Joshua Cooper Ramo’s got some great schtick his new book
I’m way out of my element here, but I’ve been trying for years to complete the analogy between the invention of cubism and what happened in jazz between Kind of Blue
My point here is simply this: much easier to pop in a CD and listen than it is to jet off to Philadelphia to stare at Duchamp.
On the political tension over water conservation:
Why should I save water when all it does is enable more sprawl?
Pietro Nivola at Brookings has a new discussion paper that provides, among other things, a useful discussion of where the American public is on climate change.
Superficial polling suggests relatively strong support, but when you probe deeper, the cracks show:
Majorities, in sum, dutifully nod at abstractions-for example, “doing more” to combat climate change. They may even appear to embrace the general labels of particular policy proposals (like “cap-and-trade”). And they say the Democrats can “handle” things better. But they jump ship as soon as they learn that “handling” (or “doing more” about) climate change is not a free ride. For environmental progressives, that reality cannot be ducked indefinitely. Their partisan rivals will make a potent case that adopting, say, a cap-and-trade program will effectively impose a tax increase.
This resonated for me after spending the day Friday talking to folks in Washington about what happened this past week in the U.S. Senate, with a series of votes that suggested enthusiasm for free climate lunches and not so much for action that might incur any costs.
Really, Really Giant Squid
I have a standing policy here at the Inkstain News Center against quoting anonymous sources, but this is too sweet to pass up:
My alligators tell me that Joe Monahan’s college nickname was “Squid”.
“Alligators” is NM politics blogger Monahan’s word for his anonymous sources, who tell him all kinds of important stuff, some of which is true. The alligators have propelled Monahan to worldwide fame. Just ask Monahan, who noted in a recent post that the importance of the alligators has been
noted by the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, Roll Call, Congressional Quarterly, the BBC, PBS NewsHour, the Santa Fe New Mexican, Santa Fe Reporter, Real Clear Politics, National Public Radio, NM Independent, the Alibi, KOB-TV, KRQE-TV, KASA-TV, KOB Radio, KSFR-FM Radio, C-SPAN, Voice of America and the Las Cruces Sun-News, among many others.
Wow! Good job, Joe, thanks for keeping track. And it clearly shows how prescient your college colleagues were in calling you squid, what with 300 species and all those arms and stuff. Squid rocks. (Squids rock?)
(I’d link to Monahan’s post with the list of media kudoing, but I can’t figure out how to get his permalinks to work, sorry. There’s obviously a reason my work has never been mentioned on Voice of America. I’m no squid.)
Money for nuclear weapons cleanup in the stimulus bill (adwalled):
The federal government will pump $384 million into New Mexico’s nuclear institutions to clean up and dispose of old Cold War waste in one of the largest economic stimulus investments in the state.
Los Alamos National Laboratory will get $212 million between now and 2011 to clean up radioactive waste on an old lab site next to the community of Los Alamos.
This is not an April fool’s joke.
Regular readers will have noticed that I’m a fan of David Zetland, the water economist. He has a great blog that is widely read in the water wonk community. Reading it has helped me a great deal in understanding some key economic principles that underly water issues I follow.
But there’s a problem. A guy like Zetland in the new media ecosystem appeals to a self-selected audience of people interested in the issues he’s raising, either because they agree, or disagree and want to argue, or are just trying to understand. But for his work to have the necessary reach to influence policy outcomes, Zetland’s ideas need to reach beyond the self-selected water wonk world. How to do this?
By infecting people like me with his ideas, or perhaps, my colleague Sean Olson, who wrote about water pricing in this morning’s newspaper:
The logic goes that people notice slight increases in their water bills, but it isn’t enough of a bother to change their watering habits. But when a bill three times the size of their last one shows up, they burn the hose and post a guard at the bathroom door. “If the price is high enough, people will pay attention,” water economist David Zetland said in a recent interview.
Sean pushes Zetland’s message beyond the people who would not self-select.
From today’s NYTimes article about the San Francisco Chronicle:
The Chronicle’s Web site, SFGate.com, draws an unusually large audience for a paper its size, three million to four million people monthly, according to Nielsen Online, but generates a fraction of the paper’s revenue.
If serving readers on the Internet is your measure, the Chronicle has been fabulously successful, and it’s going down the tubes. This is another example of the problem with the railroad metaphor. Far from making the mistake of thinking it was in the paper business rather than the news business, the Chron thought it was in the news business and used the Internet to do a bangup job of reaching readers that way.
Sat down with my favorite search engine’s news goober this evening to see what’s up with cap-and-trade, and I can report that the sweep of coverage had a certain consistent flavor. Some representative headlines: