Chu admitted to a House committee that the administration is not interested in lowering gas prices.
Chu, along with the Obama administration, regards the spike in gas prices as a feature rather than a bug. High gas prices provide an incentive for alternate energy technology, a priority for the White House, and a decrease in reliance on oil for energy.
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The consequences of the policy are not likely to be of benefit to the Obama administration. The Republican National Committee has already issued a video highlighting the spike in gas prices and the failure of the administration to address the issue.
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Add into the mix green energy fiascos like Solyndra, and Chu might well have kindled a full blown scandal.
How do you paint with sound? It’s a good question and the answer comes from German photographer Martin Klimas.
He starts by putting different colored paint on top of a speaker over some translucent material, then cranks up the volume.Martin Klimas - Kraftwerk, 'Transistor' from the album 'Radio-Activity'
The vibrations of the speaker shoot the paint into the air creating beautiful patterns and sculptural forms, and Klimas snaps them with his camera while in flight.Martin Klimas - Steve Reich and Musicians, 'Drumming'
Each image becomes an abstract portrait of whatever song he plays—from Miles Davis to Kraftwerk.Martin Klimas - Miles Davis, 'Pharaoh’s Dance' from the album 'Bitches Brew'
The New York Times says he spent six months and about 1,000 shots to get the required results and also that his influences were abstract art and Hans Jenny, a scientist versed in cymatics, the study of waves and vibrations.
New fossils found in China are evidence of the oldest fleas - from 125 million to 165 million years ago, said Diying Huang of the Nanjing Institute of Geology and Paleontology. Their disproportionately long proboscis, or straw-like mouth, had sharp weapon-like serrated edges that helped them bite and feed from their super-sized hosts, he and other researchers reported Wednesday in the journal Nature.
Scientists figure about eight or more of today's fleas would fit on the burly back of their ancient ancestor.
"That's a beast," said study co-author Michael Engel, entomology curator at the Natural History Museum at the University of Kansas. "It was a big critter. I can't even imagine coming home and finding my miniature schnauzer with one or more of these things crawling around on it."
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These flea beaks "had almost like a saw running down the side," Engel said. "This thing was packing a weapon. They were equipped to dig into something."
It is a fire-proof, two-storey reinforced concrete structure with a storage capacity of 31,000 cubic metres [almost 1.1 million cubic feet]. Its fixed and revolving shelving system runs 43,000 linear kilometres [26,719 miles] and is designed to optimize high density, rational storage and efficiency. New technology monitors security, climate and humidity and the bunker is also provided with a HVAC system, an emergency lighting system and a paging system.
CONTAINING more than 80 kilometres of shelves packed with an unknown number of papal documents spanning 12 centuries, including correspondence with Genghis Khan's grandson, Wolfgang Mozart and Adolf Hitler, the Vatican's secret archive opened to the public for the first time yesterday, putting on show 100 documents in Rome.
Usually the preserve of select scholars, the archive boasts such treasures as a letter, bearing 81 wax seals, sent by British nobles to Pope Clement VII in 1530 demanding King Henry VIII be allowed to divorce Catherine of Aragon, a request the Pope refused, helping prompt the formation of the Church of England.
The letter, lost on the shelves until 1920, takes pride of place alongside an 1887 letter from a North American Indian chief, written on a strip of bark, addressing the Pope as the ''Grand Master of Prayers'', and Galileo Galilei's shaky signature on his retraction in 1633 of his heliocentric views after the Vatican put him on trial for heresy.
From 1493 there is the papal bull that split the new world between Spain and Portugal after Columbus's return from the Americas.
What happens when you seamlessly cut and splice together chase scenes from 14 of the biggest big budget action flicks — including The Rock, The Matrix Reloaded, Transformers, and Bad Boys II? You get this absolutely amazing eleven-and-a-half-minute short film called Chasing Trinity: Part 2. It's the biggest, baddest, most Michael Baygasmic car chase... in the world. Ever.
The story thus far: Will Smith is chasing Trinity after she tries an escape with the secret documents. Sean Connery is not far behind and Nicolas Cage tries to keep up, but Matt Damon intervenes. A huge meta car chase ensues.
LookingForLissa Product Review: Kensington Keyfolio (iPad stand and keyboard)
The short version: I like it. A LOT.
The longer version: For someone who types as much and as fast* as I do, the iPad keys are irksome. They’re large . . . but not QUITE large enough to type normally. The electronic keys mean that just as you’re starting to get up a rhythm autocorrect will pop up and ruin your day. (Damn you, autocorrect!!)
As long as I’d had the iPad I’d been using one of those magnetic cases that shuts off the device once closed (yeah, I do miss that feature). But in the interest of more and easier typing – and posting – I purchased this doohickey.
The US Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program is distributing more food stamps than ever before.
Meanwhile, the US National Park Service asks us not to feed the animals, because they may grow dependent and not learn to take care of themselves.
What did I miss here?
The firing at Naval Surface Warfare Center Dahlgren Division (NSWCDD) kicks off a two-month-long test series by the Office of Naval Research (ONR) to evaluate the first of two industry-built launchers. The tests will bring the Navy closer to a new naval gun system capable of extended ranges against surface, air and ground targets.
“We are starting our full-energy tests to evaluate the barrel life and structural integrity of the prototype system,” said Roger Ellis, program manager of the EM Railgun, part of ONR’s Naval Air Warfare and Weapons Department. “It’s the next step toward a future tactical system.”
The EM Railgun launcher is a long-range weapon that fires projectiles using electricity instead of chemical propellants. Magnetic fields created by high electrical currents accelerate a sliding metal conductor, or armature, between two rails to launch projectiles at 4,500 mph to 5,600 mph.
The 32-megajoule prototype demonstrator, built by BAE Systems, arrived at NSWCDD on Jan. 30.
One megajoule of energy is equivalent to a 1-ton car being thrust at 100 mph. The prototype — which now looks more like a naval weapon compared to previous lab-style launchers — is the first of two industry-built launchers to be delivered to the Navy. General Atomics is building the second launcher, scheduled for delivery in April. ONR previously relied upon laboratory-built systems to advance the technology.
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When fully developed, the EM Railgun will give Sailors a dramatically increased multimission capability. Its increased velocity and extended range over traditional shipboard weapons will allow them to conduct precise, long-range naval surface fire support for land strikes; ship self-defense against cruise and ballistic missiles; and surface warfare to deter enemy vessels. The Navy’s near-term goal is a 20- to 32-megajoule weapon that shoots a distance of 50 to 100 nautical miles.
To achieve this, the Navy is moving ahead with the EM Railgun program’s next phase: to develop thermal management systems for both the launcher and pulsed power to facilitate increased firing rates of up to 10 rounds per minute. Toward this end, BAE and General Atomics have been contracted to begin concept design of a next-generation thermally managed launcher.
With their strange coloured surfaces and unusual landscapes, these stunning photographs look like they were taken on an alien planet.
But the incredible shots were actually captured aboard a Cessna light aircraft flying over Iceland.
The beautiful images reveal some of the country's most incredible scenery, ranging from explosive volcanoes to colossal mountains.
Photographer Sandro Santioli racked up 70 hours of flight time as he took the extraordinary images while holding his camera out the window of the aircraft.
Consider the Dodd-Frank law of 2010. Its aim was noble: to prevent another financial crisis. Its strategy was sensible, too: improve transparency, stop banks from taking excessive risks, prevent abusive financial practices and end “too big to fail” by authorising regulators to seize any big, tottering financial firm and wind it down. This newspaper supported these goals at the time, and we still do. But Dodd-Frank is far too complex, and becoming more so. At 848 pages, it is 23 times longer than Glass-Steagall, the reform that followed the Wall Street crash of 1929. Worse, every other page demands that regulators fill in further detail. Some of these clarifications are hundreds of pages long. Just one bit, the “Volcker rule”, which aims to curb risky proprietary trading by banks, includes 383 questions that break down into 1,420 subquestions.
Hardly anyone has actually read Dodd-Frank, besides the Chinese government and our correspondent in New York (see article). Those who have struggle to make sense of it, not least because so much detail has yet to be filled in: of the 400 rules it mandates, only 93 have been finalised. So financial firms in America must prepare to comply with a law that is partly unintelligible and partly unknowable.
Dodd-Frank is part of a wider trend. Governments of both parties keep adding stacks of rules, few of which are ever rescinded. Republicans write rules to thwart terrorists, which make flying in America an ordeal and prompt legions of brainy migrants to move to Canada instead. Democrats write rules to expand the welfare state. Barack Obama’s health-care reform of 2010 had many virtues, especially its attempt to make health insurance universal. But it does little to reduce the system’s staggering and increasing complexity. Every hour spent treating a patient in America creates at least 30 minutes of paperwork, and often a whole hour. Next year the number of federally mandated categories of illness and injury for which hospitals may claim reimbursement will rise from 18,000 to 140,000. There are nine codes relating to injuries caused by parrots, and three relating to burns from flaming water-skis.
Two forces make American laws too complex. One is hubris. Many lawmakers seem to believe that they can lay down rules to govern every eventuality. Examples range from the merely annoying (eg, a proposed code for nurseries in Colorado that specifies how many crayons each box must contain) to the delusional (eg, the conceit of Dodd-Frank that you can anticipate and ban every nasty trick financiers will dream up in the future). Far from preventing abuses, complexity creates loopholes that the shrewd can abuse with impunity.
The other force that makes American laws complex is lobbying. The government’s drive to micromanage so many activities creates a huge incentive for interest groups to push for special favours. When a bill is hundreds of pages long, it is not hard for congressmen to slip in clauses that benefit their chums and campaign donors. The health-care bill included tons of favours for the pushy. Congress’s last, failed attempt to regulate greenhouse gases was even worse.
Complexity costs money. Sarbanes-Oxley, a law aimed at preventing Enron-style frauds, has made it so difficult to list shares on an American stockmarket that firms increasingly look elsewhere or stay private. America’s share of initial public offerings fell from 67% in 2002 (when Sarbox passed) to 16% last year, despite some benign tweaks to the law. A study for the Small Business Administration, a government body, found that regulations in general add $10,585 in costs per employee. It’s a wonder the jobless rate isn’t even higher than it is.
... it's very easy for well-paid pundits who have never started a single real enterprise or met a single payroll to pontificate about "opportunity" and small business as the engine of growth, blah blah blah. It's also easy for those with no actual experience to reach all sorts of absurd conclusions about how easy it is to turn a small business into great wealth. (No, Bain Capital or other Wall Street outposts of financialization are not "small business.")
In real life, it's only easy to run a small business into the ground, especially when there's a thousand tons of junk fees, taxes and useless bureaucratic requirements on your back.
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There is nothing mysterious about the cause of this Kafkaesque Status Quo: each city, county, state and Federal fiefdom must justify its existence and payroll, and everyone in each fiefdom will fight with every fiber of their being to protect their turf. Politically, it's a fight to the death to trim even the thinnest slice of bureaucracy, and so little if any ever gets trimmed.
Nobody will care until the city, county and state's revenues collapse as people opt out of supporting the bloated dead-weight of the Status Quo with their own sweat and blood.
The only way to survive is to not have a "real" business, i.e. you write code in your living room or parents' basement, or you do enough business in the informal sector (cash) to support your high-cost formal business.
Fasting was a common medical treatment in the past, but now new research suggests there may be good reason for it to make a comeback. This is because it seems to trigger all sorts of healthy hormonal and metabolic changes.
Researchers have long known that cutting back animals’ calories over an extended period can make them live up to 50 per cent longer — it’s been harder to prove benefits in humans because few people can stick to this restrictive regimen.
But there’s now emerging evidence to show occasional fasting — which is much more manageable — also carries benefits. Fasting days involve eating between 500 and 800 calories (the usual daily intake for a woman is 2,000 calories, for a man, 2,500).
This intake appears to cause a drop in levels of growth-factor, a hormone linked with cancer and diabetes, as well as a reduction in ‘bad’ LDL cholesterol and triglycerides (fats) in the blood.
Meanwhile, free radicals — the damaging molecules linked to disease — are dampened down. Studies also suggest that levels of inflammation can fall. And now there is the suggestion that fasting protects the brain, too.
‘Suddenly dropping your food intake dramatically — cutting it by at least half for a day or so — triggers protective processes in the brain,’ explains Professor Mark Mattson, head of neuroscience at the U.S. National Institute On Ageing.
‘It is similar to the beneficial effect you get from exercise.’ This could help protect the brain against degenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s.
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According to an article that will be appearing in the leading science journal Nature Neuroscience next month, calorie restriction can protect the cells from damage and make them more resistant to stress.
‘Part of this effect is due to what cutting calories does to appetite hormones such as ghrelin and leptin,’ he explains. ‘When you are not overweight, these hormones encourage growth of new brain cells, especially in the hippocampus.’
This is the area of the brain which is involved in laying down memories. If you start putting on weight, levels of ghrelin drop and brain cell replacement slows. ‘The effect is particularly damaging in your 40s and 50s, for reasons that aren’t clear yet,’ he says. ‘Obesity at that age is a marker for cognitive problems later.’
The good news is that this brain-cell damage can be reversed by the two-day fasting regime, although so far Professor Mattson has shown this only in rats. A human trial is starting soon. There is reason to think it should work.
I'm going to say something here that is going to raise some hackles. Then I'm going to explain my statements and, hopefully, make everyone buy it. Here we go. Ready?
Buy a gun. Get a bat. Own some weapon and have enough skill to use it to save your own life and the lives of your family members. DO NOT RELY ON THE POLICE TO SAVE YOUR LIFE FOR YOU.
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Suppose some bad guy comes into your driveway and starts to attack you. When you (or perhaps your hopefully observant neighbor) call 911, what happens? The phone rings in some dispatch center and hopefully gets answered immediately. Now, let's assume for simplicity's sake that you are calling from your own home phone and your call is actually going to your local police. Remember that if you call 911 from your cell phone the call is usually routed to a mobile 911 call center, not to mention they will have the added chore of figuring out where you are if you're unable to tell them yourself.
Anyway, your call in this scenario is answered by your local police and a call taker begins collecting information from you such as your location, the type of emergency and what response is required. Elapsed time so far while you're getting your ass kicked: 2 minutes.
Now the call goes to a dispatcher who has to read the call, decide which officer(s) to send, and dispatch the call. On a good day: probably another minute.
So now you've been fighting for your life, or more likely laying there being beaten upon, for three minutes. The police are on the way. If an officer is immediately in your neighborhood, you may get a response within a minute or two. With four officers covering your entire city, figure 5 minutes is more likely. So you've now been under attack for 8 minutes. And that is under ideal circumstances. Longer times are far more likely. If your attacker is using a weapon of some sort you are most likely already dead or dying if that was their intent. Otherwise, they have most likely made whatever point it was they were trying to make and they have probably fled the scene. At this point the police arrive and find your bloody, beaten carcass in your driveway.
No one wakes up in the morning one day and decides to become an armed robber. It is a gradual process that requires some experience and desensitizing. Before a man will pick up a gun and threaten to kill people who have done him no harm in order to get their usually meager possessions he has to get comfortable with some things.
He has to get used to seeing others as objects for him to exploit. He has to accept he may be killed while robbing. He has to accept the felony conviction for Robbery will haunt him all his life. He has to accept he may need to kill a completely innocent person to get away with his crime.
This is a process that starts with stealing candy at the corner store as a child. It progresses through bigger property crimes that may also involve violence. But one day [he] gets tired of selling his stolen property for nothing and decides it would be better to steal cash. Cut out all that tiresome sales stuff.
Keep in mind many petty thieves, auto burglars, residential and commercial burglars, paper thieves, and hustlers will get to that point and decide not to become armed robbers. Most will. It is a special group of outliers who decide threatening to kill people for a few dollars is the way to go.
Once a man starts armed robbing he has crossed a line most won't. Don't forget that when you are looking these bastards in the eye. Their decision to kill you is already made. Your life means nothing to him. Only his does. His sole motivation for not killing you is he doesn't want a murder case. He has already accepted he may pick one up though.
Rule #1 Don't Get Shot! When people get shot, they get hurt. When people get hurt, their survivability dwindles. With each bullet that enters their body, their ability to survive another minute evaporates. Not getting shot is the crux of the matter. The witticisms seem to accept the idea that a gunfight is unavoidable. In fact, the opposite is true. Many conflicts that end in death are avoidable. Therefore:
Corollary #1 Don't get into gunfights! If you can avoid a gunfight, avoid it. People get killed in gunfights. They are not healthy environments to be in. The risk factors with lead flying past you are greater than the risk factors of most other endeavors. Compromise. Let the other guy win verbal challenges. Walk away with hoodlums heckling you. If you do not have to engage others in a lethal conflict, do not do so. It may be your last day on Earth, and you just don't know it yet. Luck plays a huge part in gunfights. A lifetime of building shooting skills of every type can be blown away with just a smidgen of luck, good or bad. Because you are right does not mean you will survive a gunfight. The goal in a gunfight is to survive, not to win, and not to prove you are right. People get the idea that being right is more important than being alive. It isn't. You can prove the veracity of your argument some other time, but not if you are dead. Avoid gunfights if at all possible.
Corollary #2 If you are getting shot at, make it to where you are NOT getting shot at. This may involve running away. There is no shame in running away from things that might kill you. Ferocious animals do this all the time. It is the instinct that allows grizzly bear cubs to become big bad ass grizzly bears, who may still chose to run away rather than become injured in an unnecessary fight. Distance is a target's best friend. A shooter's skill is negated by distance. The more an opponent has to chase and hunt, the quicker he will lose interest.
To recognize threats, one has to understand how the criminal mind works. The criminal is a predator. He (or she) sees the world as having two types of people . . . other predators, and prey. Many honest gun owners like to think of themselves as "sheepdogs" but to the criminal, the sheepdog is simply another brand of predator. Like other beasts, it is a matter of survival for the criminal to prey on those weaker than themselves. To select the wrong victim is to become prey. If you want to survive in the criminal's world, you must be seen as a superior predator. Once you understand the criminal's thought processes, most attacks can be avoided simply by removing oneself from the victim selection process. There are several steps to victimization.
PLANNING OF MUNICIPAL BUS LINE 11A THREE WEEKS INTO THE FIRST RON PAUL ADMINISTRATION.
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Stop 5: Aspinwall Avenue to Edgewood Street – Prone to long delays. Many former EPA employees lived in this area before the Agency was shut down. They continue to wander the streets, confused, asking people if they’ve seen any gray wolves around. They will cause traffic backups. They might get on the bus and ask if it goes to Chlorofluorocarbon Boulevard. Instruct the bus drivers to just say yes to any questions like this — it won’t matter what the driver says anyway. The cognitive functions of the EPA zombies no longer operate as a result of drinking trichloroethylene like it was f****** ginger ale since Inauguration Day to stay alive. Instead of paying the fare in our new currency of gold doubloons, they might try to pay with shredded slips of the Clean Water Act. To avoid even longer delays, instruct drivers to just take them.
Stop 6: Edgewood Street to The Eternal Gasoline Fire Pit Where the Interstate Used to Be – Inform the driver to use caution. He should start applying the brakes well before the edge of the pit is visible. If he waits until its flames enter his sight, it will be too late. The cannibal refugees from what was once South Dakota have booby-trapped its charred earthen ring. Do not stare into the abyss where the Wendy’s drive-thru once stood. Who could have foreseen that when an executive order closed the Department of Education a vortex would open into a 5th dimension land of mist and pain? The bus will be pulled into the molten hellfire, and the half-humanoid South Dakotans will feast on the desiccated flesh of each screaming soul unfortunate enough to be caught on the bus. Plus, the 11A will then be hopelessly behind schedule.
I ask myself, what is authenticity and does it really matter? Italians are, of course, passionate about their food culture and ready at all times to chastise a foreigner for not understanding that right combinations or sequences of flavors. Salad always comes after the entrée -- never before. Pasta and soup fill the same slot in the meal, so you eat one or the other and not both. Plum tomatoes are for pasta sauce, globe tomatoes are for salad. And so it goes, a dizzying array of rules and regulations for how you eat. But still I wonder, what is the importance of authenticity?
Italian food and flavors changed dramatically after 1492 with the influx of the New World fruits and vegetables -- tomatoes, corn, beans, peppers, potatoes -- that were gradually integrated over four centuries of gardening and cooking and are at the core of today's version of Italian food. If we wanted to be really authentic with Italian food, shouldn't we do away with all the invasive species? Doesn't that make tomato sauce and polenta inauthentic?
Food is not static. What we eat is constantly evolving and changing. New things become available. When I was a child in Rome, cilantro, limes, and yams were unknown and unavailable; today, thanks to immigration and the global produce trade, you can probably find all three at the corner vegetable stand. When I first started paying attention to my neighbors' farm in Tuscany, they were extremely self-sufficient in terms of their food. They grew, raised, and foraged probably 90 percent of what they consumed. Their food and flavors were delicious and unvarying, and the dishes Mita cooked formed the basis of my understanding of Italian food.
And yet as the times changed and they began to watch television and shop for some food at the supermarket, variances drifted in. One year we had pasta with a canned truffle and cream sauce. Another Easter my mother was surprised by violets in the salad. "I saw it on TV," Mita said. Is it inauthentic to be inspired by new ingredients? Is it inauthentic to take the combination of insalata Caprese and manipulate the ingredients until they no longer resemble mozzarella, tomatoes, and basil but the flavor combination remains the same?
I cringe when Americans do strange things to classic Italian food: Spaghetti and meatballs has me running out the door with an excuse about my house burning down. Yet while I have never seen spaghetti and meatballs on a menu in Italy, I have seen plenty of fresh-off-the-boat Italian chefs appropriate the dish and add it to their repertoire.
Much as Italian food was changed by the discovery of the Americas and recently by immigration and a global market, Italian immigrants who came to America 100 years ago were influenced by the new ingredients and the lack of availability of ingredients that were common back home. Is it inauthentic to use Vietnamese fish sauce when we are pretty sure that 2,000 years ago the ancient Romans made and consumed fish sauce themselves?
As of Wednesday, the Pakistani supply routes for American forces into Afghanistan had been closed for 89 days. With no resumption in sight for normal supply lines, Army leaders are coming to grips with the startling reality the U.S. military might not have access to Pakistan’s ports to haul out the massive infrastructure it has built up in Afghanistan.
The Army is now testing whether soldiers and contractors can drive out the countless metal containers on a route called the Northern Distribution Network, that winds through the countries north of Afghanistan. If they must rely only on that route and air transport, it could as much as quintuple the cost, said Maj. Gen. Kevin Leonard, the head of Military Surface Deployment and Distribution Command.
Pakistan closed the border to NATO in November after an air strike by a U.S. drone accidentally killed 24 Pakistani soldiers. The U.S. had enlisted a team of contractors driving what are called Jingo trucks through the Pakistan and Afghan mountains from Pakistan’s ports packed with military supplies.
NATO has since had to rely more heavily on air transport, as well as trucks and trains driven through countries north of Afghanistan. Leonard said the U.S. has even used trains traveling along a Siberian railroad to supply U.S. soldiers.
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Yet another challenge for the Army today is a basic question of timing: Combat continues in Afghanistan even as plans for the pullout have begun. That means the Army must be careful what it ships into Afghanistan, said James Dwyer, deputy Army chief of staff for logistics.
The service must carefully track what exactly is left in Afghanistan what supplies are coming in over those last months. The amount of gear and equipment left at Iraq forward operating bases surprised many transportation officials who arrived to move it out.
"Everything going in must eventually come out,” he said. “We have to be careful about sending what they need.”
"... that holster is gayer than Tom Cruise holding a box of pink dildoes."
My friend David Walker was the Comptroller General of the United States and head of the Government Accountability Office (GAO) from 1998 to 2008. He now tours the country talking about the need for fiscal responsibility. He heads a group called Comeback America.
David points out that if you simply eliminated all the “tax expenditures” (tax deductions), taxes would go up $1.3 trillion a year. If you combined that with serious entitlement reform, a much lower tax rate (the lows 20s as the top rate), and did $3 in spending cuts for every $1 in tax increases, you could balance the budget for the foreseeable future. His website lists numerous tax and budget proposals, besides his own. He points out the necessity (and I wholeheartedly agree) to have bipartisan cooperation to avoid a fiscal disaster. He demonstrates that we have $75 trillion in unfunded liabilities in Medicare, Social Security, and pensions.
Actually, the number $75 trillion is not all that interesting to me, for the simple reason that we can’t pay it. It will never happen. Far more interesting is the question, when will we realize we can’t pay it and what will we do? Or maybe, what will we do when the bond market decides we can’t pay it and begins to ratchet up interest rates? Unless we begin to get control of the deficit, we could face a very bleak future.
There are ways to get serious entitlement reform. The very conservative Congressman Paul Ryan and the quite liberal Senator Ron Wyden have combined to come up with a plan for reforming Medicare that goes a long way toward what is needed. And it has upset a lot of people serving in Congress with them. But such compromise and cooperation is precisely what must happen if we are to avoid a true crisis. Whether you agree with every small detail in their proposal, you should applaud their willingness to seek bipartisan solutions.
I get rather strong letters from my conservative friends chiding me for not “keeping the faith.” What we need, I am told, is smaller government and less spending. But when I press them as to whether the path we are on will result in crisis, they almost always agree that if nothing is done we will see a severe crisis. So my next question is, do they think we should hold the philosophical line, or allow the country to fall into economic chaos?
I have spent much of my life holding that line. But my analysis is that without a deficit solution we will enter another depression that will take years to come out of. And waiting until one party or the other has total control of Congress and the White House is not the answer. We are getting to the Endgame. Time is running out. We have a few precious years to set the ship of state back on a better course. I would rather keep the ship from sinking than argue about what should be on the menu at dinner. We can worry about that when the leaks in the boat are fixed.
And for those who asked, I still think we will do the right thing. Cutting spending will have consequences. We should do it slowly (over 4-5 years), and that will mean a Muddle Through Economy with more risks of recession. I talk of dire consequences only if we fail to fix the deficit. I think the former outcome is more likely. If you don’t share my optimism, then you should plan for a depression. And if we get to the end of 2013 and it is clear that no compromise is forthcoming, I will probably get much more concerned. Maybe even become downright gloomy. Just saying.
Brazil's Regional Service for the Investigation and Prevention of Aeronautical Accidents is looking into the reasons why a rescue helicopter disintegrated shortly after landing in the northern state of Para on Wednesday.
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Officials believe the helicopter experienced what is known as ground resonance, a condition that happens when the aircraft's rotor is working while the helicopter is on the ground.
Four people that were travelling aboard the helicopter were injured.
Every time you go shopping, you share intimate details about your consumption patterns with retailers. And many of those retailers are studying those details to figure out what you like, what you need, and which coupons are most likely to make you happy. Target, for example, has figured out how to data-mine its way into your womb, to figure out whether you have a baby on the way long before you need to start buying diapers.
Charles Duhigg outlines in the New York Times how Target tries to hook parents-to-be at that crucial moment before they turn into rampant — and loyal — buyers of all things pastel, plastic, and miniature. He talked to Target statistician Andrew Pole — before Target freaked out and cut off all communications — about the clues to a customer’s impending bundle of joy. Target assigns every customer a Guest ID number, tied to their credit card, name, or email address that becomes a bucket that stores a history of everything they’ve bought and any demographic information Target has collected from them or bought from other sources. Using that, Pole looked at historical buying data for all the ladies who had signed up for Target baby registries in the past.
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As Pole’s computers crawled through the data, he was able to identify about 25 products that, when analyzed together, allowed him to assign each shopper a “pregnancy prediction” score. More important, he could also estimate her due date to within a small window, so Target could send coupons timed to very specific stages of her pregnancy.
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So Target started sending coupons for baby items to customers according to their pregnancy scores. Duhigg shares an anecdote — so good that it sounds made up — that conveys how eerily accurate the targeting is. An angry man went into a Target outside of Minneapolis, demanding to talk to a manager:
“My daughter got this in the mail!” he said. “She’s still in high school, and you’re sending her coupons for baby clothes and cribs? Are you trying to encourage her to get pregnant?”
The manager didn’t have any idea what the man was talking about. He looked at the mailer. Sure enough, it was addressed to the man’s daughter and contained advertisements for maternity clothing, nursery furniture and pictures of smiling infants. The manager apologized and then called a few days later to apologize again.
On the phone, though, the father was somewhat abashed. “I had a talk with my daughter,” he said. “It turns out there’s been some activities in my house I haven’t been completely aware of. She’s due in August. I owe you an apology.”
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I can promise you that Target is not the only store doing this. Those people chilled by stores’ tracking and profiling them may want to consider going the way of the common criminal — and paying for far more of their purchases in cash.
