Tag Archives: place

Nothing Left to Steal?

by JohnnieR41 Posted on July 14, 2014

Mother Jones

Megan McArdle points out that cars are a lot harder to steal than they used to be:

Other forms of crime are also getting less lucrative. “Small-time marijuana dealer” is no longer a viable career option in several states. Robbery is also getting tougher. As credit card transactions have come to dominate cash, the potential return from mugging someone, or knocking over a gas station, has fallen dramatically. Even burglars are facing some challenges: Expensive televisions are now too big to carry unless you bring a dolly and a truck, home theater systems are often wired into the wall, and at least in my circles, women don’t wear as much fancy jewelry or mink as they used to. For a while, small electronics made up the cash gap for burglars, muggers, and purse snatchers, but cell phone manufacturers are putting in “kill switches” starting in 2015, which will torpedo that market.

Well, perhaps in years to come thieves will turn to technology to improve their productivity. I don’t know how, but then again, we rarely predict technological revolutions in advance, do we? Maybe new smartphone apps will allow thieves to target more lucrative mugging victims? Or geolocation apps will predict which homes are likely to contain the most easily fencible items? Or maybe sophisticated data mining operations will produce new and innovative opportunities for blackmail. Beats me. But somehow offense and defense always seem to keep up with each other, don’t they?

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Nothing Left to Steal?

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A Progress Report on "Reform Conservatism"

by CarltonBragg Posted on July 11, 2014

Mother Jones

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Does the new generation of “reform conservatives” represent real change for the Republican Party? In policy terms, not really. They’ve offered up a few variations on popular conservative themes (reducing taxes via child tax credits instead of cuts in top marginal rates, for example), but for the most part they’ve just nibbled around the edges. David Frum, however, says this is still a good start:

What matters most about the reformers is not the things they say but the things they don’t. They don’t abuse the long-term unemployed. They don’t advocate tighter monetary policy in the midst of the worst slump since the 1930s. They don’t urge an immigration policy intended to drive wages even lower than they have already tumbled.

They don’t pooh-pooh the risks of a government default on its obligations, as many conservatives did when radicals in the GOP forced debt-ceiling confrontations in 2011 and 2013. They don’t blame budget deficits for the slow recovery from the crisis of 2009. They don’t shrug off the economic and social troubles of 80 percent of the American nation.

Fair enough. At the same time, there have always been successful conservatives who were tonally distinct from the tea party. Paul Ryan is the best-known example. He’s mild-mannered and speaks in the language of an accountant. He always seems reasonable and willing to engage. He doesn’t participate in tea party histrionics. In short, he doesn’t say any of the things Frum mentions above.

And yet, Ryan remains a tea party darling, and for good reason: his budget is a radically right-wing enterprise. Perhaps the most genuinely radical, genuinely right-wing enterprise in all of Washington.

So the question for the reform conservatives is: What’s next? Are they trying to build credibility with conservatives so they can later nudge them in a new direction? Or are they mostly just trying to put a friendly veneer on an essentially tea partyish agenda? We don’t know yet, because so far they haven’t been willing to take many risks. And with good reason. As a friend emailed just a few minutes ago, “The reformers are one bad suggestion away from being fully Frumanized out of the party.”

I wish the reformers luck. And I don’t really blame them for their timidity so far. Still, it’s far too early to tell how serious they are. We’ll just have to wait and see.

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A Progress Report on "Reform Conservatism"

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Does Financial Literacy Matter?

by Joellen54X Posted on July 11, 2014

Mother Jones

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We recently received the grim news that American schoolkids are behind their international peers when it comes to financial literacy. We can add this to the pile of grim news about American schoolkids being behind their international peers in math, science, reading, and every other subject imaginable.

Is this actually true? Well, it depends on which tests you rely on and which countries you compare to. And when you disaggregate by income and race you often end up with different results. Still, it’s a good horror story, and one we can’t seem to get enough of. The financial literacy debacle fits right in.

But forget for a moment whether American high school students really suck at financial literacy. The Economist raises an entirely different question: does it even matter?

Perhaps most important, courses in personal finance do not appear to have an impact on adult behaviour. As Buttonwood has pointed out, the knowledge that students acquire in school when they are in their teens does not necessary translate into action when they have to deal with mortgages and credit-card payments later in life. One study, for example, found that financial education has no impact on household saving behaviour. As a paper by Lewis Mandell and Linda Schmid Klein suggests, the long-term effectiveness of high-school classes in financial literacy is highly doubtful. It may simply be the case that the gap in time is too wide between when individuals acquire their financial knowledge, as high-school students, and when they’re in a position to apply what they have learned.

Now, I’ve long had my doubts whether any of the actual knowledge I learned in high school matters. Habits matter. Basic skills matter. The ability to figure out how to figure out stuff matters. Learning to sit still and concentrate for half an hour at a time matters. But trigonometry? Catcher in the Rye? The history of the Gilded Age? That’s not so clear. Maybe financial literacy falls into the same category.

Alternatively, it may be that education has little impact on our behavior in general. We all know that the way to lose weight is to eat less and exercise more, and yet that knowledge does us little good. Most of us overeat anyway. Likewise, even if we know that interest charges on credit card debt can eat us alive, we might just go ahead and buy that snazzy new big-screen TV anyway.

Who knows? Maybe education outside of (a) basic skills and (b) highly specific skills used in our professions really doesn’t matter much. If that turned out to be true, I can’t say it would surprise me an awful lot. Being a Renaissance Man may be overrated.

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Does Financial Literacy Matter?

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Read the Supreme Court’s Decision Striking Down Abortion Clinic Buffer Zones

by AngelaJNTN Posted on June 26, 2014

Mother Jones

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Read our explainer of the Court’s ruling here.

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width: 630,
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container: “#DV-viewer-1209603-supreme-court-abortion-clinic-buffer-zone-decision”
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Supreme Court Abortion Clinic Buffer Zone Decision (PDF)

Supreme Court Abortion Clinic Buffer Zone Decision (Text)

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Read the Supreme Court’s Decision Striking Down Abortion Clinic Buffer Zones

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Oregon tells rail companies to keep oil deliveries secret

by JessicaLgf Posted on April 24, 2014

Oregon tells rail companies to keep oil deliveries secret

By

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Oregon transportation officials are doing everything in their power to keep the state’s residents in the dark about the movement of crude-filled, explosion-prone rail cars.

The Oregonian won a two-month battle in March when the state Department of Justice ruled that the state Department of Transportation was of course legally required to provide information it receives about the oil shipments to the daily newspaper. Failing to do so “could infringe on the public’s ability to assess the local and statewide risks,” a Justice Department attorney advised.

“Risks shmisks,” the Transportation Department replied. It heavily redacted reports it had received from the rail companies before releasing them to the journalists — and then kicked the intrasigence up a notch. The department told rail companies to stop submitting reports because such reports would become public. (Rail companies have broken promises to share this type of data with the federal government. Oregon transportation officials claim publishing the information is a security risk, despite the fact that oil-laden rail cars are already clearly labeled.) From The Oregonian:

The Oregon Department of Transportation, the state’s rail safety overseer, says it will no longer ask railroads for reports detailing where crude oil moves through the state after The Oregonian successfully sought to have them made public.

Railroads “provided us courtesy copies with the understanding we wouldn’t share it — believing it might be protected,” ODOT spokesman David Thompson said in an email. “We now know that the info is NOT protected; so do the railroads.” …

State law requires railroads to annually submit detailed reports saying what dangerous substances they’ve moved, where and in what volume. They’re due to emergency responders across the state by March 1 of each year. That hasn’t been happening.

The reports have been sent to ODOT instead, which historically acted as a central hub, providing the information on request to firefighters across the state.

ODOT officials say that process needs reform. But as ODOT begins working to change those disclosure rules, its officials say they no longer need any reports.

Keeping this kind of information secret won’t just make it hard for residents to make decisions about where they can live and travel safely. It will make it more difficult for the Transportation Department to do its job. “There’s no other place to get the data,” a retired department rail safety inspector told the paper.


Source
ODOT acts to limit disclosure of oil train shipments after The Oregonian won its release, The Oregonian

John Upton is a science fan and green news boffin who tweets, posts articles to Facebook, and blogs about ecology. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants: johnupton@gmail.com.

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"Markets" Weren’t Rattled Yesterday. It Was Just the Usual Few Morons Overreading the Tea Leaves.

by Bart Jameson Posted on March 20, 2014

Mother Jones

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James Pethokoukis summarizes the conventional wisdom about Janet Yellen’s first run-in with the media yesterday:

A “market rattling” press-conference performance from Janet Yellen, and Wall Street is suddenly thick with Ben Bernanke nostalgia. “The more experienced Bernanke knew to avoid clarifying deliberately vague statement language,” wrote JPMorgan economist Michael Feroli in a research note. Feroli was referencing Yellen’s squishy, off-the-cuff remark that interest rate hikes might start earlier rather than later next year, or “about six months” after the end of the central bank’s bond buying program. A “rookie gaffe” is how economist Paul Edelstein of IHS Global Insight put it.

You can find about a million stories like this. But as much as I like to mock the panicky nature of Wall Street traders, I think everyone needs to take a deep breath here. As you can see in the chart above, the S&P 500 lost a whopping 1 percent of its value for a grand total of about 24 hours. By 1 pm today it was right back where it had been for the two days prior to the Fed meeting.

The numbers tell the tale: It’s pretty obvious that Yellen, in fact, had only a tiny, transient effect on the market—exactly the same kind of effect Bernanke used to have whenever analysts trained their Wittgensteinian microscopes on, say, the precise linguistic difference between “extended” and “protracted.” In the end, a few morons lost money by overreacting to Yellen’s comments, and that’s about it. This is not exactly a rare event in global high finance.

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"Markets" Weren’t Rattled Yesterday. It Was Just the Usual Few Morons Overreading the Tea Leaves.

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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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"Purge" May Not Mean What You Think It Means

by AlisonBeak Posted on March 19, 2014

Mother Jones

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Marcy Wheeler reports on today’s Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board hearing:

The most striking aspect of the hearing was the tooth-pulling effort to get the panel to define the terms they use….The most interesting redefinitions were for “purge” and “search.”

….Purge does not mean — as you might expect — “destroy.” Rather, it means only “remove from NSA systems in such a way that it cannot be used.” Which, best as I understand it, means they’re not actually destroying this data.

….“Purge.” To keep. Somewhere else.

Maybe not even somewhere else! Perhaps to the NSA, purging a record merely means flipping a database flag so that it won’t show up in ordinary queries. There’s no telling.

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"Purge" May Not Mean What You Think It Means

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The Trade Deficit Is Down, But There’s a Catch

by John Grit Posted on March 19, 2014

Mother Jones

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The Wall Street Journal reports on the latest trade deficit numbers:

The U.S. current-account deficit sank to the lowest level in more than 14 years at the end of 2013, reflecting a smaller trade gap and better returns on assets Americans own abroad….The gap, which has narrowed 20% from a year earlier, now represents 1.9% of U.S. gross domestic product. That’s the smallest shortfall as a share of the U.S. economy since 1997.

That’s all good, but there’s a caveat: since 2009, the overall trade deficit has been flat while net imports of oil have decreased by about $50 billion per quarter. This means that net imports of all other goods have actually increased. The fracking boom is helping us out, but only temporarily. We still have a fairly chronic trade deficit problem everywhere else. More here on why this was probably inevitable.

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The Trade Deficit Is Down, But There’s a Catch

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Bobby Jindal Is Running for President

by LeonardClutter Posted on March 19, 2014

Mother Jones

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I guess it’s the law: The modern way to announce that you’ve thrown your hat in the ring for the Republican presidential nomination has nothing to do with Facebook or Twitter or anything like that. You merely have to ratchet up your wingnut rhetoric to 11. That’s how you let people know.

So I guess this means Bobby Jindal is officially running for president. Dylan Scott runs down his latest crackpottery here.

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Bobby Jindal Is Running for President

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