The Daily Parker

Politics, Weather, Photography, and the Dog

Health care reform, simply put

Leave it to Krugman:

The essence is really quite simple: regulation of insurers, so that they can't cherry-pick only the healthy, and subsidies, so that all Americans can afford insurance.

...[W]hat it means for the individual will be that insurers can’t reject you, and if your income is relatively low, the government will help pay your premiums.

That's it. Any commentator who whines that he just doesn't understand it is basically saying that he doesn’t want to understand it.

The article he's reacting to is also worth reading.

What would $20 gas look like?

The Freakonomics blog interviews author Christopher Steiner about his book $20 Per Gallon:

[At $8 per gallon, predicted in 2019,] our restaurant world won't be terribly different from what we’re used to now. We'll always have Chinese food — or at least the Americanized version of it (batter it, fry it, smother it in sweet and tangy sauce). The tricky part of the question concerns foods like sushi. When gas is $8 per gallon, sushi will still be hanging around. Things get interesting, however, at $18 per gallon.

By the time gas has reached $18 [predicted in 2029-2039], most people will live in places where density dictates that schools be grouped closer together, putting them within an easy walk or a brief bike ride.

Q: What are some things you suggest people enjoy now before they’re gone?

A: Eat sushi. Drive the trans-Canadian highway (in summer). Go to Australia. Go see Tokyo and take notes — life will be more like that and less like, say, Omaha, in the future.

I wish I had time to read this book. Maybe if I get all my Duke reading done before next week. As if.

Let's raise our glasses one last time

I'm going to be in London two weeks from now, so it saddened me to hear this on NPR's Morning Edition today:

The British Beer and Pub Association says an average of 52 pubs are closing each week. Changing consumer tastes, a two-year-old smoking ban and the deepening economic recession have hit pubs hard. But for thousands, the death blow has been dealt by rising government taxes on beer — up to 20 percent in the past two years. The traditional pint glass of beer now runs about $6, meaning few working-class Brits can afford that other British tradition: buying your friends a round.

Prime Minister Gordon Brown has refused to reconsider further increases in the tax on beer. Industry leaders say that means thousands more pubs will close their doors.

...

"There is no alternative to the pub," [Fuller's Brewery's chairman Michael Turner] says. "It is the center of the community. And all the social interaction that goes with a pub is likely to be lost when the pub goes. I mean, you can go from three pubs to two pubs in a community, but when you lose the last pub — that's it."

Very sad.

Stupid lawyer tricks

When Chicago-based Horizon Realty sued a former tenant for defamation because of a Twitter tweet, did anyone tell them how badly this could go for them? Seriously, that's some atrocious lawyering:

"Who said sleeping in a moldy apartment was bad for you? Horizon realty thinks it's okay," Amanda Bonnen apparently wrote in her Twitter feed May 12 at 9:08 a.m.

Horizon Group Management, which leased Bonnen's Uptown apartment, wasn't pleased.

Last week the company filed suit against Bonnen in Cook County Circuit Court, claiming Bonnen "maliciously and wrongfully published the false and defamatory Tweet."

...

Regardless of the legal merits of the case, Horizon is "inviting a PR nightmare" and drawing scrutiny well beyond the 17 followers Bonnen's Twitter feed had before it was closed, said Sam Bayard, assistant director of the Citizen Media Law Project.

(Emphasis mine.)

OK, I think we can draw two important lessons from this:

First, Twitter feeds are public, and anything you tweet (or post on Facebook or on a blog or...you get it) is most likely "publishing" for the purposes of libel and defamation law. Further, if you actually libel or defame someone on a public website, you may be exposing yourself to suit not only where you live and where they live, but in any jurisdiction with a long-arm statute where people can access the Internet. (Lawyers: New York State is one, right?)

Worse, not every jurisdiction in the world follows the U.S. rule that it's up to the person claiming libel to prove both malice and dishonesty. In the U.K., for instance, because they have a "loser-pays" system, it puts the burden of showing that the alleged libel was actually true on the defendant. I commend to your attention the destruction of Oscar Wilde, who lost his libel suit and went to jail.

But that's not the main point. Libel in the U.S. is very hard to prove. Incompetence, however, is quite easy to prove, as when a company sues someone because they think the person made them look bad. The lawsuit makes them look positively reprehensible. Any lawyer who advises a client to proceed with this case is not helping her client. Any client who doesn't listen to his lawyer in this case is plain stupid. Look, the woman had 17 followers before last week; how many people are aware of the case now? 17,000? 17 million? What do you suppose Horizon's reputation looks like now?

More reasonably, it looks like they're suing this woman to punish her, knowing they have no hope of winning. I would not be surprised, if that's the case, if she counter-sues and wins on a claim of abusing the judicial process.

The bottom line: get over it.

Her Majesty's Recession

Apparently the Duchy of Lancaster, which is essentially the property of the British Royal Family, has suffered a bit of a decline:

The Duchy of Lancaster - a portfolio of land, property and assets held in trust for the Sovereign - saw a drop of £75m to £322m in the 2008-9 financial year.

But the income the Monarchy received from the Duchy, used to fund her public and private activities, increased by 5.4% from £12.6m to £13.3m.

During the last financial year, the total cost to the taxpayer of keeping the monarchy increased by £1.5m to £41.5m.

The Beeb notes, however:

[T]he Duchy of Lancaster is a body created under Charter, it is completely self-financing and does not rely on any taxpayers' money.

Foreign Policy adds:

This is further bad news for her Highness, who has had her many, many requests for increases to the royal budget rejected by parliament in the last year. The monarchy's annual expenses currently run at £41.5 million, excluding an estimated £50 million in security costs. Nonetheless, Palace officials continue to engage in talks with the Treasury to elicit more funding for the Crown for, amongst others, planned household refurbishment and the 2012 diamond jubilee celebrations.

The Queen recently dipped into her now-dwindling private funds to pay for a few royal expenses, including Prince Harry's latest trip to New York.

The most surprising thing to me, though, is that £90 million doesn't seem like a lot of money, given the income to the country the Royals may generate merely by existing. How much money from tourists comes in because of the Royals? Has anyone studied this? And how much do most countries spend on heads of state, to what benefit?

Quick hits

Lots to do for the next, oh, 17 months, so I thought I'd get started. My first Duke box arrived today, containing 6 kg of books, course packets, handouts, and more books, all of which have to be read by August 15th. Fortunately I have a few extra hours each day to do all this (I use them to sleep right now, so they're kind of wasted).

Just a couple news stories of note today:

  • President Obama gave an hour-long press conference yesterday in which he spent 50 minutes discussing the single most important domestic-policy issue in the U.S. right now, health care. Since health care policy is complex, full of compromises, difficult to understand, and absolutely imperative to fix, the network talking heads spent all their time today discussing a stupid Cambridge, Mass., police officer who made an ill-advised arrest Monday. This, in turn, is why network talking heads are useless. I can't wait to see Jon Stewart's take.
  • Mark Buehrle, who plays for the other Chicago baseball team, threw a perfect game this afternoon, the 2nd club history and only the 16th time ever in the major leagues. (A perfect game is one in which none of the offensive players gets on base by any means.)
  • Finally, Gidget the Chihuahua, aka the Taco Bell dog, died yesterday at 15.

Back to work...

How green is your city?

Via Beth Filar-Williams, the National Resources Defence Council has ranked U.S. cities by environmental factors. The study ranks 67 large (population 250,000+), 167 medium (100-250k), and 405 small (50-100k) cities on nine factors, including standard of living, water management, transportation, and environmental participation. Seattle comes out on top for big cities; San Francisco, 2nd; Chicago, 10th.

Other leaders include Madison, Wis. (medium) and Bellingham, Wash. Bottom of the pack: Lexington, Ky., Paterson, N.J., and Pine Bluff, Ark.