So I’m contemplating buying a digital SLR, and, after much huffing, puffing and reading of reviews I’m hesitating between a Nikon D40 and Canon EOS 400D (or Digital Rebel XTi as they call it in the US). The Nikon has a six megapixel sensor and the Canon has ten, and the Canon has some patented dust-removal system. But the Canon costs £100 more. I figure the extra isn’t worth it, and, ten days ago, I buy the Nikon. A couple of days ago Nikon announce a new camera, the D40x. Same as the D40 (more or less) but with a 10MP sensor and an expected price-tag that matches or exceeds the Canon. The comment boards go nuts with discontented D40 buyers, and I think — for a moment — “I should have bought the Canon.” Reminds me of the Sidney Morgenbesser joke:

bq. After finishing dinner, Sidney Morgenbesser decides to order dessert. The waitress tells him he has two choices: apple pie and blueberry pie. Sidney orders the apple pie. After a few minutes the waitress returns and says that they also have cherry pie at which point Morgenbesser says “In that case I’ll have the blueberry pie.”

Ever heard of “AllAcademic Inc.”:http://www.allacademic.com/? This company describes itself as “an application service provider specializing in online solutions for abstract submissions, session submissions and conference management for annual meetings, conventions, and other types of events”. They are selling a range of papers that have been presented at previous APSA conferences (and annual meetings by many other academic associations). For example, there are papers for sale written by Jonathan Quong on “luck multiculturalism”:http://www.allacademic.com//meta/p63637_index.html?type=info, David Wasserman on “disabilities and the capability approach”:http://www.allacademic.com//meta/p59051_index.html?type=info, Simon Caney on “the global basic structure”:http://www.allacademic.com//meta/p58933_index.html?type=info, Richard Arneson on “sufficientarian conceptions of justice”:http://www.allacademic.com//meta/p59049_index.html?type=info, John Christman on “cultural recognition”:http://www.allacademic.com//meta/p63723_index.html?type=info, and two papers by Henry, “one”:http://www.allacademic.com//meta/p64378_index.html?type=info on E-commerce, and “one”:http://www.allacademic.com//meta/p64305_index.html?type=info on regulatory trajectories in the information age. There are also two by myself, “one”:http://www.allacademic.com/meta/p63603_index.html on the gendered division of labour, and “one”:http://www.allacademic.com/meta/p59129_index.html on Rawls and Sen. Most papers were presented a couple of years ago. They are for sale for USD 7 per piece. So, should we be happy with this commercial service?
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I’ve a new “bloggingheads”:http://bloggingheads.tv/video.php?id=215 with Will Wilkinson up. The first topic (and unsurprisingly the one we disagree about most vigorously) is unions and card check (Will is skeptical that employers either have asymmetrical bargaining power vis-a-vis workers, or are likely to abuse their position). I’d wanted to refer in our debate to a story that provides strongly suggestive evidence regarding the real reason why employers and their political allies are opposed to card check but couldn’t find it on the interwebs in time; Kris Raab (who, unlike me, has access to the _Daily Labor Report_ ) was able to find it for me later.

A legislative proposal that would make it easier for labor unions to organize workers through a union authorization card process would allow them to bypass a formal election process and could prevent employers from making a case for why workers should not join a union, former Labor Department [deputy secretary] Steven Law told a wholesalers and distributors industry group Feb. 1. … Speaking at an executive summit of the National Association of Wholesaler-Distributors (NAW) in Washington, Law advised the group’s members to focus their lobbying efforts against the labor-friendly Republicans who co-sponsored previous versions of the legislation. … Law told the NAW meeting that unions view the card-check process as key to building their membership. He said the bill would make it more economical for unions to organize smaller companies. “This is a holy grail solution to build themselves up and become a fighting force once more.” … At least one person in the audience did not seem have a problem with the legislation and complained during a question-and-answer period that Law’s comments portrayed union organizing as “heinous.” Law replied, “If you think that unionizing is a great thing, then this (legislation) is a great thing.” He later told BNA that his comments were not meant to portray unions as good or bad, but to emphasize that the card-check legislation could bypass the secret ballot process [HF-you can almost hear the reporter’s incredulity leaking through]. Also during the question-and-answer period, another audience member spoke out against EFCA, voicing disapproval of the legislation, and saying the bill is “very, very dangerous.” According to that audience member, the International Brotherhood of Teamsters sought to organize 30 of his company’s drivers in 2003, but obtained only 11 signed union authorization cards. Unless an employer learns of the organizing drive, “You have no chance to retaliate–I shouldn’t say retaliate,” he said to peals of nervous laughter from the audience. Rather, he corrected himself, “You have no chance to say [as an employer] what’s going on.”

Opposition to card check is all about stopping unionization, and providing opportunities for employers to retaliate against pro-union employees. Not that this is exactly news to anyone who follows this stuff (the National Association of Manufacturers have never been the most credible-sounding converts to the cause of democracy in the workplace), but it’s unusual to see it stated as bluntly as it’s stated here.

I should note here that this post contains strong language, and thus probably makes the Baby David Broder cry. Consider yourselves warned.

Some time back a reader chastised me for making fun of Ross Douthat. (Hmm, that makes her sound completely insane, but she was actually rather polite in the thread. I promised I would address her points in another post “soon”, but I did not do so because I am fundamentally an indolent, unreliable person.) The complaint Douthat was making is one that is heard a lot in anti-feminist circles, and often in a doubly irritating concern-troll fashion. It boils down to this: sexual liberation has paradoxically furthered mens’ interests at the expense of the hapless women it purported to be liberating. This is because all men want lots of commitment-free, anonymous sex with lots of different women, while all women want to be taken to the State Fair and have their special man win them a giant, plush, pink teddy bear which will fill the car with the etiolated scent of frying fat while she gives the guy a hand job. I believe it all goes back to life on the veldt, when our proto-human female ancestors needed to eat the pink, heart-shaped fruit of whitmansampler africensis in order to have the energy they needed to bear young. [click to continue…]

Last night I was talking with fellow Blueshirts about Irish politicians’ reluctance to think about energy policy in a strategic way, or to look further ahead than the next election at issues that have a 20-30 year horizon. Ireland’s not even on the end of a pipeline, and any deal Germany makes with Russia isn’t going to concern itself with us. We are still opening peat burning stations with relatively high CO2 emissions, and our gas supply is running out. To diversify, we’ve got interconnectors with the UK – current and planned – and in the next decade or so, we’ll have an interconnector direct into the French national grid. Which is striking, given how sniffy Irish people are about nuclear power. [click to continue…]

Jo Wolff’s “Guardian column today”:http://education.guardian.co.uk/higher/comment/story/0,,2027064,00.html is all about the limitations and dangers of using Powerpoint (a subject “I’ve discussed before”:https://crookedtimber.org/2003/12/21/powerpoint/ ). In a spasm of anti-Microsoftness, I used “S5”:http://meyerweb.com/eric/tools/s5/ in my lectures this year but eventually gave up because of the sheer hassle of doing anything other than bullet points with it – Powerpoint just worked better (as does Impress, btw). Jo’s key complaint, though, is about what PP does for spontaneity:

bq. For those who prefer to project the idea that a talk is a unique event, a voyage of discovery that could go in any one of a number of directions, and may well go in all of them, PowerPoint gives the game away. As someone once said: “The art is hiding the art.” With PowerPoint, everything is on display. Elegantly effortless performance is hard enough as it is. PowerPoint makes it impossible.

I don’t know how Jo does his lectures, but one thing it is pretty hard to get away without (given student expectations and all that) is the _handout_ . And once you’ve given them a handout then they either know where you’re going or you’ll confuse the hell out of them if you go somewhere else. How does Powerpoint make things any worse in this respect?

The Wall Street Journal has a confusing (to me) “editorial”:http://www.opinionjournal.com/editorial/feature.html?id=110009742 about the attempt by the Italian courts to prosecute CIA agents involved in “extraordinary rendition”. Here’s what is supposed to have happened:

bq. Nasr, a radical imam also known as Abu Omar, is a terrorist suspect who had been under Italian police surveillance since 9/11. In the covert operation that took place in February 2003, Italians and Americans worked together to apprehend Nasr, before whisking him back to Egypt against his will and without the permission of an Italian court.

(Nice use of the word “whisking”, that. Next time I’m charged with kidnapping I’ll tell the police that I was just planning to whisk my victim from A to B.)

The conduct of the Italian courts is deeply wrong according to the WSJ:

bq. No one seriously claims, however, that the CIA agents were in Italy without the explicit knowledge and participation of Italy’s security services. This is the crucial point — and explains why the indictments are a hostile act against the U.S. By long-established international legal practice, the official agents of one country operating in another with that state’s permission are immune from prosecution. The status of forces agreement that governs U.S. troops stationed in Italy enshrines this principle at least for official conduct.

We might pause to note the last five words of that paragraph and wonder whether the “whisking” constituted “official conduct”. It is also worth noting the slippage between “explicit knowledge and participation of Italy’s security services” and “operating … with that state’s permission”. Would the Wall Street Journal really contend that all and any acts (kidnappings? assassinations?) performed by foreign agents on US soil with the “knowledge and participation” of US government agencies (such as the CIA, or its operatives) should be taken to be acts carried out with the permission of the US government? Would they want to say that the perpetrators of such acts should be immune from prosecution in American courts? I rather doubt it.

I’m very sorry to see, via “the Virtual Stoa”:http://virtualstoa.net/2007/03/05/in-memoriam/ , that “Chris Lightfoot”:http://www.ex-parrot.com/~chris/wwwitter/ , blogger, coder and social entrepreneur “has died suddenly”:http://www.mysociety.org/2007/03/05/rip-chris-lightfoot-1978-to-2007/ . My own knowledge of Chris was limited to reading his blog, exchanging the odd email, and sometimes visiting the various projects he helped create (such as “Pledgebank”:http://www.pledgebank.com/ ). But I read enough to notice that he was one of the few really individual voices on the interwebs: quirky, stubborn, idiosyncratic and pretty determined about the things he cared about – such as government and commercial threats to privacy.

Erik Olin Wright’s manuscript-in-progress, Envisioning Real Utopias is on the web. Erik has been working on the Real Utopias Project for about 15 years, cajoling and encouraging left-ish social scientists to think daringly but rigorously about reform ideas that may not be practicable in the short term, but, if enacted, would forward an egalitarian agenda, and would be internally workable. (I’ve been mentioning it a lot recently, in case you hadn’t noticed). I asked Erik to provide a brief intro for your edification, which is below the fold. He’s keen to get (useful) comments at this stage, so please either email him. Or, if your comments concern chapters one, two, or three, comment here (I’ll put up another post for discussion of subsequent chapters next week). If you have the patience to wait till publication to read the whole thing, this paper nicely motivates, and summarises some of, the project.

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Two sensible pieces, one by the BBC’s peerless Mike Baker (can we have an education journalist like him in the US, please?) and another by Fiona Millar on school places lottery flap. A very peculiar piece at the BBC site reporting on research that, as far as I can tell from the report, has nothing to do with the lotteries. The researcher is quoted as saying that:

Our research suggests that lotteries of over-subscribed school places would produce the worst of both worlds – greater educational polarisation and longer, more environmentally damaging car journeys to distant schools by middle-class parents. She said it was interesting that Labour-controlled Brighton was proposing it on the grounds of fairness and equality of opportunity, when this research suggested it might have exactly the opposite result.

I gather that this claim has gotten some play in the debate, so it’s worth refuting it. (As a bonus for my New Labour friends I include a criticism of David Willetts below the fold).

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38°13’36.38″N, 112°17’56.59″W.

_Update_: OK, sorry, so there are lots more of these.

Via “Gruber”:http://daringfireball.net/, comes a post about “The Boring Store”:http://www.methodsreporter.com/2007/02/27/826chi-boring-store-eggers/1/, which sells nothing of utility and definitely does NOT contain assorted spy equipment. Here’s a part of the awning:

“Brad DeLong”:http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2007/03/talking_past_ea.html on China and Jeff Faux:

In general, we have a choice between policies. We can eliminate or sharply restrict trade with an odious regime–as we do with Cuba–in the hope that it will put pressure on it for reform. We can encourage the maximum possible trade with an odious regime–as we do with China–in the hope that the more economic, cultural, and political contact there is the more we strengthen the forces over there that we like. Which of these policies we follow will have impacts on domestic income distribution–but much smaller impacts than do our educational, social insurance, and tax policies which do much, much more to move wealth and opportunity down or up the American income distribution. I tend to be on the side of free trade abroad and social democracy at home. But I am not sure that I am right. I am sure, however, that painting the issues as Davos plutocrats (and their water carriers) and commissars-turned-capitalists on one side and America’s working people on the other doesn’t move us forward at all.

I don’t agree with Brad that ‘painting the issues as Davos plutocrats … doesn’t move us forward at all.’ The consonance between mainstream political opinion on China and the interests of American businesses hungry for access to the Chinese market surely reflects in part the efforts of think tanks and politicians who depend on aforementioned businesses for funding and donations. But I do agree that there’s more to the story. The most interesting piece I’ve read on this recently is James Mann’s “long article”:http://www.prospect.org/web/page.ww?section=root&name=ViewPrint&articleId=12477 (behind paywall) in the current issue of _The American Prospect_. [click to continue…]

On Bloggginheads.tv, Virginia Postrel and Dan Drezner discuss organ markets, Virginia’s recent spat with Amitai Etzioni, and the importance of making clear that Kieran Healy Is Not A Libertarian. In the discussion, Virginia wonders what I think of Etzioni’s view. I have a post up over at OrgTheory about it.