November 15, 2008 at 6:15 pm · Filed under General
The first one is on the looming energy crisis, and here’s a nice passage:
The gap now evident between what is currently being built and what will be needed to keep pace with demand is set to widen sharply after 2010,” the report states. This means that our margin for error for maintaining sufficient production will get increasingly narrow. Any sort of problem that disrupts this growth in infrastructure—political, geological, financial, or anything else—is going to kick off another oil shock. Oil is not only going to keep getting more expensive, but it’s going to be prone to many more of the sort of radical price swings we’ve seen in the past year.
About time to have a floor on the price of gasoline, perhaps?
And then there was an article by the writer of Liar’s Poker:
Eisman knew subprime lenders could be scumbags. What he underestimated was the total unabashed complicity of the upper class of American capitalism. For instance, he knew that the big Wall Street investment banks took huge piles of loans that in and of themselves might be rated BBB, threw them into a trust, carved the trust into tranches, and wound up with 60 percent of the new total being rated AAA.
Happily, though, we witnessed huge turnout at the protest against CA’s voting in favor of Prop 8 (or H8 as many signs called it) today. Yes, we’ve been at Bauhaus for a solid 5 hours today. Without further ado, here were some favorite sign slogans:
Jesus had two dads
When do we get to vote on your marriage?
November 9, 2008 at 10:23 am · Filed under General
Mankiw’s memo to President-Elect Obama (so glad that’s been taken care of) is worth reading. Predictably he mentions encouraging free trade, reducing social security benefits, etc., but also reiterates that Obama has some talented advisors on his staff, and he should listen to them and steer away from some of the populist messages he used in the campaign.
Anyway, reading this reminded me of one of my other favorites from Mankiw, written in ‘06. Actually, come to think of it, I think I like it a lot more. We’re getting pretty close to New Years’, so here are some of his proposed resolutions:
- Promote Free Trade
- Get rid of farm subsidies
- Carbon Tax!!!
- Get rid of penny (nice)
I wish the Free Trade thing were less controversial than it is. The New Yorker has a nice section on Obama’s view of Free Trade when they covered him in 2004, which does a much better job articulating what I hope his personal view is than looking at his voting record (see Mankiw’s memo) or campaign rhetoric:
He mostly told the union men what they wanted to hear. Then he said, “There’s nobody in this room who doesn’t believe in free trade,” which provoked a small recoil. These men were ardent protectionists. A little later, he said, with conviction, “I want India and China to succeed”—a sentiment not much heard in the outsourcing-battered heartland. He went on, however, to criticize Washington and Wall Street for not looking after American workers.
Later, I asked him if he wasn’t waving a red flag in front of labor by talking about free trade. “Look, those guys are all wearing Nike shoes and buying Pioneer stereos,” he said. “They don’t want the borders closed. They just don’t want their communities destroyed.”
November 8, 2008 at 8:28 pm · Filed under General
This website has been making the rounds quite a bit recently, but I wanted to link to it here, not just because of the great way it gets the information across, but also for one of the maps’ sheer aesthetic beauty. I’m a big fan of all things anti-aliased, and I have to say, this map looks pretty nice:
courtesy http://www-personal.umich.edu/~mejn/election/2008/
Also worth looking at, especially if you are in the anti-electoral-college camp, are the maps that scale blue/red counties according to population:
Next entries »
