I'm delighted to report that - after experimenting with conventional high school - my elder sons have resumed homeschooling. Their complaints were numerous, but our whole family was taken aback by their school's disinterest in academics. Math aside, every class was infused by a pedagogical philosophy I can only describe as "touchy-feely." This philosophy was so pervasive that teachers seemed unaware of the possibility that other views even exist.
On the surface, admittedly, touchy-feely pedagogy seems unobjectionable. The teachers warmly express their affection for the students. They believe in treating students like human beings - and making learning fun. Most seem quite sincere: They're convinced that their methods are great for everyone. Alas, they're mistaken. Our chief objections:
1. Some subjects simply don't lend themselves to a touchy-feely approach. Math is the obvious example; you can't teach math by asking kids "How do the numbers make you feel?" But the same goes for writing. If you want to improve students' writing, you must make liberal use of your red pen.
2. The touchy-feely approach crowds out measurable learning. Teachers in virtually every one of my kids' classes (none of which had "Art" in the title) assigned art projects - posters, name tags, flags, and so on. The voluminous time the students spent on these projects could have been focused on techniques that actually yield knowledge: reading the textbook, solving problems, writing essays, and taking tests.
3. Some students clearly enjoy the touchy-feely approach. But plenty of others resent it. A few - like my kids - find it humiliating. So contrary to the party line, touchy-feely is not "Better for everyone."
4. The party line is especially galling because the practitioners of touchy-feely pedagogy don't settle for passive obedience. In a traditional academic program, students are expected to complete their work, but no one says they have to enjoy it. In a touchy-feely program, in contrast, teachers keep insisting, "This is fun!" and "Students love doing this!" And every student's supposed to play along.
5. I didn't bother sharing my concerns with my sons' teachers because I deemed it fruitless. But if I had vented, I bet they would have replied thusly: "But all the kids I talk to love my approach." Plausibly true, but deeply misleading, due to two powerful psychological forces: Social Desirability Bias and confirmation bias. Long story short: students keep negative opinions to themselves, and teachers misinterpret mixed evidence in their own favor. Just like humans generally.
I don't expect the world to revolve around me or my kids - and lashing out at touchy-feely people is hard because they're so nice. Still, as we economists emphasize, nice people often do bad things. Good intentions are not enough; if you really want to do good, you have to calmly weigh the actual consequences of your actions. You may find drawing posters more fun than reading textbooks, but that's a reflection of your personality type, not a universal law of human nature. Forget these truisms, and you risk being a touchy-feely bull in a china shop - loudly expressing philanthropic sentiments as you trample all over the feelings of hapless studious children.
Tyler Cowen directed me to a post by Brad Setser, with this very interesting observation:
I feel I am at risk of becoming a bit shrill on the topic of tax and trade, but it is very hard--in my view--to understand a lot of the trade data without understanding how heavily a lot of trade is influenced by what might be termed chains of tax arbitrage that have nothing to do with conventional tariffs. The trade flows linked to such tax arbitrage are in my view why the U.S. runs a large trade deficit in pharmaceuticals overall, and why most of the deficit is with places like Ireland and Switzerland. And the U.S. would technically run a trade deficit with Puerto Rico if Puerto Rico were disaggregated from the U.S.--even though the ships that sail from the U.S. to Puerto Rico sail to Puerto Rico full and come back almost empty. Welcome to the world of transfer pricing!
Puerto Rico's economy was a disaster area even before Maria, but at least they almost always run trade surpluses:
Seriously, trade data is so misleading that I sometimes wonder if we would be better off not even collecting it, just as we don't waste time calculating the trade balance between North and South Dakota.
The war on drugs has been going on since 1971, and we have a winner: marijuana. Back then, possession of pot carried heavy penalties in many states—even life imprisonment. Today, 29 states sanction medical use of cannabis, and eight allow recreational use. Legal weed has become about as controversial as Powerball.
One sign of the shift came in Wednesday's debate among the Democrats running for governor of Illinois. The state didn't get its first medical marijuana dispensary until 2015, and it decriminalized possession of small amounts of pot only last year. But most of the candidates endorsed legalization of recreational weed, and one supported "full decriminalization."
Those positions are not politically risky, in Illinois or in most places. They're mainstream.
In 2016, Gallup Poll found that 60 percent of Americans supported full legalization—up from 36 percent in 2005. Given the choice, voters generally favor it. Nine states had cannabis initiatives on the ballot last year. Medical marijuana won in four states, and recreational pot won in another four. Only Arizona's recreational pot measure failed.
Next year should further erode pot prohibition. "Campaigns are underway in at least five states to legalize either medical or recreational cannabis," reports Marijuana Business Daily. It also notes that New Jersey, Rhode Island and Vermont could get recreational cannabis through legislative action.
All this progress has occurred even though federal law bars possession and use—impeding normal commerce in states that permit dispensaries. Under President Barack Obama, the Justice Department chose to defer to states that allowed cannabis. But banks generally are leery of doing business with pot dispensaries, forcing many to operate on cash alone.
As a candidate, Donald Trump indicated he would follow more or less the same course as Obama. Attorney General Jeff Sessions, however, has been an implacable opponent of liberalization. He once joked—well, I assume he was joking—that he had no problem with the Ku Klux Klan until he "found out they smoked pot."
He appointed a task force on crime, hoping it would confirm his preposterous claim that Obama's laissez-faire policy was to blame for rising violence. But the panel report, which has not been made public, recommended sticking with that approach.
The case for full legalization becomes stronger all the time. One reason is that the disproportionate impact on African-Americans has gained more attention. Blacks are nearly four times likelier to be arrested for pot possession than whites even though there is no racial difference in usage.
Drug enforcement has been a major motive for stop-and-frisk tactics that have fostered resentment of cops among black men. Treating cannabis like beer or cigarettes would greatly curtail such encounters.
For years, opponents said legalization would lead to disaster. But as Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. noted, "A page of history is worth a volume of logic." We no longer have to rely on ominous forecasts. We now have actual experience in states that have taken the leap, and the results refute the fears.
Studies show that after Colorado permitted recreational pot, there was no increase in adolescent use or traffic fatalities. In Washington, which voted for legalization in 2012, crime rates proceeded to decline. California found that when medical dispensaries closed, neighborhood crime didn't fall; it rose.
This year, the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine found "substantial evidence that cannabis is an effective treatment for chronic pain in adults." That helps explains why states that allow cannabis have far lower rates of opioid overdoses. The simple reality is that marijuana eases suffering and saves lives.
States with fiscal problems—Illinois being a prominent example—also stand to gain from allowing recreational pot. First, they don't have to spend so much money arresting, trying, and incarcerating users and sellers. Second, they get a windfall from taxing a product that previously sold only on the black market. Washington's cannabis taxes bring in about $250 million a year.
State governments can also expect savings in Medicaid and other health care programs as some patients opt for inexpensive cannabis over pricey prescription drugs. There are also financial savings for ambulances, hospitals, and morgues when fewer people overdose with opioids—not to mention a lower toll in human misery and heartache.
It's too late to undo all the harm produced by the war on drugs. But Americans are realizing it's never too late to enjoy the benefits of peace.
I don't know how this will end but perhaps reforming Spain's constitution to make it more federal in character might make more sense. Then Portugal can join ;P
Mariano Rajoy’s response to the Catalan independence movement is one of the most dramatic moments in Spain’s 40 years of democracy.
Spanish Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy announced Saturday that he would set in motion a process to strip Catalonia of its leadership, relieving the regional President Carles Puigdemont of his position. Rajoy will ask the Spanish parliament to dissolve the Catalan parliament and Catalonia will then be asked to hold new elections in the region.
“This is not a suspension of home rule but the dismissal of those who lead the regional government,” Rajoy said.
If that sounds dramatic, that’s because it is. Rajoy just triggered the so-called “nuclear option”: Article 155, a never-before-used clause in the 1978 Spanish constitution that allows the central government to take unusual powers to ensure the continued unity of the state throughout the country’s 17 autonomous regions; Catalonia is one of the wealthiest.
It is an unprecedented move that comes at the end of three weeks of deep uncertainty following a highly controversial independence referendum held on October 1. That ballot was ruled illegal by the Spanish Constitutional Court, and the central Spanish government attempted to enforce that ruling.
The day was marked by violence. The Spanish central government sent in the civil guard, which clashed with protesters; images of police in bloody meetings withwould-be voters were seen around the world.
The October 1 referendum produced a lopsided result: 90 percentof voters voted to secede from Spain. But the results were deeply skewed. Only 43 percent of the region’s eligible voters participated in the referendum. Many eligible voters boycotted the vote, believing the referendum itself was an undemocratic imposition by the Catalan secessionists who hold a whippet thin majority in the Catalan regional parliament.
Protests rocked Barcelona for days following the referendum. First came marchers calling for the right to secede and protesting police violence, then came marchers in all white, asking for dialogue with the Spanish central government. But yet another groupswamped the city that was equally large: the group that wanted to remain part of Spain.
Just nine days after the referendum, on October 10, regional President Puigdemontannounced that the region had won the right to declare independence. But then, immediately, he added that he was temporarily suspending the declaration of independence. Instead he asked for negotiations with Madrid.
Prime Minister Rajoy rejected the idea of talks and asked instead for a firm decision from the region.
“The cabinet has agreed this morning to formally require the Catalan government to confirm whether it has declared independence after the deliberate confusion created over whether it has come into effect,” Rajoy said the following day.
Rajoy then set a deadline of October 19 for the Catalans to formally declare independence or not. On October 16 the central government also jailed two secessionist leaders, triggering further protests in Barcelona.
When October 19 arrived, Puigdemont sent a letter to Rajoy, asking him once again for a dialogue and blaming him for escalating the conflict.
Rajoy’s answer was to call this special session of ministers held Saturday morning on how to trigger Article 155.
European Union leadersimmediately signaled they stood withRajoy. And, with the future of the region in a state of suspended animation, businesshas already taken action. Banks and multinational corporations based in Barcelona have begun the process of relocating their headquarters elsewhere in Spain.
The news isn’t likely to bring calm to the region.
Not really that interested either way. Although I did watch that miniseries 11.22.63.
But he has the authority, and a little bit of time, to block their release.
President Donald Trump tweeted on Saturday morning that he’s probably going to release the final batch of classified government documents surrounding the 1963 assassination of John F. Kennedy.
“Subject to the receipt of further information, I will be allowing, as President, the long blocked and classified JFK FILES to be opened,” he wrote.
Under the JFK Assassination Records Collection Act passed in 1992, the government is scheduled to release thousands of never-before-seen documents related to JFK’s assassination — unless they’re blocked by the president, who can cite national security concerns and prevent their release. Assuming Trump does not change his mind, the documents are currently slated for release by this Thursday, October 26. The president can also decide to redact portions of what’s released.
Trump used ambiguous language in his tweet, suggesting that he’s likely to allow the files’release, but his decision is contingent on the “receipt of further information.”
The information he’s referring to is likely the assessment by various agencies in the intelligence community on whether or not the documents should be held back or at least partially redacted.
Since the JFK Assassination Records Collection Act was passed in 1992, the government has released millions of pages of previously classified documents under the act’s mandate, some of them partially redacted. The documents due out on October 26 comprise the last batch of them.
Some of those documents, which are held by the National Archives and Records Administration, are CIA and FBI files. Earlier in October, the CIA told CNN that it was conducting a review “to determine the appropriate next steps with respect to any previously-unreleased CIA information."
An unnamed National Security Council official told the Washington Post in the days leading up to Trump’s tweet that some government agencies are advising Trump against releasing the documents in full.
Roger Stone, Trump’s longtime political adviser, has said that he’s encouraged Trump to release the full trove of documents and referred to Trump as his “hero” for tweeting plans to allow their release. Stone is a conspiracy theorist who wrote a book arguing that Lyndon Johnson, Kennedy’s vice president, was involved in Kennedy’s assassination.
At least two Republican lawmakers, Rep. Walter Jones of North Carolina and Sen. Chuck Grassley of Iowa, have also pushed the president to release the documents in full. “No reason 2 keep hidden anymore,” Grassley tweeted on October 4, objecting to what he refers to as a problem of “over classification” in government.
According to the Washington Post, experts on Kennedy’s assassination don’t expect the remaining documents to contain any wild revelations, but believe they will likely shed light on details like Kennedy assassin Lee Harvey Oswald’s activities while in Mexico City in 1963, and his efforts to engage with Cuban and Soviet intelligence.
A complete disclosure may also help dispel the persistent conspiracy theories surrounding Kennedy’s assassination — including one that is seemingly harbored by the president himself.
“His father was with Lee Harvey Oswald prior to Oswald's being — you know, shot. I mean, the whole thing is ridiculous,” Trump said in an interview with Fox News. “What is this, right prior to his being shot, and nobody even brings it up. They don't even talk about that. That was reported, and nobody talks about it.”
The report Trump was referring to was apparently a claim in the tabloid the National Enquirer. Time will tell, come Thursday, if Trump believes the American public deserves to know as much as the government does about what happened.
AmiMoJo writes: A startup in the Netherlands is developing the "Crowbar," a bird feeder that takes discarded cigarette butts as payment for dispensing food. A camera recognises cigarette filters and rejects any other objects placed in the Crowbar. The idea isn't entirely original, a gentleman in the US has already built a similar device and trained crows to deposit coins. The hope is that crows will be able to keep cities clean, sort through refuse and perform other tasks for our mutual benefit.
Popular Mechanics notes that crows "are some of the smartest animals in the world," suggesting this means "we could harness their abilities for the greater good of our planet."
The top 0.1 percent of earners projected to pay more to the IRS than the bottom 80 percent combined. This year, official government data show, the top 20 percent will pay 95 percent of all income taxes.
And:
Not just that: It’s hard to cut tax rates on moderate-income people without simultaneously benefiting the rich. That’s because everyone pays the same marginal tax rates on, say, their first $50,000 in income, regardless of how much they make in total. So cutting, for example, the 15 percent tax bracket helps the poor and rich alike.
Those who fail to repay a bank loan will be blacklisted, and they will have their name, ID number, photograph, home address and the amount they owe published or announced through various channels – including in newspapers, online, on radio and television, and on screens in buses and public lifts.
…In the southern city of Guangzhou, the personal details of some 141 debt defaulters have so far been displayed on screens in buses, commercial buildings and on media platforms at the request of local courts.
Meanwhile in Jiangsu, Henan and Sichuan provinces, the courts have teamed up with telecoms operators to create a recorded message – played every time someone calls – for those who fail to repay their loans. The message tells the caller: “The person you are calling has been put on a blacklist by the courts for failing to repay their debts. Please urge this person to honour their legal obligations.”
E-cigarettes are less dangerous than cigarettes but are equally effective at delivering nicotine. Levy et al. estimate that if smokers switched to e-cigarettes millions of life-years would be saved, even taking into account plausible rates of non-smokers who start to vape. (It’s worth noting that the authors are all cancer researchers, statisticians and epidemiologists concerned with reducing cancer deaths.)
A Status Quo Scenario, developed to project smoking rates and health outcomes in the absence of vaping, is compared with Substitution models, whereby cigarette use is largely replaced by vaping over a 10-year period. We test an Optimistic and a Pessimistic Scenario, differing in terms of the relative harms of e-cigarettes compared with cigarettes and the impact on overall initiation, cessation and switching. Projected mortality outcomes by age and sex under the Status Quo and E-Cigarette Substitution Scenarios are compared from 2016 to 2100 to determine public health impacts.
Compared with the Status Quo, replacement of cigarette by e-cigarette use over a 10-year period yields 6.6 million fewer premature deaths with 86.7 million fewer life years lost in the Optimistic Scenario. Under the Pessimistic Scenario, 1.6 million premature deaths are averted with 20.8 million fewer life years lost. The largest gains are among younger cohorts, with a 0.5 gain in average life expectancy projected for the age 15 years cohort in 2016.
Vaping saves lives but the FDA has in the past tried to impose severe regulations on the industry and to make vaping less pleasurable. (Aside: It’s interesting that liberals tend to favor other risk-reducing devices such as condoms in the classroom but disfavor vaping while conservatives often take the opposite sides. I don’t think either group is basing their choices on the elasticities.)
The FDA, for example, has tried to ban flavored e-cigarettes. In a new NBER paper, Buckell, Marti and Sindelar calculate that:
…a ban on flavored e-cigarettes would drive smokers to combustible cigarettes, which have been
found to be the more harmful way of getting nicotine (Goniewicz et al., 2017; Shahab et al., 2017).
In addition, such a ban reduces the appeal of e-cigarettes to those who are seeking to quit; ecigarettes
have proven useful as a cessation device for these individuals (Hartmann-Boyce et al.,
2016; Zhu et al., 2017), and we find that quitters have a preference for flavored e-cigarettes.
Everyone knows that the first place you shop a right-wing-conspiracy hit piece on a major Democratic funder is the reliably reactionary New York Times.
Having tried and failed to make Bill Clinton politically toxic for his own sleazy harassment habits, it was a matter of time before we conservatives turned our sites on poor Harvey. It’s important to note that he’s not directly quoted in this Daily Mail piece about him supposedly blaming the right for his sudden misfortunes, but it’s also important to note that blame-shifting and partisan misdirection is entirely consistent with his damage-control strategy over the last 24 hours. If he hasn’t blamed the American right yet for the various allegations against him, just give him time. He’ll get around to it.
Harvey Weinstein believes the allegations of inappropriate sexual behaviour against him are part of a right-wing ‘conspiracy’ to take him down, DailyMail.com can reveal…
In an echo of his close friend Hillary Clinton’s notorious claim that ‘a vast right-wing conspiracy’ was out to get her and her husband, the Democratic supporter is making the claim to those around him – despite his admission
Weinstein believes a team of lawyers linked to conservative groups have been digging up dirt on him and that other prominent Democrat supporters will be attacked next.
Let’s put it this way: If a team of conservative groups is in fact in cahoots with outspoken liberal Ashley Judd to bring down Weinstein, it’s only because the entirety of the celebrity left, possibly up to and including the Obamas, has until now either been afraid to open their mouths about him or unwilling because it’s not in their financial interest. As for what blame-shifting and partisan misdirection, here’s the statement he put out last night, which I encourage you to read in full if you haven’t yet. I managed to hold down the bile past the part about him coming of age in the 60s and 70s and therefore seemingly harassing every woman he crossed paths with in adult life, but by paragraph four there was no stopping it:
I cannot be more remorseful about the people I hurt, and I plan to do right by all of them.
I am going to need a place to channel that anger, so I’ve decided that I’m going to give the NRA my full attention. I hope Wayne LaPierre will enjoy his retirement party. I’m going to do it at the same I had my Bar Mitzvah. I’m making a movie about our President, perhaps we can make it a joint retirement party. One year ago, I began organizing a $5 million foundation to give scholarships to women directors at USC. While this might seem coincidental, it has been in the works for a year. It will be named after my mom, and I won’t disappoint her.
This guy’s one and only redeeming quality may be the sheer contempt in which he holds the left’s intelligence and willingness to be bought off. He’s essentially offering them the same hush-money settlement he allegedly offered his victims if they’ll just keep their mouths shut, look the other way, and let him go on doing what he does. The difference this time is that instead of paying it to them personally, he’ll pay it to their pet causes. You want a million bucks for gun-control groups in return for pretending like he’s not inviting starlets to his hotel room and “asking” them if they want to watch him shower? Done. Two million? Done, done. Name your price. Everyone has one. Oh, and don’t forget, this is all a right-wing conspiracy, you partisan progressive zombies.
One other thing, although it’s the least important detail in the Times story that blew him up. What kind of a weird come-on is “Would you like to watch me shower?” for a man, especially a man who looks like Weinstein? That line would work for maybe 50 percent of women and maybe three percent of men. And he ain’t in the three percent, to put it mildly. Assuming he really did say that to Ashley Judd, I think what explains it has less to do with any illusion Weinstein has about his own physical appeal and more to do with sheer power. He probably got off on the idea that Ashley Judd, a star even at the time, felt pressure to stand there and feign interest in watching this slug shower purely for the sake of protecting her career. He might as well have asked her to scrub his toilet while she was at it. Both tasks are equally demeaning.
Bob has been providing arguments to a more nuanced view. He has said that “Spanish is not all that far from being banned from public schools” in Catalonia. That is true, but to put it into context provides additional knowledge. The reality is much worse. 60% of Catalan children has the Spanish language as mother tongue (30%, Catalan language) All primary and secondary schools use Catalan as vehicular teaching language (with an hour a week of Spanish… or nothing) Basically, in practice, you are not allowed to decide in which language do you want your children to be taught. I am sure most of you will think that this cannot be true in a democratic country.
As the United Nations recognizes (21st of February, day of the mother tongue) children should be schooled in the mother tongue whenever possible. But 60% of Catalan children are denied this right by successive Catalan regional governments… 30 years and counting. This has produced a situation in which two generations of Catalan children with Spanish as mother tongue have systematically been denied the possibility to develop his potential mental abilities to the upmost, with the consequences that Tyler, in other contests, has commented regularly. They will forever occupy the lowest range of jobs in the Catalan economy. This is cultural supremacy to the core. You will not find this in any other democratic country… nor by a mile. I will leave for other time, perhaps, which characteristics the teachers and principals of the schools share.
The Spanish Constitutional Court has ruled several times against this discrimination, instructing the Catalan government to remedy the situation. To no avail. The regional government pays not attention, neither the central government or the civil society doing much. Civil society movements, very prominent in Catalonia, are basically arms of separatist parties. Still, the threat of the Constitutional Court is there, so better to get rid of this nuisance declaring independence.
Stats have made baseball somehow even more boring than before. Yikes.
Statistics showing precisely when starting pitchers become less effective have prompted teams to remove them from games earlier than before. That has increased one of the biggest drags on pace of play: pitching changes. Regular-season games this year saw an average of 8.4 pitchers used between both teams, an all-time high. That’s up from 5.8 pitchers a game 30 years ago.
This to me seems deadly:
Games this season saw an average gap of 3 minutes, 48 seconds between balls in play, an all-time high.
And the average game is now three hours, five minutes long.
That is from a WSJ article, by Brian Costa and Jared Diamond, about how the quants are slowing down the game of baseball.
Depending on which analysts you choose to believe, Windows Mixed Reality headsets will either sell strongly, outselling the Oculus Rift by two-to-one and the HTC Vive by ten-to-fifteen percent in the fourth quarter... or get off to a slow start, with VR remaining niche.
On the more upbeat side is market research firm SuperData. SuperData points to the advantages of Microsoft's platform: low-price headsets (ranging from $299 to $499) and lower hardware specs (a basic experience will work on machines with Skylake-integrated graphics, though more advanced titles will require discrete GPUs). The inside-out tracking of the Windows headsets also makes for easier installation: no need to mount base stations on the walls or anything like that; just plug the headset in and go.
The Windows platform will also have a good range of content; Microsoft has its own IP such as Halo and Minecraft, and the platform will also be compatible with SteamVR, giving access to two VR ecosystems with a single headset purchase.
New Keanu Reeves film Replicas is destined to be a "so bad it's good" cult classic.
Every once in a while, a movie comes along that is so resoundingly terrible that it achieves perfection. It doesn't just have a lame twist, awful acting, or some kind of cheesy technology. It has everything. And that's exactly the vibe you'll get from Replicas, the astoundingly ridiculous new movie starring Keanu Reeves and the robot from I, Robot.
So here's the plot of Replicas, insofar as one can call it a plot. Reeves is a neuroscientist who has a heads-up display that allows him to teleport (???) his dead wife and children's minds into other bodies (???) or maybe robots (???) or maybe clone them (???). Any movie that earns 12 question marks based on the trailer alone is already destined for cult-classic status.
There are robots that look just like the CGI from I, Robot, which is convenient. Also there is some kind of technology that plunges a needle into your eye, because as I said, this movie has everything. Reeves' lab partner is played by Thomas Middleditch (Silicon Valley), which made me think that at any moment, a crazy VC was going to show up and try to invest in something. A social media platform that stabs your eyes preemptively before you start posting? Sounds great! [Bong hit.]
The asphalt-derived material before (left) and after it has been coated with lithium. (credit: Tour Group, Rice University)
Most of the batteries we use, from our cell phones to our cars, rely on using lithium ions. As a result, their capacity is largely a product of how much lithium you can stuff into a given volume. Obviously, using a pure lithium electrode would provide the highest density possible. But there has been no way to control where the lithium ends up as a battery goes through charge/discharge cycles. The typical result is a set of lithium metal spines that short the whole system out.
As a result, a lot of effort has been put into finding other materials that can incorporate lithium into their structure. This lowers the total lithium content but keeps the battery from shorting out. However, a new paper suggests an intriguing alternative, describing a material that ensures lithium forms a smooth coating on its surface with no spines. What's this wonder material? A slightly modified version of asphalt.
Pavement from a chemistry perspective
Although the term "asphalt" is often used as a general term for blacktop pavement, it has a technical meaning as well: a viscous, semi-liquid hydrocarbon that's one of the components of the paving material. There are several different types of asphalt, but the team here worked with something called gilsonite, which is close enough to a solid to be mined. Like other hydrocarbons, it's a complex mix of molecules rather than a pure substance, and it contains things like nitrogen and sulfur due to its origin in biological material.
Countries such as China and Russia are reluctant to come to terms with their history. Many of their residents are unaware of the horrors perpetrated by Mao and Stalin. I suppose that's no big surprise; people prefer to see their country's history in a positive light. More surprising is that young people in America and Britain also seem unaware of the horrors of socialism. Indeed polls show that under 25 voters in the UK favor Labour over the Conservatives by a 3 to 1 margin. And that's largely due to their strong support for the Labour leader (and odds on favorite to be the next British Prime Minister), Jeremy Corbyn.
Now you might argue that Corbyn is a European social democrat, not one of those bad socialists. But that's not really true. He's a big fan of Hugo Chavez's policies in Venezuela, and also Fidel Castro. His top aides include an apologist for North Korea and also a fan of Trotsky and Lenin. He really is a socialist.
And so is the mayor of New York City, Bill de Blasio:
what's been hardest is the way our legal system is structured to favor private property. I think people all over this city, of every background, would like to have the city government be able to determine which building goes where, how high it will be, who gets to live in it, what the rent will be. I think there's a socialistic impulse, which I hear every day, in every kind of community, that they would like things to be planned in accordance to their needs. And I would, too. Unfortunately, what stands in the way of that is hundreds of years of history that have elevated property rights and wealth to the point that that's the reality that calls the tune on a lot of development.
I'll give you an example. I was down one day on Varick Street [in the pricey Tribeca neighborhood], somewhere close to Canal, and there was a big sign out front of a new condo saying, "Units start at $2 million." And that just drives people stark raving mad in this city, because that kind of development is clearly not for everyday people. It's almost like it's being flaunted. Look, if I had my druthers, the city government would determine every single plot of land, how development would proceed. And there would be stringent income requirements around income levels and rents. . . .
The problem is at the top end. In very few ways can we address the rampant growth of wealth among the one percent. The state and the federal government have the power to do that. . . . It frustrates me greatly that we don't have the power here to tax the wealthy in this city.
Sounds kind of like the "Red" London mayor Ken Livingstone, who ended up making peace with neoliberalism.
The National Review article where I found this quotation points out that de Blasio has been almost completely ineffective. And yet he remains popular, and is likely to win re-election overwhelmingly. Similarly, Trump's hard core supporters don't seem to perturbed by his lack of tangible accomplishments.
Jeremy Corbyn is no fan of free trade, and has always been somewhat skepticial of the EU. In contrast, his youthful supporters are huge fans of the EU, which is about as far from Venezuelan-style socialism as you can get. The EU actually has lots of regulations requiring free markets.
Similarly, I'd wager that lots of de Blasio's young supporters prefer a ride-sharing free market with companies like Uber and Lyft, over the regulated taxi cartel favored by de Blasio. Based on the track record of de Blasio, Livingstone, and Trump, I wonder if a Corbyn government would actually deliver much change to the UK.
Perhaps the modern infatuation with socialism is based on a combination of ignorance and fashion. They don't know anything about real world socialism, but think it sounds kind of cool. Thus those with Mao posters on their walls don't actually favor murdering rich people (many of their parents are rich) and those wearing Che t-shirts don't actually favor the sort of barbaric executions that he engaged in. It's just a pose.
Polls show that Trump supporters overwhelmingly support the DACA program, even though abolishing this program was a big part of the anti-immigrant movement that helped propel Trump to power.
I find all this rather depressing, but maybe I should look on the bright side. Maybe it's actually good news that socialism and fascism (in the West) are no longer actual policies that kill millions, rather just fashion statements.
PS. If modern politics isn't really about anything, what happens if someday we accidentally elect someone who really means it.
Interesting and unsurprisingly depressing interview with a Venezuelan economist.
The Financial Times has an excellent interview with economist Ricardo Hausmann on the Chavez and Maduro-created tragedy that is Venezuela. HT2 Timothy Taylor, aka, the Conversable Economist.
The whole thing is worth reading. With help from a good interviewer, Cardiff Garcia, Hausmann, an economics professor at Harvard's Kennedy School, gives a good narrative about the changes in economic policy that took Venezuela from being one of the economic jewels of South America to being arguably, if the numbers are adjusted for reality, one of the poorest countries in South America. Short summary of economic policy: price controls, profligate government spending, and expropriations with the attendant disrespect for property rights. Short summary of political strategy: Chavez overthrows Venezuela's constraints on presidential power and he and his successor jail political opponents and critics.
Now some highlights.
The trouble started way before Chavez
So it was a magnet. It was wealthy, prosperous. It used massively its resources to invest in infrastructure. When democracy came along it prioritised education, health, public housing. And it was a fairly prosperous place. University education was free. Not only primary and secondary but university education was free. There was very cheap access to electricity, water and so on. So it was a fairly prosperous place. When in 1973, 74 the price of oil went up, then the country had these grandiose plans. Very much State centric at the time. State owned enterprises in steel, aluminium, ship-building and all sorts of other things that ended up in very bad failures, and the 1980s was a very, very difficult period in Venezuela.
Chavez's consolidation of power
Well, in the first couple of years he was focused on changing the constitution in order to create a much more powerful Presidency, with a much longer period and with a possibility of re-election, with a single chamber in the legislative branch instead of two, so as to make it more pliant. And with the ability to scrap all the judicial system and start from scratch.
So he concentrated his first couple of years in consolidating political power. He did not change the economics much. He left the same Finance Minister that [previous President Rafael] Caldera had, Maritza Izaguirre, and there was no discernible change in policies.
Then in the year 2000, with the new constitution, he got re-elected and there he started to move a little bit more on the economic front, and in one day he asked the more-pliant-now National Assembly to grant him the power to pass laws through Presidential Decree.
And on one day he passed 48 laws through a Decree. No-one had read the laws. Nobody had discussed the laws. That led to a massive protest movement, and that massive protest movement ended up unseating him for something like 48 hours, and then his popularity had actually collapsed and things were not looking well for him.
Government spending on "social" programs and their intellectual origin
And there he [Chavez] started to use oil money to massively expand social programmes. These social programmes were mostly designed by Cuba, in Cuba, with significant Cuban advice. And he started to spend a lot of the increasing oil money in that.
Price controls, exchange controls, and import controls--and Chavez's motive
So they used exchange controls, price controls, import controls as a way of keeping control on the private sector -- as a way of making the private sector pliant and dependent on bureaucratic decisions of the State. And there I think Sebastian Edwards' model of saying: Okay, what we are going to do now is we are going to expand spending, this is not going to generate inflation because we're going to have price controls, and this is not going to generate a balance of payments crisis because we have import controls... But that, mixed with the fact that they could borrow internationally, and they borrowed internationally in massive amounts. In incredibly massive amounts.
The collapse of the oil industry that reads like a precis of a chapter in Atlas Shrugged
Let me just give you a sense of the magnitude of the mismanagement of the oil industry. In 1998, the year before Chávez got elected, or the year in which in December of that year Chávez got elected and he took power in February 1999. In 1998, Venezuela produced 3.7 million barrels of oil [per day]. Today it's producing about two. If Venezuela had maintained its market share in the world oil industry -- which it could have because it had infinite reserves, it had the largest reserves in the world -- it would be producing two million barrels more than it is currently producing. With the same market share. So the collapse is immense relative to history, and it's immense relative to this opportunity cost of where it should have gone had it just kept its market share the way it was.
That collapse of the oil industry happened in two steps. First, all the know-how of that industry, centuries of man-years of experience was lost in the firing of these people. They were not only fired but persecuted, so most of them left the country. Many of them left the country. And they caused, for example, an oil boom in Colombia [where many of them moved to]. Colombia went from producing 200,000 barrels of oil [per day] to a million barrels of oil thanks to the fact that Venezuelans knew how to extract much more oil from the fields that Colombia was already exploiting.
So there was a massive loss of human capital. They also wanted to create a politically conscious oil company, so they started to put an enormous amount of social programmes and other things on the books of PDVSA, the oil company. And as a consequence they starved the company from investment and they ran the company in an amazingly corrupt way, and this is really not just talk about corruption but evidence of corruption in massive ways. There were these foreign oil companies... These foreign oil companies have been complaining to the government that they want to wrest control of the procurement of oil projects because they know that this procurement is being done at multiples of what things should cost. There's people that have been found in the US owning hundreds of millions of Dollars of money that has been laundered out of PDVSA and so on.
Chavez's wave of nationalizations
Exchange controls and price controls were put in 2004. Chávez won re-election in 2006. And in early 2007 he announced that he was now going to move towards socialism, and he started with a spree of nationalisations. In those days the price of oil was very high, so he could afford to just buy everything that moved or that he fancied.
So for example he nationalised the telephone company that was owned by Verizon. He nationalised the three cement companies that were owned by the Mexicans, Cemex, Holcim and Lafarge. He nationalised one of the largest banks, which was owned at the time by Banco Santander. He nationalised the supermarket chain. He nationalised 3.7 million hectares of land.
So he went on an expropriation spree. At the beginning, when he had money, he would pay for things, and then if these were things owned by people he didn't like, he would just expropriate and not pay for them. So he changed the contracts of the oil companies in a way that essentially extracted part of the expected cash flows out of them, and many of them accepted but a few of them, Exxon, Conoco Phillips and so on sued. And these suits are now being adjudicated by the International Court for the Settlement of Investment Disputes, and these investment disputes in Washington now add up to $16 billion of claims. Of expropriations that he didn't pay for. And these are only the foreigners.
He expropriated the service companies that provided services to the oil company, because they started to protest that they were not being paid so instead of paying he just expropriated them.
Another chapter out of Atlas Shrugged
So he took over significant chunks of the Venezuelan economy, and the typical thing is that the moment they took over a company, they ran it to the ground. Production collapsed. They nationalised the steel company. The steel company at the time of nationalisation was producing 4.5 million tons of steel with 5,000 workers. It now has 22,000 workers but it's producing something like 200,000 tons of steel. So they ran those companies to the ground. Aluminium is almost not done any more, when Venezuela was producing about a million tons of aluminium back when...
So essentially they expropriated the economy and collapsed it on the public sector. And in the private sector they created all these constraints and this enormous uncertainty over property rights because everybody else was being expropriated and you never knew when it would be your turn. Owens-Illinois was a company making bottles. They were expropriated. Why bottles? Another company making detergents was expropriated. Why detergents?
So everybody else would not know when would his turn come up.
The effect of the Venezuelan government's interventions on living standards
So as a consequence, incomes per capita have collapsed to a degree that it is hard to transmit and understand, and that collapse in private incomes is accompanied by a collapse in public services like healthcare for example. They are just beyond belief. People have been writing pieces that I'm sure are going to win a Pulitzer Prize, because it's just astonishing how life expectancy rates, how the prevalence of diseases that had been eradicated... Venezuela was the first country to eradicate malaria back in 1961. Even before the US did. And malaria is back big time. Measles is back big time. There are no drugs for HIV. There are no drugs for hypertension. There are no machines to do dialysis. There are no cancer drugs.
So there's been an incredible collapse in health standards. And as you know, Caracas is the highest murder city of the world. It beats Central American countries which come second and third as the most violent city in the world. So that is what's happened to the collapse in living standards.
The awful role of lenders, including Goldman Sachs
So you think of capital markets as being angels for good in the world. But when capital markets have to deal with a government that is willing to compromise future cash flows for any cash up front, and it's not using the resources to create any good things for the future, then you're giving money to an authoritarian regime to mismanage in the short run and you are condemning the future of the country with obligations that they will not be able to afford to pay. So that's why I call them hunger bonds.
A very clear example that prompted this was Goldman Sachs lending the government $850 million at an interest rate of 50%. No-one has a project that pays 50%. So the government has $850 million now, then they have to pay an amount going forward that they will not have the resources to pay it with. Because they're not using the money in any investment programme that will be able to pay for that debt. That debt is just to prop up the current regime, and in my mind that makes that debt odious. It's a debt of the regime, it's not a debt that should bind the people of a country, because the regime does not represent the people and the regime cannot commit the future of the country. The people's future.
Trump's sanctions, surprise, surprise, haven't made things better
Cardiff Garcia: Any potential restructuring now is further complicated by the US sanctions enacted since that initial interview was taped. The sanctions which have made it very hard, maybe impossible, for US investors to enter into any new exchange of bonds that would happen as part of a restructuring.
The government's attacks on Hausmann and a close relative
Then obviously the government has attacked me for writing op-eds, or they accuse me of these fancy conspiracy theories of all kinds. But the truth is they haven't been able to grab me but they have been able to put my brother-in-law in jail for being a journalist. So that in itself was also a very traumatic experience for the whole family. So I would say this repression, this oppression, this destruction of dreams has been a very disrupting element of my life these last few years.
. . .
No, he's under house arrest. After spending seven months in very, very inhumane conditions.
My one little criticism is that it would have been nice for Cardiff to draw Hausmann out on something that virtually every economist knows, but some readers do not: there is no mystery in why shelves in supermarkets are empty: price controls cause shortages and extreme price controls cause extreme shortages. (11 COMMENTS)
That line about Law and Order: Chupacabra made me laugh.
Law & Order True Crime: The Menendez Murders., NBC. Tuesday, September 26, 10 p.m.
SEAL Team. CBS. Wednesday, September 27, 9 p.m.
Fred Allen is usually remembered as one of the great comic voices of the golden age of radio in the 1930s and '40s. (If for no other reason than that he drove NBC censors of the day clinically insane. Convinced there was something, somehow dirty about his running gags about the dimwitted foibles of the populace of a town called North Wrinkle, the network forbade him to ever mention it again unless he could prove it didn't exist.) But though Allen didn't have a lot of success on television, he was a one-man factory of witty aphorisms on the subject of the tube. Consider this: "They're calling TV a new medium. Why medium? Because nothing on it is well done." Then there was his anticipation of reality TV ("people who haven't anything to do watch people who can't do anything") and, the subject of this week's TV programming observation, "Imitation is the sincerest form of television."
Here in the second week of the new fall broadcast season, the top two offerings are the (at least) third miniseries adaptation on the ineptly parricidal Menendez brothers and a seemingly flawless clone of a bang-bang drama about U.S. special forces operations, it's pretty hard to argue with the astuteness of that last Allen observation.
Yet before dismissing this week's shows as beneath even the contempt of a TV critic—which would be a truly Olympian achievement, by the way—some careful consideration must be given to Law & Order True Crime: The Menendez Murders.
For one thing, it represents the most audacious branding effort since back in the 1950s when entire shows were named after the products that sponsored them, like The Texaco Star Theater. In this, executive producer Dick Wolf is employing the name of his cookie-cutter Law & Order series (at least seven of them so far, not distinguishable from one another by the human eye) to launch an entirely unrelated anthology true-crime series. If this works, I expect Law & Order: Chupacabra and Law & Order: Kardashian Butt-Sculpting to follow shortly.
Even more startlingly, The Menendez Brothers is not a bad show at all. Wolf's laconic just-the-bloodily-murderous-facts-ma'am approach mixes surprisingly well with the tabloid-trash genre. When your show stars parent-killing sociopaths who raise incestuous child-molestation as a defense, you don't need to toss Lady Gaga or Siegfried and Roy into the mix.
Before O.J. and the white Bronco drove into our lives, the Menendez brothers seemed like the made-for-TV true crime couple of the century. Vacuous Beverly Hills brats, they were accused in 1989 of shotgunning their wealthy parents to death so they could buy Porches and tennis coaches without taking a lot of lip about it. Their first trial, broadcast daily by Court TV (the early incarnation of what is today TruTV) was a national sensation—or so we thought until O.J came long and redefined the term.
Regardless of what you think about the Simpson case, it hit a lot of cultural touchstones—race, celebrity, domestic abuse, the 24-hour news cycle—that lent a serious foundation to its tabloid glamour.
The Menendez story, though, was pure sleaze, wealthy sociopaths cannibalizing themselves. And aside from a slight populist tinge ("Mercedes loaners!" exclaims a homicide detective as he and his partner pass a line of luxury cars while walking up the driveway to the crime scene in the Menendez mansion. "My wife takes the car in for service, she gets a bus ticket"), Wolf refrains from trying to imbue the spectacle with substance.
And why bother? He's got a pulp-Shakespearian cast of characters to play with. There's elder brother Lyle (soap hearthrob Miles Gaston Villanueva, doing a surprisingly credible job), who fantasizes about becoming the chicken-wing king of American college campuses with the proceeds of the murders. Whiny younger brother Erik (Gus Halper, Goat) is stupid enough to write a screenplay outlining how he intended to kill his parents. Judalon Smith (Heather Graham) is there as the lusty and vengeful mistress of Erik's shrink.
And best of all, Edie Falco is back on TV as hired-run defense attorney Leslie Abramson, playing her as a Jewish mother with fangs, doting on the psychos she springs from prison, resolutely indifferent to their victims.
Wolf's Law & Order shows are notorious for their reliance on close-ended storytelling (every episode is resolved in 42 minutes without any loose threads, the better to sell them in syndication, where they're likely to be shown out of order) at the expense of the characters, who often struggle to attain even one-dimensionality.
But that works pretty well in The Menendez Brothers, where the characters have been hand-delivered by history and the principal challenge is sorting out a coherent story line from a somewhat complex series of events. The scripts, mostly written by L&O veteran Rene Balcer, do a nifty job of carving a clean narrative trail through the usual true-crime cloud of ephemera.
CBS' SEAL Team offers a different sort of challenge: how to tell it apart from The Brave, the virtually identical shoot-'em-all-and-let-Muhammad-sort-'em-out series that debuted last week on NBC. Everything The Brave's got, SEAL Team's got, too.
Virile but vulnerable team leader? Check. Young, talented but wild team member? Check. Prim civilian female supervisor concealing a smokin' hot body under her power pants suit, possibly to be deployed at any moment? Check. Team-wide ability to shoot 12,000 Muslim hordes with seven bullets? Check. So, basically, it comes down to whether you prefer David Boreanez and Jessica Pare (she played Don Draper's French-Canadian wife in Mad Men) of SEAL Team or Mike Vogel and Anne Heche of The Brave?
Me, I say turn 'em over to the Menendez brothers and let Dick Wolf sort it out.
A third threat to free speech at University of California, Berkeley has led to more censorship than political rioters or college administrators.
It's the Americans with Disabilities Act.
Berkeley is expensive. Out of state students must pay $60,000 a year. But for five years, Berkeley generously posted 20,000 of its professors' lectures online. Anyone could watch them for free.
Then government regulators stepped in.
The Americans with Disabilities Act stipulates, "No qualified individual with a disability shall ... be denied the benefits of ... services."
As with most laws, people can spend years debating what terms like "denied," "benefits" and "services" mean.
President Obama's eager regulators, in response to a complaint from activists, decided that Berkeley's videos violated the ADA. The Justice Department sent the school a threatening letter: "Berkeley is in violation of title II ... The Attorney General may initiate a lawsuit."
What Berkeley had done wrong, said the government, was failing to caption the videos for the hearing impaired. The ADA makes it illegal to "deny" deaf people services available to others.
Equality is a noble goal, but closed captioning is expensive.
Computers are learning to turn speech into text, but so far they're not good at it. A speech-to-text program transcribed a Harvard lecturer's comment "on our campus" as "hot Kampen good."
Captions that meet government's standards must be typed out by a person who listens to each word. Captioning Berkley's 20,000 lectures would cost millions. The school decided that, to be safe, it would just stop offering its videos. The administration even removed the existing videos from its website.
So now, instead of some deaf people struggling to understand university lectures, no one gets to hear them.
Politicians mean well when they pass rules like the ADA, but every regulation has unintended consequences. Most are bad.
In this case, fortunately, an angry entrepreneur came to the rescue. Jeremy Kauffman hates to see valuable things disappear, so right before Berkeley deleted its website, Kauffman copied the videos and posted them on his website, called LBRY (as in Library).
He says the Berkeley videos are just the start of what LBRY has planned. He wants the site to be YouTube—but without the content restrictions.
LBRY uses a new technology that operates like Bitcoin. It's "decentralized," meaning videos posted are stored on thousands of computers around the world. That makes it nearly impossible for governments—or even Kauffman himself—to remove them.
"LBRY is designed to be much more decentralized, much more controlled by users" and "absolutely freer," Kauffman explains in a video I posted this week.
He acknowledges that with no censorship, his invention may end up hosting videos of bad things—beheadings, child porn, who knows what else. But he argues that if he creates a system with censorship, "it allows us to keep the bad stuff out, which is great, but it also allows dictatorial regimes to keep content off. Do we want to make videos available to the people in Turkey, Iran and China? We say yes."
LBRY will let users flag videos depicting illegal actions. Those videos may no longer be shown on LBRY. However, other websites can show the illegal content using LBRY's technology, and Kauffman can't stop that.
Kauffman says he won't remove the Berkeley videos from his site even if he's sued because there aren't captions for deaf people.
"Is that a reason that content shouldn't be available to everyone?" asks Kauffman.
Government is force whether it is deliberately doing something cruel or just trying to solve one group's problems by imposing restrictions on others.
"Do you want to put a gun to someone's face and say 'Caption those videos'? It's absurd."
It is absurd. What government does is often absurd.
Thank goodness for the internet and for people like Kauffman, someone willing to spend his own money to keep information free.
Theresa May has been applauded by Brussels for her “constructive spirit” after she set out plans to keep Britain in the EU in all but name until 2021, five years after the country voted to leave the bloc.
In a conciliatory speech in Florence, Mrs May also said Britain would pay €20bn into the EU budget after Brexit and signalled the contribution was only a downpayment on what could be a considerably larger exit bill.
Although Britain will formally leave the EU in March 2019, under Mrs May’s model it would still be covered by all EU rules, European court judgments, the free movement of EU workers and budgetary contributions to Brussels until the transition ends. . . .
The speech delighted business leaders who believe Mrs May’s plan for a transition period of “around two years” after Brexit in March 2019 will avoid a cliff-edge and was welcomed by Michel Barnier, the EU’s chief negotiator.
Here are some comments:
1. By now it should be clear why I distinguished between the economic effects of “Brexit uncertainty” and the economic effects of Brexit itself. We now know that Brexit uncertainty had no noticeable impact on UK real GDP growth (which was about the same in the 12 months after Brexit as during the 12 months before.) I still believe that Brexit itself will lead to somewhat slower growth, as do the currency markets. But the delay in Brexit has allowed a partially recovery in the pound, which has bounced back to $1.35, after dropping from $1.46 to $1.23 after the vote (and subsequent “Brexit means Brexit” rhetoric.)
2. I think it’s very unlikely that the UK will (de facto) leave the EU in March 2021 (if ever). May is rumored to have favored an even longer delay, but worried about a leadership challenge from Boris Johnson. Notice she said “around two years”, which could mean three years. Britain really doesn’t want to leave; that’s obvious.
3. And by 2021 or 2022, who knows what the political situation will look like in the UK? What if the Tories need support from the Liberal Dems after the next election? Would the LDs demand further delays? What if Labour wins? Every year that goes by, more older Brexit voters die off and more younger Brits who are comfortable with a cosmopolitan UK enter the voting rolls. Like gay rights and pot legalization, globalization has massive momentum in the long run, as there are truly vast differences between the views of the young and the old.
PS. So the Tories promised to do Brexit, but obviously don’t actually want to do so. In the US, the GOP has promised to get rid of Obamacare. When will that happen? When it comes to health care policy, is history on the side of the GOP? And I’d say something similar about the Tories. In 2040, the UK will be more tightly integrated into Europe than in 2010, even if they are not formally in the EU. Bryan Caplan may lose his Brexit bet, but only on a technicality.
PPS. I’m guessing that this was Obama’s expression earlier this afternoon, when he heard about McCain’s decision.
I think McCain made a defensible decision, but not Rand Paul. Given Paul’s ideology, he really should have supported Graham-Cassidy. It’s far more libertarian than any plausible alternative that Congress is likely to enact.
Someday, kids might only have to endure a single jab to get the benefits of several vaccines, thanks to a new technology by a team of MIT engineers. They've created a method that allows a single injection to carry enough doses for the first one to tw...
The Washington Supreme Court has upheld the conviction under state child porn laws of a 17-year-old boy who sent a picture of his own erect penis to a 22-year-old woman. The case illustrates a bizarre situation in which Eric Gray is both the perpetrator and the victim of the crime. Under state law, Gray could face up to 10 years in prison for the conviction.
On appeal, Gray's attorneys had argued that the language of the law was ambiguous—lawmakers did not anticipate a situation like this—and that the law was potentially in violation of the state and the federal constitutions. The court, in a 7-1 ruling, disagreed.
The majority opinion issued Thursday drew a distinction between this case and situations where teens are busted for consensually sexting one another—as Ars reported in 2015. (A Drexel University survey from 2014 found that, while the majority of teens sext with each other, an even higher percentage were unaware that engaging in such behavior could be prosecuted as child pornography.)
Canada used to have a sufficient supply of domestic sperm donors. But in 2004, we passed the Assisted Human Reproduction Act, which made it illegal to compensate donors for their sperm. Shortly thereafter, the number of willing donors plummeted, and sperm donor clinics were shuttered. Now, there is basically just one sperm donor clinic in Canada, and 30-70 Canadian men who donate sperm. Since demand far outstrips supply, we turn to you. We import sperm from for-profit companies in the U.S., where compensating sperm donors is both legal and normal.
Note, by the way, that contrary to what you might expect from Titmuss et al. US sperm is considered to be of high quality because it comes with information about the donor.
And sperm isn’t the only precious bodily fluid that Canada imports.
Canada has never had enough domestic blood plasma for plasma-protein products, such as immune globulin. Our demand for those products, however, is increasing. Last year, we collected only enough blood plasma from unremunerated donors to manufacture 17% of the immune globulin demanded. The rest we imported from you, in exchange for $623 million, or $512 million U.S.
Reliance on your blood plasma looked like it might change a little bit when, in 2012, a company called Canadian Plasma Resources announced plans to open clinics in Ontario dedicated to collecting blood plasma. The trouble is that its business model included compensating donors. Almost immediately, groups such as the Canadian Union of Public Employees and the Canadian Health Coalition began to lobby the Ontario government to pass a law to stop CPR from opening clinics. Ontario obliged in 2014, passing the Safeguarding Health Care Integrity Act, which among other things made compensation illegal.
…As for safety, the fact that we import products made with remunerated donors should tell you that it is emphatically not an issue. Health Canada has said that there is no health concern. The CEO of Canadian Blood Services, Graham Sher, took to YouTube to explain that “it is categorically untrue to say, in 2015 or 2016, that plasma-protein products from paid donors are less safe or unsafe. They are not. They are as safe as the products that are manufactured from our non-remunerated or unpaid donors.”
As Jaworski writes:
What Canada should do is legalize compensation for renewable bodily fluids in our own country. It would be the morally right thing to do. It would help make and save more lives, without harming anybody.
Enlarge / Dangerous molds fill the walls of a flooded home in New Orleans, Louisiana, February 14, 2006, six months after Katrina. (credit: Getty | Fort Worth Star-Telegram)
Humans inhale somewhere between 1,000 and 10 billion mold spores on an average day—let alone on days after catastrophic flooding or a Category 5 hurricane hits, when fungal flare-ups can ensue. Each one of those teeny spores has the potential to embed in our moist, warm lungs. There they can unfurl fungal tendrils that grow like kudzu, invading and engulfing our organs, slowly choking the life out of us as mold bursts from our seams.
Luckily, our immune systems keep most of us safe from such an agonizing death. But they don’t pull it off with a bloody, fungal massacre each day—no, they use a much more dignified defense, according to a new study.
In the lung, immune cells get cozy with invading fungal spores, then trick them into pushing their own self-destruct buttons, researchers reported Thursday in Science. When the researchers used genetic engineering to override the spore’s self-destruct system, immune cells in mice were powerless to stop the fungal infiltration.
The WaPo is reporting that Vietnam is moving toward a pro-China position, out of desperation:
Vietnam’s fierce rivalry with China often exceeds any lingering resentment against the United States, which is now seen as a crucial counterweight to Beijing’s ambitions.
Yet the suspending of the Repsol drilling project has provided wary Vietnamese with a reason to believe their government is capitulating behind the scenes. Neither the Spanish company nor the Vietnamese government has offered an explanation for suspending offshore activities.
“There are so many rumors swirling around Repsol, as there always are when it comes to China and Vietnam. But there doesn’t appear to be any reason to do what they did other than pressure from Beijing,” said a prominent member of the international business community who frequently interacts with officials representing the three countries involved, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he is not authorized to publicly speak about political matters.
If Vietnam did privately back down, he said, it has not been left with much choice since President Trump took office. “The U.S. really left Vietnam at the altar when it canceled TPP. What are they supposed to do?” he asked, referring to the Trans-Pacific Partnership, the trade deal that included Vietnam and explicitly excluded China. Trump had slammed the deal as a job-killer during the presidential campaign, and he withdrew from the pact just days after taking office.
At least we have a reliable ally in South Korea. But for how much longer? Here’s the Guardian:
Donald Trump has asked aides to prepare for US withdrawal from a free trade agreement with South Korea, it was reported on Saturday – a potentially stunning development at a time of tense confrontation with North Korea.
. . .
The decision is not final yet, and several leading members of the Trump administration are seeking to dissuade the president, according to the Washington Post, but the report added “the internal preparations for terminating the deal are far along and the formal withdrawal process could begin as soon as this coming week.”
Withdrawal from the 2007 trade deal (known as Korus) with one of Washington’s closest allies in Asia would be only the latest of a series of zig-zagging interventions by Trump amid the looming nuclear missile crisis that have caused bewilderment and alarm in the region.
. . . withdrawal would be in line with campaign promises to tear up trade deals Trump has presented as disadvantageous to US workers. He has already ruled out joining the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) . . . as well as the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership with Europe, and he is threatening to pull out of the North American Free Trade Agreement (Nafta).
Ian Bremmer, the president of the Eurasia Group, a political risk research and consulting firm, said that if Trump went ahead and withdrew from the agreement, “it would be a significant loss of US influence in Asia – nearly on par with withdrawal from the TPP”. . . .
“China would be the big winner, with [South] Korean president Moon [Jae-in] harder pressed to maintain present levels of security cooperation with the United States. If China is your key economic partner, there’s a lot less reason to listen to Washington.”
Putin’s gamble backfired. Once it became clear that the Russians tried to influence the election, Congress turned against the Kremlin. The sanctions will stay in place. China’s turned out to be the big winner from Trump’s stupidity. Steve Bannon also looks like a fool, as the Trump/Bannon policy regime is delivering exactly the sort of Chinese hegemony that Bannon warned us about.
PS. Perhaps Trump will put tariffs on Chinese steel, thereby assuring that Chinese manufacturers have a cost advantage over American companies that rely on our high priced steel. Or maybe he’ll start a war with N. Korea. The possibilities are endless when you are dealing with a mentally unstable president.
There are also signs that Mr Corbyn’s Teflon coating is wearing thin. On August 7th he returned from a cycling holiday in Croatia to face a barrage of questions about Venezuela. Why is a country that he once praised as a land of milk and honey turning into a giant gulag? Why had he said nothing while the regime beat and killed dissenters? Mr Corbyn eventually broke his silence only to say he condemned violence on “all sides”, seemingly oblivious to his own recent tweet that “If you are neutral in situations of injustice you have chosen the side of the oppressor.” This came on the heels of two other embarrassments. He back-pedalled on his promise to forgive all past student loans on the ground that, even in Labour’s free-spending Britain, writing off £100bn might be a bit irresponsible. And he clashed with the pro-European wing of his party when he insisted that Britain would leave the single market when it left the European Union.
Further skeletons lurk in Mr Corbyn’s closet. He has spent his life forgiving people their nastiness so long as they are hostile to the Great Satan of the United States.
BTW, lots of respectable “progressive” intellectuals supported this disgusting jerk.
Corbyn can’t quite bring himself to clearly condemn socialists because he is a socialist, just as Trump can’t clearly condemn alt-rightists because he is an alt-rightist. Their supporters insist they aren’t the bad kind of extremist; Corbyn is not a Stalinist and Trump is not a Nazi. That’s true, but their refusal to take a clear moral stand shows you where their heart is—with the bad guys.
PS. It really doesn’t matter whether deep down Trump is a racist thug or just a thug. The fact that he feels a need to pardon racist thugs is all that we need to know.
Whenever dictators rise to power one of the first steps they generally take is to assert control over the media. After all, you don’t want stories circulating among the people which are critical of your various abuses. Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro is no exception to this rule, and he quickly moved to shut down two of the nation’s remaining radio stations which had aired stories critical of his takeover. (Associated Press)
Authorities have shut down two radio stations that aired critical coverage of President Nicolas Maduro’s government by refusing to renew their licenses, a broadcast executive announced, as the country staged military exercises in defiance of Washington and new U.S. sanctions.
Enza Carbone, president of the country’s Radio Chamber, said late Friday in a statement that the National Telecommunications Commission did not renew the stations’ permits when they expired and ordered them to cease transmitting.
The National Media Workers’ Union accused the government of taking “arbitrary” action and violating freedom of expression.
Two days earlier, Maduro ordered cable television carriers to stop offering a couple of stations from Columbia which also broadcast “wrong thinking” news. This is precisely the same pattern we saw in Turkey last year after the failed coup attempt when Recep Tayyip Erdogan began imprisoning journalists by the hundreds and closing down newspapers who printed unfavorable analysis of his regime.
The end game of a strategy such as this can be seen in North Korea today. There is no media (aside from some black market radio from across the border) except for the state operated television and radio networks. Rather than news or any sort of informed discussion, citizens who can somehow afford a television or radio (and they are few in number) are treated to a non-stop flow of approved government propaganda designed to lionize the leadership and condemn the west as enemies.
So what, if anything, will the rest of the world do about Maduro? Our United Nations Ambassador, Nikki Haley, came out this week with yet another forceful condemnation, asserting that the United States would not “tolerate” a dictatorship in Venezuela. (Reuters)
U.S. ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley said on Friday that U.S. sanctions against Venezuela were a strong message to President Nicolas Maduro that the United States would not tolerate a “dictatorship” in that country.
Haley, speaking at United Nations headquarters in New York, said she had not been asked to meet at the UN with visiting Venezuelan foreign minister Jorge Arreaza.
It’s a noble message, but at this point the dictator ship has sailed, if you’ll pardon the pun. The former government is all but dissolved. Maduro’s new assembly of sycophants has usurped all the powers of the legislature and they’re just rewriting the laws of the country to reflect the President’s whims on the fly. Their Supreme Court is packed with Maduro loyalists. Armed militias roam the streets beating down and in some cases murdering protesters and members of the opposition party are quickly filling Maduro’s prisons to overflowing.
I’m not sure how many more things or people we could really sanction at this point. None of it is dissuading Maduro. We may not want to “tolerate” a dictatorship in Venezuela, but we’ve most certainly got one.
On Facebook this morning, economics Ph.D. student Garrett Malcolm Petersen, aka The Economics Detective, asked the following:
Has anyone else noticed the contradiction between Rawls' veil of ignorance argument against inequality and the concept of male privilege?
Not only had I not noticed it, but, even after reading his question, I still didn't see it.
Fortunately, I was not alone. Other commenters asked Garrett to explain. He did, and has allowed me to reprint his explanation. Here goes:
Men are the high-variance gender. We see more men at the highest peaks of achievement but also at the lowest points of failure. If the men and women in the same country were actually two different countries, Manistan would have a higher average income than Womania but it would also have more absolute poverty, much more crime and incarceration, a higher suicide rate, etc. By saying that men have male privilege, we're essentially saying that being born in Manistan is inherently advantageous over being born in Womania.
The difference between Manistan and Womania is similar to the difference between the United States and Sweden. The US is richer but more unequal than Sweden. So it's somewhat contradictory to say that, behind a veil of ignorance, you would choose being born male over being female (male privilege) while also saying that, behind that veil, you would choose to live in a less unequal country even if it meant a lower average income (social democracy).
Garrett even has an explanation for why people have come up with the idea of male privilege:
My theory is that people who talk about male privilege are high achievers surrounded by other high achievers, in which case their experience would be with men dominating most areas they have experience in. If a social worker came up with a theory of privilege, they would probably invent a theory of female privilege based on all the poor and homeless men they deal with. But privilege theory was developed by academics, so the privilege they saw around them was male privilege.
Although I don't think he should use the word "privilege" to describe success, I think he's making an excellent point.
By the way, I think Garrett is an excellent interviewer, at least based on his interview with me.
Both Trump and Arpaio believe that maintaining “law and order” is more important than adhering to the technicalities of actual law
The official reason President Donald Trump pardoned former Maricopa County sheriff Joe Arpaio Friday night — issuing the first pardon of his presidency for a criminal contempt-of-court conviction issued for violating a federal court order meant to prevent racial profiling — was Arpaio’s long career in government service.
“Sheriff Joe Arpaio is now eighty-five years old, and after more than fifty years of admirable service to our Nation, he is worthy candidate for a Presidential pardon,” the official pardon statement from the White House read.
But everyone knows the real answer, because the real answer was given by President Trump himself — at a rally on Tuesday night in Phoenix where he all but promised to pardon Arpaio, while coyly saying he wouldn’t do it just yet.
“Do the people in this room like Sheriff Joe?” he asked the crowd, to cheers. “So, was Sheriff Joe convicted for doing his job?” The crowd appeared to agree; the president did too.
The fact that the president (and, for that matter, Arpaio) sees a law enforcement officer violating a federal court order as “doing his job” might seem like a paradox. But it isn’t. Joe Arpaio recognized the fundamental truth of Trump’s worldview even before Trump did: that promising “law and order,” and protection from social disorder in the form of unauthorized immigration and street crime, didn’t require you to actually adhere to the rule of law.
Arpaio succeeded on Trumpism before Trump did
Sheriff Arpaio played a key role in validating Donald Trump, whose candidacy was initially seen as a joke, as the champion of hardline immigration policies and the cultural anxieties that came alongside them. Trump’s first truly major campaign rally, in August 2015, was in Phoenix with Arpaio and some of the “Angel Moms” (mothers of people killed by unauthorized immigrants) he would continue to co-opt as a candidate and president. Arpaio formally endorsed Trump in January 2016 — before a single primary vote had been cast. He took a gamble, and he won.
So it makes sense that Trump, who has some apparent loyalty to people who supported him back when he was one of 17 Republican presidential candidates, would think warmly of Arpaio. But the endorsement isn’t really the basis of their simpatico. It’s just an acknowledgment of the political truth that Trump is engaging in exactly the same brand of politics that Arpaio pioneered a decade earlier. As politicians, they used tough-on-crime rhetoric and breaches of “political correctness” to give the impression of sticking up for law and order; as government executives, they exercised their power to the greatest possible extent, without a ton of attention paid to the rule of law.
Like Trump, Arpaio communicated toughness through big, theatrical stunts — raids conducted with armored vehicles, the pink underwear, the tent cities — that often happened to violate the rights of their targets. (The tent cities were ultimately shut down after being cited as violations of the Eighth Amendment prohibition against “cruel and unusual punishment.”) His “law and order” policies weren’t successful as anti-crime measures (911 response times went up hugely during the heyday of Arpaio’s sweeps), but succeeded in terms of targeting and victimizing the intended people.
In Arizona — a state with a fast-growing Latino population, but also a substantial population of older white residents who had often moved to Arizona from places that hadn’t had many Latinos — anxieties about demographic and cultural change were acute, and Arpaio capitalized on them. By the mid-2010s, those anxieties had percolated through much of the rest of the country as well, and Arpaianism was ready to go national — in the form of Trump.
But when it came to the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office obeying the laws as well as enforcing them, Arpaio was, at best, uninterested. His internal-affairs office, as Judge Snow found, was more a task force to pursue grudges than an effort to root out misbehavior among deputies. He’s been cited for systematic abuses of power in trying to get his enemies brought up on criminal charges — including local judges, members of the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors, and the former mayor of Phoenix.
In other words, his conviction for contempt of court didn’t come out of the blue. It was a predictable consequence of the way he’d run his department — guided by a philosophy that as long as law-enforcement officials were grabbing headlines by going after undesirable people, the public wouldn’t care so much about how it was done.
The Trump administration has turned that philosophy into a matter of federal rhetoric (such as Trump’s “joke” urging officers to be rough with suspects when shoving them into the backs of police cars) and policy (in walking back court-enforced federal oversight of police departments). President Trump himself is liable to tweet angrily about “so-called” judges when he doesn’t get his way.
Joe Arpaio is lucky that he was convicted under a president who cares more about the order Arpaio professed to maintain than the laws to which he was supposed to adhere. But Donald Trump is far luckier that he had, in Arpaio, a model for how such a politician could operate.
While anyone can purchase tokens, the company will be managed by a ‘Council of Six’ made up solely of Jewish representatives. The representatives will likely be prominent leaders in both public and private sectors, though there is no word yet as to the planned demography of the leaders.
As the currency is aimed specifically at Jewish communities, there will be an automation option so that trading operations may take place on Shabbat, when the handling of money is prohibited by Jewish law.
Just to be clear, I don’t think that all or even most of these new coins are viable entities…
The war on drugs has been going on since 1971, and we have a winner: marijuana. Back then, possession of pot carried heavy penalties in many states—even life imprisonment. Today, 29 states sanction medical use of cannabis, and eight allow recreational use. Legal weed has become about as controversial as Powerball.
Vaping saves lives but the FDA has in the past tried to impose severe regulations on the industry and to make vaping less pleasurable. (Aside: It’s interesting that liberals tend to favor other risk-reducing devices such as condoms in the classroom but disfavor vaping while conservatives often take the opposite sides. I don’t think either group is basing their choices on the elasticities.)
Law & Order True Crime: The Menendez Murders., NBC. Tuesday, September 26, 10 p.m.
2. I think it’s very unlikely that the UK will (de facto) leave the EU in March 2021 (if ever). May is rumored to have favored an even longer delay, but worried about a leadership challenge from Boris Johnson. Notice she said “around two years”, which could mean three years. Britain really doesn’t want to leave; that’s obvious.
I think McCain made a defensible decision, but not Rand Paul. Given Paul’s ideology, he really should have supported Graham-Cassidy. It’s far more libertarian than any plausible alternative that Congress is likely to enact.
Someday, kids might only have to endure a single jab to get the benefits of several vaccines, thanks to a new technology by a team of MIT engineers. They've created a method that allows a single injection to carry enough doses for the first one to tw...
