Linky Friday #8

[A] For Michael Cain: As the United States turns to natural gas, Europe is turning back to coal.

[B] Matt Yglesias and Kevin Drum explain why pot is illegal everywhere in the world.

[C] So apparently, Patrick Dempsey has purchased Tully’s Coffee. There was one back in Zaulem where we used to live. There are actually a lot of places out west that serve their coffee and have their logo in the window, though they’re not part of the chain. (Sadly, it does not appear that anybody – movie star or otherwise – has bought Hit Coffee.)

[D] William Pesek writes on the road China has ahead of it. It touches on the demographics problem, as well as one of my issues (they’re not going to want to make our cheap stuff forever).

[E] This is probably a hat-tip to my freakishness, but I think “PC City” in this Vizio ad looks blissfully practical and efficient (except for a disk drive coming out of a building and such). It’s probably no coincidence that I like the basic look of Thinkpads and standard tower computers. I want to live in PC City. (Which apparently was made from models.)

[F] A documentary-maker on fracking is accusing Matt Damon’s new anti-fracking movie of being a liar. In the interest of fairness, it’s starting to look like resource exploitation in Alberta is doing a number on the water there.

[G] When all of the flaws of Cash for Clunkers were pointed out, a counterargument was that aside from the economics, it was about the environmental benefit. Maybe not. I may not agree with the premise that C4C was a primary… errr… driver in the raising of used car prices, but what a stupid program.

[H] Cosmic radiation could be causing Alzheimer’s in astronauts. Speaking of astronauts, anyone up for a one-way trip to Mars?

[I] Ezra Klein writes an ode to Biden and explains that he really could be a presidential contender in 2016.

[J] A lot of people don’t realize that the Catholic Church has a back door for married priests. My scumbag former pastor was fired from the Episcopal Church and is now a married pastor in the Catholic Church.

[K] One of these days, when they have it running and I’m ready, unless I end up going back to school for realz, I am going to try one of these online-certificate courses.

[L] I love stories wherein real life intersects with our video game life. If you ever find some good ones, feel free to send them my way in an email or OT comment. I have a potential creative pursuit that involves this sort of thing (short version: a detective in a place wherein the world revolves around the virtual and most crimes that are committed occur because of something happening in a game.)

[M] Slate on global fertility decline.

[N] Dan Slater wonders if online romance is threatening monogamy. I think, as with school and college, choice paralysis is a potential issue. But I think this piece is overwrought. Amanda Marcotte and Alexis Madrigal have stronger words.

[O] The potentially regressive effects of technocraticism.

[P] How can Atlantic Cities write a not-brief piece on the decline of the shopping mall without mentioning Walmart? Because it doesn’t fit with their narrative? Because it didn’t occur to them? Regardless of that oversight, it’s a worthwhile piece.

[Q] EDK points out that we probably wouldn’t even see a doomsday asteroid until it’s too late.

[R] Japanese scientists have located a giant squid in the Pacific Ocean.

[S] Apps are coming to cars and Ford and GM are looking for developers. I’m a bit at a loss as to why Android isn’t there yet. I have an idea of why Google wouldn’t want to do it, but somebody should. There’s no reason for this to be on a separate platform.

Warning, the rest of the links involve smartphones – and Linux, for a couple of them. If you don’t care, I hope you enjoyed the above links.

[T] If you want to learn Android programming, the Linux Foundation wants to help. Meanwhile, Ubuntu is planning to release their own OS. Kinda neat, I guess, but also kind of redundant.

[U] AndroidCentral recommends against getting the 8GB Nexus 4 because that’s not enough space. Of course, this wouldn’t even be an issue if they had a MicroSD slot.

[V] I have mixed feelings on the way that Samsung is (along with Amazon) running away with the Android tablet market. The good news is that, with it being Android, they have to keep putting out a good product. Or, at least, Samsung does.

[W] I think Apple’s move towards cheaper smartphones is – while good for cheapskates like me (if I were an Applyte) actually a mistake. They’re also considering multiple colors. As a consumer, I’m not a fan of the idea (there is no reason ever to deviate from black or silver). As a business matter, I don’t know that it really matters.

Will Truman

Will Truman is the Editor-in-Chief of Ordinary Times. He is also on Twitter.

23 Comments

  1. P: I don’t think the rise of Walmart (and for that matter Target) had much to do with the decline of the shopping mall – different market segments. Walmart has (nearly?) entirely replaced the smaller versions of themselves (e.g. Roses, Zayres), their biggest conquest being Monty Ward’s, and of course put K-mart & Sears on life support for a bit (I’m not sure the latter has ever recovered)

    (though, you may have a point as Sears anchors a few malls in the places where Macy’s and their peers do not. And you could say with the split between Walmart/Target and Macy’s/Nordstrom (etc), places like J.C. Penny’s – back in the day, a mall 2nd anchor staple – are stores without a country)

    • I disagree. Both hypermarkets and malls have something significant in common: single-stop spending. There are, of course, a lot of people who will shop at one but are reluctant to go to the other, but I think there are enough cases of people who want some clothes, a blender, and a haircut that used to think that the mall was the easiest place to do that and now think that Walmart is.

  2. [R] was the first link I followed. I love that there’s film of a giant squid. It’s too bad the video in the embedded link is down, but I’m sure it’ll resurface again in a few days somewhere else. Something to scale the picture against would be helpful.

    [N] I read just a few days ago myself in The Atlantic. Choice paralysis for romantic partners is one thing, but I’m skeptical about how representative the individuals interviewed really are. Seems to me that you either want a long term relationship or you don’t, and the author found people who claim to want LTRs, but in truth really don’t.

  3. L: Umberto Eco. “Foucault’s Pendulum,” I believe it is.
    There’s a word processor that’s programmed to print gibberish that turns out to be clues in his friend’s disappearance. It gets weirder form there.

    • After about 300 pages of Foucault’s Pendulum I didn’t have the remotest fishing clue what was happening and assumed that someone had dosed the narrator with LSD.

      There was some Goddess-worship going on, I think.

      • That’s a book for reading on a kindle with 3G or 4G if ever there was one. The ability to look up words as you read would definitely help; for without the deep knowledge of the vocabulary, it’s impossible to digest, short of eating the pages.

        Access to an on-line dictionary as you read would be the plinth block holding up one’s comprehension of Focault’s Pendulum.

  4. A: Natural gas prices in the US over the next few years are going to be very interesting. Lots of people making plans that assume the current glut of very low-priced NG will continue: electric generators using NG instead of coal where they can; large-scale LNG exports; bringing chemical processing that uses NG as feedstock (eg, fertilizer production) back to the US; LNG fuel for long-haul trucking; compressed NG for automobiles. OTOH, there are good reasons to believe that the current wellhead price is well below the cost of drilling and finishing a well and is unsustainable. Gas associated with new oil production doesn’t bring in enough revenue at current prices to make it worth building the collection pipeline networks; large amounts of flaring going on in the shale oil fields of North Dakota and Texas. Companies working tight gas plays have borrowed boatloads of money, and many have no choice but to sell at whatever price they can get right now to generate some sort of cash flow for servicing that debt. Tight gas wells (eg, shale gas) have frighteningly high depletion rates; as a result, maintaining a constant level of production requires drilling lots of new wells on a continuous basis. Drilling rates are starting to drop as companies run out of capital. All of those combined are reason to think that NG wellhead prices could double or possibly triple over the next few years.

    • They’re also trying to convert the LNG onloading facilities (for imports) to offloading facilities (for exports). From what I understand, the current issues are as much regulatory as they are technical.

  5. The article’s argument that C4C didn’t have a good environmental effect is pretty weak. If the new cars had significantly better MPG than the old ones – which the article acknowledges they did, with an average different of 16 MPG for the old ones vs. 25 MPG for the new ones – then it’s reasonably probably there was a positive environmental impact. The only thing the article offers against this is an assertion that better mileage would just cause people to drive more, but it doesn’t provide any evidence that this is actually what happened.

    The scale of the program being small relative to the total number of cars in the US doesn’t mean that it wasn’t useful or positive. Small improvements are still improvements.

    Now, if by some miracle Congress could pass a carbon tax, that would make a much greater positive difference, but the political barriers to that are pretty high, so starting small is still better than doing nothing.

    • The bigger argument the piece made involved waste in combination with environmental benefits mitigated by different driving habits. No, they didn’t provide proof that people change their driving habits on the basis of gasoline costs/mileage, but isn’t that what proponents of carbon taxes are counting on?

      • The “Waste” part was the part I recall reading. Junking the cars, rather than reselling or recycling them, both produced significant pollution in the destruction phase, and generated additional pollutants due to requiring the production of their “replacements” in the market (since a car that has already been manufactured is “better” environmentally, than producing a second, more fuel-efficient car to replace the first, while incurring more production pollution in that process).

        • I remember hearing that at the time, and it made a certain amount of sense to me. I actually tried to track down an article saying such to accompany this one but couldn’t.

          This one talks more about the landfill side of waste. Since the engine has to be destroyed, you can’t recycle its parts.

    • I believe it would be more proper to say that C4C accelerated any notable environmental impact rather than having a causal effect.

      • It’s hard to say. It’s possible that absent some government program the next car they bought would not have been as fuel efficient. But to the extent that’s the goal, I think a better way of going about it is basically to further subsidize the purchase of fuel efficient vehicles over time rather than demanding that they get rid of the car they have right now in order to take advantage of it.

    • What’s the carbon footprint of making a car? Is the increased mpg really enough to offset that? The answer is maybe, depending on how much of an increase in gas mileage you get, what kind of emissions controls (or not) your old car has, how big a new car you buy, etc. If you have a car that has decent emissions controls and gets decent gas mileage, you will probably not do the environment a lick of good by buying a new one, unless it’s a Flintstones foot-powered car.

      • Well sure, it responds to standard cost accounting: you’d have to amortise the initial cost over the number of miles driven at a given MPG rating, to calculate the total cost per mile. Translate costs to carbon footprint, seems to work.

        You might still do better to buy the new car, though, especially if you drive a lot of miles. The old car’s steel will be recycled, which has to be factored into the old car’s carbon footprint.

  6. [M] Lucky No. 7,000,000,000 probably celebrated his or her birthday sometime in March and added to a population that’s already stressing the planet’s limited supplies of food, energy, and clean water. Should this trend continue, as the Los Angeles Times noted in a five-part series marking the occasion, by midcentury, “living conditions are likely to be bleak for much of humanity.”

    Hog and wash. We’ve been hearing this refrain since the late ’60s when the earth had half the population. At that time population biologist Paul Ehrlich published The Population Bomb, in which he argued that the fight to feed humanity had already been lost, and there was no way to prevent mass starvation in the coming decade. The Global 2000 Report released in 1980 claimed, “If present trends continue, the world in 2000 will be more crowded, and more vulnerable to disruption than the world we live in now…Despite greater material output, the world’s people will be poorer in many ways than they are today.”

    It all sounds so plausible, but it never comes true. It’s the boy who cried wolf syndrom.

    That said, I’m pretty much in favor of declining population. It seems to indicate a healthy and prosperous population, and I like a clean environment with lots of open space. But that doesn’t mean hitting 9 billion humans on earth will turn it into a dystopian nightmare.

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  8. [Q] NEOs are “small objects in the solar system (asteroids and short-period comets) with orbits that regularly bring them close to the Earth and which, therefore, are capable someday of striking our planet,”

    Making it doubly true that Neos are bad actors.

  9. [L] Walter Jon Williams has been writing role-playing-game related novels lately: Implied Spaces is set in an RPG universe, while the Dagmar Shaw novels star a woman who creates them. They’re OK, but I want the third Metropolitan book.

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