A Chinese Gas Station - The Daily Dish | By Andrew Sullivan

A Chinese Gas Station - The Daily Dish | By Andrew Sullivan

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Not sure what the deal on reader is, so Sully's just getting his own links this way.

I was fascinated by the idea of Russia being a cheap Chinese gas station. The comparisons reminded me of what I heard a few weeks ago when the so called "brick" nations held an official economic session. Russia was compared more to Saudi Arabia than the others, and it was unclear how their general economy was functioning (although the price of oil has been rising to compensate for their failings of late). They produce almost nothing for export but raw materials, and of that almost all in energy. By contrast, countries Brazil and India have grown up large technology sectors AND have a broader cross section of raw material AND have more or less internally sustainable agricultural sectors. Unless fossil fuel energy remains of high demand, Russia is going nowhere. It's still China that looks like the dominant power to contend with over the next century. Russia is fast becoming a backwards afterthought, much they were throughout most of their history.

MJ down?

but I have real news instead to care about


Since he did turn out dead from this, I realize this is a story. It should not be THE STORY. This was once a man who produced major musical records and was idolized around the globe. So his death should be a news worthy event. But it wouldn't be a major story to me unless he died say after the release of Thriller or while on tour or something where he could be considered to have something major to contribute to the world left or at the peak of his powers as an artist (a la Bruce Lee dying suddenly after Enter the Dragon). This is more like Elvis, the tragic footnote of the life of a person who was once king of the pop world. In both cases, they seem highly overrated by my count for musical contributions. At least the Beatles actually said stuff through their music in addition to selling syrupy pop music. Jackson always seemed like a corporate planned and marketed product. Sometimes the product was brilliant, entertaining, and flashy. I'm just not sure how much substance was being stirred in. His sister did much better at that (for a while). Marvin Gaye looks like the predecessor to the Michael Jackson era. To me that says "huge drop-off". Sort of like Jordan leaving nobody in his wake either in basketball. Took another 6-7 years for something more to arrive on the scene (for the Wade/Kobe/LeBron/KG superstar era). In the music world, that's about the time it took for hip-hop to arrive as a major social force (ie, consumed by suburban kids who drove the music business) after Marvin. And then another 6-7 years for rap to become a art just as packaged and syrupy as pop.

Meanwhile there are real events going on. Iran is still ongoing, but without major media there to see most of it, and without easy internet access to broadcast video or photo imagery that briefly captivated people, they don't seem too interested in discussing it. Africa has several major conflicts ongoing involving millions of refugees (along with Pakistan/Iraq/Afghanistan/Sri Lanka in Asia). There's a show trial in Burma involving a Nobel peace prize laureate. There's the new euphemism for sexual affair: "hiking the Appalachian Trail", committed by a man who seems far too boring to have ever been considered for President. Health care reform debates are ongoing, and likely to be intense over the next month or two. There's still a new SCOTUS appointee coming up along with various case decisions coming down over the next week (including an unpardonable decision not to legally reprimand the school principal involved for the strip search case, though at least they said it was unconstitutional policy to do it in the first place). The cap-trade (sort of) bill is still in limbo. The banks are actually still in limbo and nobody seems to realize this. Etc. At least some of these are things that get coverage from time to time.

But really. We must stop the presses to cover the divorce of Jon and Kate (who I've never heard of except in oblique references to the disproportionate amounts of media coverage they get, and by all accounts I've seen anybody could have had seen this coming anyway, making it a boring story of old news in the manner of modern media) and the sudden death of a long-fallen musical pop star. I'll settle for sports news and NBA trades leading up to the draft over the regular news right now if this is what's going to be talked about.

Updated slightly: In retrospect, Jackson's death is significant perhaps more than I feel it is. But this is largely because in my case I basically regarded him as an empty shell of a human being a long time ago. The genius or talent was used up and consumed in a brief and powerful passage of glory. And then there remained only the long tail of a decaying comet to marvel at. That's not very interesting to me I suppose. Perhaps that makes his actual societal contributions harder to evaluate. But it really doesn't seem like he did something revolutionary and powerful with his music itself. It was the flare surrounding the music that maintains the power and mystique. I contrast this with someone like Jimi or Marvin, where the performances had that mystique, but they involved his music, his real artistic work, as much as himself. It's hard to see much changing because someone's got a funky and fun dance move, and this is the reason I've never been impressed by Elvis either (the music just isn't as good as the mystique around it). It could also be the relative transformation of 80s sounds in general, the sort of artificial popular consumption drivel that made everything seem the same for the better part of a decade, and from which MJ was no different. Still though. When I look for some indication of a substance and a power that reaches me on any personal level, it's hard to find. Enjoying something on some aesthetic level is vastly different than being able to contemplate it with feeling or power, and it tends to me to suggest that it is the second form of enjoyment that has lasting and meaningful impact on the world when you're dealing with artistic expression. I'm just not seeing enough of it here. And what there was, there wasn't anything left. We used it all up a long time ago.

That's really the tragedy of this story.

science is fun

But TV ruins it.

So over the weekend, in between the helping administer the cleaning to a family estate sale, I caught a National Geographic thing on magnetic fields. Like all such shows today involving science, the apparent backdrop of explaining complex things like Van Allen Belts and magnetic navigation is "the end of the world".

So the show takes about a half hour explaining how the magnetic fields are created out of the molten core of the planet and that somehow the core is hardening and the magnetic field dying, takes a left turn and explains that the magnetic fields (polar north/south) change over time and have done so repeatedly by weakening the fields just like now, and that somehow the planet and its animals are in danger because of these gradual random and significant changes, and then there's one line tucked into the end of the show about how there's no proof linking such changes to mass extinctions (or any extinctions of any kind).

Much like anything the history channel does on mega disaster or the Mayan prophecies, it's ridiculous nonsense posing as arbiter of fate rather than scientific analysis or even hypothesis. But there is at least some scientific exposure placed in there, talking to the experts about how this stuff works. Then the editors get involved I guess. I would have imagined that NatGeo would be above such hype-based nonsense to attract attention, from my childhood experiences of reading about far away places and random scientific discoveries by naturalists and astronomers. But one imagines that there's at least somewhat less fact checking necessary to get at the actual material that the show presented in a less than honest and sensible fashion than has been the case with many many historical portrayals of prophetic events. We've seen similar problems with new technology like the LHC as though it's the end of the world. The types of changes exposed by studying things carefully and analytically can be revolutionary, but they're hardly the end of the world. Even the unlocking of the atom hasn't yet ended up as a doomsday scenario, and I was a child in the age when that was still considered a serious possibility (when a comic book like Watchmen can be written about it). That's still a formative memory of how human beings could at any moment decide to destroy each other by the millions. Something stops us. And it isn't some deities or even a deus ex machina plot device of some sort. Sometimes I think it's just better to be a force of creative influence than to destroy. Science doesn't seem to care one way or the other, which is probably a good thing.

not looking good

suicide squad attack?

It reads like the "craft an assassination attempt to confuse people and galvanize official strength" move out of the dictator playbook. Things have reportedly gotten ugly with riot police everywhere.

weekly wrap

I figured I'd start taking the end of the week point to re-hash the things I listed as shared on here and perhaps add a few points here and there.

gay marriage looks a lot like...marriage

I didn't figure this should shock most rational people. There's still plenty of irrational arguments about the effects of gays upon children or somehow other marriages that will need to be assailed with empirical data at some point. But this is a nice start.

old news

This problem has been around for a lot longer than the Israeli-Palestinian problem. The British never figured out how to deal with active resistance of a non-violent nature in India. We didn't either in the South. If ever there becomes a cause for which people will champion with non-violent resistance that isn't worth dying or fighting for, we're screwed. The only good news is that causes like that don't seem to exist. At some point a Hamas like agency will press for non-violent resistance to the oppressions of Israeli occupations and economic blockades of their people and we'll see just how much more effective that will have been at creating an independent state than all the bombs could ever be. The "fortunate" problem seems to be that there's plenty of people who are fighting for more than just independence and as a result must resort to violence to press for their demands, ie, they want Israel to go away. That's not something that can be protested for and created through non-violent resistance. But pressing for equal rights or equal statehood, sure.

evolution has its pitfalls

I suppose this is a possible explanation for my lack of dating and my generally healthy immune system. More plausible for both is my lack of general or excessive human contact on a daily basis.

nobody knows who this is either

I like reading articles about nobodies who happen to actually be somebody. Especially when they criticize things that I often lean toward. I don't quite think he understood the argument for not licensing doctors (since ol' Milt meant the state not licensing them, not nobody licensing them). But there's not a few things on monetary policy that don't quite make sense in the real world that Milton Friedman was big on to go along side such "libertarian nuttiness". He does have several ideas I'm big on: negative income taxes, abolition of private/public school distinctions through school choice, abolition of state monopolies over things like mail and social security, things of this nature. But when it comes to fiscal and monetary policy, sometimes the crowding effects or inflation arguments get in the way of real and behavioral effects that should not be discounted as valuable in a crisis. It's the non-crisis stuff where that would become strong and meaningful arguments. You know, like the bubbles and inflationary spending over the past decade that created a problem for which one plausible answer was to borrow and spend our way out of. There might even be a good idea to redistribute much of the stimulus check money in there, since a lot of it was probably too long term.

damn they're slow

kazaa? so 2002

I have some issue with why someone was still using kazaa in 2005 personally. The amount of illegal songs, not so much. But seriously, the RIAA basically announced they were hunting using KaZaa way back in like 2003. And the advantage of the internet and file sharing software was the de-centralized nature. All it really took was a means of distributing software for specific types access to the internet and that's about it. The name on the box, so to speak, was not terribly important. If someone really wanted to pirate music, they were going to find a way to do it and nobody could really expect to be tracking it with reliability. The problem I guess is the sheer laziness of most people.

The truly amazing part is how long such things have taken to resolve. The case itself started in what, 2006/7? And the RIAA has been suing people for almost a decade. Meanwhile, Apple and others went into the digital music market and invented one, one in which they get paid and which seems to conform, at least occasionally, to the demands of consumers. I've heard much less about "downlifting" and online piracy cases since the heady days of the late 90s and the early internet file sharing efforts. Pirate Bay is about the only one I've heard of.

There were lots of complaints about piracy but the truth seems to be more that the industry was slow to catch on and capitalize on new forms of media (not that this was a unique problem of music executives or even of the internet/digital revolutions). They saw such things not as an avenue for more profits (perhaps at lower margins), but as a competition within their own industry somehow. Statistics vary, but it doesn't seem clear that free or even pirated distribution of music has even truly hurt the overall revenues of music providers and producers. Only specific old guard titans have gotten clobbered, making it only worse for themselves by not taking the money from a scorched earth policy of downlifter prosecution and investing it in a digital distribution method of their own.

Who Wants School Vouchers? Rich Whites and Poor Nonwhites

Who Wants School Vouchers? Rich Whites and Poor Nonwhites

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Not surprising really. The groups of people who would benefit most are generally the very poor, particularly of racial minorities, or heavily religious people. I disagree with the benefits of the second group, mostly because there are plenty of state constitutional restrictions on public funding of religious institutions, including their schools. But if these private and parochial schools were placed on an equal footing with both public and private schools at present, and appropriate considerations for income adjustments could be made (right now this has been politically impossible), I would not care whether people sent their children to a religious school. It's their money. The real issue is the poverty adjustment. There's clear support among the poor for school choice reform, the reason being that the schools they have to send their children to usually are quite terrible. But the actual school choice debate never seems to acknowledge this as a key feature of a market for education nor does it appropriately compensate for the cost of education of lower income students (or the lack of funding to be provided by individual families). In Europe the debates over school reforms nearly always factor this in.

I guess the assumption made here is that poor people would be somehow happy sending their children to an incrementally better public school in this country while rich folk get to keep sending theirs off to a private academy, only with some public funding to make it easier still. Meanwhile it looks like if you were in the middle class, you don't care one way or the other. Probably because on average your children go to a decent school (or at least there is a perception that the school is decent, I'm highly skeptical of such claims when compared to schools around the globe in particular). Classic nimby sort of thinking. If it's not my problem directly, I see no problem for anyone else that needs resolving.

the gentle arts of making enemies

and calling them something else

I especially note the first one.
"Good conversation is an exchange. The most basic form of social ineptitude is to say what's on your mind, even though you have no reason to believe your listeners are interested. Even more cloddish: Saying what's on your mind, even though you know that your listeners are not interested."
Since it is clear that very, very, very, very few people have a good deal of interest in the random things that I do, I accept that most people don't want to hear what's on my mind. And hence don't share this freely. The trick has been finding enough of a breaking in point to interfere or interrupt in the cloddish banality of others with a moderately interesting factoid and then move away from the conversation once it retires to boring things. I think the problem for me is more finding other people who have interesting things to say more than finding my own words too interesting. Maybe those two things are related.

"...strong preference for expressing your own ideas and little interest in the things other people want to talk about - especially social chitchat and small talk". Right. I can only have so many conversations about "how's your day" before they instead become "what's your day". Few people have much interest in the actual how portion of the question.

I do however find some credence in the "acting like a jerk won't get people to listen to you". I see this problem all the time with various experts on scientific matters (or especially w/ economics). Krugman is a notorious asshole in this regard, getting in constant digs of ad hominem attacks on his political adversaries while explaining how stupid they were. But he also just won a Nobel for economics. So it's not like people didn't listen to him anyway at some point. I'm not sure where I come down on the idea of "being friendly/nice" to other people. But it doesn't really seem like it should be a default position given the nature of "other people".

I suppose this conditional problem would change if I actually needed all that much of regular favors or networking effects. Or I understood how to leverage such things in a useful way.

random thought on the non-aesthetic determinants of fashion

There were a few random blog postings and reports on the nature of Islamic decrees on the apparel of women (and the presumptive demands of a younger majority in a country like Iran). Since I myself have no intention of expressing opinions on the aesthetics of high fashion, as in what supposedly looks "good" or "fashionable", I shall confine myself to deliberations over the cultural and individual determinations, the sort of war between the two where individuals actually select what to adorn their bodies with in the company of others.

Firstly, we have a cultural expectation. There are some cognitive advantages to this in that we are able with furtive glances to decide the character, occupation, or some other vital attribute. The difficulty is that such attributes are really only those which another person wishes to share (which could be very confusing on its own if a person decided to appear as a doctor in a moment of medical crisis, but was not actually licensed to practice medicine). Piled upon this problem is the nature of perceptions. We are left to determine what we think another person would think or presume upon looking at our clothing selections (or, in some versions, lack thereof). This is a difficult consideration, if not impossible, given the variations of people, and their various expectations of what we would/should/could/have to wear.

Bound up in all of that messy illogical consideration is a mild to severe gender gap problem. For example, it is possible as a male to generate attention or condemnation on our attire. But it tends to require several deviations more away from some credible norm before such attention is roughly comparable to that created by a woman's choice of attire. As in a particularly nice suit worthy of its own commentary, a Hawaiian shirt at a business meeting, or whatever it is that is considered "flaming homosexual" attire that month. Yet there is such a general requirement of conformity upon male attire that it pretty much all looks the same anyway. The subtle variations between casual and business casual are lost upon me. They draw commentary only where the distinction somehow impunes a person's character with a perception of un-professionalism. This sort of commentary is in fact never made in direct statements of a sort like "go buy better clothes". It's more like "you don't fit in here". By contrast, it seems that with all the attention that is lauded fairly or not upon a woman's attire, she has much greater flexibility on how to actually accede to the cultural norms (at least in a society like this one where she doesn't have to cover her entire body with cloth). There is not a strong repulsion to women wearing men's clothing for professional purposes (though there is of course, some commentary to this effect). But there is a strong repulsion to cross-dressing. I find it difficult to make sense of this, a paradox of sorts. Women have more attention paid to clothing choices, but effectively have more options. Men have no attention but have few options.

I say this issue with "few options" not for the idea that men should seek to wear women's fashion or to adopt the level of scrutiny involved, but really that it seems like it's reasonably harmless manner of self-expression to select YOUR OWN fashionable demands rather than to conform to some strict social norm. For some reason it's more socially acceptable to get a tattoo than to buy a "loud" shirt (whatever that means). Clothing is to me a tremendous pain in the ass. I tend to leave it up to various holidays throughout the year to replenish my wardrobe, without a great deal of thought as to what it is composed of (beyond trying to avoid advertising for anyone or anything). And thus it would seem that the image that would create is illegible or incoherent. It's certainly not one that I feel compelled to put any serious thought into. I'm not sure what expression that conveys to the general public, when I have cause to bump into the public. But the notion that someone else should tell me what I have to wear to satisfy their demands of what I should look like is tremendously repellent.

I have no idea how to square that paradox either. That I should care that much about a problem I don't actually give a damn about. But in terms of something like Islamic hijab, I have some thoughts. It doesn't look like it's actually something that was to be the responsibility of the woman to cover herself by a holy writ, but rather the man to respect her privacy. The fiqhs and hadith on specific clothing requirements came about later. I don't necessarily object to the idea of dressing "modestly". This came up in an article with an Islamic feminist (or something like that), whose consideration was that a khimar was not religiously needed, but that women running around half-naked shouldn't necessarily be the ideal either. I might agree with her point to some extent, in that women doing so when men are dressed formally can be viewed with skepticism. But realistically, the problem is again that men are not respectful, and do not express themselves using clothing (or lack thereof), and so there is a perception of inequality. Women should be free to arrive at a gathering wearing very little, be totally covered, or somewhere in between and have just as little commentary upon these features as any accompanying men would for similar variations.

The ideal state would be where any person is free to craft their attire in the manner they see fit, and that they accede to social circumstances or woeful mis-perceptions of their character only out of politeness, decency, or mutual respect and not out of some required and enforceable notion of what is acceptable dress. To be honest, I'm not really sure what the difference between Iranian or Saudi hajib rules and US fashion magazines are on the surface as both attempt to determine a code of dress and conduct for women (with very limited expressions of appropriate male clothing). The distinction seems to be more the level of social or political repression that is suffered for deviation from that rule and not the actual nature of the rules themselves.

breaking from iran for a moment

Much as I've been riveted to the blogosphere on Iran, there are a few things happening in American politics. Like this

And Obama also gave a rather nondescript account of health care reforms. Which I've read but haven't had time to consider. By which I might mean: consult with the doctor in the family. I am still more impressed with HAA instead of this at first glance. But the new financial regs, I can look over really quickly and decide on.

1) New regulatory agencies. I'd rather they consolidated the agencies they have already instead of create new bureaucracies. The interconnected or overlapping nature of most financial institutions now means that they should be regulated more based on their actual activities instead of a name plate. As such, you're better off having a few agencies with more agents per building basically. Right now we already have alphabet soup. And to my way of thinking, MORE regulatory agencies for compliance means BIGGER banks. Which looks to me like it was part of the problem. They did at least want to establish a super regulator overseeing the gaps, but we'd also benefit by a consolidation of regulations.

2) Nothing in there about breaking up the superbanks. This will happen in some respects anyway, simply because it hasn't been shown that getting bigger and bigger as a bank really helps the bank itself and the two biggest dogs are both looking like they expanded too fast and have to now sell off parts. But realistically, if a bank, or any company, gets "too big to fail", it's too big to exist. That seems to be part of the nature of the anti-trust regulations that we adopted in the early 20th century, with the idea that a towering corporate structure would get so large that if it had a problem it would paralyze the general economy. This is no less true when the resources that a corporation provides are financial instruments and credit for lending purposes than when its purpose is distributing coal or oil. It's possible you can sidestep this with a bank by having stronger reserve requirements for larger banks, which essentially limits their size anyway by increasing the competitiveness of smaller banks.

3) Consumer Financial Protection Agency. I have mixed feelings on this. Going back to the credit card bill they passed earlier in the year, there were certainly some egregious things that they put a stop to (at least by law), so there's some use in proper regulation and oversight of business practices. And I could agree there's merit in having a consumer watchdog in government, or at least give consumers a seat at the table to lobby alongside everyone else. But the idea does sound an awful lot like NRA from the 1930s, in the sense of attempting to control rates, in this case on mortgages and credit card lending, back then on just about everything else. I'm not sure how it works precisely, one will have to wait for the actual legal text in Congress to see how it plays out. But if it's actually like NRA, this thing should die immediately. We don't need price fixing to resolve the problem.

What we really need is an idea of how much to price some of the worthless stuff still on the bank's balance sheets. If we can do that, they can figure out how much they really have to loan out with greater ease. Somehow this got pushed into the background when it was all along the most pressing issue.


Update:

1) Give the federal government power to take over and wind down a large financial company. --- Good, why this wasn't covered by LAT I don't know. It's probably the most important aspect of the regulation.
2) Mandate that large financial institutions raise more capital and meet higher liquidity standards. - And good, second most important.
3) Abolish the Office of Thrift Supervision and create a new national regulator for financial institutions. - Huh... why abolish one just to replace it?
4) Require advisers to hedge funds and other private pools of capital to register with the Securities and Exchange Commission. - Transparency over derivatives looks like the target here when combined with later provisions. Good idea.
5) Suggest there be some sort of federal coordination of insurance regulation. - Standardization, things like apples to apples comparisons, would be helpful.. but at the moment, this is done by states. I suppose the interstate commerce clause is useful on occasion.

Still nothing in there about market valuation of toxic assets though.