quotable – Page 4

Category: quotable (page 4 of 6)

Food is the new rock and roll

December 29, 2009 / Rafe / 0 Comments

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.

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.

Creating a true impression

December 23, 2009 / Rafe / 0 Comments

For one thing, newspapers work very hard to report things that are true, but they are less concerned with whether the overall impression from their reporting is a true impression. Shark attacks, for instance, happen very rarely. But if you report excitedly on every shark attack that happens, people will think they happen quite a bit. You haven’t told anyone any lies, but your stories aren’t leaving your readers with a true impression of the world.

Ezra Klein in The media’s Sarah Palin problem — and ours.

The safest choice in ethnic cuisine

December 23, 2009 / Rafe / 4 Comments

Korean is perhaps the safest bet, for two reasons. First, non-Koreans are not usually interested in the food. They might enjoy Bul-Gogi but there will be plenty of other dishes for Korean patrons and these will not be “dumbed down.” The lack of mainstream interest limits the potential for sell-out behavior on the part of the restaurant. Second, many Korean dishes, most of all the pickled vegetables, “travel” relatively well and do fine in a culture — the USA — which is not obsessed with fresh ingredients.

Tyler Cowen: Which are the “safest” cuisines? He nominates Chinese as the most dangerous (in terms of the likelihood of getting a bad meal). I heard once that there are more Chinese restaurants in America than McDonalds and Wendy’s combined. With those kinds of numbers, the odds are never going to be very good.

The actual cost of anti-vaccine hysteria

December 21, 2009 / Rafe / 1 Comment

Why didn’t the United States have enough vaccine to fight swine flu this fall? It’s partly because federal health officials didn’t mix adjuvants into the drug. Adjuvants are substances that boost the immune system’s response to a vaccine, so that less vaccine is needed per dose. Using them could have allowed us to create up to four times more H1N1 vaccine doses than we have. Most of Europe used adjuvants; so did Canada. Why didn’t the feds?

They were too worried about spooking anti-vaccine activists, many of whom claim adjuvants contribute to autism. This almost certainly isn’t true: Adjuvants have been widely used for years, with no reputable study suggesting a link between them and autism. But federal officials feared people would avoid the H1N1 vaccine if it included adjuvants. As Anne Schuchat of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said in congressional testimony last month, “The public’s confidence in our vaccine system and in vaccines in this country [is] very, very fragile.”

Clive Thompson with his nomination for worst idea of the decade.

The hidden costs of the health care status quo

December 16, 2009 / Rafe / 2 Comments

In the cradle of American innovation, workers are making career choices based on co-payments, pre-existing conditions and other minutiae of health insurance. They are not necessarily making decisions based on what would be best for their careers and, in turn, for the American economy — that is, “where their skills match and where they can grow the most,” as another Silicon Valley entrepreneur, Cyriac Roeding, says. Health insurance, Mr. Roeding adds, “is distorting the decision-making.”

It is impossible to know how much economic damage these distortions are causing, but they clearly aren’t good. Economic research suggests that more than 1.5 million workers who would otherwise have switched jobs fail to do so every year because of fears about health insurance. Some of them would have moved to companies where they could have contributed more, and others would have started their own businesses.

David Leonhardt: If Health Reform Fails, America’s Innovation Gap Will Grow.

Why you should care about menhaden

December 16, 2009 / Rafe / 0 Comments

menhaden

The deal with fish oil, I found out, is that a considerable portion of it comes from a creature upon which the entire Atlantic coastal ecosystem relies, a big-headed, smelly, foot-long member of the herring family called menhaden, which a recent book identifies in its title as “The Most Important Fish in the Sea.”

Paul Greenberg: A Fish Oil Story. This is a must-read.

What remains of health care reform

December 15, 2009 / Rafe / 2 Comments

The Institute of Medicine’s methodology says 22,000 people died in 2006 because they didn’t have health-care coverage. A recent Harvard study found the number nearer to 45,000. Since we talk about the costs of health-care reform over a 10-year period, may as well talk about the lives saved that way, too. And we’re looking, easily, at more than a hundred thousand lives, to say nothing of the people who will be spared bankruptcy, chronic pain, unnecessary impairment, unnecessary caretaking, bereavement, loss of wages, painful surgeries, and so on.

A lot of progressives woke up this morning feeling like they lost. They didn’t. The public option and its compromised iterations were a battle that came to seem like a war. But they weren’t the war. The bill itself was. When liberals talked about the dream of universal health-care insurance 10, 20 and 30 years ago, they talked about the plight of the uninsured, not the necessity of a limited public option in competition with private insurers.

Ezra Klein on what remains in health care reform. Yes, it’s still worth passing the bill. In sports terminology, passing the bill that’s out there now constitutes “escaping with a win,” not losing.

Update: Please also read Why Progressives Are Batshit Crazy to Oppose the Senate Bill, by Nate Silver.

Update: Kevin Drum:

Ten years ago this bill would have seemed a godsend. The fact that it doesn’t now is a reflection of higher aspirations from the left, and that’s great.

Update: Here’s one proposal for how health care reform should have been handled, politically. It reads like a joke to me. How many Senators were against more substantial reform and letting Olympia Snowe, Susan Collins, Joe Lieberman, and Ben Nelson take the flack? I suspect that Rahm Emanuel and Harry Reid have a better count than I do, and that the number is far greater than zero. Yglesias names a few of them in his post.

The power to obstruct

December 14, 2009 / Rafe / 0 Comments

Can’t liberals be just as stiff-necked as Lieberman? Sure, they could. But liberals members do have an incentive to compromise—the tens of thousands of people who die every year for lack of health insurance. The leverage that Lieberman and other “centrists” have obtained on this issue (and on climate change) stems from a demonstrated willingness to embrace sociopathic indifference to the human cost of their actions.

Matthew Yglesias on Joe Lieberman’s obstructionism.

Spammers gaming Google

December 13, 2009 / Rafe / 3 Comments

Paul Kedrosky has a good post on the latest trend that lowers the value of the Web, content farming:

Google has become a snake that too readily consumes its own keyword tail. Identify some words that show up in profitable searches — from appliances, to mesothelioma suits, to kayak lessons — churn out content cheaply and regularly, and you’re done. On the web, no-one knows you’re a content-grinder.

Via Michael Sippey.

Update: John Battelle has a more optimistic take.

rc3.org

Strong opinions, weakly held