Posts

There are two growing identity-related controversies that I’m keeping an eye on today. The first is ScienceBlogs’ decision to add a blog sponsored by Pepsi to its stable. ScienceBlogs publishes many highly regarded blogs, and authors there are concerned that the Pepsi blog will hurt their credibility. Just take a look at the front page of ScienceBlogs and you’ll see that most of the posts are about the new corporate blog. One blogger is abandoning his blog for now. Another says that paid content is going to cost ScienceBlogs its reputation. There are many, many more examples. ...

I’ve been reading stories about the government at every level blocking access to areas affected by the oil spill pretty much since the oil spill started. Just this weekend, Duncan Davidson reported on new restrictions on journalists documenting the effects of the spill in, Should it be a Felony to Cover the Oil Spill? Glenn Greenwald rounds up news of law enforcement officers working with BP personnel to prevent journalists from covering the spill. He also notes that this pattern of behavior precedes the spill – law enforcement previously detained a freelance photographer for photographing a refinery in Texas City, Texas. The reasons why the government might not want people to see how bad it is on the Gulf coast these days are obvious, but the calculus is depressing. The government sees the costs of harassing journalists who are trying to document the spill as being lower than the costs of people seeing the effects of the spill. ...

Tyler Cowen responds to the Andy Grove essay I linked to previously. I think Cowen, who rejects the essay wholeheartedly on economic grounds, gets the better of the argument. There’s no doubt in my mind that in the greater scheme of things, globalization is a strong positive force in the world. People in rich countries get better stuff at lower prices, and people in poor countries do gradually move up the economic ladder. The jobs in Chinese semiconductor factories may not be great compared to jobs in America, but they’re still better than peasant farming in China. However, the benefits of globalization are not evenly distributed, and if we’re going to commit to globalization as a project, we should also commit to providing a strong social safety net for people who are losing out to globalization as well. ...

Intel founder Andy Grove on startups: Startups are a wonderful thing, but they cannot by themselves increase tech employment. Equally important is what comes after that mythical moment of creation in the garage, as technology goes from prototype to mass production. This is the phase where companies scale up. They work out design details, figure out how to make things affordably, build factories, and hire people by the thousands. Scaling is hard work but necessary to make innovation matter. ...

If you, like me, read a lot of liberal blogs, you see people arguing every day that the best thing the government can do right now is spend more money to stimulate the economy and restore economic growth. For example, it’s become clear that the spending in the stimulus bill in 2009 has been offset fully by the contraction in government spending at other levels that resulted from falling tax revenues. And the general argument is that as long as interest rates are low for government bonds, we should take advantage and borrow money to prop up the economy. I find this argument persuasive, so I’m on the lookout for solid counterarguments. ...

Jim Henley on the human tendency to tolerate the failure of “low road” approaches to solving problems while we keep “high road” solutions on a tight leash: Across a whole range of problems there’s a class of responses I’ll dub the “low road” and another class I’ll call the “high road.” Examples of the former include war, torture, sanctions and blockades, imprisonment, aversive conditioning of all types (spanking; “dominance”-based animal training). Examples of the latter include diplomacy, rapport-building, civil disobedience, the free exchange of goods and ideas, decriminalization and rehabilitation, positive conditioning (of humans and animals). ...

YouTube’s developer blog has a sort of state of the video tag post, explaining why the HTML5 approach works for experimental purposes but isn’t going to soon displace Flash as the default for their service. The problem of browser makers not agreeing on a single video standard to support is huge: First and foremost, we need all browsers to support a standard video format. Users upload 24 hours of video every minute to YouTube, so it’s important to minimize the number of video formats we support. Especially when you consider that for each format, we also provide a variety of sizes (360p, 480p, 720p, 1080p). We have been encoding YouTube videos with the H.264 codec since early 2007, which we use for both Flash Player and mobile devices like the iPhone and Android phones. This let us quickly and easily launch HTML5 playback for most videos on browsers that support H.264, such as Chrome and Safari. ...

The big macroeconomic debate is over deficit spending. Should the federal government keep borrowing money and spending it to lower unemployment and hasten economic recovery, or should it focus on fixing its balance sheet by cutting spending and possibly raising taxes? Ireland went for the latter approach, and the New York Times reports on the results. Ezra Klein has the Cliffs Notes version. I’ll go even shorter: it’s been a disaster for Ireland. ...

This morning I was talking about English nationalism and the World Cup with a friend, and the discussion shifted to an op-ed in this morning’s Washington Post by Andrew Bacevich on the corrosive effect of long wars on the military and on democracy. Here’s how his piece begins: Long wars are antithetical to democracy. Protracted conflict introduces toxins that inexorably corrode the values of popular government. Not least among those values is a code of military conduct that honors the principle of civilian control while keeping the officer corps free from the taint of politics. Events of the past week – notably the Rolling Stone profile that led to Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal’s dismissal – hint at the toll that nearly a decade of continuous conflict has exacted on the U.S. armed forces. The fate of any one general qualifies as small beer: Wearing four stars does not signify indispensability. But indications that the military’s professional ethic is eroding, evident in the disrespect for senior civilians expressed by McChrystal and his inner circle, should set off alarms. ...

Tyler Cowen on who benefits from Dave Weigel’s firing: At a more general level this is a tax on journalists, who now have a greater fear of being fired for past actions. It’s also a tax on the moody, the volatile, the web-savvy, the non-mainstream, and a subsidy to in-control smooth talkers and careful writers.