Blue Marble Dispatches

Post of the Month...

2009-01-19T21:19:00.000-08:00

Because I dislike those phone robots so very much...

"For a list of all the ways
technology has failed to improve the quality of life
please press three."

-Alice Kahn

Peak Oil in Ten Minutes

2008-12-17T12:38:00.001-08:00

Kevin Drum has the run down.

G20 and Puppies

2008-11-16T00:58:00.000-08:00

A good laugh, from Politico:

The difficulty in working out and coordinating world policy while America's hands are effectively tied until Obama takes office was unintentionally made clear in the statement the group produced announcing that it had agreed to work toward "strengthening transparency and accountability, "enhancing sound regulation" "promoting integrity in financial markets," "reinforcing international cooperation" and "reforming international financial institutions."

The anti-good-things-that-pretty-much-everyone-wants-in-principle lobby did not return phone calls by press time but is widely expected to oppose the agreement, and also to come out against puppies and sunsets.

Let's win this thing

2008-10-22T08:47:00.000-07:00

Mr. Obama’s favorability is the highest for a presidential candidate running for a first term in the last 28 years of Times/CBS polls. Mrs. Palin’s negative rating is the highest for a vice-presidential candidate as measured by The Times and CBS News. Even Dan Quayle, with whom Mrs. Palin is often compared because of her age and inexperience on the national scene, was not viewed as negatively in the 1988 campaign.

Noted without comment.

Via Daily Kos.

Herman Daly Rocks

2008-10-22T07:27:00.000-07:00

If only I could be this clever (From Michael Pollan's "Farmer in Chief"):

What was once a regional food economy is now national and increasingly global in scope — thanks again to fossil fuel. Cheap energy — for trucking food as well as pumping water — is the reason New York City now gets its produce from California rather than from the “Garden State” next door, as it did before the advent of Interstate highways and national trucking networks. More recently, cheap energy has underwritten a globalized food economy in which it makes (or rather, made) economic sense to catch salmon in Alaska, ship it to China to be filleted and then ship the fillets back to California to be eaten; or one in which California and Mexico can profitably swap tomatoes back and forth across the border; or Denmark and the United States can trade sugar cookies across the Atlantic. About that particular swap the economist Herman Daly once quipped, “Exchanging recipes would surely be more efficient.”

Credit-Cards are the New Mortgages

2008-10-22T07:22:00.000-07:00

It seems that credit cards have been chopped up and securitized just like mortgages, and we're probably about to see a lot more defaults. The scariest part for me:

That's bad news for players like JPMorgan Chase and Bank of America that have largely sidestepped—and even benefited from—the mortgage mess but have major credit-card operations.

Bank of America was just profiled as one of the smart ones, and I said to myself "At least we have a few big banks that aren't on the verge of collapse." Sigh.

Via Matt Yglesias.

We don't need no water...

2008-10-22T06:50:00.000-07:00

Nice.

And the Pendulum Swings

2008-10-20T09:53:00.000-07:00

It seems every time I read something that really pisses me off (see the last post), I find something that touches me and gets me back to equilibrium:

I was raised by my grandmother and am from a military family. Everyone is a Republican. I was the first to go to college and am finishing up my graduate degree. ...

I am currently in a relationship with a black man in what John McCain would describe as the "real Virginia." My family, after three years, are just now becoming comfortable, if you want to call it that, with my boyfriend. They claim that he isn't like all of the other *****.

Before my grandmother died, she left me with a note that she didn't want me to open until she died. I opened that letter. My grandmother — who has never referred to blacks appropriately — had [early] voted for Obama. She called him a "socialist" in her letter but she voted for him because she said that maybe the values that her parents instilled in her, which was to hate anyone that didn't look like her, would not be passed on if people saw Obama in office.

It was especially touching given my current relationship, and I honestly believe that there are many others out there just like my grandmother.

Robocalls

2008-10-20T09:17:00.000-07:00

This is what we're up against, and this particular example is getting another hour of volunteer time out of me. From Sean Quinn:

Over in Indiana, PA and Northern Cambria, PA, volunteers fielded complaints of a massive wave of ugly robocalls both paid for by John McCain's campaign and those paid for by third parties. The third party call was interactive, and purported to be from Barack Obama himself. The call starts out reasonably, and then "Obama" asks what the listener thinks is the most important issue. Whatever the response, "Obama" then launches into a profane and crazed tirade using "n***er" and other shock language.

From what we've seen, this IS the McCain ground campaign. Robocalls count as "touches" on voters, as do direct mail pieces such as this one. As David Plouffe said in today's fundraising letter to supporters, "These tactics are all that the McCain campaign and their allies have left."

Crossing State Lines

2008-10-16T09:39:00.000-07:00

I forgot to post this after the 2nd US Presidential debate:

John McCain talks about health care:

I want to give every American a $5,000 refundable tax credit. They can take it anywhere, across state lines. Why not? Don't we go across state lines when we purchase other things in America?

My question is, when he says I can cross state lines, does that mean I can go to Canada?

No seriously.

"Stopping a Financial Crisis, the Swedish Way"

2008-09-26T09:26:00.000-07:00

One of these days I'll actually do some real reporting, instead of passing on other people's news stories. Yeah.... one day:

Stopping a Financial Crisis, the Swedish Way

Swedish, Norwegian, and Danish Will Now Be Suspended Because of the Financial Crisis

2008-09-25T10:11:00.000-07:00

From the same book by Romaine: Swedish, Danish, and Norwegian are separate languages largely for political reasons:

"When these [three] languages were standardized, differences were consciously exaggerated."

Romaine gives a recent example, the spelling of the word for "what", which before 1906 was the same in all three langauges. But in 1905, Norway became independent from Sweden, and so a few changes were made:

Original for all three languages: Hvad

After 1906...

Danish: Hvad
Swedish: HVad
Norwegian: Hvad

(These are all pronounced the same way, "Va")

I just thought that was cool. Continue about your business.

Why do Swedes not understand Danish?

2008-09-25T09:46:00.000-07:00

This one is for my Swedish friends, I'm sure they'll relate.

When I was in Stockholm, I heard a lot about how most Danes understand spoken Swedish perfectly, but Swedes, especially those in Stockholm, often have a really hard time understanding Danish (this is curious mainly because Swedish, Danish, and Norwegian are very similar, and most Scandinavians can read newspapers in all three languages).

Well from "Language in Society" by Suzanne Romaine comes this interesting clue:

"However, Norwegians and Danes claim to understand Swedes better than Swedes claim to understand either Norwegians or Danes. How can this be? Studies of mutual intelligibility are not really about linguistic relationships... but about social relationships, since it is people and not the [languages] who understand or do not understand one another. More Norwegians and Danes have been in Sweden than Swedes have been in the other two countries. Only a quarter of Swedes claim to read anything in the other two languages. While 41 percent of Danes and 52 percent of Norwegians listen to Swedish radio, only 9 percent of Swedes listen to Norwegian or Danish radio... more accomodation is made towards Sweden and Swedish because Sweden is a larger and wealthier country."

This is a good point, that mutual intelligibility is shaped as much by social linkages as by the grammar and pronunciation of the languages in question. Most of the Swedes who've mentioned Danish talk about how the Danes "swallow" letters when they speak, which is the most common reason I've heard for why it's hard to understand Danish. But I bet if people spoke and listened to more Danish in Sweden, a lot more Swedes would start to understand. Thoughts from friends in Sweden?

PS There's a lot of American English on Swedish television, and most Swedes seemed to understand my English just fine (or pretended to), even though I swallow words, chop them in two, talk quickly, and mumble. Interesting....

Solar Panel Black Market

2008-09-24T13:24:00.000-07:00

An interesting story in the NYT...

Solar power, with its promise of emissions-free renewable energy, boasts a growing number of fans. Some of them, it turns out, are thieves...

Just ask Glenda Hoffman, whose fury has not abated since 16 solar panels vanished from her roof in this sun-baked town in three separate burglaries in May, sometimes as she slept. She is ready if the criminals turn up again.
“I have a shotgun right next to the bed and a .22 under my pillow,” Ms. Hoffman said.

Police departments in California — the biggest market for solar power, with more than 33,000 installations — are seeing a rash of such burglaries, though nobody compiles overall statistics.

Assuming that installations go up, this is probably going to become a much bigger problem. Which is why this graf at the end of the story caught my eye:

In Europe, where the solar industry is well-established, thievery is entrenched, and measures to ward it off have become standard, including alarm systems and hard-to-unscrew panels.

I'd be interested to see more info about this, I'm sure our European friends could teach us a few things about busting solar panel rings.

And does this mean that one of the green jobs we keep talking about will be solar theft detective?

I guess I missed my 'Ronvoy'

2008-08-30T04:38:00.000-07:00

I didn't even read the story, but the headline is just too good:

Ron Paul followers hitch 'Ronvoys' for Ronstock '08 at RNC

Why am I not going, you ask? I don't like people who publish racist newsletters.

Sarah Palin

2008-08-30T04:29:00.000-07:00

Following up on the last post, here's Sarah Palin, the newly minted Republican Vice-Presidential candidate, on global warming:

What is your take on global warming and how is it affecting our country?
"A changing environment will affect Alaska more than any other state, because of our location. I'm not one though who would attribute it to being man-made"

Awesome.

(Via Matt Yglesias)

The Post-Partisan Environmentalist?

2008-08-27T06:26:00.000-07:00

Over at The Reality-Based Community, Steven Teles is discussing what he sees as Obama's secret weapon:

"I think that there is no question that Obama and the party need to go negative on McCain, in a much more cutting and substantive way than they have so far. But the nature of Obama's appeal, and simply who he is as a person, mean that it will be hard (and probably counter-productive) for him to do so directly. Obama's secret weapon is post-partisan partisanship.

The key rhetorical move in post-partisan partisanship is to say that we need to get beyond partisanship to do x, y and z, all of which are in fact partisan things. You attack the Republicans for being hyper-partisans who prevented x, y and z from being done--like universal health coverage..."

This got me to thinking: it's basically impossible for environmentalists to avoid being partisan in the U.S., at least at the federal level. In Sweden, there seems to be relatively broad agreement that something needs to be done about global warming. But in the U.S., a 2007 poll of Congressional insiders asked 72 Senators and Representatives, "Do you think that it has been proven beyond a reasonable doubt that the Earth is warming because of man-made problems?" 95% of Democrats said yes. In contrast, only 13% of Republicans agreed. Thir. Teen. Percent.

These days, the only way to get our country to actually start solving the global warming problem is to make sure that the GOP is out of power and in the political wilderness. They can believe whatever they want, as long as they can't stop the actual solutions in Congress.