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Strong opinions, weakly held

Month: December 2009 (page 1 of 7)

Karl Martino on homelessness

A friend had recently asked me what it took for me to become self-sufficient and no longer be homeless.

Karl Martino in Thoughts On Becoming Self-Sufficient and Defeating Personal Homelessness.

Why passing laws is not like making sausage

The crux of the difference, I would say, is that comparing the operations of the US Congress to those of a sausage-maker is a huge insult to the sausage industry. You may or may not think that the sausage-making process looks “gross” in some sense, but the fact of the matter is that sausage is delicious.

Matthew Yglesias in Sausage is Delicious, Mediocre Legislation is Problematic. Read the whole thing.

Food is the new rock and roll

While nobody was paying attention, food quietly assumed the place in youth culture that used to be occupied by rock ‘n’ roll — individual, fierce and intensely political, communal yet congenial to aesthetic extremes: embracing veganism or learning to butcher a cow; eating tofu or head cheese, bean sprouts or pigs’ ears. I could happily go the rest of my life without hearing about another celebrity potato farmer or rock-star butcher, about 15-year-old cheddar or 150-year-old Madeira. And I am not alone.

Jonathan Gold in the LA Times.

Jan Chipchase on redbox DVDs

Jan Chipchase comments on the disruptive effect of redbox DVD vending machines:

American customers can browse titles in any given vending machine and make a reservation online – try it here (non-US readers might want to start with the zipcode 90210). Since one vending machine holds up to 500 DVD units you’re not going to find Delicatessen or Vanishing Point but that misses the point – it’s like complaining that the Flip is too simple to use. All of their movies including new releases are offered at flat cost of $1 + tax for one nights rental. Interaction is minimal – the vending machine has a touch screen, one slot for receiving/returning DVDs and a credit card swiper.

What comes next? My prediction would be a DVD burner built into the machines, so that you can get pretty much anything you want. The only question there is whether instant viewing over the Internet outpaces redbox. Some Blu-Ray players already include the ability to stream movies from Netflix, at some point most homes will have a device connected to their TV that enables them to get pretty much any movie they want, on demand. In fact, I’d say that I already get more value from movies I can watch instantly on Netflix than I do from the aspect of the service that sends me DVDs in the mail.

Aside from the impact on the movie business, though, Chipchase argues that redbox’s business model will have an even bigger impact:

For those of you glancing nervously into the future perfect redbox’s real impact goes far further than merely renting out DVDs: they have introduced new forms of interaction into the American urban landscape making it more acceptable to use touch screens to browse content in high-footfall, outdoor public spaces; it introduces non-beverage/non-snack vending machine use to a new demographic; and most importantly the value proposition provides sufficient pull for customers to take out a credit card and swipe to authenticate (for rental pick-ups) and complete transactions.

Health care costs and compensation

Bob Herbert talks today about the downsides of the excise tax on expensive health insurance plans, and Ezra Klein does a good job of arguing the other side. There’s one thing Herbert mentions that Klein doesn’t address that betrays a pretty fundamental understanding of economics. Herbert’s argument is that lowering insurance premiums will not result in higher wages, but he’s wrong. Here’s what he says:

The rest of the $150 billion, more than 82 percent of it, will come from the income taxes paid by workers who have been given pay raises by employers who will have voluntarily handed over the money they saved by offering their employees less valuable health insurance plans. … A survey of business executives by Mercer, a human resources consulting firm, found that only 16 percent of respondents said they would convert the savings from a reduction in health benefits into higher wages for employees. Yet proponents of the tax are holding steadfast to the belief that nearly all would do so.

Of course few companies will directly convert savings on insurance costs into wages. But there are two mechanisms by which these savings will end up going to workers.

Let’s say my labor costs for a developer are $75,000. That includes their salary, their health insurance, life insurance, dental insurance, 401k match, my contribution to their FICA bill, and so on. Let’s say that a firm down the street pays $3,000 less than we do in health insurance premiums per employee. If all other labor costs are the same, they can pay the same developer $3,000 more than I can with the same impact on their bottom line. It doesn’t matter whether I pass my savings onto my employees in wages, someone is going to, gradually raising wages across the board.

The second mechanism that comes into play is annual raises. Every year companies sit down to figure out how much more they’re going to pay their employees next year. The cost of covering rising health care premiums come directly out of the same bucket that pay increases come out of. Annual raises are diminished everywhere by higher health insurance costs. Companies that try to keep the savings rather than passing it on in wages will lose employees to firms who do pass on the savings.

Rising health care costs diminish wage growth, and lowering the rate at which health care costs rise will increase wage growth, not because of charity on the part of employers but because of how markets work.

Fire the TSA?

I’ve been reading Bruce Schneier for more than a decade now, so very little of Joel Johnson’s piece, President Obama, It’s Time To Fire the TSA, is news to me. The more interesting question to me is, is there any reasonable path to changing how we think about security? Schneier hammers the TSA repeatedly for protecting against tactics that have been used previously rather than trying to think more systematically about the shape of future threats, but given human nature, it’s not surprising that we handle things that way.

The canonical example of security theater is the requirement that everyone remove their shoes before passing through security. We all know why that rule exists — Richard Reid tried to blow up an airplane with a bomb in his shoe on December 22, 2001 (yes, we’ve been removing our shoes at the airport for 8 years). There’s nothing special about secreting a small bomb in your shoe. As we learned this week, you can stuff a bomb into your underwear just as easily. But imagine the political casualties if someone were to blow up an airplane with a shoe bomb now. The opposition and the media would crucify everyone they could get their hands on for not protecting against a tactic we know that the terrorists use.

In fact, if a politician even tried to stop the shoe removal process, they would be attacked for not taking terrorism seriously. Many of us wish for more political courage from our politicians, but the incentives of every political system serve to diminish political courage and to cull out the truly courageous as quickly as possible. So I’m all for firing the TSA and restoring sanity to airport security, but I’m not optimistic that it’ll happen.

Tyler Cowen on happiness

People should strive to be more interesting and more responsible.  Happiness may result as a byproduct, but those are more important values.

Tyler Cowen discussing Gretchen Rubin’s The Happiness Project.

Competition breeds innovation

Firefox 4.0 will include a feature that runs the browser in multiple processes, like Chrome:

Electrolysis is the name of a Mozilla project that will split Firefox into multiple processes — one for the user interface, one for plugins and one for each tab. Similar functionality is already being seen in other clients, like Google Chrome. Like Chrome, a crash in a single tab will no longer be able to bring down the entire browser. Also, we can expect Electrolysis to make Firefox faster and more stable overall.

A better Christmas card list

Guardian religion blogger Andrew Brown talks about his family’s holiday tradition — sending Christmas cards to people on Amnesty International’s Christmas Card list. Amnesty International publishes a list of people who are oppressed and imprisoned and could really use some support, and encourage people to send cards to them.

The miracle on the Hudson

Here’s your adrenaline boost for today. James Salter reviews Fly by Wire: The Geese, the Glide, the Miracle on the Hudson by William Langewiesche in the New York Review of Books. Here’s a snippet of the review, which includes a gripping account of the ditch:

In the cockpit the ground warning alarm had begun, an automatic voice repeating that the plane was too low. Sullenberger called for the flaps on the wings to be extended in order to slow the plane for impact. At two hundred feet he began breaking his glide and ballooned a little. They were at 150 knots—about 180 miles an hour. He lowered the nose slightly and then, pulling back on the stick in the last few seconds before touching down, his airspeed spent, remarked coolly to Skiles, “Got any ideas?”

“Actually not,” Skiles said.

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