Megan doesn’t care for Matt Taibbi’s takedown of Byron York, in which Taibbi makes it sound like York has no idea what he’s talking about with respect to the financial crisis.

Naturally, I have no idea about any of this stuff other than feeling vaguely hostile toward Byron York. Still, I was a little uncomfortable when I first read that exchange: Taibbi’s scolding about credit default swaps came at a time when a lot of other people on the internet were also suddenly speaking knowledgeably about the financial meltdown and the rarified financial instruments to blame for it. That wave of spontaneous expertise seemed to occur suspiciously shortly after the air date of an episode of This American Life that discussed the crisis and CDSes in particular.

Which is not to say that TAL is wrong; I listened to that episode, too, and it seemed excellent! But it’s been both amusing and off-putting to see so many people brazenly parroting the same single News Source White People Like. I have no idea if this criticism actually applies to Taibbi, but the conversation between him and York certainly made it sound like it could.

UPDATE: Since Megan kindly linked back to me, I should probably add that while I can’t be sure that my speculation about Taibbi’s argument is correct, it’s very clear that York’s pathetic line about Freddie and Fannie is a regurgitated conservative talking point — a particularly lame, objectionable and well-debunked one at that. It seems likely that both sides of that conversation were blindly reciting other people’s arguments.

Michael Pollan was on Fresh Air a moment ago. It’s part of his world/public radio tour in support of Farmer In Chief, last week’s NYT Magazine article asking the next president to adopt better agricultural policies. I heard him giving pretty much the same spiel on a Philadelphia-area NPR station over the weekend, too.

I don’t want to quibble with the man’s larger crusade, but he keeps making one particular point that really bugs me. Pollan is fond of pointing out that since 1960 the average American household’s spending on food has dropped as a share of income, from 18 percent to 10.

I’m pretty sure this is dumb. Or half, dumb, anyway. I’m sure food has gotten cheaper in absolute terms, and that those savings have been paid for in animal suffering and environmental destruction.

But it’s also the case that household income tends to increase faster than the rate of inflation, while human nutritional requirements do not. Wikipedia says that real median income has increased about 30% since 1967. Unless I’m missing something, that means that if a family used to spend $1800 on food, today they spend $1300 — not $1000, as Pollan implies. If median household income data was available for 1960, rather than 1967, you can bet that the differential would be smaller still. And if you consider the fact that household size has declined from 3 to 2.6 people since 1967, the gap shrinks even more.

Of course, the picture is much more complicated than just a dollar amount. I’m sure we eat out a lot more, eat more processed food, eat more meat, pay more for specialty food and less for staples, and generally eat in ways that support Pollan’s thesis. But this particular argument about income is a bit dishonest, and I wish he’d quit using it. Nutritional needs do not scale with income.

This is a pet peeve of mine with economic arguments about consumption in general: they tend not to pay any attention to the limits of human biology. This is why I’m similarly suspicious of estimates of exploding per capita bandwidth consumption. Yes, our bandwidth needs will continue to increase. But the human nervous system has its own bandwidth limits, too. Maybe there’ll be one more video resolution revolution — HDTV2, let’s say (pending the invention of a more confusing acronym). But to go beyond that will require video walls — they look cool in Total Recall, but why would you pay for something larger than your field of view? — or three-dimensional holo-whatnots. I’m sure the latter will be popularized eventually, but I’ll probably be pretty old and confused by then.

The human fovea has a finite number of neurons, and we’re already pretty good at keeping them busy. Personally, I think that household bandwidth use is likely to level off sometime in the next decade or two — there’s only so much data that a human body can use. Our bandwidth expenses as a percentage of income will then start to fall, both because the growth in demand has slowed and because income continues to rise, but also because the resource itself will continue to get cheaper as technology improves.

That won’t constitute proof that we aren’t spending enough on bandwidth, though. It’ll just mean that we’ve found some other stuff to spend our new money on, rather than simply ramping up our budget linearly. (My guess: hyper-ipods.)

My friend V made this video and asked me to pass it along:

Scary! And of course it’s hard to argue with the basic point that Sarah Palin is less qualified to run the country than the average Model UN participant.

The video implicitly makes another, more subtle point, too: Vladimir Putin may be a vampire.

Write your own “blood for oil” joke — I’m too terrified to do it.

Julian is killin’ it over at Ars — be sure to check out his latest. It’s not exactly surprising that the content industry would lie about the economic impact of piracy, but it’s fascinating to read Julian’s account of how the numbers they quote were born. He’s done a real service to us all by hunting this story down.

This bit, from near the article’s end, raised my eyebrows:

… as Yochai Benkler has argued persuasively, IP is an input to innovation as well as the product of innovation. So under certain very specific conditions, “piracy” can produce net gains. While it seems extremely unlikely that this is the case in the aggregate—IP theft almost certainly does impose net economic costs—simply calculating lost sales and licencing fees, assuming someone could produce a credible figure, would not provide a complete picture of the economic impact of IP infringement. It would give us, at most, one side of the ledger.

Julian is smart to be conservative when making this point, but I suspect that those “very specific conditions” aren’t all that specific at all. My hunch is that experience born of unauthorized use of IP provides necessary context to a huge variety of wealth-creating endeavors, even when the unauthorized use doesn’t lead directly to the resulting innovation. This could take the form of a mixtape in a touring band’s van or an automotive engineer checking out how the other guys built their throttle body; either way, the point is that there’s a constant background hum of infringement that’s innocuous and absolutely necessary for our society’s continued functioning, but which is usually only considered during the drafting of RIAA press releases.

I’m not a regular reader of the Corner, but I’ve found myself stopping by after each debate to enjoy a bit of schadenfreude. And, with apologies to Brian — this is his gig — it really just makes no goddamn sense:

Saturday Night Live recently did a terrific sketch on the bailout bill in Congress. Shortly afterward, the sketch — which had been available on NBC’s website — disappeared. The sketch mocked a wealthy couple who profited off subprime mortgages named Herb and Marion Sandler, and it turns out there really is a wealthy couple named Herb and Marion Sandler who made billions off of subprime loans, and speculation was that offending the real Sandlers was the reason for pulling the sketch.


So now the sketch is back up, without any mention of the Sandlers. But as the L.A. Times notes, what’s really curious is that the re-edited sketch removed any satirical references to Barney Frank’s involvement in creating the economic crisis:

In the original skit Sandler addresses Frank, saying, “And thank you Congressman Frank as well as many Republicans for helping block Congressional oversight of our corrupt activities.”


To which Frank replies enthusiastically, “Not at all!”

That’s all gone. I’d love to hear an explanation for that.

Okay, here’s an explanation: when you edit a character out of a scene, it’s awkward to leave in lines that have other actors interacting with that now-nonexistent character. I realize this may seem like kind of a technical point, but I assure you that even those of us who are not professional screenwriters can, with diligence, grasp the dramaturgical logic underlying NBC’s decision.

I’ve got no opinion of the decision to edit out the Sandlers, incidentally. Aside from the Barney Frank impression it was a pretty lousy sketch anyway — making it shorter is a generally good idea.

Once again, I pretty much lost track of the debate by its end — I was typing furiously and drinking too fast. But I guess I agree that Palin seemed to be merely a bit dim, rather than so cartoonishly stupid that you’d hesitate to trust her with solid food.

She did regress in at least one respect, though: her pronunciation. She managed to say the word “nuclear” perfectly correctly during her convention speech. But last night she adopted the “nucular” formulation favored by grade school boys and our current president. Here, check it out.

Palin at the RNC – Nuclear, clearly


Palin at the Debate – Nucular contamination

There are a few ways to react to this. Wolfson linked to this piece at Language Log today, which perceptively notes that:

Ordinary people, faced with what are for them deviant, “wrong”, bits of language, see nothing but a mistake, period. They are resistant to the linguist’s idea that there could be a rationale for the “mistake”, even a system to it, or that, in fact, the very same thing could result from different sources or represent different systems. (This attitude presents a tough challenge when we teach beginning linguistics courses — not only when we talk about dialects, but also when we talk about language acquisition. One of the hardest lessons for many students is that instead of saying what’s wrong, what people “can’t” or “won’t” do, they should be describing what people *do*, and making hypotheses about *why* they do that.)

On the other hand, this is stupid. It’s nuclear. Everybody knows that. Perhaps someday the situation will become sufficiently muddy that a postmodern assessment of the word’s pronunciation will become appropriate. But we’re not there yet. Right now if you press people — even those who say nucular — most will grudgingly admit that there is a correct pronunciation of the word, and that it doesn’t rhyme with “tubular”.

Also, it’s worth pointing out that linguistics is dumb and the classes I had to take about it in college were awful. So there.

No, I prefer to subscribe to a theory along these lines: namely, that the choice to use the “nucular” pronunciation is increasingly a deliberate one, at least among politicians. I suspect that it’s going to eventually become a sign of party allegiance on the right, a little piece of deliberate ignorance designed to subtly defame members of the “Democrat Party”.

The only other explanation I can think of for the discrepancy in Palin’s pronunciation is that her convention speech was spelled out on the teleprompter (which she didn’t use, mind you!) FO-NET-I-KAL-LEE. I suppose that’s plausible enough — you can take your pick between that or the deliberate mispronunciation explanation. As it so often does when examining modern conservative behavior, it’s a toss up between stupidity and malevolence.

This video is making the progressive blogospheric rounds:

It’s good! But I’ve gotta say: if you grew up going to a church with a halfway-competent minister — someone with some charisma and some time spent in seminary — this clip is going to sound pretty familiar. That’s not to diminish it, but the cadence and patterns are amazingly similar to what I listened to every Sunday growing up. This guy’s got talent, no doubt, and his message is an indisputably important one. But it’s a well-trodden form. I guess I just want to point out that if you find this experience particularly moving, you can probably enjoy it on a weekly basis a few blocks from your house. It’ll be a bit more Jesus-y, but the delivery and rhetorical structure will be just as satisfying.

And I say all this as a kid who grew up Presbyterian. The Frozen Chosen! I can only imagine the firestorm that a Baptist with some book-learnin’ could bust out.

ALSO: This speech happened on July 1. Weird.

This has to be a joke. To seriously propose this would reveal a level of idiocy even greater than we’ve seen among recent vice presidential candidates. That, or a brazen and desperate desire to hand billions of dollars to defense contractors.

Via Brian.

Alex Balk:

Why does John McCain tell so many lies? Because lying works! If you didn’t read that AP analysis we mentioned earlier, you really should. It makes the very instructive point that even if the press actually does its job and shows that the lies John McCain and his surrogates tell are, real, honest-to-God lies, it doesn’t make a difference. Noting how the media had debunked many strands in the giant web of lies the McCain team has put out over the last two weeks, the article goes on to admit that it doesn’t really matter:

Major news outlets have written such fact-checking articles for years. “But in the last two election cycles, the very notion that the facts matter seems to be under assault,” said Michael X. Delli Carpini, an authority on political ads at the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School for Communication. “Candidates and their consultants seem to have learned that as long as you don’t back down from your charges or claims, they will stick in the minds of voters regardless of their accuracy or at a minimum, what the truth is will remain murky, a matter of opinion rather than fact.”

Now, real-life evidence. Check out this comment, from a Wired post about the various Palin spoofs — it’s whole point is to catalog parodies, and it’s quite explicit about this!

Hi,

just a question:

http://sarahpalin.typepad.com/

is this real??? I read and read and have a very hard time struggling with the idea that she is really this dumb that she can write this.

Come on, War with Russia, Creationism, Anti-Abortion, but admitting to ban and steal books from the libraryfor those reasons? that’s not at all a sane woman. Please answer: how are u sure it’s her blog??

Thanx

I have read a lot of comments like this over the past few weeks. And while they’re sort of funny, they’re also deeply depressing. I suppose that says as much about my sense of humor as it does about the electorate. But one of those things results in awkward moments at parties, while the other will ultimately lead to the death of thousands, if not millions, if not the destruction of the entire planet.

Doomed, I say!

Ryan and Ezra and Matt are talking about cars that can’t go faster than 75 miles per hour, the idea being that mandating such a change would save lives. I’m not sure what to think about that. I probably shouldn’t bother thinking much — the idea is clearly politically impossible.

But it’s intriguing nonetheless. In particular, it’s interesting to consider this theoretical speed limitation as an analogue of DRM — a means of crippling devices so that consumers don’t misuse them. As you might imagine, I’m not a fan of conventional DRM. I think it’s inevitably circumvented and accomplishes nothing other than inconveniencing users.

On the other hand, I do favor some sorts of restrictions on the devices that consumers can buy and that manufacturers would like to sell to them. I approve of some forms of gun control, for instance, including limitations on the mechanical capabilities of firearms. I think that such restrictions are less easily circumvented than copy protection, and of course the consequences of a single successful circumvention do not represent a system-wide failure in the way that they would within the digital realm. That makes the undertaking a bit more worthwhile in my eyes.

Cars fall somewhere in the middle. There’s already a thriving hobbyist scene devoted to swapping out engine timing chips for less efficient, more powerful alternatives. And of course more generally there’s a ton of aftermarket automotive components that performance tuners can buy. I have no doubt that speed restrictors, however implemented, would be easily beaten by motivated individuals.

But would the inconvenience of upgrading from the default limitation save lives? Probably. I’m not sure how many, though, and it’s conceivable that a speed limitation may cause deaths in ways that this debate’s participants aren’t anticipating. I remain generally suspicious of efforts to cripple devices that consumers can buy.

Mostly unrelatedly, during some preparatory spooky-story reading this weekend I came across this quotation from The Gold-Bug, which I thought sums up the DRM situation pretty nicely:

[I]t may well be doubted whether human ingenuity can construct an enigma of the kind which human ingenuity may not, by proper application, resolve.

Until recently public key cryptography arguably provided a counterexample, but quantum computing seems poised to prove Poe right once again.