Friday November 30, 2007

This picture is from Beirut. The billboard on the left reads “Before it is repeated,” the “it” referring to the brutal fifteen-year civil war that ripped Lebanon to shreds. The billboard on the right, well, needs little translation. If you looked up “juxtaposition” in the dictionary, wouldn’t you see something like this?

Well great, just a picture of Paris, right? Not so much. This is a development in Hangzhou, China, that apparently spent an absurd amount of yuan replicating Paris.

See more compelling photos at MSNBC’s PhotoBlog here.

Thursday November 29, 2007

Y’know the joke about how everything causes cancer? Well, the World Health Organization announced today that night causes cancer. Or at least night shifts …

LONDON – It was once scientific heresy to suggest that smoking contributed to lung cancer. Now, another idea initially dismissed as nutty is gaining acceptance:  The graveyard shift might increase your cancer risk.

Next month, the International Agency for Research on Cancer, the cancer arm of the World Health Organization, will classify shift work as a “probable” carcinogen.

That will put shift work in the same category as cancer-causing agents like anabolic steroids, ultraviolet radiation, and diesel engine exhaust.

If the shift work theory proves correct, millions of people worldwide could be affected. Experts estimate that nearly 20 percent of the working population in developed countries work night shifts.

It is a surprising twist for an idea that scientists first described as “wacky,” said Richard Stevens, a cancer epidemiologist and professor at the University of Connecticut Health Center. In 1987, Stevens published a paper suggesting a link between light at night and breast cancer.

Back then, he was trying to figure out why breast cancer incidence suddenly shot up starting in the 1930s in industrialized societies, where nighttime work was considered a hallmark of progress. Most scientists were bewildered by his proposal.

But in recent years, several studies have found that women working at night for many years are indeed more prone to breast cancer, and that animals who have their light-dark schedules switched grow more cancerous tumors and die quicker.

Two problems. First, as the article later notes, the studies focused on high-stress occupations like nurses and flight attendants, so there’s not a good control group. Second, the explanation doesn’t really make any sense. They claim that melatonin, which is produced in darkness, is a cancer suppressant; when you’re awake and have lights on all night, then you’re stifling melatonin production, raising your risk level. Well, wait, are the amount of light touching your skin and the time of day perfectly correlated? Probably not. It also fails to explain a detail later in the story: variable sleep schedules are worse for cancer risk than being nocturnal. There is not even a clear hypothesis here, let alone a conclusion. Ergo, bullshit.

Tuesday November 27, 2007

Presented for no particular reason:

Tuesday November 20, 2007

From the Washington Post, here’s the punchline:

Kenneth Rogoff, a former chief economist at the IMF who teaches at Harvard, notes that if the United States were unable to fund its debt, world economic output could fall by as much as 25 percent.

The only reason we’ve been able to hold on this long is because people still accept dollars in both commodity and financial markets. How much longer will that last? Sooner or later, China et al will stop financing us, and when that happens, Dr. Rogoff’s doomsday scenario will come to pass. So how bad is a 25 percent drop in world economic output? Yeah, that’s kinda what happened in the Great Depression.

Sunday November 18, 2007

The music and youth lifestyle channel MTV has launched an Arabic service it hopes can tap into a booming appetite for Western-influenced culture.

[Editor's note: Wait. "Music and youth lifestyle channel"? What music? What lifestyle? Not that I'm an active viewer ... though Daria did get me through high school.]

MTV says it hopes to respect local culture without diluting its brand. The MTV Arabia service will screen Arab music videos, talent shows, and international programmes like Pimp My Ride adapted for Arab audiences. [Network executives say that] the channel can act as a cultural unifying force in a region known for political tension.

Yeah, I’m not really seeing that happening. Question #1: Will the show still be called “Pimp My Ride”? I can see the mullahs not dealing well with that.

Tuesday November 6, 2007

AP headline: Ron Paul raises more than $4.2 million. IN ONE DAY. Who knew a Guy Fawkes-themed campaign pitch could rake in that kind of money? Based on the low poll numbers, I guess this means pretty much everyone supporting him has kicked in some scratch.

And that includes yours truly, who kicked in $25 sometime in the spring on a lark when his quixotic bid for the presidency seemed almost comical. Now he’s got a hell of a lot of money on hand. Now I’ve got serious reservations about the Ron Paul presidential bid, but … well c’mon, look at the field here. It’s not like either party has anyone I’d consider to be the person I want running the executive branch. (Notably, though, I think pretty much all of the major candidates would be at least a marginal improvement over Dubya, with the exception of the fascistic Rudy Giuliani.) Paul has too much of a nationalist streak for my taste — anti-immigration, dubious on free trade — and unnervingly seems to have the entire crackpot community behind him, like the 9/11 truthers and the people that think Canada and Mexico are going to destroy us … but he would resolve the economic crisis I’ve been hounding you all about for years on end now by demolishing the welfare state and stopping the dollar’s slide. (Granted, this would have some ugly side effects, but it would get the job done.) Most importantly: no more damn wars and no more unthinking paranoia inflicted on us by our own government.

Y’know, assuming he actually had a snowball’s chance in hell. I’m going windmill-tilting anyway! Gotta register as a Republican this month … as painful as that’ll be.

Meanwhile: BBC did a lengthy feature story on the subprime mortgage crunch. So where did they send their economics reporter? Cleveland! Hooray for blight!

Monday November 5, 2007

Tom Brady’s girlfriend won’t take our money anymore!

The world’s richest model has reportedly reacted in her own way to the sliding value of the US dollar – by refusing to be paid in the currency.

Gisele Bündchen is said to be keen to avoid the US currency because of uncertainty over its strength.

The Brazilian, thought to have earned about $30m in the year to June, prefers to be paid in euros, her sister and manager told the Bloomberg news agency.

Seriously though, as the article goes on to point out, people who know quite a bit about business agree that we’re screwed:

Last month, billionaire investor Warren Buffett said that he was not confident about the strength of the dollar.

“We are still negative on the dollar relative to most other currencies so we bought stocks in companies that earn their money in other currencies,” he said of his Berkshire Hathaway investment vehicle.

And last week, Jim Rogers, a former investor partner of George Soros, said that he was selling his home and all his possessions to buy Chinese currency, the yuan.

The dollar has slipped amid US interest rate cuts which have been trimmed to 4.5% after standing at 5.25% in September.

This means that investors are looking to buy other currencies that will give a higher rate of return.

Let’s put this in perspective here: Five years ago, a Canadian dollar was worth US$0.64. It’s now worth US$1.07. That’s a 67% gain. In other words, absolutely no one wants American currency. That sort of thing doesn’t happen at random. The currency traders and financiers out there know what absolutely no one else appears to (or, perhaps, wants to) see: We’re poised for a meltdown.

Sunday November 4, 2007

… it’s time to find replacements for Stewart and Colbert.

Slate held a contest, and here are the five winning jokes:

Saturday November 3, 2007

We’re doing the absolute dumbest thing imaginable: keeping smart people out of our country.

Congress has failed to pass immigration reform, so industries that depend on foreign workers have already been left in the lurch. But Senator Chuck Grassley now wants to make things worse.

Last week Mr. Grassley, the Iowa Republican, slipped an amendment into a spending bill that would tax businesses that hire skilled immigrants an additional $3,500 per visa to a total of $5,000 each. According to the National Foundation for American Policy, this represents a $3.1 billion tax increase over five years on some of America’s fastest growing companies.

Well that’s brilliant. The H1-B visa for skilled workers, primarily high-tech people that generate absurd amounts of innovation and wealth, is already capped at a mind-bogglingly small 65,000 people per year — for comparison purposes, 120,000 people applied on the first day that the visas were available. It’s gotten to the point that Microsoft is moving software development operations across the border to Vancouver because they can’t get the people they need in Redmond. Of course, this is all happening while other developed countries like Ireland will take as many skilled high-salary workers as they possibly can. (I’ve looked into this.)

In short, we have the most idiotic immigration scheme imaginable: We take in tons of foreign students, then refuse to let them work here. And this doesn’t even factor in the whole “let’s have all of Latin America wander across an open border and integrate them into our economy, then refuse to acknowledge their existence except as a perpetual underclass that can be deported on a whim” approach we’re going with. This is the magic of path-dependency: there’s a small flaw that gets larger and larger until everyone’s entrenched in a hopelessly shattered system and the only politically viable “solutions” just make things worse.

Meanwhile, two top-of-their-game articles from The Onion here and here.

Thursday November 1, 2007

Apparently, according to Countdown on MSNBC, the State Department has resorted to sending diplomats to Iraq against their will because, funny story, people don’t like being blown up. Hence, we’re going to have what amounts to a civil service draft. If the draftees refuse to go, they’re going to lose their jobs. Needless to say, they are PISSED.

One of the potential future firing squad targets cited a survey of State Department personnel where 88% thought we should leave Iraq. “Maybe, in this case, the 88 are right,” he said. The Bush administration political appointee that was hosting this Q&A came back with this:

“Well, at one point, 88% of Americans believed in slavery.”

Wow. There’s several serious problems with this. Beyond the absurd non-parallel, there’s the fact that he just equated not wanting to see more soldiers die with, um, supporting the subjugation of an entire race 200 years ago. Because those are sooo similar. This guy is clearly incompetent or soulless — or better yet, both!