Photo Credit: Wikimedia Commons
Last year at Thanksgiving we bought a turkey from a local farm and it cost $58. I couldn't help noticing, around the same time, that our local supermarkets were offering a comparably-sized bird for $8. The local turkey tasted quite good, but I've enjoyed many a Thanksgiving with the store-bought variety, and it seemed to me not just painful but profligate to spend all that additional money in this way. So this year we're going to buy the supermarket turkey and find a soup kitchen or homeless shelter to which we can donate $50. In fact I suppose we can donate $65 or $70 if we take account of the tax deduction.
(Photo: xybermatthew/Flickr)
In 1967, 50% of American men had been arrested. Since then, arrests made in connection with domestic violence and illegal drugs have pushed the number to 60%, estimates Alfred Blumstein, a criminologist at Carnegie Mellon University. The annual number of arrests for possession of marijuana more than tripled to 1.8 million from 1980 to 2007, according to the U.S. Department of Justice.
I've blogged in this space before about the many ways in which modern life promotes bigness--in business, government, finance, health care and so forth. Here's another: the New York Times is reporting that a new federal law requiring safety testing of toys, adopted in response to an influx of unsafe toys from overseas, may be a threat to artisanal toy-makers who use maple, beeswax and other wholesome stuff. It seems they can't afford the testing. Photo Credit: Flickr User monozygotic
Recently my wife and I got iPhones. There's a lot to say about them, but most of it has been said, so I'll spare you. What I find most interesting and surprising, after about a week of ownership, is what spectacular reading devices they've turned out to be. In fact I find it easier to read a newspaper on my iPhone than I do on paper, probably because of the low-light problems associated with presbyopia. The iPhone screen resolution is just dazzling, and anyone with a special interest in the future of books, reading etc really ought to head over to the nearest Apple store and play with one. I read parts of The Mayor of Casterbridge on mine, and have installed the NY Times and Wall Street Journal apps.
Once you get started with this, any doubt you might have had about the future of ink on paper will likely fall away. Simply put, there is no future for ink on paper, at least not in the mass distribution and consumption of text. I've only briefly played with a Kindle, but I believe that Apple's long-rumored tablet (basically a big iPod Touch, which is essentially an iPhone without the phone) has the potential to be truly transformative, if it's priced right.
I wonder if they are considering some kind of subscription-subsidy model, like the iPhone with AT&T. Why not sell people the tablets cheaply if they agree to spend a certain amount each month on reading matter for a couple of years?
Although there are serious implications for people like me, who make their living with a keyboard, I think the shift to e-books is mostly a good thing, and has the potential to help revive literacy, as email has done. But this may be entirely wishful; it's only human to see virtue in necessity, and this change is coming whether I like it or not.
(Photo: Flickr/Christopher Chan)
. . .this is a reminder that new high rise condos are not included in the new home inventory report from the Census Bureau, and are also not included in the existing home sales report from the NAR (unless they are listed). These uncounted units are concentrated in Miami, Las Vegas, San Diego and other large cities - but as these articles show, there are new condos almost everywhere.The NAR is the National Association of Realtors. Also Alan Abelson, in Barron's, has a column about the sword of Damocles (or perhaps the crabgrass avalanche) hanging over the housing marke, in the form of foreclosures waiting to happent:
The full Abelson column is here, but i'm not sure it's available to non-subscribers. For some broader perspective, consider that Moody's and Zillow agree that about a quarter of homes are "underwater," meaning they are burdened with mortgages greater than their valueAmherst [Securities] estimates this massive overhang at seven million units. That's the equivalent of 135% of a full year's existing-home sales and chillingly greater than the 1.27 million units that made up the overhang in early 2005, when the housing bubble had just begun its dizzying and more than a little lunatic ascent.
Put another way, of the 56 million units that the Mortgage Bankers Association says make up the mortgage universe, Amherst gauges 6.94 million units are in what it dubs the "delinquency pipeline" eventually headed for liquidation. And it reckons that another 300,000 mortgages replenish that unwelcome flow every month.
Essentially, then, this shadow inventory represents a massive furtive supply of future foreclosure.
A new Harvard study estimates that lack of health insurance kills about 45,000 Americans annually, which is 2.5 times as many as the previous best estimate commonly cited in the health care debate. This is a big difference (27,000 additional lives). But it still pales in comparison with the more than one million Americans who die annually by their own hands--which they use to light cigarettes, lift forks and convey too many alcoholic beverages to their lips. That so many die as the result of behavioral causes is no argument against universal health coverage, and the new Harvard study bolsters the case for covering everyone, which I suspect we could do just by harvesting some of the incredible waste in the system today. But the vast loss of life associated with bad habits does suggest that we could do vastly more good by changing people's behavior, whether by exhortation, better education or sumptuary taxes.
Tobacco offers a promising precedent; smoking is down by something like half since mid-century, as I recall, and while this has contributed (perhaps significantly) to our national weight gain, on net this reduction in smoking has saved many lives and much suffering and expense. Further reductions in tobacco, as well as an assault on over-eating and unhealthy foods, might produce similarly large gains.
A pdf of the study is here (it's quite brief) and an even briefer essay on the whole subject, from the Wall Street Journal, can be found via my earlier Atlantic posting about the devastation we inflict on ourselves by our unhealthy lifestyles. There is vast room for improvement in this area, and progress in it could be a major force for reducing our runaway health-care costs--not to mention saving the lives of so many of our fellow citizens. President Obama has rightly called on students to work harder in school. Why not rally the rest of us to save ourselves from early death?
(Photo: Flickr User Siege N. Gin)
Actually this may not be quite as bad as it looks. Students will be equipped with Kindles and the like. If anything the real news here may be that the headmaster is so politically tone-deaf that he thinks it's a good idea to do the whole TV-and-cappuccino rec-room transformation at the same time as he abolishes the library. Why not just announce a new environmental initiative to heat the facility by burning volumes from the library? It's not just eliminating books. It's going green!
Daniel Akst
