It’s not a Teradactyl, but this company has patented a pizza box that you can tear apart to serve as a plates and a left overs container. Of course, you don’t need their patented perforations to do this (although you might want a box cutter). I’m not sure how “green” take out pizza actually is after being enhanced with a patented perforated pie-box, but it is a pretty clever way to get a little more use out of the box.
I’m on a posting binge this morning. I caught up on some old Planet Money blog posts, and I saw this one TED presentation.
The speaker was introducing gapminder.org, which is a new online service to visual trends in the types of statistical data that governments and NGOs have been ferreting away since the 1960s. The idea is to be able to see the changes that have happened, and challenge many of the myths that define how we think about the world. This stuff is seriously awesome.
Wal-Mart is heavily dependent on government subsidies. Wal-Mart routinely gets sales and property tax abatements when it opens a new store, to cite but one example. According to a 2004 study (albeit one funded by a union) the subsidies can amount to as much as 12 million dollars per store. Additional de facto subsidies come when uninsured or under-insured Wal-Mart employees get health care at government expense. Supporting government-run health care looks like a sop to the politicians who control the subsidy tap.
Personally, I’ve always been rather apathetic when it comes to hating Wal-mart. Maybe it’s time for that to change.
“War, Nobby. Huh! What is it good for?” he said.
“Dunno, Sarge. Freeing slaves, maybe?”
“Absol–well, okay.”
“Defending yourself against a totalitarian aggressor?”
“All right, I’ll grant you that, but–”
“Saving civilization from a horde of–”
“It doesn’t do any good in the long run is what I’m saying, Nobby, if you’d listen for five seconds together,” said Fred Colon sharply.
“Yeah, but in the long run, what does Sarge?”
I’ve spent the better part of the last year trying to figure out exactly what Twitter is good for. I think I might be getting an inkling.
Saving civilization from a horde of black-robed Mullahs?
We’ll see.
Twitter seems to be what newsgathering will look like in a post-Journalism world. CNN was 24 hours behind twitter in picking up on the brewing crisis after the election. And Twitter re-scheduled maintenance on their server farm to not interfere with Iranians using it. As wired put it recently, when commenting on the MySpace loosing ground to Facebook:
When your server farm’s service schedule has an impact on Middle East Peace you are onto something big — much bigger than which garden-variety walled garden has more members.
The federal debt was equivalent to 41 per cent of GDP at the end of 2008; the Congressional Budget Office projects it will increase to 82 per cent of GDP in 10 years. With no change in policy, it could hit 100 per cent of GDP in just another five years.
Democrats blame it on the cost of the war in Iraq, but the debt was decreasing for most of Bush’s second term (see the bar graph here at Instapundit.) Not that Bush was all that thrifty, but we’ve seen a sharp decrease in tax revenues because of the economic downturn. The Obama team is predicting that the economic stimulus ( a big chunk of the deficit increase) will increase tax revenues in 2011, but that remains to be seen. Can you really spend your way out of a recession? Or are we going to see higher levels of inflation? Inflation that will sharply decrease the real earning power of wages that have largely stagnated in the past 30 years.
Used children’s clothing stores, like Kid to Kid, are basically going to be forced out of business. With no way to easily distinguish between “safe†and “unsafe†clothes without testing every item that comes in for lead and phthalates (which is fairly expensive), these stores can’t stay in business. Either their business model will have to change or they’re done.
(Emphasis in the original)
Hopefully it won’t, but it does illustrate the unintended consequences of government legislation. The definition of tragedy is the conflict between two goods. Obviously we need to protect consumers from poorly manufactured goods, but we need to do so without imposing an undue hardship on lower income families or simply dumping what are otherwise still useable products into a landfill.
Interesting news release about a study of contemporary homelessness that will be published early next year in Historical Archaeology.
In the study Larry Zimmerman and Jessica Welch of IUPUI studied the material culture of homeless populations. Material culture - the clothing, utensils and other “stuff” that helps people live.
Some of their findings and even what they did not find surprised them. “We found a large number of food cans. Most had been opened, often not very successfully, with knives or by banging them against rocks or even by heating them until the contents exploded. We rarely found cans that had been opened by a can opener. That made us realize that they didn’t have can openers, which must have been very frustrating to them,” said Zimmerman.
“We also found a lot of hotel-size bottles of shampoo and conditioner, deodorant and toothpaste. Only the toothpaste was used. This tells us that giving things like shampoo and conditioner to individuals without access to water doesn’t make sense. It would be better to send these kinds of things to shelters and not distribute then to people living on the streets. When we try to deliver aid to the homeless we tend to give them what we think they need. A much better way to deliver aid is to target what they actually need, and our work on the material culture of the homeless may help us find out what that really is,” said Zimmerman.
In the study, led by Jamie Arndt, PhD, of the University of Missouri-Columbia, randomly chosen university medical students were asked to answer questions about their own mortality. Afterward, all the study participants inspected fictitious emergency room admittance forms for Muslim and Christian patients complaining of chest pain, and risk assessments were made for each patient. The participants who had been reminded of their personal mortality rendered more serious cardiac risk estimates for Christians and less serious estimates for Muslims despite the patients being otherwise identical in their characteristics and symptoms.
The study blurb doesn’t say what profession of faith that the medical students had, if any, only noting that none of them identified themselves as Muslim. One wonders whether there would be a difference in assessments depending on whether or not they identified as Christians or as Agnostic/ cultural Christians.
Does America need rockstar teachers?
My cousin Craig posted a link to a NYT article on comments Intel’s Craig Barrett made in support of a report released by Achieve Inc., a non-profit Education Policy think tank that he co-chairs. Evidently in Finland, teaching is a highly sought after occupation.
One comment on the original NYT article I thought was insightful:
Until parents and schools begin to realize that our entertainment culture is hurting the minds and aspirations of our young people, there is no hope for the state of education in the United States. A culture that celebrates wealth, flash and emotional manipulation is bound to be headed towards the same sorts of fires that burned Rome to the ground.
Sort of reminds me of the Extramurous society in Neal Stephenson’s new novel Anathem. Too bad we don’t have the Avout concents as well.
I actually don’t think that the problem is that teachers aren’t paid enough. The last time I checked, being a Doctor or a Lawyer was slightly more difficult than teaching, and we actually have a shortage of doctors in certain specialties. We currently seem to have a glut of people willing to teach. And, to be honest, is it really necessary to have our best and brightest clamoring for teaching jobs? I mean, do you really want to draw those people away from cutting edge research to teach Johnny 7th Grade Earth Science?
It’s one thing for Karl Marx to assert that “religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature†and another for Barack Obama to claim that we “cling to … religion†out of economic frustration.
I don’t normally link to op-ed political pieces in the dead-tree-based medium of record, but I think Kristol raises an interesting point: Obama has put an enormous effort into putting his Christianity on public display, but in his comments on voters in PA, he’s as dismissive of their religious convictions as Karl Marx was of the religion of the bourgeoisie. “DIe Religion… ist das Opium des Volkes.” (I have to agree with Kristol, Marx does sound better in German.)