I had another dream, I had another life
It’s an interactive map that lets you zoom all the way from the sun and our solar system out to the Milky Way, including a view of 100,000 real nearby stars (there are 200 – 400 billion in the entire Milky Way). You can zoom and scroll around to get an idea of what our little interstellar neighborhood is like.
I viewed it in Chrome (which is what it’s designed for), and I hear it works in Firefox (that’s where I first heard about it) but I don’t know about IE.
Today has been a very stressful and very busy day. So this video helped. I hope it helps you too.
The music totally makes it, right? And look: someone made an image. I need this on a t-shirt, stat!
P.S. YouTube poster says the cat was fine, so that keeps the humor-level high. :-D
I’m not sure if the packages were actually designed to be able to do this, but it’s still pretty neat.
There’s a lo of talk about budgets, deficits, and debts. I don’t think this picture provides anything like a conclusive political point, but it does give some idea of the scale of “entitlement” spending, which for Greg Mankiw means “stuff the government has to give you if you prove you’re eligible”.
Environmentalism is not a topic I’ve tackled here at Difficult Run, and it’s not something I write about a whole lot. That doesn’t mean that I don’t care, however. I just recognize that it’s way outside my area of expertise. I’m at once incredibly skeptical of most environmentalism that comes from a politically liberal mindset because I find it ideologically blind and totally impractical. But that doesn’t mean that I don’t care. I just don’t know what to do.
The person I respect the most on this issue is Chris Fields-Johnson. Chris is a PhD student in crop soil & soil environmental science at Virginia Tech and is the founder of The Piedmont Earthworks. Chris knows his stuff, and he has spent years studying and honing his skills so that his passion is matched by his depth of expertise. When I want to talk about environmental policy without the politics and with someone who knows what they are talking about, I talk to Chris.
Today he posted a fascinating and informative environmentalism piece discussing the environmental history of the southeast (especially Virginia) from the arrival of early European settlers to this day. The short version (although you should read the full article), is that a combination of beaver hunters and tobacco growers eviscerated the diverse ecosystems, and only the advent of widespread planting of loblolly pine prevented the total desertification of the region.
However, as Chris writes, the loblolly pines are not valuable enough as pulpwood to justify continued investment in the land, and so the degradation continues. Chris asks the question: what next? He suggests homesteading, as he is currently doing, to use the loblolly pines as a basis from which to begin reclaiming the original biodiversity of the region.
I’d like to hear more details about Chris’s suggestion, so I left a comment there. I’m turning comments off on this post so that if you have questions, you can ask them there as well.
A week or two ago there was a spate of stories about big-name US newspapers like the Wall Street Journal and New York Times getting hacked by the Chinese. I thought it was pretty noteworthy, and I was going to put up a note when I got distracted by other things.
Then it all went to Hell.
It’s been an open secret for quite some time that the Chinese military are behind an onslaught of cyber attacks on US soil, but outside of tech security circles you probably didn’t hear very much about it. This all changed when US cyber security firm Mandiant issued a scathing report linking the attacks (perpetrated by a group known as “APT1”) with a specific unit within China’s People’s Liberation Army: unit 61398.
Mandiant’s report, summarized via Slashdot, specified that:
“Since 2006, Mandiant has observed APT1 compromise 141 companies spanning 20 major industries,” the report continues. “APT1 has a well-defined attack methodology, honed over years and designed to steal large volumes of valuable intellectual property.” APT1 has the ability to access victim networks for an average of 356 days, stealing terabytes of compressed data during that period.
Sound ominous? It should. So what’s the point of all this hacking?
I’ve heard wildly divergent perspectives on Joanna Brooks memoir The Book of Mormon Girl, including one convert who lives on the East Coast and is convinced that Joanna actually grew up in a cult, not vanilla Mormonism. I haven’t read the book yet, but I have been impressed by Joanna’s reasonable and kind tone in blog posts and interviews.
This review from award-winning playwright Mahonri Stewart makes me even more curious to read the book.
Anne and I consider ourselves devout Mormons. We connect deeply with and believe in Mormon scripture and theology… Despite that heartfelt and abiding faith, however, there have been times when we have felt like we were foreigners in our own religion… It is here that works like Joanna Brooks’ The Book of Mormon Girl have given me and my wife hope.
I know that I don’t agree with everything that Joanna believes, and so I probably won’t agree with every word in the book. And that, actually, is part of why I want to read the book.
DR commenter and fellow Mormon blogger WalkerW wrote an excellent piece about the importance of listening for the sacred in “profane” music.
Suffering, as I noted in my last post, is an intrinsic part of reality. We are expected to mourn with those who mourn. Confronting suffering, pain, and sin head-on is the life of Christian. If our example is Jesus Christ, a man who “loved people in great misery who were taken from Him and did not understand Him” and was then “beaten and executed for espionage and treason,”[3] how then can we as disciples not look misery in the face? We can shy away from music that is filled with angst, despair, and sadness. We can look at it as “unworthy.” But we might miss out on something beautiful. As philosopher Roger Scruton noted, “Beauty can be consoling, disturbing, sacred, profane; it can be exhilarating, appealing, inspiring, chilling. It can affect us in anunlimited variety of ways…[I]t speaks to us directly like the voice of an intimate friend.”
There are lots of great songs in that post. Song full of loss and longing. Here is just one.
President Obama made a surprise call to increase the national minimum wage to $9 per hour. Is that actually a good idea? Becker and Posner took the issue on directly. Becker writes in a measured, but skeptical tone:
The two main issues debated are the effects of a higher minimum on employment of the low skilled, and its effects on the degree of poverty. Both theory and evidence indicate that higher minimums reduce employment for teenagers and other workers with low productivity, and that it does little to alleviate poverty. Neither conclusion, however, is without controversy, especially the employment effect.
He adds at the end that since recipients of minimum wage are also the customers of companies that have to bear the brunt of paying their workers above market rate: “low-income families are hit by two bullets: some of their members find it harder to get jobs, and they face a higher cost of the goods they consume.”
Posner weighs in with skepticism as well:
The proposal will not commend itself to most economists who study the economic consequences of minimum wages. They make three principal arguments: minimum wage laws reduce employment (and efficient resource allocation) by pricing labor above its market rate; the laws do not reduce poverty, because most beneficiaries of minimum wage laws are not poor; and as a means of reducing economic inequality, such laws are inferior to the Earned Income Tax Credit (i.e., the negative income tax). I will try to assess these arguments.
His conclusion is that, since we know so little and the proposed increase is so large, we should start with a more modest increase. He also suggests that indexing to inflation is a bad idea:
And I don’t think indexing the minimum wage to inflation is a good idea; should inflation surge, which is always a possibility though not (it seems) an imminent one, an equal increase in the minimum wage might contribute to an inflationary spiral.
I actually found an interesting article by Michigan macro professor Miles Kimball which addresses the controversial employment effect. Kimball cites work by Isaac Sorkin (an incredibly brilliant grad student who started the PhD program at the same time that I did) who explained that the employment effect might be much greater than expected; it just takes a long time to go into effect. A lot of companies engineer their production around assumptions about wage, and when the wage assumptions change (e.g. minimum wage goes into effect), they only gradually move to less labor-intensive production because of adjustment costs. In other words: they don’t go out and buy brand new machines on day 1, they just gradually phase out machines and processes to shift towards using fewer employees. That’s more reason to suspect that a minimum wage hike will do more harm than good, and indexing it to inflation would compound the problem.
And then there’s Greg Mankiw (very respected macroeconomist, but also openly Republican) who asks the simple question: why $9? Mankiw’s point is that if minimum wage is a magic wand to increase the salaries of the poor, why wouldn’t you you jump all the way to $25 (equivalent to the current median income of $50,000 for 2,000 hours/year)? Some mysterious force suggest we shouldn’t go too high, but the President isn’t talking about it. What is it? Good question.
My own take is that it is socially useful to have jobs available that pay less than what a person could live off of, primarily for teenagers to gain initial job experience. You need to have a bottom rung of the ladder, a place where you can go, start a resume, and use it as a launching pad for better jobs. I got my first minimum wage job when I was 14, and I’ve worked ever since: janitor, file clerk, bus boy, dishwasher, etc. I didn’t life myself up by my bootstraps, so a starter job is not enough. But it does help. Taking that away won’t help anyone. Fighting poverty and reducing income inequality are valid goals, but this is not a valid strategy to accomplish them.
Today I published my first post there as a permablogger: Mormonism and the New Religion of Secularism. This is the post that I had mentioned I was writing in the Faith Is Rational post from last week. Give it a read!