn makes possible trillions of dollars’ worth of enterprise.

What Shapes Politicians’ Perceptions?

Masket ponders the finding that both liberal and conservative state legislative candidates overestimate the conservatism of their constituents:

Why might politicians think voters are more conservative than they actually are? It could be that their views are shaped by political media reports. State legislative candidates rarely have great polling operations, and if they perceive public opinion to fall halfway between whatever Fox says and whatever CNN says, they’re going to come in somewhere to the right of the population median. Politicians may also be estimating that those who will actually turn out to vote will be somewhat more conservative than their constituents as a whole. This could also be an artifact of these two issues at a particular time in our history: public attitudes on same sex marriage have moved leftward rapidly in recent years, and a politician could be forgiven for being a bit behind the times on this. And there is a broad (and correct) perception that Democrats nationally were punished at the polls in 2010 for their stance on health reform.

(Above: another chart from the Broockman and Skovron working paper (pdf))

The Seth MacFarlane Approach To Politics

Taylor Bigler of The Daily Caller “reports” that potential Senate candidate Ashley Judd has done various nude scenes as an actress. Alyssa pounces:

Attacking Judd for her nude scenes is part and parcel of the right’s current strategy to discredit promising female advocates. Like Rush Limbaugh’s attacks on Sandra Fluke, the Caller’s attempts to impugn Judd as an exhibitionist are an attempt to make her seem less serious by impugning her sexual chastity (that this tactic remains in the playbook is a whole other world of crazy). But the evidence is even more specious and pathetic here. Fluke, who became engaged shortly after enduring nationally-broadcast attacks on her character, stumped for birth control access in the real world. Judd took her clothes off as part of fiction. The Daily Caller may not know the difference, but voters do. And Judd, who already knows a thing or two about the insanity of media scrutiny, is getting a real, and sadly valuable education in what you have to be willing to take if you want to be active in American public life as a woman.

Alex Pappas of the Caller claims that the Judd hit-piece was simply “entertainment.” Alyssa goes another round:

[T]he tittering assertion that the Caller’s stories about Judd’s entertainment career are just for Monday afternoon giggles is an idea belied by the Daily Caller’s very site structure, which is using stories about the fact that she’s done on-screen nudity and dated Michael Bolton to drive coverage to more substantive—though I hesitate to dignify it with that term—reporting about Judd’s political positioning for a potential race.

New Dish, New Media Update

We’re on the verge of our first 30 days with the meter installed and this is the result:

Your subscriptions totaled $100,000 in 30 days. We’re psyched, even though we remain $270,000 below our 12-month goal to keep the Dish as it is. Still, if the subs come in all the year the rate they’ve been coming in February, we’ll be well over our target and be able to start planning for serious new projects, like commissioning long-form journalism. But I’m a worry-wart (not getting a salary for a month or the indefinite future concentrates the mind), and we’re not there yet. Almost 15,000 of you have reached your max of 7 read-ons for the month. That’s a sign of a real commitment to the Dish. It’s also a sign that with multiple devices, our very leaky pay-wall may need some tightening up so more of you actually confront a meter request for a subscription. If you’re never directly asked … how are you going to pay?

So a request for all of you hanging in waiting for the meter to re-set: $19.99 for a whole year of Dishness is a great deal. We work hard to keep this blog alive and alert and diverse and inclusive. The alternative is either distracting ads or “sponsored content” (which we’ll NEVER do). You have the power to make media history. If all 15,000 of you fence-sitters just agreed to pay a nickel a day, we’d have an instant $300,000 – and make our target for the entire year, and then some.

Our manifesto is here; you can subscribe [tinypass_offer text=”here”].

“Never Forget That They Were All Wrong”

TNC reflects on his initial response to the Iraq War:

[I]f I regret anything it is my pose of powerlessness — my lack of faith in American democracy, my belief that the war didn’t deserve my hard thinking or hard acting, my cynicism. I am not a radical. But more than anything the Iraq War taught me the folly of mocking radicalism. It seemed, back then, that every “sensible” and “serious” person you knew — left or right — was for the war. And they were all wrong. Never forget that they were all wrong. And never forget that the radicals with their drum circles and their wild hair were right.

Since I’ve been airing some of my own delusions about the Iraq war ten years’ ago, it’s worth recalling that TNC was right. Perhaps one of the most critical pro-war opinion-leaders was Bill Clinton (even though he supported more time for diplomacy in the run-up to the war). In 1998, it was Clinton who made removal of Saddam official US policy. Here is Bill Clinton on the Letterman show ten years ago this month, predicting a cake-walk and assuming the presence of WMDs:

“[Saddam] is a threat. He’s a murderer and a thug. There’s no doubt we can do this. We’re stronger; he’s weaker. You’re looking at a couple weeks of bombing and then I’d be astonished if this campaign took more than a week. Astonished.”

One more Clinton quote from that March:

“[I]f we leave Iraq with chemical and biological weapons, after 12 years of defiance, there is a considerable risk that one day these weapons will fall into the wrong hands and put many more lives at risk than will be lost in overthrowing Saddam… In the post-cold war world, America and Britain have been in tough positions before: in 1998, when others wanted to lift sanctions on Iraq and we said no; in 1999 when we went into Kosovo to stop ethnic cleansing. In each case, there were voices of dissent. But the British-American partnership and the progress of the world were preserved. Now in another difficult spot, Blair will have to do what he believes to be right. I trust him to do that and hope the British people will too.”

But what would happen then? Even Clinton, who made it formal US policy to remove Saddam, hadn’t thought that much about that. Neither had I. To my eternal shame.

(Photo: US President Bill Clinton (L) is introduced by British Prime Minister Tony Blair during a ground-breaking ceremony for Springvale Educational Village in Belfast, Northern Ireland, on May 10, 2007. By Joyce Naltchayan/AFP/Getty.)

Jeb’s Pre-Flip-Flop-Flip

Not exactly a great start for Brand Jeb. Elise Foley summarizes the policy described in Jeb Bush and Clint Bolick’s forthcoming book on immigration, calling it a reversal from Bush:

Bush and Bolick write that there should be “two penalties for illegal entry: fines and/or community service and ineligibility for citizenship.” They don’t fully rule out citizenship, however, despite what that sentence implies. Although Bush and Bolick state there should be no special pathway, they say undocumented immigrants should be allowed to go through normal channels to naturalize by going to their native country to apply. That process currently requires three- or 10-year bars and no guarantee of return, making it untenable to many undocumented immigrants.

Benjy Sarlin thinks Bush may be trying to out-conservative other 2016 contenders, while Beth Reinhard notes that Team Jeb is now backtracking on the book-stance, and with a novel excuse:

When Bush and coauthor Clint Bolick were writing the book during the 2012 presidential campaign, the GOP was veering far to the right. Republican nominee Mitt Romney had staked out a hard-line position against illegal immigration, blasting his primary rivals as pro-amnesty and promoting “self-deportation” for undocumented workers. Bush sent the book to the printer before Christmas – weeks before a handful of Senate Republicans embraced a sweeping overhaul that, like the proposals backed by Bush’s brother, former President George W. Bush, would allow illegal immigrants to earn citizenship. In other words, Bush’s party moved a lot faster than the book-publishing world.

What doesn’t? Reinhard adds that “the bottom line is that in Bush’s zeal to kick-start an immigration reform debate in the GOP, he apparently laid the groundwork for his own flip-flop.” Weigel points out that “this argues for politicians writing e-books or pamphlets that they can update quickly, not writing hardcover tomes that will be mulched unless they become president.” Meanwhile, Reihan focuses on the policy in the book, which he thinks is fair:

This strikes me as entirely appropriate. Unauthorized immigrants who are eligible (i.e., who have resided in the U.S. for a sufficient period) can choose to accept permanent non-citizen resident status and continue to have access to the U.S. labor market or they can leave the country and go through the formal process of becoming authorized immigrants. Many will still have a leg up in the process over other potential immigrants, due to family ties in the U.S., English language proficiency or skills acquired while in the U.S., etc. Yet taking this path will entail taking a serious risk for the unauthorized immigrants who choose it — the opportunity cost of foregone U.S. wages and the very real possibility that they won’t be accepted. That seems like a fair trade.

The View From Your Window Contest: Winner #143

A reader writes:

Perhaps its something like familiarity bias, but I’m always struck by how many images look like my own locale, Southern California. This view with the large grey mountain in the background, the cars in the foreground, the palm trees in the mid-view, could be a suburb of Los Angeles. But there is a pagoda-like roof to the left, and a Islamic looking tower in the mid-ground, and I’m going to go with Tehran, Iran.

Another:

I’ve never put in a guess on one of these before, but I just passed through Puebla, Mexico the other day and it has a volcano similar (indeed, identical, hopefully) to the one in the picture.

Another:

Olympia, Washington? I couldn’t find the exact house, but isn’t that Mt St Helens? With no snow?

Another:

If not Naples itself it is one of the surrounding cities. The mountain in the background is Vesuvius, unless of course I am wrong. I spent a day at Pompei and saw it from many views. It wasn’t until later in the day that I realized the peak I’d been centering in my photos was only the far right side of what was left of the mountain. It was with that realization that the full magnitude of the event hit home as you could see there was a huge piece of the mountain that is missing.

Another is on the right track:

This has to be Japan. There’s the characteristically roofed building in the lower left hand corner, the boring modern sameness of all of the building you see in the skyline, the cars all small, sleek and new. I looked at a topographic map of Japan to see which cities would be surrounded by nearby visible mountains. After guessing around a bit I found a photo of Fukuoka which seemed to match the flatter topped mountain in the background.

Another:

It’s 1:05 a.m. after a birthday party in Montreal, and I should know better than to take a crack at a VFYW contest on a hunch, but here goes. The clay tiled roofs and right-hand drive cars suggest Japan. The palm trees and exposed staircases suggest a southern climate. The urban density says a large city on a southern Japanese island, and that suggests Naha, Okinawa. And now I’m going for some poutine (cheese-curds, gravy and French-fries – renowned Canadian hangover cure!)

Another:

Here’s why I love this stupid, awful contest.

Since Saturday I’ve learned that the ugly institutional Soviet-style architecture I’ve hated my whole life is called Brutalism, I’ve learned that the Scion line is only sold in North America, that Grupo Bimbo has opened two two bakery facilities on the outskirts of China, and I’ve dusted off some pretty dormant geographic knowledge I once knew by heart and clearly took for granted. I feel smarter for having searched.

Here’s why I hate this fun, stimulating contest. None of the above mattered much in my search, and I’m still left without even being 100% certain of the right continent. My answer may as well be Pangea.

This view is insanely frustrating. It is a terribly ugly city. There are no people in the view. The city is almost entirely bereft of notable signage or advertising. There are cars, but they are all backed into a deck. The roof tiles suggest Asia, as do the few visible characters, but I eventually went crazy and at moments thought those were red herrings too. I have image searched things as varied as Nigeria, East Timor, the suburbs of Beijing, and seemingly every stray corner of Oceania. My wife was convinced one of those horrible buildings was a hospital based on the size of the rooftop access doors, and was Googling things like “asia hospital helipad”.

I’m saying Akita, Japan, or someplace near. I have my reasons but they’re all terrible, and this guess is also I’m convinced. I’m only sending this in because after my wife and I spent most of two evenings on it, I feel I owe it to myself to enter a guess, any guess. I have a list of about 12 questions I need to have resolved about this view, and I’ve probably never anticipated an answer this much.

And somebody was there last week or was best man in a wedding on top of that stupid TV network building looking thing with hardly any windows. Or some other bullshit. I hate that person.

Another:

Fuji-san!! That was my first thought when I first saw the picture. I have seen it from a speeding Shinkansen several times. I knew it was Japan – the cars in the parking spaces looked right – and the vague lettering on the signs too. But the longer I looked the less and less it looked like Mt. Fuji, which is more conical and would certainly have snow on the summit this time of year.

I looked at other mountains … Mount Haruna? No, too flat. Maybe Mount Ontake in Nagano? I looked at a lot of mountains. Then I looked some more, and wondered if maybe it wasn’t Mount Fuji after all. I can find some images that look a little like that. So … I’m sticking with a view of Mt. Fuji, from the city of Fujinomiya.

Another sends a view of the right mountain:

Another identifies the right city:

This is the first time I have ever attempted a VFYW. To be honest I never really understood the appeal of internet searching as a form of fun. I always just want to find something, the searching part is actually kind of annoying. However, there were many clues in this view that led me to believe I could be victorious. The lettering on the buildings, the foliage and the FREAKING VOLCANO!

Because of the clues I’m sure someone has already beat me to the location as Kagoshima, Japan. The characters on the sides of the building are nice and friendly, indicating Japanese The right side steering is another giveaway, that and the cars are all new and spotless. I first thought Okinawa Prefecture. Some of these islands are volcanic, but none of the mountains I could find were near city big enough to have multiple tall buildings. I was searching for photos of Okinawa and I stumbled on a blog in English about someone who lives on Okinawa and bam! There is that volcano! The particular post was about a trip to Kagoshima and from there it was easy to locate. The weird green roofed?(color blind) building in the foreground is pretty unique and is the Kagoshima City Museum. There is only one tall building behind it that is either a hotel or apartment building, I’m not sure. When I click on the building in Google maps its says “Kagoshima-ken, Kagoshima-shi, Shiroyamachō.” Whatever that means.

It was a thrill to find it, thanks bunches!

Another:

I think this is my fastest ever, less than ten minutes from seeing the contest photo to finding the building from which the photo was taken. I don’t have a story or anything to go along with the guess, but the photo was taken in Kagoshima, Kagoshima Prefecture, Japan, facing east towards Mt. Sakurajima:

Another:

I had a feeling that if I could figure out what the stylized kanji on the left said that it would lead me to the window and I was right! My other Japanese friend and I were able to correctly piece together than the kanji are

満秀

which leads immediately to the hotel Manshu in Kagoshima, Japan!

Another:

Kagoshima is the hometown of Heihachiro Togo, the great Japanese admiral who humiliated the Russian navy at Tsushima. Sakurajima sits due east of the city across a narrow stretch of Kagoshima Bay. Since the view is to the east, we are looking for a part of the city with streets running southwest-to-northeast. A quick aerial tour shows that the oldest part of the city – bombarded by the British in 1863 – fits the bill. The copper-roofed building is the Kagoshima City Museum of Art, and the green-surfaced parking deck in the VFYW’s foreground is plainly visible as part of a large apartment complex to the west. Its address is Shiroyamacho 3-35; Google translates the name of the building as “Surpass Shiroyama Park City.” I’ll say it’s a view from the top floor, about a quarter of the way along the northeast side of the third building up the hill.

Another sends an image of the building:

This one was really easy so I’m sure there will be a lot of correct responses given the amount of signage in Japanese. The photo looks like it was taken from the Surpass City Shiroyama Park apartment building in the Shiroyama-cho district of Kagoshima Japan. Probably from the 5th or 6th floor of the main building or one of the units right above the parking lot. I’ve attached a fun rendering of the building which overlooks the active volcano on Sakurajima.

Another adds:

These are “manshon” or condominiums, one of which seems to be for sale right now for about $226,000. Looks like a lovely spot, and the statue of Saigo Takamori (The “last” Samurai) right across the street adds interest. Somehow I wouldn’t want to test my luck that close to an active volcano, though.

Another sends a painting of the volcano:

Sakurajima in Morning Light, Kagoshima, Kyushu by Toshiro Maeda

Close to 250 readers correctly answered Kagoshima, and a dozen of those have correctly guessed difficult views in the past without yet winning, so determining a winner this week is extremely difficult, especially without knowing the exact floor or unit from which the photo was taken. One Kagoshima guesser goes for bribery:

If I win I will subscribe!

No pay-for-play on the Dish. So to break the tough tie this week, we found the reader among the aforementioned dozen who has entered the most contests overall. The image from that reader’s Kagoshima entry:

Congrats to that reader on the close win. From the photo’s submitter:

My daughter took this picture on February 3 at 2:30 PM. The view is the city of Kagoshima, Japan, looking across the bay to the active volcano Sakurajima, which is only about five miles away. The exact address is 701 Surpass City Shiroyamakouen, 3-35 Shiroyama-cho, Kagoshima. I have no idea what all that means, unfortunately,although the neighborhood is called Shiroyama-cho. People should notice the nearby mountain that is recognizable as a volcano, and the roof in the foreground looks very Asian so I think people may get to Japan quickly, but Kagoshima, onthe southern island of Kyushu, is pretty off the beaten track.

She is studying in Tokyo for her junior year abroad, and is doing an internship for a month between semesters as a distillery in Kagoshima. She likes to look at the VFYW and is always sending me photos asking if this would be a good one, and I finally think she got it right.

Love the contest and the Dish! Of course I’m a subscriber. Also sent you your contest view of Waterton Lake last summer, which thrilled me to see on the blog. Keep it going everyone!

He follows up:

Awesome to see my daughter’s picture of Mt Sakurajima from Kagoshima as this weeks puzzle entry! I thought I’d pass along a new picture she sent me (a view from your car window) of the mountain in a big ashy eruption the other day, taken from the streets of Kagoshima:

(Archive)

Your Tuesday Cry

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=_cpUnUUQF3o]

There’s a moment here – about a minute in – when you see chimps who have lived almost all their lives in research cages finally see the world God made them for – either again or for the first time. Some are as old as 50. The look on their faces is simply one of awe. Andri Antoniades sets the scene:

The United States remains one of the only two nations in the world that still uses chimpanzees for biomedical research purposes. Kept in laboratory cages, these animals are never given the chance to see the outside world, let alone touch it with their own hands. But that is (slowly) changing. Recently a small group of federally owned laboratory chimpanzees were retired to the Chimp Haven sanctuary in Keithville, LA. The Humane Society posted this clip of some of those animals and their first foray into a natural habitat. For the elderly chimps that were originally caught in the wild, it had been decades since they experienced life outside of a cage. And for the younger chimps that had been bred in captivity, this was their first time ever stepping onto soil or feeling the embrace of others in their group unobstructed by cage bars.

Pwning Krugman

In some ways, they are talking past each other. Scarborough wants a small investment stimulus now but also wants much more serious entitlement reform later (which is my position too). I’m not sure Krugman wouldn’t be far off that either – but he wants a much bigger stimulus now and seems to argue that we can worry about long-term debt later. Part of the issue is timing: the danger of premature and overdone austerity in an economy with barely any demand to start with is under-rated on the right (and you might want to watch the Cameron government’s woes if you stick to your fiscal conservatism regardless of circumstance). But equally, the long-term debt has not been fully faced by the left and president Obama, while advocating cuts in Medicare, has yet to tackle the long term crisis with anything more than experiments in healthcare provision in the ACA (which might even be working).

Still, Scarborough came prepared and clearly prevailed over a Nobel laureate in economics. Not bad for a hack. And he’s dead right about Krugman’s contempt for those with whom he disagrees. It actually weakens his case unnecessarily. And I have to say that over the past five years, I think Krugman has been more right than wrong.

Green Shoots On The Right, Ctd

“I wish New Jersey were governed more conservatively: that Christie had not, for example, agreed to expand Medicaid last week on federal taxpayers’ tab. But we’re talking about New Jersey here. It’s a state that last elected a Republican to the Senate in 1972 and last went for a Republican presidential candidate in 1988. It went for President Barack Obama by a larger margin than any other state governed by a Republican.

Conservatives shouldn’t just cut Christie some slack. They ought to listen to him to find out how a pro-life critic of unions has become so popular in unfriendly territory — if, that is, they want the political map of the country to get any redder,” – Ramesh Ponnuru.