The Economist reports that traffic to Internet dating sites is up:
[A]long with discount retailers and pawnbrokers, online-dating sites such as eHarmony.com and OkCupid.com have seen business look up. There are several theories to explain why. It may be that people have more time to devote to their private lives as the economy slows; that uncertain times increase the desire for companionship; or that living alone is expensive, whereas couples can split many of their costs.
At OkCupid, which is aimed at a more casual, youthful crowd, there has been a jump in membership ... says Sam Yagan, OkCupid's boss. ... OkCupid has the advantage of being free, which has proved popular with people looking for partners for what Mr Yagan euphemistically calls "cheap entertainment." After all, if you have a girlfriend or a boyfriend, he says, "you can just play Scrabble instead of going out for the evening."
(Is that what people call it these days? "Hey honey, wanna get a triple word score?")
Though, as Mark Morford explains, you need to choose one first:
Communists had their turn. Feminists. Hippies. Then came the evil homosexual people, with their famous, much-lauded agenda to destroy the holy sanctimony of Christian marriage via encouraging girls to smoke and listen to punk rock, teaching interior decorating to straight boys and convincing innocent church pastors and Republican senators to fellate them in cheap motel rooms. The horror!
But no longer. Proposition 8 and The Ugly Mormon Uprising of 2008 notwithstanding, the gays have nearly completed their vile mission. They are everywhere. They are almost normal. ...
Which leaves us a gaping hole, an urgent question in need of an answer. Who's next? Whom will the pseudo-moralists in America accuse of trying to convert our innocent children to their depraved ways? ...
Will it be, say, the polyamorists? Vegetarians? Yoga teachers? Polyamorist vegetarian yoga teachers who like anal sex and Ecstasy and really strong coffee? We must ponder. We must find out.
I less-than-three Morford.
Sorry.
Alaska's disasters, natural and man-made, are front and center today. First, today is the 20th anniversary of the Exxon Valdez disaster. Who can forget?
An estimated 11 million gallons of oil eventually spilled into the water. Attempts to contain the massive spill were unsuccessful, and wind and currents spread the oil more than 100 miles from its source, eventually polluting more than 700 miles of coastline. Hundreds of thousands of birds and animals were adversely affected by the environmental disaster.
Today, however, Louisiana governor Bobby Jindal's mockery of volcano monitoring last month has taken an annoying turn for his Alaska counterpart Sarah Palin:
As a slew of observers -- from local officials to geologists to bloggers to Paul Krugman ("the intellectual incohernence is stunning") -- pointed out at the time, volcano monitoring is crucial work. At the risk of stating the obvious, using advanced technology to predict when a volcano might erupt, at the most basic level, allows local officials to, um, save people's lives by evacuating them. It's hard to think of a better use of government money.
Why is Jindal's line looking even worse now? Because, as you've likely heard, Alaska's Mount Redoubt, 100 miles southwest of Anchorage, erupted [Monday] night. And a USGS geologist confirmed to TPMmuckraker that a portion of the stimulus spending for volcano monitoring that Jindal lampooned has been slated to go to USGS monitoring Redoubt.
Simple economics might suggest that the expense of double-hulled tankers and of volcano monitoring equipment might be lower than the expense of cleaning up Alaska. But that's for us in the reality-based community, I guess; the GOP didn't get it in the 1980s, and doesn't get it now.
Via Krugman, a clear and convincing description of why the Geithner plan may save the economy and make a few bankers even richer, at the modest expense of a few dollars per family:
Half of the [iunvestments of $100] wind up worthless, so the investor loses $300 total on those. But the other half wind up worth $100 each for a $16 profit. $16 times 50 pools equals $800 total profit which is split 1:1 with the Treasury. So the investor gains $400 on these winning pools. A $400 gain plus a $300 loss equals a $100 net gain, so the investor risked $600 to make $100, a tidy 16.7% return.
The bank unloaded assets worth $5000 for $8400. So the private investor gained $100, the Treasury gained $100, and the bank gained $3400. Somebody must therefore have lost $3600…
...and that would be the FDIC[...].
Warms the heart, it does. And it convinces me I'm in the wrong profession.
Metra, which runs Chicago's heavy-rail commuter lines, hasn't changed much at all since the 1970s, as today's Chicago Tribune describes in sad detail:
Metra runs on paper, as in paper tickets. Although the majority of riders use monthly passes, passengers in January still bought more than 666,000 one-way tickets or used 10-ride tickets, which conductors have to punch individually.
... Other open rail systems have done away with punching and checking individual tickets. For example, conductors on Boston's Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority check tickets with hand-held electronic devices. ... On Caltrain, a commuter rail line operating between San Francisco and San Jose, passengers buy tickets from vending machines and conductors make random checks. Anyone without a ticket faces a $250 fine.
[And] it's cash or checks only on Metra. The line doesn't take plastic because of the processing fees that credit-card companies impose, Metra spokeswoman Judy Pardonnet said.
The article also mentions a lack of information about train whereabouts that even our CTA buses provide.
I think the article makes Metra sound better than it really is, simply by comparing it only to its American analogues. The authors ignore, presumably out of pity for Metra, the Shanghai Maglev at one extreme, or even more typical European rail systems like Berlin's S-Bahn and the UK's Oyster Card scheme as examples of how to modernize at the very least how people pay for transit.
All right, maybe Transport for London isn't the best example. Still, when Boston has free Wi-Fi and we can't even pay with credit cards, something is wrong. At least TfL has a dedicated express train running from Heathrow to central London (on which you can use your Oyster Card), and we have...the Blue Line. Sad, really.
The Iraq war began six years ago today. Do you feel victorious yet?
Not to libel ostriches, or suggest mass killings of the birds, I think McDonald's and other fast-food restaurants prefer customers who stick their heads in the sand. This may result from McDonald's execs sticking their own heads—never mind. Apparently the laws in New York, Philadelphia, and California requiring calorie and nutrition information be on fast-food restaurant menus are causing customers to buy salads instead of triple-bacon-lardburgers-with-extra-goo, so McDonald's wants a Federal law instead:
The measure would create a single standard, allowing McDonald's and even sit-down chains like Applebee's to avoid stricter laws in places like New York, Philadelphia and California. Instead of being forced to post nutritional information on menus, the restaurants want to put it somewhere nearby.
... Proponents disagree. "Not only do we think their bill creates a weak standard, it would preempt some of the positive things we have already accomplished across the country," says Derek Scholes, a lobbyist for the Dallas-based American Heart Assn.
How about this instead: McDonald's no longer has to divulge any nutrition information, but it has to donate 1% of its net income (which was $23.5 billion in 2008) to the American Heart Association. Given the success of California's anti-smoking campaign, that might actually benefit people more than just publishing calorie counts.
Bristol Palin and whosit have split.
Didn't see that one coming. (Probably because I wasn't looking.)
Regardless of what one thinks of Thomas Friedman generally, his column today echoes some of my own bleak thoughts recently:
Let's today step out of the normal boundaries of analysis of our economic crisis and ask a radical question: What if the crisis of 2008 represents something much more fundamental than a deep recession? What if it’s telling us that the whole growth model we created over the last 50 years is simply unsustainable economically and ecologically and that 2008 was when we hit the wall—when Mother Nature and the market both said: "No more."
Or, on the other hand, it can just be one of those once-a-century economic catastrophes that ultimately leaves the second generation following better off, and the third generation following to do it all over again.
Now that the press have had a couple of days to digest the Bush Administration's anti-terror legal memos, a consensus of sorts is emerging:
Yale law professor Jack Balkin called [the memos] a "theory of presidential dictatorship. They say the battlefield is everywhere. And the president can do anything he wants, so long as it involves the military and the enemy."
The criticism was not limited to liberals. "I agree with the left on this one," said Orin Kerr, a law professor at George Washington University. The approach in the memos "was simply not a plausible reading of the case law. The Bush [Office of Legal Counsel] eventually rejected [the] memos because they were wrong on the law, and they were right to do so."
In a similarly outrageous bit of memorandizing, the Tribune on its Metromix site completely failed to include Duke of Perth in its list of the best fish and chips in Chicago. I mean, "skate crusted in panko with fries tossed in garlic oil, Pecorino-Romano and chives"? I'd bet it wouldn't even stain a paper towel.
All right, that's not in the same league as asserting dictatorial powers and destroying American democracy, but then again, all politics is local.