Posts

To me, the biggest effect of higher oil prices is the havoc they are wreaking on the airline industry. Andrew Leonard looks at state of things on his blog, but I think there’s a lot more analysis to be done. A friend of mine who spent many years working at American Airlines remarked last week that there is not a commercial aircraft in the air that was built for these fuel prices. When you look at the purchasing cycle (and the research and development cycle) for commercial aircraft, you have to wonder how long it’ll be before more economical planes will even be available, if ever? ...

Sorry for the lack of activity here. I have a bunch of posts percolating but none seem to be finished, and I’ve been insanely busy for the past couple of weeks. I’m not a fan of “why I’m not posting” posts, but I thought some people might be starting to wonder. Of course, as soon as I post this I’ll find ten things I can dash off posts about and will be back on my usual pace. ...

Tyler Cowen responds to a reader request for tips on visiting developing countries. Great stuff. (See Chris Blattman’s adenda to his tips as well.)

I know I’ve been posting a lot about politics lately, but that’s the season we’re in. After a weekend of hearing arguments about why the delegations from Michigan and Florida should or should not be seated at the Democratic National Convention in August, I’m left with one lesson, and that’s that we should not confuse arguments of principle with arguments of politics. It’s an argument of principle whether we should provide health insurance to every American, whether or not they can afford it. It’s an argument of principle whether the United States should hold people without charges in secret prisons overseas. Whether or not to seat delegates from Michigan and Florida is not such an issue. ...

Ed Felten and some co-authors have written a paper discussing a more modern approach to open government. They suggest that the best approach is that rather than government agencies focusing on building Web sites that provide access to government data, they should focus on providing the data itself in an open format so that it can be utilized by anyone. Here’s the meat of the proposal: Rather than struggling, as it currently does, to design sites that meet each end-user need, it should focus on creating a simple, reliable and publicly accessible infrastructure that “exposes” the underlying data. Private actors, either nonprofit or commercial, are better suited to deliver government information to citizens and can constantly create and reshape the tools individuals use to find and leverage public data. The best way to ensure that the government allows private parties to compete on equal terms in the provision of government data is to require that federal websites themselves use the same open systems for accessing the underlying data as they make available to the public at large. ...

Washington Post reporter Stephen C Fehr writes about leaving the newspaper after accepting an early retirement package: When historians look back at the challenges that American newspapers faced in the early years of the 21st century, they will no doubt center on how the Internet competed with newspapers to deliver information. They will chronicle the declines in circulation and advertising revenue that led so many news organizations to trim their staffs. In The Post’s case, the newspaper lost $77 million in print advertising revenue last year but gained only $6 million in online advertising revenue. ...

Here’s a quote: I don’t try to divine people’s motives. I look at their actions and what they say. I don’t pretend to be an expert on the state of their emotions. … You’ll have to ask someone who engages in this psycho stuff to talk about their emotions. It’s from Jeffrey Goldberg’s interview with John McCain. Would you want to work for this guy? The question was, “What do you think motivates Iran?” ...

Here’s Upton Sinclair on Scott McLellan’s new memoir: It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it. Apparently McClellan came to understand many things once he was no longer on the White House payroll.

Politico editor in chief John Harris wrote a sort of meta-piece on the controversy over Hillary Clinton’s invocation of the assassination of Robert F Kennedy as an example of a Democratic primary that was still going in June. If you really read the piece, you’ll find it’s a sort of shameful confession of the fundamental sleaziness of the political media. His main point is, “Yes, we suck, and we’re surprised to find that the more established outlets suck just as badly as we do.” ...

John Gruber flags a report that Apple sells two thirds of the computers sold at retail stores for over $1,000. I didn’t realize that Apple was doing that well or that the bottom had fallen so far out of the PC market. Are people who are buying high end PCs buying them online? What does this mean for the game industry, where the latest games need more powerful PCs to run? ...