It’s an overused genre, but I thought this was a pretty good “Hitler is pissed” video about Carmageddon. (via) Here’s an open thread.
It’s 5 AM and You are Listening to Los AngelesPost + Comments (32)
Read a fucking book.
mistermix has been a Balloon Juice writer since 2010.
by $8 blue check mistermix| 32 Comments
This post is in: Open Threads
It’s an overused genre, but I thought this was a pretty good “Hitler is pissed” video about Carmageddon. (via) Here’s an open thread.
It’s 5 AM and You are Listening to Los AngelesPost + Comments (32)
by $8 blue check mistermix| 51 Comments
This post is in: Science & Technology
Amazon has dropped the price of the 3G Kindle to $139, and the WiFi Kindle to $114, if you’re willing to tolerate ads on the home page of the device. I like my Kindle, and for those of you who have one or are considering one, I wanted to share a couple of tips for reading long-form magazine articles.
The Kindle is good for one thing, reading text, but for that it’s excellent. I prefer the Kindle’s screen over any backlit LCD, no matter how high the resolution. With battery life measured in weeks, and weight measured in ounces, it’s great to take on trips even though I’m the kind of person who always travels with a laptop. Even though Amazon would like you to use Kindle to buy books and subscribe to periodicals via their store, every Kindle includes an email address which allows you to email content to the device. In the past few months, I’ve used that address to read hundreds of magazine articles on my Kindle.
Kindle comes in have WiFi and 3G versions. The 3G version connects using the AT&T cell phone network or wireless Internet, and the WiFi version can only use WiFi. Both versions will let you email content to the device, but since the 3G version costs Amazon money, Amazon charges you a few cents to get content when the device is on 3G. To avoid those charges, 3G owners have a regular Kindle email address and a free one. Use the free one unless you don’t mind spending a buck or two to get articles on your Kindle. Both of these email addresses are managed on your “Manage your Kindle” page on Amazon. To avoid spam, Amazon will only let email addresses that you authorize communicate with your Kindle. For any of the following to work, you need to set up your email address and allow a couple of email addresses to communicate with your Kindle on the “Manage your Kindle” page.
The first service that I find useful is a site called Delivereads. The owner of the site sends out a weekly “newsletter” that has around 4 long-form magazine articles. He’s got pretty good taste, and the service is totally free. If you’re at all intrigued about reading magazine content on your Kindle, I’d give this a shot to see if it’s worth the trouble.
The second service is Klip.me. It’s delivered as a browser extension in Chrome and Safari, and a bookmarklet in Firefox and IE. What that means is that users of Chrome, for example, will get a little button in their toolbar after installing Klip.me. When you press the button, the contents of the page you’re viewing will be sent to your Kindle’s email address. Usually, articles sent that way show up in under a minute. I’ve tried a couple of other, similar services, and this one is by far the best.
When I see a long article that I want to read later, I go to the “print” or “single page” version, and hit the Klip.me button. Because the Kindle’s formatting is much simpler than a web page, and because a lot of publishers are trying to maximize page views, this doesn’t always work, but I’ve found that it’s fairly reliable, and after a few tries, you can usually judge which pages aren’t going to be sent correctly.
Finally, a site that’s worth a visit for more long-form magazine writing is Byliner. This site allows you to search for online magazine articles by authors you like, and it also has a section called “Byliner Originals”. These are “Kindle singles”, which usually cost about 99 cents, that are commissioned specifically for the site.
When I first got my Kindle, I subscribed to a couple of magazines, but I found that they really weren’t worth the money. I’d rather pay a la carte, but that market is still in its infancy. I’d like to see more curated content like Delivereads, and I’d be willing to pay for it. Since Google is going to create a Kindle-like reader, and Amazon is probably going to break the $100 price point with its next Kindle, I think there’s a market here.
by $8 blue check mistermix| 85 Comments
This post is in: An Unexamined Scandal
A few of the smarter libertarian bloggers (EDK, Balko) are upset because an overzealous public health MD is wondering if obese children should be taken from their parents.
Before we slide down a slippery slope, let’s look at a couple of cases. Here’s one:
That piece [in the journal Pediatrics] discussed a 440-pound 16-year-old girl who developed breathing problems from excess weight and nearly died at a University of Wisconsin hospital. Doctors discussed whether to report her family for neglect. But they didn’t need to, because her medical crisis “was a wake-up call” for her family, and the girl ended up losing about 100 pounds, said co-author Dr. Norman Fost, a medical ethicist at the university’s Madison campus.
Another case involved a mother who lost custody of her 555 lb. 14-year-old son, a boy who’s now living with his aunt and has lost 200 lbs.
Both of those examples are conspicuously absent from ED’s and Balko’s articles. I assume that’s because it’s easier for Balko to call it “self-evidently horrifying” than it is to look at the evidence, and it’s easier for ED to go down a long “what if” chain that ends up with non-vaccinated kids being taken away from parents. Apparently, the real-world evidence of parents feeding their kids to death doesn’t take place in a frictionless, two-dimensional plane that is infinite in all directions, so it must be ignored.
Speaking of the real world, taking away children is well-nigh impossible unless the kid has been beaten hard enough to break bones, fucked by a close family member, unfed or otherwise seriously abused. I have a number of good friends and family members who are healthcare workers, and they’ll all tell you that there are cases that keep them up nights where a child is clearly being neglected but no state intervention is possible. Part of the reason is that it takes all kinds of money to run a good child welfare and foster care system, so the current system is overloaded and only able to deal with the worst possible cases. So, no, your roly-poly or non-vaccinated kid will, as a practical matter, never be taken away from you.
But even if the child welfare system were better-financed and empowered to take away some obese kids, do these smart and thoughtful libertarians really think that it’s state overreach to allow some state intervention for 440-555 lb children? If so, we need more argument than Balko’s self-evidence and ED’s slippery slope.
First They Came for Happy Meals, Then They Came for Our ChildrenPost + Comments (85)
by $8 blue check mistermix| 47 Comments
This post is in: Open Threads
It was a long, hard slog against the heathens, but this true believer finally earned the right to wear his religious headgear in his drivers’ license picture.
Open thread by request.
by $8 blue check mistermix| 48 Comments
This post is in: Election 2012
Kyle Kondik of Larry Sabato’s group has written up their first set of House rankings, and it’s a mixed bag. Democrats need 24 seats to win back the House, and Sabato’s forecast has 30 Republican seats in play. This is a redistricting year, but it looks like neither party will gain much (if anything) from redrawn districts. So, at best, it looks like a big lift for Democrats in the House, and the Senate is also going to be tight, with a bunch of safe Republican seats and a few shaky Democratic ones.
Kondik uses the 1948 election as a recent historical example where Democrats flipped the House after a Republican mid-term wave. In that election, Harry Truman ran against the “do-nothing 80th Congress”, and the parallels are interesting:
Under Dewey’s leadership, the Republicans had enacted a platform at their 1948 convention that called for expanding social security, more funding for public housing, civil rights legislation, and promotion of health and education by the federal government. These positions were, however, unacceptable to the conservative Congressional Republican leadership. Truman exploited this rift in the opposing party by calling a special session of Congress on “Turnip Day” (referring to an old piece of Missouri folklore about planting turnips in late July) and daring the Republican Congressional leadership to pass its own platform. The 80th Congress played into Truman’s hands, delivering very little in the way of substantive legislation during this time. The GOP’s lack of action in the “turnip” session of Congress allowed Truman to continue his attacks on the “do-nothing” Republican-controlled Congress. Truman simply ignored the fact that Dewey’s policies were considerably more liberal than most of his fellow Republicans, and instead he concentrated his fire against what he characterized as the conservative, obstructionist tendencies of the unpopular 80th Congress.
As much as we’d like Michelle Bachmann and her closeted pray-away-the-gay husband to be the Republican candidate, Mitt Romney will probably grind out a win. By next Fall, he’ll be running towards the center, away from the Teatard House. Because today’s Republicans no longer have a positive agenda, a special session of Congress would be pointless. But running against the do-nothing House, combined with a strategy that cherry picks some of Romney’s recent base pandering and compares it to clips of, say, Louie Gohmert or Bachmann, is a winning strategy for Obama that could also give him some coattails.
This also gives Obama an opportunity to turn swing voters without damaging their delicate and exquisitely tuned feelings. It’s hard to tell people that they elected someone who’s crazy, because it makes them look stupid — discerning swing voters should have garnered that from the 2010 campaign. But if you tell them that they elected someone who’s lazy, that’s a different matter, because you can’t tell lazy from a campaign commercial.
by $8 blue check mistermix| 37 Comments
This post is in: Our Failed Media Experiment, Our Failed Political Establishment
Somehow the beltway media missed this in the discussion of the debt ceiling, but right now, the real rate of return on government debt is negative (via):
Suppose the government had two choices. It could either pay for infrastructure improvements as it went along out of tax revenue or it could borrow money build the infrastructure now and then repay the money with tax revenues.
Ordinarily the question would be, does the advantage of building quickly outweigh the cost of the interest.
However, right now the interest cost is negative. The government saves money by borrowing now rather than waiting and paying cash. Let me say again because I have noticed that this goes against so much intuition that its hard for many people to wrap around when I first say it.
The government will wind up paying more if it decides to pay cash for a project than it will if it decides to borrow. This is irrespective of the return on the project itself or the advantages of avoiding delays or anything like that. It is simply that the cost of borrowing is negative.
It is cheaper than paying cash.
Speaking of borrowing, one of our big creditors thinks we might want to pare back our military spending (via):
The chief of the General Staff of the People’s Liberation Army, Chen Bingde, told reporters he thought the U.S. should cut back on defense spending for the sake of its taxpayers. He was speaking during a joint news conference in which he traded barbs with visiting U.S. counterpart Adm. Mike Mullen.
“I know the U.S. is still recovering from the financial crisis,” Chen said. “Under such circumstances, it is still spending a lot of money on its military and isn’t that placing too much pressure on the taxpayers?
“If the U.S. could reduce its military spending a bit and spend more on improving the livelihood of the American people … wouldn’t that be a better scenario?” he said.
by $8 blue check mistermix| 25 Comments
This post is in: Open Threads
I’ll just outsource my comment on the chickenshit, candyass McConnell/Boehner cave to Miss Peggy Lee.
And, somehow, this seems relevant:
Here’s an open thread.