Tag Archives: early

Factlet of the Day: Mutual Funds Suck

by MonserrDalgarno Posted on March 15, 2015

Mother Jones

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Jeff Sommer summarizes the results of actively managed mutual funds over the past five years:

If all of the managers of the 2,862 funds hadn’t bothered to try to pick stocks at all — if they had merely flipped coins — they would, as a group, probably have produced better numbers.

I am not an investment advisor, so do whatever you want to do. But if you’re smart, you’ll invest in a few low-fee index funds and then just leave them alone. That is the path of wisdom.

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Factlet of the Day: Mutual Funds Suck

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Ides of March Catblogging – 15 March 2015

by DanieleMcGowen Posted on March 15, 2015

Mother Jones

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Et tu, Hopper? A few days ago I featured Hilbert draped over my sister, so I figured that turnabout is fair play: here’s Hopper draped over me to make up for the lack of normal Friday catblogging. Hopper is a Daddy’s girl, and will sit on no one’s lap but mine. Nor will she even do that very often. But once or twice a day she suddenly gets in the mood and plonks herself into the crook of my arm for an hour or so, purring loudly the whole time. Unlike the tubby Hilbert, Hopper weighs a svelte 11 pounds (up from nine when we first got her), so she’s no trouble at all to handle. A relaxing time is had by all.

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Ides of March Catblogging – 15 March 2015

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Friday Hummingbird Blogging – 13 March 2015

by ConcepcMacarthu Posted on March 13, 2015

Mother Jones

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My physical collapse this week prevented me from taking any new cat pictures, and today I have full day of workups in preparation for stage 2 of chemo. However, I did snap a new picture of our hummingbird babies yesterday. They seem to be growing nicely.

In the meantime, if you need a cat fix, my sister recommends this Daily Mail article about a human-cat translation device. Spoiler alert: it didn’t go well.

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Friday Hummingbird Blogging – 13 March 2015

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Friday Cat Blogging – 6 March 2015

by ZacAlfordq Posted on March 6, 2015

Mother Jones

Today’s catblogging is special. As usual, the lighting in our living room is pretty bad, but nonetheless, this is your first glimpse of the commenter known as Inkblot’s Aunt—aka my sister Karen. She’s been wonderful about helping us out as Marian and I both recover from our various medical problems, and on Wednesday she came over and stayed with me all evening when I was feeling especially bad. You can see her reward in the photo: Hilbert finally decided she was part of the family and plonked down in her arms for a nice hour-long snooze.

By the way, when I head off to stage 2 of my chemotherapy, Karen will be catsitting for several weeks. This means she’ll be responsible for using her iPad to capture catblogging photos each week. Depending on how I feel during stage 2, I’ll post them as I get them. In any case, be nice to her in comments. Sometime in the next month or two, catblogging will depend on her.

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Friday Cat Blogging – 6 March 2015

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Yet Another Health Update

by CorrineSharrow Posted on March 6, 2015

Mother Jones

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I promised another health update last night, so here it is. I know that some of you are interested in this, while others find it tedious, so I’ll put it all below the fold. Here’s the nickel summary: There’s a good chance I’m going to continue feeling lousy for a couple of weeks or so, but I should start to improve after that.

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Yet Another Health Update

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Even the Voting Problems Are Bigger in Texas

by TomasDennis Posted on March 5, 2015

Mother Jones

Battleground Texas, the effort by Obama vets to turn the nation’s biggest red state blue, got off to a rough start last fall when Democratic gubernatorial nominee Wendy Davis lost by 21 points. But now, as the organization looks to rebuild toward its long-term goal of mobilizing the state’s long-dormant Democratic base, its leaders are doing a public dissection of what went wrong—and what to do differently next time.

In a feature published by Texas Monthly in late February, Robert Draper broke down the organization’s financial struggles and turf wars, but also the difficulties Battleground faced with the field of battle of itself. The newcomers, Draper explained, had no idea just how hard it would be enroll new voters while complying with the state’s Byzantine rules:

For a group like Battleground to register Texans to vote, they themselves must be Texas residents, must be eligible to vote and—in a wrinkle that is unique to Texas—must be deputized by each county where they’re registering. In some of the state’s 254 counties, going through the requisite voter registration training course can be done online; in others, certification is offered only once a month, at the county courthouse during work hours. But as the Battleground team came to learn, the complications only begin once a deputy registrar is certified. If a Dallas County-certified volunteer registers someone who says they live in that county when in fact they live just across the border in Tarrant County, then the deputy registrar has committed a misdemeanor. If the volunteer turns in the completed registration forms more than five days after they’ve been collected, that’s also a misdemeanor.

“When we first heard about these laws,” recalled executive director Jenn Brown, “I said, ‘There’s no way this is the law—this is unbelievable.'”

The organization has released a 36-page report documenting the findings of its voter-protection program. There’s plenty to chew over, some of it anecdotal, some of it not. In Texas’ five largest counties—the urban, majority-minority areas heavily targeted by Democrats—provisional ballots were rejected more than four times as often as the national average. (Only one in four provisional votes was accepted.) That’s significant because a variety of factors on the most recent Election Day—like the debut of a voter ID requirement that affected as many as 600,000 eligible voters, and a breakdown of the state’s voter registration portal—made it much more likely that citizens who showed up at the polls had to fill out provisional ballots.

The report highlights another inconsistency in the state’s voter law—what happens when you move:

Unfortunately, although more than one in 10 Americans move annually, Texas law requires voters to completely re-register after moving between counties within the state. If a voter fails to do so, her ability to vote is dependent upon a seemingly irrelevant factor—whether that voter casts a ballot during Early Voting or on Election Day. If a voter has moved to a new county and the voter rolls have not been updated, she is only permitted to vote a so-called limited ballot for statewide offices, and can only do so during Early Voting or by mail. On Election Day, by contrast, that same voter cannot vote at all. We received more than a hundred reports involving voters who had recently moved within Texas, yet whose address had not been updated on the voter rolls.

This isn’t Battleground’s attempt to explain away that 21-point stomping, and there’s plenty of debate on that in the Texas Monthly piece. But it’s a revealing look at what’s on the organizers’ minds as they retool for 2016 and beyond.

Read the full report here:

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Even the Voting Problems Are Bigger in Texas

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All the best science experiments involve dynamite

by ColetteUKM Posted on February 19, 2015

All the best science experiments involve dynamite

By on 18 Feb 2015commentsShare

Picture a scientist. Good. Now make that scientist a geologist who studies tectonic plate movement. Are you picturing a total badass? Well, you should be, because from 20th century Arctic expeditions to modern day explosives, badassery abounds in the study of plate tectonics.

Let’s start with Alfred Wegener, the German scientist who first proposed the concept of continental drift way back at the start of the 20th century. Yesterday, the New York Times published this beautiful cartoon about Wegener’s work:

To recap: Wegener flew around in hot air balloons to study the atmosphere, hunted seals, fended off polar bears, traveled around on dogsleds, rigged up scientific equipment to box kites, and — perhaps most impressively — endured wicked backlash from the scientific community for what was then a radical new concept. (Lest you forget, this all happened in the early 1900s, which makes these expeditions about a thousand times more impressive.)

Okay. I promised you explosives.

While continental drift is now common knowledge, scientists still don’t entirely understand how the continents move, which is why some of them recently decided to detonate a bunch of dynamite 50 m below the ocean floor off the coast of New Zealand.

No, this was not the move of a bunch of mad scientists, but an attempt to create some harmless seismic waves. Seismic waves like those generated by earthquakes have long been a useful tool for geologists to explore the earth’s underbelly because they pass through (or bounce off of) different surfaces differently. By measuring how these waves travel, scientists can effectively see the different layers of whatever the waves are moving through.

The problem is, seismic waves from earthquakes are too big to get a very precise picture. Seismic waves generated with carefully placed explosives, on the other hand, provide a much more fine-grained view of whatever they’re traveling through.

And so, equipped with plenty of dynamite and hundreds of seismometers, this international crew of researchers continued the tradition of badassery in their field and blew up the ocean (they didn’t really, but it sounds cool when I say it like that). More importantly, the team came away with some valuable new information about how the plate under New Zealand moves around. Turns out, there’s a thin, lubricating layer of rock between the plate and the mantle that allows for some slippage. Scientists have suspected layers like this to exist under other plates, so this is further evidence that this may be a common feature of tectonic plates around the world.

Our big takeaway? Scientists should probably use dynamite more often.

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Geophysicists blast their way to the bottom of tectonic plates

, Physics World.

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All the best science experiments involve dynamite

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Gospel Music’s Soul Stirrers Will Delight Even Nonbelievers

by HelenaMilerum Posted on February 2, 2015

Mother Jones

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The Soul Stirrers
Joy in My Soul: The Complete SAR Records Recordings
ABKCO

From the late ’50s until his death in 1964, the great R&B singer Sam Cooke championed other important artists on his SAR Records label. Having launched his own career in the early ’50s as a member of gospel music institution the Soul Stirrers, it was only natural that Cooke produce and write for the group when he got the chance. Featuring 33 tracks (including four previously unreleased songs) on two discs, Joy in My Soul will delight believers and nonbelievers alike. The fiery lead vocals and rousing harmonies crackle with uplifting vitality, offering a template for soul music. There’s no telling how popular the Soul Stirrers could have become with secular audiences if they’d been willing leave the church.

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Gospel Music’s Soul Stirrers Will Delight Even Nonbelievers

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Our Obsession With Mass Incarceration May Finally Be Ebbing

by NevaRIUIood Posted on January 2, 2015

Mother Jones

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Atrios has a New Year’s wish:

My hope is that the tide continues to turn (it has, I think, if slowly) against the mass incarceration project this country has been engaged in for decades. It isn’t that I wasn’t aware of it as a problem before, it’s that I now have a much greater sense of how it’s the nexus of a whole system of racist horror. Let’s fix it.

This is a very reasonable wish. It’s important to realize that the huge boom in prison construction and mandatory sentencing laws of the 70s and 80s was a response to a real thing: the massive increase in violent crime during the 60s and 70s. It’s almost a certainty that we overreacted to that rise in crime and incarcerated too many people in response. Still, it wasn’t just an irrational panic. Violent crime really did skyrocket during that era, and fear of victimization was both palpable and legitimate. That made a big increase in the prison population inevitable.

Needless to say, that’s changed. Violent crime has plummeted by an astonishing amount in the past two decades. It takes a long time for public perception to catch up to changes like this, but it does catch up eventually—and as the fear of crime eases, the lock-em-up mentality of 40 years ago has started to ease along with it. In addition, there are simple demographics at work: if there’s less crime and fewer arrests, there are simply fewer criminals to lock up. Long sentences from an earlier era have kept prison populations high despite this, but eventually even that has begun to fade away.

In other words, in the same way that mass incarceration surged because of a real thing, it’s finally starting to ebb because of a real thing: the actual, concrete decline in violent crime that started in the early 90s and which appears to be permanent. America is simply a safer place than it used to be, and looks set to stay that way.

Our prison population is still gigantic by any measure, and there are vast inequities in who gets locked up and how they get treated. But for those of us who’d like to see this problem addressed, at least there’s a decent tailwind helping us out. It’s not crazy to think that the next decade could see some real changes in the American attitude toward the mass incarceration society we’ve constructed.

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Our Obsession With Mass Incarceration May Finally Be Ebbing

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Why Did the Enclosed Mall Die?

by KatlynSoutter Posted on January 2, 2015

Mother Jones

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Alex Tabarrok links today to a BBC piece on the death of the American shopping mall. But it’s really about the death of the enclosed American shopping mall. So why did enclosed malls go the way of the dodo starting in the early 90s? Here’s the author’s crack at an explanation:

When the 35-year-old Cloverleaf Mall in Chesterfield, Virginia, closed in 2007, the Chesterfield Observer noted that while it had been a popular hangout for families in the 1970s and ’80s, “That all changed in the 1990s. Cloverleaf’s best customers, women, began staying away from the mall, fearful of the youth who were beginning to congregate there. People said a former Cloverleaf manager started seeing kids with huge baggy pants and chains hanging off their belts, and people were intimidated, and they would say there were gangs.”

OK. How about Amy Merrick in the New Yorker earlier this year? What does she think?

As any cubicle dweller knows, people like natural light and fresh air and, when deprived of them, feel oppressed. So are people alienated by those older malls, with their raw concrete, brutalist architecture and fretful, defensive air? Developers have a shorthand for this style: the “classic graybox.” In his talk, Rick Caruso flashed grim photos of their façades. He lingered on a picture of a deserted food court; you could practically smell the stale grease. “Does this look like the future to you?” he asked.

Here’s Neil Howe in USA Today:

There is a generational story behind what’s happening to shopping malls. And if you want to know how it will end, you have to pay attention to each generation’s role….What most impressed the G.I.s (and the Silent Generation who succeeded them) about malls was their enormous efficiency….Then came suburban Boomers, who grew up with these newly minted malls as kids. As they matured, many Boomers soured on what they regarded as the soulless and artificial consumerism of malls and began to champion what business author Joseph Pine calls the “experience economy” — turning stores and restaurants from mere retail outlets into places that mean something (think Rainforest Cafe or Build-a-Bear Workshop or L.L. Bean). That thinking not only inspired more stores to include a “tourism” component, but it also drove the surging popularity of lifestyle centers in the early 1990s.

….But Xers soon changed the mall scene. This strapped-for-cash generation helped popularize “category killers” and was the first to adopt online shopping. Millennial teens who arrived in the late 1990s began to show less interest in malls in part because their parents deemed malls too dangerous.

The lack of reasonable explanations suggests that nobody really knows the answer. It certainly remains a mystery to me. There’s no question that shopping spaces of all kinds have been hurt in recent years by the rise of online retail, and that mall development in particular was hurt by the Great Recession. But the switch away from enclosed malls began in the 90s, and it wasn’t because people were tired of shopping. Nor was it because suburbs started to die. It was because enclosed malls were replaced by outdoor “power centers” and “lifestyle centers.”

But why? I still don’t know. Is it due to the decline of traditional department stores, which served as anchors for enclosed malls? Are stores like Target and Best Buy simply unsuited to be anchors for enclosed malls? Is it cheaper to build outdoor malls? Was it really because people started to see malls as dangerous, as two of the stories above imply?

And how does this play out in less temperate climes than Southern California? No new enclosed mall has been built near me since (I think) 1987. That’s not too big a deal, since even in winter it’s no chore to shop at an outdoor shopping center. But what about in the suburbs of Chicago? Or Detroit? Or Kansas City? Do people really want to shop at outdoor lifestyle malls when it’s ten below zero? Do enclosed malls make a sudden comeback when the weather is bone-chillingly cold and then die again in the spring? Or what?

Perhaps this is just one of those mysteries: consumer tastes changed in the early 90s, and they changed because that’s what consumer tastes do. Radio Shack used to be pretty popular too.

Still, it’s an interesting mystery. I wish there were a good explanation, not just a few obvious guesses that amount to little more than a shrug of the shoulders. Why did enclosed malls die? Somebody needs to come up with a definitive answer.

POSTSCRIPT: One thing I should note is that although few (no?) new enclosed malls are being built, older malls that have been shut down don’t all turn into the infamous dead malls that have gotten so much attention lately. A fair number of them are renovated and reopened. I’m not sure what, if anything, that means. Just thought I’d mention it.

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Why Did the Enclosed Mall Die?

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