Tag: Premium

LinkedIn:

At first glance, the platform looks well positioned to become the only major U.S. social network to succeed in China. Twitter, for example, has been blocked in China ever since July 2009 riots in the Western Chinese region of Xinjiang, when news of police violence there first leaked via tweet. Facebook started having problems earlier, in July 2008, after launching a Chinese-language version. (The Chinese government has never admitted to blocking either of them.)

By contrast, the California-based LinkedIn bills itself as the “world’s largest professional network,” and doesn’t appear to aspire to much more than fulfilling that core competency. Its sharp focus surely lends some comfort to Chinese authorities wary of speech-and-information-freedom advocates like Twitter. LinkedIn’s emphasis on helping members make professional connections — all communicated through a barrage of red status alerts and email invitations to congratulate a connection on tweaks to their profile — seems a perfect fit for what many Chinese would agree is a status-obsessed society, some of whose members suffer from Internet addiction.

George Anders wonders whether Chinese censors will give LinkedIn trouble:

[LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner] says his company will implement Chinese restrictions on content “to the extent required,” while also undertaking “extensive measure to protect the rights and data of our members.” Given that LinkedIn’s main news feed is a haven for articles like “The Secret to Never Being Tired at Work,” Chinese authorities may clap their hands with joy when they read most content. But back corners of the LinkedIn site still might stir controversy. It’s possible to imagine the site in a tougher spot if China’s censors objected to specific user groups or personal profiles created by social activists.

Lily Hay Newman notes that “even before the Simplified Chinese site, LinkedIn was one of the only U.S.-based social networks that the Chinese government allowed access to in China”:

Raffi Khatchadourian traveled to France to visit an unfinished reactor intended to produce thermonuclear energy by reaching temperatures “more than ten times as hot as the sun at its blazing core”:

No one knows [the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor]’s true cost, which may be incalculable, but estimates have been rising steadily, and a conservative figure rests at twenty billion dollars—a sum that makes ITER the most expensive scientific instrument on Earth. But if it is truly possible to bottle up a star, and to do so economically, the technology could solve the world’s energy problems for the next thirty million years, and help save the planet from environmental catastrophe. Hydrogen, a primordial element, is the most abundant atom in the universe, a potential fuel that poses little risk of scarcity. Eventually, physicists hope, commercial reactors modelled on ITER will be built, too—generating terawatts of power with no carbon, virtually no pollution, and scant radioactive waste. The reactor would run on no more than seawater and lithium. It would never melt down. It would realize a yearning, as old as the story of Prometheus, to bring the light of the heavens to Earth, and bend it to humanity’s will. ITER, in Latin, means “the way.”

But the reactor hit its latest snag this summer, after repeated delays:

In the previous year, ITER had met barely half its goals. The latest target date for turning on the machine—2020—was again slipping. Officials were now quietly talking about 2023 or 2024. What if the schedule continued to slide? Engineers operate in a world of strictly measured loads and heat fluxes, but political forces are impervious to precise measurement. Still, the ultimate repercussions were obvious: there would come a point, eventually, when frustrated politicians decided that ITER was simply not worth the increasing expense of delay.

In June, the ITER Council gathered in Tokyo, and it was evident that the organization was grappling with its own inner turbulence. At one point, the council member from Korea picked up his papers and stormed out. Ned Sauthoff, the U.S. project manager, bluntly made it known that he thought the project’s nuclear-safety culture was lacking. America’s involvement was growing more tenuous. The Department of Energy had cut funding for a tokamak at M.I.T. to help pay for ITER, and the decision had familiar implications; members of Congress were invited to view the inert machine, and they returned to the Hill expressing outrage. (“ITER is going to eat our whole domestic program.”) Official estimates of the U.S. contribution had doubled, to a billion dollars, and then rose again, to $2.4 billion, merely to get to “first plasma”—essentially, just turning on the machine. Before summer’s end, Dianne Feinstein, the chairwoman of the Senate subcommittee that handles appropriations for energy development, announced that she would discontinue all funding for ITER until the Department of Energy provided a detailed assessment of the total American financial commitment. The request was both logical and impossible to answer accurately; even people at ITER did not know. The department was reluctant to provide a number, and [Ned] Sauthoff told me, “We are in unknown territory.”

Update from a reader:

A somewhat more hopeful example of the pursuit of fusion is the National Ignition Facility here in the States. As I understand it – and I am only an observer from the wings – the Dep’t of Energy largely threw its chips in with this plan for producing and capturing fusion energy, which involves compressing supercooled hydrogen with powerful lasers, rather than superheating it with huge electrical jolts, to create Sun-like conditions. There was big news from the NIF earlier this month: the first energy-positive firings, where more energy came out than went in. Not an end by any means, but a start. A really solid and sober report on NIF is here.

Also too, the thing looks badass.

Update from a reader:

As a physicist working on magnetically confined fusion (but not working on the Iter project), I think the piece gives an unfair view of the project. The US involvement in it has been nothing but trouble: when the Iter project was first considered to be built in the end of ’90s, with major US involvement, it was brought to a halt when US suddenly withdrew support. It took more than 10 years to reconsolidate funding, with additional reductions in design specifications and budget (the original design was decidedly badass, as a sure-fire approach). Currently the US has a 9% stake in the project (like India, Russia, Korea, China and Japan), while the EU funds 45% of it. EU and Japan have an additional bilateral agreement on additional funding for supporting projects such as the IFMIF project. So, the US involvement currently is at best marginal. Is this the best we can do?

While any approach to fusion research is important, I think your reader’s evaluation of the NIF project is lacking. The energy produced in this instance is compared to the energy delivered to the fusion fuel pellet, not total energy used to power the machine. The lasers are about 8% efficient, can be fired about three times per day (when they can), and are used for indirect drive by producing a plasma around the pellet. This means that the energy delivered to the fuel pellet is a tiny fraction of the total, so as a power plant it’s a bust. It does give great insights on what’s happening in a thermonuclear explosion, and appropriately about 5% of the research is highly classified. Not really a fair comparison.

If the Iter fails due to politics and bureaucracy, fusion will be set back probably at least several decades. While it has a lot of detractors, the tokamak is basically the only device so far that has come near engineering break-even, and Iter is projected to produce about 10 times as much as it takes in. Some of the criticism is valid, but it’s still our best shot. Let’s not ruin it.

A new report from the Center for American Progress finds that gun violence could soon become the leading cause of death among young people:

In 2010, 6,201 young people between the ages of 15 and 24 died by gunfire. Guns were a close second to the leading cause of death among this age group, car accidents, which took the lives of 7,024 young people that year. But, while car accident deaths among young people have been steadily declining over the past decade, gun deaths have remained relatively unchanged. And, as described in a new Center for American Progress report [pdf] released Friday, if current trends continue, gun deaths will surpass car accident deaths among young people sometime in 2015[.]

Zara Kessler reads the report and adds some context:

More than half — 54 percent — of Americans murdered with guns in 2010 were younger than 30. Among 15- to 24-year-olds murdered with guns, 65 percent were black. Adulthood not delayed, but stolen. In addition, in 2010, 33,519 individuals ages 17 to 29 survived being intentionally shot. Disabilities, physical and emotional scars – those last for life.

Low levels of household formation among young Americans may be a troubling portent for the nation’s financial health. But not nearly as disturbing as the annual loss of more than 1 million years of potential life due to gun deaths. (Quite a few unformed households, to say the least.)

Because young people also perpetrate a substantial portion of gun violence, millennial lives are destroyed on both sides of the muzzle. In 2012, people under 29 accounted for about two-thirds of arrests on weapons offenses. Almost 5,000 12- to 24-year-olds were arrested in 2011 for homicides, and guns were implicated in about 70 percent of the murders. It costs taxpayers (who have already paid to educate the perpetrators) about $2 million to imprison someone for life beginning in his or her late teens. Not much economic stimulus there.

In one of his trademark takedowns, Chait explains why the Republican party can’t seem to coalesce around their own version of Obamacare:

Lots of people treat the Republican Party’s inability to unify around an alternative health-care plan, four years after the passage ofthe Affordable Care Act, as some kind of homework assignment they keep procrastinating on. But the problem isn’t that Cantor and Boehner and Ryan would rather lay around on the sofa drinking beer and playing video games than write their health-care plan already. It’s that there’s no plan out there that is both ideologically acceptable to conservatives and politically defensible.

Carping from the sidelines is a great strategy for Republicans because status quo bias is extremely powerful. It lets them highlight the downside of every trade-off without owning any downside of their own. They can vaguely promise to solve any problem with the status quo ante without exposing themselves to the risk any real reform entails. Republicans can exploit the disruption of the transition to Obamacare unencumbered by the reality that their own plans are even more disruptive.

I know we’re all supposed to be used to this by now, and regard it as the way politics works, but seriously: is there a more glaring example of the subordination of the public good to opportunistic factionalism? The GOP acts as if its only goal is to get power, even if it has nothing much to offer about how it would tackle such tough problems as climate change or immigration reform or healthcare when it gets it. They are in this for the electoral game, as Mitch McConnell once famously explained. The rest seems subordinate to that objective. Jonathan Bernstein adds:

Chait mentions that this has been going on for years, but he doesn’t refer to the granddaddy of all “repeal and replace” claims: the op-ed written in early 2010 by House Republican committee chairmen promising not just a bill, but a whole process. They were going to hold hearings, draft a bill and bring it to the House floor. I haven’t checked recently, but last I looked the story was that they hadn’t even bothered with the hearings part. As Chait says, there’s just nothing there.

Looking at the proposals that have come from the GOP so far, Peter Weber says they all have drawbacks:

The CBO analysis for Rep. Young’s bill to raise full-time employment to 40 hours, for example, found that the bill would raise the federal deficit by $74 billion while reducing the number of people getting employer-sponsored health insurance by about a million; about half of those people would go on Medicaid or other public programs, the other half would be uninsured.

It’s not clear the other Republican proposals would be popular in practice, either. Some of them, as the Washington Post editors note, would be better than ObamaCare at holding down health care costs and incentivizing people to buy private health insurance. But they are more disruptive to the status quo — especially post-ObamaCare — and almost all of them would be ripe for articles about sick people losing coverage or watching their health insurance costs skyrocket.

A major cause of the GOP’s ideas deficit is, of course, the Tea Party:

In Jindal’s diatribe, he claimed that Obama is “waving the white flag” on the economy by focusing on executive actions in the face of Congressional gridlock, and took a shot at Obama’s push to raise the minimum wage by decrying his “minimum wage economy.” The evocation of the minimum wage sheds light on the real cause of “polarization.” Here is a policy that is supported by broad majorities, one Republican officials have voted for in the past. Large chunks of Republican voters support it. But as two recent polls showed, Tea Party Republicans overwhelmingly oppose the hike, while non-Tea Party Republicans support it. The GOP position is dictated by the Tea Party.

Allahpundit reacts to the latest Windsor-inspired court ruling in a red state:

By now, if you’ve read one of these decisions, you’ve read ‘em all. Sometimes they find a violation of equal protection, sometimes they find a violation of equal protection and of due process insofar as the right to marry is “fundamental.” Sometimes they find that gays are a “suspect class” deserving of special protection for purposes of EP analysis, sometimes they skip that part and find that bans on gay marriage have no rational basis and therefore it doesn’t matter how you classify gays. The judge in Texas, a Clinton appointee, took the latter route in both cases.

The basic point is always the same, though: Federal courts don’t see any compelling reason to restrict marriage to straights only.

Amy Davidson isolates a core rationale in the Texas ruling:

A word that appeared several times in Judge [Orlando L.] Garcia’s ruling was “dignity.” “By denying Plaintiffs Holmes and Phariss the fundamental right to marry, Texas denies their relationship the same status and dignity afforded to citizens who are permitted to marry. It also denies them the legal, social, and financial benefits of marriage that opposite-sex couples enjoy.” The laws, he continued, “demean their dignity for no legitimate reason.”

It’s great to see a word with deep origins in Catholic Christianity coming to the defense of homosexual persons. Garcia’s ruling can be read in full here. Sean Sullivan and Scott Clement put it in context:

More recent data show that Texas ≠America as a whole when it comes to gay marriage.

A December 2013 poll from The Public Religion Research Institute showed that 48 percent in Texas favored allowing gay and lesbian couples to marry legally while 49 percent opposed. That compared with a national rate of 53 percent in favor to 41 percent opposed. In short, even as attitudes nationally have shifted dramatically toward embracing gay rights during the past decade, there are plenty of states, like Texas, where opinions don’t mirror the broader attitude. What Wednesday showed is that even in these states, the laws may change.

Still, these changes will continue to encounter stiff criticism from opponents of gay marriage. Texas conservatives led by the state’s top Republican swiftly criticized Wednesday’s decision, signaling the stiff push back that is sure to surface in the GOP-dominated Lone Star State in the coming days.

But I can remember when the very idea that Texas would be evenly split on the question was incredible. Lyle Denniston looks ahead even further:

Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott immediately announced plans to appeal the case to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit. Among the five federal appeals courts where appeals on this issue are or soon will be unfolding, the chances seem greatest in the Fifth Circuit that a panel of conservative judges would be ruling on the case. If that happens, it would likely increase the chances that there will be conflicting decisions on same-sex marriage bans, and that would enhance the chances that the Supreme Court would step in to decide the issue, perhaps as early as next Term.

It’s shaping up to be Jamaica:

The island’s energy minister, Philip Paulwell, who also leads government business in parliament, has said he will find time this year to decriminalize possession of small amounts of marijuana. At a stroke, the move will cut the number of criminal offenses by as many as a million a week. It will also make a Jamaican break somewhat less nervy for ganja-puffing tourists. Reform proposals have been knocking around for some time: a National Commission on Ganja recommended decriminalization in 2001. But helped by moves towards legalization in Uruguay and decriminalization in the United States, momentum has been growing. A Cannabis Future Growers and Producers Association was launched last month, and a commercial company to support medical marijuana in December.

Alas for the ghost of Peter Tosh, legalization is still a ways off:

It will remain illegal to grow and trade marijuana in large quantities, something that suits the big players just fine. Full legalization would knock the bottom out of the market, hurting the island’s powerful criminal gangs. It would also curtail the potential for extortion; seven police officers appeared in court this month on allegations that they took a $2,750 bribe from a businessman in return for overlooking a ganja find on his premises.

I’m really excited about Dave Camp’s reportedly doomed tax plan. That is all.

— Reihan Salam (@reihan) February 26, 2014

Philip Klein has mixed feelings about the Michigan Republican’s proposal:

Overall, though the bill would represent progress, too much of it still accepts the premise that the federal tax code should be used by the government to promote certain national priorities rather than merely being a neutral way to raise revenue. There are other provisions that I’d take issue with, such as the one targeting investment firm managers (see this Avik Roy post for a good explanation of the issue).

Additionally, I would have liked to have seen Camp tackle payroll taxes, because for most Americans, this is the heavier burden than income taxes. They are also an incredibly economically destructive tax, because not only do they reduce spending power, but they make it more expensive for employers to hire new workers.

I’m sympathetic to that. I’d love a tax code whose sole purpose is the most efficient, simple and least market-distorting mechanism by which to raise revenues. But I’ve learned not to prefer the perfect to the good. In terms of economic impact, Chait says the proposal is the best he’s seen from Republicans:

The evidence suggests that cutting tax rates, financed by deficits, does little or nothing to spur economic growth. But Camp’s plan doesn’t do that. It instead reduces tax rates by eliminating preferences in the tax code. Subsidies for home mortgage debt and employer-sponsored insurance, among others, would be radically scaled back. And eliminating these kinds of favoritism encourages workers and businesses to instead follow market signals, and likely to make more market-friendly decisions.

It would surely be better if Camp agreed to draw up a plan that increased revenue, but let’s get real about this. Republicans were never going to agree to higher tax revenue for nothing.

Drum takes a second look and is more impressed:

I was wrong. It turns out that Camp’s plan specifies the tax breaks he wants to close in considerable detail. And according to the analysis of the Joint Committee on Taxation, which is usually fairly reliable, it would be both revenue neutral and distributionally pretty neutral too. Over ten years it would raise about $3 billion more than present law[.]

But Jared Bernstein insists that the plan is “fundamentally flawed”:

First, it claims to be revenue neutral, but achieves that goal only with timing gimmicks that ensure that its revenue neutrality will not last. Second, revenue neutrality is itself a recipe for an unsustainable budget path. Our demographics alone, not to mention growing challenges like climate change, imply future demands on government programs that clearly show neutrality to be a misguided guidepost for tax reform.

Yes, but you can still raise revenues after tax reform, can’t you? Chye-Ching Huang also warns that the plan will lead to lower revenues in the long run:

The plan’s scaling back of certain tax breaks raises more revenue up front than over time.  For example, the plan ends “accelerated depreciation,” which allows businesses to deduct the cost of new investments at an accelerated rate.  The JCT estimates show that the revenue gains from ending accelerated depreciation peak in 2019 and then dwindle.  Treasury economists have found that ending accelerated depreciation saves much less revenue in the second decade than in the first, and less in the third decade than in the second.

Mark Calabria worries that the proposed bank tax would further enmesh the government with the finance sector:

While standard Pigouvian welfare analysis would recommend a tax to internalize any negatives externalities, [Too Big To Fail] is not like pollution, it isn’t something large banks create. It is something the government creates by coming to their rescue. I don’t see TBTF as a switch, but rather a dial between 100 percent chance of a rescue and zero. By turning the banks into a revenue stream for the federal government, we would likely move that dial closer to 100 percent–and that is in the wrong direction. For the same reason, I have opposed efforts to tax Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac in the past. The solution is not to bind large financial institutions and the government closer together, as a bank tax would, but to further separate government and the financial sector.

Politically, Stan Collender explains why the plan is probably going nowhere:

The plan includes tax increases on key Republican constituencies. No matter how rational that might be from a numerical point of view, that’s not something Camp’s colleagues will be able even to tacitly approve let alone actually vote for before either the next congressional election this November or the next presidential election in 2016.

In fact, Camp’s heir-apparent at ways and means — House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-WI) – and Speaker John Boehner (R-OH), the two most important people on tax reform other than Camp himself, both made it clear today before the Camp plan was formally revealed that they (and, by extension, House Republicans) are not close to being ready to deal with tax increases any time soon. Given that Ryan will likely take over from Camp next year, the very clear message he sent this morning was that the prospects for a tax increase will be different when he’s chairman.

A reader writes:

First, thank you for giving atheists a say in your conversations about religion. One of your readers referred to atheists like me as “dickheads” because he gets tired of us constantly talking about our disbelief in gods. Okay, I’ll happily join the ranks of feminists who were dickheads about getting the vote, African Americans who were dickheads in the pursuit of equal rights, and those dickhead gays who demand respect and the same rights as heterosexuals.  I only want my government to respect my right to not believe the existence of a god, to remain neutral when it comes to religion, to not push Christianity as a national religion, or give special privileges to religions.  I want a social climate where atheists are not stigmatized.

A number of friends and relatives have told me in private that they, too, don’t believe in the existence of gods but either cannot or prefer not to make that public.  I want that to end someday.  I want to see a day when people believe or don’t believe because it makes sense to them, not because everyone else believes it, or that’s what’s expected of them.

I speak out so that our leaders understand there are atheists out there who feel just as strongly about our belief as they do about their religion.  I never want another person to experience what happened to me a few years ago.

When my wife’s sister collapsed and died suddenly, her whole family was devastated. At the funeral they were still reeling. My wife’s family is devoutly Catholic and she never told them that I was an atheist (she’s accepted it).  During the Catholic service honoring her sister’s life, the priest spoke highly of her sister’s service and devotion to the church, that she is now in a better place with Jesus, and how Great our Lord Jesus is. To reinforce this, he exhorted everyone who believes in the love of Jesus to stand up. My wife and I were seated near the front of the church and I quickly had to decide what to do. I chose not to stand. Everyone saw this and it just added to the pain of the moment for my wife. (I might add that I am not the same race as her family, which added to the awkwardness.)

I want religious leaders to understand that exhortations like this can embarrass those who aren’t Christians, and in some cases it can break up families and marriages.  If the priest had just asked those who believe to say “Amen” few if any would have noticed those who said nothing.  This has left a lasting scar on my marriage and my relationship with my wife’s family.

I honestly don’t care if people believe in a God or not.  I never talk about people’s religion or try to convince them there is no God unless they bring my atheism up first. I’m only a dickhead when people force their religious beliefs on me or on my government.  I want people to understand that there are a lot of atheists out there, that we are sane, moral citizens with rights we are willing to stand up for.

Another atheist:

I don’t think New Atheists are any more militant or angry than other minority advocacy groups, but I can freely admit that there is some actual anger, and that there are some pretty legit reasons for it. There is a large segment of the population that believes that an atheist is inherently immoral because humans are incapable of having a moral compass without divine belief. There is the mirror belief, even among agnostics, that being religious is somehow an indicator of higher ethical standards. Given history, a lot of atheists find this annoying, dismaying, and at times infuriating. Does not every minority encounter and react to these sorts of morally superior arguments and broad based but inaccurate characterizations and assumptions? Why is the bar for anger and militancy set so low when discussing the godless? And I have not even touched on religion’s extraordinary influence on the culture wars and politics, which Thomas Wells makes only the briefest mention of before dismissing it.

Lastly, regarding your reader who analogized atheism to his dislike for soccer, questioning the appropriateness of him constantly berating his friends and relatives if they ever watch the sport: Know what I do at the half-dozen events per month that involve someone telling us to bow our heads in prayer? I remain quietly respectful, as all atheists I know would do. Know what I do if someone asks me about my religion or what church I attend? I tell them I am an atheist. See the difference? The only time it may get a little tense is if I am baselessly accused of immorality, hatred of god, willful disobedience to what I “know must be true”, or encounter the justification of a preferred public policy decision because “its in the Bible.” You tell me who is being the dick in such a conversation.

One more:

Great thread, thanks. Let’s say the New Atheists are indeed “dickheads” and “contrarians,” as your writer argues. That’s even more of a reason to speak out, and do so with grace and kindness.  One of the best compliments I ever received was from a Christian co-worker after she found out about my atheist activism, saying that my kindness disproved the stereotype of the amoral atheist.

Nick Danforth explains how north ended up at the top of maps:

There is nothing inevitable or intrinsically correct — not in geographic, cartographic or even philosophical terms — about the north being represented as up, because up on a map is a human construction, not a natural one. Some of the very earliest Egyptian maps show the south as up, presumably equating the Nile’s northward flow with the force of gravity. And there was a long stretch in the medieval era when most European maps were drawn with the east on the top. … In the same period, Arab map makers often drew maps with the south facing up, possibly because this was how the Chinese did it.

So who was primarily responsible for the flip?

The north’s position was ultimately secured by the beginning of the 16th century, thanks to Ptolemy, with another European discovery that, like the New World, others had known about for quite some time. Ptolemy was a Hellenic cartographer from Egypt whose work in the second century A.D. laid out a systematic approach to mapping the world, complete with intersecting lines of longitude and latitude on a half-eaten-doughnut-shaped projection that reflected the curvature of the earth. The cartographers who made the first big, beautiful maps of the entire world, Old and New — men like Gerardus Mercator, Henricus Martellus Germanus and Martin Waldseemuller — were obsessed with Ptolemy. They turned out copies of Ptolemy’s Geography on the newly invented printing press, put his portrait in the corners of their maps and used his writings to fill in places they had never been, even as their own discoveries were revealing the limitations of his work. For reasons that have been lost to history, Ptolemy put the north up.

Previous Dish on north-south cartography in The West Wing here. Money quote:

When the top of the map is given to the Northern hemisphere and the bottom is given to the Southern, then people will tend to adopt top and bottom attitudes.

(Image of map from the 15th century depicting Ptolemy’s description of the Ecumene via Wikimedia Commons)