“In the east coast, earthquakes are not nearly as common (that’s a good thing!) and usually are smaller. However, the crust in the eastern United States is markedly more efficient at propagating seismic waves than in the western United States (it’s older and colder). This means that for the same magnitude earthquake, the one in the eastern U.S. will be felt much more widely than one in California.”
— Here’s your explanation for why the entire Eastern seaboard felt what was, in relative terms, only a modestly powerful earthquake.
“Slaves were the principal form of wealth in the South — indeed in the nation as a whole. The market value of the four million slaves in 1860 was close to $3 billion — more than the value of land, of cotton, or of anything else in the slave states, and more than the amount of capital invested in manufacturing and railroads combined for the whole United States. Slave labor made it possible for the American South to grow three-quarters of the world’s marketed cotton, which in turn constituted more than half of all American exports in the antebellum era.”
— James McPherson, as quoted by Ta-Nehisi Coates. It’s often forgotten just how central slavery was to the economy of the United States before the Civil War, but it shouldn’t be. Slavery was hardly tangential to the conflict.
The bizarre decision to award the 2018 and 2022 World Cups to Russia and Qatar, respectively, is just the tip of the iceberg:
FIFA corruption matters… not because the integrity of the [Executive Committee] makes much difference to the average American or European fan, but because FIFA isn’t a closed system. Its decisions, however farcical in themselves, open the door for better or worse things to happen elsewhere. Old men fluttering about knighthoods in Asunción lead to exploitation and murder in South Africa. “Society is full of devils,” Blatter once said, “and these devils, you find them in football.” For all that they act like minor Dickens villains, FIFA executives are not sequestered in a novel; they impact the real world.
It puts in perspective the behavior of American sports teams. Showing a blind eye to drug use and extorting new stadiums from cities under threat of moving seem tame by comparison.
Some good news for once. Econobloggers appear to be unanimous (e.g., Tyler Cowen here and here, Dylan Matthews here) that these are good choices in terms of moving the Fed in a more proactive direction. I assume, given that Clarida is a Republican, that the Obama administration has a plan to get these selections approved in the Senate. We’ll see.
President Obama, during a speech Thursday in Holland, Mich., urged Congress to quickly pass a slew of bills on issues ranging from patent reform to trade deals. But one topic was conspicuously missing from his to-do list for lawmakers: energy legislation.
Obama instead touted steps his administration has taken without Congress, including the new vehicle-fuel economy standards announced in recent weeks.
As well he should. Although it would be much better to have comprehensive climate legislation, Obama deserves credit for pursuing climate policy through what avenues he can, most notably by regulating large emitters of greenhouse gases through the Clean Air Act.
Still, it’s worth remembering how this was originally supposed to go. Back in 2009, the Democrats controlled the presidency and the House of Representatives, as well as had a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate. Despite that, climate legislation was far from a shoo-in for passage, due to the presence of Democratic Senators from Rust Belt states or states with large fossil fuel reserves. While both the Waxman-Markey bill and what became the Kerry-Lieberman bill went out of their way to provide compensation to both fossil fuel producers and the industrial sector for putting a price on carbon emissions, they were both backed up with an implicit threat from the Obama administration: Pass some kind of bill regulating carbon emissions, or else the EPA will do it for you, and it’ll be on much less generous terms.
Rather than spurring legislators to act, however, the threat of EPA regulation itself became a target, with both Republicans and conservative Democrats offering bills and joining lawsuits to bar the EPA from regulating greenhouse gases. Meanwhile, negotiations over climate legislation fell apart, as Ryan Lizza chronicled last October. Now the Obama administration is moving full steam ahead on EPA regulation and other executive actions to promote clean energy, while trying to stave off Republican efforts to stop it. A resolution to this standoff likely won’t come until 2013 at the earliest: Either President Romney (or Perry) comes in and puts the EPA in a deep freeze, or a reelected President Obama tries to regather support for energy and climate legislation.
Now, why is this the case? To be sure, it’s but one facet of the GOP’s strategy of blocking anything and everything the President wants to do, even if many Republicans (e.g., Fred Upton) once supported taking action on climate change. The filibuster also had a hand in this: A Senate with simple majority rule would have passed Waxman-Markey or something like it fairly easily in 2009. But it ought to be disturbing that, instead of reaching consensus of some kind on something as incredibly important as climate change, the two elected branches of government are pulling apart from each other. One expects some butting of heads in a presidential system like ours — particularly under divided control — but gridlock that doesn’t yield satisfying results is, I think, corrosive to trust in our political institutions. I’m reminded of Bruce Ackerman’s description of the pathologies to which presidentialism can succumb:
Rather than all out war, president and house may merely indulge a taste for endless backbiting, mutual recrimination, and partisan deadlock. Worse yet, the contending powers may use the constitutional tools at their disposal to make life miserable for each other: the house will harass the executive, and the president will engage in unilateral action whenever he can get away with it. I call this scenario the “crisis in governability.”
He notes that mail volume at the Postal Sevice has fallen 20% in the last four years, one of many factors putting it in financial jeopardy:
This is a big historic, cultural shift. But it does make me wonder how viable the USPS as we now know it will be in the coming years. Big systems like a postal system can only survive with massive economies of scale. Without the bills and bulk mail and everything else keeping the whole system moving, sending your tiny little letter probably couldn’t be remotely cost-efficient.
Indeed, outside of parcel shipping, which has a good deal of private competition, there doesn’t seem to be much of a future for mail as we have traditionally known it. So what will be the purpose of the Postal Service, a constitutionally mandated organization, in the years ahead?
This is neither an original nor terribly practical idea, but I’ve always liked the idea of the Postal Service becoming the vehicle for universal broadband in this country. Post Offices could become Internet cafés and provide tech-related services, such as teaching computer literacy and how to protect yourself online. Of course, the history of having bureaucracies change from doing one thing to something else entirely is pretty awful. But an Internet-focused USPS would be in keeping with the spirit of the Constitution’s support for communications networks, which in the 18th century meant post roads, and in the 21st century means computer networks. Alternatively, there’s Michael Ravnitsky’s proposal to add data collection on pollution, cellular dead zones, and other things to the Postal Service’s mission as an additional revenue stream.
