Chart of the day: on how we don't pay for the energy we consume

But, of course, politics means that we can never have rational discussions on addressing the huge gap between the private and social costs of energy.  Not here in the US, and not across countries.

This NYRB article, from where I excerpted the above graphic, adds:

The need for taxes on energy externalities such as carbon emissions is central to our ability to reduce the harmful side effects of economic growth. It is striking how the political dialogue in the US has ignored a policy that has so many desirable features. Perhaps, in the near future, faced with the deadline of a dire economic situation, negotiators will formulate such a policy. It would generate substantial revenues while bringing so many long-run economic and environmental benefits. Simply put, externality taxes are the best fiscal instrument to employ at this time, in this country, and given the fiscal constraints faced by the US.

Unfortunately, ain't gonna happen anytime soon!

Students are trapped in the higher education ponzi. And are chained to their loans!

If students actually had to earn the money to pay for that world-class fitness center, the 2,000 different clubs, and the off-campus apartment with the pizza parties, there would be a lot less of those things.  And while I like both world class fitness centers, and apartments, they're not the sort of thing that should be funded with borrowed money.

That was Megan McArdle writing in the context of her arguments to "allow students to discharge their student loans in bankruptcy."

The university where I teach has built an ultra-modern fitness center, with rock-climbing walls.
Here is how a recent all-campus email described the facility:

The HWC is a 40,000 square foot facility, comprised of a two-court gymnasium with an elevated track, two racquetball courts, three multipurpose rooms, a 6,000 square foot cardiovascular and strength training area, a 40 foot high by 40 foot wide rock climbing wall, locker rooms,an equipment check-out area, lounge areas with wireless internet capabilities and the Aquatic Center (lap and therapy pool).

Seriously, we need such a facility so that our students' learning will be vastly improved?  Coming next: a cigar lounge with a well-equipped bar?

Of course, students have no choice but to pay a fee every term they are registered as students.  And, most of them do not use it either--their lives are way too busy, juggling work, family, and essays and tests.

Anyway, the same email also included this info on how much faculty and staff will have to pay if we wanted to use it:

Fall term membership cost is $78

$78 for three months works out to a monthly rate of $26.  Turns out that this is pretty much the market rate at privately run fitness centers that have swimming pools too.

The end of originality?

Jorge Luis Borges wrote (where exactly I can't recall; am getting old!) that all stories are mere retelling of the first original one, Don Quixote. 

In the contemporary world, it seems increasingly so.  Music and movies often tend to generate a sense of I have heard/seen this before, and often it is not wholly imagined.

In the research in the humanities and the social sciences, rare is any original insight, and forever we are echoing ideas and arguments sometimes even from centuries ago.  The internet has further facilitated this process of all of us becoming DJs of sorts--all we appear to do is nothing but remixing in so many ways.  This blog post, and the blog itself, is evidence of the remixing that happens every single day. 

The following video (ht) conveys the point so well through images and sound from the world of cinema.


Everything Is A Remix: THE MATRIX from robgwilson.com on Vimeo.

Cartoon of the day: flatscreen and flat abs :)

A high school classmate, K, sent this across:

Men in White ... means ... dirty politics? :)

You make the call:

The context for such a gathering of men in white

The prime minister, Manmohan Singh, has been one heck of a disappointment.  Maybe like Seinfeld, he ought to have called it quits when he was ahead--when the country and the rest of the world was all praise for him for having initiated the economic reforms back in the 1990s.  After his first term as the PM, Singh should have walked away.  Instead, and increasingly, he seems to behave like a hostage to his captors and comes across as if he suffers from a serious case of Stockholm Syndrome.

Caravan has a lengthy feature on how much Singh has fallen:

“The fall has been so dramatic,” said a former Union Cabinet minister who has known Singh since the 1960s. “There is a visible drift, without any direction, and he appears to be helpless. People will say that of course he is an honest man and nobody doubts his personal integrity, but when you are presiding over an outfit that is dealing in corruption, you have to answer for that. How do you defend it? You can’t defend it.”

“Just look at the cartoons,” the former minister continued. “He is shrinking in size every day. He must be feeling awful.”

Quote of the day: on the party of NO

At a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing:

[Lindsey] Graham asked them how many votes they received at their confirmations.
"Ninety-eight," Scalia said.
"Eighty-seven," Breyer followed.
With that, Graham had made his point to his colleagues.

Interesting, right?  Justice Scalia who gets on most Democrats' nerves every single time was practically unanimously confirmed.  Then later during Clinton's tenure, when obstructionism seriously began, Breyer's confirmation generated a lot more no votes.  And now, we are pathetically down to party-line voting, to oppose for the sake of opposing.

The context for Graham to ask that question was this:

One of the sole Republicans to have voted in favor of both Sotomayor and Kagan, Graham looked directly into C-Span's cameras on Wednesday to tell those watching that nominations are a "political decision" and, accordingly, the Senate should accept the consequences of elections and vote for competent judges even if their philosophies don't line up with those of the senator's political party.

 
Good luck with getting that idea across to the Grand Obstructionists Party.

Dahlia Lithwick writes that the joint appearance by Breyer and Scalia is all the more the evidence that the US Supreme Court proceedings ought to be televised:

the two justices killed before the Judiciary Committee, raising the question anew: Why don’t they do this every week? Why are they hiding this great light under a marble bushel? A new Gallup poll shows that the Supreme Court’s approval rating is at a nearly historic low—only 46 percent of respondents approve of the high court, while 40 percent disapprove. That’s a 15-point drop from the recent high of 61 percent in 2009. Politico notes that the lowest approval recorded by Gallup was in 2005, at 42 percent.

On the one hand, the justices of the court shouldn’t care what the polls say. On the other, they really do. And Wednesday’s outing—proving that even ideologically opposed justices can riff about the Constitution, agree about more than they disagree, and call each other “Nino” and “Steve”—can only reassure the American public that there is nothing fearsome, elitist, or threatening about the courts.