The Economist: Every day this week, our cartoonist is sending his sketches from the Democratic convention in Denver, Colorado. Sketches from previous days can be found here. You can find up-to-the-minute coverage on our American politics blog.
About ten hours after the end of last night's closing ceremony, I headed to the Olympic Green, completely unsure of what I'd find when I got there. I hadn't heard much about when the Green will open to the ticketless public, or if it would stay open until the Paralympics -- so I knew it would either be packed to the brim, or completely deserted. I arrived to find the latter.When I approached the Olympic subway line, the streets packed with tourists and scalpers just yesterday were now empty, and only one of dozens of security checkpoints to access the subway was open -- and there wasn't even anyone in line. Unsure if my accreditation card would still be valid, I approached the checkpoint to find a guard waving me through. Two of the guards were even taking a nap -- it was obvious that I was their first customer for quite some time.
Here's our theory: Daily deadlines did in the newspaper industry. The pressure of getting to press, the long-practiced art of doom-and-gloom headline writing, the flinchiness of easily spooked editors all made it impossible for ink-stained wretches to look farther into the future than the next edition. Speaking of doom and gloom: Online ad revenues at several major newspaper chains actually dropped last quarter. The surprise there is that they ever managed to rise. The newspaper industry has a devastating history of letting the future of media slip from its grasp. Where to start? Perhaps 1995, when several newspaper chains put $9 million into a consortium called New Century Network. "The granddaddy of _______," as one suitably crotchety industry veteran tells us, folded in 1998. Or you can go further back, to '80s adventures in videotext. But each tale ends the same way: A promising start, shuttered amid fear, uncertainty, and doubt.
If "An Inconvenient Truth" sounded the alarm on global warming, "I.O.U.S.A.," a new documentary opening in theaters Friday, hopes to do the same for the rising federal deficit.Backed by Blackstone Group Chairman Peter Peterson, "I.O.U.S.A." follows former U.S. Comptroller General David Walker and the Concord Coalition's Robert Bixby on a "fiscal wake-up tour" across America. In the movie, which is co-written by "Empire of Debt" co-author Addison Wiggin and directed by "Wordplay" filmmaker Patrick Creadon, Messrs. Walker and Bixby argue that unless the government alters its policies and spending habits, the U.S. will be in for a serious financial meltdown.
Mr. Walker, who headed the Government Accountability Office from 1998-2008, exited his official U.S. post five years early in order to head the Peter G. Peterson Foundation and dedicate himself fulltime to fiscal education before, as he says, "we face a real economic crisis." Mr. Walker spoke with The Wall Street Journal about the dangers of the debt and what needs to be done to prevent what he foresees to be an economic catastrophe.>
A beautiful vr scene from the diving platform in Beijing, host of the 2008 Olympic Games.
Why did banks become so overexposed in the run-up to the credit crunch? A risk manager at a large global bank--someone whose job it was to make sure that the firm did not take unnecessary risks -- explains in his own wordsIN JANUARY 2007 the world looked almost riskless. At the beginning of that year I gathered my team for an off-site meeting to identify our top five risks for the coming 12 months. We were paid to think about the downsides but it was hard to see where the problems would come from. Four years of falling credit spreads, low interest rates, virtually no defaults in our loan portfolio and historically low volatility levels: it was the most benign risk environment we had seen in 20 years.
As risk managers we were responsible for approving credit requests and transactions submitted to us by the bankers and traders in the front-line. We also monitored and reported the level of risk across the bank's portfolio and set limits for overall credit and market-risk positions.
Costco held a very well attended party this evening celebrating the opening of their new Middleton warehouse club [Map].
I did not see a stand to purchase law degrees.
Middleton provided a TIF (Tax Incremental Financing) agreement to the site developer. A related Isthmus article can be found here.
A few additional photos:
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The 2008 biennial news consumption survey by the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press was conducted by telephone - including both landline phones and cell phones - from April 30 to June 1 among 3,612 adults nationwide. It finds four distinct segments in today's news audience: Integrators, who comprise 23% of the public; the less populous Net-Newsers (13%); Traditionalists - the oldest (median age: 52) and largest news segment (46% of the public); and the Disengaged (14%) who stand out for their low levels of interest in the news and news consumption.Net-Newsers are the youngest of the news user segments (median age: 35). They are affluent and even better educated than the News Integrators: More than eight-in-ten have at least attended college. Net-Newsers not only rely primarily on the internet for news, they are leading the way in using new web features and other technologies. Nearly twice as many regularly watch news clips on the internet as regularly watch nightly network news broadcasts (30% vs. 18%).
This web-oriented news segment, perhaps more than the others, underscores the challenges facing traditional news outlets. Fewer than half (47%) watch television news on a typical day. Twice as many read an online newspaper than a printed newspaper on a typical day (17% vs. 8%), while 10% read both.
However, Net-Newsers do rely on some well known traditional media outlets. They are at least as likely as Integrators and Traditionalists to read magazines such as The New Yorker and The Atlantic, and somewhat more likely to get news from the BBC.
Larry Lessig
I have my doubts - unfortunately - that Obama will be much better on the crucial broadband issue for two reasons:
HEALTH care has long seemed one of the most local of all industries. Yet beneath the bandages, globalisation is thriving. The outsourcing of record keeping and the reading of X-rays is already a multi-billion-dollar business. The recruitment of doctors and nurses from the developing world by rich countries is also common, if controversial. The next growth area for the industry is the flow of patients in the other direction--known as "medical tourism"--which is on the threshold of a dramatic boom.Tens of millions of middle-class Americans are uninsured or underinsured and soaring health costs are pushing them and cost-conscious employers and insurers to look abroad for savings (see article). At the same time the best hospitals in Asia and Latin America now rival or surpass many hospitals in the rich world for safety and quality. On one estimate, Americans can save 85% by shopping around and the number who will travel for care is due to rocket from under 1m last year to 10m by 2012--by which time it will deprive American hospitals of some $160 billion of annual business.
THE earthworks left behind by the long vanished civilizations of the Midwest are harder to spot than the pueblos and kivas of Arizona and New Mexico. For a long time many of them were hidden in plain sight or dismissed as little more than heaps of soil. But the more today's archaeologists learn about the Midwestern mounds, the more intriguing is the picture that emerges from 1,000 or more years ago: a city with thousands of people just a few miles from present-day St. Louis, a 1,348-foot earthen serpent that points to the summer solstice, artifacts made of materials that could only have arrived over lengthy trade routes.Looks like a fascinating drive.
In 1989, the Berlin Wall fell, democracy was on the march and we declared the End of History. Nearly two decades later, a neo-imperialist Russia is at war with Georgia, Communist China is proudly hosting the Olympics, and we find that, instead, we have entered the Age of Authoritarianism.It is worth recalling how different we thought the future would be in the immediate, happy aftermath of the end of the cold war. Remember Francis Fukuyama's ringing assertion: "The triumph of the west, of the western idea, is evident first of all in the total exhaustion of viable systematic alternatives to western liberalism."
Even in the heady days of 1989, that declaration of universal - and possibly eternal - ideological victory seemed a little hubristic to Professor Fukuyama's many critics. Yet his essay made such an impact because it captured the scale, and the enormous benefits, of the change sweeping through the world. Not only was the stifling Soviet - which was really the Russian - suzerainty over central and eastern Europe and central Asia coming to an end but, even more importantly, the very idea of a one-party state, ruthlessly presiding over a centrally planned economy, seemed to be discredited, if not forever, then surely for our lifetimes.
BRODY MULLINS and ELIZABETH WILLIAMSON:
When the Democratic Party holds its convention the week after next, members of Congress will be able to hear singer Kanye West at an all-expenses paid party sponsored by the recording industry.They can play in a poker tournament with Ben Affleck, courtesy of the poker industry. They can try to hit a home run at Coors Field, home of the Colorado Rockies, thanks to AT&T Corp. Free drinks and cigars will be on offer at a bash thrown by the liquor industry.
The corporate largesse is on tap despite new ethics laws and rules that both chambers of Congress adopted in 2007, aimed at weakening the links between lawmakers and lobbyists. Spearheaded by the Democratic Party, the ethics effort included an attempt to ban corporations and lobbyists from throwing lavish parties for members at the national political conventions.
But in the months since the new rules took effect, lawmakers have watered down the guidelines, and Capitol Hill and K Street have teamed up to find ways around the guidelines as written. Politicians and lobbyists are now preparing about 400 of the biggest parties -- both at the Democratic gathering in Colorado and when Republicans convene the following week in St. Paul -- that conventioneers have ever seen.
Verizon, AT&T, and their regulated cohorts love to blab how the "free market" and "competition" will keep prices low for consumers. According to California, it's a big fat expensive lie. The cost of basic phone service has soared since the Public Utilities Commission lifted price controls in 2006, leading the agency to conclude:"There is no indication of any change in the near future regarding the current state of competition. Market forces have not yet met the challenge of controlling price increases."
AT&T is "carefully considering" monitoring the Web-surfing activities of customers who use its Internet service, the company said in a letter in response to an inquiry from the House Committee on Energy and Commerce.While the company said it hadn't tested such a system for monitoring display advertising viewing habits or committed to a particular technology, it expressed much more interest in the approach than the other big Internet providers who also responded to the committee's letter.
AT&T did however promise that if it does decide to start tracking its customers online, it will "do so the right way." In particular, the advertising system will require customers to affirmatively agree to have their surfing monitored. This sort of "opt-in" approach is preferred by privacy experts to the "opt-out" method, practiced by most ad targeting companies today, which records the behavior of anyone who doesn't explicitly ask to not to be tracked.
For all that has been written and said about Hillary Clinton’s epic collapse in the Democratic primaries, one issue still nags. Everybody knows what happened. But we still don’t have a clear picture of how it happened, or why.More from James Fallows.The after-battle assessments in the major newspapers and newsweeklies generally agreed on the big picture: the campaign was not prepared for a lengthy fight; it had an insufficient delegate operation; it squandered vast sums of money; and the candidate herself evinced a paralyzing schizophrenia—one day a shots-’n’-beers brawler, the next a Hallmark Channel mom. Through it all, her staff feuded and bickered, while her husband distracted. But as a journalistic exercise, the “campaign obit” is inherently flawed, reflecting the viewpoints of those closest to the press rather than empirical truth.
Full Screen VR Scene.
Map 27.247581 -82.536145. Clusty Search: Siesta Key. A beautiful beach.
This is one of those moments when a camera in hand meets a scene waiting to be photographed: a beleaguered traveller resorting to solitaire on his PC while waiting for the promised next flight. The blue sky ignores the chaos below. Air travel is certainly, as a fellow passenger lamented, "not what it once was".
'As a self-described "aviation nut," Vern Raburn the former software executive and one of the early employees of Microsoft who remains a close friend of Bill Gates was well aware of a famous saying in the aviation industry: The way to make a small fortune is to start with a big fortune.The charismatic, high-tech whiz raised at least a billion dollars from investors, including Gates, who were willing to hitch a ride on his dream that Eclipse Aviation, the company Raburn founded in 1998, could produce light and inexpensive six-seat jets (a pilot and five passengers) that would become an air-taxi service for the masses.
But last week, while Raburn was at the famed Oshkosh air show, where his friend and actor John Travolta was promoting prompting Eclipse Aviation, Raburn was ousted by his board, leaving questions about not only the future of the company but about the legacy of a computer industry pioneer who believed he could draw on software development background to transform general aviation.
"You have to worry about things you can do something about. I worry about people not being there and I want to make them aware." We should be mistrustful of knowledge. It is bad for us. Give a bookie 10 pieces of information about a race and he’ll pick his horses. Give him 50 and his picks will be no better, but he will, fatally, be more confident.We should be ecologically conservative – global warming may or may not be happening but why pollute the planet? – and probablistically conservative. The latter, however, has its limits. Nobody, not even Taleb, can live the sceptical life all the time – “It’s an art, it’s hard work.” So he doesn’t worry about crossing the road and doesn’t lock his front door – “I can’t start getting paranoid about that stuff.” His wife locks it, however.
He believes in aristocratic – though not, he insists, elitist – values: elegance of manner and mind, grace under pressure, which is why you must shave before being executed. He believes in the Mediterranean way of talking and listening. One piece of advice he gives everybody is: go to lots of parties and listen, you might learn something by exposing yourself to black swans.
I ask him what he thinks are the primary human virtues, and eventually he comes up with magnanimity – punish your enemies but don’t bear grudges; compassion – fairness always trumps efficiency; courage – very few people have this; and tenacity – tinker until it works for you.
Website, Location. George Eastman via Britannica and Clusty.
1940's?
