Author's posts
Jan 19 2013
Why I hate to fly
Part 213-
Why Boeing’s 787 Dreamliner was a nightmare waiting to happen
Dominic Rushe, The Guardian
Friday 18 January 2013 11.51 EST
The 787 was pitched as the airline of the future – a revolutionary plane that that would use new technology to bring aircraft design into the 21st century. The Dreamliner is made of carbon-fiber reinforced plastic composite. More radically still, pneumatic and hydraulic systems have been ditched for electric systems.
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Outsourcing parts led to three years of delays. Parts didn’t fit together properly. Shims used to bridge small parts weren’t attached correctly. Many aircraft had to have their tails extensively reworked. The company ended up buying some suppliers, to take their business back in house. All new projects, especially ones as ambitious as the Dreamliner, face teething issues but the 787’s woes continued to mount. Unions blame the company’s reliance on outsourcing.
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Arguably, it is not just Boeing’s fault that the Dreamliner wasn’t ready. Boeing is a powerful force in Washington.
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(T)he Dreamliner was passed under a very compressed schedule, said Mann. “And there was an electrical failure and an emergency landing during the test-flight programme,” he said. “That was blamed on a ‘foreign object’.”Mann said the FAA’s mandate changed under administrator Marion Blakey, appointed by president George W Bush in 2008 as Boeing was working on the Dreamliner. “Blakey saw the FAA as a ‘customer services organisation,'” said Mann. The FAA was working with the airlines to cut regulation, not to impose it, he said.
Jan 19 2013
One step ahead of the law.
Fed official alleges Geithner may have alerted banks to rate cut
By Alister Bull, Reuters
Sat Jan 19, 2013 1:28am EST
In the summer of 2007, as storm clouds gathered over the world’s financial system, then-New York Federal Reserve President Timothy Geithner allegedly informed the Bank of America and other banks about the possibility the U.S. central bank would lower one of its critical interest rates, according to a senior Fed official.
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According to transcripts of the call released by the Fed on Friday, Geithner at the time denied that banks knew the Fed was considering cutting the discount rate.
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Private disclosure of confidential, market-sensitive information by the central bank would be highly unusual, but it was not immediately clear if it would be illegal. It also was not clear if strict Fed internal rules governing confidential information would have been breached, or whether any internal or external investigation was mounted.
Not that I expect an orange jumpsuit, but clearly there should be (h/t Atrios).
Jan 18 2013
Matt Yglesias: I have an acute case of teh stupid.
When Real Interest Rates Are Negative, Taxing Is More Costly Than Borrowing
By Matthew Yglesias, Slate
Posted Friday, Jan. 18, 2013, at 1:15 PM ET
A good article about public policy ought to be making some kind of non-obvious point about the world in order to get people to think about things differently. Simply responding by saying that the suggestion sounds funny is absurd.
You don’t say.
Let’s break this down. You’re the mayor of a city. A storm strikes and ruins a whole bunch of your police cars. Now you need to buy new ones. You have two options for paying for the cars-you can borrow the money and pay the bill ten years from now, or you can raise taxes and pay right now. The case for paying later is pretty clear. In ten years’ time your city’s overall economic output will be higher so the burden of paying off the loan then will be lessened. On the other hand, the case for paying now is also pretty clear-lenders generally expect interest payments in exchange for their loans so the total cost of the debt option is higher. But wait! The city’s accountants show up and point out that it’s currently possible for the city to borrow at a negative real rate. Suddenly the interest costs are off the table as a reason to prefer paying sooner.
So what’s left? Nothing. The city will be richer in ten years, so pay then. The logic becomes especially compelling when you recognize that the city’s income will grow more rapidly under the lower-tax regime that encourages more investment in residential and commercial property and more business activity.
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Perhaps Linker and I disagree about what kind of reductions in Medicare and Medicaid spending would be optimal, but I have no disagreement that they should be reduced to below their currently projected levels. That said, under any scenario the government is going to be spending money in 2013. The question on the table was should we finance that spending with taxes or should be finance it with borrowing. My view is that with real interest rates below zero, it makes sense to tax less and borrow more. This has literally no relationship to my view about the appropriate level of future government spending.
Moron.
Hat tip Dr. Duncan Black formerly of the London School of Economics, the Université catholique de Louvain, the University of California, Irvine, and, most recently, Bryn Mawr College.
It’s funny how the issues changes but the language stays the same. Liberals, in being perfectly right about many things, are silly and irresponsible children.
Jan 18 2013
No rest for the wicked.
Well I’m still kind of unhappy that dday has left the building just as I was with Valtin, but his replacement DSWright has highlighted an interesting dichotomy.
Democratic Party Divided As Obama Inauguration Approaches
By: DSWright, Firedog Lake
Friday January 18, 2013 6:47 am
The Democratic Party has always prided itself on having a “big tent.” But representing a diversity of interests is different than representing conflicting interests. As President Obama’s Second Inauguration approaches the divisions within the Democratic Party over wealth inequality and social justice are boiling to the surface.
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Calling the DLC “center-left” is a bit of a misnomer. The correct division is between Corporate Liberals and progressives. Those that genuinely believe (or are paid to genuinely believe) that the growth of Corporate Power in American society is not only a positive development but necessary for progress. On the other side are the progressives who believe the power of capital – particularly finance capital – has grown to the point of suffocating democracy and the possibility for progress. No easy divide to bridge.
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In no debate is this divide more clear than on entitlements where Corporate Liberals have decided to swallow right-wing talking points whole despite all evidence to the contrary. They also have, to an embarrassing degree, embraced Wall Street’s worldview on debt. After bailing out the banks – making private debts public debts – the Corporate Liberals have sided with the Republicans to now extract debt payments from the lower classes to pay off that odious debt.
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And of course the Corporate Liberals’ biggest blind spot, (is) the environment. Despite lofty goals and rhetoric climate change remains unaddressed in any meaningful way. By his own metric Obama has failed on one of the biggest issues of his time.It will be interesting to see how this divide plays out for the remainder of Obama’s presidency. Neither side of the divide has a compelling reason to lay down.
Jan 16 2013
I don’t need nuthin’
Justice is not Law, Law is Not Justice
by Ian Welsh
2013 January 16
A law is deserving of respect to the extent, and only to the extent, it is just. A law which is not just deserves only the level of obedience one gives to any group or individual who says “do this, or I’ll hurt you.” That is, to the extent that you believe their threat is credible, you may choose to obey to avoid the adverse effects of being caught disobeying.
The recent imbroglio over Aaron Swartz has seen a lot of people using the word “proportionality”. It does not matter if someone is guilty of a crime if the punishment is disproportionate. In England the penalty for stealing a chicken, at one point, was death or being sent to a penal colony (Australia). Juries started refusing to convict people even in the face of incontrovertible evidence of the accused’s guilt. The sentencing had to be changed: stealing was no(t) made legal, rather the penalty was reduced.
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Full trials, and the full protection of the law, such as it remains, now belongs only to those who are very wealthy, and sometimes not even to them. Defending a trial can take hundreds of thousand or millions of dollars. An ordinary person cannot afford it. Public defenders are overworked, underfunded, and generally plead out. This is on top of the fact that most rich criminals, such as the bankers who committed widespread fraud, are never charged with crimes, and if they are charged are allowed to settle with a token payment which immunizes them from further charges for their criminal acts, acts which demonstrably cost hundreds of thousands of people their houses, lost people their jobs, and even their lives. Law which is enforced only against some classes of people, and not against others, is unjust.
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A social system only works if there are people willing to carry it out. The USSR collapsed when the people running it were unwilling to call out the army. That same class of people, in the Prague Spring, did call the army out. It collapsed because the factory workers weren’t working, the farmers weren’t farming, and so on.The US legal system (it does not deserve to be called a justice system) works because people carry out its dictates. The people who run the prisons put up with, or even encourage the rapes. Private companies make money from prisoners, so need more prisons. The police make huge amounts of money by seizing the assets of “criminals” before they are even convicted. The judges put up with the 3 strikes laws and mandated sentencing. They allow trials to be put back and back rather than throwing them out due to lack of a speedy trial. Everyone get onside with plea bargaining. The rich are good with this because they either get a real trial, or they don’t get charged at all. The middle class think that if they’re “good” they’ll be ok, till they find out otherwise, and the poor put up with it because of a boot in the face and much more.
The principles of fixing the system (never use the word reform, it means making things better for the rich and worse for everyone else) are simple enough. No secret evidence. No secret laws. No secret interpretations of law. No tolerance of rape in prison. Nobody gets plead out if the plead involves doing jail time or becoming a felon. No criminal record checks for jobs which don’t really really need them, so that prisoners can reintegrate into society. End civil forfeiture. Allow no private defense attorneys, everyone uses a public defender including the rich, and the defenders are drawn by lot (they will be very well funded very quickly, and they will be the best lawyers in the country.) All this will make enforcing current laws impossible with the current budgets Fine. Give judges back discretion, remove three strike laws and overly harsh sentencing, repeal virtually all prohibition laws for most classes of drugs. Stop sending people to jail for IP offenses, and create an economy which gives poor people real jobs.
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There is no justice without proportionality, no justice in a land with secret laws, no justice in a country where the rich skate and the poor plead out. There is only law, the same law the Stasi proclaimed: do what we say or else.
Carmen Ortiz and Stephen Heymann: accountability for prosecutorial abuse
Glenn Greenwald, The Guardian
Wednesday 16 January 2013 06.40 EST
Whenever an avoidable tragedy occurs, it’s common for there to be an intense spate of anger in its immediate aftermath which quickly dissipates as people move on to the next outrage. That’s a key dynamic that enables people in positions of authority to evade consequences for their bad acts. But as more facts emerge regarding the conduct of the federal prosecutors in the case of Aaron Swartz – Massachusetts’ US attorney Carmen Ortiz and assistant US attorney Stephen Heymann – the opposite seems to be taking place: there is greater and greater momentum for real investigations, accountability and reform. It is urgent that this opportunity not be squandered, that this interest be sustained.
The Wall Street Journal reported this week that – two days before the 26-year-old activist killed himself on Friday – federal prosecutors again rejected a plea bargain offer from Swartz’s lawyers that would have kept him out of prison. They instead demanded that he “would need to plead guilty to every count” and made clear that “the government would insist on prison time”. That made a trial on all 15 felony counts – with the threat of a lengthy prison sentence if convicted – a virtual inevitability.
Just three months ago, Ortiz’s office, as TechDirt reported, severely escalated the already-excessive four-felony-count indictment by adding nine new felony counts, each of which “carrie(d) the possibility of a fine and imprisonment of up to 10-20 years per felony”, meaning “the sentence could conceivably total 50+ years and (a) fine in the area of $4 million.” That meant, as Think Progress documented, that Swartz faced “a more severe prison term than killers, slave dealers and bank robbers”.
Swartz’s girlfriend, Taren Stinebrickner-Kauffman, told the WSJ that the case had drained all of his money and he could not afford to pay for a trial. At Swartz’s funeral in Chicago on Tuesday, his father flatly stated that his son “was killed by the government”.
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(A)s CNET’s Declan McCullagh detailed in a comprehensive article this morning, it is Ortiz who “has now found herself in an unusual – and uncomfortable – position: as the target of an investigation instead of the initiator of one.” And that’s exactly as it should be given that, as he documents, there is little question that her office sought to make an example out of Swartz for improper and careerist benefits. Swartz “was enhancing the careers of a group of career prosecutors and a very ambitious – politically-ambitious – U.S. attorney who loves to have her name in lights,” the Cambridge criminal lawyer Harvey Silverglate told McCullagh. Swartz’s lawyer said that Heymann “was going to receive press and he was going to be a tough guy and read his name in the newspaper.”
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Ortiz and Heymann continue to refuse to speak publicly about what they did in this case – at least officially. Yesterday, Ortiz’s husband, IBM Corp executive Thomas J. Dolan, took to Twitter and – without identifying himself as the US Attorney’s husband – defended the prosecutors’ actions in response to prominent critics, and even harshly criticized the Swartz family for assigning blame to prosecutors: “Truly incredible in their own son’s obit they blame others for his death”, Ortiz’s husband wrote. Once Dolan’s identity was discovered, he received assertive criticism and then sheepishly deleted his Twitter account.Clearly, the politically ambitious Ortiz – who was touted just last month by the Boston Globe as a possible Democratic candidate for governor – is feeling serious heat as a result of rising fury over her office’s wildly overzealous pursuit of Swartz. The same is true of Heymann, whose father was Deputy Attorney General in the Clinton administration and who has tried to forge his own reputation as a tough-guy prosecutor who takes particular aim at hackers.
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The US has become a society in which political and financial elites systematically evade accountability for their bad acts, no matter how destructive. Those who torture, illegally eavesdrop, commit systemic financial fraud, even launder money for designated terrorists and drug dealers are all protected from criminal liability, while those who are powerless – or especially, as in Swartz’s case, those who challenge power – are mercilessly punished for trivial transgressions. All one has to do to see that this is true is to contrast the incredible leniency given by Ortiz’s office to large companies and executives accused of serious crimes with the indescribably excessive pursuit of Swartz.
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In most of what I’ve written and spoken about over the past several years, this is probably the overarching point: the abuse of state power, the systematic violation of civil liberties, is about creating a Climate of Fear, one that is geared toward entrenching the power and position of elites by intimidating the rest of society from meaningful challenges and dissent. There is a particular overzealousness when it comes to internet activism because the internet is one of the few weapons – perhaps the only one – that can be effectively harnessed to galvanize movements and challenge the prevailing order. That’s why so much effort is devoted to destroying the ability to use it anonymously – the Surveillance State – and why there is so much effort to punishing as virtual Terrorists anyone like Swartz who uses it for political activism or dissent.The law and prosecutorial power should not be abused to crush and destroy those who commit the “crime” of engaging in activism and dissent against the acts of elites.
Jan 16 2013
À la recherche du temps perdu
Jan 15 2013
Kthulhu!
With noted Villager Idiots Peggy Noonan, Al Hunt, Judy Woodruff, David Walker, and George Stephanopoulos.
Transcript. Abridged Edition.
What did you think would happen when you voted for the lesser evil?
Web exclusive content-
Jon Stewart doubling down on his personal ignorance-
Ok, I’ll stop blaming your writers and just blame you. You’re a moron. The one ruining their brand is you.
Not that I don’t have some nits to pick with Herr Doktor Professor who so intimidates you that you won’t even have him on your show.
Coward.
Jan 14 2013
A ‘The Daily Show’ Fail
Normally Jon Stewart and his writers are reasonably good at lampooning current events and especially the media that covers them, but occassionally they fail.
Now normally it’s something stupid and petty like his inside comic interviews that make no sense at all, or more seriously his letting big ‘gets’ weasel away from the tough questions, especially his pet beltway ‘friends of the show’.
His blessedly rare independent editorializing is dreadful because he’s always going for the false equivalence of liberals and conservatives, a meme he constantly lambastes in others.
Thursday he displayed his and his writers’ mind boggling ignorance of Economics 101-
Stewart seems weirdly unaware that there’s more to fiscal policy than balancing the budget. But in this case he also seems unaware that the president can’t just decide unilaterally to spend 40 percent less; he’s constitutionally obliged to spend what the law tells him to spend. True, he’s also constitutionally prohibited from borrowing more if Congress says he can’t – which is a contradiction. But that’s the whole point of the discussion.
And it makes no sense at all to talk about any of this without the context of extortion and confrontation.
Above all, however, what went wrong here is a lack of professionalism on the part of Stewart and his staff. Yes, it’s a comedy show – but the jokes are supposed to be (and usually are) knowing jokes, which are funny and powerful precisely because the Daily Show people have done their homework and understand the real issues better than the alleged leaders spouting nonsense. In this case, however, it’s obvious that nobody at TDS spent even a few minutes researching the topic. It was just yuk-yuk-yuk they’re talking about a trillion-dollar con hahaha.
Hey, if we want this kind of intellectual laziness, we can just tune in to Fox.
Just because I like you most of the time doesn’t mean you get a pass. Which goes for Krugman too.
Jan 13 2013
Divisional Playoff Throwball: Texans @ Patsies
ek? How can you possibly root for the Texans?
Well, on the merits they’re a pure expansion team that simply took the biggest market available after the Oilers bolted. And of course I’ll never forget how the Patsies took Hartford for a ride so they could screw over Foxboro.
That said there’s no reason they shouldn’t crush the Texans like a bug, the Patsies are the surest things this weekend.
But I’ve been 100% wrong so far.
Jan 13 2013
Divisional Playoff Throwball: Seahawks @ Falcons
A battle of expansion teams the Seahawks extended a 5 game winning streak last week beating the noxious Native Americans and handing D.C. a well deserved defeat.
A word about that. I hope and wish Robert Griffin has a swift, speedy, and complete recovery, but the likelihood is that it will be long and painful and as with Broadway Joe Namath his game will never be the same. Why did Mike Shanahan and the rest of the organization including their preening team physician, trainers, and offensive coordinator so badly blow this call?
Stephen Strasburg.
You will recall that Davey Johnson took no end of heat over his decision to bench Strasburg in the playoffs rather than risk permanent injury to their star stopper in what would have been an ultimately futile pursuit of a pennant anyway. Indeed I expect the Monday Morning Quarterbacking to resume the instant Pitchers and Catchers report and while I will call this masturbatory manifestation of instant gratification “D.C. Disease” most fans are not immune.
The Versailles Villagers, that passel of perpetually wrong pundits and politicians who suck up and kick down confident in their non-existent knowledge of subjects they know nothing about and have no interest in really except as psychic proof of their pompous predestined prepotency over us mere peons and an affirmation of their inherent superiority and hard work instead of inbreeding and nepotism, insist they are entitled and every last one of them is a rabid fan of that team with the racist name where they can get season tickets or a seat in the owners box or sideline and no one else can.
God ordained them in the womb and that divine silver spoon is a true refection of their merit and treasure in heaven and not a distorted fun house mirror. If they were supposed to be sinners they’d have poor parents and according to His will their struggles would not be blessed with success. But they are successful and thus His plan is made manifest in this world as well as the next, forget that eye of the needle stuff- if Jesus was so holy why wasn’t he rich?
Thus endeth today’s lesson on hubris and hypocrisy.
Back on the field if the Seahawks were not on a roll you might be tempted to believe that the Falcons had a shot what with home field advantage and all, but their defense is very ordinary especially against the run and they have no ground game of their own to speak of. Additionally Matt Ryan has never ever won a single playoff game (0 – 3).
But if you insist on another reason to hate the Falcons they are the team that drafted Michael Vick, noted Dog Murderer.
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