Obsidian Wings

your broken sidebar Friday open thread

by liberal japonicus

Not really sure what is up with the sidebar, it doesn't show up with the normal blog, but when you open an individual post, it does. Since I'm thinking of trying to do some renovation on the blog during the holidays, I might start with that. If there is anything else that you'd like, scriven it here and if you know of any pitfalls with typepad, feel free to share your experience.

Worthy of Their Hire

by Doctor Science

Why can't self-proclaimed capitalist, free-market businesspeople recognize the law of supply and demand? In particular, if you can't find appropriately-skilled employees when you offer salary $S, Adam Smith says you should try offering $S+n. If that doesn't work, you offer $S+2n. The cost of labor isn't something the employer decides ahead of time, it's determined by the free-market value of the labor needed to do the job.

But per links from Anne Laurie at Balloon Juice and her commenters, many employers seem to think that if they can't find employees willing to do a job at a particular wage, it *must* be because there's a lack of appropriately-skilled workers. (I've talked about this before, with regard to farm labor specifically.)

What are they teaching them in business school? And what are they teaching them in the pages of the Wall Street Journal and other sources of continuing business education?

Rembrandt, The Parable of the Workers in the Vineyard. 1637.

Agreement on Black Friday? This cannot stand!

by liberal japonicus

We found an area of common ground here with the question of Black Friday and obviously, we can't have that. 

My alternate take on Black Friday is that it is like my students who think they can learn the material covered in a semester (or more!) of English by spending the last day or two studying. They can't, because almost all the classes I teach are skill based, and it would just be like the guy training for a marathon waiting until the week before to start hitting the road. 

I think one can contrast Black Friday with Japan's approach to consumption, which seems to be a seamless, year-round effort. Sure, there are spikes (the periods after workers get twice yearly bonuses, year end and mid year present giving (oseibo and ochuugen) and a number of other events), but it is not all or nothing. Also to be noted is the custom of giving omiyage. It is the constant buying, giving, consuming, and having to do it all over again that seems to have saved the Japanese economy, or at least kept it with a faint pulse, when similar conditions in other countries have ended up in social unrest. This isn't to say that there are not serious problems here, but this discussion between Paul Krugman and Martin Wolfe probably sums it up

The conversation turns to the Japanese crisis of the 1990s. In retrospect, I suggest, the Japanese seem to have managed the aftermath of their crisis quite well.

He agrees. “What we thought was that Japan was a cautionary tale. It has turned into Japan as almost a role model. They never had as big a slump as we have had. They managed to have growing per capita income through most of what we call their ‘lost decade’. My running joke is that the group of us who were worried about Japan a dozen years ago ought to go to Tokyo and apologise to the emperor. We’ve done worse than they ever did. When people ask: might we become Japan? I say: I wish we could become Japan.”

Krugman expands on that a bit here. And while I guess he's thinking about employment policies, I have to think that the consumption ethos makes a difference as well. In the US, everyone wants everyone else to cut corners and run a lean operation. This, via LGM, is an example of how everyone is supposed to cut every bit of fat out of the operation. However, this doesn't apply on Black Friday, which is like some dionysian festival where you get to do all the things you aren't supposed to do during the rest of the year. 

At least, that's what Black Friday looks like from here. Sure, it's disgusting and embarassing, but it's that way because it concentrates it all into a day of shopping. People would be a lot better off if it were distributed throughout the year.

Thanksgiving + Black Friday open thread

by liberal japonicus

Black Friday has really grown, it seems, since I left the US, but attaching it to the end of Thanksgiving? That seems a bit much. Thoughts?

Finally! A good thing to come out of Romney's candidacy

by liberal japonicus

Every cloud has a silver lining. From a Dem point of view, having Romney as a candidate may have been all silver lining, but it is hard to imagine the tiniest glimmer from the Republican side, as this Amy Davidson New Yorker piece makes perfectly clear. Of course, if you are a heighten the contradictions kind of person, you might argue that Romney's candidacy was the best thing to happen to the US since Watergate. Or Vietnam. Or maybe even the Civil War. (in fact, if you look at things that way, US history tends to be full of silver linings)

But I'm not one of those folks, so for the nation, I think this is great

One of the quirkiest rituals of the presidential election—the straw poll of Republican voters in Ames, Iowa—is obsolete and should be eliminated, Iowa's GOP governor says.

"I think the straw poll has outlived its usefulness," Gov. Terry Branstad said in an interview about the political jamboree. "It has been a great fundraiser for the party, but I think its days are over."

While everyone has concentrated on the ideas that the Republicans need to change or revise, all that talk is about the basic principles, and functionalist that I am, if the structure of how they select a candidate doesn't change, I don't see those basic principles changing that much. It also seems the if progressives want more of a voice, they are going to have to argue for similar changes as well, though after Obama's victory, it's would be the Republicans that will do the heavy lifting for changing any system. I'm wondering what everyone thinks should be done to change the way we nominate a candidate and how it would actually happen. The wikipedia article gives a dizzying array of proposals, but how these go from drawing board to implementation, I have no idea.

Is it merely because of considerations of efficiency and state law that (most?) Repub and Dem primaries are on the same day? I'm thinking that, absent that, and given the Republican predilictions, I wouldn't be surprised if they would change their system to a regional one, and have the first region be all the states of the former Confederacy...

I'm sure many of you saw this, but I am reminded of the  Iowa Nice video  and I have put it (censored version, slightly NSFW) below the fold.

The curious incident of the presidential campaign in the night-time

by Doctor Science

The 2012 Presidential campaign can be explained with a single image:

Created by me at 270 To Win.

Huh? you say: that looks almost exactly like the final result:

From The New York Times' election coverage.

Yes. And yet, that first map is based on predictions made by David Rothschild and Chris Wilson at Yahoo's The Signal blog, in February.

your gender confusion open thread

via liberal japonicus

Sound interesting? Well, it's below the fold.

Zizek on Obama

via liberal japonicus

I think some folks here might be familiar with Slavoj Žižek, though his name appears a lot more at Crooked Timber (I don't think I've ever seen his name here). This Guardian profile gives as an enjoyable look at the man, but if you don't click on it, you can get a taste from the title, which is a quote from him: 'Humanity is OK, but 99% of people are boring idiots'.

So if you are familiar with his writings, his opinion piece in the Guardian on Obama, entitled "Why Obama is more than Bush with a human face" may be of interest. It certainly surprised me a bit. An arresting image:

In Europe, the ground floor of a building is counted as zero, so the floor above it is the first floor, while in the US, the first floor is on street level. This trivial difference indicates a profound ideological gap: Europeans are aware that, before counting starts – before decisions or choices are made – there has to be a ground of tradition, a zero level that is always already given and, as such, cannot be counted. While the US, a land with no proper historical tradition, presumes that one can begin directly with self-legislated freedom – the past is erased. What the US has to learn to take into account is the foundation of the "freedom to choose".

Anyway, thought it might raise some discussion. Have at it, folks.

Curiouser and curiouser

by liberal japonicus

This, from Jane Mayer at the New Yorker, is pretty fascinating

Both the New York Times and the Washington Post report that the F.B.I. had found, after months of investigation, that neither retired General David Petraeus, now the former director of the C.I.A., nor the woman with whom he was evidently involved, his biographer Paula Broadwell, had broken any laws. Congressional intelligence officials reportedly want to know why they were not informed earlier that the F.B.I. was investigating Petraeus. But what I am wondering is why, if the F.B.I. had indeed concluded that they had no criminal case, this matter was brought to anyone’s attention at all.

and

But according to the Times, at the end of October, a week or so after the F.B.I. investigators confronted Petraeus, an unidentified F.B.I. employee took the matter into his own hands. Evidently without authorization, he went to the Republicans in Congress. First he informed a Republican congressman, Dave Reichert of Washington state. According to the Times, Reichert advised this F.B.I. employee to go to the Republican leadership in the House. The F.B.I. employee then told what he knew about the investigation to Eric Cantor, the House Majority Leader. Cantor released a statement to the Times confirming that he had spoken to the F.B.I. informant, whom his staff described as a “whistleblower.” Cantor said, “I was contacted by an F.B.I. employee who was concerned that sensitive, classified information might have been compromised.” But what, exactly, was this F.B.I. employee trying to expose? Was he blowing the whistle on his bosses? If so, why? Was he dissatisfied with their apparent exoneration of Petraeus? Given that this drama was playing out in the final days of a very heated Presidential campaign, and he was taking a potentially scandalous story to the Republican leadership in Congress, was there a political motive?

According to the Times, Cantor said he took the information, and “made certain that director Mueller”—that is Robert Mueller III, the director of the F.B.I.—“was aware of these serious allegations, and the potential risk to our national security.” This is a strange way to explain his contact with the F.B.I. on this matter, because it is almost inconceivable that director Mueller was not already aware that the bureau he runs had examined the e-mail account of the director of the C.I.A., and, further, confronted him in person. Such a meeting between the bureau and head of the C.I.A. would have been extraordinary, and it is fairly unthinkable that Mueller wouldn’t have been consulted. So what information was Cantor conveying when he got in touch with Mueller?

Greenwald is explaining why this is evidence that we defer to the military too much, which may be true, but it seems like the bigger story is lying beneath the surface on this.

 

the 11th of November

by russell

Today is Veterans Day, when we remember everyone who has served in the US armed forces.  It's distinct from Memorial Day, when we remember everyone killed while in service; on Veterans Day we remember the living, as well as the dead.

Veterans Day began, way back when, as an observance of the end of WWI.  President Wilson observed it in 1919, then Coolidge did so again, in 1926, at the request of Congress.  Later, in 1938, a Congressional Act was passed making it a perpetual nation holiday:

a day to be dedicated to the cause of world peace and to be thereafter celebrated and known as 'Armistice Day'.

In 1954, after it had become all too painfully obvious that WWI was not, in fact, the war to end all wars, the holiday was expanded to honor servicepeople and veterans of all US wars

And that brings us to today.

We've been in Afghanistan for over eleven years now, and Iraq almost ten.  The scope of our involvement in both places has scaled down, thankfully, but still, today, there are Americans in both places, in harm's way.  Unlike in either WWI, or WWII, or the Korean War, or Vietnam, both Afghanistan and Iraq have been conducted by a purely volunteer military - we no longer have a draft, or any requirement for universal or even broad-based participation in military service, or any other form of public service.  As a result, the burden of our involvement in those two wars has fallen, disporportionately, on a fairly small sector of the population.

War chews people up.  It damages them, sometimes forever.  Physically, psychologically, morally, spiritually, emotionally.  The sophistication of our modern war-making technology means that many more of our people survive, but in many cases that comes at a cost of extreme, life-changing traumatic head damage.  Even for folks who return physically whole, the process of finding their way back into normal, everyday life is fraught with difficulties including traumatic psychic damage, substance abuse, family problems, or even simply finding a job.

Somewhere between one in four and one in three homeless people are veterans.  The rate of suicide among active personnel now approaches one a day.  There are a lot of folks who are simply being crushed by the consequences of their service over the last 12 years.

It's common to refer to folks who are serving or have served in Afghanistan and Iraq as 'heroes'.  I have no issue with that on its face, there is certainly a heroic aspect to putting yourself in harm's way in service to your country.  But I often think we use that term to distance ourselves from the reality of what those folks live with, day to day.  It's as if they are some other category of person, and their problems and difficulties are just part of what they have taken on by stepping into the role of 'hero'.

What I think we forget is that we - all of us, each and every one of us, regardless of what our positions on either Afghanistan or Iraq are or were - own some responsibility for what happens to these people, because they went in our name.  

On this Veterans Day, I would like to ask everyone reading this to try to find some way to help the folks who are serving, and have served, the country, at our demand, and in our name.  Nearly every community in the country has some organization or other doing the good, necessary, and hard work of helping these folks find their way back into civilian life.  There's something all of us can do.

We owe it to those who have served.