Minor Thoughts from me to you

Silicon nanoparticles enhance performance of solar cells

Placing a film of silicon nanoparticles onto a silicon solar cell can boost power, reduce heat and prolong the cell's life, researchers now report.

To make their improved solar cells, the researchers began by first converting bulk silicon into discrete, nano-sized particles using a patented process they developed. Depending on their size, the nanoparticles will fluoresce in distinct colors.

Nanoparticles of the desired size were then dispersed in isopropyl alcohol and dispensed onto the face of the solar cell. As the alcohol evaporated, a film of closely packed nanoparticles was left firmly fastened to the solar cell.

Solar cells coated with a film of 1 nanometer, blue luminescent particles showed a power enhancement of about 60 percent in the ultraviolet range of the spectrum, but less than 3 percent in the visible range, the researchers report.

The process of coating solar cells with silicon nanoparticles could be easily incorporated into the manufacturing process with little additional cost, Nayfeh said.

Should we raise taxes to pay for road and bridge repair? In the wake of the Minnesota bridge collaspse, many politicians are certainly saying that we should. But what have they done with the road money that they already have?

Of Bridges and Taxes

James Oberstar, the Minnesota Democrat who runs the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, recently stood beside the wreckage and recommended an increase in the 18.4-cent-a-gallon federal gas tax, as a way to prevent future bridge collapses. His wing man, Alaska Republican and former Transportation Chairman Don Young, agrees wholeheartedly.

As it happens, these are the same men who played the lead role in the $286 billion 2005 federal highway bill. That's the bill that diverted billions of dollars of gas tax money away from urgent road and bridge projects toward Member earmarks for bike paths, nature trails and inefficient urban transit systems.

As recently as July 25, Mr. Oberstar sent out a press release boasting that he had "secured more than $12 million in funding" for his state in a recent federal transportation and housing bill. But $10 million of that was dedicated to a commuter rail line, $250,000 for the "Isanti Bike/Walk Trail," $200,000 to bus services in Duluth, and $150,000 for the Mesabi Academy of Kidspeace in Buhl. None of it went for bridge repair.

Even transportation dollars aren't scarce. Minnesota spends $1.6 billion a year on transportation--enough to build a new bridge over the Mississippi River every four months. But nearly $1 billion of that has been diverted from road and bridge repair to the state's light rail network that has a negligible impact on traffic congestion. Last year part of a sales tax revenue stream that is supposed to be dedicated for road and bridge construction was re-routed to mass transit. The Minnesota Department of Economic Development reports that only 2.8% of the state's commuters ride buses or rail to get to work, but these projects get up to 25% of the funding.

How is this not illegal? Select Hospitals Reap a Windfall Under Child Bill - New York Times

Despite promises by Congress to end the secrecy of earmarks and other pet projects, the House of Representatives has quietly funneled hundreds of millions of dollars to specific hospitals and health care providers under a bill passed this month to help low-income children.

... One hospital, Bay Area Medical Center, sits on Green Bay, straddling the border between Wisconsin and the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, more than 200 miles north of Chicago. The bill would increase Medicare payments to the hospital by instructing federal officials to assume that it was in Chicago, where Medicare rates are set to cover substantially higher wages for hospital workers.

The bill, for example, would give special treatment to two hospitals in Kingston, N.Y., stipulating that Medicare should pay them as if they were in New York City, 80 miles away. Representative Maurice D. Hinchey, Democrat of New York, who worked to get this provision into the bill, said it would allow the hospitals to pay competitive wages so they could keep top health care professionals.

John E. Finch Jr., a vice president of Benedictine Hospital, one of the two in Kingston, said the bill would "make a significant difference to us financially," increasing the payment for a typical Medicare case by $1,000.

Republicans sometimes did the same thing when they controlled Congress. Under a 1999 law, for example, a small hospital in rural Dixon, Ill., was deemed to be in the Chicago area "” 95 miles away "” at the behest of its congressman, J. Dennis Hastert, who was then speaker.

This is outright fraud. No matter how hard hospital administrators pretend different, these hospitals are not in New York City or Chicago. The hospitals will be taking money that the law says they're not entitled to. That's wrong. Any doctor trying to defraud Medicare out of that much money would be stripped of his license, find, and probably jailed. Why should these Congress men and women be treated any differently?

One of the great things about the division of labor -- having each person do one job and do it well -- is the lengths to which complete strangers will go to make each others' lives better.

Take, for example, road signs. We drive by thousands of them each year. Have you ever thought about what it would take to make a better road sign? I haven't. But Don Meeker has.

The Road to Clarity - New York Times

In 1989, after his success with the waterways project, the State of Oregon approached Meeker with a commission to think up a roadside sign system for scenic-tour routes. The problem sounded modest enough: Add more information to the state's road signs without adding clutter or increasing the physical size of the sign itself. But with the existing family of federally approved highway fonts -- a chubby, idiosyncratic and ultimately clumsy typeface colloquially known as Highway Gothic -- there was little you could add before the signs became visually bloated and even more unreadable than they already were. ""I knew the highway signs were a mess, but I didn't know exactly why," Meeker recalled.

Around the same time Meeker and his team were thinking about how to solve the problem of information clutter in Oregon, the Federal Highway Administration was concerned with another problem. Issues of readability were becoming increasingly important, especially at night, when the shine of bright headlights on highly reflective material can turn text into a glowing, blurry mess. Highway engineers call this phenomenon halation and elderly drivers, now estimated to represent nearly a fifth of all Americans on the road, are most susceptible to the effect.

"When the white gets hit, it explodes, it blooms," Meeker, who has the air of a scruffy academic, went on to say.

And, he spent the next fifteen years coming up with a new font for road signs and getting it approved by the Federal Highway Administration. Isn't that fantastic?

Only an economic system that frees people from subsistence living can give people enough freedom and flexibility to spend 15 years designing a better road sign.

Or, take the story of UPS.

U.P.S. Embraces High-Tech Delivery Methods - New York Times

But increasingly, it is the researchers at its Atlanta headquarters, its technology center in Mahwah, N.J., and its huge four-million-square-foot Louisville hub who are asking the questions that will drive the company's future.

What if the package contains medicine that could turn from palliative to poison if the temperature wavers? What if it is moving from Bangkok to Bangor and back to Bangkok, and if customs rules differ on each end? And what if the package is going to a big company that insists on receiving all its packages, no matter who ships them, at the same time each day?

Increasingly, it is the search for high-tech answers to such questions that is occupying the entire package delivery industry. U.P.S. and FedEx are each pumping more than $1 billion a year into research, while also looking for new ways to cut costs.

Customers of both FedEx and U.P.S. can now print out shipping labels that are easily scannable by computers. Meteorologists at both companies routinely outguess official Weather Service forecasts. And both are working with the Federal Aviation Administration to improve air safety and scheduling.

The research at U.P.S. is paying off. Last year, it cut 28 million miles from truck routes "” saving roughly three million gallons of fuel "” in good part by mapping routes that minimize left turns. This year, U.P.S. began offering customers a self-service system for redirecting packages that are en route.

And now the U.P.S. researchers are working on sensors that can track temperatures of packages, on software that can make customs checks more uniform worldwide and on scheduling processes that accommodate the needs of recipients as well as shippers.

Absolutely incredible. UPS and FedEx are spending a combined $1 billion -- just to find a way to get a package to your door faster, cheaper, safer. Their researchers don't know me and they'll probably never meet me, but they're intensely focused on making my life better.

Only the profit motive produces that kind of incentive. (When was the last time a motor vehicle or postal employee cared about your time or happiness?) Only the division of labor allows that kind of single-focused effort.

Capitalism may not be a perfect economic system, but it's the only one I ever want to live in.

Even President Bush realizes that spending has to be prioritized. Sadly, Congress has yet to learn the lesson. Bush Rejects Gas Tax as Way to Shore Up Bridges - New York Times

Asked about the gasoline proposal, which could amount to an increase of 5 cents a gallon under schemes floating around Congress, Mr. Bush said, "Before we raise taxes, which could affect economic growth, I would strongly urge the Congress to examine how they set priorities."

In a nod to using earmarks to pay for transportation projects like the one supposed to pay for the "bridge to nowhere" in Alaska, Mr. Bush said:

"From my perspective, the way it seems to have worked is that each member on that committee gets to set his or her own priority first, and then whatever is left over is spent through a funding formula. That's not the right way to prioritize the people's money."

Why is Congress talking about raising the gas tax?

Representative James L. Oberstar, Democrat of Minnesota and chairman of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, suggested this week that a tax increase might be needed to finance a proposed trust fund to repair bridges in the Federal Highway System, A large percentage of the bridges have been identified as having structural problems.

Mr. Oberstar raised the possibility of a temporary 5-cent-a-gallon tax. The idea has some bipartisan support.

Representative Don Young, Republican of Alaska and former chairman of the transportation panel, said he could possibly support such a tax. Mr. Young has previously voiced support for increasing the gasoline tax.

Oh, well, if Don Young supports it, it must be a good idea. This is, after all, the same man under Federal investigation for taking bribes. He's also infamous for treating tax money as his own personal slush fund. Obviously, we should follow Rep. Young's advice on tax policy.

No, wait. I've reconsidered. Let's prioritize our spending instead. Let Congress actually decide to fund what matters instead of what personally enriches them. Then we could repair the nation's bridges without needing to raise a dollar of additional taxes.

That would demonstrate true political courage.

Allied Drive jobs program struggling

A local Madison jobs training program has been in operation since January. It was intended to help residents of the Allied Drive neighborhood find decent jobs.

The START program prepares people to take entrance tests for trade apprenticeships. It began in January and has been touted as one of the best ways to lift people out of poverty.

Participants enroll in a six-week class of instruction and individualized tutoring in math, English and spatial skills. The training also covers safety standards, blueprint reading and interviewing skills.

After seven months and $75,000, how is the program doing?

Only two Allied Drive residents completed the program in the first five months. The contract goal for the year is 32. Only one of them passed an apprenticeship test, and only one got a job. The goal is 20 jobs for Allied Drive residents in 2007. ... A city analysis found 82 percent of the people who gained employment through the program live outside the city, including Prairie du Sac, Fall River, Sun Prairie and Janesville.

Something's not quite right here. Why aren't more Allied Drive residents participating in the program? And why is Madison heavily funding a program that is mainly being used by people who live outside of Madison?

Thankfully, I don't live in Madison so I don't have to worry about how long my property tax dollars will fund such an unsuccessful program.

Every politician has a pet charity. Unfortunately, politicians fund their pet charities through my income. In case you've wondered, this is why I love politicians so much.

State Rep. Gary Bies is just the latest politician to make my "dead to me" list. Dentists urge 2-cent tax on soda.

When state Rep. Garey Bies was growing up poor in a large family, he was thankful for a program in Oshkosh that made it financially possible for him to see a dentist.

That is why the Sister Bay Republican has authored AB 237, a bill that would impose a tax on soft drinks -- which dentists say increase risk of tooth decay -- to subsidize dental access for low-income people and to pay for dental education.

Come on. If Rep Bies really wanted to do something useful, he could travel the state talking about the value of dentistry and asking private donors to contribute. Trying to force Wisconsin's taxpayers to contribute is just tacky.

For once, however, an industry trade group actually offers robust opposition to a stupid idea.

"No one will argue that people need dental care and education. They also need vision care and obesity care. Should we tax certain products to pay for that type of help?" asked Brandon Scholz, president and chief executive of the Grocers Association.

"Say people need reading glasses, should we impose a tax of 10 cents on each newspaper? How would your publisher like that? You would say that's not fair to us or our customers, and we view the soda tax the same way."

Scholz added that if sugar causes tooth decay, why just pick on soda? How about ice cream or a bag of sugar?

"Once they go down that road, they will tax everything else," he warned. "And all that money won't go for the program. It would be diverted elsewhere."

So very true.

If you're in the capitol today, and you see Rep. Bies, grab his wallet and pull $10 out of it. I have a few charities I'd like to help. He should approve.

I'm disappointed in Life Promotions, the organization that organizes the Lifest Festival each summer in Oshkosh, WI. (Full disclosure: I attended Lifest 2007 with my sister.)

Last year and this year, Lifest hosted the "Air Glory" ride at the festival. Air Glory is a bungee-jump type of ride, available for $25 a ride to festival attendees. Unfortunately, a girl died on the ride this year. Fond du Lac Reporter - Girl dies after fall from Air Glory free-fall ride at Lifest

A girl was killed in a fall from the Air Glory ride Saturday afternoon at Lifest.

The victim, who was not immediately identified, was taken to a local hospital, but Lifest officials made an announcement from the Main Stage about 9:35 p.m. that she had died.

The State of Wisconsin licenses all rides that operate in the state. The license is supposed to ensure that the ride is safe and that all operators meet the relevant criteria (being 18 or older). For the past month, state officials have been investigating the ride.

A few days ago, Lifest representatives said that Lifest bore no responsibility for the accident.

Mitch Lautenslager, vice president of operations and programming for Life! Promotions in Oshkosh, last week said the organization had no responsibility to check to see if Air Glory was registered or inspected in Wisconsin before it opened. "Everything we had done with Air Glory, all the homework, showed they had been cleared to go," Lautenslager said. "We didn't have any reason to believe otherwise."

Life! Promotions spokesman Wes Halula said Air Glory also appeared at last year's Lifest. "It's between the state and Air Glory," Halula said. "The onus is on Air Glory to keep up on all that paperwork."

I'm sorry, but I find this attitude unacceptable. Lifest invited Air Glory to appear at the event. Lifest promoted the event to thousands of parents and youth leaders as a fun, safe time. By putting Air Glory into their promotional materials, Lifest gave their stamp of approval to the ride. Like it or not, Lifest bore a responsibility to ensure that the ride was well-maintained, well-run, and -- above all -- safe.

It's not simply a matter of "keep[ing] up on all that paperwork". By it's very nature, state regulation is always going to be a hit or miss affair. Parents trusted Lifest -- not the State of Wisconsin -- to provide a fun, safe atmosphere for their children.

I believe Lifest had their own responsibility to check the ride before promoting it as an integral part of Lifest. That responsibility was a moral one, not a legal one. I would not sue Lifest for failing in that responsibility. Instead, I'll take my own responsible course: I no longer trust Lifest to provide a safe, fun event. I no longer trust Lifest to have executed due diligence before promoting an event.

Until Lifest takes responsibility for what happens at their festival, I will not be attending. My daughter will not be old enough to attend festivals for another 10-12 years. Lifest has that long to earn back my trust and prove that they're willing to do whatever it takes to keep her safe.

While I'm on the subject of trade-offs, I'd like to mention a recent article from the Wisconsin State Journal. Bridge repairs could cost Wisconsin over $2 billion

Wisconsin's bridges are considered safer than the national average, but the state still has more than 2,100 bridges that fall short of federal standards for carrying loads and providing wide lanes for cars, according to a Wisconsin State Journal review of state and federal records.

The civil engineers report noted Wisconsin needs some $1.75 billion for state and local bridge projects between 2000 and 2020 as outlined in a state plan. That doesn't include another $2.8 billion in road and bridge projects planned for the Milwaukee area and the southeastern part of the state.

I'm glad the Wisconsin section of the American Society of Civil Engineers is looking into this. With the collapse of the bridge of the Minnesota, every politician in America is focused on bridge maintenance and repair. If that money needs to be spent on bridge repair, then spend it.

But first, take it out of another section of the budget. Delay spending increases on other projects. Cut spending on redundant areas of the budget. Prioritize spending in all areas of the budget.

I know what Wisconsin's politicians would like to do: raise taxes by $2 billion to cover this spending. I'd like to do that to -- I'd like to just increase my own income whenever I have something new I want to spend money. Unfortunately, I can't. And neither can Wisconsin's politicians. Every time they raise taxes, I get a pay cut. It's impossible to tax and spend a state into prosperity and safety.

By all means, maintain the bridges. But focus on the trade-offs inherent in doing that and make tough decisions about the budget.

Trade-offs are an inescapable part of life. The sad truth is, it's impossible to both eat your cake and have it too. Unfortunately, far too many of our policy debates try to pretend that it is possible to have everything at once. Politicians follow their instincts and promise to give voters everything the voters want. But all of the promises in the world can't abolish life's fundamental trade-offs.

What am I talk about? Let me illustrate. Lately, a debate has been raging in legal and political circles about a clash between family life and work. Employers still expect employees to put in a 40-hour work week, occurring mostly between 8am and 5pm. An increasing number of employees want to work odd schedules, work from home, or take large amounts of time off to care for ailing family members. As a result, these employees are being passed over for promotion, denied raises, or being outright fired.

Family-Leave Values - New York Times

Since the mid-1990s, the number of workers who have sued their employers for supposed mistreatment on account of family responsibilities "” becoming pregnant, needing to care for a sick child or relative "” has increased by more than 300 percent.

... Williams argued that the growing tension between work and family was not simply a product of economic necessity. It stemmed, rather, from a marketplace structured around an increasingly outdated masculine norm: the "ideal worker" who can work full time for an entire career while enjoying "immunity from family work." At a time when both adults in most families had come to participate in the labor force, Williams argued that this standard was unrealistic, especially for women, who remained the primary caregivers in most households.

This New York Times article is fairly typical of the debate. It's heavily anecdotal and hard to excerpt. (If you want the human stories behind the rhetoric, click through and read the full article.)

The article starts by telling the story of Karen Deonarain. Karen worked for a small company as a full-time employee. When she went through a tough pregnancy (and gave birth 16 weeks early), she informed her employer that she'd need four months off to recover, before coming back to work. Her employer ended up firing her.

The article continues on, talking about the difficulties that Karen Deonarain now faced. I'd like to stop and focus on the difficulties her employer faced. Her employer was small -- less than 50 employees. This would tend to indicate that each employee was important and the work that Karen Deonarain was valuable. Karen informed her employer that she didn't intend to do any work for more than a fourth of the year. What was her employer to do?

A job had been left unfilled. Work needed to be done, by someone. Ms. Deonarain was unable to do it, so the company would need to hire someone new. It's hardly a good idea to spend time finding and training a new employee, only to lay them off when the former employee decides to return to work. It's also not fair to expect someone else at the company to cover the job until Ms. Deonarain was ready to return.

Here's the trade-off: businesses offer generous pay and benefit to those that can show up and get work done. Men and women who expect to take lots of time off whenever they have a family problem are not showing up and getting the job done. Is it so unfair then, that businesses wouldn't offer these people generous pay and benefits?

If workers aren't contributing something of value to the company, why should the company have a responsibility to contribute something of value to the workers? The job market is a two-way street: workers work for pay, employers pay for work. If workers expect to start and stop working on a whim, they shouldn't be surprised when employers expect to start and stop paying just as quickly.

This isn't a matter of discrimination and shouldn't be covered by state or federal anti-discrimination laws. This is a matter of fulfilling your obligations as an employee. Being a parent -- or a responsible son or daughter -- doesn't magically absolve someone of their responsibilities to their employer.

There will always be a trade-off between work and family. Lower wages and less stable jobs are an inevitable consequence of choosing to work fewer hours on an unstable schedule.

As seen on Slashdot

Garbage collection is fine as a private service, but roads? What would possibly improve by letting individual profit-seeking companies control where and when you are allowed to drive?

It's a simple answer. Individual profit-seeking companies only make a profit if you can drive when and where you want. Right now, only one "company" provides roads -- your local state government. And if they don't feel like building where you want to drive, tough luck. A private company would have a financial incentive to build a road where you want to drive.

Example: The population on the west side of Madison has been growing. More people have been moving to West Madison and to the West Madison suburbs. Traffic on the Madison beltline has been increasing, especially in certain sections of the western half. Traffic on County Road M has also been increasing. In some places, it's only a one-lane road.

The state of Wisconsin has no plans to widen the beltline or CR-M. They've publically stated that the earliest they'd even consider doing something would be around 2014. As a result, I increasingly do everything possible to avoid CR-M and the beltline during periods of high traffic.

Unlike the state, a private company would have an incentive to widen both of these roads and increase capacity. More capacity means more drivers. More drivers means more profit. It's a win-win scenario. They get more money, I get a faster commute. This is the beauty of free-market capitalism -- both parties win or there is no deal.

All of this only works, of course, as long as there is more than one private company building roads. Two competing companies would each have an incentive to get me where I want to go as quickly and efficiently as possible. A private company that has no competition -- for instance, one granted a monopoly by the state or local government -- would likely do little better than the government does. Competition is the magic ingredient that makes a free-market work.

So, why do you think roads should be government controlled instead of privately owned?

It turns out that I don't read too much. In reading, I'm strengthening my brain and preparing it for old age. So say researchers in the July 31 edition of Neurology. Mental Abilities: Good Readers Better Able to Retain Brain Skills - New York Times

It is not surprising that when doctors examined people who had worked at a lead smelter for years, they found no lack of neurological problems associated with lead

But not every worker was affected equally, a new study says, especially when it came to those who were good readers. While those workers had the same sorts of motor skill losses as their colleagues, they had retained much more of their thinking skills.

People who are good readers, generally a sign of better education, have been found in earlier studies to have better health. The presumption has been that this is because they can take better care of themselves or afford better food, housing and medical care.

But writing in the July 31 issue of Neurology, researchers said that in this case some smelter employees were protected not as a direct result of their reading but an indirect one. The years of reading, the study said, may have helped their brains develop more of what doctors call cognitive reserve.

After all of the reading I've done, my cognitive reserve must be through the roof. Not that I plan to stop building my reserve anytime soon. After all, who knows how much I'll need later?

One of life's primary lessons is that you shouldn't just think about the immediate effects of a decision or policy, but the long-term secondary consequences as well. Here are a few examples.

Be careful about trying to soak the rich through taxes. It may backfire. Asymmetrical Information: Loser..er...Labor Pays

Recent research has cast an eye in a somewhat different direction, showing that the tax may be borne not entirely (or even principally) by owners of capital, but by workers. ... A recent paper by Kevin Hassett and Aparna Mathur of the American Enterprise Institute analyzes data across countries and over time, concluding that for countries that are part of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), a 1% increase in corporate tax rates results in a 0.8% decrease in manufacturing wage rates. (Economic intuition suggests significant negative effects of the corporate tax on manufacturing wages because of the complementarity of capital and labor for skilled workers.)

Wage effects of this size suggest labor bears much of the burden of the corporate tax. In fact, workers collectively would be better off if they voted for higher taxes on labor with corresponding cuts in the corporate tax.

That's for tax policy. How about trying to reduce state healthcare costs by requiring state employees to pay a larger portion of their own healthcare costs? Agency: GOP benefit cuts problematic

A plan by Assembly Republicans to require most state employees to pay 10 percent of their health insurance premiums could actually end up costing taxpayers more money, the state Department of Employment Trust Funds warns.

Stella warned that by requiring workers to pay a flat 10 percent premium, it would undercut the state's three-tiered premium system. Under the current system, employees who enroll in more cost-effective plans pay a lower percentage of the premium than those in higher-cost plans.

"We believe the 10 percent mandate will end the tiering structure and will eliminate our ability to effectively control cost increases," Stella wrote. "In fact, if we are correct premium costs for the state will increase rapidly and, if significant enough, render any savings from this proposal illusory."

Finally, how about changing the way doctors are compensated? Doctors - Wages and Salaries - New York Times

In the United States, nearly all doctors are paid piecemeal, for each test or procedure they perform, rather than a flat salary. As a result, physicians have financial incentives to perform procedures that further drive up overall health care spending.

Doctors are also paid whether the procedures they perform go well or badly, Dr. Bach said, and whether they are crucial to a patient's health or not..

"Almost all expenditures pass through the pen of a doctor," he said. So a doctor may decide to perform a test that costs a total of $4,000 in order to make $800 for himself -- when a cheaper test might work equally well. "This is a highly inefficient way to pay doctors," Dr. Bach said.

This article doesn't list any unexpected consequences of changing the way doctors are paid, but I can take a few guesses. Doctors might start to work fewer hours if they're salaried instead of being paid by the procedure. If doctors are paid based on performance rather than procedure, they may start to avoid sicker patients in favor of healthy, easy to treat patients. It's not a guarantee, of course, but is a possibility.

When considering any policy changes, it's best to at least think through the possible secondary effects of the change.

So, apparently, the President has been negotiating an arms deal with the Saudi's. (Last I heard, it still needed Congressional approval.) Unfortunately, the State Department still doesn't understand the Middle East. Therefore, we're getting taken for a ride and -- assuming the deal is approved -- the entire Middle East will think we're morons of the highest degree. Why? Middle East observer Daniel Jackson comments.

One Hand Clapping > Blog Archive > The US-Saudi arms deal - a view from Israel

So, if I understand all of this, the US is giving the large men of Saudi Arabia $20 billion worth of high tech toys with no strings attached. ... Here is the first warning -- the Shah of Iran. Five years after the fall of Vietnam (the dread of the liberal left), Jimmy Carter lost the first round of this war without a shot. According to Professor Steve Brahms at NYU, it was largely due to the inability of the State Department to understand what Khomeini's value preferences were in the emerging standoff.

To the point, as history has shown, it was unthinkable to the State Department mind that a rational actor might prefer death (read martyrdom) to money. Who would not want to talk to the US and not get lots of money?

While the liberal left is worried that Iraq as another Vietnam, they are ignoring the first total failure of the post-Vietnam foreign policy culture -- Iran. Carter's failure, and the first complete humiliation of the US, was simply because of a refusal to work in the Bazaar. There is no market/capitalist mode of production out here.

As I mentioned before, negotiating in the Bazaar is not working the Market. Possession is everything and all transactions are conducted in front of all other actors in the Bazaar. Whoever wins is considered to be a Big Man because he was able to force the other person (the loser) to take a lower price or pay more than the item was worth. There is nothing here about mutual benefit -- whoever has the good has the power and dictates the price. Just look at Hamas's recent change in the price for Shalit, the Israeli soldier kidnapped (he was 19 then) last year. It is not about price, it is about power.

The worst, however, position to be in the Bazaar is to be the one who gives up something for nothing. This is the freier -- a term that can only be roughly approximated as a sucker, but this lacks the total humiliation of the term. The freier is the guy who gives up a good or does a job for nothing. Even the concept of "getting ripped off" lacks the appropriate derogatory abuse that accompanies being labeled a freier.

We're about to be the freier. The last thing we want is for the Middle Eastern nations to view us as imbeciles. But, if State gets the deal approved, that's exactly how we will be viewed.

Read Daniel Jackson's full commentary -- he provides much more information than the little bit I've excerpted here.

Panel Votes to Allow Regulation of Cigarettes - New York Times

A Senate committee approved legislation that would allow federal regulation of cigarettes for the first time.

Bravo for the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee. There's just one little problem. Regardless of how long I pore over Article I, Section 8 of the U.S. Constitution, I can't find anything granting Congress the power to regulate cigarettes. Nor do I found -- anywhere in the Constitution -- anything granting Congress the authority to grant itself more authority.

Quite the contrary. The Constitution grants Congress a very limited, specific, and well-defined list of powers.

If Congress does ultimately start regulating cigarettes, who's disobeying the law? Those that ignore the new regulations or the Congress that illegally passed the regulations in the first place?

Maverick Leads Charge for Charter Schools - New York Times

Steve Barr, a major organizer of charter schools, has been waging what often seems like a guerrilla war for control of this city's chronically failing high schools.

In just seven years, Mr. Barr's Green Dot Public Schools organization has founded 10 charter high schools and has won approval to open 10 more. Now, in his most aggressive challenge to the public school system, he is fighting to seize control of Locke Senior High, a gang-ridden school in Watts known as one of the city's worst. A 15-year-old girl was killed by gunfire there in 2005.

In the process, Mr. Barr has fomented a teachers revolt against the Los Angeles Unified School District. He has driven a wedge through the city's teachers union by welcoming organized labor "” in contrast to other charter operators "” and signing a contract with an upstart union. And he has mobilized thousands of black and Hispanic parents to demand better schools.

Three years ago, Mr. Barr negotiated with district officials about overhauling Jefferson High School, a dropout factory in downtown Los Angeles. When the talks bogged down, Mr. Barr concluded he needed clout.

Green Dot organized a parents union, and its members, buttonholing neighbors in supermarkets and churches, collected 10,000 signatures endorsing Jefferson's division into several smaller charter schools.

Mr. Barr marched from Jefferson High with nearly 1,000 parents to deliver the petition to district headquarters. The authorities refused to relinquish Jefferson, but the school board approved five new charters, which Green Dot inaugurated last fall, all near Jefferson and drawing students from it.

Kudos to Steve Barr for waging this war. I wish him nothing but success as he fights the entrenched education bureaucracy. I just wish it wasn't necessary to fight these battles in order for parents to have control of their children's education.

Fight Song at Ozarks: Work Hard and Avoid Debt - New York Times

The Times has a nice write-up of College of the Ozarks.

Like many undergraduates, students at the College of the Ozarks here work their way through school, though they often do such unconventional campus jobs as milking cows at dawn in the college's barns and baking fruit breads for sale to donors.

But what is truly different about Hard Work U. "” as the college styles itself "” is that all 1,345 students must work 15 hours per week to pay off the entire cost of tuition "” $15,900 per year. If they work summers, as one-third are doing this summer, they pay off their $4,400 room and board as well. Work study is not an option as it is at most campuses; it is the college's raison d'être.

This is a college that is philosophically opposed to students starting careers with an Ozark mountain of debt "” 95 percent graduate debt free "” and it believes that students who put sweat equity into their education value it more.

Unfortunately, they can't quite lose the New York snobbery.

Colleges like Columbia pay high salaries to attract top scholars and offer students a smorgasbord of electives as well as amenities like Olympic-scale gyms. College of the Ozarks is run on a lean staff -- it has only four deans -- and pays full professors under $70,000 a year for teaching more hours per semester, 12. English majors can avail themselves of a bare-bones survey course like 20th-century British literature but not of a course just in James Joyce.

Horrors -- students are deprived of the opportunity to study James Joyce for an entire semester. Maybe I'm just a philistine, but I don't imagine many people outside of New York City would find that troublesome.

Certain Degrees Now Cost More at Public Universities - New York Times

Starting this fall, juniors and seniors pursuing an undergraduate major in the business school at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, will pay $500 more each semester than classmates. The University of Nebraska last year began charging engineering students a $40 premium for each hour of class credit.

And Arizona State University this fall will phase in for upperclassmen in the journalism school a $250 per semester charge above the basic $2,411 tuition for in-state students.

Such moves are being driven by the high salaries commanded by professors in certain fields, the expense of specialized equipment and the difficulties of getting state legislatures to approve general tuition increases, university officials say.

This makes sense to me. Some degrees offer a higher return on investment than others -- in the form of higher starting salaries, more opportunities, or more networking. Why shouldn't students pay more to access more valuable opportunities? Surprisingly, not everyone agrees with me.

"There was a time, not that long ago, 10 to 15 years ago, that the vast majority of the cost of education at public universities was borne by the state, and that was why tuition was so low," he said. "That was based on the premise that the education of an individual is a public good, that individuals go out and become schoolteachers and businessmen and doctors and lawyers, that makes society better. That's no longer the perception."

I have just one response: College of the Ozarks. Treating the "education of an individual" as a public good is a decent idea. But why not run public universities more like College of the Ozarks? Why try to make them taxpayer subsidized versions of the elite private universities? Providing education as a public good does not automatically require a state to provide full weight rooms, olympic size swimming pools, palatial dorms, and all of the other amenities to which students are starting to become addicted.

Growing up, I always heard that I should have an "attitude of gratitude". That phrase sounded annoyingly pat back then and still does now. That doesn't make it any less true. Here are two examples of people with a great attitude of gratitude.

First, Chef Mojo from Daily Pundit wrote about experiencing life with new hearing aids. Daily Pundit » The Hum and Roar of the World.

At some point when I was a child, it became apparent that I was a bit different from the other kids. Namely, I couldn't hear the things they heard.

This was somewhat expected, my mother being hearing impaired. I stepped into this life with the genetic code that dialed me down a notch or so when it came to sound. A childhood of constant ear infections only increased the damage.

...

The audiologist took the results of my test and input them into a program on her Dell laptop and dialed up the brands and models of aids that would apply to me. ... The thing was an inch long and little over a quarter inch thick, with a very thin tube encasing a wire that attached to a transmitter in the form of flexible silicone earbud. No more ear molds.

... The Lady gave me a little look and said, Hey sweetie. And she started reading from a poster in the office.

I almost started crying.

I'd never heard her before. Not like this. Not this way. Not to the point of being almost normal. Her voice was pure sparkling clarity and oh so sweet.

I turned to the audiologist who said, the humming is the light fixtures overhead. I looked up and it occurred to me that the world was opening up in waves around me within this tiny office. I could hear the secretary a room away on the phone and the printer printing and a phone ringing behind me, and I knew right were it was.

How often are you thankful for just the simple ability to hear, and to hear well?

Secondly, how about waking up from a coma after 19 years, to find that your entire world has changed? BBC NEWS | Europe | Pole wakes up from 19-year coma.

Railway worker Jan Grzebski, 65, fell into a coma after he was hit by a train in 1988. ... Doctors gave him only two or three years to live after the accident. ... When Mr Grzebski had his accident Poland was still ruled by its last communist leader, Wojciech Jaruzelski. ... The following year's elections ushered in eastern Europe's first post-communist government. Poland joined the Nato alliance in 1999 and the European Union in 2004.

"Now I see people on the streets with mobile phones and there are so many goods in the shops it makes my head spin," he told Polish television. "When I went into a coma there was only tea and vinegar in the shops, meat was rationed and huge petrol queues were everywhere," Mr Grzebski said. "What amazes me today is all these people who walk around with their mobile phones and never stop moaning," said Mr Grzebski. "I've got nothing to complain about."

Every so often, I try to stop and remember what life used to be like. I try to talk to people who remember what life was like in the 50's, 60's, 70's, and 80's. Really, we don't have it so bad today.

So, as you go through your day, try to have an attitude of gratitude -- no matter what happens.

Do you feel safe about taking a flight? Do you think that another 9/11 style attack couldn't possibly succeed? Do the TSA regulations and onerous security procedures make you feel safer? If they do, they shouldn't. We're just as much at risk as we were six years ago.

Hot Air > Blog Archive > A Pilot on Airline Security

At this moment, there are roughly 5000 commercial airliners in the skies above you. There will be 28,000 flights today, and 840,000 in the next month -- every month. The U.S. fleet consists of some 6000 aircraft -- almost all of which will be parked unattended tonight at a public airport. We will carry almost 7 billion passengers this year, the number increasing to 10 billion by 2010, barring an exogenous event like another 9/11.

There is simply no deployable technology that has a prayer of keeping a motivated, prepared terrorist out of the system every time -- even most times. TSA misses more than 90% of detectable weapons at passenger checkpoints in their own tests, and it is not their fault, because of the limitations of technology and the number of inspections they must conduct. This doesn't count several classes of completely undetectable weapons like composite knives and liquid explosives.

What is TSA's fault is their abject failure to embrace more robust approaches than high visibility inspections, and their accommodations to the Air Transport Association's revenue interests at the expense of true security, while largely ignoring the recommendations of the front-line airline crews and air marshals who have no direct revenue agenda and are much more familiar with airline operations than are the bureaucrats (remember government ignoring the front-line FBI agents who tried to warn them about 9/11?). Deplorable amounts of money have been wasted on incomprehensible security strategies, while KISS [Keep It Simple, Stupid] methods proven to work have been ignored.

...

Almost six years after 9/11, it is inexcusable that -- in an environment where TSA misses more than 90% of weapons, RON aircraft are not secured, and ground employees are not screened -- fewer than 2% of our airliners have a team of armed pilots aboard, fewer than 5% have air marshals, and the flight attendants have no mandatory tactical or behavioral assessment training. $24 billion dollars later, we are not materially safer, except in the areas of intelligence that prevent an attack from getting to an airport. Once at the airport, there is little reason to believe the attack won't succeed.

...

I know I've gotten pretty far afield of your topic, but I want to give you the sense that RON aircraft are just one small piece of a multilayered security system wherein every layer leaks like a sieve. The problem is much, much bigger than any single element.

In the end, we should be starting with defending the smallest spaces -- the cockpits and cargo compartments, and working outward to the limits of our resources; instead of starting with the airport perimeter and working inward, ignoring the actual defense of those spaces that are actually the terrorist targets. And we should be using the resources already in place to the greatest extent possible, instead of trying to bring new, untried methods into play, then waiting to find out they don't work nearly as well in reality as they do on paper.

Given that Congress regulates air travel and air security, you can blame them for that. Just one more reason Congress has earned its 14% approval rating.

If you want to demand change, the issues raised in this article would be a great place to start.

The Ladies Home Journal predicts the future, in 1900. Our "now" was their nearly unimaginable future. Their vision of our present tells us more about them then it does about us, I'm afraid.

Some of the predictions are fairly prescient:

Automobiles will be cheaper than horses are today. Farmers will own automobile hay-wagons, automobile truck-wagons, plows, harrows and hay-rakes. A one-pound motor in one of these vehicles will do the work of a pair of horses or more. Children will ride in automobile sleighs in winter. Automobiles will have been substituted for every horse vehicle now known. There will be, as already exist today, automobile hearses, automobile police patrols, automobile ambulances, automobile street sweepers. The horse in harness will be as scarce, if, indeed, not even scarcer, then as the yoked ox is today.

Others missed the mark by a mile:

There will probably be from 350,000,000 to 500,000,000 people in America and its possessions by the lapse of another century. Nicaragua will ask for admission to our Union after the completion of the great canal. Mexico will be next. Europe, seeking more territory to the south of us, will cause many of the South and Central American republics to be voted into the Union by their own people.

At the time, adding new states was a fairly common occurence. Oklahoma, New Mexico, Arizona, Alaska, and Hawaii hadn't yet become states in 1900. So, of course, they thought it reasonable that eventually most of Latin and South America would decide to join the Union.

Check it out. Not only was it fun reading, but it's a warning against getting too smug about our own understanding of the future.

Vitamin C doesn't do much to fight colds, lycopene probably doesn't prevent cancer, and eating a quarter of a grapefruit a day could kill you.

Kinda shakes up your world, doesn't it?