I take it back

Have been watching live coverage of the 60th anniversary festivities from Beijing for the last two hours (on the local Chinese-language TV station in DC). Nice blue-sky day in town! Yes, they had the giant and threatening-seeming military displays I mentioned earlier.

But they were intermixed among mass pageantry of every imaginable campy Rose Parade-type variety. For each deployment of tanks, there has been a Farmers' Coop float. For each regiment of goosestepping female soldiers, all exactly the same height and with skirts exactly the same length, there has been a group of Clean Energy workers, accompanying a display of wind turbines and solar panels -- or a group of athletes from the Phys Ed university. Plus some pompom group whose ID on the screen I couldn't understand, and miscellaneous other celebrations. And a float from each province or region, with waving local beauties! This is becoming truer to the randomness of China as I think of it.  Happy 60th birthday.

Emptying the obesity-and-class mailbag

I will say goodbye for now to this topic, which began with an offhand mention that America didn't seem as fat as I "expected" after three years away. An unprecedented amount of mail came in; below and after the jump, samples of some of the themes I hadn't previously gotten to. Thanks for the responses.

Eating as an available pleasure. From a reader in South Dakota:

"An overlooked connection between obesity and class, I believe, stems from varying quantity of personal enjoyment and anticipation of enjoyment.

"It is one thing for a successful, financially comfortable, socially accepted and respected person who has multiple things happening every day that are pleasurable (golf, driving a nice car, nice home, stylish clothing, success at work, interesting social events, kids doing well, planning vacations, etc) to take just one pleasurable aspect of life (overeating) and sacrifice some of that pleasure for the good result of losing weight.

"Now, for people struggling financially and socially, trying to just get through the day and keep their lives together to varying degrees...their meals are often the only consistently happy and pleasurable events they can count on each day. 

"Obviously, a generalization.  But, if one gets up and faces a day with a tedious and unfulfilling job, not much money to spend on anything but necessities, and no "fun" things ahead, how much more difficult it is for that person to also think ahead to a day of denying themselves the pleasure of their mealtimes...."

The processed-food factor:

"I was quite surprised to note the glaring lack of an obvious contributing major factor in your recent post on obesity: processed foods.

"I was first struck by the weight of this factor (pun intended) during a trip to Buenos Aires a couple of years ago. During my stay, I was absolutely astonished to find such a small percentage of fat people given that:

"a) the per-capita consumption of meat (in Argentina) is the highest in the world.

Continue reading "Emptying the obesity-and-class mailbag" »

Beijing, 3am

Well, we're going to see a lot of these shots in the next 24 hours out of Beijing, as the 60th anniversary celebrations for the founding of the People's Republic take place. This is from a reader looking down Xidawang Lu, not far from our former home, at 3am local time October 1-- a few minutes ago as I write.

A nice tool for envisioning rhetoric

At this IBM research site, an interesting way to assess the themes in presidential inaugural addresses. The researcher, Jonathan Feinberg, uses fancy math to analyze which words in an address are most similar to those other presidents have used -- and which are most distinctive. The larger the words in the diagram, the more often a President used them in a given speech -- and the bluer they are, the more unusual their use is, compared with other speeches. The pink words are ones "conspicuously absent" from a speech -- ones showing up in other inaugural speeches but not this one.

For instance, this is the graph of GW Bush's Wilsonian-sounding Second Inaugural Address, with its commitment to "the expansion of freedom in all the world." Blue words are those distinctive to this speech; pink ones, those strikingly missing.

Update on McCaughey and tobacco

Yesterday I reported this exchange with a representative of the Manhattan institute, where Betsy McCaughey was based when she wrote her "No Exit" attack on the Clinton health reform plan:

 "I wrote back to Lindsay Craig asking which of these options the Manhattan Institute was saying:

"A: The Rolling Stone contention that tobacco companies collaborated with Ms. McCaughey and M.I. is totally false; there was no such contact or collaboration.

"B: We are confident that Ms. McCaughey's opinions were not influenced by tobacco companies, even though she may have worked with them.

"Her immediate response:
"A.   Betsy never worked with Phillip Morris." 

As a followup, I asked Ms. Craig whether there was any significance in the distinction between "tobacco companies" in the question and "Phillip Morris" in the answer. She said: No.  Her flat denial applies to "Tobacco companies (plural -- though the document in question is from Phillip Morris)."

Clear enough. So we now have documents, reported in Rolling Stone, in which a tobacco lobbyist claims in detail to have worked with McCaughey as she put together her articles -- and a categorical denial from the Manhattan Institute that she worked with tobacco firms. Yet again it would be helpful to have Ms. McCaughey address the specifics of the lobbyist's claim.

Local boys make good, China version

In an article this spring about China's recovery from the world slowdown, I mentioned a visit to the BYD company in Shenzhen, Guangdong province, where a materials-science PhD named Wang Chuanfu was leading the development of advanced battery powered cars.

On that trip I also visited the nice-but-nothing-fancy dorm-style quarters where Wang and the rest of the BYD management lived. Here's the punchline from that article (with a shot of Wang from the press conference in December announcing his new cars):

"The company's official goal is to be the biggest automaker in China by 2015, and the biggest in the world by 2025. Wang's unveiling of the car in Shenzhen coincided with U.S. congressional debate about emergency aid to GM and Chrysler. I asked Wang if he had any tips for the U.S. companies. He is a quiet, nerdish man who seemed to blanch as he heard the question translated. "For 100 years, nothing has changed in Detroit," he finally said (through the interpreter). "I think they need to reconsider their product lines."

Now, according to this report, Wang has become the richest man in China, thanks to a rise in BYD stock and a stake from Warren Buffett. That is a volatile distinction, with people's fortunes rising and falling, but impressive as an up-from-nothing manufacturing success story.

And in this article in 2007, I discussed the amazing Chinese "reality" show Win in China, which was a kind of super-capitalist version of The Apprentice. One of the finalists in the show was an earthy,  non-college-grad character named Zhou Yu and generally known as the "Lone Wolf."  Ole Schell, who has made a great new documentary about Win In China, has just posted an online report about the Wolf and his lingerie factory in Shandong province. Congrats all around. 

Doing Business in China: Porcelain Skin

Next installment in the Doing Business in China series: a look at the cosmetics business in China, in particular the very strong market for skin-whitening creams.

The desirability of "porcelain skin" in China -- like the analogous light-skin beauty images in Japan, the Philippines, much of Southeast Asia, much of India, and much of everyplace else --  has a variety of origins, largely in the tangled realm of basic color prejudice. In this clip we look briefly at a more straightforward source: the association in Chinese history between dark, tanned skin and a manual-labor, agricultural background -- which made untanned, light skin a marker of privilege and status. In practical terms this has significant business implications for cosmetics firms, as the clip suggests.

A nice offhand allusion in the NYT

The third paragraph of Sharon LaFraniere's story today in the NYT, about the Chinese government's obsessive over-preparation for the 60th anniversary celebrations of the founding of the People's Republic, on October 1 (background on the celebrations here):

"China's government at times resembles an exasperated parent trying to rein in a pack of rebellious children. Its edicts are persistently flouted by censor-dodging Internet users, wayward local officials and rioting Uighurs."

Two things strike me about this. First, it's good to see correspondents flat-out saying how things look to them, rather than having to rely on "Some observers say" or "Mr. X of YY think tank observes..." Second, this little context-setting aside is so much more realistic than the standard Western press references to a big, omniscient, all-powerful Chinese regime effortlessly working its will on the populace, whether in a good way by installing green technology or in a bad way by squashing dissent.

Over the past three years, I've emphasized maybe a million times how diverse, churning, individual-minded, and generally resistant to control much of today's China seems. If I were writing LaFraniere's sentence myself, I'd say "often resembles" rather than "at times resembles," and I'd replace the reference to the Uighur uprising (an exceptional, real emergency) with something about one billion rule-evading ordinary citizens. But this is a worthy step toward a sane perspective on China -- worth bearing in mind as we prepare to see the (deceptively) precise and orderly displays on October 1.
 
Photo from the NYT about the kind of precise pageantry we'll be treated to. Don't be misled.

More on Ls and Rs in Japanese

As mentioned yesterday, the risk in correcting others is that you get exposed to correction yourself. So it turns out to be -- sort of -- with my comments about the L and R sounds in Japanese. Major point: it remains correct to say, as I did, that Japanese speakers do not "lallate" -- use Ls in place of Rs, and vice versa. Minor refinement! It's not quite right to say, as I also did, that the Japanese phonetic system "has no L sound." Its writing system has only Rs instead of Ls (when represented in the western alphabet), but the sound is more complicated. Representative messages:

"I think it is more accurate to say that Japanese has a single sound that is somewhere in between English 'l' and 'r'.  The Japanese 'r' is certainly not standard US retroflex 'r'.  Say the name "Richard" and feel where your tongue goes (it's back towards the roof of your mouth).  Now say "baseboru" with your best shot at a Japanese accent - you'll find that your tongue is further forward in your mouth and just taps the ridge of your gums.  Now say "Lilly" - your tongue will be even further forward.  The 'r' in 'baseboru' is somewhere in between  "Lilly" and "Richard". " [JF note: this corresponds to my experience in coping with Japanese.]

And, from someone raised in America whose husband was raised in Japan:

"Yeah - they use "R" when they write those syllables in Roman alphabet.  I've learned though that my pronunciation is somewhat less comical to the listener if I pronounce it closer to the English "l" sound.  As best I can make out, the tongue position makes it something of a cross between our "r", "l", and "d".

I believe there is research showing that a newborn is able to "hear" most any of the sounds you can make, but by the time you are 3 or 5 (or somewhere in there) your brain has specialized for the sounds you normally hear.  My husband simply cannot hear the difference between the spoken "l" and "r", because there just aren't those distinct sounds in spoken Japanese.
"

Continue reading "More on Ls and Rs in Japanese" »

The obesity / class / region express rolls on

In response to a reader's comment that a pack of buffed-up CPAs "built like lumberjacks" took on construction workers and held their own, plus another about slimmed-down med students, this reponse:

"I agree with many of the observations from your med student correspondent. I work for a mid-sized management consulting firm comprised almost entirely of former Big Four consultants. We employee many CPAs and MBAs. Other people have different higher degrees. Though we have offices all over the Midwest as a group the employees are not merely trim but fit. Just in my office in Kansas City (traditionally considered one of the fattest cities around) we have several triatheletes, lots of marathon runners and long-distance cyclists. Having a personal trainer is not consider out of the ordinary.

"It is assumed that everyone has an athletic hobby. To be unfit would be a career-limiting trait. To be obsese would be career suicide. No one munches chips at their desks.

"Management consulting can be a bit of a macho world. Some guys compete, even place bets, when they participate in local charity runs. To lose is to invite gentle (or not so gentle) ribbing from other males. Our firm regularly competes in Corporate Challenge, which is taken quite seriously by the leadership. To win an event merits a mention at office-wide meetings.

"I think fitness is seen by the leadership as a proxy for discipline, self-control, and health. We are forbidden by HR from asking certain questions during interviews so questions about excercise and visual inspection of candidates can be used to gather important data about perspective hires. All things being equal, a big fat guy would not be hired.

"Most of us have to visit clients and it is believed that the appearence of fitness and vitality gives clients confidence in our skills, our ability to work long hours, our discipline.

"Not all of this is class. Many of the partners and employees, including myself, come from working class, rural or near-rural childhoods in small towns thoughout the Midwest or South. Some come from extremely small towns in western Kansas. A few were overweight or obese earlier in life and have worked hard to overcome that. I guess a lot of this is self-selection but I think most is a by-product of ambition and peer pressure. Somewhere along the way, we picked up the idea that to rise in the corporate world you had to have a certain look. This look includes being trim, having no facial hair, having enough muscle to fill out a suit but not so much you're conspicuous, and having nice teeth."

After the jump, a report based on compare-and-contrast observations in Kansas City and Chicago.
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Continue reading "The obesity / class / region express rolls on" »

Manhattan Institute replies (re McCaughey and tobacco lobby) UPDATED

In response to this item today, concerning Rolling Stone's claim that Betsy McCaughey worked secretly with tobacco lobbyists when preparing her 1994 New Republic article about the Clinton health reform plan, I have just received this note from Lindsay Craig of the Manhattan Institute:

"Below is a letter to the editor of Rolling Stone from Lawrence Mone, president, Manhattan Institute for Policy Research.

"In his article "The Lie Machine," Tim Dickenson asserts that former Manhattan Institute scholar Betsy McCaughey's work was influenced by Phillip Morris.  This conclusion is false.  Betsy McCaughey wrote two articles for the Wall Street Journal on the Clinton Health Care plan and an additional article for the New Republic which was solicited by its publisher.  At no time were her ideas influenced or controlled by anyone but the author herself."

I have written back to Lindsay Craig asking for clarification on what, exactly, Mr. Mone is saying. The Rolling Stone documents say that Ms. McCaughey worked, in secret, with tobacco company lobbyists in preparing her articles. Mr. Mone's statement says that she was not "influenced or controlled" by anyone else. I have written to ask whether Mr. Mone is saying that she never worked with tobacco representatives (whether or not she was "controlled" by them); and whether the Manhattan Institute was aware of any such collaboration. More info as it arrives.

UPDATE:
 I wrote back to Lindsay Craig asking which of these options the Manhattan Institute was saying:

"A: The Rolling Stone contention that tobacco companies collaborated with Ms. McCaughey and M.I. is totally false; there was no such contact or collaboration.

"B: We are confident that Ms. McCaughey's opinions were not influenced by tobacco companies, even though she may have worked with them.

Her immediate response:

"A.   Betsy never worked with Phillip Morris." 

Is this a question of a lobbyist grossly exaggerating his "influence" to impress bosses and funders? That's a very familiar pattern in Washington. On the other hand, the lobbyist's detailed knowledge of Betsy McCaughey's writing plans suggests some interaction. I don't know the underlying truth here. It would be valuable if Ms. McCaughey, who has specialized in detailed textual analysis, would address in specific what these documents contend.

One crucial B. McCaughey update

I have deliberately laid off the Betsy McCaughey theme for the past month-plus. I had my say; she continues to have hers; people can make up their minds.

But revelations late last week by Tim Dickinson, of Rolling Stone, are at face value so important that they deserve to be underscored. It's worth reading Dickinson's whole dispatch and studying the on-line scans of the documents he has found. But to me the real news is the evidence that tobacco lobbyists secretly worked with McCaughey to prepare her infamous 1994 New Republic article "No Exit." 

As I argued back in 1995 in "A Triumph of Misinformation," everything about McCaughey's role in the debate depended on her pose as a scrupulous, impartial, independent scholar who, after leafing through the endless pages of the Clinton health proposals, had been shocked by what she found. If it had been known at the time that she was secretly collaborating with one of the main interest-group enemies of the plan, perhaps the article would never had been published; at a minimum, her standing to speak would have been different.

(For the record: Yes, I am aware that my friend and current Atlantic colleague Andrew Sullivan, who was then TNR's editor, is the one who decided to publish this article. In the 15 years since the article's appearance, the magazine and its writers have, to their credit, repeatedly pointed out its errors and apologized for spreading its misinformation. Mickey Kaus was doing so immediately after the article's embarrassing selection for a National Magazine Award for "Excellence in Public Interest." Jonathan Cohn, author of the indispensable book Sick, did so early this year. The TNR site has a "link" to the original McCaughey piece, but it's not connected to the article itself.)
 
Now Tim Dickinson produces documents from a tobacco lobbyist about his efforts to derail the Clinton health bill, including this one involving McCaughey and her then employer, the Manhattan Institute:
 

In case that's blurry, here is what Dickinson says:

"What has not been reported until now is that McCaughey's writing was influenced by Philip Morris, the world's largest tobacco company, as part of a secret campaign to scuttle Clinton's health care reform. (The measure would have been funded by a huge increase in tobacco taxes.) In an internal company memo from March 1994, the tobacco giant detailed its strategy to derail Hillarycare through an alliance with conservative think tanks, front groups and media outlets. Integral to the company's strategy, the memo observed, was an effort to "work on the development of favorable pieces" with "friendly contacts in the media." The memo, prepared by a Philip Morris executive, mentions only one author by name:

' "Worked off-the-record with Manhattan and writer Betsy McCaughey as part of the input to the three-part exposé in The New Republic on what the Clinton plan means to you. The first part detailed specifics of the plan." '

"McCaughey did not respond to Rolling Stone's request for an interview."

Maybe there is another side to this story, but if unrebutted it is damning.

A whole bunch more on obesity theories

After the jump, an American-style cornucopia of observations and theories about which Americans are overweight and why. I have been fascinated to read this mail and am trying to share some of the most interesting or representative parts.

First, why med students aren't fat, from a fourth-year med student from Indiana:

"1)  From what I've seen, class is a massive factor when it comes to obesity.  For us, it's actually frighteningly easy to quantify class when seeing patients -- we rotate through 4 different hospitals here and the term "Wishard Patient" is a well worn code among students/doctors/nurses/etc.  Typically, it's used in the context of trauma (gun and knife club) but it's depressing how routine it is to see diabetic patients 50/100/150 lbs overweight in the populations that can least afford care.  When working in a clinic for the local indigent population I saw a whole family where I'm certain every member was at least 100 lbs overweight, and a 14 year old girl already weighed over 250 lbs.

2)  For some reason, there are very few fat medical students or residents.  Undoubtedly some of this is class, but the number of overweight students is too low to be attributed solely to that.  This actually kind of surprised me, because I've known my share of fat doctors.  My dad was a physician and could have stood to lose 30-40 lbs for most of his life...  But I'm constantly amazed at how fit my class is.  I can think of maybe 5 people I'd call "overweight" (let alone obese) in a class of 280.  I probably work out less than the mean, and I'm 6'2, 200 lbs, lift/run sporadically but play tennis once a week minimum.  I have friends who literally look like they can bench press trucks.  Some people just never NOT go to the gym, even on their most brutal rotations (sometimes that can mean 100+ hour weeks).  That's really inspiring to me. 

"But the moral of the story is why that's the case?  Undoubtedly some of that is self selection, but I think a lot of it is that the medical hierarchy can be incredibly cruel to the overweight.  I suspect it's much harder than an overweight candidate all else being equal to get admitted to medical school to get admitted (maybe even relative to other professional schools or graduate schools).  I've seen superiors (staff, residents) just blatantly insult the weight of subordinates -- what comes to mind in particular is a staff physician constantly berating an extremely overweight resident to his face.  And honestly, I sometimes wonder how patients would react to an obese physician -- is it tough to tell someone to quit smoking when you're a 100 pounds overweight?  I'm not sure."

Are cars the problem,  or suburbs? A view from Austria:

"Interesting last post about the perils of car culture. I think it's dead on, but I wanted to emphasize that it's not just cities that come out looking good. The lesson is closer to, it's suburbs that are bad.

Continue reading "A whole bunch more on obesity theories" »

Obesity and politics

A reader notes the thematic resemblance between two maps. First, the famous NYT map showing the counties that voted more Republican in the 2008 presidential election than in 2004. The areas in red show where Barack Obama, while winning nationally, got less of the vote than John Kerry did while losing.


What this means, if anything, is hard to say, because of the state-versus-county difference in scale and other anomalies. Still, it's interesting. The reader says:

"You brought up the voting map, but even before I saw your mention of it, it struck me that the obesity/median income map strongly resembled maps that showed percentages of people voting for McCain and Obama. There is a V, with its bottom point in Arkansas and extending an arm NE to West Virginia and NW to Montana, that covers both McCain voters and the poor-and-fat. So the GOP is not just the natural home now of evangelical whites but also the disproportionatlely poor and heavy? Wow. That's a lot of cultural signifiers for rednecks conservatives all rolled up into one.."

Here, also from the NYT, is a map of the states McCain actually carried, showing the reach up toward Montana.

Quis custodiet ipsos custodes, Besuboru dept

Update: Just after posting the item below I learned of the death of William Safire, who for three decades wrote the NYT Mag's language column, among his voluminous other works. Sorry for a querulous-seeming note under the circumstances. On the other hand, this is the kind of distinction that Safire himself reveled in. My condolences to his family.
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There is a big risk in writing items on the lines of: "Everybody thinks X, but everybody's wrong. Actually Y is correct." The risk is that, as the corrector, you can be wrong yourself. I know! I've been there before, and no doubt will be again.

Unfortunately, I think that the estimable Jack Rosenthal of the NYT, in today's "Language" column in the magazine, is there too. Most of the column is devoted to correcting widely-practiced misuses of "phantonym" terms -- "disinterested" to mean bored (wrong) rather than impartial (right), etc. I'm with him on all of these! Then he adds this multilingual note:

"The Japanese love besuboru, reflecting the phonetic phenomenon of lallation, reversing "r" and "l." "

Not really. Rather, in keeping with my opening note of caution: to the best of my knowledge and experience, this is incorrect. Japanese fans of the Hiroshima Carp or the Nippon Ham Fighters do indeed refer to the sport as either besoboru or, more formally, 野球, yakyu. But they don't say besoboru because they are switching Ls and Rs. They say it because the Japanese language does not have the L sound. Where English speakers would use either L or R, the Japanese language has only R.*
 
Therefore when Japanese people speak English, they often have trouble with Ls and may even "lallate," mixing up Ls and Rs. Much as English speakers, raised in a language with no gender, often mix up le/la or der/die/das in gendered languages like French or German. But when they're speaking Japanese, they say besoboru because that's the way their language works. (And if Rosenthal meant that the change wasn't caused by lallation but simply illustrated the use of an R where there had been an L -- OK. But it's still a bad illustration, since both Ls and Rs in English will become Rs in Japanese. Saying that it illustrates lallation implies that Rs would become Ls in Japanese -- Balaku Obama, etc. That doesn't happen.)

OTOH, a very nice homage to one of my long-time Atlantic friends and colleagues in the Cox-Rathvon acrostic in the same magazine today, and a lot of unusually elegant clues. Check it out.
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* Primer on Japanese sound system here and here. As anyone who has studied the language knows, its syllabary has the ra / ri / ru / re / ro sequence of R sounds, but nothing involving Ls.

Foreign words are often brought directly into Japanese and and converted to Japanese phonetics -- in contrast to Chinese, where the concept behind the foreign word is often re-rendered in Chinese. Thus "computer" is konpyuta (コンピュータ) in Japanese, but dian nao, "electric brain," (电脑), in Chinese. And thus in China I had a whole invented Chinese name with little relation to my original name, whereas in Japan, within the limits of Japanese sounds, my last name became ファローズ, Fuarohzu.

Obesity and class: the "hotness" factor

An additional view on the relationship among education, income, and weight:

"I am currently enrolled in an MBA program in a large city in the South.  On the weekends, I drive 80 miles and work as a paramedic for 48 straight hours for an emergency medical service that covers a bunch of rural small towns.  I am about 50 pounds over my ideal weight.  In my classes and in my neighborhood, which is very "creative class," my weight is definitely irregular.  In a b-school class of 50 or a full trendy neighborhood restaurant, there might be one other person who is more than 20 pounds overweight.  In the more rural area where I work, however, I'm damn close to the median.

"A couple of thoughts:
"1. Very broadly, American culture trends to stereotype those who get good grades as unathletic nerds.  Might be true in engineering, computer sciene and the natural sciences.  But in the professional classes, the same people I went to school with who had the discipline to put in the study time necessary to get into the good law schools, med schools or grab the investment banking or management consulting jobs also had the willpower to put in the time at the gym.  I'd bet that many current 22-year-olds would consider maintaining or obtaining "hotness" as as important as career success.  D.C. is full of these types of successful grads of good schools.

"2. Car culture is terrible for public health.  Again, I'm significantly overweight.  Always trying new exercise and diet programs that never result in sustained weight loss.  What has?  Spent two months in London without car, relying on public transit and walking, no attempt at dieting or exercising.  Weight loss: 22 lbs. Six weeks in NYC without car, relying on public transit and walking, no attempt...  Weight loss: 19 lbs.  D.C. also benefits from this.

"I had a friend from my paramedic job come visit me in the city a couple months back and bring his brother and a few of his brother's friends, who all work physically demanding construction jobs.  The construction guys, who are all stocky but in various stages of growing beer guts, somehow got into a fight with this group of guys who were built like lumberjacks.  It was a draw.  I later found out that the lumberjack guys were all "Big 4" accountants - CPAs who somehow had better arms and fitness levels than those who actually used their bodies for a living."

More in the queue.

FT, Economist, and me

- Very nice brief review of my Postcards book today, by Rahul Jacob in the FT. I am grateful for his seeing just the points I was trying to make.

- From the Economist's online site, a thought-experiment designed to show the ultimate folly of protectionism. This item has also been picked up by the Atlantic's own Andrew Sullivan.

This isn't the place for a full discussion of the differences between the world as laid out in a first-semester ec course and the world as it actually operates. My unified field theory on the topic is in this Atlantic story, "How the World Works," from 1993.

But this is the place to point out the basic logic error in the "thought experiment." Here's what the Economist's site said:

"But the idiocy of the whole idea [of tariffs and protectionism] can be understood with a simple thought experiment, which I haven't seen used elsewhere.

"If tariffs are such a good economic idea, then why stop at national boundaries? If they make everyone richer, why not have customs posts between New York and New Jersey? Cars entering and leaving the Lincoln tunnel would have to pay, on top of the toll, a surcharge on all the goods they contain. Why not, indeed, make New York and New Jersey self-sufficient in all their needs, making all their own cars, growing all their own food etc?"

Here's the difference between commerce involving New York and New Jersey, and commerce involving, say, the U.S. and China. New York and New Jersey are in the same country. Why does this matter? Let's try a little thought experiment.

Suppose you grow up in New Jersey. By the time you're looking for a job, the flow of capital, ideas, and innovation may mean that the best opportunities are in New York. Or Idaho, Or California. Sentimentally, perhaps you'd rather not move away from home. But in a pure economic sense, it doesn't matter in where the action is. You're free to move there. Within the national borders of the United States, there are only trivial, incidental impediments to citizens moving wherever they want. All "factors of production" -- money, material, people -- can flow freely throughout the country, for maximum efficiency. That's what the ec textbooks call for, and that's how it can work within a given country, or a free-movement zone like in Europe.

But it's not the same between countries. If you grow up in New Jersey and the real opportunities are in Shanghai, you can't necessarily move there. You may not be able to move there even if you grow up in Qinghai province, China. People do move across national borders, legally and illegally. Immigration is America's distinctive strength, so I'm glad as many move here as do. But in general, people's economic well-being depends very heavily on the industries and opportunities in the country where they are born.

Pointing this out doesn't prove protectionism right -- or wrong, as a strategy for developing a national economy. I'm on record as arguing that open Chinese-US trade has been good for both sides. But it does mean that the "thought experiment" makes no sense. There's a first-order difference between the flow of factors within a country and the flow between countries. I suspect this is the reason we haven't seen this powerful analogy "used elsewhere."

From Sudan, the Arctic, Shanghai: last takes on obesity

... at least for a while. Previously here, and with backward-reaching links here. Today's themes:

Role of psychological factors, beyond class and geography:

"Earlier this year, I spent a month in Southern Sudan. Returning to the US has many culture shocks - overpowering media environment being one. But the most striking was the preponderence not only of obese people, but people of all classes who were clearly overweight.

"I live in Rochester, upstate NY which I consider a small midwestern city. The class lines referred to in your post are easily visible and confirmed. But I'd add one other possible obesity factor that likely traverses class lines: depression. No data, but I would guess that people who are depressed or anxious most often turn to food to soothe those beasts. Perhaps there's also a subtle factor of reaction to our Calvinist, repressive cultural history when it comes to sensual pleasure; food is allowed."

The Eskimo angle:

"I live in a predominantly Yup'ik Eskimo part of the world, where education levels are typically lower and the consumption of junk food has led to rapidly increasing rates of diabetes.Overweight and obese are the norm here, and not just among Yup'iks....

"Another indicator from here: the used-clothes boutique has literally tens of feet of rack space for large, large clothes, about one foot or less for what one would consider small sizes.A doctor friend says the medical community has to redefine normal, since official normal does not represent most people...

"I recently took a trip to Kansas City - which appears periodically in those lists generated somewhere of most-obese cities - and was struck by how few overweight people I was seeing. In fact, it was notable to me how fit most people looked, whereas here it is just the opposite. I was surprised."

From a British friend in Shanghai:

"I'm not surprised you are surprised not to see so many obese people. The world is enjoying the conversation about an 'obesity epidemic' and technically America tops the scales which gives the rest of us a chance to enjoy a seeming superiority. Whether or not that situation has changed in America and whether or not the situation for the rest of us has changed (in Europe, China or wherever getting fatter) doesn't matter. It's become a truism that Americans are fatter in greater numbers. This belief is held on to by both a) foreigners who like to have a dig at the US whenever we get a chance and b) ex-pat Americans who take the ex-pat view of all ex-pats that the country they come from has gone to the dogs since they left it. As you've been mixing with both foreigners and ex-pat Americans for several years in China you've probably let your guard down a bit and allowed it all to seep into your consciousness as it sort of seems right. Therefore when you return and are re-immersed in American life your unconscious assumption made while overseas is challenged.

"Or, maybe you just need glasses!

"Seriously though, it is interesting how many myths, stereotypes and assumptions you make about your own society while out of it for even a relatively short time.

"Therefore the question is not really what happened to America's weight, good or bad, but what happened to James Fallows while he was away!"

Ah, that last line opens up some questions that reach far beyond the obesity theme...  For now I'll say that I will return shortly to the ever-pressing boiled frog and slippery slope debates. And I will add, after yesterday's set of obesity maps, that a wonderful site for visualized data in general is FlowingData.com -- eg with this set of charts about making sense of flight delays. Nothing to do with body weight but interesting nonetheless. Thanks to Parker Donham for this lead.

More on obesity, geography, and class

Gary Chapman, of the University of Texas, has created this way of envisioning the relationship between income and obesity. Concept: the shading varies with the obesity rate divided by median household income. This is a not-immediately-obvious way to present the data, in order to highlight one particular phenomenon: The darker the shade, the likelier you are to find people who are both poor and obese. Map created via Datamasher.org.

Continue reading "More on obesity, geography, and class" »

Drollest boiled-frog-inspired imagery so far

Jay Ackroyd writes in, concerning the "replacement for boiled frog imagery" theme:

"The one I've always used for this kind of thing is the male pattern baldness combover. Makes sense at first, but when do you decide that today is the day you now look like an idiot."

Thematically-related contribution from The Onion here.

Weight, class, and Wal-Mart

From a friend in Boston, a note that gives an extended version of a theme in many responses I've received. Background here and here. Charts and data on this point shortly. The argument here -- that, along with smoking, obesity has become a class-bound marker and problem in America -- is hardly surprising, but the power of the connection is what many people emphasize.

"i wonder if your seeing fewer overweight people than you expected when you got back to the states might be, at least in part, a function of class. this is a point i'm somewhat uncomfortable making, but it shouldn't be ignored. people who, just as a for instance, run and listen to npr and read (not to mention write for) the atlantic are both likelier to be fit and likelier to associate with people of the same ilk. (as a nation, we've not only gotten fatter but also, as you know, much less likely to mix with people who don't share our educational or cultural background.)

"i remember walking  through harvard yard back in 1986 during the university's celebration of its 350th anniversary. the place was awash in alums, and there was something noticeably different about most of these people. it wasn't that they were expensively dressed or looked like preppies, i realized. it's that almost everyone was so *trim.* none of  these people would likely be found shopping in wal-mart, where waistlines look a lot different.

"as an aside: i've long thought it would be an interesting commentary on the stratification in this society to have political candidates asked during a debate if they'd ever shopped at a wal-mart. i have to think that very few could honestly answer yes--and the higher the office the fewer the yeses. to think that a democracy's leadership class should  have no connection (other than owning stock--or, in hillary clinton's case, being once on its board) to the biggest corporation in the country, how strange! back when the biggest corporation was gm or exxon, even the wealthiest people likely had *some* dealings with it, even only being chauffered in a cadillac."

To answer the last question: I'm not a political candidate, but I have not only shopped in W-Ms around the US but have also been to many outlets inside China. That's a story on its own -- the one in Shanghai has whole pig carcasses suspended by hooks right inside the front door, and tanks full of live carp, which the shopper-housewives let flop around on the floor to see which ones look best for the evening's dinner. No one will ever convince me that W-M doesn't know how to globalize/localize.

But I digress. To sharpen my friend's question: a candidate should be asked when was the most recent time he or she enjoyed Every Day Low Prices.

Reactions on Chinese tires

In this item two days ago, I mentioned that most of the mainstream economics press had gone (predictably) berserk in overreacting to the shock-horror nightmare of the Obama administration's tariff on imported Chinese tires.

First point: I neglected to mention the honorable exception of Andrew Peaple, reporting in the WSJ and playing down "Oh no! Smoot Hawley!" hysteria from the start. The online version of his initial story:

"WSJA(9/15) Heard On The Street: Tires, Chickens, Common Sense
   (From THE WALL STREET JOURNAL ASIA)
   By Andrew Peaple
"Fought over the likes of bras and bananas, trade wars always give off a whiff of the absurd.

"With a measure of good sense, a spat between the U.S. and China involving tires and chickens won't devolve into a trade war as well."

Unfortunately, the version of the story that is now online has a much more alarmist headline, though the common-sense content of the article itself is still the same. Here's the new headline:


Next, from someone with on-scene experience, making a point left out of most of the reflexive, "Oh no! Smoot Hawley!" original coverage

"I was a senior International Trade consultant with 2 major firms in China 2003-2007.   Approximately one third of the over 100 projects I managed during that four year period involved assisting foreign companies (US, EU, some Japanese) in defending themselves against either investigations by, or anti-competitive practices perpetrated by, the Chinese Customs authorities. 

"I believe that I can safely say that without fail, each project of this type that I was involved in was predicated by a distortion or willful misunderstanding of both Chinese and WTO/WCO trade law and operational norms by the Customs authorities.  Nor were these actions limited to provincial backwaters (though the most egregious did take place there); many of our projects involved Shanghai or Beijing Customs entry ports.  Practices such as demanding improper HTS classification of goods (HTS classification determines applicable duty rate) or arbitrary valuation of goods (the Customs declared value upon which duty and VAT are assessed) are practiced daily throughout the country and cost foreign companies substantial amounts.

"I very seldom see this issue addressed in any article concerning China trade and thought I would bring it to your attention."

Main point: this is a far more complicated issue, with a far longer and more tangled history, than 95% of the western-press reaction would indicate. I urge everyone to keep up with this "China Financial Markets site before expressing heated opinions on the subject.

Update: there's actually no material after the jump; original posting included some background notes, by mistake. But our system retains the "continue reading" link even with nothing there any more.

Continue reading "Reactions on Chinese tires" »

Are we fat?

Assents, dissents, and elaborations -- well, actually no assents -- to these two earlier comments that I have not noticed the American obesity epidemic as much as I expected, after a few years away.

"You need to get out more." A note representative of many I received:

"You are in Washington.  Too many urbanites who buck the trend.  Spend a week off the coast - In Cincinnati, Columbus, St. Louis especially in the suburbs and you will see it."

Ripple Effects:

"Your comment about not seeing as many obese Americans as you expected to has prompted me to write. I teach product design in the college of engineering at [a major public university in the Midwest], and am currently working on a project to help the hospital technicians who do X rays, sonograms, CT scans, etc. It turns out that many of these folks suffer quite serious injuries at work, and by far the major cause of these injuries is the obese patients they deal with on a daily basis.

"It appears that most of these technicians are women who are often required to move patients who outweigh them by several hundred pounds. In fact, one of the techs we interviewed in our study pointed out that when she performs vaginal sonograms on very large women, each of the patient's legs often weighs more than she does. I've often read articles about the growing obesity problem in the US, but I've never come across anything concerning this large and growing problem, if you'll pardon the pun. 

"I find myself wondering, when I read about the growing cost of obesity in the US health system, if anyone is looking at the cost of injuries to the people who are responsible for treating these folks?"

More refined view of the regional difference:

"My personal, unscientific evaluation of obesity is that it's lower in big cities than small.  I live in Chicago, but have friends and family throughout the Midwest.  My impression is that I see more "volume abundant" people in the smaller and rural towns.  A little Googling gave that a bit of support, but it is related to property values:  titled "Zip Codes And Property Values Predict Obesity Rates."  I don't know where you were making your observations, but that may be a big contributor.

Continue reading "Are we fat?" »

Airplane noise, senior-citizen driving: replacements for frogs

Suggestions on replacements for the boiled-frog metaphor:

"The cat litter box is a good substitute and there are plenty of similar examples if one considers sounds. A succinct example of this is from the movie the Blues Brothers. After Elwood picks up Jake from prison, they go to Jake's apartment in Chicago. Right after an El train rattles by, Jake asks Ellwood, "How often do the trains come by?". Jake responds, "So often, you don't even notice."

"A similar situation occurred with my grandmother. She and her husband bought a house near LAX in the 50s, when I'm sure the occasional airplane flying over was a pleasant distraction. At the time of her death in the 90s, LAX had 4 runways and their house was bombarded by the noise from constant aircraft that seemed to be flying just a few feet overhead. Anyone walking into her house would have wondered why the TV was so loud, until the next takeoff or landing occurred.

"Two more frog equivalences. Ever work on another person's computer and find that it operates brutally slowly? No one ever seems to notice that almost day-by-day loss of performance themselves. Easy to understand, but I can't think of a catchy shorthand.

"So finally, my nomination for the replacement, an old person driving. They never notice the degradation in their driving skills until some unsuspecting passenger or pedestrian has a (hopefully only) near death experience."

More to come.

America's newest shortage: the obese

In response to my observation that I hadn't encountered as many very heavy Americans as I thought I would on return from three years away:

"My wife (who is Australian and green card-holding) and I ( who was born in England but am now naturalized) were married this summer in Washington DC. Naturally her Australian family and some English relations of mine came to the wedding; for all of them it was their first time in the States and they combined their trip to DC with the usual American tourist visits (Disneyland, NYC, etc). On separate occasions both the Australians and the English said to me more or less what you wrote: "There are not as many fat people here as we expected".

"As far as I understand it the rest of the Anglophone world is not so far behind the US in terms of obesity rates so maybe their stereotypes about America haven't caught up with the new, fatter reality in their own countries..."

Once and for all with the frogs

Now that varied components of the online world are bearing down on the boiled-frog problem (Glenn Beck; Andrew Sullivan; Kevin Drum; the ever-useful Linguistics Log etc), here is the state of play:

1) Consensus that real frogs don't actually do what the cliche (and Hillary Clinton, Al Gore, and countless others) say they do. Consensus unfortunately has not reached the otherwise- beyond-reproach Tom Toles of the WaPo, whose cartoon today is:


2) Consensus that one kind of frog actually does behave this way: these are frogs with their brains removed. Details here. Thanks to Michael Jones for the science on this one, and congrats to Joe Romm for putting the revised image to use.

3) Consensus that the metaphor itself is useful. See here and here.

4) Allegations that there are no substitutes. OK, here's one, as mentioned early this year: the "cat lady" litterbox problem. You have cats in the house (I speak as a cat fan*) and you don't notice the mounting smell. Then someone walks in the door, involuntarily steps back, and says, "My God! What is that reek?" Here is the classic formulation, as laid out by Don Rose here, regarding the Gov. Blago scandal:

"Out of towners often ask me how it is that folks in Chicago and Illinois put up with all the hanky and panky that goes on in our political snakepits.

"I tell them about my cat litter box.

"Currently I have two cats--once I had nine. In any case, I used to think I kept their potty clean and odor free. Then, every so often someone would come to the door, sniff the air and whisper in confidence, "I think your cat box needs changing."

"They were right, of course. They came from cat-free environments and could sense a drop of urine at 30 paces, while I had grown so desensitized to the aroma that my schnozz would tell me I was romping through a fresh pine forest."

And I bet we could even work in some slippery-slope reasoning here!

So, to answer Kevin Drum's question: we don't cling to the frog story, even knowing it's false, because there is no possible other illustration from the realm of shared human experience that would illustrate progressive desensitization. The litterbox problem is one that is actually true -- and I bet a million times more people have experienced it than have actually seen a boiled frog. There's some other psycho/linguistic reason why the boiled frog story has caught on. But for the moment, this is my candidate for a new image: the reeking kitty-litter box. If someone has a better candidate, great.

___

*On the cat-fancier theme: to demonstrate that I am a friend of all animals involved in these image controversies, the hapless frogs as well as the reeking cats, herewith a photo of the now quite elderly Mike the Cat, in his prime. He has been in loving adopted care, since our departure for China. Then and now, no odor came from his litterbox -- according to us.

A few more random return-to-the-homeland notes

I will never do this systematically, so I'll keep jotting them down at random. As I repatriate, I notice:

- Not as many very fat large Americans as I was expecting. Am I looking in the wrong places? So propagandized into thinking that all of my countrymen are obese that expectations are off? Something gone wrong with my visual judgment? Something gone right with public health? I don't know. Just telling you what I have (not) seen.

- In a number of airports the past few days. I can't help noticing the moronic, utterly rote and meaningless announcements that begin, "The Department of Homeland Security has determined that the threat level is Orange. Please be alert..." The way you can tell that I'm still not fully acclimated is that I notice the announcements at all. For everyone else, they are 100% white noise. Is there a stupider aspect of national policy at the moment than these formulaic "threat level" announcements, which are always orange and which give no useful info whatsoever? Okay, I'm sure there's something stupider, but for rhetorical purposes I'll say that I can't think of one right now.

- When I am king: I will outlaw "wheelie"- style rollable bags for carry-on luggage. Wheels and a handle on a big, heavy suitcase meant to be checked? Perfectly reasonable. But if you're going to carry something onto the plane, the law should require you actually to carry the thing, all the way to your seat. Why do I care? The wheelie triples or quadruples the floor space occupied by any one person, and the people tugging them don't look behind. I get my revenge by kicking the bags as they're being dragged across my path and tripping me. Then I act like it was an "accident."

- But even before that I will outlaw: leafblowers. God in heaven, do I hate that noise. Unfortunately, the neighborhood abounds in households that love hiring crews for the all-out leafblower experience -- they stagger their days, so it happens pretty much nonstop. I realize that the Beijing approach (below) is probably not practical in the U.S. But, hey, I actually have used a rake in my time. Part of the new Clean Energy policy for America?

 
 

If you're in Princeton this afternoon....

... go hear Zhang Yue, the environmentalist-mogul who was the subject of my story "Mr. Zhang Builds His Dream Town," give a talk at the university. Time and place details here.

Zhang Yue, in sunglasses, when I first visited "Broad Town," his surrealistic factory town in Changsha, Hunan province. More pictures and narrated slideshow here.

Well, at least Glenn Beck has confirmed my theory

When we have Paul Krugman and Beck reaching accord on so basic a point of science -- well, it means something, but I am too weirded out to say just what at the moment.

(Background, in case you've missed it, here.)

About those Chinese tires

I keep putting this off, so before it finally disappears into the mists of time, here is a bullet-point summary of what I would have said at greater length when the Chinese tire tariff first arose.

1) There is not now, and there never was, a serious possibility that this would escalate into some sweeping, self-intensifying, global-recovery-threatening "trade war."  The many publications and commentators who raised their hands in "Oh no! It's Smoot Hawley again!" horror need to calm down -- and to have their tendency toward over-reaction noted for the record. Yes, I'm talking about you, Economist magazine cover-designers (last week's cover image, below), but you had tons of company.
 

There is too much going on, on too many other fronts, involving affairs of incomparably greater consequence between China and America, for this to have been more than a contained, specific dispute -- contained in both duration and sweep. This was clear at the time and should have buffered the shock-horror tone of the stories. Why this matters: because of the  boy-who-cried-wolf principle. There are issues between China and the outside world in which a small disagreement could spiral into a very dangerous confrontation. Many of these involve Taiwan, for reasons to be spelled out another time. But tire tariffs, agree with them or not, were never going to set off a global economic confrontation.

2) Larger point about the nature of this reaction, by analogy to Al Sharpton. Not to pick on him, but why did Sharpton's reputation as a careful, precise commentator on national affairs suffer during the 1980s? Especially after the unfortunate Brawley case? I would say it was the magical combination of predictability, exaggeration, and tendentiousness. His reaction to any news event was predictable (it was always about racism); it was exaggerated (it was always really terrible racism); and it was tendentious, in being uninterested in the details of the specific case. On the other hand, he was witty! I often think of the bad, non-witty side of the Sharpton of that era when I see the mainstream reaction to any trade dispute. It's predictable (oh no! Trade war!); exaggerated (oh no! Smoot Hawley!); and tendentious, in not being interested in any contextual point other than the evils of unions and protectionism.

3) What's the context that does matter? Usefully, two people with whom I often disagree on trade questions -- the former editor of the Economist, Bill Emmott, and Robert Samuelson of the Washington Post -- have both pointed out that there is a more important issue here than whether one agrees on the merits of the tire decision. They both criticize the decision  -- but as the headline on Samuelson's column puts it, "Bad Policy, Right Message." (My own view would be: Maybe bad policy, certainly right message.)

The right message concerns the historic transformation of the Chinese economy that began a year ago, when demand from its biggest overseas customer, the United States, dried up all at once.  This story, which I wrote from China six months ago, discussed the magnitude of the adjustments China was trying to make -- and also emphasized the parallel that Michael Pettis, an economist at Peking University, drew between China's situation in 2009 and America's 80 years earlier. The details are laid out in that article, but the main point was this: Like America in the 1920s, China in the 2000s had been the dominant "global surplus" country, manufacturing and selling to everyone else and piling up big surpluses. When customers suddenly stopped buying -- America's because of the Great Depression, China's because of this recent freezeup -- the surplus countries lost disproportionately many jobs, because they'd had more than "their share" to begin with. That happened to America in the 1930s, and it is happening to China now.

This kind of loss is painful for any country under any regime. In terms of human suffering, it's all the worse for China, since so many of the displaced workers are so hard-pressed to begin with. In the long run, everyone agrees that both the Chinese and the U.S. economies need serious adjustment: the US toward more savings and investment, China toward more domestic consumption and less reliance on export markets, so that its own, still-poor population can enjoy more of the fruits of their own labor. But in the short run, the adjustment is difficult -- for each country. And the drama that Pettis foresaw six months ago, and which provides the proper background to the tire dispute, is the Chinese government's (natural) attempt to resist the inevitable and keep its trade surplus up as long as it can.

That's the significance of stories like this, which I've mentioned  (eg here and here) over the months.


This is not at all a matter of "blaming" China. Moralizing has no place in these sorts of economic adjustments -- whether we're talking about the Chinese government's currency-management to keep the RMB's value artificially low (details here), or the US imposition of tire tariffs. The real question is how the economies can manage the complementary adjustments each of them has to make, with minimal damage to their own populations and to world business as a whole. These are big, woolly, complicated, world-historical processes underway. There are a lot of useful things to say about them -- not including "Oh no! Trade war!"

Now I see why I put this off so long.

Continue reading "About those Chinese tires" »

By popular demand: Volokh on frogs and slippery slopes

Recently I made an oblique allusion (last line of this item) to an article by Eugene Volokh, of UCLA Law School, in defense of "slippery slope" reasoning.

Apparently it was a little too oblique, so in response to a number of queries let me come right out and say: Eugene Volokh has written in defense of "slippery slope" reasoning here, in a Legal Affairs article with David Newman from 2003, and here or here, in versions of a Harvard Law Review article that same year. I think these pieces do a reasonable job of showing why the slippery slope may be useful as a legal concept, whether or not the phenomenon exists in the natural world.* (Sort of like the legal concept of the "reasonable man." Never mind, just a little joke.) Stay tuned for more reader nominees for most plausible real-world example.

And while we're on the legal-concept theme -- ie, slippery slope as a rhetorical device, not a reality -- here's another related entry:

"I think there are some good uses of slippery slope arguments. One example is the general constitutional idea of safe harbor, which I became acquainted with while reading the transcripts and decision in Reno v ACLU, where it became clear that the law was written in such a way that there were large number of sites which would not be considered to be pornographic under the normal understanding of pornography but which the statue would allow to be prosecuted. The prosecution (in Reno vs ACLU) essentially argued, "Oh, we don't intend to prosecute those cases" and the court in effect said, but the law doesn't allow anyone to be sure they are doing the right thing."

Back to the search for real-world examples soon.
___
* Volokh unfortunately lards his argument with specious boiled-frog references, but at least in the Harvard Law Review version he redeems himself by admitting -- as Paul Krugman recently did -- that he's referring only to fictional figure-of-speech frogs, since real ones would probably try to save themselves.

Two views of SECDEF Gates

In response to this item yesterday, noting Robert Gates's mention of John Boyd as one of the "transformative figures of American air power," two reactions. The first is from a relatively recent product of the Air Force Academy (whom I don't know). The second is from a long-standing friend who is a quite experienced veteran of the defense business. First up:

"I graduated from the Air Force Academy in 2002, and while I was there Boyd was taught in our Military Strategic Studies courses as though he was the latest in a line of military theorists that stretched from Sun Tzu, Clausewitz, Jomini, Douhet, Mitchell, Liddell Hart, Boyd, and Warden.  In fact, Boyd's OODA loop was taught with such reverence that I distinctly remember making light of it with my classmates.

"I am a few years to junior for such an assignment, but were I on the the staff of Secretary Gates assisting with the preparation of speeches, I would not have batted an eye at the inclusion of Boyd among that line up, and I doubt any officers from my cohort would either.  If anything, LeMay strikes me as out of place and far more controversial in today's Air Force."

Now, from Charles A. Stevenson, a friend and former professor of mine who has written a book, SECDEF, about the "nearly impossible job" of running the Pentagon:

"I share your surprise and satisfaction over the performance of Bob Gates...  I fully expected him to follow the Laird model: wind down the war in Iraq, cut deals with the senior military on other issues, end-run the White House types on issues that mattered to him. From his long government service and membership on the Iraq Study Group, that seemed likely. His appointment by Obama suggested that the new team liked his style and welcomed the political cover he provided as a Republican.

"Now I think his closest model was the first SecDef Gates, Tom Gates, who had served several years in the Pentagon under Eisenhower before being elevated to SecDef.

Continue reading "Two views of SECDEF Gates" »

Doing Business in China: The Elusive Chinese Internet

Next up in the Doing Business in China series: what to make of the positive and negative effects of China's embrace of the internet. My Atlantic article about the subject last year is here; previous entries about the series here. This clip, and the related parts of the series, go into some of the related and subsequent developments.
 

I keep waiting for SECDEF Gates to do something really stupid ...

... and I'm sure his time will come. (Most likely occasion of error: Afghanistan.)

But for the moment, he keeps offering surprises in the opposite direction. Including last week, with this speech to the Air Force Association convention, the ending of which is exemplary in two ways.

For one thing, it ends with what used to be known in speechwriting land as an "ending," rather than the boilerplate that has become standard in presidential addresses. The ending is nothing special, but at least he tried. (And he didn't take a shortcut with "God bless the Air Force.")

More important is this peroration, which starts with an appreciation of Billy Mitchell and goes on to say:

"It strikes me that the significance of Mitchell and his travails was not that he was always right. It's that he had the vision and insight to see that the world and technology had changed, understood the implications of that change, and then pressed ahead in the face of fierce institutional resistance.
"     The transformative figures of American air power - from Mitchell to Arnold, LeMay to Boyd - had this quality in varying degrees. It is one I look for in the next generation of Air Force leaders, junior and mid-level officers, and NCOs who have experienced the grim reality of war and the demands of persistent conflict. These are men and women we need to retain and empower to shape the service to which they have given so much."

Whoa! To have John Boyd -- fighter pilot, theorist of combat, unbelievably persistent thorn in the Air Force establishment's side from the late 1960s through his death a dozen years ago -- become part of an offhand, last-name-only allusion to the "transformative figures of American air power" is something like the moment when establishment economics began including "Keynes" in their list of major figures.* Gates had done homage to Boyd before, for instance as discussed here. But this is a further, interesting, and deserved step. The Gates-misstep watch perforce continues.
______
* For as much more as you would like to know about John Boyd, you can follow the links in this previous item, or of course read Robert Coram's wonderful biography Boyd. On the Keynes comparison, I don't mean that Boyd ideas have affected as many people in as many countries through as many decades as Keynes's have; but the vindication of ideas previously considered total heresy is comparable.

I love this on so many levels

It turns out that the "Chinese site" with dramatic photos of rehearsals for the 60th anniversary commemorations in Beijing on October 1, which I mentioned this morning, is a straight-ahead, flat-out, unblushing rip-off of this "The Big Picture" feature three days ago from the Boston Globe's site. I don't see any mention of the Globe on the Chinese site, either in English or what I think is the Chinese version (Boshidun Huanqiu - 波士顿 环球 ?).

I should have guessed. (Why would a Chinese site have bothered to include translated English captions? Why was there a semi-edgy photo of a lone man and a tank?) My reflexes must be going. I'll have to re-sharpen them with a visit soon. Thanks to C. Wang and others for the heads-up. Apologies to the Globe.

Book list: Repeat After Me

Rachel DeWoskin's Foreign Babes in Beijing -- a memoir of her unlikely career as a vampy soap opera star on Chinese TV in the 1990s -- is deservedly on the list of books that expats in China tell new arrivals they should read for a pop-culture feel of the place. My own reaction, when newly arrived, here.

DeWoskin's new book, Repeat After Me, is different: novel rather than memoir, set half in New York and half in Beijing rather than all on-scene in China. But the voice and nervous/sassy sensibility are similar, and similarly memorable. When I was reading it this summer, I marked a few passages that made me miss Beijing (no small achievement, just after I'd left) or that rang particularly true. The book's not at hand at the moment, so I'll just say: a book worth finding out about for yourself.

The 60th anniversary celebration is almost here!

From this Chinese site, with English translation, some appropriately amazing pictures of the preparations and practice runs for the celebrations of the 60th anniversary of the founding of the People's Republic of China, on October 1. (Previous mention here.) A few samples:

Nightime practice drill last month.

More slippery slopes

This is not the only subject on my mind at the moment (eg, the Redskins' unimpressive victory over the Rams just now, Barack Obama's more impressive TV fandango this morning, the ever-interesting Chinese tire tariff question, etc)  but it's the one with the biggest backlog of worthwhile incoming material. From reader BJ in Florida:

"Three thoughts on your "slippery slope" dialogue:

"1) As your reader Webster Marquez hinted, the frequency of a slippery slope argument actually bearing out seems to be quite rare. In fact, if a scientist or statistician was looking at this question, it seems to me that they would be comparing the number of times that a "slippery slope" argument did NOT bear out, versus the number of times that one actually DID bear out. When looked at this way, history is seemingly littered with thousands of failed "slippery slope" arguments, versus a precious few arguments that may have been considered true.
 
"2) One good, general recurring slippery slope argument may be the drawing of colonial boundaries that ignored the indigenous geography of ethnicity, language, culture, religion, etc. Once formalized, the results appear to inevitably be tragic whether it's Palestine, Iraq, Afghanistan, Kenya, Nigeria, etc.
 
"3) I'm almost ashamed of myself for suggesting the following, but not ashamed enough...If there was ever a valid "slippery slope" in politics (albeit not policy-related), it surely must be (literally and figuratively) the initiation of an extramarital sexual relationship. Once that "little step" is taken, the results are almost universally predictable:

Continue reading "More slippery slopes" »

Harmonic convergence dept: frogs, China Daily, etc

I realize this may be more interesting to me than to the public at large, but: Somehow I feel fulfilled to find my favorite newspaper, the China Daily, taking my favorite factually-erroneous cliche, the boiling frog, and putting it to excellent and unexpected use. Today's China Daily illustrates the frog problem -- but, for once, in an accurate way! As the water is getting hotter, the little froggies are jumping right out. Just like in real life, except for the tiny backpacks. (Parachutes?)

Thomas de Quincey on slippery slopes

Profundity from the author of Confessions of an English Opium-Eater:

"If once a man indulges himself in murder, very soon he comes to think little of robbing; and from robbing he comes next to drinking and Sabbath-breaking, and from that to incivility and procrastination. Once begin upon this downward path, you never know where you are to stop. Many a man has dated his ruin from some murder or other that perhaps he thought little of at the time. Principiis obsta-that's my rule."

Principiis obsta -- resist the first inklings, "nip it in the bud" -- is of course the slippery-slope concept with a college degree. Thanks to J. Stein, even though this one does not win the "most convincing real world example of a slippery slope" award. More to come.

Slippery slope updates

A few more from a very nice array that has arrived. Original post here.

Serious:

"With the exception of the birth-death sequence of life, our notion of free will tends to negate the unavoidability of the slippery slope - to our great benefit, I would have thought."

Serious in a different way:

"Trying is the first step towards failure."
Homer Simpson, The Simpsons

A powerful real-world example:

"The birth-to-death suggestion is not a valid example of a "slippery slope," in that it is not so much "slippery" as perfectly smooth. Mortality is an inevitable straight-line progression missing the essential element of choice. There is no option to "back up" the slope, to pause, or to go faster. In principle, the reader's example is no different than that of striking a match in a windless room, something that will inevitably turn the match to ashes. Nothing slippery about that, although matches flame out quicker than lives.
 
"The best example of a "slippery slope" in the realm of public policy may be the American journey toward racial equality. It's taken more than 100 years. There have been pauses along the way, with some temporary backtracking. We've gone from the Emancipation Proclamation, to the Anti-Slavery Amendments, to the Jim Crow era of "Separate but Equal," to Brown v. Board of Education, to the Civil Rights Act of 1964, to the Voting Rights Act of 1965, to improvements in these statutes, to the Supreme Court's abolition of antimiscegenation laws (Loving v. Virginia). Focusing only on the "de jure" aspects of this, African Americans have traveled the complete journey, beginning as the lawful property of white men and ending with full legal equality. "

I think there is a lot to this last point. (Indeed, to all of them.) In American history the  slippery-slope Cassandras whose worst fears have been most vividly realized were the segregationist hard-liners of the pre Civil Rights-legislation era. They warned that once you blurred the racial barriers you'd have race-mixing of all sorts, including intermarriage. And once you headed down that road, you'd have these mixed people all over the place... in the extreme nightmare version, even at the White House.

More in the queue. And later today, a long-promised update on whether slippery-slope thinking applies to the Chinese tire tariffs.

Why the China Daily will always be my favorite newspaper

I miss the joy of opening it each morning so much!

Full story here; earnest Onion-worthy comments here; thanks to Shanghaiist, here.

Early "slippery slope" contender

Many fine entries in hand; keep them coming.  One line of reasoning predominates, well illustrated by this submission:

"Birth consistently leads to death.  There are often events of interest to someone between the two.  Aside from fairy tales, I know of no more reliably consistent slippery slope.

"More pop into my head, but following on their heels are exceptions.

"Here is a chain of events for you:

"Birth leads to toilet training.  Toilet Training leads to puberty. Puberty leads to adulthood.  Adulthood leads to death.  Of course, it isn't entirely consistent given that some do not achieve all steps."

More later.

Political rhetoric question/contest: "slippery slopes"

Due no doubt to the few years I spent producing political rhetoric and the many decades I have spent ingesting it, I'm obsessed with endlessly interested in the connection between the words we use about public life and the decisions we make and attitudes we hold. For instance, that's the point behind the "God bless America!" or "boiled frog" watch. These are cases where language actually takes the place of thought. Yes, I realize that I'm not the first person to have noticed this connection. Indeed in my GBA/frog campaigns I am remiss in not having quoted Rule #1 from the modern classic work on the misuse of language in political discourse:

"1. Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print."

Which leads to this open question, suggested by reader Webster Marquez:

"The health care debate (and, indeed, the debate around Obama's and Democrats' agenda) is filled with rhetoric about "slippery slopes." To wit: health care reform => government takeover => tsarist communism! Somehow!

"Can you find any examples of a slippery slope argument actually bearing out? A leads to B, which leads to C, all the way to Z?

"How is it that an argument that is considered a "classic informal fallacy" (per Wikipedia, but I remember this family of concepts from college philosophy) is given so much currency across the media and political spectrum?"

Although the finest and most famous example of pure slippery-slope rhetoric is Ronald Reagan's renowned 1961 broadcast about the risks of socialized medicine, it's worth noting that this reasoning can be applied from any part of the political spectrum.  Eg: Patriot Act => elimination of civil liberties => fascism in America. Just this morning I heard a representative of ACORN used the "criticism of us => return of McCarthyism" form of the argument. Similarly, most objections to the Obama Administration's decision to cancel European missile-defense plans concern not the Czech/Polish sites themselves but the "sign of weakness => encourage agressors => appeasement brings on Another Hitler" concept.  (Image from here.)

I know that for some people, Mr. Marquez's question is too easy to answer. If you think we already live in Fascist Amerika, or that it's been a one-way trip down the road to moral collapse since [Elvis Presley, the Miranda ruling, choose your starting point], real life is a living confirmation of slippery-slopeism. But as a de-politicized, purely analytical question, I wonder what the best real-world example of this phenomenon is. To be clear, we're talking about a situation where one step leads unavoidably to another -- in which people end up with Consequence Z, which they never would have chosen, purely because they took initial steps A and B. Almost as if they started down a slope, and began to slip, and then...    Nominations welcomed; results will be announced.

DVD series: The World's Factory

Next up in the Doing Business in China series (previous entries here): a look at China's factories.

What I like about this segment (not including the load of industrial goo slathered on my hair by a well-meaning Shanghai stylist just before filming, but I digress) is its emphasis on the elements other than cheap labor that have been crucial to China's manufacturing success. Yes, $10-a-day factory wages give Chinese producers a big edge. As I explained in the magazine two years ago, they also affect the way the whole production process is planned and laid out. Eg: Some functions that would always be mechanized in the US, Japan, or Europe are done by hand in China, because the cost of the machines isn't worth it. This has its disadvantages, yet it also can allow Chinese factories to switch from product to product much faster than a more "modern" facility could.

But there are a lot of places with much cheaper wage rates than China now. The Chinese advantage over such places -- Cambodia, Bangladesh, much of Africa --  is the combination of relatively cheap labor and absolutely superb production infrastructure. Ports, industrial zones, highways headed to airports, whatever else it takes. This clip mentions the issue; the whole series goes into it at some length, and gives you an idea of what these factories look like on the inside.

Discussion with John Podesta at Gov 2.0 conference

Last week Tim O'Reilly held his debut "Gov 2.0" conference in Washington. All the parts I saw were interesting and provocative. For a list of clips, podcasts, and so on, go here. For the record, here is a clip of a session I did with John Podesta, former Clinton White House chief of staff and now head of the Center for American Progress. We decided to do it as a split-shift Q-and-A: first, improbably, he asked me questions, and then I asked him some. We ran out of time before I could get many details on something I really wanted to know about: what it was like to spend time with Kim Jong Il, when Podesta accompanied Bill Clinton to North Korea this summer.

 

Seriously, the conference was a valuable series of presentations, worth perusing especially if you're feeling blue about the general tone of American political "discussion" these days and the fecklessness of many public efforts.

A nice place to start is with this presentation by Carl Malamud, whose efforts to open public data to (gasp) the public I've often noted over the years. I return to the theme: we take our encouragement where we can find it.

"God bless Precinct 8"

Courtesy of a reader in Texas who has my undying gratitude:

"State Rep. Kino Flores, D-Palmview, said today he will not seek re-election.

"The announcement comes two months after he was indicted by a Travis County grand jury. He is accused of omitting hundreds of thousands of dollars' worth of income from financial statements that elected officials are required to file with the state...... 

" 'As my former boss, the late Bob Bullock, used to say, he left Texas better than it was,' Flores said in the press release. 'Well, as anyone can see, there is no doubt that I will leave House District 36 better than it was. God bless Texas, and God bless District 36.'"

On the other hand, I regret to announce that a previous dispatch scoffing at the idea that John Adams, rather than Ronald Reagan, had started the country down this unfortunate rhetorical path seems to have been, ummm, flat wrong. Several readers wrote in to make this point. Let me give the microphone to Joshua Friedman, who adduces actual historical evidence:

"Abigail Adams wrote a letter to John on July 21, 1776, describing her experience of hearing the Declaration of Independence read aloud from the balcony of the Massachusetts State House. 'As soon as [it] ended," she writes, 'the cry from the balcony was, "God save our American States," and then three cheers which rended the air. The bells rang, the privateers fired, the forts and batteries, the cannon were discharged, the platoons followed, and every face appeared joyful.'

Continue reading ""God bless Precinct 8"" »

Better news: 'Hawk and Dove'

Nicholas Thompson's new book The Hawk and the Dove has received admiring reviews and was the subject of a wonderful feature story this past weekend in the New York Times. It's a very good work -- not least because it takes a gamble on a "high concept" for the book, and pulls it off.

Actually there are two high concepts here. One is that a paired biography of two often-contending figures of the Cold War era -- Paul Nitze and George Kennan (left and right, respectively, in the photo, often with the opposite orientation in their policies) -- will work in literary and intellectual terms. The other is that the author's relationship to one of the subjects -- Nitze was his grandfather -- will give him extra insight without warping his perspective. It succeeds on both counts.

Nicholas Thompson is 34 years old; I first met him a dozen years ago, when he was part of a student group pressuring US News to change its benighted college-ranking system. (I was then US News' editor. Story for another time.) Since then he has worked for great magazines -- the Washington Monthly, Legal Affairs, now Wired -- and been part of the New America Foundation. With all the woes of journalism, it's encouraging to see ambitious and talented people giving it their best.

Sad news: Jody Powell

I had intended to finish up a big "how to think about the Chinese tire tariff" item, when instead I heard the news that Jody Powell had died. This is sad in its own right, and when coupled with the death last year of Hamilton Jordan is unexpectedly poignant. Jimmy Carter, who will soon turn 85, is in the position every parent dreads, that of outliving the children.

Powell and Jordan were of course only virtual children to Carter, slightly older than his real offspring and having a work-centered relationship with him. But they'd driven with him across Georgia in the early days and to fund raisers and stump speeches when he was starting his improbable run for the presidency. In the public imagination they survive as the jaunty young characters -- "jaunty" to their friends, "cocky" to their detractors -- they were when Carter took office, as captured in the classic Rolling Stone cover published 32 years ago. (Media fans: click on the cover for a larger version, and study all the names there.)

My own relations with Powell were often tense during the campaign and the two years I spent in the White House. He was de facto overall boss of the speechwriting operation, and -- in contrast to the Reagan or Obama administrations -- speeches were often a source of public disappointment and therefore of internal disagreement and friction. Reporters generally respected his intelligence, his toughness, his honesty, his hard-bitten sense of humor, and his unparalleled knowledge of the President's mind, manner, and temper. Long after the Carter team had left office, I came to a much more positive relationship with Powell. This was especially so after each of us had published books on what was wrong with the press. His is here.



Powell and Jordan, paired 30 years ago by their precocious achievement and now paired again by death in their 60s, were much better and more admirable human beings than the standard Washington view held. Jordan, gentler and more thoughtful. Powell tremendously loyal and intelligent and honorable, and a devoted husband and father.

I can't help noting Carter's statement on Powell's death, as reported by the Washington Post:
"I could always depend on his advice and counsel being candid and direct." That would have made Powell give one of his tight grins, because it's Carter's way of saying: He wouldn't hesitate to tell me when I was screwing up.

UPDATE: The main site for Powell Tate, the public relations firm Jody Powell co-founded, now has a tribute page for him, with statements from friends and colleagues and details about services.

DVD Series: Carrots in the Washing Machine

Here's the third clip from the Doing Business in China series; previous ones here. All the clips are my favorites, but this one is a particular favorite. It's a look at one of the big unknown issues for China's commercial future: whether, how, and when its companies can rise out of the pure low-cost commodity-supplier role to have valuable brand names of their own.

The starting point is the "white goods" manufacturer Haier, which absolutely dominates the Chinese domestic market for washers, fridges, and so on and is becoming better known world wide. The segment title refers to one of its breakthrough innovations. Bonus in this clip: a cameo of Kai-Fu Lee, who once directed Microsoft's research labs in Beijing, and who until last week headed Google's offices in China, before resigning to set up his own VC firm. I first met him when I worked at Microsoft ten years ago and saw him frequently in China. More later; enjoy this clip for now.

Our second president on "God Bless America"

As noted here more than a few times (eg this), U.S. presidents before Ronald Reagan did not end their major addresses with "God Bless America!" to indicate "The speech is now over, and I'm not going to bother thinking of a real concluding sentence." Presidents from Reagan onward have used the phrase in an "Amen!" sense. The anonymous author of the Jotman blog writes in with new historico-linguistic evidence, of the biopic variety:

"In a recent post you complained -- yet again -- "about the trite hackneyedvacuousportento-pious lazy comforting and beloved three-word ending for all presidential addresses since the time of Ronald Reagan: 'God bless America!'" 

"You are clearly mistaken.  If I may set the record straight...

"The "God bless America" tradition did not begin with Reagan.  In fact, the tradition goes all the way back to the the first reading of the Declaration of Independence in Philadelphia. 

"The proof is on video.  Watch this YouTube clip from about the 6:00 mark until 6:40 and you will see what I mean."

Then Jotman moves out of sarcastic mode:

"P.S.  Of course, Americans of the founding generation weren't such ninnies.  They would not have sought  "comfort" in such a banality as this phrase.   The inclusion of this modern abomination not only ruined the whole scene for for me, it also broke the "historical spell."  I no longer believed I was watching a serious attempt to portray events as they might have actually have happened in 1776.  The director lost my trust.   Actually, hearing the phrase misused in a historical drama irritated me exponentially more than having to listen to any modern American politician.   It's one thing when politicians help to ruin the American character of the present generation through repetition of a lousy rhetorical innovation, but it's far worse when the custodians of American culture project our flaws backward in time; when they make it appear as if the lamest, most pathetic inventions of our own times have deep historical roots. 

"It's a slippery slope.  At this rate, some future documentary about the Revolutionary War is bound to include a water-boarding scene. Or show Alexander Hamilton founding Homeland Security in 1790."

After the jump, a Marine combat veteran with thoughts on patriotism.

Continue reading "Our second president on "God Bless America"" »

Right of fair reply: Apple, Adobe, Broomfield

Several days ago, in the finale to a nerds-only discussion that began with a discussion of whether Apple's new "Snow Leopard" used "huge pages" and 64-bit code, I quoted several readers who didn't want their names used. They were objecting to previous comments by someone who had used his name, Ken Broomfield. He reasonably asks for the chance to defend his views. Below and after the jump, his reply, which fundamentally has to do with what he considers lapdog coverage of Apple in the press:

"The bigger point that animates me (and which only applies a little to the Ars article) is that coverage of Apple and a lot of the popular tech press in general is pretty fawning or fluffy. (Have you seen the David Pogue kerfuffle?) It's a bit like the debate over healthcare reform: the details are complicated and the history poorly understood, so people often fall back on tribal affiliations (especially in the Church of Appleology).

"The full story on 64-bit apps is even less complimentary to Apple.

Continue reading "Right of fair reply: Apple, Adobe, Broomfield" »

Another traveler to Yunnan

In my story in the current issue about Xizhou, a small but historically prosperous and architecturally rich village in far southern China, I mention the cautionary example of the city of Lijiang. In the 1990s, Lijiang was also small and charming. Now, most foreign visitors instantly recognize it as a combination of Atlantic City, a discount mall, and a turnpike rest stop. The Chinese domestic tourism industry, which is developing very fast, is in the stage where it is processing huge numbers of necessarily low-end travelers. As sites become popular, many of them end up looking like Lijiang. That's the fate the friends of Xizhou are trying to avoid.

Kevin Kelly, "Senior Maverick" at Wired, has traveled widely in Asia, including to both Lijiang and Xizhou. That's his picture of "old" Lijiang, to the left. His account:

"Every regular visitor to China has their own story of headsnapping change. Mine has to do with Lijiang. I first visited Lijiang in the mid 90s on a month-long trip with my two daughters who were 8 and 10 at the time. Lijiang was our starting point for an excursion into the north beyond what is now called Shangrila (Zhongdian back then) into the Tibetan areas around Litang. I've spent a lot of time in the Himalaya and so was quite taken by Lijiang. It seemed to have everything a Shangrila was supposed to -- views, climate, music, and a strong unique, even isolated, culture. One could see how the fantasy began there. I wanted to return with my wife and son someday.

Continue reading "Another traveler to Yunnan" »

If you thought the Olympic opening ceremony was impressive...

... just wait for the parades and public ceremonies in Beijing on October 1, celebrating the 60th anniversary of the founding of the People's Republic of China.

For the past few months I've heard from university contacts in China about students being marshaled for long drill sessions before the massed exercises for the 60th anniversary celebrations. Courtesy of Glenn Mott, this slide show (text in Chinese) of soldiers, police, and others getting ready for the big day. Eg, soldiers being checked with tape measures and plumb lines to be sure they're standing straight.


More pictures in the same vein, from Sohu, here -- for instance:
 


I can't emphasize enough how much this is not the way most Chinese life seems most of the time. The main mental pictures I recall are people doing their own thing, in their own way, with only reluctant and enforced attention to the "rules." But, as with the Olympics, it is certainly the face that official China wants to present -- even if the effect is to make foreigners unrealistically alarmed about a big, single-minded, perfectly-organized Rising China emerging to crush all in its path. Since so many of the people working in unison on October 1 will be actual soldiers carrying weapons, the international fluster effect will be all the greater. Check out the two minute video here (sometimes slow to load) from the 50th Anniversary commemorations ten years ago, for the general idea.

If I were a US defense contractor, I'd show that video at every Congressional hearing about the "Chinese threat." But since, as always, the Chinese government cares a million times more about looking strong, successful, and in control to its own people than about whatever foreigners might think, we'll soon see endless waves of goosestepping soldiers. Then life will get back to normal.

From the magazine: Field of dreams in China

The new issue of the Atlantic is worth reading cover to cover -- and IMHO better read on paper than on line. For sometime soon: talking systematically about what kind of material is best read, scanned, absorbed, enjoyed in what kinds of media - handheld, computer screen, "real" print, Kindle-style reader, and so on.

For the moment, a mention of my own very short article in this issue: a profile of an American family that has ended up in one of the most beautiful parts of China, trying -- against considerable odds -- to put together a coalition of local residents, Communist party officials, businesses, and NGOs to preserve traditional Chinese culture against the onslaught of kitsch-style development otherwise transforming the country's look. Their adopted home town is Xizhou, in the lush, southerly Yunnan province, and this is one view of their "Linden Centre," with local kids biking by.



More on Brian and Jeanee Linden and their ambitions here, and a four-minute narrated slideshow of the town, the center, the family, and the challenge is below (or here). That is Brian Linden, who first became known in China 25 years ago when cast in a movie about a famous and tragic US-Chinese interaction, in blue jeans and white shirt in the opening shot below.
 


If you can make your way to Yunnan, this is very much worth a visit. Below a look at "downtown" Xizhou this spring, with the bean harvest being threshed.


From a terrace in the Linden Centre.

September 11

Some of the Atlantic's articles from the past eight years, collected here, stand up well as assessments of the moment and its aftermath. As a way to return to the mood, the reactions, the unity, and the incipient disagreements of the attacks on September 11, 2001, William Langewiesche's American Ground will be studied and admired for a long time.

If you're looking for thematic readings today, you could do very well with the links on this page -- not simply the four articles in the center of the page but the six others in the "From the Archives" column.

The newspaper story that struck me most today was this one, by N.R. Kleinfield in the New York Times: "A Fortress City that Didn't Come To Be." Its subject is New York, and it explains how, despite its unprecedented loss and trauma, the city recovered not just its vitality but also its deeper sense of balance. It decided to go ahead as a live, open, and inevitably still-vulnerable city, rather than surviving hunkered down, as an armed camp. Having visited New York only once since moving back to the country, I am struck by how much lower is its level of "security theater" than what prevails in Washington. Usually I regard New York as an interesting variation on "normal" American life, rather than as an example to the rest of us. I think in this case it has been the most American part of the country.

Two quick updates: flu in China, 64-bit code

Flu: Over the months, I have frequently remarked on the difference between the Chinese government's approach to H1N1/swine flu and that of many other countries. Difference in brief: the Chinese government has applied sweeping quarantine measures to try to keep the disease out of the country and then to limit its spread; many other countries have viewed the spread as more or less unavoidable and have tried to cope with the consequences.

(Photo from this previous post, about visiting Americans quarantined in Shanghai.)  In all countries the emerging view seems to be: the flu has not been that dangerous so far, during this atypical, spring time emergence (in the Northern Hemisphere). But it might be a more serious problem when it comes back in new form during the regular flu season, as the weather gets cold.

A reader who has recently been in Beijing writes to make a point I have heard from a number of health professionals too:
 

"I'm not an immunologist or anything remotely close.  But I wonder if China is actually hurting themselves by so aggressively stopping the spread of H1N1.  The current incarnation of H1N1 seems to be less lethal than the variants that we normally deal with.  Wouldn't it be better to let this variety of H1N1 spread so that people build up immunity to this mild version of H1N1 and then if H1N1 becomes more lethal they will already have some immunity?

"By the way, while I was at university this summer in Beijing, a student living on the sixth floor of a dorm became ill with H1N1 and the police came with buses and removed about 60 people from that floor."

The argument from the Chinese authorities is that in a big, poor country with a shaky public health network, they have no choice but to fight a new disease with everything they've got. Memories of the under-reaction to SARS in 2003 also have a Hurricane Katrina-style "let's not make that mistake again" effect. Given the inconvenience many people, Chinese and foreign, have already suffered in the name of flu control, I hope the hyper-aggressive early response to the flu doesn't backfire.

64-bit code: Last week, I declared a moratorium on discussion of "huge pages" in Apple's operating systems. (Hey, it was interesting at the time.) The reply below, for nerds only, qualifies in the spirit of fair-response. A reader writes:

"I have nothing to add to the "huge pages" discussion. I promise.

"But I would like address Mr. [Ken] Broomfield's closing statement which, I believe, is misleading:

Continue reading "Two quick updates: flu in China, 64-bit code" »

Once again, a first-rate speech

I don't know how many people stayed tuned in to watch the whole hour-plus of this speech, counting intro and so on. But, once again among his major addresses, it will bear long-term study for its range, tone, and clarity:

 - Conciliatory: You Republicans want to talk about tort reform? Let's hear your ideas.
 - Tough: When you tell lies, we will call you out.
 - Clarifying: For the first time ever, I felt as if I glimpsed a "larger idea" behind the Obama plan.
 - Big picture: The role-of-government soliloquy at the end, including the connection to the moral and social-contract histories of Social Security and Medicare.
 - Emotional, sans schmaltz: As he got ready for the end, I feared that he would tell the story of all the Lenny Skutnik figures in the First Lady's box. Instead, he told Ted Kennedy's story, with allusions only to Kennedy's Republican friends.
- Simple performance dynamics: Well delivered, including at crucial points talking over the applause to keep the rhythm going.
- Manners: Will it pay off for the Republicans to have booed him and, in the case of Rep. "Gentleman Joe" Wilson of South Carolina, to have yelled "you lie!" at the President? We'll see. Update: An ActBlue site supporting an opponent to Wilson raised more than $25,000 within three hours of his outburst. Via Simon Owens.

There will come a time when Barack Obama cannot pull himself out of pinch with a big speech. And obviously we don't know how this debate will turn out yet. But he hasn't fallen short on the big-speech front yet. More tomorrow.

Now this is tempting: ideas for the DHS!

From a contact within the greater "Homeland Security" community, a link to the Quadrennial Homeland Security Review, an interactive exercise to gather suggestions for what the DHS should start doing, and stop doing.

Hmmmm! And hmmmmm. 

The survey, which can be found here, was initially supposed to end this past weekend. But due to interest and demand, it's been extended through Wednesday, September 9 -- tomorrow as I type.

From the registration page, here, it looks as if "General Public" is one of the category of "stakeholders" allowed to express views on the DHS's future. Who says this isn't the age of transparency and interaction?

 

I was wrong (again)

I've seen the light. No longer will I complain about the trite hackneyed vacuous portento-pious lazy comforting and beloved three-word ending for all presidential addresses since the time of Ronald Reagan: "God bless America!" I won't complain, that is, as long as the words are always presented in the style of the clip below. See especially from time 2:00 onward.

 

From here. Thanks to Gary Puckett.

DVD series: The Two Chinas

Here is the second in the series of "Doing Business in China" clips. As I have argued many many times, most recently here, the first step toward sanity in dealing with "China" is to recognize that there are dozens, hundreds, perhaps tens of thousands of separate realities all lumped together under that one label. This clip eases us into that concept by talking about the first big division -- between the modern, urban China we mainly hear about in the outside world, and the very different place where most Chinese citizens actually live. Click "play" for more....
 

Remaining holiday-festival updates, #9 - 999, all in one place

Labor Day weekend has, sigh, reached its close, and with it the feeling of summer. To clear out the list of update topics for this weekend-long festival:

- #9 Striking gold in China. I mentioned previously my skeptical response to the story of Americans showing up in China and suddenly finding great jobs. Seems that this was pretty much the response by the expat community in China too. See this and this from last month -- plus after the jump, a reply today from someone who showed up a year ago in China and has put the  "Chinese streets are paved with gold" hypothesis to the test.

- #10 Is China (unfortunately) starting to learn from the TSA? Secondly after the jump, an account of a new wrinkle in Chinese airport security: having passengers take off their shoes, just like in the U.S.  Not sure whether this is a local aberration or the beginning of a new policy.

- #999 President Obama speaks to the schoolchildren. I was all in favor of this earnest buckle-down, back-to-school pitch until I saw the way the presentation ended. Sigh. And that brings us to the end of this holiday weekend special!
_____

Continue reading "Remaining holiday-festival updates, #9 - 999, all in one place" »

Festival of updates #8: Chinese/US attitudes on race, flu

These are both big, complicated topics, but to catch up on recent developments in each:

- I mentioned many times last year that there seemed to be less excitement about Barack Obama's rise in China than in, say, Europe or Africa, and that this was due at least partly to racial attitudes.* Many Chinese people with experience in America appreciate the centrality of black-white relations in the story of America's development. For instance, in a profile of Gao Xiqing, who directs the Chinese government's vast investments in the U.S., I mentioned that he has a small portrait of Martin Luther King over his desk in Beijing. (Gao went to law school at Duke.) But in my experience, many ordinary people with little exposure outside China freely expressed anti-black racial attitudes. During the 2008 primary season, this turned up as a kind of puzzlement about whether a black candidate could plausibly have the skill, sophistication, knowledge, work habits, etc to stand up to veteran opponents like Hillary Clinton or John McCain.

That's the context in which to read the stories about the hard times faced by a (beautiful) young Chinese model-aspirant whose mother is a Han Chinese from Shanghai and whose father was a black American. The girl, Lou Jing, is at right, and her mother at center in this picture:


Stories from last week here, in the Straits Times in Singapore (thanks, C. Tan), and from the Shanghaiist site here. A summary (in English) of some of the harsh Chinese on-line chatter at this site, which was also the source of the picture. Discussion of parallel situations in Korea here. The ChinaSmack site, which translates a lot of blog material into English, is said to have a discussion here, but for whatever reason I can't get it to load.

UPDATE: The China Smack link did finally come up, which has a lot of trenchant material, including what is claimed to be a statement by Lou Jing herself, plus this additional and additionally charming photo:


To be clear about the context: this is not a "blame China" episode but rather one of many illustrations of the differences in day by day social realities and perceived versus ignored sources of tension in particular societies. That's all to say about it for now.

- In the same "varying realities" vein, I mentioned repeatedly through this spring how H1N1/swine flu was being taken as a huge public-health emergency in China, leading to extraordinary gestures of what most foreigners considered heavy-handed security-theater. But inside China, the prevalent perception was that the government was taking all necessary and proper steps -- while the US was being self-indulgently and irresponsibly lax, letting infected people roam free to spread disease wherever they went. I'm judging this by what I saw in the Chinese press and by the voluminous complaint messages I received from Chinese readers.

That is the context for this item by James Areddy of the WSJ last week, concerning an inflight-video on a Chinese airline flight explaining what a "shame" it is that flu virus has been spreading from America. As Areddy points out, the video refers to mei zhou -- 美洲, "the Americas" -- as the source of infection, rather than mei guo, 美国, "America." So maybe it's  Mexico-US-Canada NAFTA-solidarity in blame. On the other hand, the English subtitles say "America." In any case, interesting as a reminder of difference in attitudes. This will matter more, of course, if the flu comes back in a more lethal form this fall. (Photo by Areddy from his item:)


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* In part, it also reflected the long-standing Chinese assumption that Democrats will be tougher than Republicans on trade policy, and the preference for sticking with known figures in US politics. Hillary Clinton was much better known to the Chinese public and officialdom than Obama was, and thus she seemed the safer bet from their point of view.

Holiday festival of updates #3A: Back to Snow Leopard and "huge pages"

I declare this the last posting in this venue on whether Apple's new Snow Leopard operating system does or does not support the use of "huge pages" in memory addressing, as laid out previously in Holiday Update #3 here. But for completeness, I offer this report from the other side of the operating system divide:

"I'm a Software Engineer at Microsoft.  Apple's smart enough to see how little use 4MB pages are and I doubt they will ever implement support any time soon.  
 
"Huge pages hurt when the other factors at play are accounted for like memory fragmentation, additional memory used, cost of reading in 4 MB at a time from the disk.  I think this has been tested on IA64 servers with huge amount of ram and it hurt not helped."

Let's add this to the list of "how big is the universe"-style endlessly debatable questions.

So many more updates, so few remaining holiday weekend hours.

Festival of updates #7: NYT hit-and-miss

Catching up on one NYT item that rang exactly (and surprisingly) true, and another with a different effect:

Sounds true to me: A "good news" item that stayed on the "most popular" list for a very long time. Its news was that years and years of running can actually protect and strengthen your knees, rather than inevitably pulverize and destroy them. I am here as a one-man long-term-longitudinal study to say: yessir!

Except for the past three years-of-smog in China -- lest we forget: Easter Day, 2009, in Beijing, shown at left -- I have been running many times a week for many decades. I shudder for various reasons to realize that I ran my first Boston Marathon 40 years ago. As the body-odometer has gotten into the tens of thousands of miles, I've logged problems with: Achilles tendon (too often -- hmmm, I wonder if there should be some term for a point of chronic weakness); hamstrings or calf muscles (periodically, including now); shin splints or ankle issues (rarely); etc. But knees, which I'd always been warned would be used up by running? No problems, at all. (As opposed to my dad -- who played college football and for the next 60 years coped with trick knees.) Now that actual medical research has confirmed that this is the expected result rather than a fluke, my knees feel even better.  So can yours!

On the other hand: we have this story last month, which suggested that if young Americans couldn't find jobs at home, all they had to do was move to China and they'd shortcut into positions of responsibility. I'm here to say: Well, sort of.

Is China exciting enough that people should go there? It sure is. Can young people with no background in China or Chinese find work quickly? Probably so -- if they're willing to teach English. (And can get a visa -- whole different topic.) And if they stay and learn the language, lots of other opportunities often do turn up. Really, for Westerners in their 20s it's hard to think of a better investment of a few years than going to China, learning what it's like, becoming comfortable with Chinese ways and Chinese people, facing its discouraging realities but also sharing its sense of possibility.

But the idea that many non-trained grads will find "good" jobs -- eg, ones where the Chinese employer regularly pays them? Or that it's realistic to go from zero to "highly proficient" in Chinese language in a short time? Or that young foreigners will be insulated from the, ummm, idiosyncrasies of typical Chinese accounting and business practices? Those all seem a stretch. This kind of "land of gold!" account of today's China has a touching parallel to the "gold mountain!" accounts of prospects in America that have historically drawn Chinese migrants across the Pacific. Both are accurate in spirit, but potentially misleading on details.

Festival of updates #6: TSA vs. the toddler menace

No, this doesn't prove anything, but the picture is too interesting not to share. It's from a reader who describes his experience at BWI airport. It was back in 2005, before the BWI-specific improvements mentioned here, so maybe this would never happen again. But...

"Attached is a picture of my daughter (15 months old at the time) being frisked by a TSA security screener at BWI....

"I had been carrying her through security after putting the stroller through.  Of course the metal detector detected something. You can see in the picture that I am holding my pants up with my hand rather than my belt and have no shoes on so who knows what it was.  Maybe it was her shoes - they didn't make her take them off.  I got the feeling when they called a woman over that they were going to frisk her so I called to my wife who had already gone through to get a picture.  Sure enough they gave her the wand metal detector and pat down treatment."

Festival of updates #5: Wolfowitz and Iraq

For the rest of his life, Paul Wolfowitz will face questions about the invasion and occupation of Iraq. You can hear that realization sinking in on him during the course of his ten-minute interview with Guy Raz of NPR, broadcast this evening on on All Things Considered. Wolfowitz had come on the show to discusss his essay on foreign policy "realism" in Foreign Policy magazine -- about which more in a moment. Through the ten minutes, you can hear Wolfowitz sounding startled, then testy, then something like resigned when Raz keeps coming back to the questions he obviously had to ask, about how Wolfowitz's current theories match the record in office for which he will always be best known.

The idea that we'll "always" be known for a moment in the unchangeable past, no matter how the rest of our lives turn out, is a proposition so fatalistic that that we all naturally resist it. (Except maybe Michael Phelps, Sandy Koufax, perhaps Tom Brady and Neil Armstrong, etc.) The earnest post-Vietnam career of Robert McNamara is a testament to how much he struggled with that reality. Remarkably and rarely, Al Gore will "always" be the man at the losing end of Bush v. Gore, but he made a new identity after that.

In the ten minutes of his interview, whenever Wolfowitz says "Look!" what he's really signaling is: I don't want to talk about this Iraq stuff any more, so why do you keep coming back to it? The reason for coming back, of course, is that Wolfowitz does and always will occupy a unique role in the intellectual history of the decision. Dick Cheney will apparently never reveal a doubt or second thought; George W. Bush has (with some dignity) backed off the public stage for now; Colin Powell has made sure to signal that he was never that enthusiastic; and who knows what Donald Rumsfeld will come up with. But Wolfowitz was the one who from the start had the sweeping vision of the historic rationale for removing Saddam Hussein.

The public case for invading Iraq was purely negative. ("Simply stated, there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction." Dick Cheney, speech to national VFW Convention, August 26, 2002.) But the "enlightened" case that Wolfowitz in particular had made for years in articles, interviews, and speeches involved the broader, Wilsonian prospect of bringing democracy to the Arab world, as it had largely come to much of Asia and Latin America. I did a profile of him in early 2002 that emphasized this theme. I also had a sense of its origins, having lived in Southeast Asia in the 1980s, when Wolfowitz helped swing U.S. policy against Ferdinand Marcos in the Philippines, and then was a very popular U.S. ambassador to Indonesia. By all accounts, Wolfowitz was a prominent voice telling a rattled President Bush, during the first, nervous strategy session at Camp David days after the 9/11 attacks, that for positive and negative reasons alike he had to get to the root of the terrorist problem by moving against Iraq. (For more on Wolfowitz's role in war planning, see here and here.)

In its way it was an honorable vision, as were most of Robert McNamara's beliefs through the early days in Vietnam. But it did not -- OK, has not so far -- turned out anything like what Wolfowitz advertised publicly and within the government. To his credit, Guy Raz of NPR played back to Wolfowitz the tape of his notorious Congressional testimony just before the invasion, in which he said "We can't be sure that the Iraqi people will welcome us as liberators ... [but] I am reasonably certain that they will greet us as liberators, and that will help us to keep requirements down." And "It's hard to conceive that it would take more forces to provide stability in post-Saddam Iraq than it would take to conduct the war itself and to secure the surrender of Saddam's security forces and his army. Hard to imagine."

It's worth listening to -- along with the full 37-minute unedited interview, here. Among other reasons, I suspect it will be a while before we hear Paul Wolfowitz in such a setting again. The first 15 minutes or so of the "long" version involve what he did want to talk about -- his new Foreign Policy article warning against excessive "realism" in America's approach to the world. Judge for yourself, but it strikes me as a concerted argument against a non-existent or straw-man foe. When an American president has given a major speech in an Arab capital saying that the U.S. needs to engage in the modernization of the Islamic world, it's hard to argue that the U.S. is showing a steely indifference to social and political conditions outside its borders.

It took more than twenty years after Robert McNamara's departure from the Pentagon for him to begin talking seriously about Vietnam. I look forward to what Paul Wolfowitz eventually says about his war.
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In an on-air colloquy with Guy Raz after this interview, I made my own mistake. I said that a recent ruling by a panel of judges from the 9th Circuit held that John Ashcroft, former Attorney General, "was" personally liable for illegal detention of a U.S. citizen. Actually, the ruling said that he "could be" personally liable. My apologies.
 

Weekend festival of updates #4: service sector!

Previous entry now redacted, as we say, for excessive churlishness. Never mind!

Festival of updates #3: Snow Leopard and "huge pages"!

Nerds only. I mentioned yesterday that the elegant 23-page Ars Technica review of the new Mac Snow Leopard OS should give as much tech detail as "anyone" would want. Au contraire! (Someday I will learn to avoid saying "anyone," "everyone," "no one," etc.) After the jump, a remaining question apparently left unanswered even by Ars Technica -- namely, whether the latest Mac OS supports "huge pages." An explanation of what this is and why it matters, via reader and software guy Ken Broomfield, follows. This goes into the "there are always more details" category, and is offered as a public service.

Ken Broomfield writes:

"ArsTechnica deserves a lot of credit for doing in-depth stuff like this that's becoming hard to find anywhere except in dry, poorly-written journal articles (though Ars has done less of this lately). But they lost me with this part, about the desirability of a 64-bit OS X kernel:

>"Tracking 96GB of RAM requires 1.5GB of kernel address space. Using more than a third of the kernel's address space just to track memory is a pretty uncomfortable situation."<

Continue reading "Festival of updates #3: Snow Leopard and "huge pages"!" »

Festival of updates #2: China business!

Recently I mentioned an enjoyable discussion session at the Motley Fool, which is available in this podcast. Today there was a followup analysis here, at the Fool's site. The low-road reason I mention it is that it's very complimentary about my assessment of life and business in China. But there's a high-road reason too, which involves an aspect of making sense of China that, IMHO, needs to be stressed again and again, even if you've already stressed it a lot -- as I certainly have.

This aspect, which indeed can never be stressed strongly enough, concerns the chaos, diversity, internal contradiction, unknowability, and general "many different countries and cultures coexisting under one name" nature of today's China. It's harder to keep track of such a confusing reality than it would be to say, "We must be afraid of China" or "The Chinese want XXXX" or  "With its new power, China will do YYYY." But it is certainly more interesting and stimulating to embrace all this contradictory reality than to stick to a monolithic view of one big, "rising," potentially menacing power. It is also much truer to life. In any case, I am glad to see the Motley Fool analyst underscoring this point. And I think the author of this item, Sean Sun, has added a very interesting born-in-China perspective. As he says:

"I was born in China and raised in its countryside in a small, mountainous village. I've worn a suit and tie in tier-1 metropolises, donned hard hats in tier-2 and 3 cities, and marveled at the rapid growth in rural areas like my hometown. When someone wants to ask me about China, I ask: Which one?"

Worth reading, as part of your holiday weekend fare.

Holiday festival of updates! #1 in a weekend-long series

Labor Day Weekend wouldn't be the cherished American ritual it is, without cookouts, beer, one last beach weekend frequent updates on past technical, political, and aviation matters. To kick off this special all-weekend series, an airline industry insider's account on why the Transportation Security Administration condones class-war in the airport security system: Shorter lines for high-mileage passengers (like me! until my China-travel miles time out), all the longer waits for everyone else. Here's the inside view:

"You might have already gotten this from other sources, but as a 25-year airline industry veteran, the discriminatory TSA lines are easily explained.

"They exist because the Legacy Airlines cut a deal with senior-level political appointees in the early days of the TSA, and no one has ever challenged them, and it is set up so no one can challenge them. The airlines are, of course, not actually paying anything for the privilege of deciding which taxpayers have first-class/second-class access to federally mandated security screening. The "justification" is that airline rents and fees "pay" the costs of the airport, therefore they have the right to control how "public" spaces in the terminal are used. Neither airports or the TSA gets an incremental dollar for allowing this discrimination.

"The floor space used to sort passengers into different queues is officially controlled by the airlines, and is separate from the space (just behind it) that is controlled by the TSA. Thus the situation is quite different from discriminatory queues you might have experienced in London and other overseas points, where the airlines actually paid money to fund separate "business-class" airside access points. All that money you paid United to earn Platinum status pays for the lounges and upgrades you get. But your preferential TSA access is a gift from the government, and a "wealth" transfer from all of us in steerage to all of your friends in business class.

Continue reading "Holiday festival of updates! #1 in a weekend-long series" »

Three updates: Hudson River, "false claims," origins of Iraq

Catching up on a variety of previous reports:

1) The FAA responds in a sensible, proportionate way to last month's tragic crash above the Hudson River. Following the lead of the NTSB, as mentioned here, it will soon propose clear, common-sense rules of the "road" to keep airplanes and helicopters safely separated in the busy Hudson River corridor. For instance, it will require -- rather than just expect -- that northbound traffic stay on the east side of the river, and southbound on the right; and that helicopters stay at a lower altitude than the airplanes; and all pilots stick to the same radio frequency; and other steps.

Why this matters: because it's a targeted, non-panicky response directed at the specific problem that has been revealed, rather than a sweeping exercise in TSA-style "security theater." It will no doubt create complications of its own, mainly through increased work for controllers. But overall, this is a victory for common sense.

2) Jim Rutenberg of the New York Times, whose previous reporting about the health-care debate has been noted (in different ways) here and here, has a very strong story today about Elizabeth McCaughey and her role in these discussions.

Why this matters: the story straightforwardly does something that goes against the nature of mainstream coverage. It notes the influence that Ms. McCaughey's claims have had on public discussion, while also flatly saying that those claims are often false. It's worth recognizing what a step this is for the Times, prefigured in this story from three weeks ago. The natural reflex of mainstream publications is to finesse such disagreements with the "some critics claim..." approach. It seems more "objective," and it certainly is safer for the reporter and the news organization. And when we are talking about differences of opinion, judgment, or political creed, of course that's exactly the right approach to take. ("Is the Administration's approach to Iran likely to work? Some critics claim...") But there is a such a thing as plain misstatement of fact, and it is good when the press can point it out.

3) James Gibney of the Atlantic also has a very strong, short item about revisionism now being practiced by some of the architects and enthusiasts of the invasion of Iraq.  In particular, the writer Max Boot and the former DOD official Paul Wolfowitz, the latter of whom I have written about here and here.

Why this matters: The edge to Gibney's argument will be evident to anyone who reads it. What most people would not realize is how particularly trenchant a judgment this is, coming from him. As a one-time Foreign Service officer (and former executive editor of Foreign Policy magazine), James Gibney is no one's idea of a hothead. He is more gentlemanly than most people who express views on this site (not to mention on the whole untrammeled web), and less known for harsh opinions. These words have weight.

More than you probably want to know about Snow Leopard

I expect to have a Mac OS X 10.6 / Snow Leopard install disk on hand for amusement over the Labor Day weekend. Between that and getting TV service re-connected -- after a month, we finally gave in -- it should be a full and satisfying few days.* What is this program they talk about, called "The Daily Show"?** And this man "Conan"?

On expository as much as purely technical grounds, I have to say something complimentary about the new 23-page-long review of Snow Leopard by John Siracusa at ArsTechnica. It has technical analysis that should satisfy anyone so inclined. Eg, this diagram and accompanying discussion of Snow Leopard's use of the LLVM approach (Low Level Virtual Machine) and more generally the explanation of how the operating system is designed to do "more with more," that is, making use of the vastly-increased processing power of modern computers.



But the review also includes much more accessible discussion of the difference this system will make to ordinary users. The Go/No-go advice, which comes on page 23 of the review, is that for most users of Intel-based Macs it's an obvious Go, even though there will certainly be some bugs in this initial release. My main point for the moment is not to give advice one way or another about software upgrades but to note an impressive piece of technical writing.

UPDATE: Install disk was there when I got home; applied to one computer, MacBook Pro; finished in about 40 minutes with no problems or complications and appears to have freed up many Gigs of disk space.

UPDATE 2: After repeated attempts, the new OS has not installed on the MacBook Air, after easy handling of the MacBook Pro. This is no doubt due to the fundamental design compromise built into the MBA. To make the system unbelievably light and elegant, a lot of "basic" features were left out, like its own DVD/CD slot. So it installs programs or plays music only from "remote" discs, namely those on other machines in the same local network. Sometimes it works; sometimes it doesn't. I'll try tomorrow with hard-wired rather than Wifi connections.

UPDATE 3: Well, it looks like the failed-install to the MacBook Air had a silver lining. Have tried out all my normal programs and utilities on the Pro; all seem to work without problem on the new OS. Except, I just now learn, the beloved "K4" -- the Adobe-based production software we use to edit, lay out, and put together every article in the magazine. Hmmmm. Maybe I'll pretend I did get Snow Leopard installed on all my computers, so I have an excuse to miss the next few deadlines. Or not bother to install it on the MBA, and stick with that for actual work.
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*For the record, Snow Leopard will go on the household's three Macs, which are also running Windows XP under VMware Fusion; the poor ThinkPad T60 that was blighted with the original, unworkable version of Vista will be left in tech hospice to sputter out its last days; and my wife's new HP laptop, replacing one that died on our very last day in China, not only has the much-less-objectionable latest release version of Vista but also an upgrade certificate for Windows 7, which will be applied in due course.

** Just a little joke. I know it's on summer hiatus; even in China I could see it on computer, though boy does the Great Firewall slow down video feeds.

A very simple question about the 'public option'

No one I have ever met who is eligible for Medicare would dream of turning down its coverage.

And therefore the "public option" would be so terrible because.... ???
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Medicare is of course a "public option" in spades. I remember the debates before its enactment in the 1960s, about how the coming of "socialized medicine" would be the end of the American way.

Of course now we have a system that is taken for granted as a central part of the American way. Yes, yes, I am aware of the arguments (as laid out here, here, and elsewhere) about the distortions and cost pressures within Medicare. Still: as a matter of politics I have always thought that the route toward health-coverage reform in America would be steady expansion of the eligibility standards for Medicare. First down to age 60, then 55, then... 

I know that "logic" tells us only so much about health policy debates. But, seriously, how can people with a sound mind and a straight face take Medicare as part of the landscape but consider the "public option" an abomination? Just curious -- but genuinely curious.

My visit to the Motley Fool

A week ago, when for unrelated house-reconstruction reasons I was comatose from no sleep, I had a very enjoyable hour-long visit with the staff of the Motley Fool, at their stylish HQ in Alexandria, Va. This was part of their Motley Fool Conversation series. A podcast of the result is available here. I realize that I may have been snarkier-sounding about the future of Twitter than reasoned analysis would support. But, hey, I was only half awake! And it was at the Motley Fool. Most of the talk was about China, with side notes about Microsoft, speechwriting, the Future of the Atlantic, and so on.

Seriously, most TV and radio talk shows could take useful interviewing tips from these guys. A very enjoyable exchange, at least from my point of view.

The right kind of college rankings

As a one-time staff editor of the Washington Monthly magazine, I am biased in favor of that plucky enterprise and its approach to the world.

As a one-time editor of  US News & World Report, I am all too aware of the fatuousness imperfections of its college-ranking system. Being a pioneer in ranking has been the economic salvation of US News. But the premise that vastly different institutions can be precisely ranked on overall quality has its obvious limits. What are the "best" ten lines of work, ranked one through ten, for your child to aspire to? What are the "best" twenty-five cities to live in -- or pieces of music to listen to, or food to eat? Or people to marry? The only sane answer is, "it depends," which is the answer when it comes to colleges and universities too. For more on this theme, the classic source is this 2001 article -- as it happens, in the Washington Monthly -- by Amy Graham, who came to US News on my watch to try to clean up the rankings, and Nicholas Thompson, who has a wonderful new joint biography of (his grandfather) Paul Nitze and George Kennan coming out soon.

The practical solution to ranking mania is not to try to eliminate them -- it's too late -- but instead to crowd the field so that no one "Best Colleges" list has disproportionate influence. Toward that end, the Washington Monthly's latest iteration of its college rankings is valuable simply for existing and adding diversity to the ranking field. It's more valuable than that, because of the way it carries through its analysis about the traits we really should value in universities, plus letting people tailor their own rankings based on the qualities that matter most to them. Here's a glimpse at its "National Universities" ranking, which is quite different from the familiar list in US News (this shows just a few of the elements on which schools are rated).

Last aviation post of the day: the world's biggest fire truck

Quite amazing footage from Fox 11 in Los Angeles of a specially modified 747 serving as a fire-fighting tanker today. The plane is flying extremely low-and-slow to dump retardant in an attempt to contain the LA-area wildfires. From this site.


For the first two or three minutes of this video I found it hard to believe it was live footage of an actual airplane, rather than a computerized simulation. Better use of local-TV live cams than following cops in a standard highway chase! (Thanks to Joseph Musco.)

Rounding out our "love for the TSA" theme

Don't know how to explain it, but over the past week I've received a large amount of correspondence all with the same gripe about the Transportation Security Administration: its role as enforcer of class-inequality among the airborne traveling public. (Previously on the TSA here.) For instance, this sample note, from a military official with whom I've usually corresponded about Iraq policy and so forth:

"My big puzzle/complaint with TSA:  how can they enforce and man discriminatory lines in the airport check in?  If someone is paying United more for a first class seat they can enjoy better service and seating on United--but in going through gov't run, TSA-manned security, how can there be a first class line with faster security checks?  It's a clearly wrong, illegal practice.

"I protested it once--going through first class line with my cheap seat ticket, and refusing to go back, pointing out that this is a government security service, not the airline, and its illegal for gov't to discriminate for a business.  They called security police, I continued arguing for 10 minutes, got escorted through, then subjected to thorough bag searches despite having waved my military ID around.  I had plenty of time to waste on this, and it did no good apparently (unless they've stopped this practice at Las Vegas airport).  They may argue that its the airport folks who man the front part of line, but that's often not true, and it is always TSA folks at the security end of the line--they are illegally discriminating."

Thanks to my travel back and forth from China in recent years, I have a million-zillion miles on United and therefore am in favor of any class inequality that might favor high-mileage customers like me. But I recognize that having public officials doing the favoring is unseemly. This is the next-to-last straw in judging the TSA an experiment that desperately needs to be rethought. The last straw comes from Patrick Smith, of the always-excellent "Ask the Pilot" site on Salon, who asks pointedly whether the intrusive and expensive TSA checklines are doing any good at all. Read his whole column for details, but here is the gist [my emphasis added:

"The novelty of the Sept. 11 attacks notwithstanding, the primary threat to commercial planes is, was and shall remain the smuggling aboard of explosives, which is what happened on Pan Am 103 [the Lockerbie explosion twenty years ago whose instigator was recently set free]. The bomb came onboard in a suitcase. The hijack paradigm changed forever on 9/11, rendering the inflight takeover concept unworkable for a terrorist....

"Yet whether by virtue of incompetence or willful ignorance, TSA continues to waste untold time and untold millions of dollars on a tedious, zero-tolerance fixation with blades and sharps. This does nothing to make us safer, and in fact draws security resources away from worthy pursuits.

"Yes, TSA scans most bags for explosives. Mandates were put in place after 9/11 that have greatly increased the percentage of bags that are run through high-tech detectors, with a goal of screening all of them. But eight years later, screening is still not fully comprehensive. It does not yet include 100 percent of luggage and cargo, and procedures remain inadequate at many overseas airports from which thousands of U.S.-registered jetliners depart each week. Neither is there widespread screening for explosive materials that somebody can carry on his or her person. Good luck getting a hobby knife through a concourse checkpoint, while a pocket full of Semtex is unlikely to be noticed....

"There is a level of inherent risk that we simply must learn to accept. But, if we are going to have an airport security apparatus, and if we are going to devote millions of tax dollars to the cause of thwarting attacks, can we please do it smartly and at least improve our odds? Am I the only one who finds it maddening, and even a little scary, that we can't get this right? Is it not a national disgrace that TSA should spend its time confiscating butter knives from uniformed pilots rather than focusing on deadly threats with a long historical precedent?

"Where are the voices of protest? As I've said before, the airlines ought to be speaking out and pressuring TSA to revise its policies. I know it puts them in a tough spot, liability-wise -- carriers don't want to be perceived as opposing security, even when that security isn't helpful -- but much of what people despise about flying pertains to the TSA rigmarole.

"And passengers, for their part, are apparently content with, or at least resigned to, the idea of security theater in lieu of the real thing. Indeed, rather than demand or expect change, hundreds of thousands of Americans have paid good money for the chance to simply circumvent the hassle of TSA."

Amen. Now, if there were only some way to channel the surplus emotion from anti-health-care-reform "town meetings" and direct it toward the excesses of "security theater."

Continue reading "Rounding out our "love for the TSA" theme" »

Gmail down -- and now back up!

This is broadly known in the tech world, but for the purposes of the Atlantic's site this will be the official announcement that: for at least the last hour, Gmail has been inaccessible through most of the normal means-of-access. OTOH, I am still getting Gmail messages on my Blackberry, since I have Gmail set up to bounce a copy of all incoming info there. So some of the lower-brainstem functions of Gmail are still intact. Depending on how long this takes to clear up -- next few minutes, another hour or two -- will no doubt set off various speculation about the vulnerability of cloud computing, about whether there are some aspects of scale too vast even for the unimaginably vast collection of Google servers, whether Twitter (now ablaze with reports) could be brought down in collateral damage, and so on. All of that in due course. Right now, it's like living through real-time tech history!

5:14 pm EDT: It's back! At least for the moment. Will be interesting to hear this sleuthed out.
 
(Updated official Google status reports here.)

The NTSB on the Hudson River crash

Late last week the National Transportation Safety Board put out a "safety recommendation" letter about preventing accidents in the "VFR Flyway" above the Hudson River. For previous items on the August 8 airplane-helicopter collision that killed nine people, see here, here, here, and here. VFR = "Visual Flight Rules," in which pilots are responsible for their own navigation and for keeping out of other planes' way.

The full NTSB account of the accident will take many months to complete. This interim recommendation, available in PDF here, is interesting in several ways. First, in contrast to some excitable "it's the Wild West up there!" comments by politicians and media figures, it notes that there have been no previous collisions in 30 years of operating under current procedures over the Hudson, and just one reported "near miss" in the past ten years. Thus, "The procedures in use to promote separation between VFR flights appear to have been effective in preventing collisions." [Full quote from this section, with caveat, after the jump.]

Nonetheless, its recommendation for avoiding problems in the future includes something that makes obvious sense: keeping helicopters and airplanes at different altitudes, since helicopters can safely operate much closer to the ground than airplanes can. This recent collision happened at 1,100 feet -- the altitude at which airplanes typically fly through the corridor, since above that they get into controlled "Class B" airspace for New York's three major airports. The airplane was flying level at that altitude; the helicopter climbed to that altitude just before the crash. By the NTSB's recommendations, helicopters would not get that high.

There are other observations about air traffic control procedures to keep a closer eye on traffic. (For the reaction from air traffic controllers' union, see this Washington Post item. More on the merits of this part of the argument later.) Worth checking out.
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The Real China

Starting this week and through the fall, the Atlantic's site will have a series of clips from the DVD series "Doing Business in China" in which I was involved before moving back to the United States. I'll have more to say shortly about the background of the project, and what I view as its potential importance. For now I'll just say thanks to: Bob Schapiro and Dovar Chen, who figured out how to get the original and quite startling video footage inside Chinese factories, bureaucracies, stores, etc over the past few years; Joe Nocera of the New York Times, who appears on the films in "what it all means" discussions with me after each segment; and Emily Chang, on-camera co-host. I'll also mention that when we were filming some of the narration in Shanghai, it was hot and humid beyond all belief, and we were standing in direct sun on a rooftop. More to come, and I will say that I learned a lot about China through the process of working on this project.

Karel van Wolferen on the Japanese electoral revolution

I mentioned last week that the Dutch writer Karel van Wolferen was, like me, a devotee of "interesting" software for writing and thinking. His real metier, of course, is political analysis, most notably about Japan. On his site he has just put up a detailed post about this weekend's historic ousting of the Liberal Democratic Party from governing control in Japan.

The LDP's name has unfortunately misleading connotations in English; as the hoary joke goes, it is neither "liberal" nor "democratic" but instead is the long-standing force of status-quo, favor-trading conservatism. And as Karel has argued in his many books and articles, its mere existence is misleading in a more fundamental sense, since it implies that Japan is a "normal" democracy, in which political parties compete for the power to control government policy. In fact, elected politicians from the LDP and all other parties have been relatively weak, compared with the permanent and powerful bureaucrats who distribute money, set policy, and in most senses run the country.

To see that analysis applied to the current situation, check out his latest dispatch. He asks whether this election will make any more difference than the only other time the LDP was driven (briefly) from power, just after Bill Clinton's inauguration:

"Will Japan's new government be able to do what the reformists could not possibly accomplish in 1993? Skeptics point at the  divisions within the [new ruling party]...

"But my impression is that the individuals of the inner core of the party are deadly serious about what must be done to turn their country into what one of them, the most senior and most experienced Ozawa Ichiro, has in his writing called a 'normal country'."

The idea of Japan as a "normal" country -- one that takes responsibility for its own defense, one with a functioning political system -- is more significant than most people outside Japan usually recognize. I remember hearing Ozawa use that phrase when I interviewed him, in his role as an LDP potentate, twenty years ago while I was living in Tokyo. I have no idea whether this election really will signify, as the one in 1993 did not, the long-awaited historic emergence of Japan as a functioning democracy. But Karel van Wolferen's post lays out the stakes, and the reasons to think it might.