For Manhattan, a place where evening matters more than morning, that special day comes on May 30th this year, one of only two occasions when the Sun sets in exact alignment with the Manhattan grid, fully illuminating every single cross-street for the last fifteen minutes of daylight. The other day is July 13th. Had Manhattan's grid been perfectly aligned with the geographic north-south line, then our special days would be the Spring and Autumn equinoxes, the only two days on the calendar when the Sun rises due east and sets due west.

But Manhattan is rotated 30 degrees east from geographic north, shifting the days of alignment elsewhere into the calendar. Upon studying American culture, and what is important to it, future anthropologists might credit the Manhattan alignments to cosmic signs of Memorial Day and, of course, the All-Star break. War and Baseball. [More]

Labels: fun, science

Comments: Will Peterson confront the "magic beans" and "monopoly money" charges by detailing where the $17.5 billion to $18 billion from the so-called reserve funds will come from? He has failed to detail the offsets so far and most expect him to be silent again. If all this sounds bewildering, it is. It's no wonder the vast majority of voters are losing faith in their government. The House farm bill process is another sad example of how not to write a major bill.

The question Rep. Peterson should answer: How much funding has Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) agreed to, and where are the offsets coming from? Without answers to those questions, the farm bill process (or whatever you want to call it) is not transparent. Leadership on so many things in Washington is needed -- from both political parties.

Bottom line: If the split-personality farm bills go to the House floor, those seeking multibillion-dollar boosts in funding (food and nutrition, conservation, specialty crops) will likely cause a donnybrook. That is when we may finally get a true, open debate. We haven't had that in the House Ag Committee to date. And the Senate Ag Committee remains a work in non progress. [More - via a reasonable subscription]

How do people think the Democratic Congress is doing after six months? Lousy. But better than the alternative.

It's midyear, and the Democratic Congress is taking a break. Well-deserved? No, say Republicans.

"We are now halfway through the first year of the 110th Congress," Rep. Eric Cantor, R-Virginia, said. "And there is no question that the failure on the part of the Democrats in terms of their midterm exam is really a letdown to the expectations of the American people.''

Democratic leaders are inclined to agree. "I'm not happy with Congress, either," Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi said.

And the American people? Look at the grades. President Bush is doing terribly -- an average of 30 percent job approval in six recent polls. Congress is doing worse -- 25 percent on the average in five polls. (Poll: Support for Democrats wavering)

Why the low marks? Democrats point to one issue where not much seems to be getting done. "The war in Iraq is dragging down people's confidence in what's going on in this country," Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said. [More]

A major cause of the misperception, though, is President Bush's sagging popularity. It's clear that many people let their discontent with the president color their view of everything. If he is failing to win the war in Iraq or curb illegal immigration, we assume he must also be coming up short on the economy.

The polls suggest that some people won't acknowledge anything good here lest it suggest competence on the part of a president they can't stand. According to a survey by the Pew Research Center for People and the Press, 43 percent of Republicans say the economy is fair or poor, but 79 percent of Democrats take that view. "People are giving partisan responses," says public opinion expert Karlyn Bowman of the American Enterprise Institute in Washington. [More - great read]

I think that if people did not already have the sense that their country was in some sense slipping away from them -- if they felt secure enough about our country and its direction -- then they would be a lot less inclined to think that illegal immigrants were taking it away from them. But the reason they think their country is slipping away from them need have nothing to do with illegal immigration itself, as opposed to a more general sense that the rules are stacked against them, and no one obeys the laws, and decent people who work hard get screwed. [More]

Labels: farm bill, immigration, politics

Labels: culture, fun

The report takes particular aim at the (enormously regressive) payroll tax. Either payroll taxes should be integrated into the ordinary income tax system or the wage-cap on payroll taxes should be lifted. It brims with ideas for government tinkering: trade-adjustment assistance and unemployment assistance should be morphed into a single programme that offers wage insurance, portable health insurance and retraining. Communities should be able to federally insure their tax base against sudden economic dislocation (when, say, a factory moved to Mexico). [More]

Labels: economics, globalization

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The 2007 Farm Bill is critical to Australia's interests because US subsidies to wheat, cotton sugar and dairy farmers have the potential to distort prices of some of our major agricultural commodities.

The 2002 legislation, which is due to expire in September, has long been a source of concern to the Australian Government because it directly subsidies the incomes of American farmers, making it harder for countries such as Australia, New Zealand and Brazil to compete, despite being efficient low-cost producers. [More]

The White House and key members of Congress had been pushing for major reforms aimed at cutting overall subsidies, capping payouts to millionaire farmers and generally bringing the regime into line with international trade rules.

The agriculture committee chose to ignore all that.

If ever there was a sign that the United States isn't serious about reaching a global free-trade deal, there it was. Talk about backtracking and intransigence. [More]

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger is urging Congress not to forget their fruits and vegetables as they write a new federal Farm Bill.

Schwarzenegger and the governors of New York, Florida and Texas co-signed a letter sent Tuesday to the congressional Agriculture Committees that outlines what the four most populous states want out of the legislation.

But what California wants may not matter when it comes time to write the bill, because the committees are stacked with Midwestern members. [More]

Labels: farm bill, farm program, international, trade

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This fits with my intuition: We face such a huge looming problem with fossil fuels exhaustion that we should be thinking about moving away from fossil fuels due to rising costs and lowered production rather than because we might melt the polar ice caps. We need to embrace solar, nuclear, and wind because we just do not have as much fossil fuels left as the climate doomsters think we do.

If the Peak Oil, Peak Natural Gas, and Peak Coal folks are correct then why do the IPCC types spend so much time talking about climate catastrophe? My guess: Human-caused climate disaster makes for a far more dramatic moral story of human sin. Talk of using up all the coal and oil doesn't satisfy the need to see human action in such sinful terms. If we run out of oil then we suffer from the exhaustion of the oil but nature doesn't suffer as much as we do. We sin, but against ourselves. By contrast, if we heat up the planet the argument can be made for humans as massive sinners against nature. [More]

Labels: energy, global warming

Labels: farm program, politics

The senators voted, 64 to 35, to invoke cloture, or move to consideration of the bill itself. Since 60 votes are required for cloture, and only 45 voted for cloture two weeks ago, the measure’s supporters were heartened by today’s vote. Had the cloture vote failed today, the bill would have been dead for the foreseeable future.

The Senate’s next step is to consider a batch of amendments, some designed to be easier on illegal immigrants, some meant to be tougher. The amendments’ differing intentions underline the fragility of the coalition behind the bill.

Another make-or-break cloture vote could come before this weekend, and it is by no means certain that those who voted for cloture today will vote for the bill itself. [More]

Another problem, though, was that the Senate bill was worse than it needed to be. On the legal side of the immigration equation, there are easy trade-ups to be had. In fact, even a National Journal columnist with no apparent qualifications could write a better bill.

And what might that look like? Glad you asked.

* First, raise the number of legal immigrants by about 50 percent, to about 1.8 million a year. That meets the economy's demonstrated demand for workers.

* Second, provide pathways to permanence. Bring in these 1.8 million people on temporary visas, say for three to five years, with the promise of permanent legal residency (a green card) if they stay out of trouble, pose no security risk, and work or get a college degree.

* Third, don't micromanage who gets in. Allocate visas using a simple three-way formula that gives about equal weight to family, work, and education: 600,000 family visas for close relatives of citizens and green-card holders; 600,000 work visas for people who are sponsored by an employer and have less than a bachelor's degree; 600,000 education visas for people who hold a bachelor's degree or higher, with first call going to those who also have employer sponsorships or family ties. [More]

Labels: culture, immigration, politics

Unfortunately, U.S. corn land produces only 50 gallons worth of gasoline per acre per year—against an annual gasoline demand of 135 billion gallons. New U.S. ethanol plants coming on line could take 30 percent of next year’s U.S. corn for auto fuel—an unprecedented diversion of the world’s scarce cropland. Supplying the Bush goal of 35 billion gallons of ethanol per year would currently force farmers to clear more than 200 million acres of Midwest forest to supply even 10 percent of our gasoline demand from corn ethanol. [More]

Archer Daniels Midland, the nation's largest producer of ethanol fuel from corn, is setting its sights on a move into Brazil's sugar cane-based ethanol business, according to a published report.

The Wall Street Journal says ADM (Charts, Fortune 500) is exploring a variety of strategies to enter Brazil's ethanol market, ranging from building sugar-cane mills and ethanol plants from the ground up to acquiring sugar-cane companies. [More]

Labels: ethanol

• ADM
• Monsanto
• Cargill
• Umm, I can't think of any more right now, but they could be hiding.
  

Labels: culture

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"It's a threat to rural America. It's a threat to every consumer - a threat to the nutrition of the whole, entire world," said Rep. Frank Lucas, R-Okla.

In case someone missed his point, he later added, "It is a threat to everyone, a real physical threat."

How so? Another committee member suggested that Kind's bill could triple the price of breakfast cereal. Another lawmaker predicted the legislation would lead to a "vastly consolidated world of agriculture production." [More]

Labels: farm program, policy, politics

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Labels: immigration, politics, technology

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The result has been a torrent of money into a finite pool of assets. There is no precedent for such fortunes suddenly to find their way into global financial markets, and they help explain the waterfall of liquidity that has driven up the value of risky (and less risky) assets of all descriptions around the world. The world's entire supply of shares is $55 trillion, and bonds account for a similar amount. Sovereign-wealth funds could soon become the most important buyers of such assets, and many others besides. If so, the world will witness the intriguing spectacle of its largest private companies being owned by governments whose belief in capitalism is often partial. [More]

The growing importance of SWFs and diversification into other markets is beginning to attract both worry and criticism.

First, there is the impact on U.S. Treasury bonds. The IMF estimates that central bank buying has depressed yields on long-term U.S. Treasury bonds by between 30 and 100 basis points. Sudden portfolio adjustments by, say, China's SWF, could lead to a collapse of U.S. bond prices, making it more expensive for the United States to finance its debt.

Second, there is the issue of transparency. Few SWFs give details of their operations. If monitoring the currency and asset compositions of official reserves is difficult, tracking the investments of SWFs is nearly impossible. Only Norway provides anything close to transparency. The Abu Dhabi Investment Authority (ADIA) seems to be the model for most SWFs. ADIA has a reputation as a highly professional organization with a diversified portfolio and a cadre of talented managers. Yet despite managing $875 billion, there are next to no public details on AIDA's operations. It makes the most secretive hedge funds look like an open book. [More]

All of that borrowed money had to come from somewhere, and most of it came from Asia. When China stopped turning up at bond auctions in 2007 and started investing directly in companies instead, alarm bells should have rung. They didn't....

...Lots of the banks had sold insurance on those IOUs and on a bunch of other stuff that they bundled together into derivatives called collateralized debt obligations. When those investments started to blow up, we all realized that nobody knew who owed what to whom. And banks and hedge funds had become such a big part of the global economy that they dragged everything else down with them. [More]

Labels: economics, finance, international, policy

There are places in Manhattan where they’re constantly fighting rising underground rivers that are corroding the tracks. You stand in these pump rooms, and you see an enormous amount of water gushing in. And down there in a little box are these pumps, pumping it away. So, say human beings disappeared tomorrow. One of the first things that would happen is that the power would go off. A lot of our power comes out of nuclear or coal-fired plants that have automatic fail-safe switches to make sure that they don’t go out of control if no humans are monitoring their systems. Once the power goes off, the pumps stop working. Once the pumps stop working, the subways start filling with water. Within 48 hours you’re going to have a lot of flooding in New York City. Some of this would be visible on the surface. You might have some sewers overflowing. Those sewers would very quickly become clogged with debris—in the beginning the innumerable plastic bags that are blowing around the city and later, if nobody is trimming the hedges in the parks, you’re going to have leaf litter clogging up the sewers.

“But what would be happening underground? Corrosion. Just think of the subway lines below Lexington Avenue. You stand there waiting for the train, and there are all these steel columns that are holding up the roof, which is really the street. These things would start to corrode and, eventually, to collapse. After a while the streets would begin cratering, which could happen within just a couple of decades. And pretty soon, some of the streets would revert to the surface rivers that we used to have in Manhattan before we built all of this stuff. [More] [Update - Sorry, the link wasn't working. All better now.]

Labels: science

For instance, the study compared the first-page searches from major engines and found that on average:

* 69.6% of Google’s [first page results] were unique to Google.
* 79.4% of Yahoo’s were unique to Yahoo.
* 80.1% of Live’s were unique to Live.
* 75.0% Ask’s were unique to Ask.


All in all, according to the survey, only 1% of results appeared on the front page of all four search engines. [More]

Labels: computer, culture, technology

The background: We're in the midst of a merger mania, and the Federal Trade Commission and the Justice Department's antitrust division—the agencies tasked with assuring that mergers don't harm consumers by reducing competition—have approved almost every deal. If the nation's largest hog producer buys the second-largest hog producer? OK. Telecommunications giants SBC and AT&T want to merge? No problem. Giant supermarket company Albertson's and giant supermarket company SuperValu get together? You got it.

But when Whole Foods, the extremely successful, bobo-friendly, high-end, blue-state organic grocery chain and Wild Oats, the less successful, bobo-friendly, high-end, blue-state organic grocery chain, say they want to merge, the answer is no. This week, the FTC sued to stop this puny ($670 million) merger, saying the planned deal would "eliminate[e] the substantial competition between these two uniquely close competitors in numerous markets nationwide in the operation of premium natural and organic supermarkets" and result in higher prices and less consumer choice. [More]

Currently, organic apples that go into storage are refrigerated at 0 °C (32 °F) under low oxygen conditions. The reduced oxygen content is maintained by a constant flow of low-grade nitrogen, the researchers explained in the paper. (The use of nitrogen and the manipulation of oxygen levels are not considered violations of organic growing principles because the storage environment, rather than the produce itself, is affected.) The refrigeration process is so expensive to maintain that most organic orchards have their fruit turned into apple butter, juice, and sauce rather than put into cold storage. As a result, few organic apples are available past the harvest months, driving up the price of the fruit. [More]

Labels: food, organic, technology

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A SWEET whiff of burning flesh hangs over India’s open-air cremation grounds. The reason is that the traditional funeral pyres preferred by Hindus are extremely inefficient. On a windless day disposing of the remains of a fully-grown Hindu can take six hours and 500kg of wood.

With around 8.5m Hindus expiring each year in India, these pyres exact a huge environmental toll. By one estimate, they consume around 50m trees a year, producing 500,000 tonnes of ash and 8m tonnes of carbon dioxide. [More]

Think the residential real estate market is tough? Try finding a buyer for your unwanted graves.

Never an easy sell, disposing of extra burial plots has become more difficult. The latest tactic is to offer them online, via at least a half-dozen sites that some marketers tout as a "multiple listing service" for cemetery lots. And, yes, you can even sell them on eBay.

Just don't expect it to happen overnight -- if at all. [More]

Labels: culture

The panel, a subcommittee of the House Agriculture Committee, brought each of several proposals for change to the farm bill to a vote before rejecting them, sending a strong message to those pushing for major changes to farm legislation. They include the Bush administration and a bipartisan coalition led by Representative Ron Kind, Democrat of Wisconsin.

The Bush proposal received one vote. The Kind proposal was defeated unanimously, as was an unusual proposal from Citigroup that suggested a voluntary buyout to farmers receiving subsidies. Even modest reforms introduced by committee leaders were rejected. [More]

Labels: farm bill, farm program, policy, politics

I hear what you're saying but, with all due respect, it's not exactly rocket science. Basically, at the end of the day, the fact of the matter is you have got to be able to tick all the boxes. It's not the end of the world, but, to be perfectly honest with you, when push comes to shove, you don't want to be literally stuck between a rock and a hard place. Going forward we need to be singing from the same songsheet but you can't see the wood from the trees. Naturally hindsight is 20/20 vision and you have to take the rough with the smooth before proceeding onwards and upwards. The bottom line is you wear your heart on your sleeve and, when all is said and done, this is all part and parcel of the ongoing bigger picture. C'est la vie (if you know what I mean). [More]

Labels: fun

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Such frustration has now boiled over into the threats of violence by the Crav, made in a video message sent to France's new President, Nicolas Sarkozy.

In the video - shot in a secret location late at night - seven wine-makers, their faces hidden by black balaclavas, read out the spine-chilling warning that "blood will flow" if Nicolas Sarkozy does not act fast to raise the price of wine. [More]

Labels: globalization, international

Labels: immigration

Some may say that a food that is organic and a food that is carbon neutral are two different things. For some, to eat organic is a diet choice, and not necessarily a consideration of whether a food has been flown from Turkey or Thailand. [More]

Local food must be more environmentally friendly, they say – the distance it travels from farm to fork is shorter so its carbon footprint is smaller. Right? Wrong. Local food, per se, is not necessarily more environmentally friendly than that produced overseas. There is no reason, per se, that food produced in Kent has a lower environmental footprint than food produced in Kenya.

The concept of food miles remains easy for consumers to grasp but, in practice, it is too simplistic and we lose sight of a raft of wider sustainability issues. How does, for instance, the issue of Fair Trade fit into a concept of food miles?

And how can the food industry effectively communicate those issues on sustainability to consumers in a way they are willing and able to understand? [More]

Labels: culture, food

Global-warming activists would like this. But so would skeptics, because they believe the models are exaggerating the warming forecasts. After all, the averaged UAH/ RSS tropical troposphere series went up only about 0.08C over the past decade, and has been going down since 2002. Some solar scientists even expect pronounced cooling to begin in a decade. If they are right, the T3 tax will fall below zero within two decades, turning into a subsidy for carbon emissions.

At this point the global-warming alarmists would leap up to slam the proposal. But not so fast, Mr. Gore: The tax would only become a carbon subsidy if all the climate models are wrong, if greenhouse gases are not warming the atmosphere, and if the sun actually controls the climate. Alarmists sneeringly denounce such claims as "denialism," so they can hardly reject the policy on the belief that they are true.

Under the T3 tax, the regulator gets to call everyone's bluff at once, without gambling in advance on who is right. If the tax goes up, it ought to have. If it doesn't go up, it shouldn't have. Either way we get a sensible outcome. [More of a really interesting proposal]

Regardless, I appreciate suggestions for solutions in addition to proof of one position or other.

Labels: global warming, policy