Speaking at OSCON 2011
My Benchmarking talk has been accepted for OSCON 2011. Looking forward to updating it for the occasion. Woohoo!
Is Sugar Toxic?
If Lustig is right, then our excessive consumption of sugar is the primary reason that the numbers of obese and diabetic Americans have skyrocketed in the past 30 years. But his argument implies more than that. If Lustig is right, it would mean that sugar is also the likely dietary cause of several other chronic ailments widely considered to be diseases of Western lifestyles -- heart disease, hypertension and many common cancers among them.
via Is Sugar Toxic? - NYTimes.com.
UPDATE (same day): a good followup: http://justoneminute.typepad.com/main/2011/04/now-sugar-causes-cancer.html
The Cuts Are A Lie
Instead, the cuts that actually will make it into law are far tamer, including [...] $2.5 billion from the most recent renewal of highway programs that canât be spent because of restrictions set by other legislation. Another $3.5 billion comes from unused spending authority from a program providing health care to children of lower-income families.
â¦.The spending measure reaps $350 million by cutting a one-year program enacted in 2009 for dairy farmers then suffering from low milk prices. Another $650 million comes by not repeating a one-time infusion into highway programs passed that same year. And just last Friday, Congress approved Obamaâs $1 billion request for high-speed rail grants -- crediting themselves with $1.5 billion in savings relative to last year.
About $10 billion of the cuts comes from targeting appropriations accounts previously used by lawmakers for so-called earmarksâ¦.Republicans had already engineered a ban on earmarks when taking back the House this year.
Republicans also claimed $5 billion in savings by capping payments from a fund awarding compensation to crime victims. Under an arcane bookkeeping rule -- used for years by appropriators -- placing a cap on spending from the Justice Department crime victims fund allows lawmakers to claim the entire contents of the fund as budget savings. The savings are awarded year after year.
via Ahem, a lot of the spending cuts are frauds -- Marginal Revolution.
Egypt Goes Full Circle: Back to Imprisoning Bloggers
An Egyptian military tribunal just found guilty the 26-year-old Maikel Nabil Sanad. What is his alleged crime? Insulting the army. How did he do it? Reported about misbehavior by the army. What is his sentence? Three years in prison.
via Rubin Reports » Egypt Goes Full Circle: Back to Imprisoning Bloggers.
How Many Regressions Did You Run?
One of the very few XKCD comics that I think is actually funny, not merely juvenile. Via http://cafehayek.com/2011/04/the-con-in-econometrics-made-visible.html.
Think of this next time anyone tells you they found a correlation on anything, *especially* in economic reporting.
Our Suicidal Government
... government has promised more than it can realistically deliver and, as a result, repeatedly disappoints by providing less than people expect or jeopardizing what they already have. But government canât easily correct its excesses, because Americans depend on it for so much that any effort to change the status arouses a firestorm of opposition that virtually ensures defeat. Governmentâs very expansion has brought it into disrepute, paralyzed politics and impeded it from acting in the national interest.
A Thousand Dollars per Pound, Delivered to Orbit
Reaching Earth orbit and only spending a thousand dollars per pound to get your spacecraft there--it's long been the shining goal of the launch business. Tuesday, Elon Musk, the founder of Space Exploration Technologies (SpaceX), made an announcement promising a new launch beast that could reach that mark in a couple of years--and shake up the space industry. He unveiled a new launch vehicle dubbed "Falcon Heavy." It's a derivative of SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket, which successfully delivered a pressurized capsule into orbit in December after a successful first flight last summer. But Musk says the Heavy will be able to blast five times as much payload into orbit.
via SpaceX Falcon Heavy Rocket - Private Space Technology - Popular Mechanics.
If you worry about government cutting too much …
Thereâs a $1.6 trillion deficit but the feds are still hiring. As of March 23 they were hiring someone to run a Facebook page for the Deparment of the Interior (at up to $115,000 a year). They were hiring equal opportunity compliance officers at the Peace Corps and Department of Interior for $150,000 to $180,000 a pop. They were hiring deputy speechwriters for officials at relatively obscure agencies. â¦P.S.: The point isnât so much that these federal employees are overpaid, though they are. The point is that if there were any actual sense of a deficit crisis in Washington these are jobs that would not be filled at all.
Do We Really Need to Raise Taxes to Close the Deficit?
Much as I hate to say it, probably so:
If the GOP really believes that they can get to anything close to a sustainable budget without raising taxes at least a little bit, then they are spending too much time reading their own press releases, and far too little time talking to voters outside of their tea party base.  I think it's probably possible to do more, on balance, with spending cuts than with tax hikes--but not all. Mathematically, it's certainly possible--but politically, it isn't.
via Do We Really Need to Raise Taxes to Close the Deficit? - Megan McArdle - Business - The Atlantic. See also my take on it from last year: http://paul-m-jones.com/archives/1354.
Environmentalist George Monbiot: Anti-Nuclear Movement Has Lied To Us All
Over the last fortnight I've made a deeply troubling discovery. The anti-nuclear movement to which I once belonged has misled the world about the impacts of radiation on human health. The claims we have made are ungrounded in science, unsupportable when challenged, and wildly wrong. We have done other people, and ourselves, a terrible disservice.