I was looking at the profile of a friend’s friend on Facebook the other day. All of this person’s friends were Latinos – or, at least, had Hispanic names. I wondered if this enclave had an impact on this person’s politics, brand affinities, job prospects, priorities, etc.
Meanwhile, here’s Project Gaydar.
An interesting article about a lack of energy standards for consumer electronics, and its impact on our energy needs, neglects to ask the manufacturers of efficient appliances like refrigerators and washing machines how they have fared under regulations.
Now that they’re 40-70% more efficient, are they also more profitable per unit? The article doesn’t say (and, perhaps, the manufacturers would be reluctant to say, fearing greater intervention.) Here’s the sizzle but you’ll need to look elsewhere for the steak:
Worldwide, consumer electronics now represent 15 percent of household power demand, and that is expected to triple over the next two decades, according to the International Energy Agency, making it more difficult to tackle the greenhouse gas emissions responsible for global warming.
To satisfy the demand from gadgets will require building the equivalent of 560 coal-fired power plants, or 230 nuclear plants, according to the agency.
Most energy experts see only one solution: mandatory efficiency rules specifying how much power devices may use.
Appliances like refrigerators are covered by such rules in the United States. But efforts to cover consumer electronics like televisions and game consoles have been repeatedly derailed by manufacturers worried about the higher cost of meeting the standards. That has become a problem as the spread of such gadgets counters efficiency gains made in recent years in appliances.
In 1990, refrigerator efficiency standards went into effect in the United States. Today, new refrigerators are fancier than ever, but their power consumption has been slashed by about 45 percent since the standards took effect. Likewise, thanks in part to standards, the average power consumption of a new washer is nearly 70 percent lower than a new unit in 1990.
“Standards are one of the few ways to cheaply go after big chunks of energy savings,” said Chris Calwell, a founder and senior researcher at Ecos, a consulting firm that specializes in energy efficiency.
The Economist: “According to Luca Solca of Bernstein Research, 60% of the luxury market is now based on demand from ‘aspirational’ customers rather than from the wealthy elite.”
simen johan: paintings and sculptures
josh keyes: drawings and paintings
cai guo-qiang: sculptures
walton ford: paintings
A friend of mine tried to outsmart a fellow voter using Twitter. And I thought: that’s an interesting game.
Twitter is like previous word games. To play a word game, you have to follow some rules. In the case of poetry it’s: rhyming, staying on beat, and painting a picture. One of the few rules for playing Twitter is limiting yourself to 140 characters. This limitation, combined with a global arena filled with willing players, could make Twitter a fun way to improve lines.
The United States benefits from a market economy. Only, it’s not really a market economy, is it? Economist Nancy Folbre in the New York Times:
[A] large share of our economic output is now produced by large companies whose sales exceed the gross domestic product of many countries of the world. The vertically integrated supply chains of these large, often bureaucratic institutions seldom involve markets.
We value markets because of the freedom that they imply. But markets are not designed to maximize freedom, they’re designed to maximize profit. Freedom is a condition of markets but, as in all recipes, substitutions may be used.
It’s a trope on both the left and the right that we live in a world where economic powers exert great political power. Perhaps, inordinately so. But it might be interesting to expand the conversation in the other direction.
Perhaps our popular narratives could take a closer look at how companies are set up. There’s politics there, too. And there’s no greater change than change from within.
(via this MetaFilter post on employee ownership and the work of the economist Ronald Coase.)
1) Scott Simpson has rewritten classic book titles with an ear for today’s marketing lingo. Example: Veblen’s The Theory of the Leisure Class becomes Buying Out Loud: The Unbelievable Truth About What We Consume and What It Says About Us.
2) A YouTube user responds to a demonstration of an AI written to solve the video game Super Mario Bros. in real time: “So I undestand correctly: da computer will play video games for us, so we have more free time? Way cool.”
Both via Andy Baio.
Kathrine Gutierrez improves on what looks to be a dreadfully boring movie about Darwin by imagining it as a teen romance:
it should’ve been about him being a young, carefree, drinking-pub-hobbit-pre-ring lad type and then getting roped into a dreary trip to escape his sorrow at losing his girl to a more serious type, and then going to that one island and seeing some crazy huge turtles, and then coming back and giving an impressive speech that both wins him the girl and scientific accolades, maybe Queen Somebody played by a Dame could have a private audience with him and secretly fund his subversive science.
Why not. Real Genius (Val Kilmer, Brian Grazer), Weird Science (John Hughes) and Revenge of the Nerds ($40m on $8m) were all hits. Not to mention War Games.
This woman with a sign that turns “cap and trade” into “cap and traitor,” does she know what cap and trade is?
I’ve read several essays on cap and trade and I’m not really sure I understand how it would work. So I wonder if the average American – and, especially, this woman – knows how it would work?
Because the part about cap and trade that I do understand is that a federal agency would give private companies money to develop new technologies. It’s a reward system for good capitalists. In short, cap and trade is as American as tax breaks. Or the aerospace industry.
Knowing this makes me suspect that the woman holding the “unamerican cap and traitor” sign doesn’t really understand what cap and trade is. If she did, she might not think it’s unamerican. (Whether she would still endorse “whiteface” on a multi-racial president is another story.)
So maybe her sign is telling us – nay, imploring us: “Please write a catchy jingle about cap and trade that explains it to me.” A jingle every bit as effective as five-dollar footlong’s.
The Arlington Independent School District in Texas decided not to show President Obama’s address to students live yesterday because it reportedly didn’t want to interrupt its regularly scheduled lesson plans. However, the district has now decided to bus its students off-campus on [Monday] Sept. 21 to hear President Bush speak.
Well, sort of. In fact, the former president and first lady may not be the main attraction:
[T]he Arlington Independent School District… accepted an invitation to take 28 fifth grade classes to a Sept. 21 media event sponsored by a committee preparing for the 2011 Super Bowl to be played at Arlington’s new $1.15 billion Dallas Cowboys football stadium.
Along with the former president and first lady, the program will feature “legendary Dallas Cowboys,” along with business and community leaders from across North Texas. The event, being held to announce “the largest youth-education program in Super Bowl history,” will give invited students free lunches and a T-shirt. Planners were also working to “secure a performance by a well-known recording artist to cap the festivities in high style.”
Affordable health care for all, especially mental health care, would erode the financial base of at least one right wing organization:
James Dobson understands that behind the rights’ politics of resentment is a culture of personal crisis that he’s been catering to and cultivating since he became a public figure in the early 70s. And what Dobson does and where his strength comes from, is the correspondence in his organization Focus On the Family, based in Colorado Springs, which rakes in about $150 million every year. The correspondence department there handles so many letters and so many phone calls that they have their own zip code in Colorado Springs.
The letters basically are people pleading for advice on basic problems – from their child’s bedwetting problem to marital strife. And they will receive, in short order Dobson-approved advice. But then their person information is entered in a database and they’re bombarded with political mailings, telling them that the source of these problems and the source of societal decay is liberalism, is the homosexual agenda, feminism, etcetera.
From the wellspring of California conservatism:
Michael Duvall is a conservative Republican state representative from Orange County, California. While waiting for the start of a legislative hearing in July, the 54-year-old married father of two and family values champion began describing, for the benefit of a colleague seated next to him, his ongoing affairs with two different women. In very graphic detail.
For instance:
She wears little eye-patch underwear. So, the other day she came here with her underwear, Thursday. And so, we had made love Wednesday–a lot! And so she’ll, she’s all, ‘I am going up and down the stairs, and you’re dripping out of me!’ So messy!
…the woman who wears the “eye-patch underwear” is Heidi DeJong Barsuglia, a lobbyist for an energy company, Sempra Energy. Duvall is vice chair of the Committee on Utilities & Commerce.
Exactly.
A wonderfully detailed account of how the poster for an indie sci fi movie was designed.
The movie’s web site also has some novel behind-the-scenes demonstrations.
Raffi Khatchadourian in the New Yorker:
At the time of Steele’s deployment, the 101st Airborne’s base of operations in Iraq was in Tikrit, and its offices were divided into two wings: one was devoted to operational matters, such as raids to kill or capture insurgents; the other was focussed on civil and legal affairs. Someone had posted a sign reading “Carnivores” over the entrance to the operations wing, and a sign reading “Herbivores” over the other entrance. Though intended as satire, the signs reflected a deep division… It was not until the surge of 2007 that the work… was synthesized, under the command of General David Patraeus, into a strategic framework.”
Petraeus did away with a false dichotomy. We’re omnivores.
The great American prime-time soap opera is overdue for a comeback. I’d tune in for a reboot of Dynasty or Dallas featuring characters loosely based on the loud and brash Angelo Mozilo as well as the prim yet passionate Sheila Bair. As they tussle behind closed doors, the fate of one family becomes the fate of millions. Money, greed, power.
All of life a game, a hunt:
Panksepp has spent decades mapping the emotional systems of the brain he believes are shared by all mammals, and he says, “Seeking is the granddaddy of the systems.” It is the mammalian motivational engine that each day gets us out of the bed, or den, or hole to venture forth into the world. It’s why, as animal scientist Temple Grandin writes in Animals Make Us Human, experiments show that animals in captivity would prefer to have to search for their food than to have it delivered to them.
From Seeking by Emily Yoffe via MetaFilter.
on the brouhaha over the President of the United States addressing America’s public school children.
one of the few benefits of being a Cuban refugee is that for myself and, much more so, for my parents, totalitarianism isn’t a threat, it’s a reality. we’ve spent our lives coming to terms with dictatorship, doublespeak and the elimination of a public sphere (i.e., a society where there is no room for debate: you’re either with the party or you’re a traitor.)
i have no doubt that much of the right wing in the United States, as I’ve come to know it, shares key political values with the Castro regime. i am also confident that this minority would welcome any opportunity handed to it by external factors (geopolitics, economic turmoil, social instability) to usher in a novel and distinctly American totalitarian society, undoubtedly draped in rhetoric that contradicts its very goals. (for those who know Cuban politics, recall the joke about Castro the watermelon. also, to be clear: the right wing is often represented in and by the Republican Party but the two are not one and the same.)
in a free society, totalitarian movements create and rely upon a fantastical enemy in order to advocate for illiberal policies. nothing short circuits the gradual, conservative pace of a liberal democracy like the looming threat of an all-powerful and ruthless tyranny – a tyranny that calls for super-legal actions and unconstitutional measures.
during the last nine months, if not nine years, American politics have been increasingly influenced by just this sort of duplicitous rhetoric, the goal of which is to defend totalitarian values using the threat of totalitarianism as pretext. the right wing accuses its enemies of harboring intentions it cherishes and of exploiting tactics it would reserve for itself.
for example: the right wing is currently accusing the White House of using a Presidential address to school children as an occasion to advance the goals of socialism. never mind that the text of the address is Reaganism 101 – the importance of personal responsibility.
Because of the state’s size and statewide standards, Texas’s choice of school books is often adopted by state’s and school districts around the country. And the state is about to adopt a policy only to adopt textbooks which teach students to “identify significant conservative advocacy organizations and individuals, such as Newt Gingrich, Phyllis Schlafly, and the Moral Majority.”
in fact, the right wing has explicitly and effectively targeted public schools for decades through school board elections, legislation and lawsuits over curricula. when unable to take over public schools, they’ve pushed for home schooling and school vouchers to create state licensed or state funded alternatives that advance their political ideology.
the complaints over this President’s address are thus an expression of genuine fear: the fear of effective competition. this President has risen to the highest rank in American society not by being born into the right family, but by his wits and eloquence. the last thing an authoritarian movement can countenance is a charismatic president who embodies a liberal agenda of universal rights.
without so much as a single word, this President exposes the lie of prejudice: that a man can be judged by rumor and reputation rather than by his own words and deeds. and when this President does speak, the jig is up:
I’m fascinated by Italy because the gap between what it claims to be (liberal democracy, capitalist economy, Catholic society) and what it actually is (kleptocracy, crony capitalism, debauchery) is wide enough to fit… the Vatican.
But when readers complained that maybe a Roman Catholic newspaper had a moral duty to denounce divorce, consorting with teenage girls, naked poolside parties and being caught on tape telling a prostitute to wait for him in “Putin’s bed” while he showers, the newspaper’s editor began to weigh in.
“People have understood the unease, the mortification, the suffering that this arrogant neglect of sobriety has caused the Catholic Church,” the editor, Dino Boffo, wrote last month.
On Thursday, Mr. Boffo was out of a job.
Late last week, Il Giornale, the newspaper owned by Mr. Berlusconi’s brother, called Mr. Boffo “a homosexual known to the Italian secret services” and the culprit in a sexual harassment suit.
Essentially, the pillars of Italy are so fundamentally corrupt that its the most brazenly hypocritical who rule the roost. Amazing. Reformation, anyone?
On mike and maaike’s concept vehicle, the atnmbl.
As energy becomes more expensive, roads more congested and computers both more powerful and cheaper, the automobile reverts back to its predecessor: the train wagon.