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Here’s the last sentence of a very interesting blog post: Perhaps what Alan Greenspan needed, back in the day, was a livelier Internet.

Barack Obama’s campaign paid NBC and CBS a combined total of $1,736,000 for a half our of their airtime last night. Had the campaign purchased the 30 minutes of prime time air time on those networks in 30 second increments for normal ads, they would have paid $13,179,420. Pretty good bargain.

It looks like Iceland faces a grim future. I honestly can’t imagine what it must be like for a country to essentially face permanent bankruptcy. Earlier this year, National Geographic published an article about the industrialization of Iceland. One thing Iceland has to offer is cheap hydroelectric power. This has attracted aluminum smelters, because the process has enormous energy demands. There has been some tension in Iceland about whether it’s worth it to despoil its pristine environment in order to attract more industrial development. Something tells me that collapse of Iceland’s banking industry is going to lead to the construction of a lot more aluminum smelters. ...

Here’s a free tip. When you’re making ad hoc changes to a database directly from the database client, it is a good idea to stick LIMIT 1 on your UPDATE and DELETE statements if your intent is to only update one row. Even if you want to update many rows, I still recommend a dry run with LIMIT 1 first. Then if you make an error in your boolean logic or leave something out of the WHERE clause, the wreckage will be limited. It’s much easier to deal with the loss or unwanted alteration of one record than a whole database. ...

Farhad Manjoo writes about the effectiveness of text messaging in political campaigning: Political scientists have run dozens of such studies during the past few years, and the work has led to what you might call the central tenet of voter mobilization: Personal appeals work better than impersonal ones. Having campaign volunteers visit voters door-to-door is the “gold standard” of voter mobilization efforts, Green and Gerber write. On average, the tactic produces one vote for every 14 people contacted. The next-most-effective way to reach voters is to have live, human volunteers call them on the phone to chat: This tactic produces one new vote for every 38 people contacted. Other efforts are nearly worthless. Paying human telemarketers to call voters produces one vote for every 180 people contacted. Sending people nonpartisan get-out-the-vote mailers will yield one vote per 200 contacts. (A partisan mailer is even less effective.) ...

I went to early voting today and cast my vote for Barack Obama for President (along with a whole bunch of other Democrats). I was going to write up a long explanation of why, but if you’ve been reading this site for any time, you know what impresses me about him as a candidate. If you don’t see what Obama’s supporters see in him, it may be worth reading Cass Susstein’s endorsement. ...

In 1940, the New York Times endorsed Republican Wendell Willkie after having endorsed Franklin Roosevelt in 1932 and 1936. They went back to endorsing Roosevelt in 1944, when he won his fourth term. Why Willkie? From the endorsement: We give our own support to Mr. Willkie primarily for these reasons: Because we believe that he is better equipped than Mr. Roosevelt to provide this country with an adequate national defense: because we believe he is a practical liberal who understands the need of increased production; because we believe that the fiscal policies of Mr. Roosevelt have failed disastrously; because we believe that at a time when the traditional safeguards of democracy are failing everywhere it is particularly important to honor and preserve the American tradition against vesting the enormous powers of the Presidency in the hands of any man for three consecutive terms of office. ...

What is liberalism about, in the most basic sense? Matthew Yglesias explains liberalism by way of an argument about a specific case regarding special needs children. I’d grab a juicy pull quote but you should read the whole thing.

In an answer to a reader question on how to choose popular non-fiction books to read, Tyler Cowen says: The first open up a whole new world to you where previously none had existed. Many people felt this way when they read Dawkins’s The Selfish Gene for the first time. For obvious reasons, books like this are increasingly hard to find as you continue your reading career. It would be fun to make a list of such books. The interesting thing is that in many cases books in this category can provide you with an important new way of seeing things even if you wind up rejecting a lot of what’s in them. Noam Chomsky’s Manufacturing Consent fell into this category for me. I’m going to think about making a longer list. ...

Salon provides a list of the biggest blunders of the pundit class in 2008. I’m proud to say that I didn’t go for any of them. In fact, the day McCain selected Palin I told people it would go down as the worst political decision he ever made. Wish I’d blogged it.