{"id":1406,"date":"2005-07-31T15:17:00","date_gmt":"2005-07-31T20:17:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/cheerfulchaotic.crazycrew.org\/?p=1406"},"modified":"2005-07-31T15:17:00","modified_gmt":"2005-07-31T20:17:00","slug":"news-roundup","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cheerfulchaotic.crazycrew.org\/?p=1406","title":{"rendered":"News roundup"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I have a few news links that I harvested while screwing around at work that seemed interesting:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Old News\n<ul>\n<li>A washington post <a href=\"http:\/\/www.washingtonpost.com\/wp-dyn\/content\/article\/2005\/07\/18\/AR2005071801327.html\">article<\/a> on the effectiveness of aid to the poor and other programs.<br \/>\n<!--more old nytimes content, subscription required--><\/p>\n<li>A new york times <a href=\"http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2005\/07\/17\/fashion\/sundaystyles\/17ZACH.html\">article<\/a> 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.\n<li>An article on the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2005\/07\/17\/automobiles\/17hybrid.html\">failures of hybrid cars<\/a>.  Look, hybrid cars are great, increased gas mileage at significantly increased car cost.  Except that&#8217;s increased mileage under stop&#038;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.\n<li>Another on a <a href=\"http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2005\/07\/17\/national\/17denver.html\">decline in housing prices<\/a> 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.  <\/ul>\n<li>Terrorism\n<ul>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2005\/07\/28\/opinion\/28watzman.html\">Shoot to kill<\/a> as the policy on possible terrorists.  Lets go through the problems on this shall we?\n<ol>\n<li>Innocents.  The &#8216;oops&#8217; factor.\n<li> The missed interrogation opportunity.  Dead men tell no tales\n<li>How it can quickly be made ineffective in the rare cases that it is targeted correctly:  Dead man switches.<\/ol>\n<p>  Game over, you lose.  <\/p>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2005\/07\/28\/opinion\/28sperry.html\">Profiling<\/a>.  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 &#8220;kamikaze&#8221; 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.  <\/ul>\n<li>Labor Market and European Interventions\n<ul>\n<li>A paul krugman <a href=\"http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2005\/07\/29\/opinion\/29krugman.html\">piece<\/a> on the value the french place on family v labor, compared to the US.  &#8220;real family values&#8221;.  How I wish I&#8217;d listened to professor Fong and started reading his stuff then.\n<li>An academic <a href=\"http:\/\/www.google.com\/url?sa=X&#038;oi=scholarr&#038;start=2&#038;num=3&#038;q=http:\/\/www.wiwiss.fu-berlin.de\/w3\/w3collie\/SocPolWS03\/Nickell.pdf\">paper<\/a> 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.<\/ul>\n<li>Semisonic&#8217;s drummer on <a href=\"http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2005\/07\/29\/opinion\/29slichter.html\">payola<\/a>.   For you musicians in the crowd.  I&#8217;m distinctly not a fan of payola.  I like the idea of variation among local music scenes.  It&#8217;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&#8217;t have to worry about that for quite some time, but I do hope that we are some day faced with that difficult question.\n<li>And finally, a bit on <a href=\"http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2005\/07\/29\/business\/29adco.html?8hpib\">anti-agricultural subsidy ads<\/a>.  I&#8217;m anti ag subsidy.  I&#8217;m generally anti-megacorp.  Or a significant revamping of the ag subsidy to favor small farmers, and cost us less $$.  <\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1406","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cheerfulchaotic.crazycrew.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1406","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cheerfulchaotic.crazycrew.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cheerfulchaotic.crazycrew.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cheerfulchaotic.crazycrew.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cheerfulchaotic.crazycrew.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1406"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/cheerfulchaotic.crazycrew.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1406\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cheerfulchaotic.crazycrew.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1406"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cheerfulchaotic.crazycrew.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1406"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cheerfulchaotic.crazycrew.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1406"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}