All Things in Moderation

Cinemagraphs. They are photos where just a small portion is animated. Some are neat, some are creepy.

With the poverty, gang activity and high murder rate in my home town, Memphis, TN, it’s nice to see the police are still taking time to do the important work of stamping out the crime of illegal gardening.

See Jeb Corliss Grind the Crack. How someone can possibly learn to do that without killing themselves first, I have no idea.

All that time, Chewbacca was apparently mackin’ on Princess Leia. Who knew? But . . . who could blame him? Laugh it up, fuzzball, indeed.

Hurt your brain with 92 different optical illusions (some of those aren’t illusions, exactly, but they can still make your eyes hurt).

Boo! It’s the Ghost Cities of China. Talk about a real estate bubble. Well, they clearly believe government stimulus is the way to go. At least their shovel ready jobs aren’t in Finland!

Of course, I’m still enamored of Hashima, Japan, otherwise known as Battleship Island.

Several years ago, I tried to do a few musical covers. One of the best was probably my cover of Blondie’s Dreaming, although, I think my voice still leaves something to be desired. I mean, it “has character”. — KW

I loves me some Elizabeth Warren, I do!

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There’s lots of stuff being worked on, but nothing done, so I thought I might open up a morning thread. So, fellow ATiMers, Stand and Deliver.

If you weren’t a teenager in the 1980s who just got MTV, the Stand and Deliver thing probably won’t mean that much to you. But who isn’t amused by the site a pretty kitteh in a giant pile of what could be snow, or could be cocaine. Who knows?

The iPhone 5 is going to debut Oct 4! Hopefully, AT&T will drop the price of the iPhone 4, and I will buy one of those.

It’s been a rough 10 years for the middle class, statistically speaking. Anecdotally, it doesn’t seem any rougher, to me, than what I observed in the ’70s and ’80s. But statistics don’t lie!

This post has been brought to you by Montanto’s House of the Future.

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Tax the rich.

Yet most people I know don’t want to trade their slick smartphones for “Matrix”-era Motorolas. The people I know are happier now than they were in the ’90s. They do not see a 15.1 percent poverty rate as a cause for panic. Their wages are not lower than they were 14 years ago. Today’s high poverty rate is not, as far as I can tell, a mainstream concern. This is one of the reasons the American economy is in such trouble.  

The Great Recession found most of its victims among the least educated Americans. The unemployment rate for Americans who lack both high school and college degrees is 23.9 percent. But these are not the people you will typically hear from in the mainstream media; they’re not a major force in popular culture or in the policy world. Among people with bachelor’s degrees or higher, the unemployment rate is 4.3 percent — close to the number that the Federal Reserve would accept as “full employment” if it applied to the country as a whole. I hate to use the phrase “skilled labor,” as it seems like a pretty haughty thing for a guy with a degree in theater who can’t change a tire to say, but the truth is that the economy has been unforgiving to those who tried to go right from high school into a trade.  

The result is that we have 46 million people living below the poverty line — and for the most part, living there quietly.

And then he says: “America can’t afford 46 million poor without raising taxes on the rich.”

As many no doubt know, I’m open to more progressive taxation on the wealthy, and especially the super-duper-wealthy. But is wealth redistribution the answer to poverty? Could we ever, even in the most optimistic light, expect to be able to tax the wealthy enough to make up the gap, and bring the poor above the poverty line? Is a model that creates economic growth by taxing the wealthy, subsidizing the poor, and seeing economic growth proceed from there one that could possibly be sustainable?

I am very dubious. Not that I don’t think the rich can afford, and maybe should be paying, more money for more government projects, money to the space program, infrastructure, and maybe even expanding medicare or shoring up Social Security.

One more thing: I commonly argue that context matters, and that it’s a worthwhile thing to consider modern American poverty in the light of worldwide poverty, both present day and historically. The common response to this is the same one the author brings up. That is, yes, poverty in America may be much better than poverty in Nigeria, but “is ‘better than Nigeria’ really a standard we want to adopt in judging American economic conditions?”

Of course not. But if you never stop to appreciate what you have achieved, and what few successes you’ve won, how do you know you are making any progress at all? Moreover, what’s the point in trying to make progress? No point in fighting a war on poverty, because as long as anybody has less than anybody else, you’ve accomplished nothing.

I’m rambling. It’s late. I should go to bed. I just happened to read that Op-Ed in The Daily, and I thought I would share it.

Good night to all, and good morning to many.

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US Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner has warned European leaders to stop the “loose talk” about divisions over how to solve the eurozone debt crisis, the Dow Jones news agency has reported. Speaking at a closed meeting of eurozone finance ministers in Poland, he is reported to have told them that the divisions were “very damaging”. The eurozone ministers delayed a decision on Greece’s next bailout loan.

Yet they did announce tougher economic governance rules. Set to come into force for all nations in the European Union (EU) from October, they will make it easier for states to be punished for overspending. Mr Geithner reportedly said: “What’s very damaging is not just seeing the divisiveness in the debate over strategy in Europe but the ongoing conflict between countries and the [European] central bank.”

He said that “governments and central banks need to take out the catastrophic risk to markets”. BBC

Sounds like a Labor thug! The unhinged will go off!. Timmy is advocating wanton violence against catastrophic risk mongers.
But seriously, some guy from the US saying, ‘don’t talk back,’ at least he didn’t say, ‘eat your peas.’ Loose talk, is that what opposition to can kicking bank bailouts is called nowadays? I’ll bet the old farts in the German Parliament are not amused.

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This is launched off some of Shrink’s points about China. Hi, Shrink!

I’ve pointed to this video by Hans Rosling before. Yes, I’m doing it again.I love this quote early on from the video: “The world view that my students had corresponded to the state of the world the year their teachers were born.”

The point being, I would still argue that, broadly, the developed world is dragging the developing world into the 21st century (over years, not news cycles) and that the big data points support this view. Or you could say the developing world is joining the developed world, whether or not we’re doing anything to make it happen.

Whichever way you look at it, things are much better than they were, and are likely to become much better still.

Okay, and this is tangential to my main point, but since I can’t embed videos in comments, I’m going to do it here. Hans Rosling talks about how ending poverty is crucial to controlling population growth. And it’s true: the best birth control in the world is not laughter, it’s money.

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*crickets*

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I’m often prone to say there are lies, damned lies, statistics, and predictions. So, of course, I enjoyed this episode of the Freakonomics podcast:

Joe Namath, pension fund managers, Romanian witches, psychic grandmothers, the Farmer’s Almanac, Mad Money, Barney Frank, Donald Rumsfeld . . . good stuff.

http://www.ritholtz.com/blog/2011/07/freakonomics-the-folly-of-prediction/

“It’s impossible to predict the future, but humans can’t help themselves. From the economy to the presidency to the Super Bowl, educated and intelligent people promise insight and repeatedly fail by wide margins. These mistakes and misses go unpunished, both publicly and in our brain, which has become trained to ignore the record of those who make them.“


If you don’t already know, you’ll discover I’m a big fan of Freakonomics, TED Talks, the Ricochet podcast, and No Agenda. I will quote them often. You have been warned.

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Ya think?

“Federal investigators issued a report concluding that the Deepwater Horizon oil-rig disaster was primarily due to BP’s cost-cutting measures and poor safety standards — and that BP is ultimately to blame.”

Video here:

http://www.thedaily.com/page/2011/09/15/091511-news-gulf-oil-spill-video/

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Update: We’re using this thread to discuss site issues today (Thursday).

If you run back and forth and juggle all things in your life, you get here and want to see where the people who said something said it, especially if in response so no one feels ignored if you talked to someone else or started with a new post.

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