As a California budget-watcher pointed out to me, when you get Arnold Schwarzenegger in a room with the leadership of the Senate and Assembly, Schwarzenegger has the most budget and legislative experience in the room. A guy who was starring in Terminator films as recently as 2003 is now the most seasoned elected official during one of the worst crises California has ever had. Ezra Klein in The folly of term limits. ...
Like many people whose occupation and hobbies both involve sitting at a desk, I could stand to lose some weight. We’ve arrived at the time of year when a lot of people think that they could stand to lose some weight, too, and so I thought I’d talk about an approach to eating that has been working for me – the line diet. I read about the line diet this summer in a blog post at kottke.org. But before I talk about the line diet, I want to talk about weight loss in general. ...
Here’s a story that combines today’s earlier post, about geek ascendancy, with an age old problem, pervasive discrimination against the poor and against minorities. It talks about the use of mapping to expose and fight discriminatory practices that have gone on for decades – excluding minority communities from municipal services like sewer, water, and trash collection and ignoring those communities when planning new roads and so forth. The maps make the problems obvious in a way that no other approach could. ...
Here’s Jim Henley’s nomination for “thing of the decade”: As Hardison said, “Age of the geek, baby!” As defeatist (and boring) as that last post sounded, the great consolation of the Oy’s, for me and people like me, was – and I mean this in a healthful, life-affirming way – our ruthless and total conquest of the culture. Even areas that were once considered almost off limits to geeks, like sports fandom, have been occupied by geek legions. Geeks have not only changed the way sports is covered, but even the way professional sports teams are run. Geeks have finally witnessed the ascendancy of the medium in which they are the most comfortable (the Internet) and the form of analysis they most prefer (quantitative). Don’t think of it as a coincidence that CBO scores of legislation have become so important. If you don’t make an effort to crunch the numbers, nobody takes you seriously any more. ...
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.
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. ...
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. ...
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. ...
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. ...
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. ...