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Why did Social Security privatization fail? And why is it so hard to tell the story straight?
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First voice of dissent about the first Android phone points out what should be obvious: it’s got serious design issues.
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Oboy. This is not good–a potentially wormable hole in Windows file sharing might as well just say “get ready for the next Blaster.”
Month: October 2008
Should Massachussetts abolish the state income tax?
The endgame of the 2008 election season is interesting in a few ways. First, I find it interesting that Obama’s numbers go way up after people get to see him in action (e.g. during debates), and start to edge back down when robocalls and other personal attacks start to hit. In particular, it’s interesting to compare the projected electoral map from the beginning of the week to today, when Florida becomes a toss-up state again, as well as seeing the effect of ebbing Obama support in West Virginia and New Hampshire (and a gain in South Dakota).
But of more interest to me at the moment is a local question: what if Massachusetts abolished its state income tax? What’s interesting to me is not the question itself, which as I wrote yesterday is an idiotic response to crisis (and the New York Times agrees), but rather how loud the voices are about the question. The question isn’t drawing the same urgent public outcry as the effort to get the legislature to put marriage to a referendum, but it’s a pretty loud outcry nonetheless. And it makes me wonder: what’s really going on? Does being a social conservative in a state like Massachussetts just get more and more frustrating until one feels compelled to hold the recipients of critical government services hostage to get one’s demands met? I sometimes think that if I were conservative here, I’d feel effectively disenfranchised and thus would be inclined to grand gestures.
Nevertheless, there are quite a few people I’ve heard from who think it would be a good idea because it would make the legislature “pay attention” to their concerns about waste. To which I reply: there are more constructive ways to pay attention, and more constructive ways to reform. Specifically, I urge anyone who’s thinking about voting Yes on Question 1 to try making the cuts yourself first, with the Boston Globe’s Massachusetts Budget Game Calculator. The brilliant thing that you learn as you go through the budget item by item is just how limited the options are, and just how many challenges are in your way.
And there are challenges, because the budget is non-linear. Reducing spending in some areas leads to reduced state revenue and federal grants, making the job that much harder. Here’s an example: cutting 25% from the $32.2 billion state budget across the board (a chainsaw of a budget cut, if you will) nominally removes $8 billion in expenditures but only closes the budget gap by $4.9 billion, thanks to losses in federal funds and inability to get revenue. In fact, even a 50% cut across the board still leaves a $2.5 billion deficit.
The irony is that we’re already seeing big cuts in state government, thanks to the market meltdown, and we’ll see more. So even with a nationwide progressive sweep on November 4th (and that’s an unlikely scenario), the state is going to have to be fiscally conservative to make it through the coming recession. And that’s without a yes vote on tax abolition. Proponents of the abolition of the tax claim it will make the state a more attractive place to live and work, but the massive hatchet of Question 1 could ruin us.
Grab bag: courting chaos
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An automated iPhoto to Flickr sync engine sounds good but doesn’t solve my problem–sharing some photos while setting privacy settings on others.
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JP makes BoingBoing–a post about the new Make TV preview reel that’s out that gives a shout out to John Park as host.
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There’s a certain amount of organized idiocy at work in the ballot question to eliminate the state income tax. I hope enough people see it for the idiocy that it is.
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What’s striking in this review of the different phases of McCain’s campaign messaging and the decisions that led to each shift is how tactical it all is. And yes, I know all elections are tactical. But the best candidates–and for that matter the best products–have a core underneath them that is consistent from positioning to positioning, and message to message. Reading the story reinforces for me the feeling of a campaign that’s twisting in the wind.
Grab bag: Are there really undecided voters?
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Hysterical profile of the undecided voter.
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Sounds like a killer concert, and the promotional video is a lot of fun to watch.
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Two useful hints: check out GeekTool, and make sure it sleeps with SleepWatcher.
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Jonathan Hoefler schools the scientists who created the “world’s smallest letters” in the fine art of italic typeforms and points out that, on that hex-based grid, an italic rendering of Si would be even smaller.
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A new add-on option to an existing product has to be conceived of as a full product, not just a feature–complete with packaging and customer set-up experience.
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Cross domain Javascript loading via CSS. Interesting new vector. Should probably be closed off by the browser vendors ASAP.
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Highly practical method for constructing forward compatible stylesheets in a way that’s highly maintainable. I’m sure pros know these tricks already, but I’m itching to go in and separate my typography and colors into separate stylesheets.
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Our prayers with the Senator and his grandmother.
Grab bag: Economics of all kinds
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Radiohead made more on “In Rainbows” in the months prior to its physical release than it made on its previous release “Hail to the Thief” in total.
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Dissecting the McCain/Joe the Plumber anecdote; there are some real economic issues behind the dumbed down theatre.
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Estaminet makes a visit to a spot from local legend. I’ll have to remember to post the audio sometime.
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Colin Powell makes the case for Obama.
How she was picked
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Palin’s selection process detailed. Interesting to read the role of the conservative media in this.
Two hours and change with the Drain Doctor
I got a little carried away back in 2004. I assumed that when the clogged drain that backed up into our driveway got fixed, it stayed fixed.
Hah.
I found signs that it backed up again this morning, and proof this afternoon as a pool rose out of it when the washing machine drained. I called a complete bathroom renovation specialist in Adelaide, the Drain Doctor, and when he arrived I talked him through what I knew about the plumbing. He snaked back from the French drain, determined that the blockage wasn’t there, then went for the inside soil stack cleanout.
An aside: I don’t know how many other houses in our neighborhood have the peculiarities of our plumbing. The French drain is there because the driveway extends all the way to the back of our house, and is located right in front of our garage, which is in the basement. There’s a downward slope that used to pick up storm water from the street and take it down to the drain, in really heavy rain; fortunately, our driveway paving fixed that, but still any rain runoff from the driveway itself goes into the drain.
The drain, it appears, connects directly into our sewer pipe, with only a back pitch (it slopes up into the house) keeping nasty stuff from flowing up. Which means that when the main sewage line gets blocked, as it did tonight, the overflow went out back and came up the drain.
So the Drain Doctor guy snaked the line until we realized that he was hitting a blockage somewhere in the front of the house. We found another cleanout in the sump pump pit, which he opened up, and as it was somewhat, er, full, he realized he needed to snake both forward and back of the cleanout.
Which he did, over the course of about forty minutes. I take back everything I’ve ever said about plumbers: they earn their money. At the end, he sucked up all the stuff that came out of the cleanout into his own shopvac, poured his own Clorox into the sump pit to clear the smell, and left once he confirmed that we had clear running water going out the pipe.
The sad thing is, I’m pretty sure the blockage was caused by the previous owner, because tonight’s plumber pulled out some of the same things that our plumber in 2004 found—it just had never snarled up enough since then to be a problem, apparently. But it’s a good thing our pipes are clear, because I really feel like I need a shower.
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Grab bag: Premature snickering edition
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Was Palin connected with the John Birch Society? Interesting, but at Where’s long? Right instead of left: McCain chose before shaking hands with the moderator at the end of the transfer the wrong direction. point, somewhat gratuitous investigation.
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McCain Loses Hastily Convened Fourth Presidential Debate With Lifesize Cardboard Obama | DagBlog.comThis is the sort of thing Barack and Joe have been emailing about–it’s a little early for celebratory Onion-style pieces about the Dems’ lead in the polls. (Of course, after chiding the base, I bet Barack and Joe are laughing their asses off–this is really funny.)
Follow-up: Intrade confirms artificial inflation of McCain trading
I don’t know if Erik‘s seen this, but I found this report on Talking Points Memo interesting. Apparently Intrade’s internal investigation confirms that someone is artificially inflating the value of McCain (that is, the probability that he’ll win in November) by dumping huge amounts of money into the market in an irrational fashion. The CQ article says that it’s a single “institutional” member of Intrade and that they’ve been in contact with the investor, but that there’s no evidence that the rules of the exchange were violated.
I guess what this proves is that:
- Intrade is small enough to be manipulated, if you have a little spare change, and therefore its predictions aren’t trustworthy. Double-check any important prodictions with the Iowa Electronic Market and Betfair.
- There are McCain supporters out there who are willing to spend, and lose, large amounts of money to influence an outlying marker of the campaign’s success.
Shannon Worrell’s The Honey Guide is released
Looks like The Honey Guide dropped a little early. I happened to search for Shannon Worrell on iTunes last night and the album was already there; her MySpace page said it wouldn’t be available until this morning.
I’m listening now and it’s pretty wonderful. I’d listen to her sing the phone book, I think–her voice is that mesmerizing–and it’s nice to hear the voice again. The rest of it is deceptive. There’s more open space in the arrangements–quite a few of her old tunes were all vocal, all the time, and the very first track features an extended instrumental break–but there are more musicians in her band, I think, than ever before. It sounds like country, but that’s mostly the pedal steel–there are the same tight sinews underneath that powered her September 67 songs. And then there are the songs that are out of a different tradition: the echo, shuffling drums, and organ of “If I Can Make You Cry” feel like they came from somewhere unstuck in time near Louisiana. “Sweet Like You” is intimate and dreamlike.
But the lyrics. As always, Shannon’s songs are drenched in images, but where on Three Wishes she was tapping Greek myth and children’s TV, here the songs are swaddled in something simultaneously more personal and a little closer to Greil Marcus’s “old weird America.” The narrator of “Sweet Like You” wants to set her love floating down the James River. Kitchen tables rise and fly. Giant stars are removed from mountaintops. And lovers call from countryside bars because the bartender took their keys.
The Honey Guide is better than a note from an old friend: it’s a letter from a strange place. In its deepest waters it feels like a warmer version of Neko Case’s Fox Confessor Brings the Flood; in other places it feels like afternoon by a fire. Highly recommended.
Grab bag: Joe the Plumber’s 15 minutes
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Joe the Plumber has no plumbing license, has never served as an apprentice, and owes back taxes–which helps to explain his choice of topics.
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Here’s the real context for Obama’s “spread the wealth around” comment to Joe the Plumber–he was arguing against a flat tax.
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Joe the Plumber: confusing Obama with another friendly black man. And admitting his hypothetical is wrong–he wouldn’t be in Obama’s target tax bracket anyway.
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Not really what the caption says, but funny nonetheless.
Unfortunate camera-mugging
Thanks to John Gruber for pointing to Austrian coverage of last night’s debate, complete with this bizarre picture of McCain. I think the caption says that he was reacting after he mistakenly turned the wrong direction to shake hands with the moderator. But there couldn’t be a worse image to sum up his debate performance last night:
Grab bag: Taste we can believe in
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You absolutely have to have this t-shirt. I don’t care if you’re an Obama supporter, a McCain supporter, or a vegan. It’s hysterical.
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Adding to the count of things to excoriate the Bush presidency over, two more signing statements instructing the executive branch to ignore parts of laws that were passed.
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Too bad Wired didn’t get deeper into the science behind Symphony Hall’s acoustics. I’d love to read a really physics driven discussion of how the hall works.
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All about DisplayPort, the new display technology on Apple’s laptops.
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Programmer as Journalist is a pretty good meme. I’d argue that Dave Winer’s Newsjunk falls into this category.
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Campbell Brown states the obvious: Yes, it’s a smear, and yes, it shouldn’t matter if he were an Arab or a Muslim.
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Christopher Buckley: did he jump out of the National Review, or was he pushed? Whatever. Sounds like the conservative press is rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic again.
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The independents are speaking up, and they’re saying, “McCain hasn’t addressed the real issues. He’s only touched on them very narrowly. This is a time when we need to address issues much more clearly than they ever have been in the past.”
Voter registration vs. voter suppression
What does it say about our politics that one party regularly tries to engage new voters and the other regularly tries to suppress them? If you believe the complaints from the GOP, they’re just trying to stave off widespread vote fraud. But study after study has shown that there is no widespread vote fraud conspiracy, which surely the Republicans know full well. Salon’s article Behind the GOP’s voter fraud hysteria covers some of the studies, including the fact that from 2002 to 2005 only one person was found guilty of registration fraud, 20 were found guilty of voting while ineligible and five people were found guilty of voting more than once, while the GOP worked to ensure that thousands more were disenfranchised.
And that’s really what the voter fraud suppression efforts are about: disenfranchisement on a massive scale.
Hey, Republicans: how about you go out and register your own voters rather than suppressing newly registered ones?
Grab bag: People power
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You know, the ground organization Obama has going on could really change things. It could change the whole country.
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I think we’re in orange, moving to red.
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It’s more than a little problematic for any government official to put a spin like this on an ethical situation; it’s a little worse when that official is running for heartbeat-from-the-Presidency.