Louie Palu

Photo gallery of Alpha Company of the 24th Marine Expeditionary Unit Battle Landing Team.

(Danke: David Schonauer)

David Brooks on point

"General Motors automobile mural" by Toban Black

Update: Ezra Klein says “not-so-much” about these bailouts being an expensive jobs program:

That will amount to the world’s most expensive jobs program.” I seriously doubt that last bit. The virtue of the G.M. bailouts is that, in the current economic climate, they’re actually a very cheap jobs program. The jobs already exist. The buildings already exist. The managers are already in place. The workers are already trained. Amidst the absent demand of a recession, preserving existing jobs is almost always much cheaper than creating new ones. And that probably goes double for preserving jobs at an employer of such economic and psychological consequences as G.M.

Obama shouldn’t have saved G.M.:

Corporate welfare rarely works when the government invests in rising firms. The odds are really grim when it tries to subsidize fading ones. (In the ’80s, Chrysler already had the successful K-car in the pipeline.)

The most likely outcome, sad to say, is some semiserious restructuring plan, with or without court involvement, to be followed by long-term government intervention and backdoor subsidies forever. That will amount to the world’s most expensive jobs program. It will preserve the overcapacity in the market, create zombie companies and thus hurt Ford. It will raise the protectionist threat as politicians seek to protect the car companies they now run.

It would have been better to keep a distance from G.M. and prepare the region for a structured bankruptcy process. Instead, Obama leapt in. His intentions were good, but getting out with honor will require a ruthless tenacity that is beyond any living politician.

(My emphasis.) We can only hope that Obama does have the “ruthless tenacity” to let G.M. die should its new restructuring fail yet again. But Brooks is right: he’ll have a political nightmare on his hands if he does this. Read the whole thing.

Abort!

One Sentence.

Solve all your parking problems

…with a blowtorch:

"Parking" by xkcd.com

Hilzoy vs. Dreher

Update: Ta-Nehisi Coates and Matthew Yglesias weigh in.

Interesting read about gay marriage. Hilzoy shows Dreher’s argument to be lacking.

Sage advice

From one of the elite educators and mentors of all time: John Wooden.

more about "Sage advice", posted with vodpod

Cool tech watch

Turns your appliances that are in standby mode completely off, which leads to household energy savings of 12%! Pretty neat. Incredibly practical.

The ever-shrinking privacy of the internet

Not that there was much to begin with. But now there’s a program that’ll find any and every picture of your face on Facebook, even if it’s untagged.

So all those pics you untagged so that your boss won’t seem ‘em? Yeah… fair game.

Face.com leaves privacy matters of Photo Finder up to Facebook itself. “Photo Finder has nothing to do with privacy. It scans photos that have already been shared with you. We respect the privacy settings set up by Facebook, so you don’t have to manage privacy in two different places,” the company said.

But in practice, Photo Finder does reveal just how publicly you’re sharing your photos, and widespread use of the technology will make it easier for others to find images of specific people among their network of contacts.

Healthcare, privacy and sanity

"Stethoscope" by a.drian

Sullivan links us up to a great post by Michael Kinsey:

You probably think that if you visit your doctor with a bunch of symptoms that aren’t wildly unusual, and he or she is able to diagnose what’s wrong with you, what happens next will usually be pretty clear: The doctor will prescribe whatever treatment has worked best for others. A country of 300 million people is a permanent floating controlled experiment. Or it would be if anyone collected and compared the results. But no one does. Kaiser Permanente, the country’s largest HMO, keeps records of its own patients, their treatments, and the results. And “outcomes” data also plays a big role in Britain’s National Health system. But in this country, most of this valuable information is never collected and never analyzed.

Hillary Clinton’s health-care plan 16 years ago included a provision for collecting outcomes data. Opponents misrepresented this as a massive invasion of your privacy, and it helped to kill that effort. Another charge about keeping outcomes data is that it will lead to rationing. People will be told they can’t have the pill or the surgery they want because it is too expensive and outcomes data show that it doesn’t work. Or it works no better than some other therapy that is cheaper. I suspect that this latter concern is realistic. But the notion that it can be avoided is not. Telling people they can’t have treatments that are proven wastes of money isn’t rationing. It’s sanity. And refusing to find out what doesn’t work, for fear that we will be told we cannot have it, is doubly nuts.

The problem will arise when an expensive therapy turns out to be, not worthless, but just a tiny bit better than a cheaper alternative. At that point some agonizing decisions will have to be made. But isn’t it better to make them with knowledge than in ignorance?

(My emphasis.) To me… more knowledge is always better than ignorance. That just seems to make sense, no?

But Sullivan’s concern is a real one: we don’t want to stifle innovation in the healthcare field. To me, that’s the bigger concern with single payer. But all the hoopla about outcomes data being an invasion of privacy is a little overblown. The government can surely contract out a document-redaction contractor to protect sensitive private information while still getting the data to optimize the system.

Seems like the right time for an Obama pragmatic compromise…

In defense of intelligent debate

Ta-Nehisi Coates on the value of discourse with intelligent interlocutors you disagree with (or rather, the counter-productivity of engaging idiot interlocutors you disagree with; my emphasis):

As a liberal, I can see the point. Kristol was, indeed, a useful idiot. But we need to tease out a couple things. Kristol wasn’t merely a conservative who was bad on the issues, he was a columnist who was bad at his job. He was not so much a conservative columnist, as he was  a GOP shill, a political operator who ran an advance office for the Palin 2012 campaign, out of the Times’ edit pages. Paul Krugman may be a liberal, and a lefty, but he most certainly isn’t schilling for the Democratic Party.

More than that, Kristol failed at the non-ideological essentials. Getting your facts right is a basic standard of the profession. There’s no left/right to it–either Obama was in pews to hear Jeremiah Wright, or he wasn’t. Either Michelle Malkin said it, or she didn’t. These are basic rules that you can teach a 14-year old. And Kristol got them wrong. Often. He was, in sum, an incompetent foe, the sort of boxer who think road-work is for sissies. In the midst of writing a review of one of Ann Coulter’s silly tomes, Christopher Hitchens once told a reporter,  “If I can’t fuck up Ann Coulter before lunch then I shouldn’t be in this business.” Indeed. And to even the most simple-minded liberal I’d say, If you can’t fuck up Bill Kristol before breakfast, you shouldn’t be blogging.

The dude was good for that first Monday morning entry, no doubt. But here is the thing–in the war of ideas you don’t gain much by measuring yourself against the worst that your opponents have to offer. The thing about competing against jokers, is that it eventually makes a joker of you. Your ideas lose their complexity, their volume and heft, mostly because you don’t need them to take down Kristol. You just need to read the corrections on the Times website. I don’t see how that helps me become a better writer.

Frederick Douglass once said that “A man is worked on, by what he works on.” We have direct evidence of what comes to those who spend their days sparring with Kristol. Is that really where we’re trying to go?

Since I tend to fancy myself as a social liberal and fiscal moderate (and a bunch of other things, but these tend to be the only two axes by which we judge where one lands politically), which is an orientation that frequently has me at odds with conservatives. As such, intelligent conservatives are definitely my favorite people to discuss politics with–they help me refine and sharpen my own views, and keep me honest. If all goes well, I can do the same for them.

While the back-patting of talking politics with other liberals can be comforting and can recharge-the-batteries, so to speak, it can also be intellectually stunting if that’s the only source of conversation on the subject (sometimes as stunting as consistently sparing with stupid people who disagree with you).

On that note, liberals who are dunces* are my least favorite people to acknowledge in political discourse. Do you see why?

*Here I’m operating under the assumption that I am not included in this category. Of course, there’s the distinct possibility that I am wrong in making this assumption. But if that’s the case, I’m inclined to ask: “W.T.Fuck are you doing reading this?”

The new face of war

"MQ-1B Predator, Ali Base, Iraq" by jamesdale10

Saletan takes a look at drones in Pakistan, an excerpt:

7. What are the drones’ psychological effects? Among other things, the Pakistan experiment is testing how a war waged by machines affects the morale of their human adversaries. U.S. officials tell Miller that the militants, hounded and pounded by the drones, “have begun turning violently on one another out of confusion and distrust.” One official says that al-Qaida operatives are “wondering who’s next,” that they’re “hunting down people who they think are responsible” for exposing them to the drones, and that “people are showing up dead or disappearing.” Mark Mazzetti of the New York Times adds that in northwest Pakistan, “[s]ome locals have given up drinking Lipton tea, out of a growing conviction that the [CIA] is using the tea bags as homing beacons for its pilotless planes.”

On the other hand, Mazzetti reports many Pakistanis think that the drones “reveal the fears of Americans to take casualties”—that we’re “sending robots to do a man’s job.” He cites P.W. Singer’s book Wired for War, in which Muslim insurgents “said that America’s reliance on drone weapons is a sign that the United States is afraid to sacrifice troops in combat.”

I’m not buying this. I’m not buying the U.S. spin that the drones are reducing al-Qaida to fratricide. And I’m sure not buying this jihadi propaganda about the glory of sacrifice. Sacrifice is for suckers. Even terrorists know that. That’s why, as Drew reports, our ostensibly cowardly drone operators are watching this:

On a recent day, at 1:15 p.m. in Tucson—1:15 the next morning in Afghanistan—a pilot and sensor operator were staring at gray-toned video from the Predator’s infrared camera. … The crew was scanning a road, looking for … signs of anyone planting improvised explosive devices or lying in wait for a convoy. … “We spend 70 to 80 percent of our time doing this, just scanning roads,” said the pilot. …

In short, our people are hiding behind lethal gizmos watching your people plant lethal gizmos and hide. Your people don’t intend to be there when the bombs go off any more than ours do. So if we’re sissies, so are you.

Hopscotch

"Umm" by Jessica at indexed

Three ways government can do bailouts

Very useful breakdown of the options. Mark Thoma:

Imagine a car lot that has 100 cars on it. However, some of these cars have problems. Half of them will have engine troubles that total the cars – the engines blow up and the cars are then worthless – and this will happen just after purchase. The other half are perfectly fine. Unfortunately, there is no way to tell prior to purchase which type of car you will get no matter how hard you try. Thus, half of the assets on the car dealer’s “balance sheet” – the cars on its lot – are toxic, and lack of transparency makes it impossible to tell which ones are bad prior to purchase.

If all the cars were in perfect shape, they would sell for $20,000 each. Thus, there are (50)*($20,000) = $1,000,000 in assets on the books according to one way of doing the accounting, but that doesn’t necessarily represent the true value of the cars on the lot.

The town where this dealership is located relies upon this business for jobs, it is essential, but, unfortunately, business has fallen off to nothing. Nobody is willing to risk losing $20,000 by purchasing a car that might die just after purchase, so the price has fallen. The expected value of a car is $10,000, but it’s an all or nothing proposition, the car runs or it dies, and since people are risk averse nobody is wiling to pay the $10,000 expected value. In fact, the highest price they are willing to pay, $6,000, is lower than the minimum price the dealer is willing to accept (I’ve assumed a reservation price of $7,500 for illustration, and a horizontal supply curve to make the illustration easier):

So how could the government fix the problem?

Read the whole thing.

Booting the “talent” out of bailed out banks

"The Trust Building" by Eridony

Yglesias says it might be a good thing:

None of my best friends are talented and ambitious businesspeople, but most of my favorite stuff is made by firms managed by such people. But if you’re a talented and ambitious businessman working at a government-support zombie financial institution then you don’t earn your riches by selling products to people. Instead, per Simon Johnson here and here, you maximize income by maximizing “tunneling,” i.e. “borderline legal/illegal smuggling of value out of businesses” and finding other ways to bilk the taxpayer.

If it turns out that you can make a comfortable living at zombie institutions but can’t earn big bucks there, then smart, confident, ambitious, greedy people will leave their jobs and go do other things. In a good way! Maybe they’ll start small businesses. Maybe they’ll join non-enormous, better-managed firms and help them grow and prosper. That’s the kind of thing smart, confident, ambitious, greedy people ought to be doing. Putting their talents to work in the pursuit of profitable market exchanges. Not putting their talents to work trying to run scams at taxpayer expense. [...]

Let the business geniuses, if any there be in these firms, get out and go do something useful.

Do you grok?

There’s salt water on Mars:

Droplets on a leg of the Mars Phoenix lander are seen to darken and coalesce. Nilton Renno, a professor in the Department of Atmospheric, Oceanic and Space Sciences says this is evidence that they are made of liquid water. (Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of Arizona/Max Planck Institute)

Photos of one of the lander’s legs show droplets that grew during the polar summer. Based on the temperature of the leg and the presence of large amounts of “perchlorate” salts detected in the soil, scientists believe the droplets were most likely salty liquid water and mud that splashed on the spacecraft when it touched down. The lander was guided down by rockets whose exhaust melted the top layer of ice below a thin sheet of soil.

Some of the mud droplets that splashed on the lander’s leg appear to have grown by absorbing water from the atmosphere, Renno says. Images suggest that some of the droplets darkened, then moved and merged—physical evidence that they were liquid.

At some point we’re going to send the Envoy and say, “Hi,” to the Martians, right?