Fearlessly post what you want. Self-linking is more than welcome.
- A Smart Analysis Of The Sad Case of Baby Joseph
- DC Comics closes comments on its blog due to vicious flame war. The subject under dispute? Superman or Flash, who’s faster.
- If climate scientists are in it for the money, they’re doing it wrong
- Due to a disease-altered brain, a woman is literally fearless. See also.
- The Volokh Conspiracy » What if Liberals and Libertarians Agreed on Empirical Questions?
- Now that we have bulletproof cockpits, do airplanes really require all that extra security?
- Cup o’ Joel asks: Do I vote for the party that favors an imperial presidency, or do I favor the party that favors an imperial presidency with somewhat less torture?
- Wonder Woman’s costume from the forthcoming David Kelly TV show (no, really). Annotated. (I agree with Maciej’s take here.) The word I’ve most often seen used describing the costume is “cheap.” That can’t be good.
- New climate study, stacked with climate skeptics, finds that global warming is real.
- “The key policy points (I think) are that if rich countries want to help we should permit more immigration from poor countries, stop trying to impose destructive intellectual property rules on poor countries, stop offering military assistance to repressive regimes, and bolster morale about the fact that foreign aid has been successful at promoting public health in the past and can continue to make even more progress in the future.”
- There’s Nothing Easy About War – The Libya Version
- Pratchett and Gaiman’s Good Omens to be made into a TV show. But it’s a BBC show, so it might be good.
- U.S. National Academy of Sciences labels as “settled facts” that “the Earth system is warming and that much of this warming is very likely due to human activities” I guess the N.A.S. is part of the Evil Climate Conspiracy.
- Painting a Target on Fat Kids
- The Plan To Stop Using Carbon-based Energy In Australia
- Box Turtle Bulletin on “fag,” “faggot,” “queer,” “gay” and “homosexual”
- Glenn Greenwald says this video of an ex-CIA man discussing foreign policy is a “Three-minute Cliffs Notes of U.S. foreign policy.“
- “I see no particular reason to think that Libya will have any impact on malaria funding, but I do think the level of malaria funding is impacted over the long term by the existence of a substantial number of people who seem to advocate for humanitarian goals in Africa if and only if those goals can be advanced through the use of military force to kill other Africans.”
- The six military options in Libya, boiled down to a two-minute read.
- More Questions on Libya; And Even Fewer Answers
- Scocca : Would a No-Fly Zone Over America Save the Democracy Movement in Bahrain?
- Is DOMA now a wedge issue that hurts Republicans?
- After Cleveland, Texas: Eight Ways Black Men Can Fight Rape – COLORLINES
- This person must be the world’s biggest fan of my blogging.
- The most interesting map of China’s provinces (by population) I’ve seen:
I will respond to the most important of these critical posts in the world of blogging.
1. Obviously the Flash is faster than Superman on land. In other contexts, Superman is faster. I gather that there are other opinions. Those opinions are wrong and their adherents should quietly leave the room.
2. I rather like the new costume. I think the casting decision was very poor, however, on the basis of physique. (I don’t know anything about the actress’ technical ability so maybe she’s a fantastic fit there.) I don’t mean to run down Ms. Palicki in any way; while she isn’t my type, she is a very attractive woman of the super-thin variety. But Wonder Woman isn’t super thin; Wonder Woman is muscular and if not stocky, at least solid. Linda Carter was on the thin side for the role; Ms. Palicki is a twig. The illo at your link of the cover of WW#1 is about right, at least in terms of upper body. It has the stereotypical too-small waist, of course. But look at those guns!
What a shame that the comments at BTB seem to be degenerating into a bunch of relatively privileged men 1) finding every opportunity to use the N-word to show how “brave” they are, and 2) shouting down people of other genders who made the point that the piece was extremely male-centric.
I have to admit, I almost never read comments sections (I read via an RSS feed), but that is a shame. And you’re right, it was male-centric.
@Robert: I agree on WW – she needs some muscle! It would be a nice way to “introduce” another female body type back into the media psyche as well. I’m not really liking the costume, either, but plenty of people have weighed in on that one already. General consensus seems to be it looks like a cheap Halloween costume because of the colors/material. Also, they’re going to need a lot of tape for her…superpowers…to stay decent for prime time.
Flash vs. Superman for fastest man took down the DC blog? That’s…just…awesome! I love it. Epic levels of geek/nerd-dom for fictional characters makes me happy. :)
On a slightly related note, here’s a link to a DC fan comic that’s rather cute (via The Cupcake Rogues, another great site): Batman and Sons
This is interesting: Of OECD nations, the US has the most progressive income tax system.
That is interesting, and it might even be true. But I’d like to see more detail. Is the income tax in these other countries relatively higher, lower, or about the same as the US, as a percentage of all government revenue? Are other taxes, like property taxes, more or less progressive? Etc.. I’m not sure a one-to-one comparison of income taxes, absent all that other stuff, is as meaningful as it looks at first glance.
That said, I’d happily accept a flatter tax system if it were combined with far more generous social support programs of the type that (say) Denmark has.
So can liberals and libertarians agree on Wonder Woman’s new costume? Is there an empirical judgment to be made there? Surely we can find common utilitarian measurements of the suffering it must cause.
Is top 10% the right % to use? Seems like those averages really tend to change drastically near the margins. It might be that the top 10% pay the most in the U.S. but that the top 5% (or 1%) are vastly undercharged. And what definition do they use for things like “income,” or for that matter, “taxes?” Again: the devil is in the details. Do you exclude corporate income, for example? If you’re reporting those generic numbers from other countries just for a blog post, did you actually do all the legwork to match and correct for the different definitions and treatment of “income” across all of those countries?
I’ll certainly concede it might be true, but I confess it doesn’t really ring true.
Now I’m laughing, and sad about Phil Hartman.
I like this Alex Ross painting of Wonder Woman. The costume could be better — I actually like the idea of pants, just not shiny cheap-looking pants — but that aside, the attitude is right.
(not Amp, despite the icon)
The data Robert links to is more readable in the chart Carl Smith made (hat tip to Kevin Drum for the link). That chart doesn’t show that the US has the most progressive tax system of the OECD states. It shows that if a country has a progressive income tax, then the more income inequality there is, the more of its tax revenue will come from the upper tax brackets, and the slope of that relationship will be greater than one. If the top 10% hold more income, they hold more income in the top tax bracket, so they pay more income tax relative to their share of income. That, by itself, is sufficient to produce these results.
Of course, ignoring the rest of the tax and transfer system means that we can’t draw any conclusions of any general interest from this chart. A flat tax plus a guaranteed income of $20 k a year is the same as a system with a flat tax and a tax credit of $20 k a year, but they would look completely different on this chart. The French wealth tax doesn’t show up on this chart. Universal health coverage doesn’t show up on this chart. US state and local taxes (which we all know are regressive on average, right?) don’t show up here.
The one interesting feature of the chart is the strong linear relationship in the chart between share of income and share of taxes. If this were caused by the specific features of each tax system, it would mean that there was an astonishingly strong correlation between progressivity of tax systems and income inequality, a truly bizarre idea. What that strongly linear relationship does seem to suggest is that, ignoring the fact that income tax is only a small part of the system of transfers from citizens to the government and from the government to citizens, the income tax systems of almost all the OECD countries (except Poland, Italy and South Korea) are very similar in their effective progressivity for this particular metric (the slope of the line for a particular tax system is roughly linear in my experiments with a spreadsheet).
Poland and Italy are the real outliers here, suggesting that their income tax systems are much less progressive than anyone else’s in some way, although it isn’t obvious what causes that, looking at the tax rate info at the worlkdwide-tax info site.
I think there’s one conclusion of general interest we can draw. The area of the tax system that draws much of the public attention is the income tax system. Public attention largely, though not entirely, demands progressivity. I think the chart demonstrates that the US political system is more responsive than others to demands for progressivity.
Robert, how can you conclude that?
First of all, as Charles pointed out, we can’t even determine if the US’s tax rules are any more progressive from this data, even if we limit ourselves to only considering the Federal income tax.
Second, there’s no basis for assuming that the income tax system is the area that gets the most attention everywhere.
Conclude is too strong a word.
Apropos of nothing political, but the Hartman earlier in the thread reminded me of one of my favorite Hartman SNL bits ever, Robot Repair.
(again, not Amp despite the icon)
Robert,
Consider 2 scenarios:
The current US tax system, with greater income inequality. The rich make more money in the top tax bracket, so the point on that graph is higher up and further to the right. Can we therefore conclude that the income tax system is more progressive? No.
The current US tax system with a 90% tax bracket on income above $1 million, with basically no one getting a salary above $1 million. This puts less money into the current top tax bracket, so the resulting point is not further to the right. Can we therefore conclude that the income tax system is no more progressive than the current tax system? No.
So position on that chart doesn’t tell us anything about how progressive a tax system is.
I take your points. Stupid logic, messing up a perfectly good visual sound bite.
Here’s one that I bet holds up better, on another topic:
Death rates per TWh produced, by energy type
As a commenter on my FB page noted, this doesn’t even take into account the deaths projected from AGW resulting from coal and oil.
I don’t have much disagreement with that one (although focusing on rooftop solar over large solar facilities is dodgy, rooftop solar is dangerous because rooftops are dangerous), although it does a bad job of accounting for something fairly critical: people don’t like huge long-tail risks, they care a lot more about 300 people dieing in a plane crash (happens rarely) or 3000 people dieing in a terrorist attack (happens basically never, once we exclude the outlier :p ) than they do about 1 or 2 people dieing in a car crash (happens multiple times every day), and someone dieing because they fell off a roof, no one but their friends know or care. Nuclear power plant deaths are like terrorist attacks, coal plants are like car crashes, rooftop solar deaths are literally people falling off of roofs because roofs are dangerous and they didn’t follow proper safety procedures.
Also, the nuclear number is arguable low by a factor of 10-50 (4000 deaths from Chernobyl, putting nuclear more in line with hydro.
I suspect they didn’t talk big-plant solar because there aren’t data points yet.
Well, I’ll accept that there haven’t been enough data points long enough to have much confidence in a deaths per TWh number, but there are certainly utility scale solar plants (both photovoltaic arrays and solar trough style). Of course, I suspect the same is true for rooftop solar, particularly given the lifespan of rooftop solar plants and the rate of growth of rooftop solar, numbers right now are probably going to be heavily skewed since most deaths are going to be installation related rather than operation related.
Anyway, yes, coal bad.
MRA alert!
I can’t tell if the post that Scott Adams (of Dilbert fame) is just poorly worded or if it’s as bad as everyone is taking it. He deleted it, but the internet has a wicked memory
I think you can take it either way; he’s not a professional essay writer and doesn’t make his points very effectively. However, when you compare women to handicapped people and children…well, you didn’t do your research before you wrote this, did you? Even a basic 101 knowledge of oppression would tell you THIS. IS. A. BAD. IDEA.
All I can say is that I hope he learns from the backlash.
@23: Nevermind. Scott Adams wrote back to Feministe (his comment at 24). He’s not learning shit.
Not only is he not learning shit, it seems that all criticism of him is invalid.
Dilbert gets added to my list of things that I enjoy but will not put my money towards.
New archaeological finds overturn short-chronology for N. American settlement:
http://www.latimes.com/news/science/la-sci-first-americans-20110326,0,7839145.story
Wonder Woman cries uncle, gets new threads.
So…sweatpants and an even lower bust line?
Canadian reference case considers legalizing polygamy:
http://www.vancouversun.com/life/LANDMARK+POLYGAMY+RULING+AWAITED/3860926/story.html
Wow, submit button went epileptic on me. Feel free to delete a couple of those :)
[Done! –Amp]
Hm. Robert, the article – and you, following – cite that the issue in the case is polygamy. But the picture shown is one of polyandry.
RonF,
Go look up polygamy in a dictionary. It doesn’t mean what you think it means. The word you are confusing it with is polygyny.
Charles,
RonF hasn’t researched the matter, but…
Whoops! You got me. Sorry!
Now that Scott Walker has stuck it to the unions, the people of Wisconsin don’t need to worry about overpaid, under-qualified public sector employees anymore. Boo-YAH!
Seriously. I’m not even surprised at the egregious shit conservatives pull any more.
—Myca
As a criticism of Gov. Walker I’ll back you up, Myca. As a criticism of conservatives in general, though, it’s invalid. Illinois is downright infested and dominated by the left at all levels of government and stories like this pop up in the papers constantly. Why would you parse this as a conservative vs. liberal issue?