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Did the Housing Bubble Also Spur a Microwave Oven Bubble?

by BeatrizMackenzi Posted on March 26, 2014

Mother Jones

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A few days ago, when I read this piece in Quartz about the decline in microwave oven sales, I was suspicious. “A shift in eating habits—which favors freshness and quality over speed and convenience—has left a growing number of microwaves dormant on kitchen counters,” said the author.

Hmmm. Maybe. But although there might well have been a trend toward freshness and quality among the kind of people who read Quartz, I’m less convinced that this is true of the nation at large. The frozen pizza section of my supermarket sure doesn’t seem to have shrunk lately. Still, I didn’t really have a good explanation for the decline in microwave sales. But Megan McArdle does:

So people are shifting toward built-in microwaves — and sales of microwaves peaked in 2006. This doesn’t suggest a trend toward fresher food to me; it suggests that the housing bubble produced a surge in demand for microwaves, as contractors and homebuilders installed them above half the ovens in the U.S. When the housing bubble popped, demand sank precipitously. Because people replace built-in appliances much less often than they do the ones on their countertop, it’s taking a long time to recover.

I don’t know if this is the explanation either, but it sounds fairly plausible as at least part of the explanation. Generally speaking, I’d add that microwave technology hasn’t improved or changed a lot in the past decade, so most of us don’t have much incentive to buy a new one as long as the old one is still working. After I read the Quartz piece, for example, I tried to think of what I use our microwave for, and I only came up with four things: melting butter, pre-cooking potatoes, heating pasta sauce, and reheating leftovers.1 I remember that a while ago Marian and I were thinking about getting a new one for some reason (stuck door latch?), but ended up not bothering. It just wasn’t ever urgent enough to get us truly motivated to shop around.

1Microwave popcorn is an invention of Satan. It will never be found on my shelves.

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Did the Housing Bubble Also Spur a Microwave Oven Bubble?

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Twitter Wants Everyone to Reminisce About Their First Tweet

by ZacAlfordq Posted on March 20, 2014

Mother Jones

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Everyone is fascinated by Twitter’s new FirstTweet tool, and who am I to buck the trend? In fact, I was genuinely curious to find out what my first tweet was. It turned out to be this:

Huh. I guess Kirkuk must have been in the news on that day. So what’s the answer? What did happen to Kirkuk? Nothing much, apparently. It’s still controlled by the Kurds; it hasn’t seceded from Iraq; but it remains fairly autonomous from the central government. The most recent news, however, has been bad: two days ago a suicide bomber killed 30 people, and sabotage has shut down an oil pipeline into Turkey. In other words, it looks like Option B turned out to be the correct one.

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Twitter Wants Everyone to Reminisce About Their First Tweet

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Here’s the Only MH370 Theory That Actually Makes Sense

by LucySpurlock Posted on March 20, 2014

Mother Jones

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We need more traffic here at Mother Jones, and that can mean only one thing: we need to pump up our coverage of the missing Malaysian airliner. Let’s take stock of what we know:

Investigators have discovered that data was erased from the flight simulator belonging to one of the pilots.
The plane veered off course in response to a course change programmed into the flight management system.
The transponder was turned off.
The ACARS tracking suggests the plane flew in the general direction of India. However, no ground-based radar detected the plane, which means the ACARS signals were probably spoofed.
Debris has been discovered in digitized satellite imagery, but an actual physical search has failed to find anything.

This all suggests one thing: a computer genius. A very rich computer genius. One who knows how to cover his tracks and is accustomed to avoiding discovery.

This whole affair was engineered by Satoshi Nakamoto. I will be publishing a detailed version of this theory in Newsweek shortly.

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Here’s the Only MH370 Theory That Actually Makes Sense

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Playing Political Games With Surgeon Generals Is Nothing New

by KaliWallwork Posted on March 18, 2014

Mother Jones

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Vivek Murthy, President Obama’s nominee as surgeon general, supports regulations on gun use. This has earned him fierce opposition from the NRA and seems likely to sink his nomination entirely. Paul Waldman comments:

In the calculations over whether Murthy could get confirmed, it’s notable that everyone assumes, almost certainly correctly, that every Republican in the Senate will, of course, vote against the nomination. George W. Bush appointed only one surgeon general, Richard Carmona. He was confirmed by a vote of 98 to 0. But those days are gone — what do you expect Republicans to do, examine a nominee’s qualifications and vote to confirm if he’d obviously do a fine job? Please. The default used to be that a president will get the nominees he chooses unless there’s something really egregious in their past or what they’re likely to do if confirmed, but when it comes to this president and this Congress, that has been turned upside down. Now the Republican position is that every nominee should be rejected, unless there’s some kind of a deal that allows them to get something in exchange.

I’ve made similar kinds of comments in the past, so I can’t really object to seeing them repeated here. Still, it’s worth remembering a little history. First: although President Obama’s initial choice for surgeon general, Regina Benjamin, ran into some Republican opposition when her nomination came to the floor, she was confirmed unanimously within a few days, just like Richard Carmona, Bush’s first surgeon general. Second: after Carmona’s term expired, Bush’s next nominee for surgeon general, James Holsinger, ran into a buzzsaw of Democratic opposition based on a paper he had written in 1991 which argued that “homosexuality isn’t natural or healthy.” When the Bush White House suggested it might install Holsinger via a recess appointment, Harry Reid kept the Senate in pro forma sessions to prevent it. Eventually Holsinger’s nomination died.

There was more going on with Holsinger, including his refusal to answer written questions, but basically his nomination was killed because of his anti-gay views. He insisted that his 1991 paper no longer represented his current views, but it didn’t matter.

So do Murthy’s problems demonstrate the strength of the NRA? Sure. But Holsinger’s problems demonstrated the strength of liberal LGBT views among Democrats. There’s nothing very new going on here.

In fact, I half wonder if opposition to Murthy is partly payback for Democrats killing Holsinger’s nomination. I’d be curious to hear about this from reporters who cover the conservative movement. Down in the bowels of email lists and Sarah Palin fan clubs, do tea partiers still hold a grudge over Holsinger’s defeat? Or has that long since been forgotten?

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Playing Political Games With Surgeon Generals Is Nothing New

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Obamacare is Probably Safe, But It’s Not a Slam Dunk

by Prokippxv Posted on March 17, 2014

Mother Jones

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I was chatting with a friend this weekend about what Republicans will do if they manage to win total control of the government in 2016. Will they abolish the filibuster and repeal Obamacare? I think the odds are low. At a guess, I’d put the chances of winning total control at p=20%, the conditional odds of abolishing the filibuster at p=50%, and the conditional odds of then repealing Obamacare at p=50%. (Why so low for repeal? Because by 2017 there are going to be a lot of people benefiting from parts of Obamacare; at least a few Republicans will recognize that you really can’t repeal just the unpopular bits; and the health care industry will have spent billions of dollars committing itself to operating within the framework of the law.) So that’s about a 5% chance that Obamacare dies in 2017. Not zero, but not very significant either.

But what about 2015? What if Republicans win the Senate later this year? Paul Waldman surveys the landscape and notes that House and Senate Republicans are offering very different campaign visions of what to do about Obamacare:

See the difference? The senators accept that the ACA is law and are thinking about how they’d like to change it. The House members are coming up with another way to make a futile, symbolic shaking of their fists in the general direction of the White House. And this may offer a clue to how legislating would proceed in a Republican Congress. The House, still dominated by extremely conservative Republicans for whom any hint of compromise is considered the highest treason, could continue to pass one doomed bill after another, while the Senate tries to write bills that have at least some chance of ever becoming law.

And that would be just fine with Barack Obama. If he’s faced with both houses controlled by the opposition, there’s nothing he’d rather see than them fighting with each other and passing only unrealistic bills that he can veto without worrying about any backlash from the public.

Allow me to be a bit more pessimistic. Even if they lose the Senate, Democrats will still have the filibuster available to them, and they’ll use it. And as Waldman says, Obama can veto anything he doesn’t like.

But there are two wild cards here. First, the usual way that you get difficult provisions passed is by tacking them onto must-pass legislation. Pentagon appropriations bills are the traditional favorites. Depending on the provision, this might require monkeying around with the reconciliation rules, but Republicans have few scruples about that. So the odds are that we’ll end up with yet another series of showdowns. Maybe not huge debt-ceiling style showdowns, but big fund-the-military type showdowns. And the question is who wins.

And that brings up the second wild card: will Democrats stay united in defense of Obamacare? After watching Dems scatter like frightened children over the nomination of Debo Adegbile to lead the Justice Department’s civil rights division, and then scatter again when the NRA started mau-mauing them over Vivek Murthy’s nomination as Surgeon General—well, you have to wonder, don’t you? Add in the fact that Democrats have been running away from Obamacare for months, and it’s hardly unrealistic to think that they might be less than adamantine when it comes to a showdown over protecting Obamacare while Fox News is pillorying them nightly as playing politics with our brave troops in order to save a failed health care policy.

As it happens, I’d say the odds of caving in are fairly low. Even if Republicans win the Senate, they’d need eight or nine Democrats to defect in order to break a filibuster. And Obama isn’t running for anything. He can afford to hold out.

Still, it’s not a slam dunk. Republicans won’t be able to repeal Obamacare if they win the Senate later this year, but there’s a chance they could do it some damage. It all depends on how willing Democrats are to defend their principles. Unfortunately, that’s always a thin reed.

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Obamacare is Probably Safe, But It’s Not a Slam Dunk

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One Man’s True Experience With the Naked Web

by FMRBeatriz Posted on March 16, 2014

Mother Jones

One thing led to another this weekend, and yesterday I found myself playing around with Internet Explorer on Windows 8.1. It had probably been 20 years since I’d last used it. It turned out to be surprisingly nice once I got everything set up, so then I got curious and set up the tile version too. (That’s the Windows RT version, aka the Metro version, aka the Modern UI version, aka whatever Microsoft is calling it this month.) It was actually fairly nice too. I have a few UI quibbles here and there, but that’s true of every app. Generally speaking, it was pretty good.

But. It turns out that the MUI version of IE doesn’t support add-ons. Don’t ask me why. That means I couldn’t install AdBlock. And holy cow: during the hour or so that I spent checking things out I felt like I was under assault. My browser was deluged with gigantic banner ads, flash ads, auto-play video ads, animated GIF ads, ads that danced across my screen, and a relentless series of popup ads that apparently have figured out how to foil the built-in popup blocker.

I’ve spent the last ten years or so browsing with ad blocking of some kind enabled. This was the first time in a long while that I had been forced to spend time on the naked web, so to speak. Have I just lost my tolerance for this kind of thing? Or has advertising on the web really gotten an order of magnitude worse since the early aughts? This is an academic question, since needless to say I won’t be using the MUI version of IE anytime soon, but I’m still curious. What say you, commenters?

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One Man’s True Experience With the Naked Web

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US Announces Plan to Give Up Control Over Internet Plumbing

by au87rr Posted on March 14, 2014

Mother Jones

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Well, this is interesting:

U.S. officials announced plans Friday to relinquish federal government control over the administration of the Internet, a move likely to please international critics but alarm many business leaders and others who rely on smooth functioning of the Web.

Pressure to let go of the final vestiges of U.S. authority over the system of Web addresses and domain names that organize the Internet has been building for more than a decade and was supercharged by the backlash to revelations about National Security Agency surveillance last year.

I won’t pretend I’m thrilled about this, even if it was probably inevitable at some point. Whatever else you can say about the United States and the leverage its intelligence community gets from control over internet plumbing, it’s also true that the US has been a pretty competent and reliable administrator of the most revolutionary and potentially subversive network ever invented. Conversely, global organizations don’t have a great track record at technocratic management, and world politics—corrosive at best, illiberal and venal at worst—could kill the goose that laid the golden egg. I certainly understand why the rest of the world chafes at American control, but I nonetheless suspect that it might be the best of a bad bunch of options.

Then again, maybe not. There are also plenty of global standards-setting organizations that do a perfectly good job. Slowly and bureaucratically, maybe, but that’s to be expected. Maybe ICANN will go the same way. We’ll see.

In any case, I think we can expect Republicans to go ballistic over this.

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US Announces Plan to Give Up Control Over Internet Plumbing

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The United States Is a Data Wonk’s Dream

by CarleyHannan Posted on March 14, 2014

Mother Jones

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Via Emily Badger, here’s an interesting chart showing which countries are most open with national data. Obviously rich countries do best at this kind of statistical recordkeeping, but some rich countries do better than others, and the US is one of the best. In fact, it would be the best if not for the fact that corporate registration is a state function, and the US therefore scores approximately zero for its lack of a national corporate registry database. Full data for all countries is here. Enjoy.

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The United States Is a Data Wonk’s Dream

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Marco Rubio Wants to Save the Internet From Foreigners

by ErnestoCTL Posted on March 13, 2014

Mother Jones

Sen. Marco Rubio, still engaged in his campaign to reconnect with his tea party roots after blowing it on immigration reform, announced today that he plans to introduce a bill that would “prevent a ‘takeover’ of the Internet by the United Nations or another government regime.” Steve Benen is puzzled:

To be sure, there are foreign governments that censor their citizens’ access to online content, but it’s not at all clear why Rubio sees this as a domestic threat here in the U.S. As best as I can tell, there is no effort to empower the United Nations or anyone else to regulate the Internet on a global scale. Such a policy would certainly be scary, and would require opposition, but at present, it’s also non-existent.

For the most part, Rubio is probably just glomming onto a random bit of jingoism that he thinks will rile up his base. Still, there’s actually a kernel of substance to this. Right now, the US Department of Commerce exercises ultimate control over the DNS root zone, and ICANN, a nonprofit that administers the DNS naming system, does so under contract to the Commerce Department. And while ICANN has a global governance structure, it’s based in Los Angeles and has historically had a heavy American management presence.

But that could change. Last year, in response to some of Edward Snowden’s spying revelations, ICANN’s board of directors issued a statement that called for “accelerating the globalization of ICANN and IANA functions, towards an environment in which all stakeholders, including all governments, participate on an equal footing.” Last month the European Commission joined in, releasing a statement that lamented a “continued loss of confidence in the Internet and its current governance” and proposing new governance that would “identify how to globalise the IANA functions” and “establish a clear timeline for the globalisation of ICANN.” A week later, rumors surfaced that ICANN might try to move its headquarters to Geneva.

Now, this kind of squabbling has gone on forever, and the politics behind these statements is usually pretty murky. There’s no telling if it will ever amount to anything, and in any case it certainly has nothing to do with UN control over the internet. Nonetheless, other countries have long chafed under effective American control of the internet’s plumbing, and the Snowden leaks have given new momentum to calls for that control to end. It’s possible that this is what Rubio is thinking of.

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Marco Rubio Wants to Save the Internet From Foreigners

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Sorry, the Dog Ate My Homework

by DJFAdamugtikmj Posted on March 13, 2014

Mother Jones

Apologies for the radio silence. I had an adventure-filled afternoon. My first adventure prompted me to call for help, and I discovered that my iPhone’s contact list had mysteriously disappeared. No calling for help for me! Eventually everything got sorted out, and when I finally got home I restored my contacts via iCloud. So no permanent harm done. Still, when my car strands me, I always figure my phone will bail me out. That’s what a phone is for. Right? But what do you do when your phone mysteriously decides to strand you at the same time?

And what did I do to deserve all this, anyway?

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Sorry, the Dog Ate My Homework

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