I don’t mean the fact that the top general in Afghanistan is commenting on what some nutjob in Florida is doing and how it will negatively affect our efforts in the AfPak region. I mean the fact that we’re even talking about this.

There’s a lot to dislike about mainstream media and news coverage in the modern era. The 24/7 news cycle. The vapidity of coverage. The complete lack of investigative journalism. Prioritizing ‘fair and balanced’ over ‘accurate and true’. Balloon boy.

Yet I think this takes the cake. This guy who’s planning on burning the Koran is doing it for the attention.  So by covering it, and covering it, and covering it, the news media are just giving him what he wants: a platform to spew his hateful and divisive rhetoric to a larger audience. Which then prompts other people who already occupy the hateful and divisive rhetoric niche to up their game.

However if no one covered it then it’d be a nonstory and we wouldn’t need Interpol or General Petraeus telling us that making a big show of burning the sacred texts of a major world religion might make people angry and more prone to commit violent acts.

The counterpoint to this is the whole “Ground Zero Mosque” deal. Which is to echo Josh Marshall makes over on TPM: we’ve had a lot of prominent politicians and media figures saying a lot of incendiary things about Islam and Muslims all summer, something like this is bound to happen.

Yet video games seem inherently different. Maybe the people who consume games are just more vociferous in their anger. God knows that the gaming community seems to support foaming at the mouth when even the slightest thing doesn’t go your way. Yet on the other hand I definitely see developers predicament.

After spending millions of dollars and thousands of hours on development the same copy of a game is likely to pass through three or four hands and of those customers a developer only sees the return on one purchase. The rest goes to a reseller, the most obvious being GameStop who is really more like a digital pawn shop than a reputable dealer.

So now, like every other media format before them, they are attempting to come up with ways to ‘encourage’ people to acquire their games in ways that actually support the developers. The problem is that gamers are very good at holding grudges. Actually, not just hold them but lash out in the most cruel ways. Which means that while I understand the calculus of ‘requiring unique codes for online play = more $$$$” the risk THQ runs, like so many before them, is to alienate the portion of their customer’s that are the exact people who will do all in their considerable power to take THQ down.

In any case I think this is really well written and deserving of a read.

One odd empirical regularity is that hard-nosed, pessimistic, realist, free-market guys like myself seem to spend more time agreeing with soggy Liberals than with the Conservatives who supposedly share our worldview. Part of that has to do with the success of the general Libertarian project, as Scott Sumner outlines here. Many free market ideas have now simply become conventional wisdom among wonks of all stripes. Partially , however, I think it … Read More

via  Modeled Behavior

Basically this is comparing the relative drops and recoveries in employment of pretty much every recession since World War 2. When people say ‘worst economic downturn since the Great Depression’ this is what they mean.

Via Calculated Risk.

The analysis begins with the well-documented phenomenon that U.S.-born workers and immigrants tend to take different occupations….Because those born in the United States have relatively better English language skills, they tend to specialize in communication tasks. Immigrants tend to specialize in other tasks, such as manual labor. Just as in the standard concept of comparative advantage, this results in specialization and improved production efficiency.

If these patterns are driving the differences across states, then in states where immigration has been heavy, U.S.-born workers with less education should have shifted toward more communication-intensive jobs. Figure 3 shows exactly this….In states with a heavy concentration of less-educated immigrants, U.S.-born workers have migrated toward more communication-intensive occupations. Those jobs pay higher wages than manual jobs, so such a mechanism has stimulated the productivity of workers born in the United States and generated new employment opportunities.

So basically it’s like this: the fact that you can’t understand your cleaning lady very well likely explains why she’s your cleaning lady in the first place but the fact that she’s willing to be your cleaning lady for relatively cheap allows you to do other stuff which in turn increases productivity and makes things better for everyone. The cleaning lady is probably better off than she would have been back at home, your better off by having a cleaner home than you otherwise would have and having more time to do things you’re better at and your neighbor down the street gets a higher paying job because he is better at speaking English than your cleaning lady is.

Granted in a country where people believe the president is a Muslim and that pumping the atmosphere full of methane and carbon dioxide won’t affect the climate I suppose one study won’t make much of a difference, but it sure is interesting stuff.

He has his assistant seducing women for him. His assistant, who is female and lives in India, logs onto his account on a popular dating site, browses profiles and (pretending to be him) makes connections with women on the site. She has e-mail conversations and arranges first dates. Then her employer reads the e-mail conversation and goes to the date.

I feel like as a society we’re approaching a point where if something can be done feasibly by another person, then eventually someone will hire them to do it. It’s almost a real life corollary to Rule 34 of the Internet.

Seriously though given the interconnectedness and anonymity granted by the web it’s only a matter of time before any person of sufficient means has several people spread across the globe doing their day to day tasks.

Google revolutionized the way people access information. Now it wants to transform how people get entertainment.

The search giant is touting an ambitious new technology, called Google TV, that would marry the Internet with traditional television, enabling viewers to watch TV shows and movies unshackled from the broadcast networks or cable channels on which they air.

Users would need to buy a TV or set-top box with Google software that could connect to the Internet, along with a keyboard to type commands. Users could also use their iPhone or Android phone to operate Google TV.

This will probably lead to the usual hue and cry from current television networks and cable providers but in the end this will be a boon for content producers. The Internet is excellent for eliminating middle-men and at the end of the day that’s all the networks are: companies that own the rights to airwaves that have carried programs for the past century. Yet much like it has allowed musicians and authors the freedom to self-produce without studios or publishing houses, the Internet is poised to do the same to television producers. They’ve just lacked a connection between the net’s storage and search capabilities and the medium itself. Google TV will provide that.

All of which is a long way of saying: Hang on to your butts, the ride ain’t over yet.

What this does mean is that this case is one step closer to the Supreme Court(SC), which is what the lawyers are banking on. However I’m suspect that Perry v Schwarzenegger will ever make it to the highest court in the land. Which is a good or a bad thing, depending how you look at it.

First consider that Judge Walker specifically crafted the wording and the logic of his verdict to appeal to Scalia, a member of the conservative wing of the SC. Which basically is a very clever maneuver forcing one of the Court’s most conservative members to choose to go against his own logic or approve gay marriage nationwide. Furthermore, given the rather conservative make-up of the current Court makes me think that the Supremes won’t event take it up.

The Roberts Court has made very clear by now that they’re more than willing to strike down laws preventing corporations from spending profligately in elections or constricting gun usage, which is to say  that Bush got exactly what he wanted when he appointed him as Chief Justice. All of which means that when the 9th Circuit inevitably sides with Judge Walker and strikes down Proposition 8 as the injustice that it is that the Bush appointee to top all Bush appointees will find himself in a position where he will have to either take a case that will more than likely wind up with the striking down of anti-gay marriage laws across the country or quietly pass on it and confine the gay-on-gay exchanging of vows to California.

My money’s on the latter. I highly doubt that this conservative of a court will want to be the people who make gay marriage legal across the nation but I also can’t see how they take the case and not agree with Judge Walker’s verdict. So California will be put to rights but the rest of the queers in this country still won’t be equal.

Which sucks.

However it does create an excellent legal precedent for future cases of this nature and we all know that if this isn’t the final verdict that there will be future cases. So it’d be one step up and forward, with 45 more to go after that. Long haul indeed.