Jack

We really are back to the 1990s when I find myself agreeing with Jonah Goldberg:

We live in an age of diversity, defined not merely by gender and race, but by lifestyles and values. That’s mostly a good thing — mostly. Like all other good things in life, diversity comes at a cost. And a big part of the tab is a lost consensus about what constitutes good manners and propriety. So instead of knowing how to behave, we spend vast amounts of our time worrying and arguing about it, with combatants on every side insisting it’s “Live and let live” for me but “Shut up! How dare you!” for thee.

In this age of unprecedented cultural liberty, we’ve lost sight of the fact that common standards of decency and decorum can be liberating. They inconvenience everyone — a little — but they also free us from worrying about who we might offend or why. School uniforms, remember, constrain the wealthy kids for the benefit of the poor ones.

For millennia, good manners were understood as the means by which strangers showed each other respect. Now, too many people demand respect but have lost the ability, or desire, to show it in return.

One way to defuse the issue of, say, cat-calling is to insist on decent manners, rather than to turn the question into a bloody fist-fight over patriarchy. One way to have avoided “shirtgate,” for example, would have been to parse that micro-aggression as a failure of appropriate taste in the context of a public appearance, rather than seeing it as another micro-aggression against an entire gender. Of course, this can obscure deeper issues. And I’m sure not advocating that we constrain robust feminist critiques of clueless or sexist boorishness. But a question of manners can be neutral and less emotive grounds for actually achieving what we want to achieve in creating a culture more aware of what the world feels like for many women. Demand that men be gentlemen, rather than something other than men.

I wonder also if our digital life hasn’t made all this far worse. Conor has a typically smart and nuanced take on this in its particulars. When you sit in a room with a laptop and write about other people and their flaws, and you don’t have to look them in the eyes, you lose all incentive for manners.

You want to make a point. You may be full to the brim with righteous indignation or shock or anger. It is only human nature to flame at abstractions, just as the awkwardness of physical interaction is one of the few things constraining our rhetorical excess. When you combine this easy anonymity with the mass impulses of a Twitterstorm, you can see why manners have evaporated and civil conversations turned into culture war.

I’m as guilty of this as many. There have been times – far too many – when my passion for an idea or revulsion at a news story can, in its broadness of aim, impugn the integrity or good faith of other individuals. If I had to speak my words to the faces of those I am painting with too broad and crude a brush, my language would be far more temperate (and probably more persuasive). And so restoring manners to online discourse is a hard task – especially in an era of instant mass communication and anonymity. It’s hard for a blogger or writer not least because you don’t want to sink into torpor or dullness or vapidity. You want to keep the debate fresh and real.

But all this means, of course, is that we actually need a set of manners for this age more urgently than in many others. Our web silos – from the Jihadists to the left-blogosphere to the right-media complex – make it easy to thrive and succeed without manners, and even easier to fail in the marketplace by upholding them. But manners matter. They create the climate in which free debate is possible. They are the lubrication that can make a liberal polity actually work.

Update from a reader, for the record:

Jonah Goldberg sighs about society’s lack of manners and decency:

HEALTH: Study Finds Alternative To Statins In Preventing Heart Attacks And Strokes.

Vaping is having a moment. The Oxford Dictionaries recently named the term, which means "to inhale and exhale the vapor produced by an electronic cigarette or similar device," its Word of the Year for 2014. Estimates put the size of the e-cigarette market at around $2.5 billion in annual sales.

Users tout them as tar-free alternatives to traditional cigarettes that help them reduce their nicotine consumption. Others are worried about all the unknowns associated with huffing propylene glycol and concentrated nicotine.

A new study adds to a growing body of research showing that e-cigs do, in fact, help people cut back on their tobacco consumption. Over an eight-month period, Belgian researchers tracked 48 smokers who were unwilling to quit smoking. The smokers were divided in to three groups: two who were given e-cigarettes over the entirety of the period, and a third that switched from tobacco to e-cigarettes two months into the study period.

"At the end of the 8-month study, 21% of all participants had stopped smoking tobacco entirely, whereas an additional 23% reported cutting the number of tobacco cigarettes they smoked per day by half," the authors conclude. Across all three groups, total tobacco consumption fell by 60 percent.

"The nicotine e-cig offers many smokers a successful alternative for smoking less – or even quitting altogether," said authors Frank Baeyens and Dinska Van Gucht.  "E-cig users get the experience of smoking a cigarette and inhale nicotine vapor, but do not suffer the damaging effects of a tobacco cigarette.” Altogether, 44 percent of study participants had reduced their tobacco consumption or eliminated it completely at the end of the eight months.

E-cigarettes are currently unregulated in the United States, although the FDA is currently working on it. In the meantime, government agencies have adopted an alarmist stance toward the use of e-cigarettes, based in part on factual claims that are demonstrably false.

The National Institutes on Drug Abuse says that "studies of the effectiveness of e-cigarettes have not shown they help with smoking cessation" -- even though numerous studies, including this one, directly contradict that statement. Similarly, the department of Health and Human Services says that "there haven’t been any scientific studies that prove e-cigs actually help people to quit smoking."

This caution is understandable - one main source of concern is that while e-cigs may help some people quit, they may also encourage more people to take up nicotine overall. Teen use of e-cigs is another area of concern.

But even these agencies recognize that e-cigarette vapor contains far fewer toxins and potentially dangerous contaminants than traditional tobacco smoke. From a public health standpoint, if we're interested in promoting smoking cessation it would seem sensible to encourage studies like this one, which point to new avenues for reducing the harms of smoking and helping people quit altogether.

But drug regulators remain, as ever, fixated on the dangers associated with various drugs and ways to consume them, to the exclusion of all other considerations. As we've seen with 30 years of failure in the drug war, this approach typically leads to bad policy decisions.

In the modern sense that is, of course potatoes have been genetically modified for a long time:

The Agriculture Department on Friday approved the first genetically modified potato for commercial planting in the United States, a move likely to draw the ire of groups opposed to artificial manipulation of foods.

The Innate potato, developed by the J.R. Simplot Co., is engineered to contain less of a suspected human carcinogen that occurs when a conventional potato is fried, and is also less prone to bruising during transport.

Boise, Idaho-based Simplot is a major supplier of frozen french fries to fast-food giant McDonald’s.

The story is here, and you will note that on Tuesday the mandatory GMO-labeling initiatives failed in Oregon and Colorado, the second failure in Oregon and that means failures in four states overall.  Less positively, voters in Maui County, Hawaii chose to restrict GMO cultivation altogether.  And now McDonald’s is under pressure not to use these new potatoes for its french fries.  But of course you can understand the marketing dilemma of McDonald’s here — they can’t just come out and say “these french fries won’t give you cancer.”

No one knows for sure, you will find a brief survey of some estimates here.  Let’s start with a few simpler points, however.

First, China is notorious for making announcements about air pollution and then not implementing them.  This is only partially a matter of lying, in part the government literally does not have the ability to keep its word.  They have a great deal of coal capacity coming on-line and they can’t just turn that switch off.  They’re also driving more cars, too.

Second, China falsifies estimates of the current level of air pollution, so as to make it look like the problem is improving when it is not.  Worse yet, during the APEC summit the Chinese government blocked the more or less correct estimates coming from U.S. Embassy data, which are usually transmitted through an app.  A nice first step to the “deal” with the United States would have been to allow publication (through the app) of the correct numbers.  But they didn’t.  What does that say about what one might call…”the monitoring end”…of this new deal?

Third, a lot of the relevant Chinese regulatory apparatus is at the local not federal level (in fact it should be more centrally done, even if not fully federalized in every case).  There are plenty of current local laws against air pollution which are simply not enforced, often because of corruption, and often that pollution is emanating from locally well-connected, job-creating state-owned enterprises.  Often the pollution comes from one locality and victimizes another, especially in the north of the country.   Those are not good local regulatory incentives and it will take a long time to correct them.  Right now for instance Beijing imports a lot of its pollution from nearby, poorer regions which simply wish to keep churning the stuff out.  The Chinese also do not have anything close to a consistently well-staffed environmental bureaucracy.

Fourth, if you look at the history of air pollution, countries clean up the most visible and also the most domestically dangerous problems first, and often decades before solving the tougher issues.  For China that highly visible, deadly pollutant would be Total Particulate Matter, which kills people in a rather direct way, and in large numbers, and is also relatively easy to take care of.  (Mexico for instance has been getting that one under control for some time now.)  The Chinese people (and government) are much more worried about TPM than about carbon emissions, which is seen as something foreigners complain about.  Yet TPM is still getting worse in China, and if it is (possibly) flat-lining this year that is only because of the economic slowdown, not because of better policy.

When will China cap carbon emissions?  “Fix TPM and get back to me in twenty years” is still probably an underestimate.  Don’t forget that by best estimates CO2 emissions were up last year in China by more than four percent.  How many wealthier countries have made real progress on carbon emissions?  Even Denmark has simply flattened them out, not pulled them back.

The Chinese really are making a big and genuine effort when it comes to renewables, it is just that such an effort is dwarfed by the problems mentioned above.

The media coverage I have seen of the U.S.-China emissions “deal” has not been exactly forthcoming in presenting these rather basic points.  It’s almost as if no one studies the history of air pollution anymore.

I understand why a lot of reporters want to “clutch at straws” — it’s good for both clicks and the conscience — but a dose of realism is required as well.  The announced deal is little more than a well-timed, well-orchestrated press release.

There are many good bits, here is one of them:

…I have a slightly different cut on the Snowden revelations. I think it shows the NSA more as the Keystone Cops than as Big Brother. What is striking to me is how little James Bond-like stuff was going on and how little they did with all this information. That’s why I think, in some ways, the NSA is more in this anti-technological zone where they don’t know what to do with the data they find. So they just hoover up all the data, all over the world. I think it was news to Obama that he was tapping into [German Chancellor Angela] Merkel’s cell phone.

One way to think about this is that if the NSA bureaucracy actually knew what they were doing, they would probably need way less information. What’s shocking about Snowden is how much information they had and how little they did with it.

Read the whole thing.

By Robert Evans,Luke T. Harrington,Nick Yarris,Calix Reneau  Published: November 12th, 2014  Approximately every convict on death row insists that it's all a big misunderstanding or a frame job, but for some of them, that shit is true: Since the death penalty was reinstated in 1976, almost 8,000 convicts have been sentenced to die in the United States. Of those, about 1,400 have actually been executed, while about 140 have been exonerated by DNA evidence after their trial. So, yeah, sometimes the system does just screw people over. Nobody knows that better than Nick Yarris, a man who was stuck on death row for 21 freaking years before finally being exonerated in 2003 thanks to the magic of science. That is just about the worst thing we've ever heard, so we immediately wanted him to tell us all about it: #6. It's Every Bit as Brutal as You Probably Think fergregory/iStock/Getty Images Picture this: Two muscular death row inmates dancing around each other like sweaty, tattooed ballerinas. They swing mallet-sized fists into each other's faces, turning nose cartilage into pudding and teeth into Tooth Fairy smoothies. Inmates cluster around, shouting out bets, while guards do precisely fuck-all to stop them. It might sound like the Gulag as depicted in a Cold War-era spy movie, but it was actually just one of the many cruelties Yarris says he encountered on death row in Pennsylvania: "One captain came up with the idea where they would just pick out a white kid and a black kid and let them fight in a cage for five minutes once a month, and that's how it was done. I had to fight like this on two different occasions. Even though I didn't want to do it, I knew that if I didn't, the guards would just take out their sticks and beat both of us senseless. So I fought." petrdlouhy/iStock/Getty Images Even though that's clearly a foreign-object penalty. The whole thing, Yarris says, was a misguided attempt to release racial tension in the yard. If it sounds too horrible/ridiculous to be true, note that in the California prison system, it was discovered that the guards were betting on these "gladiator fights" between inmates (there they'd do it with members of rival gangs). Yarris says there were other, entirely pointless cruelties as well, like guards plain ol' messing with you for their own amusement. One perennial favorite was the old "fake visit from mom." They'd start, he says, by telling an inmate he'd gotten a surprise visitor. Since that can be the bright spot of a convict's whole month, it made for easy bait: "They went to his cell, they got him all dressed, they told him in 15 minutes he should have himself cleaned up, and he did. He got all dressed up, and then he stood at the door with his belongings in a neat pile. They took his belongings, made him strip down, and then go ahead. And then they said, 'Oh, wait, it's the wrong Johnson, darn.' And they would laugh and laugh ..." Rich Legg/E+/Getty Images You don't even want to know what they got up to around Christmas. #5. Yes, Innocent People End Up There LOU OATES/iStock/Getty Images Yarris would eventually be exonerated for the crime that put him on death row. Eventually. First, he had two freaking decades in the slammer to sit around and wait for somebody to invent DNA testing. Yeah, he was inside longer than Andy Dufresne in The Shawshank Redemption. Columbia Pictures Unfortunately, by 1994 the movie had ruined the rock hammer trick for everybody. It would turn out that the only thing he was guilty of was being a drugged-up 19-year-old and arguing with a cop when he pulled him over. The shouting match turned into a scuffle before sanity cracked through the haze of his drug helmet: "I stopped at that point, yelling, 'OK!' and he put me in the car. He then sat in the car and calmly composed himself before calling dispatch and telling them he was now under attack, that there were shots fired and he needed assistance, because he was still under attack. And then he looked in the mirror at me with a smirk, like, 'Now you're gonna get it.'" Lisa F. Young/iStock/Getty Images He didn't even make actual gunshot sounds; he just went, "Pew! Pew!" Awaiting trial in solitary confinement for kidnapping and attempted murder of a peace officer, facing 20 to life on what he says were trumped-up charges, Yarris found a way to make a bad situation even worse. He picked up a newspaper and read about a recent unsolved murder and had a really terrible idea: "I sat there and began obsessing about having some way of using this information to barter for my way out of this desperate situation. And I went forward three days later and told the police that I knew something about this crime, like an idiot. Once they found out I was lying, they put me back in the maximum security prison." LOU OATES/iStock/Getty Images Inside or outside of a jail cell, "That's just crazy enough to work!" is usually the sign of needing a better game plan. And here was where karma came back to bite him. See, Yarris wasn't the only convict willing to throw a story to the cops in exchange for favors. Once his story about the murder fell through, the police started looking at Yarris as a suspect. And soon they had a witness against him: "They went and put a prisoner named Charles Catalina in the cell next to me, who said I confessed to him that my blood would be found on the victim. Because back then, all they had was serology. And serology would look at people's blood type from their biological materials only. And I am B-positive. I share the same blood as 15 percent of the population -- and with the murderer." luchschen/iStock/Getty Images Also dozens more inmates in that jail, cops on the force, and at least one Baldwin brother, but somehow that didn't work as a defense. And that sealed his fate -- he was actually acquitted of the charges that got him put in jail originally (the fight with the police officer) -- but now was on trial for this unrelated killing. One three-day murder trial later, after three hours of jury deliberation (over a relaxing meal at a local restaurant), 19-year-old Yarris was sentenced to death. But hey, the judge had promised the jury they'd all be home for the Fourth of July weekend. #4. You Pick Up Some Horrifying Skills Dale Yudelman Following his conviction, Yarris spent the next two decades essentially in solitary confinement. And it turns out that when you take an innocent man and lock him up with nothing but his own thoughts, things get a little ... dark. "I can kill you with a magazine and a pair of old underwear. And I don't have to leave my cell. I unroll the waistband and make a very good corded catapult. I take a magazine, take a metal staple out, take some of the threads from my underwear, wrap it around the staple until I've made a dart, and further it with the card from some of the interior advertisements in the magazine, until I have a three-and-a-half-inch really good penetrator. I dip that in a solution made of nicotine and human feces that I've been letting sit in a cup of urine that I've heated again and again over a period of days until I've extracted a very dangerous poison. "I then roll up the magazine until it's two inches in circumference and attach it to my bars with the rest of the underwear and I wait for you to walk by me. As you walk down the tier, I retract the catapult, insert the deadly dart, and shoot it right into your neck. The sepsis will take over in the next three days and kill you." grafvision/iStock/Getty Images They used to offer a knitting workshop, but they stopped trusting people with the needles. We're still not sure whether it would actually work, and it's not the kind of thing the MythBusters would try to replicate unless they decided they wanted to run off all of their advertisers. But we're willing to take his word on this one. On the lighter side, he and his fellow prisoners had plenty of time to develop a sort of "sock semaphore" communication system in which they'd cover their hands in tube socks and manually spell stuff across the yard (since talking was verboten), in addition to organizing a football betting pool that paid out in postage-paid envelopes. Yarris tells us he also passed the time by organizing a powdered-doughnut smuggling ring. You're probably hoping "powdered doughnut" is a euphemism for something cool, like cocaine or cream-filled donuts, but nope, we're just talking about regular old powdered donuts. Joe Raedle/Getty Images News/Getty Images Seeing the people have to go through Krispy Kreme DTs wasn't pretty. And then, one day, everything changed. Sort of. Ask yourself: If somebody in prison asks for a DNA test they know will get them off the look, how long do you think it would take to go from there to walking free through the front gates? A year? A couple of years? Well ... #3. If You're Wrongfully Accused, Good Luck Getting It Overturned ... Creatas/Creatas/Getty Images Try 15 years. Having grown up with 31 flavors of CSI on TV, most of us probably take DNA-based forensics for granted, so it's easy to forget it's a science that's been with us less than 30 years. When Yarris was convicted in 1983, the concept of DNA evidence didn't exist, much less the idea of being exonerated by it. And he may never have heard of it if he hadn't been lucky enough to get his hands on a local newspaper in 1988: "The Forensic Science Convention in February of 1988 was held in the Philadelphia Civic Center, and the headline had a double-helix on it and it said, 'New DNA science proves guilt' -- and then underneath it said, 'Also used to prove innocence.' I was shocked." Hemera Technologies/AbleStock.com "This almost blows today's Marmaduke out of the water." Seeing as he had never even been in the same room with his alleged victim, Yarris immediately realized the potential of DNA forensics to clear his name and requested it -- a ballsy move, seeing as no one in history had ever made that request before. "But when I asked for DNA testing, lo and behold, they threw away all of the autopsy materials." tomasworks/iStock/Getty Images Apparently in the criminal justice world, Keep-Away is played to win. Yarris studied the police records and court transcripts for more than a decade, trying to track down the bits of evidence that remained, since the cops and the court system weren't all that excited about helping him prove that they'd made a mistake. His bad luck, though, was the stuff conspiracy theories are made of. In one case, a cop removed some evidence from a lab without a warrant, only to leave it in a desk drawer until it rotted to the point of being unrecognizable. In another, evidence was shipped properly to the right lab but then dropped and contaminated once it got there. Ross Anania/Photodisc/Getty Images "Damn office lunch thief! That bag was clearly labeled 'Evidence'!" That sort of thing happened half a dozen times. You have to admire his pluck, but after 15 years of making no progress, you can hardly blame him for giving up. Finally, without a shred of hope left, Yarris demanded the only right he had left: "I wrote a letter and asked to be executed in 2002. Judge James Giles in the Federal Court of Philadelphia heard my appeal. I had one right left, and it's called the 'dead man's right.' I had the right to ask for my own execution at any time." #2. ... And Be Ready for the Long Haul Mike Watson Images/moodboard/Getty Judge Giles agreed to consider Yarris' request for execution, but only on the condition that the remaining DNA evidence -- which comprised about 3,000 cells -- be examined first (if 3,000 sounds like a lot, keep in mind that a square inch of human skin is about 9.5 million cells). mcfields/iStock/Getty Images So needle in a haystack ... except the haystack is the size of Montana. In an 11th-hour twist worthy of Hollywood, this last test consumed all the evidence, but it conclusively proved Yarris was innocent of all 21 charges. Huzzah for justice! Sort of. The prosecutor still had the right to retry him. Said prosecutor spent the better part of 90 days hemming and hawing before realizing that he didn't stand a chance in the face of, y'know, #SCIENCE. In the end, Yarris was spared the tedium of yet another trial by jury but was instead subjected to something we'll call "trial by bureaucracy." estt/iStock/Getty Images "Is it too late to request trial by combat instead?" Eight months. He sat in prison for another eight months while paperwork was shuffled back and forth, filled out incorrectly, tossed in the trash, re-filled out, corrected, uncorrected, and thrown out again, proving once more that the only thing more popular in America than executing prisoners is filling out reams and reams of paperwork. "Meanwhile, I was put into a mental derelict cell," Yarris says, "where they have the people who have broken down mentally, where they're not trusted with anything other than a paper cup -- and they made me wait out the last eight months in complete and total isolation. "Even on the last day, they got in one more 'joke.' They put me in the van at 7 a.m., drove me up to the gates of the prison, and let me through the first gate -- and then stopped me, saying, 'Oh my God, we made a mistake, the paperwork's not been done. You gotta go back.' And they literally put the van in reverse, and some of the guards talked in made-up reverse voices, and took me back into the prison and put me back in holding. They didn't actually release me until that afternoon." Darrin Klimek/Digital Vision/Getty Images "They don't usually let us make life hell for innocent people, and it seemed wasteful not to enjoy the opportunity." Wait, are we sure he was actually in a prison, and not on the set of some wacky sitcom about prison guards? Was one of the guards Zach Braff? #1. Prison Nearly Ruins Your Ability to Live on the Outside George Doyle/Stockbyte/Getty Images So, after 21 years in solitary confinement, what would you do? Travel the globe? Challenge Muhammad Ali to a grudge match? Binge-watch Real Housewives while stuffing your face with pork rinds? (We don't judge here.) How about spend seven months violently ill because your body is now literally allergic to freedom? That's what happened to Yarris. chesterf/iStock/Getty Images Just doing the bird-arms thing could put you in bed for most of a week. Keep in mind, prison had meant 21 years of eating garbage-food, breathing recirculated farts, and living in constant fear for his life and safety. And you might think that after that, the outside world would be a sudden relief. But the weird thing about the human body is that it adjusts to pretty much whatever environment you present it with -- spend 21 straight years in a combat zone, and you'll learn to hate the peace. Now that Yarris had become accustomed to the hazards of prison life, it was home-cooked meals, fresh air, and emotional honesty that he couldn't handle. It was like, in his words, he'd become allergic to the world: "Over those last dozen years, I did all my time in hermetically sealed, climate-controlled units. They had the air conditioner pumped on, they had the heat going, but there was no air. You can imagine how often they changed the filters, so for years I was literally breathing the cast-off skin cells and farts and bad breath of my fellow prisoners. There were no molecules of moisture, and therefore after a while, I became allergic to fresh air. My first seven months after my release were actually torture. I would get blinding headaches just from breathing fresh air, just from the sun on my face." belchonock/iStock/Getty Images And the guy at the joke shop gives you really weird looks when you tell him that all that fart spray is for medicinal reasons. So, just do the TV-and-pork-rinds thing, right? Nope: "And I was allergic to real food -- well, not so much allergic, but anything I ate just ran through my system. Everything I ate was so rich I couldn't eat anything other than bread for months without getting painfully sick." Stacey Newman/iStock/Getty Images Apparently that "taste of freedom" everyone talks about is really similar to bleached flour. Even the stuff about food and air, though, was easy-peasy compared with readjusting to basic human interaction: "Y'know what else I was allergic to? Human emotion. If you say something in prison, those words are taken to the nth degree. If you say, 'Man, I'll kill you,' there better be blood splatter. "See, anger and tears and happiness and joy, those are luxuries that you have as a human being that's allowed to interact with other human beings. I didn't know this world for so long that when people in my family and people around me had arguments, I would jump to arms waiting to go to war, or expect them to kill each other. But then two minutes later they're making each other a cup of coffee. And I'm thinking, 'Wow, how can you do that?'" gastonlacombe/iStock/Getty Images Eventually you realize that dying over which season of Perfect Strangers is the best is kind of silly. Still, even with all the physical and emotional misery, finally being declared innocent must have had its perks, right? Financial compensation from the state, a phone call from the governor, maybe a written apology? Nope! "Pennsylvania offers no compensation. Because I was exonerated, not paroled, I was not eligible for all of the normal assistance even a parolee gets. I had no halfway house, no healthcare, no job search assistance, no cash assistance, nothing. In fact, when I walked out of the gate of the prison, in all the chaos of the press attention one of the guards stole my prison ID and I couldn't even board the commercial airplane to fly home because I had no way to prove my identity." Ingram Publishing/Ingram Publishing/Getty Images "No, I don't have any ID, but if you'd just contact the state Department of Correcti- Why are you calling security?" And, obviously, most employers are loathe to hire a former inmate, even if said inmate was wrongfully imprisoned. So Yarris found employment in the only career that society lets pretty much anyone do: motivational speaking. "In England, over the last nine years, I had the great honor to give over 300 speaking appearances at Cambridge, Oxford, high schools; I spoke before the British Parliament; I spoke to the U.N. General Council standing next to Kofi Annan. The response from children and adults is the same: they're shocked by my story, but more importantly, inspired to live their own lives more fully." Image Source/Photodisc/Getty Images Also to spring for the best if they ever find themselves in need of a defense attorney. And while none of us here at Cracked would recommend getting into a drug-fueled fight with a cop or spending the best years of your life learning how to make deadly shit-dart-firing underwear catapults, going through such an experience will teach you a thing or two about life. According to Yarris: "You can go through worse shit than you ever imagined possible and still choose to be the best version of yourself. People ask me how I'm not angry or bitter, and I ask in reply, 'Why would I want to still be in that horrible prison of hate and bitterness of my own choosing?'" Nick Yarris now has a beautiful wife, Jesse, and a beautiful life that he's excited to live every single day. His enthusiasm for existence is infectious, even across a blurry Skype connection. Calix Lewis Reneau is working with Nick writing the feature film version of his story. You can read his secrets to surviving depression in his book Dancing with the Black Dog and his secrets to surviving religion in his book Why I Hate Being a Christian. Robert Evans has a friend trying to raise money for families affected by the violence in Ukraine. Luke T. Harrington writes a weekly column for Christ and Pop Culture and blogs over at The Western Branch of American Reform Presbylutheranism. Follow him on Twitter. For more insider perspectives, check out 5 Things I Learned as a Sex Slave in Modern America. And then check out 21 Terrifying Criminals Who Are Still on the Loose. Have a life experience to share with Cracked? Message us here.

In the 1970s the US faced a serious shock to the supply of oil but the shortage of oil was caused by price controls. Today, California is facing a serious water drought but the shortage of water is caused by price controls, subsidies and the lack of water markets. In an excellent column, The Risks of Cheap Water, Eduardo Porter writes:

Water is far too cheap across most American cities and towns. But what’s worse is the way the United States quenches the thirst of farmers, who account for 80 percent of the nation’s water consumption and for whom water costs virtually nothing….

Farmers in California’s Imperial Irrigation District pay $20 per acre-foot, less than a tenth of what it can cost in San Diego….This kind of arrangement helps explain why about half the 60 million acres of irrigated land in the United States use flood irrigation, just flooding the fields with water, which is about as wasteful a method as there is.

Tyler and I discuss water subsidies in Modern Principles:

Farmers use the subsidized water to transform desert into prime agricultural
land. But turning a California desert into cropland makes about as much sense
as building greenhouses in Alaska! America already has plenty of land on which
cotton can be grown cheaply. Spending billions of dollars to dam rivers and
transport water hundreds of miles to grow a crop that can be grown more cheaply
in Georgia is a waste of resources, a deadweight loss. The water used to grow California cotton, for example, has much higher value producing silicon chips in
San Jose or as drinking water in Los Angeles than it does as irrigation water.

The waste of subsidized water is compounded by over 100 years of rent-seeking and a resulting legal morass that makes trading water extremely difficult (see Aquanomics for a good analysis). A water trading system is slowly taking form in the American West but the political transaction costs are immense. Australia, however, faced similar difficulties but has managed to develop a good water trading system and Chile has long had a robust market in water. Subsidies to farmers are politically sustainable when everyone has as much water as they want but when faced with continued shortages and an ever-intrusive water Stasi consumers and industry may eventually demand a more rational, less wasteful system based on incentives, markets and prices.

So says one new paper on PubMed, by de Ridder D, Kroese F, Adriaanse M, Evers C.:

Three experimental studies examined the counterintuitive hypothesis that hunger improves strategic decision making, arguing that people in a hot state are better able to make favorable decisions involving uncertain outcomes. Studies 1 and 2 demonstrated that participants with more hunger or greater appetite made more advantageous choices in the Iowa Gambling Task compared to sated participants or participants with a smaller appetite. Study 3 revealed that hungry participants were better able to appreciate future big rewards in a delay discounting task; and that, in spite of their perception of increased rewarding value of both food and monetary objects, hungry participants were not more inclined to take risks to get the object of their desire. Together, these studies for the first time provide evidence that hot states improve decision making under uncertain conditions, challenging the conventional conception of the detrimental role of impulsivity in decision making.

The link is here, via Neuroskeptic.  Also from his Twitter feed we learn that rats may be Bayesians.

Via Samir Varma, here is a piece on whether Tylenol can ease the pain of decision-making, I say probably not.

Libby Nelson reports:

It’s common to hear that teachers should be paid better — more like doctors and lawyers. In 2009, the Equity Project, a charter school in New York decided to try it: they would pay all their teachers $125,000 per year with the possibility of an additional bonus.

The typical teacher in New York with five years’ experience makes between $64,000 and $76,000. The charter school, known as TEP, would pay much more. But in exchange, teachers, who are not unionized, would accept additional responsibilities, and the school would keep a close eye on their work.

Four years later, students at TEP score better on state tests than similar students elsewhere. The differences were particularly pronounced in math, according to a new study from Mathematica Policy Research. (The study was funded by the Gates Foundation.) After four years at the school, students had learned as much math as they would have in 5.6 years elsewhere…

The gains erased 78 percent of the achievement gap between Hispanic students and whites in the eighth grade.

…The $125,000 number was eye-catching, but it was just the start of the school’s approach to teaching. Teachers were also eligible for a bonus of between 7 to 12 percent of their salary. The teachers, who are not unionized, went through a rigorous selection process that included a daylong “audition” based on their teaching skills. The typical teacher already had six years of classroom experience before they were hired.

Teachers at TEP also get more time to collaborate and played a bigger role in school decision-making than teachers in other jobs. Teachers were paired up to observe each others’ lessons and provide feedback, collaboration that experts agree is important but happens too infrequently. During a six-week summer training, teachers also helped set school policy.

There is more here.  Addendum: Do read the comments, there are some excellent points in there.

It is from Japan:

The Yokohama District Court sentenced a former Japanese college employee on Monday to two years in prison for producing guns with a three-dimensional printer.

Yoshitomo Imura, 28, a former employee of the Shonan Institute of Technology, was found guilty of violating laws that strictly restrict the possession of guns and large knives and the production of weapons. The prosecution had demanded a 42-month prison term.

Imura’s actions were “vicious” because he made it easy to imitate his production method, presiding Judge Koji Inaba said, noting that Imura had released 3-D design data for his guns on the Internet.

The story is here, the pointer is from the excellent Mark Thorson.

Political discrimination is more prevalent than you would imagine, and its harmful effects haven’t been fully considered.

It comes down to this: Amazon has too much power, and it is abusing it.

Marvel showed off the first footage for its upcoming "Daredevil" show at New York Comic Con Friday to much enthusiasm.

The show will be streamed exclusively on Netflix in 2015.

During the panel, Marvel television president Jeph Loeb took fan questions under the condition the questions "pertain to 'Daredevil or someone that's up here on the stage thing.'

One fan asked lead actor Charlie Cox ("Boardwalk Empire") how it feels transitioning from an HBO show to a show like this on Netflix.

Cox said while reading the scripts for "Daredevil" there was one thing that stuck out in particular about how a Netflix series differs from regular TV.

"What we're going to be doing which is interesting is that because there isn't a week inbetween you don't have to ... you have to spend less time reminding audiences what happened," said Cox.

The actor added that if an episode ends on a cliffhanger it doesn't matter because on Netflix fans can just hit the play button and continue watching.

"Which is great because it means we get to spend more time on the real story," Cox told the crowd. "The other thing is when you watch a show you're all fans ... you remember what happened. So you're like 'Ah, we know this. Why do we have to be told this again?' So, I think, more than anything else, it's going to feel like a 13-hour movie."

Netflix's head of original content Cindy Holland has previously discussed the freedom that comes with doing a show on Netflix. Cox echoed that sentiment during the panel.

"One of the reasons I think that 'Daredevil' works so well on the Netflix platform is because as a character he [Daredevil] kind of does super slightly odd moves and so we're able to do that on Netflix," said Cox.

"You can make it a little bit darker and really give the fans who love that series ... what they want so much," he added.

After the panel, Netflix and Marvel released the first images from the series out next year. The first is above. Here's the other one of Cox in the first Daredevil suit below:

SEE ALSO: Why "The Walking Dead" casts so many actors from HBO's hit show "The Wire"

AND: PlayStation teases footage for its first original show and it looks awesome

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Some thoughts on a Slate quasi-critique of Christian missionary doctors.

Vasily Klyukin is the Monaco-based Russian co-owner of Sovcombank, a Russian commercial bank. He is also, if these sketches of his latest architecture project are anything to go by, a little insane.

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Ice cream is a dish best served cold, but liberating it from its carton is an exercise in bent spoons and throbbing wrists. Kickstarter's Michael Chou spent years striving for the perfect solution, and here it is: The Midnight Scoop, shaped to engage your most powerful arm muscles in the quest for deliciousness.

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For the first time, filmmakers in the forests of Borneo's Mount Kinabalu have documented the so-repulsive-it's-captivating behavior of a large, red, worm-guzzling predator. While it remains unclassified by science, the animal is known to the area's tribespeople, fittingly, as the "Giant Red Leech."

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Larry Ellison just increased his personal credit line to nearly $10 billion, according to documents filed with the SEC, as spotted by Bloomberg's Caleb Melby and Laura Marcinek.

That's like having a $10 billion credit card. With a "b."

Ellison pledged 250 million shares of Oracle's stock as collateral for his personal line of credit. Shares are trading at about $39 a share as of Friday, making that credit line worth about $9.7 billion. That compares to 215 million shares he pledged last year and 139 million in 2012, reports Bloomberg. Oracle's share price has grown since 2012, so he's not just trying to maintain a credit limit, he's increasing it.

And why not? As the fifth-richest man in the world, his own net worth has risen since 2012, too, from about $37 billion to more than $48 billion.

Ellison is not shy about spending his money. He collects mansions, yachts, aircraft, race cars, art. He bought most of the Hawaiian island of Lanai for a reported $300 million, and not just one, but two airlines to serve it. He could spend up to $100 million this year on his America's Cup sailing team alone.

The credit line represents only a fraction of his Oracle stake, too. He owns 1.16 billion shares of Oracle, about 26% of the company, according to forms filed to the SEC. The shares pledged as collateral are less than 20% of that.

So between Oracle, his vast real estate holdings, and his other business interests (NetSuite, for example), the banks know he's good for the $10 billion, even if they want collateral.

A bigger question is why borrow money when you're swimming in it? There are a couple of possibilities. First, interest rates are low and Oracle's stock has been on the rise. It could be cheaper for him to borrow money than to sell stock and lose out on that growth.

If he wants to buy something that costs a lot, a loan could be a faster way to get his hands on the money. As a major officer at Oracle, he has to be careful about how quickly he sells a lot of stock. He can't flood the market with shares.

Plus, most execs need to avoid accusations of insider trading. He learned that the hard way. In 2005, Ellison paid $100 million to charity to settle an insider trading lawsuit, Infoworld reported at the time. Today most execs schedule their trades in advance to avoid any perception of insider trading.

Third, he actually prefers to hold onto his Oracle stock. Although he's granted millions of shares every year in stock options, he rarely sells them, according to insider trading forms filed with the SEC.

So there's a lot of reasons for Ellison to keep a humongous credit line available.

But sometimes we still have to stop and marvel at how much money the world's richest people could spend in an instant, on a whim.

SEE ALSO: WHERE ARE THEY NOW? Look What Happened To The Cofounders Of Oracle

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How peanuts are cooked may help explain why they are allergenic.

BROADLY speaking, East Asians and Westerners suffer the same types of food allergies in about the same proportions. But there is an exception. Westerners are roughly twice as likely as East Asians to be allergic to peanuts. This is a puzzle--as is the question of why anyone is allergic to peanuts in the first place.

A paper in the Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology sheds light on both matters. The study it describes, conducted by Quentin Sattentau of Oxford University and his colleagues, found that mice are more likely to develop a peanut allergy in response to dry-roasted nuts than raw ones. Since dry roasting is more common in the West than in East Asia, that may explain the disparity of incidence. And the chemical changes induced by dry roasting help explain what causes peanut allergy in the first place.

Dr Sattentau and his team injected their mice with proteins derived from raw or dry-roasted peanuts, to prime the animals' immune systems. Then, they fed those animals raw or dry-roasted peanuts.

Mice that had been primed with proteins from the dry-roasted nuts exhibited more robust immune responses to both diets. Their levels of antibodies--specifically of a type called immunoglobulin E (IgE)--rose significantly. High levels of IgE are the hallmark of an allergic reaction. Though the mice primed with raw-peanut protein also produced lots of antibodies, far fewer were IgEs.

The difference, Dr Sattentau thinks, stems from the fact that dry roasting triggers what is known to chemists as the Maillard reaction, and to chefs as "browning". The Maillard reaction is one between sugars and proteins that forms new, complex molecules called advanced glycation end-products (AGEs). These create many of the pleasant aromas associated with cooked foods, but are also suspected of causing certain allergies--including, it would now appear, peanut allergy.

Indeed, Dr Sattentau showed that proteins derived from dry-roasted peanuts bind to dendritic cells, a type important to the immune response. Specifically, these proteins interact with cell receptor-molecules known to bind to AGEs. Dr Sattentau believes this binding is the molecular mechanism which triggers peanut allergy.

Don't go nuts

Why, even so, most people can eat peanuts without ill effect, is probably a quirk of genetics. The genes that regulate the immune system are the most variable in the human genome so, peanutwise, some people are probably just dealt an unlucky hand by the genetic shuffling that created their own genomes out of their parents'.

But for those people--and particularly for those among them for whom even proximity to peanuts risks anaphylactic shock--there is reason for hope. Results of an experiment published earlier this year by researchers at Cambridge University showed that exposing peanut-sensitive children to tiny amounts of the nuts can, over a period, slowly desensitise them. If this finding holds up it could mean that, though those who develop peanut allergy may never enjoy the things in the way that the rest of humanity does, at least effects of peanuts on them will be peanuts.

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Why the 2012 nominee keeps being floated for 2016.

Here's an interesting chart!  It's from a study of commute times in Brazil, but there are enough world cities to make it interesting.

Takeaways?

1.  Viva Marchetti's constant!  There are interesting academic debates around the edges, but the persistence of the 30-minute one-way commute, and especially the few cities with averages much less than that, echoes the observation of Marchetti and others that this seems to have been a tolerable daily travel time across both many centuries and many cultures.  Average commute times in cities don't seem to get much below 30 minutes because most people don't seem to value such short commutes.  But in highly dysfunctional cities they can get much longer.

2.   The organic "planning" of many Brazilian cities is producing better outcomes than the alleged orderliness of Chinese planning. 

3.  Despite the common whining about traffic in both places, the California metros are in good shape.  Los Angeles in particular sings the advantages of a decentralized urban structure that gives many people opportunities to live near their jobs, one that can be easily adapted to successful transit-walk-bike mobility.  

4.  Conversely, dominant and fantastically wealthy central cities (London, New York) are bad for commute times  because so few workers can afford to live close to them.

5.   Aestheticist master planning in the car era was really bad for commute times, because it tended to create building-in-park arragements that are just toxic to both transit and pedestrians.  Like many capital cities that were planned to symbolize rather than function, Brasilia excludes too many pieces of a necessary economy, spawning a vast and disorganized fringe where commute times are even longer than in more organically grown Brazilian cities.  

(Don't get me started about Australia's master-planned capital Canberra,where I've done a great deal of work over the years.  While I love Canberra for a lot of reasons, it took a lot of planning effort to get less than 400,000 people spread out over an area that's 37 km (23 miles) long, insuring long commute times for most of the population.)

Oh, and this chart demonstrates one other takeway:  If you write studies or consulting reports for a living, make sure that everything someone needs to know to understand a graphic is in the graphic, not in adjacent text.  As here, graphics quickly throw off the shackles of context to make their own journeys across the web, confusing or enlightening people depending on the wisdom of the designer.

 

 

Last week, Krugman contended that it can be done:

I’ve just been reading two new reports on the economics of fighting climate change: a big study by a blue-ribbon international group, the New Climate Economy Project, and a working paper from the International Monetary Fund. Both claim that strong measures to limit carbon emissions would have hardly any negative effect on economic growth, and might actually lead to faster growth. This may sound too good to be true, but it isn’t. These are serious, careful analyses.

He noted the “dramatic progress in renewable energy technology, with the costs of solar power, in particular, plunging, down by half just since 2010.” But Michael Levi points out that the “optimistic cost estimates have little to do with cheap solar.” Those estimates are possible only when you figure in the impacts of nuclear power, carbon capture technology, abundant bioenergy, and increased efficiency:

Krugman does an important service by rebutting those on both the right and the left who claim that serious climate action requires turning our economic system upside down. (It’s a good guess that this Wednesday column from Mark Bittman, which basically called for the end of capitalism in order to deal with climate change, provoked Krugman to write his latest.) But the sorts of policies you pursue if you think that serious climate action is mostly about wind and solar are fundamentally different from those you pursue if you believe otherwise. A central upshot is that if the modeling exercises that Krugman touts are correct, and countries pursue policies based on a belief in wind and solar, the actual costs of cutting emissions will be far higher than what Krugman claims. At the same time, if the modeling exercises Krugman highlights are wrong, he hasn’t given us particularly strong reason to believe that steep emissions cuts would be cheap.

McArdle also throws cold water in Krugman’s direction. She hesitates to draw too many conclusions from the New Climate Economy study he cites:

The details are a bit fuzzy so far (the report promises more in a forthcoming technical appendix). But most of the benefit seems to come from reducing respiratory diseases in the developing world and ending fossil-fuel subsidies, which are, no matter what you may have heard on the Internet, also concentrated in the developing world, not the U.S. tax code. …

This is not to say that the report is wrong. But many of the people who read it seem to have come away saying, “OK, great, it’s free, why can’t we do it?” Even if this is a free lunch over the long term, it is not a free lunch right now to the people who would need to make major changes in their lives. No matter how long you point to the equations, they will resist.

The Wall Street Journal has published an outstanding editorial on the success of Tesla, the boutique manufacturer of high-end electric automobiles, in extracting $1.3 billion in tax subsidies from Nevada for its new $5 billion "Gigafactory," to be built in Reno. Much of the editorial simply details the various provisions of the deal, which will leave crony capitalists everywhere salivating. It is worth noting that, as Kevin Bullis warned in MIT Technology Review last year, there are reasons to doubt the economic viability of Tesla's new battery factory, not least because sluggish sales for electric vehicles have led to a
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Something very unusual is happening in Los Angeles. Instead of fighting innovative new businesses in service to deep-pocketed incumbents, local taxi regulators are very tentatively moving towards deregulation. No, they’re not putting themselves out of business outright, but they’re trying to help traditional cab companies change how they do business. Though taxi service is only one small slice of L.A.’s sclerotic economy, the fact that local regulators are adjusting their tactics at all offers lessons for how we might revitalize urban America.The rise of ride-sharing companies like Uber, Lyft, and Sidecar has greatly improved the quality of local taxi service
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Fighting climate change could be cheaper and easier than almost anyone imagines if we wouldn’t give in to the despair.

By Kathy Benjamin  Published: September 13th, 2014  History is so full of sex, drugs, more sex, and then some sex that it is amazing they managed to find enough other information to teach us in school. If you believe your teachers, the Georgian era in England was a boring period full of polite country