Taking the "P" out of "GDP"

Recorded in our humble blog of record:

The financialization of the American economy has been a disaster. Forget all that stuff about the hollowing out of our manufacturing base or increased global competition or waves of immigrants taking away our jobs. Those are all legitimate issues of one stripe or another, but the far bigger issue is that a gigantic chunk of our productive capacity — Wall Street — is deployed almost solely to make money for one sector of our economy: Wall Street. Until that changes, until the financial industry is focused primarily on providing capital and services toother people, we're always going to suffer from either (a) underperformance in the real economy or (b) an endless boom and bust cycle. Take your pick.

There's one key metric that will tell us whether financial reform is working: the size and profitability of the FIRE sector. (That's Finance, Insurance, and Real Estate.) If it shrinks considerably, it means financial reform, despite all the watering down, has basically done its job. But if the FIRE sector remains enormous, it hasn't. We'll know in a few years. | Drum, emphasis mine |

It is an enduring mystery to me how we have sufficiently abstracted our economy to the point that a huge segment of our economy is devoted to producing exactly nothing. "Services" are a legitimate segment of the economy, but "services" are there to serve people, not rob them.

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Instant replay rule for Soccer? Discuss.

[This is a repost from the last world cup. I thought it was even more appropriate today. Enjoy the finals this weekend, everyone!]

(Lady with cool contact lenses via CNN)

Sure, video evidence would slow the game down slightly, but not as much as the luddites would have you believe. The ball is only in play for 60-odd minutes anyway and double-checking, say, a goal-line clearance, penalty or offside appeal would add seconds not minutes. If there were any doubts at all about the TV replays, the referee's original decision would stand.

Introducing technology would also change the risk v reward debate that zips around a player's head: there'd be no incentive to dive for a penalty when someone in the stands could alert the referee, who would soon be waving yellow in your direction. And why pretend to be punched, when in 30 seconds' time you'd be receiving red for play-acting?

Clearly there's a balance to be struck between maintaining the flow of the game and making the right decision but if other sports can do it, so can football. Ultimately, it boils down to what is preferable: a 30-second delay in play, or the Hand of God? Getting it right, or allowing cheats to get away with it? Certainty, or random chance?

Guardian.uk (thanks, dad!)

Skip this post if you are not interested in Austin transportation issues

It's pretty frustrating to watch the city try to grapple with traffic issues. On the one hand, the city seems somewhat committed to progressive solutions to the problem. But they turn right around and screw it up so badly that it just discredits the whole enterprise.

The latest example is the new plan for MoPac Expressway. I may not grok the whole thing as of yet, but it seems to include adding a fourth, tolled lane whose price can vary based on congestion.

This is a great idea on paper. I support congestion pricing (just like I support all polices for pricing in negative externalities). But take a look at this map:

The red box shows the location of the fourth toll lane. But southbound congestion isn't caused by the lack of lanes in this area. It's caused by the bottleneck at Ladybird Lake (red arrow), where the vast majority of afternoon southbound commuters are forced from three lanes down to two.

Adding a lane to the bridge (by widening the bridge, preferably) would have a powerfully positive effect on the flow of traffic. Adding a fourth lane to be filtered down to two lanes at the bridge seems like it will just cause more problems.

Finally, a loosely related update to my post about the commuter rail from awhile back. I posited that there would be a lot of demand for the trains to run on the weekend. Cap Metro decided to run the train one weekend, and it was a total disaster... because way more people showed up than the train schedule could support.

That's Savage!

I have not, to my knowledge, ever read anything by Chicago Sun-Times columnist Terry Savage. And she is a rare bird in not having a wikipedia entry, which is the only way I know how learn things about people, places, or things anymore. But from her latest column, I can glean a couple facts.

The column is a true story about when she and some family members pull over at the side of the road to patronize a little girl's lemonade stand:

Then my brother asked how much each item cost.

"Oh, no," they replied in unison, "they're all free!"

I sat in the back seat in shock. Free? My brother questioned them again: "But you have to charge something? What should I pay for a lemonade? I'm really thirsty!"

His fiancee smiled and commented, "Isn't that cute. They have the spirit of giving."

That really set me off, as my regular readers can imagine.

"No!" I exclaimed from the back seat. "That's not the spirit of giving. You can only really give when you give something you own. They're giving away their parents' things -- the lemonade, cups, candy. It's not theirs to give."

First, I can tell that she needs to brush up on the meaning of "spirit."

Second, I can tell that she needs to relax, man.

How's that for a lede?

"In the 77 days since oil from the ruptured Deepwater Horizon began to gush into the Gulf of Mexico, BP has skimmed or burned about 60 percent of the amount it promised regulators it could remove in a single day."

WaPo

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Shorter Senator Coburn

"Elena Kagan is ignorant of constitutional issues. 

No, I, Tom Coburn, don't know much about Thurgood Marshall. 

No, I, Tom Coburn, don't know much about Ruth Ginsberg."

Longer version here.

Google and China: A Romantic Tragedy in Five Acts

This is just getting ridiculous.

Act 1: Google self-censors in China, because, hey, turns out there's more money in being evil.

Act 2: Google stops censoring, sort of, by redirecting Chinese users to the uncensored Hong Kong site. [Q: What? A: Beats me]. This may be because of pressure from human rights organizations, or from Google's collective conscience. Or, more likely, in retaliation for a massive hacker attack by China against Google's servers.

Act 3: China naturally objects, and says to Google, NO MORE CHINA FOR YOU. Google panics.

Act 4: Google and China possibly come to an agreement in which users get the old censored site, but can access the uncensored HK site from a link on the main page.

LOL WUT?

“If the Chinese government isn’t happy with them running uncensored search results out of the Hong Kong site — I don’t see why they’ll be any happier just because it becomes one click away,” Danny Sullivan, who runs the search-analysis Web site Search Engine Land, told Bloomberg News.

China’s foreign ministry on Tuesday declined to comment.

“This approach ensures we stay true to our commitment not to censor our results ongoogle.cn and gives users access to all of our services from one page,” Mr. Drummond wrote.

“This new approach is consistent with our commitment not to self censor and, we believe, with local law,” he continued. “We are therefore hopeful that our license will be renewed on this basis so we can continue to offer our Chinese users services via google.cn.”

"I don’t see why they’ll be any happier just because it becomes one click away."

I think there's basically two reasons China might be okay with this.

First, like Google, it lets them claim to not be censoring, while still effectively censoring for folks who don't bother (or who are too scared) to make the extra click to the HK results.

Second, and more nefariously, it will make it much easier for Google to track exactly who is circumventing the censorship.

So, what are your predictions for Act 5? Google gets kicked out of China anyway? China uses Google (again) to crack down on its populace (again)? 

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Not scared... yet.

Mike Huckabee generated a little buzz on Sunday. He told Fox News that he’s the Republican who “clearly at this point does better against Obama than any other Republican.” Mitt Romney, meanwhile, continues to focus on endorsements. He’sannounced three more in Maine, bringing his total this cycle to 100. Newt Gingrich is also keeping up with the endorsement game, throwing his support to Bill McCollum’s gubernatorial campaign in Florida.  Tim Pawlenty, for his part, continues to jet about. In recent days, he’s rallied GOP activists in Tennessee and tomorrow he heads to South Carolina, where he’ll lend a hand to Nikki Haley. Sarah Palin, of course, is also busy. | corner |

It's very hard for me to take any of these folks seriously as credible candidates for president at this point. Jonathan Chait, however, thinks that economic conditions could lead to what would be unthinkable in better times:

If economic conditions remain terrible, it's likely that the Republican Party will regain power. 9% unemployment would give even a radioactive figure like Sarah Palin a decent chance to win the presidency, and a double-dip recession would give her a very strong chance of success. This means there's a significant chance that by 2013 the country will be governed by a Republican Party that makes the Bush-era version appear benign by comparison. | tnr |

I gotta think things aren't that bad? C'mon, readers, tell me not to be scared.

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IN 1981 THE SPUNG ARRIVED ON EARTH. THIS IS THE WORLD THEY AUTHORIZED.

I'm sure that the venn diagram of "my sense of humor" vs. "people who read this blog" does not enjoy significant overlap, but I'm going to point y'all to this webcomic anyway. Here are two samples:

Here are the rest.

This is not Mark Krikorian's toy army

corner:

That and 1,200 National Guardsmen Will Get You a Cup of Coffee   [Mark Krikorian]

At CSIS yesterday, JNap announced that the administration "will station an aerial drone in Texas as part of its stepped-up surveillance of criminal trafficking along the Mexican border." That's "an" aerial drone, as in one. She also announced that "federal authorities also have signed an agreement to allow local police from non-border communities to temporarily 'deploy' to the border region to assist with security" — so, local cops aren't allowed to assist the feds in enforcing immigration law in their own communities, but they can do so in other communities?

And on Tuesday, the administration requested funding for 1,000 additional Border Patrol agents, despite the fact that its original FY2011 budget requested a cut in the number of agents. Put all that together, and it's undeniable that border security is a purely political issue for this White House. In other words, the consideration is not "What do we need to do to truly secure our borders?" but "What's the minimum amount of enforcement we can get away with in order to persuade Congress to finally let us have our amnesty?" It's the spoonful of enforcement to help the amnesty go down.

If you've been reading Krikorian--and I hope you have not--you already know that he is bound and determined to conflate illegal immigration with border security. And nobody is saying that they are unrelated issues. But it's very clear that Obama is drawing a distinction between the two, and it's also very clear that Krikorian deliberately ignores the distinction. I'll write it in short words: 

There is a drug and violence problem on the border. That's why the national guard is there. They are not there to do whatever Mark Krikorian thinks should happen on the border. 

Unrelated interlude

Hi! Here's a passage from Breton's Surrealist Manifesto:

If in a cluster of grapes there are no two alike, why do you want me to describe this grape by the other, by all the others . . . ? Our brains are dulled by the incurable mania of wanting to make the unknown known, classifiable . . . It is pointless to add that experience itself has found itself increasingly circumscribed. It paces back and forth in a cage from which it is more and more difficult to make it emerge . . . Forbidden is any kind of search for truth that is not in conformance with accepted practices . . .

Groovy. Here's Rilke's "The Panther"

His gaze is so wearied from the bars 

Passing by, that it can hold no more. 

It’s as if a thousand bars were given him: 

And behind the thousand bars, no world.

The soft pace of his powerful, supple stride, 

That draws him round in tightened circles, 

Is like the dance of force about a centre, 

In which a greater will stands paralysed.

Only, at times, the curtain of his pupils 

Silently rises – Then an image enters, 

Rushes through his tense, arrested limbs, 

And echoing, inside his heart, is gone.

Yesterday evening, I wasted a lot of time reading many, many translations of that poem. Most were bad.

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Holder v. Humanitarian Law Project

A quick read of the majority decision in Holder v. Humanitarian Law Project (08-1498) leads me to a question.  Since I cannot ask the Honorable Justices in the majority for an explanation beyond what was written in the decision, and since I have neither the inclination, the money, or the academic credentials to get into law school, I'll just ask here and accept whatever enlightened, and/or crackpot answers I get:

In light of the decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission (08-205), how can the First Amendment rights of a group be curtailed with one hand (Humanitarian Law Project), and granted with the other (Citizens United)?

The potential consequences of the speech in both cases seem to me to be equally harmful.  So how can two similar majorities (the difference being that Justice Stevens joined the majority in Humanitarian Law Project and the minority in Citizens United) find that the First Amendment protects one and not the other?

Ok, that's two question.  Sue me.

Cocaine in the U.S. increasingly cut with a livestock-deworming drug

By "increasingly," I mean that 80 percent of cocaine sold in the U.S. contains this drug now, as opposed to only 10 percent just a few years ago.

By "livestock-deworming drug," I mean levasimole. It may lead to enhanced euphoria in the resulting mix, but it can almost certainly rot your flesh.


 -- Info source here, image credit here.

Is that a 1 watt laser in your pocket, or are you just happy to see me?

"Warning: Extremely dangerous is an understatement to the power of 1W of laser power. It will blind permanently and instantly and set fire quickly to skin and other body parts."

Just $200 for a very dangerous and very cool looking laser. Paging Safety Neal, our resident expert, on the personal defense applications. 

This is why you shouldn't let your kids do spelling bee

That's from Razib Khan's article, people of class drink alcohol.

Countdown begins to when CNBC tells us that BP stock is a 'real bargain'

"It's only natural... in a period of transition for the more timid element to run for cover."

- Sidney J. Mussburger, Hudsucker Industries

David Markson R.I.P.

I've never read any David Markson. But when I read he died early last week, I recalled that I had an unread book of his somewhere in my bookshelves. I searched for it and found it, discovering to my surprise that it was a signed copy (those who know me know I separately shelve signed books; I'd missed this one somewhere). My American experimental Po-Mo has not strayed far beyond Barthelme and Foster Wallace, but of course I'm going to read this book, and his much-hailed masterpiece Wittgenstein's Mistress.

My impression so far has been, thank goodness someone can do this well for the rest of us who might have really sucked at it.

By the way, from what I've read so far, I'll take Ben Marcus over Jonathan Safran Foer any day, on this point.