— In defense of street cleaning tickets.

— The famous soda/pop/coke map.

— All about race, roommates, and prejudice.

— Fun with seasonal adjustment of labor market statistics.

— Pros and cons of the House Democrats’ surtax proposal.

Song of the day, Sunset Rubdown “Idiot Heart”.

Thinking about the Dallas Mavericks’ acquisition of Shawn Marion, I looked up his numbers, and there’s really something strange going on with his three point shooting. From the 2002-2003 season through to the 2007-2008 season he consistently averaged over three three-point attempts per game, and shot them reasonably accurately. Not great, but good enough to make it a viable shot. He was a guy, in other words, that you wouldn’t want to leave open from long distance. Someone who can help space the floor and knock down shots.

Then in the 2008-2009 season his attempts crater to 0.8 per game. And a good thing, too, because his accuracy falls to .189 basically making him a guy who you never want to see take the long shot. I’ll confess that I didn’t watch him play in any games last season. Does anyone have a sense of what happened?

Mike Mullen thinks the F-35 may be the last manned fighter. Various stakeholders don’t like that idea, but Robert Farley thinks it’s right:

I guess I’m with Mullen; there are currently jobs that manned warplanes can do that drones can’t perform (human pilots are more visually capable than even the best drones, for example), but a) drones are getting better, b) drones are so much cheaper, and c)taking the pilot out means that you can do a lot of funky, interesting things with an advanced airframe. This isn’t to say that the F-35 (or even the F-22) have no role; they’ll continue to be useful frames for the jobs they’re intended to do for a substantial period of time. But I don’t think there’s a next “next generation” of fighter aircraft. And in any case, it appears that the A-10 will remain the platform of choice for fighting the giant robots that undoubtedly will afflict us in the future…

I’m with Farley on this. The point about cost savings is not totally intuitive and I don’t think it’s widely appreciated in the broader political/policy universe at this point but it’s extremely compelling. Given the long-term budget outlook it’s going to be really vital to start taking a real look at ways to get more bang for our defense buck and shifting to more reliance on unmanned aircraft is a very appealing way of accomplishing that goal. The cost differential is large enough that drones don’t need to be “as good” as human pilots before the fact that you could just have a bunch more of them starts to weigh more heavily.

Washington, DC is afflicted with a plague of “traffic circles” at places like Dupont Circle. These are very annoying for pedestrians, and also put drivers in the position of constantly facing imminent death. And don’t get me started on biking through Thomas Circle. One additional cost of all this madness is that if you go around town telling people that the country should have more “roundabouts” people look at you like you’re insane. These traffic circles are horrible, they say! But as Brad Plumer points out, a roundabout is actually something different and “modern-day roundabouts, in which incoming traffic yields to cars already in the circle, work quite smoothly, which explains why they’re creeping back in fashion.”

What’s so good about roundabouts? Well, relative to traditional intersections they lead to far fewer crashes and thus somewhat less congestion. This isn’t well-suited to every location, but it is something we ought to have more of.

Note also that the TNG portrayal of the Bajorans is pretty much the closest thing I can think of to a mainstream American portrayal of a pro-Palestinian point of view (I think DS9 wound up sort of downplaying the allegory, but it was pretty clear in the original presentation). Meanwhile, arguably her most substantial body of work was as Dr. Julianna Cox on Homicide.

Part of what we’re trying to do in ‘Saving Freedom’ is just show that where we are, we’re about where Germany was before World War II where they became a social democracy. You still had votes but the votes were just power grabs like you see in Iran, and other places in South America, like Chavez is running down in Venezuela. People become more dependent on the government so that they’re easy to manipulate. And they keep voting for more government because that’s where their security is. When our immigrants get here, they’re worried, because they see it happening here.

Look, comparing your domestic political rivals to Nazis is a time-honored tradition. But confusing the Nazis and Germany’s Social Democrats is a scandal. The Social Democrats were the main source of opposition to Hitler at a time when the Communists were bizarrely maintaining that there was no difference between the two and the mainstream parties of the center-right decided that it made sense to form a tactical alliance with Hitler. Social Democrats stand for a generous welfare state and active labor market policies. Nazis try to conquer the world and send people to the gas chamber. Jonah Goldberg aside, this is not a subtle distinction.

Meanwhile, National Review’s Andy McCarthy seems to have decided that since Uighurs are Muslims, violent Communist Party crackdowns must be a good thing.

Needless to say that’s what’s happening with ARRA money. In terms of the stimulus-qua-stimulus this probably doesn’t matter, but it also means we’re not going to be reaping nearly the long-term benefits we could or should from new transportation investmenets.

Brad says, “A recovery in which unemployment is higher two years later than when the recovery began is not much of a recovery. And I don’t see what is going to keep the probability of such an eventuality low.”

I think the theoretical issue here is that as time passes, and growth happens, and technology progresses the labor market gets more advanced and more specialized. In general, this is a sign of good things happening. But the more advanced and specialized the economy becomes, the more difficult it is to make structural adjustments quickly. And when pulling out of a big recession, that’s a big problem.

At any rate, here’s Spencer Ackerman with the news that six members of congress report that Leon Panetta conceded in testimony that the CIA has, in fact, misled congress:

I’ve said this before, but a lot of the structure of the current set-up of the CIA is basically designed to give presidents an outlet for illegal orders. It needs to change. There’s room for government secrecy, but there’s no good reason for the government to be keeping secrets from congress. That’s what you do if the president is trying to get you to help him cover up something that’s illegal.

This seems like a good moment to issue my dozenth call for congress to take another look at the Obama administration’s original revenue proposal—limiting tax deductions for high-income itemizers. This would target basically the same group of people (rich people) as House liberals’ plan for a surtax on high-income couples but raise the money in a substantially more efficient way.

When possible, it’s better to raise money by broadening the tax base—curbing loopholes, deductions, and exemptions—than by simply raising the rates. The reason is that higher rates on a narrow base do a lot to encourage people to shift income into loopholes, which both undermines your revenue-raising efforts and also distorts the economy. Both the employer tax exclusion proposals and the itemized deductions proposal fit that good model.

I try not to put too much stock in foreign press reports, but this from Barak Ravid in Haaretz seems like something Bibi Netanyahu had better deny quickly:

Netanyahu appears to be suffering from confusion and paranoia. He is convinced that the media are after him, that his aides are leaking information against him and that the American administration wants him out of office. Two months after his visit to Washington, he is still finding it difficult to communication normally with the White House. To appreciate the depth of his paranoia, it is enough to hear how he refers to Rahm Emanuel and David Axelrod, Obama’s senior aides: as “self-hating Jews.”

I wonder what they make of other top executive branch Jews like Larry Summers and Peter Orszag.

(wikimedia)

Way back in December of 2007 when happenstance led me to write a piece about foreclosure clusters, I was interested to learn that foreclosures are bad for everyone who owns a home on the block. It’s not, in other words, really just a matter between a borrower and his bank. Under the circumstances, as Mike at Rortybomb explains there’s something not very pragmatic about the laissez faire approach to home lending:

If I was a degenerate crackhead who snuck into your neighborhood and mugged you for $50, the Wall Street Journal Opinion Page would want me thrown in jail. Now imagine that I’m a degenerate crackhead who took out a subprime loan to move next door to you, in an arrangement that I’m likely not going to pay off. I might not even make one payment. If I default you’ll lose 10% of the value of your home from the externality effect. Assuming your home is worth $300,000, there’s a 20% chance I default in 2 years (realistic numbers), and you lose 10%; 300,000*.2*.1 = I’ve just robbed you for $6,000 while the Wall Street Journal Opinion Page cheered me on. And that’s one house – I’ll have a dozen neighbors. Now mind you, the product was great for me – I got to smoke crack indoors, in a house I could never realistically afford, which was a big plus. The subprime lender sold my loan to a pension fund in Denmark for a nice fee. It goes in the win column for us.

I don’t think the analogy to a mugging works in all respects. Still, I think the main point holds, there’s perfectly good reason to regard the viability of these arrangements as a matter of general social concern and there’s also good reason to want people to err on the side of caution. It adds up to a substantial argument in favor of the idea of a financial consumer protection agency.

David Pogue says there’s more to life than Google and folks should consider Bing, Microsoft’s competing product:

At first, Bing is pretty much Google. Oh, there’s a big National Geographic-y photo on the home page instead of plain white, but otherwise it’s the same deal: a Search box; a menu that offers to complete what you’re typing; and inconspicuous links to Images, Videos, News, Shopping and Maps.

Once you hit Enter, however, you can’t help noticing Bing’s more concerted effort to get you answers faster. To minimize the clicking, the hunting, the dead ends.

I dunno . . . the last really tough Googling I did was an effort to turn up a good graphic showing Soviet/Russian life expectancy trends and Bing was way worse on that score.

— No G8 agreement on climate change.

— Women, health insurance, and marriage.

— Arizona State Senator thinks the world is 6,000 years old.

— 32 flavors of freedom.

— I’ve been wondering if I should find a way to do online chats.

— Expect a lower salary cap for the 2010-2011 NBA season.

Song of the day, Wale’s “Chillin”

Among developed countries Germany is expected to take the biggest hit. Canada is in relatively good shape. If I were an incumbent U.S. Senator running for re-election in 2010 I would be terrified by these projections.

I just wanted to flesh out a point I hinted at in my TNRtv segment yesterday but didn’t get to elaborate on. My sense of the political relationship between unemployment and the deficit is as follows: Unemployment can be fairly high, but as long as it stays below some critical level, most people will think of it as something that mostly affects/threatens someone else. As a result, many will be as or more concerned about deficit-spending. Their basic calculus will be: Why should we run up enormous amounts of debt helping other people. This, I suspect, is a big reason the number of people who say they’re most concerned about the deficit has been gaining on the number of people who say they’re most concerned about unemployment/the economy in public opinion polls (scroll down to question 23 in that poll I linked to).

But at some point, unemployment presumably crosses a psychological threshold, wherein most people begin to see it as something that threatens them, too. And my hunch is that it’s kind of a knife-edge proposition–or, rather, that the number of such people gradually rises in line with the unemployment rate than balloons once it crosses a certain rate. I have no idea where that threshold is–10 percent? 11 percent? 12 percent? But, if and when we cross it, I think you’re going to see concern about unemployment diverge pretty sharply from concern about the deficit.

I think there’s one epicycle too many here. When someone loses their job, that usually has a negative impact on that person’s entire household. But most people are fine. But as the number of jobless rises, the circle of people negatively impacted by unemployment grows. Eventually, it grows to encompass a huge number of people and you reach a political tipping point.

One point to keep your eye on is that through Quarter 1 of 2009, median earnings have held up okay despite the rising unemployment:

That’s because wages are “sticky” and inflation has been low or zero. So many people who haven’t lost their jobs are actually doing better than they were a year ago. But the longer abysmal labor market conditions persist, the more that situation will change. Nominal wages aren’t infinitely sticky, after all, and hits people have taken to their retirement accounts and so forth will start to bite.

For several years after moving to DC I lived with a roommate who’s a passionate fan of Texas Football so in part to annoy him and in part because I loved this Michael Lewis article I decided to become a Texas Tech fan. And there’s no question in my mind that they’re a fun team to play as on the XBox college football game that we used to play. But now it seems that Alberto Gonzales is getting a job:

Overnight, Google announced the latest element of its drive for world domination, a new open source operating system aimed at the netbook market:

Google Chrome OS is an open source, lightweight operating system that will initially be targeted at netbooks. Later this year we will open-source its code, and netbooks running Google Chrome OS will be available for consumers in the second half of 2010. Because we’re already talking to partners about the project, and we’ll soon be working with the open source community, we wanted to share our vision now so everyone understands what we are trying to achieve.

Speed, simplicity and security are the key aspects of Google Chrome OS. We’re designing the OS to be fast and lightweight, to start up and get you onto the web in a few seconds. The user interface is minimal to stay out of your way, and most of the user experience takes place on the web. And as we did for the Google Chrome browser, we are going back to the basics and completely redesigning the underlying security architecture of the OS so that users don’t have to deal with viruses, malware and security updates. It should just work.

I have to say that I’ve never totally understood the appeal of the netbook concept. The low cost is nice, but you can’t use it as your main “go to” computer. So if you have to buy another computer anyway, you may as well invest in a decent laptop. It’s not as if my 13 inch MacBook Pro is so crippling heavy I can’t take it around with me. And I get around town by walking/biking—what does America’s car-dependent majority need with an ultra-light computer?

Meanwhile, on substance I gather it’s not really clear how much this differs from just adding a new Linux distribution. At the same time, I think you could imagine the Linux world having much greater mainstream appeal with a strong brand and a deep-pocket company like Google behind it even if on substance Google doesn’t add a great deal. Marketing matters a lot in life.