Archive for October, 2008
links for 2008-10-31
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The Democrats have held the presidency only 41% of that time, but under their rule the average annual return has been 15.26%, more than six percentage points higher than the 9.01% return under Republicans.
links for 2008-10-30
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When European colonialists realized that they had no choice but to hand over power to the indigenous citizens, they would often turn their attention to stripping the local treasury of its gold and grabbing valuable livestock
links for 2008-10-28
links for 2008-10-24
links for 2008-10-23
links for 2008-10-22
links for 2008-10-21
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Locations in Twin Peaks then and now
links for 2008-10-20
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international volunteer work through the web
links for 2008-10-18
Alternative computer science curriculum
The Design of Everyday Things, by Donald NormanThe Visual Display of Quantitative Information (and its two sister books), by Edward Tufte
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, by Robert Pirsig
Concrete Mathematics, by Graham, Knuth and Patashnik
Any book about the theory of architecture, maybe Learning from Las Vegas by Robert Venturi
links for 2008-10-14
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"The next few years are going to be very, very tough."
links for 2008-10-08
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average joe six pack indeed
Reagan, not Bush, is to blame for this mess
Or at least it all starts with the Reagan administration.
This is not Karl Rove’s fault. This is the result of nearly three decades of indoctrination in anti-social, anti-democratic and economically fallacious absurdities by almost every major instructional institution in the country including Harvard, and the PBS News Hour. Listening to the post crash coverage I heard words I had not found in the media for years, words like FDR, New Deal, government intervention and Keynes. Where had these phrases been all this time? Why was it only now respectable to mention Franklin Roosevelt again?
And why has the media and academia given so much encouragement to the myth of free markets while ignoring real things that have gotten worse since Reagan took office? Things like:
- Minimum wage as % of average wage
- Real income
- Real income bottom 60% of Americans
- Bottom 99% share of total income
- Income gap between rich and poor
- Workers pay as a percent of CEO pay
- Older families covered by pensions
- Workers covered by defined benefit pensions
- Annual personal savings rate of families
- Elder bankruptcies
- Housing foreclosures
- Child poverty rate
- Severe poverty rate
- Percent of Americans employed
- Pensions that include health care benefits
- Number of families without health insurance
- Number of public hospitals
- Number of corporations controlling most media
- Student loan debt
- Increase in wealth of wealthiest ten senators (up 13 times)
- Percent of workforce unionized
And don’t forget Reagan’s quiet declaration of martial law.
(via Robot Wisdom)
links for 2008-10-07
Dean Baker: Wall Street Follows the Path of the Steel Industry in Pittsburgh
The $700 billion bailout package slows Wall Streets day of reckoning. The Wall Street gang, with its huge campaign contributions and friends in high places, such as Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, is better positioned to get protection than steelworkers or textile workers. But, as we all know, you can’t just build walls around the country. [...]The resources tied up in Wall Street will find better uses in other areas. Specifically, the tens of thousands of highly educated workers who made huge salaries on Wall Street may find something more productive to do with their lives than shuffling complex derivative instruments. Some might become doctors, engineers or research scientists - areas where they could make important contributions to society.
And, if it is not plausible for many of the people who are currently losing their job to pursue these alternative career paths, certainly it will be possible for the people who are now in college or grad school in the hopes of pursuing a high-paying Wall Street career. By eliminating the Wall Street path, other relatively high-paying jobs will look much better.
In other words, we will be less likely to have doctors who think that they are making huge sacrifices by earning $200,000 a year. Without Wall Street as a basis of comparison, doctors’ salaries would look very good even to doctors.
(via Robot Wisdom)
links for 2008-10-06
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Glad to see the media not treating McCain's military record as unassailable
links for 2008-10-03
Don’t call it a debate
I’ve had little to say on politics lately, because others have said everything that needs to be said better than I can.
But I have a message for everyone out there who’s still calling tonight’s TV spectacle a “debate.” It’s not a debate. The McCain camp changed the rules so that Palin doesn’t actually have to debate Biden. It’s a dual interview. Get it right.
(For the record, I have no love for Biden either, as mentioned here. I agree with Balko’s assessment here. But give me Obama/Biden over McCain/Palin any day).
links for 2008-10-02
Palin’s Small-Town Snobbery: Why it’s time to bury the myth of rural virtue
Steve Chapman has a piece in Reason looking at the reverse-snobbery of rural dwellers, and provides some uncomfortable facts about small town life to suggest that small town folks are in no sense “morally superior” to their urban and suburban counterparts.
Towards the end he acknowledges that crime rates are higher in denser populations than in the country, and cites some reasons that may be.
I have another question though: what about unreported crime? How much assault and domestic abuse occurs in small towns that never gets reported? My personal experience of small town life is that bar fights occur frequently and without warning, and sometimes the people involved are neither thrown out or even cutoff at the bar. In my experience drinking in bars in big cities, bar fights are rare and when they occur the offending patrons are thrown out and sometimes the police are called.
And I have the feeling that in places where licensed counselors tell women that they should accept domestic abuse because the bible says so, there will be considerably fewer reports of violence than in an area dense with apartments with neighbors calling in domestic abuse calls whenever someone raises their voice.
