Posts Tagged ‘Krugman’
Thursday Night Links
* 2016! Bernie’s threatening to run. As always, you should take every drop of energy you’d put into a quixotic 3rd-party run for president and put it towards a new Constitution instead.
* Have Kids, Ruin Your Career, Ask Me How.
* Why Frank Underwood hates children.
* Duke Energy Must Immediately Stop Polluting Groundwater In North Carolina, Judge Rules. The arc of history is long but oops everything is already polluted, bye.
* Huge Coal Company To Pay Largest-Ever Fine After 6,000 Clean Water Violations In 7 Years. In terms of the company’s valuation and the damage done the fine might as well have been $1.
* As Mary Sue Coleman, the university’s president, called for increased enrollment of students “paying the full freight,” enrollment from outside Michigan reached 46 percent last fall. The result is that the university not only reflects the race and class inequities inherent in our society, it actually reinforces and aggravates them.
* After three years in which private college and university administrators led their public counterparts in salary gains, the publics are on top in 2013-14. I can’t wait for next year!
* Psychiatry, all along, knew that the evidence wasn’t really there to support the chemical imbalance notion, that it was a hypothesis that hadn’t panned out, and yet psychiatry failed to inform the public of that crucial fact.
* Do white men abuse their colleagues when they let their students call them by their first name?
* I Opted My Kids Out of Standardized Tests.
* And the headline reads: “Your porn is not Canadian enough, CRTC warns erotica channels.” I wrote a little one-act.
Sorry.
Wednesday Morning!
* Man tragically unable to remember saying Barack Obama would make a great president says Hillary Clinton will make a great president. Meanwhile, the rest of us are reduced to talking about Obama’s secret achievements.
* Solitary Confinement May Dramatically Alter Brain Shape In Just Days, Neuroscientist Says.
* Last Night on Jeopardy No One Wanted to Answer Qs About Black History.
* Noose Found Around The Neck Of Statue Honoring Civil Rights Icon At Ole Miss.
* What Does it Mean that Most Children’s Books Are Still About White Boys?
* The J.R.R. Tolkien Manuscripts: Public Showings in 2014.
* Here are the hoops a college football team has to jump through to be allowed to form a union.
* 84-Year Old Nun Sentenced To Prison For Weapons Plant Break-In.
* Academic freedom with violence.
* Has humanity produced enough paint to cover the entire land area of the Earth? The dream remains alive.
* Whistle-blower fired from Hanford nuclear site.
“We do not agree with her assertions that she suffered retaliation or was otherwise treated unfairly,” URS said, adding Busche was fired for reasons unrelated to the safety concerns. “Ms. Busche’s allegations will not withstand scrutiny.”
…
Busche is the second Hanford whistle-blower to be fired by URS in recent months. Walter Tamosaitis, who also raised safety concerns about the plant, was fired in October after 44 years of employment.
* A new China Miéville short story collection, scheduled for November 2014.
* A world of horrors: There is no such thing as a child prostitute.
* In the same way that certain styles of dance simulate sex, the Winter Olympics simulates scraping one’s February-chapped nostrils against the surface of a Kleenex whose aloe content is useless and reaching out for the warm escape of death. It’s an art of failed suicide attempts.
* A preliminary sketch of the data reveals, of course, that by 2050 films will be reviewing us.
* “First, why would we even think about letting it go through?”
* “This whole thing is totally and completely bonkers.”
* Grace Kerr sometimes jokes with her family that “Amanda was not that great. Zach is awesome.” What she means is that her son is finally happy, and is helping others.
* Diseased and unsound meat: Hot Pockets®!
* In Act Of Protest, Ai Weiwei Vase Is Destroyed At Miami Museum.
* News You Can Use: Why It’s Nearly Impossible to Castrate a Hippo.
* A portrait of Steve Jobs made entirely out of e-waste.
* The Ice Caves of the Apostle Islands National Lakeshore.
* Candy Crush: Addictive Game, Incredible Business, Horrible Investment.
* How the north ended up on top of the map.
* Inside Kappa Beta Phi, the Wall Street Fraternity.
* And our long national nightmare is over: Obama apologizes for disparaging art historians.
Sunday MLA Hangover Links
* Horrors and horrors: Missouri prosecutors say they are unable to bring rape charges in the brutal Maryville case, though one of the boys involved will be charged for abandoning the 14-year-old to die in the snow afterwards. The victim in the case attempted suicide last week.
* For the 20th century since the Depression, we find a strong correlation between a ‘literary misery index’ derived from English language books and a moving average of the previous decade of the annual U.S. economic misery index, which is the sum of inflation and unemployment rates.
* Run the university like a sandwich: The University of East London paid a total of £589,000 in settlement to three senior managers, including its former vice-chancellor, who resigned before news emerged that two overseas ventures had collapsed.
* A student’s request to be excused from course work on religious grounds so he would not have to interact with female peers has opened a fractious debate over how institutions navigate between competing human rights.
* A Bang, and Then a Whimper: Some Thoughts On the Death of Cooper Union.
* The Poverty Line Was Designed Assuming Every Family Had a Housewife Who Was a ‘Skillful Cook.’
* As many as 300,000 West Virginians have been warned not to use their water for drinking, cooking, or bathing following a massive chemical spill. The 6 Most Terrifying Facts About The Chemical Spill Contaminating West Virginia’s Drinking Water. Radio Disney’s pro-fracking elementary school tour sparks outrage. Freedom Industry.
Freedom means this happens constantly, a little bit. Freedom means sometimes it happens a great deal.
* With the implementation of tighter carbon emissions caps and more responsible household energy use, it is not too late to reverse the dire course of global warming, a panel of scientists who know full well that it is far too late and we are all doomed told reporters today.
* A Side Benefit of Legal Weed Is the Cops Go Broke.
* Public service announcement: These Twenty Cities Are Allowed to Complain About the Cold.
* I think I did this one before, but Google can’t find it: Population distribution of the US, as measured in Canadas.
* Poverty rates soar in US suburbs.
* Why I Bought A House In Detroit For $500.
* Neat tech demo for a puzzle game premised on manipulating forced perspective.
* Horace Lamb said he’d have two questions for God. I’d have just one.
* Baby monkey reacts to the touch of cold metal.
* America gains yet another weird marriage status on its endless road to marriage quality: Obama Administration To Recognize Utah Same-Sex Couples’ Marriages.
* A series of unrelated events: College football and rape culture.
* Let’s Be Real: Online Harassment Isn’t ‘Virtual’ For Women.
* No Girls, Blacks, or Hispanics Take AP Computer Science Exam in Some States.
* Everybody knows it isn’t sweet and right to die for one’s country. But what this column presupposes is…
* Signs of the times: Tens of Thousands of Dead Bats Are Falling From the Sky in Australia.
* How the blind are socialized to understand race.
* Why having a woman’s body under patriarchy is a job in itself.
* Understanding white privilege.
* Norway is ludicrously wealthy.
* Antinomies of Ultimate Spider-Man. Does anyone know if the described theory of Miles Morales as at least partially anti-Sony flack has any evidentiary basis?
* Chewbacca Actor Peter Mayhew Unloads Stockpile of Star Wars Set Photos.
* Disney appoints a group to determine a new, official Star Wars canon. I hope to develop the first official heresy.
* Grantland rates every aspect of Bruce Springsteen’s career on an UNDERRATED, OVERRATED, PROPERLY RATED scale. See also a seven-part interview with the Boss from the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame.
* Poetry Magazine has your Game of Thrones fanficpoetry of the week.
* And Steven Moffat says he never bothered to plot out Sherlock season three because he’s been too busy plotting out seasons four and five. Yay?
…And More
* I’ve said this before: let’s have an academic decathlon. You choose a team based on whatever pedagogical criteria you want. You can choose students from public school or private, unionized teachers or not, parochial or secular, from charter or magnet, from Montessori or KIPP or whatever else you want. However, I choose the demographics of the students on your team. For my team, the situation is reversed: you choose the pedagogical factors for my students, but I choose the demographics. You stock your team kids from whatever educational backgrounds you think work, and mine with whatever educational systems you think don’t work. Meanwhile, I give you all children from the poverty-stricken, crime-ridden inner city and impoverished rural districts where we see the most failure. I stock mine with upper-class children of privilege. I would bet the house on my team, and I bet if you’re being honest, you would too. Yet to accept that is to deny the basic assumption of the education reform movement, which is that student outcomes are a direct result of teacher quality.
* Stunning front-page from UNC’s Daily Tar Heel today.
* If you are a low-income prospective college student hoping a degree will help you move up in the world, you probably should not attend a moderately selective four-year research institution. The cards are stacked against you.
* Elderly Obama And Boehner Daughters Arrive In Time Machine To Demand Climate Action.
Who among us can forget Malia’s first words to a rapidly-growing crowd in this historical meeting between present and future, “People of 2009, we come from–” words that were immediately interrupted by her younger self, surrounded by Secret Service, saying, “It’s 2013,” which led future Malia to punch future Sasha, saying, “I told you not to mess with the controls.” Malia then continued, “2013, seriously? What’s the friggin’ point?”
* Academic jobs watch: Specialist Professor, Homeland Security.
* California isn’t a state in which liberals have run wild; it’s a state where a liberal majority has been effectively hamstrung by a fanatical conservative minority that, thanks to supermajority rules, has been able to block effective policy-making. Krugman is optimistic that the Republicans’ stranglehold on the state seems to be abating; I’d note that in the arena of public education at least all the worst ideas are coming from the Democrats.
* When (and how) Brad DeLong trolled David Graeber for months. Jesus.
* That’s because these workers represent what’s happening to U.S. work in three critical ways. First, precarity: Workers lack job security, formal contracts, or guaranteed hours. Second, legal exclusion: Labeled as “independent contractors,” “domestic workers” or otherwise, they’re thrust beyond the reach of this country’s creaky, craven labor laws. And third, the mystification of employment: While a no-name contracted company signs your paycheck, your conditions are set by a major corporation with far away headquarters and legal impunity. Guest Workers as Bellweather.
* How to Get a Black Woman Fired.
* Overwhelming Student Debt Has Parents Getting Life Insurance Policies on Their Kids.
* But if Emanuel brought Byrd-Bennett in to work the same kind of charter magic in Chicago that she did in Detroit, he may be dismayed to encounter one important difference: Chicago is now in a good position to fight back. The school closings hearings were packed with engaged, motivated citizens, and the teachers union is more organized than it’s been in three decades. During its popular and successful strike, the union’s approval rating climbed while the mayor’s fell—public opinion polls showed that taxpayers blamed Emanuel for the ugliness that took place during negotiations. The CTU’s current leadership has built relationships with community leaders and organizations, forming a coalition to fight the slash-and-burn privatization pushed by the Board of Education and its corporate sponsors, and has even hosted civil disobedience trainings open to the public. This afternoon’s protest will serve as further evidence that Emanuel is indeed up against a new opponent, one strong enough that not even the best “cleaner” may be able to defeat it.
* Detroit Schools Emergency Manager Gets Accolades as Children Fall Further Behind.
* Nate Silver makes your Final Four book: Louisville Favored in Final Four, but Wichita State Could Become Unlikeliest Champion.
* Zero Dark Thirty is supposedly a film about freedom. A “freedom so threatening that there are those around the world willing to kill themselves and others to prevent us from enjoying it,” as the TV sound-bite in the background puts it. The odd thing is that this freedom is never once glimpsed within the film itself. Obviously, we are constantly reminded of the imprisonment and torture of the al Qaeda suspects, but it is never their freedom we are meant to be concerned with. More tellingly, it is the American spaces within the film that leave this freedom unseen. A strange becoming-prisoner takes hold of the spaces, and of the American body itself: not unfolding, in the end, either defeat or victory, but pulling together in a constricted space the impossibility of both.
* Gen X hits the nostalgia capitalism threshold.
* And dollar tracking site WheresGeorge suggests discrete commerce zones in the U.S.
The Solution to the Next Krugman Crisis
First Bill O’Reilly explained how Christianity isn’t a religion. Now Paul Krugman explains that the Foundation series isn’t science fiction.
Wednesday!
* Life advice from Neil Gaiman: Make good art.
* Too ignorant to know it can’t be done: Teenager reportedly finds solution to 350-year-old math problem.
* From the too-good-to-check files: McSweeney’s interviews a safecracker.
Q: Do you ever look inside?
A: I NEVER look. It’s none of my business. Involving yourself in people’s private affairs can lead to being subpoenaed in a lawsuit or criminal trial. Besides, I’d prefer not knowing about a client’s drug stash, personal porn, or belly button lint collection.
When I’m done I gather my tools and walk to the truck to write my invoice. Sometimes I’m out of the room before they open it. I don’t want to be nearby if there is a booby trap.
* Foundation and Krugman, in Wired.
* And Mother Jones takes on America’s growing tax problem.
Thursday Night
* Breaking Trust: The Past and Future of the University of California.
We are at a tipping point for determining whether or not the university is indeed fulfilling its constitutional mandate to “encourage by all suitable means” the “general diffusion of knowledge and intelligence…essential to the preservation of the rights and liberties of the people.” As such, perhaps shifting attention away from the autonomy of the regents allows for consideration of the public trust that structures that autonomy. How, exactly, does the (temporarily withdrawn, but still looming) threat to raise tuition and fees 81% express a will to further the public’s interest? How does decimating language programs, student services, and the core teaching missions of the university promote the public good? Allowing “joint” research projects with massive corporations to direct the course of university scholarship for decades to come? Permitting the UC president to wield “emergency powers” for two years and counting, depriving faculty of a voice in shaping the university?
* We pretend that 2 degrees C is our threshold. Yet the climate scenarios and plans presented to policymakers do not actually reflect that threshold. As Anderson and Bows say, “most policy advice is to accept a high probability of extremely dangerous climate change rather than propose radical and immediate emission reductions.”
* Josh Marshall has been all over Mitt vs.Newt today. You can tell he’s really enjoying this.
* Meanwhile, Bill Kristol is still waiting for Godot Jeb.
* If men are from Mars and women are from Venus, Newt Gingrich is from the planet Trantor, a fictional world created by Isaac Asimov in his classic Foundation series about galactic empire. UPDATE: Retort! Krugman is from Trantor; Gingrich ain’t.
* Over 46 Million Americans On Foodstamps For The First Time Ever.
The 40-year-old nuclear station just outside Seneca installed the system, called a standby shutdown facility or backup control room, about 30 years ago as an added safety precaution.
On June 1, an engineer discovered that breakers associated with the system would have tripped if exposed to high ambient heat — likely in an emergency. The breakers have since been replaced with fuses not susceptible to the heat problem.
* Why New New Twitter? Because “we can and have an obligation to reach every person on the planet.” That’s why.
* And Geoff Nunberg says “Occupy” is 2011’s word of the year. Seems hard to argue there.
Lots and Lots of Monday Night Links
* ThinkProgress reports solar is surging. We’re saved! Krugman has more, and so does Steve Benen.
* Via my dad: Soviet Bus Stops.
* Occupy my dad: Class war is intergenerational war.
* Rortybomb: Two Steps Toward Tackling Our Current Student Loan Problems. Robert Cruickshank: …any student loan reform proposal that does not include some form of principal writedowns is not likely to be very effective.
* Tor reviews Stephen King’s 11/22/63. I’m much more interested in his pitch for what sounds like a truly horrifying next novel: Occupy Bangor.
* A new AAUW study shows there’s an easy way for young women to avoid sexual harassment in schools: just avoid being either pretty or not pretty.
* Polling shows Americans have begun to realize Republicans are intentionally sabotaging the economy.
* Anti-vaccination fever just got a little more crazy. Via MeFi.
* Marriage equality increases property values. Is that a good enough reason?
* Also on the equality front: Dan Harmon kind-of, sort-of apologizes for the way Community treats gay and trans people.
* Everybody still hates Romney. Poor guy.
* And Bors memorializes one of the windows broken during the Occupy Oakland protests last week.
Friday Morning Links
* Kim Stanley Robinson’s 2312 has a cover and a description.
The year is 2313. Scientific and technological advances have opened gateways to an extraordinary future. Earth is no longer humanity’s only home; new habitats have been created throughout the solar system on moons, planets, and in between. But in this year, 2312, a sequence of events will force humanity to confront its past, its present, and its future.
I know just a little bit about this and I’m really looking forward to it.
* Anwar al-Awlaki has been killed in a drone attack. Is the war over yet?
* The headline reads, “Canadian Arctic nearly loses entire ice shelf.”
* The Many Successes of Occupy Wall Street.
* The plan is working! First Vermont, now Montana: Gov. Brian Schweitzer (D-MT) announced yesterday that he will be seeking a waiver to set up his own universal health care system in his state modeled after the single payer Canadian health care system that began in the province of Saskatchewan.
* Krugman on the obsessive search for some reason not to fight mass unemployment:
Just to reiterate a point I’ve made before, none of this reflects actual economic theory. Throughout this crisis, people like Adam Posen and yours truly have been basing our arguments on standard textbook macroeconomics, whereas the Very Serious People have been making up stories on the fly to justify their calls for pain. As Wolf, who really seems to have eaten his Wheetabix, puts it,
The waste is more than unnecessary; it is cruel. Sadists seem to revel in that cruelty. Sane people should reject it. It is wrong, intellectually and morally.
And this cruelty rules our world.
* And the New York Times games Obama 2012, saying the new threshold states are not Ohio and Florida but Colorado and Virginia.
A Few Links from the Week
* Krugman says Obama’s big job speech was okay. I agree! If nothing else, perhaps bipartisan austerity is really done.
* But he’s still screwing up on judges in a big way.
* This is the second year in a row Binghamton has recorded a 1-in-100 year rain event. If only there were some sort of scientific theory that could explain these abnormal weather patterns.
* Just great: GOP debate audience cheers Perry’s execution record.
* TPM v. Anonymous. Weird times.
* Scientists have finally invented psychohistory.
* And from Reddit: a brief history of banking.
Monday Night Infinite Jest (and More)
* The MLK Memorial opened today on the Washington Mall. Pretty visually stunning.
* zunguzungu has your Libya links.
* The headline reads, “The Scramble for Access to Libya’s Oil Wealth Begins.”
* Kaufman, who has a lifelong passion for American folk music, has just written a biography of Guthrie. And, much more unusually for an academic, he is singing his way across the US to promote it. He is performing Guthrie’s songs, which he mixes with short lectures and projected images in what Kaufman calls a “live musical documentary.”
* Grant Morrison: The Rolling Stone interview. More here. Via Bleeding Cool.
* The New Yorker profiles Clarence Thomas. Via just about everybody.
* Also via literally everybody: The Decembrists’ new Infinite-Jest-themed music video.
* Don’t miss Brad DeLong’s brief history of the Obama administration. Via Digby.
* 2010: Detroit apocalypse porn. 2011: Detroit is the new Brooklyn.
* Inside the mind behind Feminist Hulk. If you’d bet the account was owned by a graduate student in English literature, pick up your money at the front desk.
* Inside the Tea Party: a UNC professor has polled Tea Party supporters to determine that the Tea Party’s core values are “authoritarianism, fear of change, libertarianism and nativism.” I can’t imagine anyone anywhere will find this study remotely controversial.
* Kevin Drum asks: Can we fix the economy? Sign me up for Krugman’s Lament (first comment); we can fix this, we just won’t.
* And a look inside how Scrabble warps your brain.
Competitive Scrabble players’ visual word recognition behavior differed significantly from non-experts’ for letter-prompted verbal fluency (coming up with words beginning with a specific letter) and anagramming accuracy, two Scrabble-specific skills. Competitive players were faster to judge whether or not a word was real. They also judged the validity of vertical words faster than non-experts and were quicker at picking up abstract words than non-competitive players. These findings indicate that Scrabble players are less reliant on the meaning of words to judge whether or not they are real, and more flexible at word recognition using orthographic information.
Gerry Canavan 
