Later On

Generalizing a bit, it seems like a logical consequence of the note below (by Hardy Green in Business Week’s BTW column) that everyone should stop giving gifts. Spend the money on things you want for yourself, and everyone’s satisfaction would go up. Anyway, the real pleasures of the holidays are not the gifts, but of seeing and spending time with family and friends, cooking and eating traditional dishes, building up memories for the next occurrence. The gifts would be easy to drop.

Here’s the note:

Wharton School economist Joel Waldfogel has built something of a reputation as a Christmas killjoy. Starting with a 1993 article in the American Economic Review ("The Deadweight Loss of Christmas"), he has been rattling the chains of Yuletide gloom.

Waldfogel says holiday spending is "a massive institution for value destruction." That’s economist-speak for the fact that so many gifts—billions of dollars’ worth, he contends—match up so poorly with what recipients want or would have bought for themselves. Now, in a new book, Scroogenomics (Princeton University), he puts an updated figure on the waste arising from holiday giving. "U.S. givers spent $66 billion in 2007," he writes, but the value of recipients’ satisfaction is much lower. Quantified, the satisfaction gap represents "an annual deadweight loss of $12 billion." That’s approaching what the federal government dissipates yearly, he says, citing the $17.2 billion in misspending estimated by Citizens Against Government Waste.

Waldfogel’s estimates of the lost value in holiday giving derive from student surveys he has conducted over the years. At first he simply asked recipients to estimate the total cost of the gifts they got and the amount they would have been willing to pay for them (apart from any sentimental value). In later surveys he asked participants to estimate prices and values both for the gifts they got and for stuff they had purchased for themselves. People ascribed 18% more value per dollar spent to their own choices.

The least "efficient" gifts, Waldfogel writes, tend to be from relatives who don’t see family members often enough to know their desires. ("Nobody is better than you at buying the sweater you want," he said in a phone interview.) And while giving cash is a way to preserve gift value, it’s often considered inappropriate or cold.

Gift cards, which now represent up to a third of holiday spending, are stigma-free, Waldfogel notes. But 10% of their value goes unredeemed each year. His suggestion: Retailers should donate those balances to charity.

Getting things ready—and early. UPS won’t be here for another 2-3 hours. Not shown in photo: the 3.5 lbs chicken thighs, 1/2 lb chicken liver, 1/2 lb chicken gizzards. Those are still in the fridge.

I’ll discard the skin from half the thighs and the bones of 20% of them, based on this recipe. I’ll separate the eggs and cook the whites before adding to the grinder.

Take a look at this site and play with the slide.

The meat grinder is scheduled for delivery today, so I went shopping for the chicken thighs, livers, and gizzards. (I wanted the heart/gizzard combo pack, but Whole Foods has only gizzards—still, that should do as an organ meat, and Nob Hill is getting heart/gizzards next week, and he said they’re mostly hearts.

In the meantime, Megs is happy eating only the Evo chicken and turkey dinner, while Molly’s still struggling with the transition from kibble. However, she seems to like the Evo 95% Venison, along with a little order of kibble on the side, so she may end up liking the homemade food.

I’m going to clean up the kitchen before starting so perhaps I can take some photos.

That was the title of a book popular among the adults when I was a very little kid. I got a copy and sent to The Son for his 40th birthday, and the title comes back to me now:

Today is the Internet’s 40th birthday.

From the link:

The simple network message that started it all: “lo.”

On October 29, 1969, that message became the first ever to travel between two computers connected via the ARPANET, the computer network that would become the Internet.

The truncated transmission traveled about 400 miles (643 kilometers) between the University of California, Los Angeles, and the Stanford Research Institute.

The electronic dispatch was supposed to be the word “login,” but only the first two letters were successfully sent before the system crashed.

Very good post at Skeptical Science. From the post:

… So we see that comparisons of present day climate to periods 500 million years ago need to take into account the fact that the sun was 4% less active than now. What about times closer to home? The most recent period when CO2 levels were as high as today was around 15 million years ago, during the Middle Miocene. CO2 levels were at about 400 ppm. What was the climate like at the time? Global temperatures were 5 to 10 degrees Fahrenheit higher than they are today. Sea level was approximately 75 to 120 feet higher. There was no permanent sea ice cap in the Arctic and very little ice on Antarctica and Greenland. The close coupling between CO2 and climate led the author to conclude that "geological observations that we now have for the last 20 million years lend strong support to the idea that carbon dioxide is an important agent for driving climate change throughout Earth’s history."  (Tripati 2009).

To sum up, Dana Royer says it best: "the geologic record contains a treasure trove of ‘alternative Earths’ that allow scientists to study how the various components of the Earth system respond to a range of climatic forcings." Past periods of higher CO2 do not contradict the notion that CO2 warms global temperatures. On the contrary, they confirm the close coupling between CO2 and climate.

It’s a party value, of course. Steve Benen:

Maybe this will help bring some much-needed attention to the story.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) excoriated Republicans on Thursday for stalling more than 200 executive and judicial nominees that in some cases have been lingering on the executive calendar for months.

"Senate Republicans are simply so opposed to everything, absolutely everything, that they even oppose putting people in some of the most important positions in our government," Reid said in a floor statement.

In the midst of the H1N1 flu outbreak, Republicans put a hold on President Obama’s surgeon general nominee. The federal courts are backlogged, but Republicans are blocking votes on President Obama’s judicial nominees. The White House has sent qualified people to the Hill to lead the Office of Legal Counsel, head the General Services Administration, and a variety of diplomatic posts, but Republicans have put holds on all of them, too.

This just isn’t normal. Indeed, the Senate isn’t supposed to function this way — and it never has functioned this way. It’s obstructionism on a scale without precedent.

Keep in mind, we’re not talking about regular ol’ opposition to White House nominees. If GOP senators wanted to reflexively oppose, en masse, every nominee the administration to the Hill, that would be fine. In fact, it’d be a huge improvement over the status quo.

Instead, Republican senators simply don’t want these nominees to get a vote at all. The officials wait in limbo for months — some have had their lives put on hold since March, waiting for a simple up-or-down vote — and government posts that need to be filled remain empty while the 40-seat minority dithers.

It’s an embarrassment to the institution.

The GOP did back down on the Surgeon General nomination, which was then unanimously approved by the committee and passed the Senate by a voice vote. But the GOP continues to block everything else that they possibly can.

And she gets paid to do that—so Joe goes along, I guess. Joe Conason:

If Democrats are disappointed by Joe Lieberman’s threat to filibuster any healthcare reform bill that includes a public option, they shouldn’t be. Despite all of his past promises to support universal healthcare, nothing was more predictable than the Connecticut senator’s fealty to the insurance and pharmaceutical lobbyists.

Much the same can be said of Sen. Evan Bayh, who emerged from hiding on healthcare to announce that he too plans to filibuster against reform with the Republicans, regardless of what his constituents and Americans in general plainly want. Like Lieberman, his state is home to powerful corporations that want reform killed — and like Lieberman, his wife has brought home very big paychecks from those same interests. . (UPDATE: A report published in a South Bend paper Thursday night says Bayh may now support a floor debate.)

The Lieberman family’s financial ties to the health industry are no secret, yet their full extent remains unknown. During her husband’s 2006 reelection campaign, Hadassah Lieberman’s employment as a "senior counselor" to Hill & Knowlton, one of the world’s biggest lobbying firms, briefly erupted as an issue, especially because the clients she served were in the controversial pharmaceutical and insurance sectors. Exactly what she did for those clients has never been disclosed.

At the time she joined the public relations and lobbying conglomerate in the spring of 2005, she expressed the touching hope that she would somehow be able to help those in need. "I have had a lifelong commitment to helping people gain better healthcare," she said in a press release. "I am excited about the opportunity to work with the talented team at Hill & Knowlton to counsel a terrific stable of clients toward that same goal." Less than a year later, having pocketed $77,000 in salary, she quit without explanation — just as her husband was facing a tough primary that he would eventually lose. Throughout the campaign, Hadassah Lieberman, her husband and their spokespersons explicitly refused to discuss her professional activities, except to note that she had not been required to register as a lobbyist.

But her stint at Hill & Knowlton was merely one episode in a professional lifetime devoted to the corporate health sector. For most of the past three decades, …

Continue reading.

Dan Colman finds a couple:

Film Version of Michael Pollan’s Botany of Desire Now Online

Sita Sings the Blues Now on YouTube

Both those links are well worth clicking just to read about the movies and watch a preview. Now I want Roku to be able to let me watch YouTube videos on my TV.

Take a look at this post in James Fallows’s blog, which begins:

Below and after the jump, an extremely detailed Kindle/Nook compare and contrast, in response to this previous comment by someone on the Nook team. This is presented in the public interest for those interested in the future of e-reading. More on the "all in one device" front later today.

"1. Google Books linkup. It might be worth clarifying for your readers that, like the Nook, the Kindle also can be used to read many (increasingly most) books that are available in "Full" (as distinct from Snippet or Preview) on Google Books. The only limitation is that Google Books aren’t accessible through the Amazon wireless link or stored in the Amazon cloud — and I haven’t been able to figure out from the Nook publicity whether that’s going to be substantially different for the Nook.

"Anyhow, apart from the Nook venture, Google Books is in the process of providing downloadable epub versions of all their Full (out-of-copyright) books as part of their normal Google Books features. Until recently, Google Books only provided txt or non-searchable (image only) pdf files of their Full books for download. Those didn’t play nicely with Kindle at all. The amount of bad OCR in the txt files made them virtually unreadable. And the pdf image files didn’t convert cleanly if at all…

Continue reading.

Read today’s column.

O.K., folks, this is it. It’s the defining moment for health care reform.

Past efforts to give Americans what citizens of every other advanced nation already have — guaranteed access to essential care — have ended not with a bang, but with a whimper, usually dying in committee without ever making it to a vote.

But this time, broadly similar health-care bills have made it through multiple committees in both houses of Congress. And on Thursday, Nancy Pelosi, the speaker of the House, unveiled the legislation that she will send to the House floor, where it will almost surely pass. It’s not a perfect bill, by a long shot, but it’s a much stronger bill than almost anyone expected to emerge even a few weeks ago. And it would lead to near-universal coverage.

As a result, everyone in the political class — by which I mean politicians, people in the news media, and so on, basically whoever is in a position to influence the final stage of this legislative marathon — now has to make a choice. The seemingly impossible dream of fundamental health reform is just a few steps away from becoming reality, and each player has to decide whether he or she is going to help it across the finish line or stand in its way.

For conservatives, of course, it’s an easy decision: They don’t want Americans to have universal coverage, and they don’t want President Obama to succeed.

For progressives, it’s a slightly more difficult decision: They want universal care, and they want the president to succeed — but the proposed legislation falls far short of their ideal. There are still some reform advocates who won’t accept anything short of a full transition to Medicare for all as opposed to a hybrid, compromise system that relies heavily on private insurers. And even those who have reconciled themselves to the political realities are disappointed that the bill doesn’t include a “strong” public option, with payment rates linked to those set by Medicare.

But the bill does include a “medium-strength” public option, in which the public plan would negotiate payment rates — defying the predictions of pundits who have repeatedly declared any kind of public-option plan dead. It also includes more generous subsidies than expected, making it easier for lower-income families to afford coverage. And according to Congressional Budget Office estimates, almost everyone — 96 percent of legal residents too young to receive Medicare — would get health insurance.

So should progressives get behind this plan? Yes. And they probably will.

The people who really have to make up their minds, then, are those in between, the self-proclaimed centrists.

Read the rest of this entry »

Very interesting post at Climate Progress, which includes some damning charts on what the GOP Administration did to US manufacturing. (I don’t think those calling the witness were expecting this.) From the post:

Paul Cicio, Executive Director, Industrial Energy Consumers of America, was the GOP witness at the landmark hearings for the Senate climate and clean energy jobs bill  today.  He seemed to think that a strong argument against the clean energy bill was that the U.S. manufacturing sector has been devastated by eight years of conservative rule.  I have argued many times that conservative do-nothing energy and economic policies led to sharp increases in energy costs (see “Senate GOP propose 25% ‘Do-Nothing’ energy tax on Americans“) and sharp decreases in US competitiveness (see “Invented here, sold there”).

But Cicio has the most (unintentionally) damning set of slides I’ve ever seen, a few of which I’m going to reproduce here since I’m sure progressives will want to use them in explaining why we must never go back to the Bush-Cheney policies.

Read the whole thing—and think about the implications of the charts and slides the GOP witness prepared. Here’s just one:

Good segment on Fox “News”:

From an email from the Center for American Progress:

Yesterday, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) unveiled the re-tooled Affordable Health Care for America Act (HR 3962). The bill will cost approximately $900 billion over 10 years, extending health coverage to 36 million Americans (6-7 million more than the Senate Finance Committee’s version). As the Wonk Room’s Igor Volsky points out, it also "includes a national public option that reimburses physicians at negotiated rates and requires individuals to acquire coverage and large employers to provide it." A less-noticed — but still significant — part of the bill would ensure that insurers in the individual market would no longer treat domestic violence as a pre-existing condition. This vital reform would prevent insurers from rejecting women who have survived domestic abuse for health insurance coverage — a practice currently allowed in eight states. This provision is part of the bill’s larger ban on pre-existing conditions, which stipulates that insurers cannot discriminate based on "health status, medical condition, claims experience, receipt of health care, medical history, genetic information, evidence of insurability, disability, or source of injury (including conditions arising out of acts of domestic violence) or any similar factors." In 2006, Senate Democrats on the Health Education Labor & Pensions Committee tried to end domestic violence as a pre-existing condition, but lost in a 10-10 vote. All the "nay" votes were Republicans. Women currently pay up to 50 percent more for health insurance than a man would shell out for the same coverage, and most individual health insurance markets don’t cover maternity care.

From an email from the Center for American Progress:

With the way the Internet is structured right now, it is just as easy for Americans to visit a tiny website about knitting run by a young mother in Ohio as it is to visit a site run by the federal government or a major corporation. This feature is part of the reason that in 1999, John Chambers, president and CEO of networking giant Cisco, called the Internet the great "equalizer between people, companies, and countries." But powerful interests in the telecom and cable industries, along with their conservative allies on Capitol Hill and in the media, are trying to create a pay-for-play system where companies able to shell out large amounts of money would have the power to make their sites run faster. If they succeed, they will change the lives of 40 million Americans who use the Internet as their primary source of news and information. (Here’s what that could look like.) Craig Newmark, founder of Craigslist, has explained what would happen if U.S. communications served the interests of broadband providers, rather than the public: "Imagine if you tried to order a pizza and the phone company said AT&T’s preferred pizza vendor is Domino’s. Press one to connect to Domino’s now. If you would still like to order from your neighborhood pizzeria, please hold for three minutes while Domino’s guaranteed orders are placed." The solution to preserving the openness of the Internet is net neutrality, supported by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), prominent federal lawmakers, consumer groups, and the "geeks" who helped build the Internet. The coalition has even attracted unlikely allies such as the Christian Coalition and Gun Owners of America. But Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) is trying to help telecoms and the cable industry make their destructive dream a reality. He recently introduced the inaptly-named "Internet Freedom Act," arguing that rules preserving net neutrality would be a "government takeover of the Internet." Join the tens of thousands of people who have spoken out in favor of a free and open Internet by taking action here.

Read the rest of this entry »

Scene: a village in Pakistan. People are going about their business, when suddenly there’s an enormous explosion: flames, smoke, screams, some people blown apart, others killed by flying debris, others wounded and dying. The people killed are civilians. Is that terrorism?

The US answer is that it’s terrorism if it was a car bomb, but not if it was a missile from a US drone. The people on the ground don’t see it that way. The Associated Press in the NY Times:

U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton came face-to-face Friday with simmering Pakistani anger over U.S. aerial drone attacks in their country and drew back slightly from her blunt remarks suggesting Pakistani officials know where terrorists are hiding.

In a series of public appearances on the final day of a three-day visit, Clinton was pressed repeatedly by Pakistani civilians and journalists about the secret U.S. program that uses drones to launch missiles to kill terrorists.

But she refused to discuss the drones strikes along the porous border area with Afghanistan that have killed key terror leaders but also scores of civilians.

Clinton’s visit was rocked from the start by a devastating terrorist bombing in Peshawar that killed 105 people, many of them women and children. Her tour has proceeded tensely, revealing clear signs of strain between the two nations despite months of public insistence that they were on the same wavelength in the war on terror…

… During an interview with Clinton broadcast live in Pakistan with several prominent female TV anchors, before a predominantly female audience of several hundred, one member of the audience said the Predator attacks amount to ”executions without trial” for those killed.

Another asked Clinton how she would define terrorism.

”Is it the killing of people in drone attacks?” she asked. That woman then asked if Clinton considers drone attacks and bombings like the one that killed more than 100 civilians in the city of Peshawar earlier this week to both be acts of terrorism.

”No, I do not,” Clinton replied…

Continue reading.

The brush looks less bushy than in the pre-shave set-up—which I forgot to photograph. A good shave, with one nick at the margin of my lower lip. My Nik Is Sealed helped, as always.

I got a good lather from The Soap Opera’s Himalaya shaving soap, and I put a new Polsilver blade in the Edwin Jagger ivory-handled Chatsworth razor. Three good passes (the nick was on the first pass, drat it) with the third passs requiring the Semogue 2o00 to go back to the bowl for more lather. I don’t know about this guy.

The New York aftershave was, as always, superb.