Recycling and bottled water

This is a great essay on the challenge of reconciling the environment with convenience, how policies have been created to discourage Americans from simply tossing (or littering) their 215 billion beverage containers per year.  Some highlights:

• Should states provide an incentive to recycle, often via a "bottle bill" that provides a cash return for recycling?
• If so, should the deposit be indexed to inflation?
• How do we balance convenience and cleanliness?
• What happens when scavengers simply empty curbside bins of recyclables?

 Get more on bottled water, from its environmental impacts to price mark ups, here.

MAPlight: connecting money with politics

Ever hear of a bill passing and wonder how much your senator or representative got paid to vote for it?  Now you can find out.  I think the interface is clunky, but if you watch the tutorial video, you can pretty quickly get a sense of how folks voted, who was lobbying them, and how much they were paying. 

I used MAPlight to critique the FISA bill vote in June.

A beautiful short film

If you have a bit of time on a lunch break, I recommend this. It defies further explanation.

Torture was endorsed by Bush

Some of us are giddy about change, but also resolved that there will be justice.  Torture, once spurned by Americans to demonstrate our commitment to higher ideals, was embraced by the Bush administration for the War on Terror, despite it being ineffective.

A new, formerly secret memo to the CIA, written in the summer of 2004, expressly permitted torture by agents.  Of course, the secret is really just to change the definition of torture. 

Maybe we can change the definition of executive privilege.  Here's one vote for Bush to stand trial in international court after he leaves office.

As seen on TV: Teen sex

The Washington Post summary says it best:

Teenagers who watch a lot of television featuring flirting, necking, discussion of sex and sex scenes are much more likely than their peers to get pregnant or get a partner pregnant, according to the first study to directly link steamy programming to teen pregnancy...The researchers took into account other factors such as having only one parent, wanting to have a baby and engaging in other risky behaviors.

When most of pop culture is peddling sex, we need comprehensive sex education [it works] so teens at least have an idea of how to be safe.

For cat owners

more animals

Challenged ballots: judge well, but consider this

State statute may affect some of your choices.  From the statute:

You may not be able to count ballot #4 or #7 by this rule:

• Subd. 3.Votes for too many candidates.
  
  
  
  If a voter places a mark (X) beside the names of more candidates for an office than are to be elected or nominated, the ballot is defective with respect only to that office. No vote shall be counted for any candidate for that office, but the rest of the ballot shall be counted if possible. At a primary, if a voter has not indicated a party preference and places a mark (X) beside the names of candidates of more than one party on the partisan ballot, the ballot is totally defective and no votes on it shall be counted. If a voter has indicated a party preference at a primary, only votes cast for candidates of that party shall be counted. [emphasis mine]

According to this section, ballot #5 may be technically an overvote, and subject to the above rule.

• Subd. 4.Name written in proper place.
  If a voter has written the name of an individual in the proper place on a general or special election ballot a vote shall be counted for that individual whether or not the voter makes a mark (X) in the square opposite the blank.

Other rules for thought:

• Subd. 6.Mark out of place.
  If a mark (X) is made out of its proper place, but so near a name or space as to indicate clearly the voter's intent, the vote shall be counted.
  
  

Challenged ballots: you be the judge

Minnesota Public Radio is giving the average citizen a chance to see what the canvassing board will be deciding - what was the voter's intent.  Click on to see challenged ballots in the Minnesota Senate race and to see if you can determine the voter's intention.

Hat tip to GM for the link (via email).




Update (after the quiz): 

• I can't believe people would give ballot #1 to Franken.  I voted Coleman, but I'd rather discard it that accept it.  It's an arrow, away from Franken!
• On #7, it's a hard one.  I'd argue that the voter started the wrong bubble and then went for their true choice - Coleman.
• #11 is not an underline, it's a strikethrough.  I gave it to Coleman.

Netflix kicks ass v2

In January I gushed about the many virtues of Netflix.  In order to keep you posted on its many advantages, I give you this update:

• Movies watched since March 2007: 57
• Average price per movie: $2.48

And did I mention I don't have to leave home to get them?

Identify this famous person

My concern has been the atrocities there in Darfur and the relevance to me with that issue as we spoke about Africa and some of the countries there that were kind of the people succumbing to the dictators and the corruption of some collapsed governments on the continent, the relevance was [the] investment in Darfur with some of our [fund] dollars.

Disclosure: the brackets are where I excised a couple words that make it a dead giveaway.

Read on for the answer, another perspective on this famous person, and a chance to read the phrase "sizzling loins" on a page with the NY Times header.

A clear view of the Russia-Georgia conflict

Kristof has a brief essay on why the U.S. should not be inviting the country of Georgia into NATO, and how their recent encounter with the Russian military was entirely their fault.  A quick read to get you up on your Asian foreign policy.

Breaking the taboo of prostate cancer

An excellent real-life account of an experience with prostate cancer, dealing with the treatment that essentially suppresses a man's testosterone.  In other words, trying to face prostate cancer "like a man" while no longer feeling much like one.

Obama: turning the tide in the war on brains?

Nicholas Kristof opines on the impact of having an "out of the closet, practicing intellectual" as our president-elect. 

An intellectual is a person interested in ideas and comfortable with complexity. Intellectuals read the classics, even when no one is looking, because they appreciate the lessons of Sophocles and Shakespeare that the world abounds in uncertainties and contradictions, and — President Bush, lend me your ears — that leaders self-destruct when they become too rigid and too intoxicated with the fumes of moral clarity.

...as Mr. Obama goes to Washington, I’m hopeful that his fertile mind will set a new tone for our country. Maybe someday soon our leaders no longer will have to shuffle in shame when they’re caught with brains in their heads.

Amen

Counting the vote: totals always change

Some camaigns like to suggest that the change in vote totals after election night and prior to vote certification is some sort of shady, underhanded practice (usually when their margin of victory is declining).  Fact is, it happens all the time (see pic, which I received via email):

Alaska update 2: turnout may break record

It seems that turnout is just fine in the nation's largest state, it just takes a while to get all the ballots in.  Something may not be rotten after all, contrary to my first post on the subject.

Thoughts on the GM bailout proposal

This essay goes in favor of a bailout, on a few principles:

• It's a loan.  The Chrysler bailout in the 1980s was paid back.
• The credit crisis means that GM could probably not do Chapter 11 (reorganization bankruptcy) and would instead have to do Chapter 7 (liquidation).  
• That means as many as a million jobs lost in manufacturing and supplier stores.  And these are good jobs with health benefits.
  
• The Big 3 are retooling and learning the lessons, improving efficiency, renegotiating with unions, and building more fuel efficient cars.

A bailout isn't the worst idea ever, but there should be some fairly strong guarantees about the direction the industry goes if they get a handout.

After the Imperial Presidency

An excellent magazine piece by Jonathan Mahler examines whether a Democratic Congress has made any strides in reasserting Congressional authority over the executive (not much) and what the implications are.  From the summary:

Will Congress simply insist on being asked for its blessing before empowering the president to do whatever he sees fit? And if so, what will it take for what the historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. identified as democracy’s greatest virtue — “its capacity for self-correction” — to kick in and restore the constitutional balance?

Curmudgeon one-upmanship

As seen on Slashdot today:

No toys here. Christmas was watching commercials and then kids at school brag about their presents. I had this one rather long branch, though, that I found incredibly straight. It was a sword, a rifle, a baseball bat, and so many other things. I would look forward to playing with my stick and using my ingenuity to find further roles for it to play.
Then, one day, I came home from school to find that my dad had refrained from getting high/drunk that day and cleaned up the back yard. I couldn't find my stick until I went to the dumpster and found that he had snapped it in four so it could fit easier into a trash bag.

A stick? Luxury.

We had to make jump rope from our own eyebrows. The only way to play hop scotch was to break our own leg, then trace the court on the ground with our protruding bone. When our dad came home and found out we broke our own legs and marked up the drive way, he used to drag us through a cactus patch with our own jump rope tied round our necks.

Detroit: needs a restructure, not a bailout

President-elect Obama has proposed a bailout for Detroit auto firms, but this proposal reeks of political favor rather than rational economic policy.  From Tom Friedman's column on the proposed bailout:

Bob Lutz, G.M.’s vice chairman...has been quoted as saying that hybrids like the Toyota Prius “make no economic sense.” And, in February, D Magazine of Dallas quoted him as saying that global warming “is a total crock of [expletive].”

Is there any question as to why an industry led by these idiots is sinking in a down economy with gas prices having been higher?  Oh, there's the health care thing, but Friedman has a thought on that:

please, spare me the alligator tears about G.M.’s health care costs. Sure, they are outrageous. “But then why did G.M. refuse to lift a finger to support a national health care program when Hillary Clinton was pushing for it?” asks Dan Becker, a top environmental lobbyist.

It's not just the car companies themselves, their Congressional representatives have done them an ill turn, as well.

The blame for this travesty not only belongs to the auto executives, but must be shared equally with the entire Michigan delegation in the House and Senate, virtually all of whom, year after year, voted however the Detroit automakers and unions instructed them to vote. That shielded General Motors, Ford and Chrysler from environmental concerns, mileage concerns and the full impact of global competition that could have forced Detroit to adapt long ago.

 In other words, we should finally show them the tough love, or we'll be doing this all over again. 

“In return for any direct government aid,” he wrote, “the board and the management [of G.M.] should go. Shareholders should lose their paltry remaining equity. And a government-appointed receiver — someone hard-nosed and nonpolitical — should have broad power to revamp G.M. with a viable business plan and return it to a private operation as soon as possible. That will mean tearing up existing contracts with unions, dealers and suppliers, closing some operations and selling others and downsizing the company ... Giving G.M. a blank check — which the company and the United Auto Workers union badly want, and which Washington will be tempted to grant — would be an enormous mistake.”

Given this advice, I think the companies (and unions) are likely to go for bankruptcy instead.  That's lousy, too, because either way there are a lot of good, union jobs going down the toilet.  But I'm not convinced there's any way to save the car companies from themselves, in a fashion that would prevent this kind of bailout again.

Campaign finance reform

Barack Obama spent a lot getting elected president, around $600 million.  In comparison, a candidate who accepts federal matching funds is required to spend no more than $84 million during the general election campaign.  Clearly, the system is no longer competitive with unlimited fundraising and spending. 

The president of Democracy 21 has proposed a fix:

• A 4-to-1 match for contributions up to $200 and nothing for contributions above that.
• Realistic spending limits: $250 million for the primary and another $250 million for the general, up from $50 million and $84 million, respectively.
• A lower individual contribution limit than $2300
• Close loopholes for joint fundraising with the party

I like options (1) and (2) for sure.  What a great way to lock in the importance of smaller donors. 

The lower contribution limit, (3), may dissuade candidates from going with public financing. 

Cutting off funds for parties through joint fundraising (4) is a mixed bag.  Consider: party fundraising is the money the Obama campaign used for get-out-the-vote and voter registration.  It's what is activating people in politics.  It can also be spent on dirty ads against the opponent.  We have to be careful not to toss the baby with the bathwater.  The dramatic increase in participation by Americans is one of the best things to happen from this wild spending.   

What think?