I have a few news links that I harvested while screwing around at work that seemed interesting:
- Old News
- A washington post article on the effectiveness of aid to the poor and other programs.
- A new york times article on Zach, the gay teen put in reparative therapy, who has attracted so much attention. Much like Matthew Shepard and the recently executed Iranian teens, Zach has been selected as the media darling representative of a gay issue. Not unlike the pretty white chick gone missing phenomenon, the single case is overstudied, while the broader picture is ignored. No context provided. Like, in the reparative therapy case, how big an industry is this, how does that square with estimates of gay teens, how effective is it, how much do they charge, yadda, yadda.
- An article on the failures of hybrid cars. Look, hybrid cars are great, increased gas mileage at significantly increased car cost. Except that’s increased mileage under stop&go circumstances. Good for city driving, and for bumper to bumper highway traffic, but better can be accomplished with redesigning cars. Now a days, the hybrids are being used to increase acceleration and power without major gains in fuel economy. If you want to conserve something or limit its consumption, raise the price or artificial supply limits. No proxy measure will cut it.
- Another on a decline in housing prices in Denver. A blip or a small trickle of an eventual flood? Prediction for the rest of the country? Hard to say of course. But concerning.
- A washington post article on the effectiveness of aid to the poor and other programs.
- Terrorism
- Shoot to kill as the policy on possible terrorists. Lets go through the problems on this shall we?
- Innocents. The ‘oops’ factor.
- The missed interrogation opportunity. Dead men tell no tales
- How it can quickly be made ineffective in the rare cases that it is targeted correctly: Dead man switches.
Game over, you lose.
- Profiling. Again with the unnoticed opportunity cost. Sure, known religious kamikaze practices, check it out, respectfully, honestly, without making a big noise about it. But, as the name “kamikaze” suggests, suicide bombings are not the sole province of young male muslims (how do you plan on identifying religion, btw?). Strict racial profiling is much more dubious.
- Shoot to kill as the policy on possible terrorists. Lets go through the problems on this shall we?
- Labor Market and European Interventions
- A paul krugman piece on the value the french place on family v labor, compared to the US. “real family values”. How I wish I’d listened to professor Fong and started reading his stuff then.
- An academic paper on unemployment v entitlements, and labor force to working age population ratios v entitlements. Conclusion: unemployment increases with: unemployment benefits substituting for lost income that are both lengthy and high, the combination of high union membership and failure of unions to coordinate, high taxes on labor especially combined with high minimum wages, and poor educational standards for the lower end of the labor market. Meanwhile, well coordinated unions, short term or significantly reduced unemployment benefits, and high labor taxes without high minimum wages do not increase unemployment.
- Semisonic’s drummer on payola. For you musicians in the crowd. I’m distinctly not a fan of payola. I like the idea of variation among local music scenes. It’s an entrenched system, and it does beg the question of how the music business would work without giant megacorps behind it. I suspect we won’t have to worry about that for quite some time, but I do hope that we are some day faced with that difficult question.
- And finally, a bit on anti-agricultural subsidy ads. I’m anti ag subsidy. I’m generally anti-megacorp. Or a significant revamping of the ag subsidy to favor small farmers, and cost us less $$.
On the acadmic paper: the abstract is written using terribly casual language. I disapprove.
The supplemental nutrition program for women, infants and children known as WIC helps about 8 million pregnant and postpartum women and their children under 5. One of its effects has been to reduce the incidence of low birth weight among infants. Think of WIC as one of our most important pro-life programs.
Ayeeee, we need to hear far more rhetoric like that from the fundies. Then I could actually respect their arguments.
re: “shoot to kill”
my thoughts exactly.
It seems like a policy thats intended for people who might actually have live bombs on them.
I believe it would be insightful to look at what the Israeli’s and the Russian’s do with such people. If each of these countries has policies they prefer over shoot-to-kill then that says something.
The Russians got a lot of flack for that “sleeping gas” incident when the Chechnyan terrorists took the Moscow ballet. But it would surprise me very much if they hand’t at least thought about snipers, and then ruled it out as a possibility, before going the gas route.
I believe I’ve seen several photos of Israeli bomb-disposal robots pinning suspected Palestinian bombers to the ground while the bomb squad defuses whatever is strapped to the bomber.
I should try submitting that point (phrased about a million times more articulately) as a letter to the editor. Showing up in the nytimes would so stroke my ego, even if only as a schmuck who wants to mouth off. =)
Whoa, on the author of the “profiling” editorial
Paul Sperry, a Hoover Institution media fellow, is the author of “Infiltration: How Muslim Spies and Subversives Have Penetrated Washington.”
Again. Whoa.
Yeah, you like that quality new york times screening process? No nut jobs here, nosirreebob.
Reading the article on payola only reinforces the idea, to me, that one of the biggest problems with commercial radio at this point is that the DJs don’t actually get to decide what music they play. It is all decided by the program director these days.
I’ve gotten to know a few DJs over time, from a few different genres, though I’ll admit that most of them are not from “mainstream” genres, and none of them have ever been commercial radio DJs. Nevertheless, I’ve noticed that with all of them, they tend to be DJs because they love listening to music. And they love finding new bands to listen to. They play their old favorites quite a bit, but every DJ wants to be the one that introduces the new cool band to listen to, and wants to share the lesser known bands they love with their audience.
When I first got out here, there were one or two radio stations that at least _felt_ like they let their DJs decide what music to play (even though they probably didn’t give total free rein). At that time, my preferred radio station played a very wide variety of songs, within an overall genre, but they kept their definition of the genre wide enough to encompass music from the 60’s through to current bands. They also didn’t censor their music (apparently swear words in music _do_ count as “Free Speech”, and as such, while the DJs are subject to the obscenity regulations of the FCC, the songs, technically, aren’t). Then the station got bought by Clear Channel. Before long, they had a new program director, and suddenly the music was censored, and the variety plummeted to a much smaller pool of songs that got played. They started losing all their best DJs. Then they even lost the replacements. Finally, the ratings had dropped so far that Clear Channel suddenly changed the format of the station to a Spanish language channel, and changed the callsign. In four years, it went from a 30+ year long running station, broadcasting on three frequencies around the Bay Area, with some of the highest ratings to getting shut down.
This is why I think radio stations would be better off letting their DJs pick the music to play. I think it would lead to greater variety, and easier time for new bands to get played, and better radio overall. Yeah, I could be wrong, but I’d at least like to be proven so first. Considering I’ve basically stopped listening to commercial radio already, I don’t see how it could do more harm 😉
This time, I’m posting in regards to the profiling article.
I find it odd that the author can justify specifically searching tons of innocent Muslim men to try to find the very rare terrorist, but thinks that searching people who are actually _behaving_ like terrorists is silly, because they’ll end up searching a lot of people who actually aren’t terrorists…
Specifically, I’m talking about the portion of the article where he ridicules the policy of searching people who are wearing baggy coats who are sweating and/or fidgeting with bags.
The “hit rate” for behavior profiling tends to be VASTLY higher than the hit rate for racial profiling. Especially since you’ll find a lot fewer people who are behaving in suspicious manners who are innocent than you will find Muslim men who are innocent. Nevermind the fact that if you rely on racial profiling, you’ll end up getting hit by a terrorist who doesn’t match your racial profile (see: Oklahoma City Bombing of 1995).
Note the title of the book the author wrote. I think it’s safe to regard him as a tinfoil hat man.
True enough, but the sentiment of the author is one I see all too frequently (see: my LJ post from today), and, as a security specialist in my field who also keeps an ear to the ground on general security principles, I feel it necessary to point out the flaws in the argument, whenever I can (even if it is to people who already agree with me… I just feel compelled to post, my apologies 😉 ).