Linky Friday #54
Sports:
[S1] From ScarletNumbers: The major league sports franchise with the longest tenure of futility is the Chicago Cubs, last winning the World Series in 1908. In the hopes of turning things around they have gotten themselves a mascot named Clark the Cub (Clark is the cross street of Wrigley Field). Deadspin decided to make Clark the Cub anatomically correct. CSNMA decided to use the Deadspin version in their story. D’oh! [NSFW]
[S2] From ScarletNumbers: The New Jersey Devils and the New York Rangers played at Yankee Stadium Sunday. The game was delayed due to sun glare. To kill some time, the cast of Jersey Boys sung “Big Girls Don’t Cry”. The lyrics refer to “an alibi”. Apparently the closed captioner didn’t have access to the lyrics, so he made his best guess as to what they were singing: Deadspin D’oh! [NSFW]
[S3] Playoffs, once instituted, expand.
Jobs:
[J1] The markets for contracts. As in… hitman contracts.
[J2] Democrats want higher wages, Republicans argue that it would mean less jobs. Democrats hire more people at lower wages, while Republicans hire fewer people at higher wages.
[J3] Smart managers fire people quickly when they take over. For all of the complaints I hear about employment-at-will, I am pretty sure I’ve seen more bad people kept around than good people fired.
[J4] Recent research says that offshoring is overrated at least when it comes to R&D. I wonder if this is why we’re hearing less about its inevitability in the tech world. My own observational experiences are that it isn’t the threat that we have made it out to be (in the tech sector, at least). I’ve seen it tried at multiple employers, and it either doesn’t work out or when cuts are made they are made over there and not over here.
Healthcare:
[H1] Kaiser has a good report from 2012 on why health care costs are rising. An interesting fact from it: In 1970, out-of-pocket costs for health care was 40% of the total. By 2010, that had fallen to 14%.
[H2] Doctors aren’t meeting PPACA’s EHR goals. At a basic level, EHR is a time-saver and win-win-win, but the amount that physicians are often being asked to put in them, if the economic incentives are not high enough, it may not be worth their time to do it.
[H3] There’s a new class of cancer treatment that may significant increase patients’ odds of survival. Unfortunately, it’s expensive. It’s pressuring physicians to control costs.
Building:
[B1] io9 has stories on rotating buildings and “skytwisters”
[B2] Public Interest Design is changing how we do things. Good.is has numerous examples.
[B3] Jim Russell argues that walkability won’t attract talent. People need transit.
Asia:
[A1] In in India: New handguns for rape victims. Out in India: street-typing.
[A2] South Korea is launching 5G… and its very, very fast.
[A3] Japan is aging, here’s a positive spin on how it’s adapting.
[A4] Scarlet Johansson was asked to resign her association with Oxfam due to her becoming a pitchwoman for SodaStream, an Israeli company operating on the West Bank. Among those upset about the boycott of SodaStream? Some Palestinians.
Europe:
[E1] There are a lot of misperceptions about World War I. We’ve recently discovered that we have underestimated the death count by a significant margin.
[E2] Scotland is looking towards tidal power.
[E3] Suggesting that the jobless should lose benefits for failing to speak English is something you would expect a Republican to say. Instead, it’s coming from UK’s Labour Party.
[E4] A Norwegian mountianside is cut off from sunlight for six months of the year, so they’re using mirrors.
MANTIS huh? That takes me back.Report
I actually watched a couple episodes on Hulu. A little preachy, but it actually holds up decently.Report
H2: This is exactly what Zazzy does for work. Having heard her reflections on her work, having worked with a doctor ahead of the curve with EHR, and having worked with doctors in the midst of transitioning over, the process is even more complicated than the article lays out. That said, any argument that the program should be abandoned because of some struggles in the very, very, very early goings is remarkably shortsighted.Report
I totally agree. I work for a HUGE healthsystem, so of course we’re chasing Meaningful Use (part 2). But once we get the tech developed, we’re likely to sell it to docs, even if they don’t work for us.
Also, some part of this is hard because the government has been creating regs really close to implementation dates (yes, a year out is really close. you gotta code, and then test, and then roll it out to prod).Report
H1: A relevant anecdote: My first job out of college, in 1994, featured health coverage with a 5% copay, IIRC $200 deductible, and zero employee contribution to premiums. My wife had a kidney transplant in 1995 that cost about $30,000.Report
[A2] sounds…implausible to me, and not just because it’s in the Daily Mail. There are some fundamental limits to wireless bandwidth based on transmission wavelength. Basically, you can have higer data rates with a shorter wavelength but the tradeoff is that the signal can’t penetrate through walls/trees/etc as well. The article says that Samsung used 64 transmitters over 2km, which is an antenna station every 100 feet or so. Still, it’d be cool if they get it to work.Report
J2: Maybe for campaigns but how does it translate to non-elections? I would want to see a study of businesses owned by Democratic people vs. businesses owned by Republicans in terms of number of employees, wages, and benefits. The businesses should not be publicly traded.Report
Good question.
Also, since the story does not give an indication of actual wages paid for working on a campaign, it only notes two weekly-earning differences between parties, ranging from the of $478 to $224, but not if that amount was actually a ‘living wage.’ Additionally, the difference in staffing numbers, R- 3,600; D- 8,800, suggests that Republicans felt the work of a few top managers worth more money, and that the greater mass of foot soldiers should work for free.
So the consolidate the wage at the top of the food chain ethos reigns red.Report
E2 Tidal power, as with every power source, has its environmental opponents. Tidal stations allegedly increase erosion and disrupt the habitat of aquatic wildlife. Le sigh.Report
One my of frustrations with the environmental movement and one that brings out my centrist streak is that they are seemingly opposed to everything that is not a return to the shire. Not all of them of course but a good number. Erik Loomis on Lawyers, Guns, and Money seems opposed to everything and offering of no solutions. He likes to make posts about how “Everything in the Ocean is Dying” but he opposes desalination because of the brine byproduct, he opposes tanks and pipeline for oil but can come up with no alternative energy source.
But some concerns are valid and erosion and acquatic wildlife are two valid concerns. We need to design safeguards.Report
It would seem to me that energy solutions are always going to be a matter of choosing the least bad option. Environmentalists are good at making the perfect the enemy of the good, eh?Report
I have some environmentalist friends who seem triumphant about the fact that we’re going to run out of recoverable fossil fuels sooner rather than later. The thing is, there is a good chance (though not an absolute one) that the more difficult it is get to fossil fuels, the more we’re likely to wreck our environment in doing so. We’re far more addicted to energy than we are to the environment.
The solutions, of course, are renewables and nuclear. The latter of which should provide something of an upper limit to how much we’re going to spend to recover fossil fuels and how deep we’re going to go. If we allow it. Which we might not, because of… the environment.Report
I don’t know all the science, but I’ve talked to a few different people who work in various sectors of the nuclear energy community (one for the NRC, one for a local nuclear plant) and both have said that their exist methods to responsibly and safely use and repurpose nuclear material, notably what the French are doing. When I asked them why we didn’t do that, they mentioned three interrelated factors: government regulation; the environmentalists; and a refusal to adopt anything connected with France because of how French it will be.
I’m not sure if the last one is a joke or not.Report
With tongue only partially in cheek, big dams kill fish, wind turbines kill raptors, and the best places to put utility-scale solar are chock-full of endangered desert species. Unfortunately, micro-hydro, backyard wind turbines and rooftop solar don’t scale to the degree needed to support industry.
People who think Carter didn’t make any long-lasting policy decisions haven’t looked at the US nuclear industry. We’re still living with his choice that US commercial nuclear would use a once-through fuel cycle and just bury the left-overs. And since it seems to be a big deal this week, he did it by executive order!Report
I would think, like sinking a ship, tidal structures (or their anchoring bases) would also provide habitat.Report
E4: The Anti-Burns!
“It’s not very big,” she says, “but it is enough when we are sharing.”
That’s what she said.Report
[B3] I wish walkability were more important to more people. For me, it is currently the most important thing about a neighborhood, and I really think high walkability vastly improves quality of life. That doesn’t mean transportation isn’t important — it’s never going to be easy to find work and a home in the same area, without increasing population density dramatically — but it does mean that transportation and walkability don’t have to work against each other.
[E1] That first link, the 10 myths one, is a mess. Some of them are straw men that nobody actually believes (e.g., “Most soldiers died”), some of them are ignorant of what people actually beleive (e.g., the argument in the article against “Lions led by donkeys”), and some border on offensive (and are well past stupid, e.g., ” Everyone hated it”; I mean, sure, we saw unprecedented numbers of psychological casualties, and had physical casualty rates in the 50s through the 70s, but some folks had fun hanging out in France or Central/Eastern Europe, so not everyone hated it!).Report
I also like walability but public transportation is also really important to me. I work from home now but when I worked downtown or was in grad school in NYC, I preferred public transport to biking because it allowed me to read a book or the paper and that was good for my day prep.
I’m not a everyone should bike to walk person.
But for daily living, I love being able to walk to the grocery store and back and such and to bars/restaurants/the movies/the library.Report
Right. I take the bus to work, and walk almost everywhere else. I like the bus for the reasons you mentioned, and for the people watching/meeting, and I would feel disconnected if I didn’t take it regularly as a result, but man does being able to walk everywhere else do wonders for the psyche.Report
We totally screwed the pooch with where we live now and walkability. We don’t even have sidewalks! There is a shopping plaza about a mile away and a big park and what passes for a “downtown” area about a mile past that but both involved walking along a fairly fast road (40MPH speed limit) with a walking lane but no curbed sidewalk.
When I was home with Mayo over the summer, we would walk anywhere. I needed to get out of the house and interact with adults and it was good for him to get the fresh air. I’d walk a mile to the bank and go inside to deposit a check with a teller — even though I could have used an iPhone app to deposit it from home. I needed the air, I needed the exercise, I needed the human interaction! One day we walked seven miles running whatever errands I could think of. I actually got to become friendly and familiar with some of the local workers… the bank tellers would always gush over the baby and a grocery checkout woman now excitedly waits to see if I have him in tow when I pull up.
Having spent the entirety of my life previous to this in highly walkable places, where we live now is torture. This is something we hope to remedy with the move we are planning.Report
I live in a ‘rural’ place, but my neighborhood has an incredibly high walkability score. I, too, love being able to walk to the market, post office, etc.; and places that are walkable have been a driver of our living choices since long before ‘walkability scores’ were handed out.
I admit, this stems in great part from a life-long affliction with migraine that makes driving difficult some days; and a style of cooking, used to be called ‘European,’ that often begins with a trip to the market to fetch the ingredients for the days meal that aren’t already in the larder.Report
@zic
When I lived in Manhattan, I walked past a Fairway Market twice a day. Fairway was one of the best grocers in Manhattan that didn’t cost an arm and a leg, especially for produce and proteins. Coupled with the fact that I lived alone and cooked for one AND had just a mini-fridge in my studio apartment, I would stop by the market twice a day. On the way to work, I’d grab a piece of fruit or two… whatever looked good and caught my eye. On the way home, I’d wander the aisle until I was motivated for dinner. I spent more aggregate time in the market than I would have with a single weekly trip, but I had virtually zero food waste, a pretty varied diet for someone who skews towards the regimented side when meal planning, and developed a better relationship and appreciation for fresh food.
I recaptured some of that over the summer. I’d walk to the Stop&Shop (fairly standard major grocer chain) two or three times a week. “OOO, fresh corn in from Jersey? Let me grab those. Hey, those tomatoes look great. And now I’m halfway to fresh salsa so tacos it is!”
The weird thing is, even though the store is just a 3 minute drive from the house, it feels like such a hassle to repeat that process now that I’m back and work full time. But if it was a 3 minute walk? I’d be more likely to repeat it. Hard to put a finger on why. There is just a visceral pleasure I experience from getting up and walking somewhere. I don’t mind driving (I delivered pizzas for a time) but it seems like a chore in a way that walking doesn’t.Report
Seems I’m not the only one who appreciates the walkability of my neighborhood. My back yard is filled with moose tracks that weren’t there yesterday. Walked right under my bedroom window while I was sleeping.
I assume it’s the market I run; I try to maintain a lot of edge habitat so that there’s always something good to eat in the neighborhood. Cats like it, too. There are several neighborhood cats that sun on my front porches after their adventures in the back yard.Report
@kazzy 12:28
Did you hear that the New Jersey Turnpike Authority is going to work with local supermarkets in order to bring fresh produce to rest areas on the Turnpike and the Parkway.
It will be a joint venture between Stop&Shop and A&P. It is going to be called “Stop & P”…Report