If you’re so inclined, the website for our collective is: www.redpaperheart.com

If you’ve visited Wikipedia today (or the Google homepage, or xkcd, or Wired, or WordPress) you’ll notice that they’re censoring their own sites to raise awareness for the SOPA and PIPA legislation.  From Wikipedia:

Wikipedia is protesting against SOPA and PIPA by blacking out the English Wikipedia for 24 hours, beginning at midnight January 18, Eastern Time. Readers who come to English Wikipedia during the blackout will not be able to read the encyclopedia. Instead, you will see messages intended to raise awareness about SOPA and PIPA, encouraging you to share your views with your representatives, and with each other on social media.

(Wikipedia has made available a page detailing why PIPA and SOPA are bad news).

xkcd.com also has a list of resources for some good (and easily digestible) information.

These are important pieces of legislation, and definitely merit contacting your representatives.  However (after you’ve educated yourself and done your part), if you’re in a pinch today and you absolutely need to read a Wikipedia article to understand Batesian mimicry or the etymology of goulash, there is a very easy workaround.  When you go to the article you want, you’ll notice it appear in your browser before Wikipedia’s SOPA/PIPA awareness page pops up.  Simply click the “stop” button in your browser after the article loads but before the awareness page pops up.  That’s it.

Why would this irk me so much? Because Ron Paul as president could be one of the worst things to happen to America in a long time.

Make no mistake; Ron Paul is an extremist (just like his son).

This is straight from his Wikipedia page:

Paul is a proponent of Austrian School economics; he has authored six books on the subject, and displays pictures of Austrian School economists Friedrich Hayek, Murray Rothbard, and Ludwig von Mises (as well as of Grover Cleveland)^[85] on his office wall. He regularly votes against almost all proposals for new government spending, initiatives, or taxes;^[66] he cast two thirds of all the lone negative votes in the House during a 1995–1997 period.^[19] He has pledged never to raise taxes^[203] and states he has never voted to approve a budget deficit. Paul believes that the country could abolish the individual income tax by scaling back federal spending to its fiscal year 2000 levels;^[90][204]financing government operations would be primarily by excise taxes and non-protectionist tariffs. He endorses eliminating most federal government agencies, terming them unnecessary bureaucracies. Paul has a consistent record as an inflation hawk^{[dead link]}, having warned of the threat of hyperinflation as far back as 1981.^[205] While Paul believes the longterm decrease of the U.S. dollar’s purchasing power by inflation is attributable to its lack of any commodity backing, he does not endorse a “return” to a gold standard – as the U.S. government has established during the past – but instead prefers to eliminate legal tender laws and to remove the sales tax on gold and silver, so that the market may freely decide what type of monetary standard(s) there shall be.^[206] He also advocates gradual elimination of the Federal Reserve System.^[207]

And Andrew Sullivan even goes to great lengths to qualify his endorsement, by basically disavowing Paul’s entire platform:

Let me immediately say I do not support many of his nuttier policy proposals. I am not a doctrinaire libertarian. Paul’s campaign for greater oversight of the Fed is  great, but abolition of it is utopian and dangerous. A veto of anything but an immediately balanced budget would tip the US and the world into a serious downturn (a process to get there in one or two terms makes much more sense). Cutting taxes as he wants to is also fiscally irresponsible without spending cuts first. He adds deductions to the tax code rather than abolish them. His energy policy would intensify our reliance on carbon, not decrease it. He has no policy for the uninsured. There are times when he is rightly described as a crank. He has had associations in the past that are creepy when not downright ugly.

So why is this guy so popular? Well, first of all, the rest of the GOP field is really that bad. You have the politi-whore that is Mitt Romney, the buffoon Rick Perry, the sluttier politi-whore Newt Gingrich, and several flavors of fire-and-brimstone types, of which Rick Santorum is now the flavor of the month.

Next, you have this emotional response to Paul’s “intellectualism” and “incorruptibility” which is actually pretty silly when you think about it. His “intellectualism” stems from his staunch beliefs in very discredited theories about economics and property rights, as well as his ultra-strict contructionist views of the Constitution that would make even Clarence Thomas blush. And after you understand that his entire political philosophy is predicated on a series of very simple black-and-white rules, it’s not hard to realize that he’s been “incorruptible.” That’s like saying that a robot is incorruptible.

Finally, his foreign policy and stances on Bill of Rights-style issues are refreshing to a lot of conservatives after the wrong turn the GOP made during the Bush years. But make no mistake, this is merely an extension of his extreme views on the Constitution, and no more.

Ron Paul as President would be a disaster. His nickname of “Dr. No” would very quickly be morphed into “Dr. Veto” and the government would effectively shutdown. You thought we had standoffs in 2011? Imagine what 2013 would look like with a Paul Administration.

Scared yet?

SEOUL, South Korea — Kim Jong-il, the North Korean leader who realized his family’s dream of turning his starving country into a minor nuclear-weapons power even as the isolated nation sank further into despotism, died on Saturday of a heart attack, according to the country’s state-run media.

[h/t] New York Times

Nuclear arms and extreme nationalism aside, it’s fair to say he was a crazy, crazy man.  From Wikipedia:

Kim was said to be a huge film fan, owning a collection of more than 20,000 video tapes and DVDs.^[111] His reported favorite movie franchises included Friday the 13th, Rambo, Godzilla, and Hong Kong action cinema,^[112] and any movie starring Elizabeth Taylor.^[113] He was the author of the book On the Art of the Cinema. In 1978, on Kim’s orders, South Korean film director Shin Sang-ok and his actress wife Choi Eun-hee were kidnapped in order to build a North Korean film industry.^[114]

…

Also an apparent golfer, North Korean state media reports that Kim routinely shot three or four holes-in-one per round.^[119] His official biography also claims that Kim composed six operas and enjoys staging elaborate musicals.^[120] Kim also referred to himself as an Internet expert.^[121]

It’s an inspirational story about a compassionate social worker who instills positive change in a troubled teenager… while the kid is mugging him.

10 bajillion karma points for Julio Diaz.

Really?

I feel like we’re spending a bunch of time talking about someone who didn’t quite do enough, especiallyin hindsight, and a whole lot less time talking about the actual guys being charged with criminal offenses, including raping little boys and lying to a grand jury.

I mean, if someone had fell off the earth the last 4 days and saw the headlines today, I can imagine the conversation I would have with them.

Off-earth-guy: “Wow.  Joe Paterno abused some boys?”

Me: “No, one of his former assistant coaches did.”

Off-earth-guy: “So he covered it up then?”

Me: “No, he told his boss (the AD) but they didn’t do anything about it”

Off-earth-guy: “So he didn’t do it, and he didn’t cover it up, so…”

Me: “Yeah.”

This isn’t to say that Paterno, or more importantly Mike McQueary (who saw Sandusky raping a little boy) or the janitor (who saw him giving oral sex to a boy), did everything they should have.  Should these people, especially the witnesses, followed up more vigorously and make sure the police were involved?  For the witnesses, absolutely.  For Paterno, probably.  I say probably because at his level it’s just hearsay.  He didn’t actually see anything.  And it’s not like he dawdled and held it close to his chest.  Here’s the actual grand jury testimony:

I don’t feel like there’s a whole lot wrong with this.  Especially if you think about it in the context of the time.  Of course this looks bad now that we know that Sandusky abused countless numbers of boys, and you should rightfully shudder at the thought of all the boys that were put at risk after this incident that could have been prevented, but at the time, when this looks like an isolated incident where you’re not really sure what to think?  I’m not so sure.

I feel like we should be in a spot where we are acknowledging a collective absence of ownership for Paterno and all the other witnesses, but not in a place where we are crucifying Paterno for not acting like Superman.

Taking this to it’s logical extreme, are those folks out there in the lynch mob prepared to always inform the police about any illegal activity they ever hear about?

“A squirrel dying in front of your house may be more relevant to your interests right now than people dying in Africa.”

-Mark Zuckerberg

Eli Periser talks about the consequences of an internet individually tailored by algorithms:

Former Apple CEO Steve Jobs, father of the Macintosh and the brains behind the wild success of the iPod, iPhone, and iPad, has passed away, Apple has confirmed on its website. He was 56.

 

RIP, man.

I came across this little article on GOOD (a nice magazine and website with lots of interesting articles) that discusses the changes that are happening to our brain because of how we use the internet. It’s a good article, but I can’t help but feel a little short changed after reading it. It sort of glosses over the very high level view of how the internet is a tool that we use just like other tools (cars, hammers, phones, watches). It also compares the internet and spread of information to the printing press and how changes in society happened because of it. I really like looking at it from this perspective and think that there is a lot of good that comes from the spread of information to the masses, etc.

However, the article didn’t go into nearly enough depth on the subject. Does anyone out there in JuiceLand™ have any articles to contribute to this discussion…or at the very least an opinion? I am very interested in this topic because it’s hard to like the internet when you sit in front of a computer all day making things that wind up on the internet and don’t do much good for the world.

Thoughts? Links? Pics or it didn’t happen?

Press releases went out today on the game, and you can expect a mobile IOS and Android version to probably hit the market in the coming month or so.

If you would like, we have a facebook page. If you would go and “like” it, that would be awesome. There is a facebook demo of the game up there and more information. http://www.facebook.com/konascrate

Also, here is a trailer for the game.

Thanks to everyone who has participated in developing this game!

GoodGuide is a website dedicated to examining the health, environmental and social performance of products and companies. Their breakdowns are really impressive and thorough–for example, above, Apple scores poorly for, among other things, its involvement with countries that have oppressive regimes. They look at everything from a manufacturers’ environmental impact, to company worker treatment, to the health risks or benefits of using a certain product.

From their website:

GoodGuide was founded in 2007 by Dara O’Rourke, a professor of environmental and labor policy at the University of California at Berkeley. Dara is one of the world’s leading academic experts on global supply chains – tracking product life cycles from resource extraction into manufacturing, through consumer use to disposal. Products often have hidden and sometimes disturbing stories – stylish apparel made in Asian sweatshops, or baby care products containing cancer-causing chemicals. Dara realized how little we know about the products we bring into our homes every day.  Information was either unavailable, too complex to understand, or biased, as marketers make unsubstantiated claims that their products are natural or safe.

To address the consumer marketplace’s need for better information, GoodGuide has assembled a team of scientific and technology experts to take on the challenge of organizing the world’s product information.    Our Chief Scientist is Bill Pease, an expert in chemical risk assessment and creator of the web’s top pollution information resource, scorecard.org.  His science team includes specialists in life cycle assessment, environmental engineering, chemistry, nutrition and sociology.  Together we are working to acquire and compile high quality data, which we then organize and transform into actionable information for consumers.

There’s a lot of messed up stuff that goes on out there in the free market. Instead of relying on laws and regulations to keep things in line, one of the things that we can do as consumers is to wield our dollars. Every time you buy something, you send a message: “Hey, product manufacturer–this is a thing that people want. Keep doing what you’re doing.” If you can afford it, do some research and support brands that operate responsibly. Voting with your dollars is a really easy way do some good.

GoodGuide

—-

Eric: It’s true. It was really fun. Fil’s really cool and good at animating and it was a pleasure and an honor to work with him. These last hours have been a real joy. Alright, later.



Things and The Things They’re Made Of. from teamasparag.us on Vimeo.



I’ve driven by that Safeway countless times.  I got married right down the street from it.  And now it’s on CNN.

It’s been a little bit of a roller coaster of emotion for the last day or two.  I just moved to Portland, OR on Friday for a temporary (~4 month) work assignment, without my wife, which is emotional enough.

Now this.

I can’t really isolate the exact reason I’ve gotten so worked up about this.  I think it’s a lot of things, really.

I remember when Gabrielle Giffords was first elected in what was then my own Congressional District, and is still the district of my parents, my brother, my grandmother, and probably several of my cousins, aunts, and uncles.  The 8th district in Arizona is a very heterogenous district.  It is mainly composed of the north and east sides of Tucson, as well as a significant portion of the rural southeastern portion of the state.  It’s slightly Republican leaning.  As you can imagine, Giffords is a centrist Democrat, and as I payed more attention to her, I became more and more proud to have her as my congresswoman.  She was the definition of sanity.  When she won reelection this year, it was a testament to her political skill.

So there’s that: a sadness for Gabby herself.

Then there was the little girl, which is too sad for me to even write about, so you’ll have to read it here.

Then there was this story of a man laying on top of his wife to protect her from bullets.  He was successful, but was fatally wounded in the process.

There’s the great work of an intern, which may have helped save Giffords from dying on the spot.

There’s the great work of the team of doctors at UMC, where I’m pretty sure I was born.

But I think the thing that’s been really amplifying this is that this is my hometown.  My brother is a deputy in Pima County.  This is his sheriff at this press conference. What if this happened when he was on duty?  Would he have run into this guy?  My dad is a manager for Safeway.  What if this was his store?  What could have happened to him?  My friends and family could have been shopping at this store.

I think when things like this happen, we all try to create a disconnect in our head.  It’s too tragic and senseless to want to really think about, and seeing it on TV somehow makes it less real.  That’s just the nature of our brains, I think.

But when that connection gets hooked up, like for me it has just by sheer familiarity with the location, it’s all that much more real.  It hits close to home, as they say.

I wanted to say something more about hyperbole and rhetoric, but then I read this Matt Bai piece, and it pretty much sums up what I was going to say, which is good, because I think I’ll try to escape a little tonight.

It’s just too sad.

For example, miles traveled via automobile have skyrocketed since the Model T in the 1920′s.  Also, air conditioning is much more common today than before.  Theoretically, these increases in consumption can be traced back to the fact that these items became more efficient.

My first issue with this theory is that this seems to only be true if the demand for an good can be substantially altered with its energy cost.  Think of air conditioning for example.  It stands to reason that if it cost you $2000 to cool your house in July, most people probably wouldn’t do it.  Alternatively, if it cost $200 dollars a lot of people would.  In other words, a large portion of the basis for demand of air conditioning is how much energy it uses.

As a counterpoint, how about a washing machine?  Is the demand for use of a washing machine correlate well to its energy efficiency?  I would say no.  I would think it would correlate better with how much dirty laundry you have.  There is an issue of scale here as well, which brings me to my next point of contention.

Surely this effect is must be an exponential decay.  In other words, as efficiencies continue to increase, or most importantly increase faster then demanded by the economy (*wink* government *wink*), this trend must slow down.

Let’s take the air conditioning example from above.  I gave some pretty extreme examples, but let’s look at the other end of the scale.  What’s the difference in demand between a $100 electric bill and a $50 one?  $50 and $25?  At what point do you stop caring about the cost?  It’s not like you’ll now want to cool your house to 50 degrees.  There is a boundary condition here.

This is similarly true for cars.  There’s a big difference between 15 MPG and 30 MPG, in terms of your wallet, but how about 30 MPG and 60 MPG?  Probably some behavior will change, but how about 60 MPG and 120 MPG?  At some point, the new limiter to how much you drive will be the time it takes you to get from A to B, not how much it will cost you in fuel.

These examples are all at the micro level, which there’s some debate as to whether this is even reliably detectable at the micro level.  But the problem with looking at the macro level is that it’s impossible to decouple this effect with general economic growth (chicken or egg?).

What does this mean for policy?  It certainly doesn’t mean we should stop pushing efficiency gains.  In my view, it means we should push them harder, until we can meet some of these boundary conditions.

In the mean time, what it really points to is the need for a price on carbon.  Most proponents of the Jevons paradox will agree that efficiency gains coupled with a carbon tax eliminates this effect.

We need a comprehensive carbon pricing scheme, and we needed it 10 years ago.