Month: May 2010

For a solution to the euro crisis, look to the states

Although the 50 states share a currency and each sets its own spending and tax policies, state deficits remain very low. Even California has a deficit of only about 1 percent of the state’s GDP and total general obligation debt of less than 4 percent of state GDP. The basic reason for these small deficits is that each state’s constitution prohibits borrowing for operating purposes. States can issue debt to finance infrastructure but not salaries, services, transfer payments or other operating expenses.

In some states, these self-imposed restrictions go back to the 19th century, a time when excessive borrowing led to state defaults. Those states wanted to assure potential lenders that such excess borrowing would not happen again. Over time, all states adopted such rules to help make the bonds they issued for capital expenditures attractive to investors. Although the states’  balanced-budget rules differ in detail, with some using rainy-day funds to offset cyclical declines in revenue, they all succeed in preventing persistent operating deficits. If the EMU governments were to adopt similar constitutional rules, the interest rates on their bonds would fall.

via Martin Feldstein – For a solution to the euro crisis, look to the states.

When Will the Present Change the Mistakes of the Past?

The author outlines the post-depression social contract and the gradual breakdown of that model. In the private sector, an example would be the breakup of the AT&T phone monopoly, which opened up the Market to the introduction of cell phones and the internet. But not every industry rose to the International challenges of Globalization and hence the Detroit automotive debacle, brought-on by the recent near-depression. The author wonders what Crash will it take to get Governments to change from their WWII model. The recent close-call (assuming that the Sovereign Debt Crisis doesn’t unravel) has shocked many of the welfare-state proponents to face the unsustainability of their historical model.

American Challenges: The Blue Model Breaks Down – Walter Russell Mead’s Blog – The American Interest.

We Have Traded Sound For Convenience

“People used to sit and listen to music,” Mr. Fremer said, but the increased portability has altered the way people experience recorded music. “It was an activity. It is no longer consumed as an event that you pay attention to.”

Instead, music is often carried from place to place, played in the background while the consumer does something else — exercising, commuting or cooking dinner.

The songs themselves are usually saved on the digital devices in a compressed format, often as an AAC or MP3 file. That compression shrinks the size of the file, eliminating some of the sounds and range contained on a CD while allowing more songs to be saved on the device and reducing download times.

via A Musical Revolution, With a Cost in Fidelity – NYTimes.com.

Furor Over Return Of Nurse’s Caps

At JFK Medical Center, health care reform is already under way, in the shape of a traditional white nurse’s cap.

The nurses in the Atlantis hospital’s cardiovascular step-down unit have temporarily tossed their royal blue scrubs for retro nurses’ whites – starched cap, hose and shoes included.

As a remedy, many hospitals nationwide have adopted color-coded uniform policies. St. Mary’s Medical Center in West Palm Beach, for example, addressed the problem when it implemented a new uniform policy in February.

Nurses now wear white tops and blue pants, pediatric nurses wear kid-friendly tops, unit secretaries are clad in khaki, and all clinical departments are assigned specific colors. Click on the link and read the flood of comments.

via Retro nurse’s outfit has returned to JFK Medical Center.

What Religions Don’t Share

Just as there are tall people in short families (none of the other men in Michael Jordan’s family was over 6 feet tall), there are religions that deny the existence of God and religions that get along just fine without creeds. Something is a religion when it shares enough of this DNA to belong to the family of religions. What makes the members of this family different (and themselves) is how they mix and match these dimensions. Experience is central in Daoism and Buddhism. Hinduism and Judaism emphasize the narrative dimension. The ethical dimension is crucial in Confucianism. The Islamic and Yoruba traditions are to a great extent about ritual. And doctrine is particularly important to Christians.

There is a long tradition of Christian thinkers who assume that salvation is the goal of all religions and then argue that only Christians can achieve this goal. Philosopher of religion Huston Smith, who grew up in China as a child of Methodist missionaries, rejected this argument but not its guiding assumption. “To claim salvation as the monopoly of any one religion,” he wrote, “is like claiming that God can be found in this room and not the next.” It might seem to be an admirable act of empathy to assert that Confucians and Buddhists can be saved. But this statement is confused to the core, since salvation is not something that either Confucians or Buddhists seek. Salvation is a Christian goal, and when Christians speak of it, they are speaking of being saved from sin. But Confucians and Buddhists do not believe in sin, so it makes no sense for them to try to be saved from it. And while Muslims and Jews do speak of sin of a sort, neither Islam nor Judaism describes salvation from sin as its aim.

via Separate truths – The Boston Globe.

Have We Forgotten How To Sleep?

If we can’t sleep, perhaps it’s because we’ve forgotten how. In premodern times people slept differently, going to bed at sunset and rising with the dawn. In winter months, with so long to rest, our ancestors may have broken sleep up into chunks. In developing countries people still often sleep this way. They bed down in groups and get up from time to time during the night. Some sleep outside, where it is cooler and the effect of sunlight on our circadian rhythm is more direct. In 2002, Carol Worthman and Melissa Melby of Emory University published a comparative survey of how people sleep in a variety of cultures. They found that among foraging groups such as the Kung and Efe, “the boundaries of sleep and waking are very fluid.” There is no fixed bedtime, and no one tells anyone else to go to sleep. Sleepers get up when a conversation or musical performance intrudes on their rest and intrigues them. They might join in, then nod off again.

Now consider the siesta. The timing of the traditional siesta corresponds to a natural post-lunch dip in our circadian rhythms, and studies have shown that people who catnap are generally more productive and may even enjoy lower risk of death from heart disease. It is the Spanish who have made the siesta famous. Unfortunately, Spaniards no longer live close enough to work to go home and nap. Instead some use the afternoon break to go out for long lunches with friends and colleagues. Having spent two hours at lunch, Spanish workers then cannot finish work until seven or eight. But even then they don’t always go home. They go out for drinks or dinner instead. (Go to a Spanish disco at midnight and you’re likely to be dancing alone; their prime-time TV shows are just ending.)

Lately the Spanish have begun to take the prob­lem of sleep deprivation seriously. The police now question drivers in serious accidents about how long they slept the night before, and the government has recently mandated shorter hours for its employees to try to get them home earlier.

What has motivated the Spanish to take action against sleepiness is not so much their accident rate—historically among the highest in western Europe—as their flat productivity. The Spanish spend more time at work and their productivity is less than most of their European neighbors.

Secrets of Sleep – National Geographic Magazine.

U-2, Before The Band

The U-2 is nicknamed the Dragon Lady for good reason. You never knew what to expect when you took it into the air, no matter how seasoned a pilot you were. This was an unfortunate consequence of its design. The trade-off of a plane built light enough to fly above 70,000 feet is that it is almost impossible to control. And 13 miles above the ground, the atmosphere is so thin that the “envelope” between stalling and “overspeed” — going so fast you lose control of the plane, resulting in an unrecoverable nose dive — is razor-thin, making minor disruptions, even turbulence, as deadly as a missile. The challenge is even greater near the ground, since to save weight, the plane doesn’t have normal landing gear.

Other risks were less benign, as I found when I was the ground officer for a pilot who radioed, “My skin feels like it’s crawling.” He had the bends so badly from changes in pressure that when he landed his body was covered with huge welts. Had the weather not cleared in time for him to land, these bubbles of nitrogen might have lodged in his brain or optical nerve — as they had in other U-2 pilots.

via Op-Ed Contributor – Flying with the Dragon Lady – NYTimes.com.