Assembled in the USA from 100% Chinese parts.

6:35am: catsforgold.com

4:55am: In Gawker, Alex Pareene rants New York City Just Gives Up on Subway Service:

Did you hear the great news? The MTA will not raise fares! Or cut service! Wonderful! Except none of the headlines say "for just one year." Or "not counting the existing fare increase and de facto service cuts."

The new $11 billion operating budget is actually just an ominous warning that in a year—or maybe a few months—the Transit Authority will once again cite the need to hike fares in order to strong arm Albany in finding a newer, more regressive way of funding operating costs.

But, yes, it is insane that our mass transit is operated by a rotating cast of idiot millionaires with free E-Zpasses for life (and beyond!) beholden to absolutely no one, at all, operating with two sets of books, and yet we have to actually sympathize with them because the people who profit from the way an efficient mass transit system allows for the mobility of cheap labor don't think they should be forced to pony up any money to keep transit affordable. Fares are simply taxes—incredibly regressive taxes, just like the sales taxes that New York City residents suffer to fund our own transit while suburban New Yorkers bitch about the prospect of being charged to clog our streets with their cars, and Jersey dicks bemoan the tolls they have to pay to enter the city where they make all of their money while contributing nothing back.

Meanwhile, though, the MTA lies, about everything, all the time. They are saving just enough of the money from the emergency bailout earlier this year to allow them to not threaten to raise fares again for one (1) year (while fighting transit workers' promised wage increase in court). And thanks to that bailout, we only had to endure a slight fare increase with no service cuts! Except that not a single goddamn line is running on schedule anymore, ever, and that's been the case all year and it only gets worse every week.

Track and signal work must be up 1000% across the board, because there's hardly a line that isn't out of commission on the conveniently poorer or less utilizied portions of the routes these days. The F just gives up at Jay St now. The service advisories, when they are actually correctly posted, which is rarely, grow longer every weekend. If you live outside Manhattan, you better catch a train home before 11 pm, because otherwise who the fuck knows when a train will show up and where it will actually take you. Lord only knows what the hell the G train was doing last weekend, and why. Everyone, anecdotally, has noticed this. But no one has just straight-up said that these are the across the board service cuts that they promised they wouldn't need to institute once we saved them from disaster a few months ago.

In the comments someone does point out that they still have the best transit system in the country. Still, quite a rant...

6:57pm: Cute commercial.
For bedfull_o_books:

From Cammy Corrigan in The Truth about Cars.

4:56pm: So I read this, and I thought, "How do you get mice to jump up and down?" and after a moment realized the answer was probably "Food."

In the meantime, the current state-of-the-science message about exercise and bone building may be that, silly as it sounds, the best exercise is to simply jump up and down, for as long as the downstairs neighbor will tolerate. “Jumping is great, if your bones are strong enough to begin with,” Dr. Barry says. “You probably don’t need to do a lot either.” (If you have any history of fractures or a family history of osteoporosis, check with a physician before jumping.) In studies in Japan, having mice jump up and land 40 times during a week increased their bone density significantly after 24 weeks, a gain they maintained by hopping up and down only about 20 or 30 times each week after that.

Then I hopped up and down on each foot 20 times each. :)

1:00am: Another in a series of quotes for people on my flist.
This one is for cmeckhardt, following up on conversations we had about intersectionality, and it's from Ta-Nehisi Coates:

But whenever I read that XX field isn't diverse enough, I don't so much doubt the truth of it, as I think the charge deeply underestimates exactly the price being exacted for white supremacy in this country, and the length of time for which it went unchecked. We're 50 years into a truly democratic, non white-supremacists America. Congratulations. But we we spent some 150 years in which the country's major institutions--its government, its business, its churches, its block associations, its military, its police force, its labor unions--in the main, aided and abetted white racism. There are certainly exceptions, but I tend to think that the long-term damage done is incalculable and has a lot to do with how we live today.

I'm reporting out a story now in which I had to talk with older black folks who'd grown up in an industrial city in the 40s and 50s. One of the things that comes through from them is that being smart and black, during that time, was really scary. I keep hearing these tales of black people with degrees in electrical engineering, who ended up working in the post office, driving cabs, or worse, running numbers. This is toward the end of Jim Crow, and after slavery, both of which did their best to exact a toll on uppity nigras, who though they were above their station. I don't think I would have made it past fourteen in that world.

What is the long-term damage of communicating a penalty, including death, for black intelligence while rewarding white intelligence? What is the long-term damage of having a federal government policy which intentionally seeks to retard the wealth of black communities? What is the long-term damage of using the police--theoretically the guardians of all that is right in society--as a kind of thug army charged with enforcing racist edicts? These are, literally, questions. I don't have answers for them, but when I hear people asking Hollywood to grapple with a history that we, ourselves, don't want to grapple with I wonder whether we really understand precisely what happened, how much we lost, and how long it will take to get it back.

5:52pm: This quote from Matthew Yglesias is mostly for dpolicar, and references a conversation where we talked about the qualitative difference between having a century-long lifespan and a thousand, or ten thousand year lifespan. But I figured other people might appreciate it too.

I like vampires, but I’m not a Twilight fan, as evidenced by the fact that it was only yesterday when I learned that instead of burning in the sun and dying like real vampires, Twilight vamps just . . . sparkle in the sunlight. Nonsense. And isn’t the idea of a dude who’s over 100 years old hanging out with a high school student pretty creepy and weird?

That in turn got me thinking about the aging process. Across various fictions, why don’t vampires exhibit more cranky old man characteristics? I’m only 28 and already I feel myself periodically overtaken by a desire to tell the young people all about How It Was Back in the Day. I’ll bore people with tedious stories about the old Monroe Street Giant in Columbia Heights before the fancy new stores opened, or about how there used to not be all this stuff on U Street but The Kingpin was the best bar in DC. Just yesterday, I think, a colleague and I were explaining to the rest of the ThinkProgress team that if the new progressive infrastructure and its blogosphere last for a thousand years, men will stay say the Social Security privatization fight of 2005 was their finest hour. If I ever attain immortality, I fully intend to harangue the young people of the future with nonsense about Voltron and how people think of Harvey Danger as a one-hit wonder but really that whole album’s underrated and had other good songs.

That and, you know, murder people in order to feast on their blood.

6:12pm: Snow in Beijing.
A video from Janek Zdzarski:
and a gallery of photos from Huang Jiwei:

Thanks to Jeremy Goldkorn and to Joel Martinsen, both at danwei.org. Mr. Martensen mentions that Mr. Huang 'prefaced [his photos with] a quote from the poet Yin Lichuan, "When it snows, the northern capital becomes northern peace," a line that plays on the capital's current and former names: Beijing (北京) vs. Beiping (北平).'

"一下雪，北京就成了北平"——尹丽川

1:16am: Stupid Google Maps tricks. (Originally stupid railpass tricks.)
Long ago, one of my friends and I were sitting in Liechtenstein--he was getting his Ph.D. there and I was visiting him--and as a thought experiment we tried to figure out how many countries we could transit in a 24 hour period, by train. This was kind of appropriate: that European trip was one of the ones where I was trying hard to see just how many trains I could ride on a two-month Eurail Youthpass. (Answer: a lot.)

Using my copy of the Thomas Cook European Rail Timetable, we came to the conclusion that one could leave northeastern Italy and cross Austria, Liechtenstein, Switzerland, Germany, France, Luxembourg, and Belgium, finally arriving in Maastricht, Netherlands, all within 24 hours. There was enough slack in the schedule we came up with that it might even be possible to start in Yugoslavia, if the connections were with you.

As it turns out, someone did it, more or less the way we thought:

According to http://www.britishcouncil.org/learnenglish-central-trivia-trains.htm:

"The greatest number of countries travelled through entirely y [sic] train in 24 hours is 10, by Aaron Kitchen on 16-17 February 1987. His route started in Yugoslavia and continued through Austria, Italy, Liechtenstein, Switzerland, France, Luxembourg, Belgium and the Netherlands, arriving in Germany 22 hours and 42 minutes later."

We also discussed whether it'd be possible to transit the same nine countries by car in the same period.

We never did get a chance to try, even after he got an old beater of a French car. But now, many years later with the help of Google Maps I have an answer ( behind the cut. )

3:42am: Quote from yesterday.
yorksranter commented in D-squared Digest:

"It's worth remembering that the presence of sufficient moderator is the difference between a functioning nuclear power station and Chernobyl."

12:52pm: Bento writes An article wherein it is explained why everything written so far about Apple’s iPhone launch in China is beside the point.

Apple is not selling iPhones in China because it wants to sell iPhones in China, but because it wants to sell iPhones to the Chinese. That’s a big difference. I’ll explain.

The Chinese have long had access to iPhones. They are for sale at stalls in every cybermall and market in every Chinese city, and come in two varieties: The most expensive ones (at around 6000 RMB in Shanghai for a 16GB 3GS, or 880 USD, depending on your haggling skills) come directly from Hong Kong, where the factory-unlocked model is available from the Apple store for around 4800 RMB. That’s a nice arbitrage play by the stall owner, and everyone is happy. The cheaper model, at around 5000 RMB for a 16GB 3GS, was originally bought locked in the US or Europe, and has been unlocked by the stall owner’s hacker-genius cousin using 3rd-party software. This kind of iPhone is cheaper, because you are on your own when it comes to upgrades and iTunes compatibility.

The distribution model is extensive and robust, and in fact most Chinese buy their mobile phones from stalls like this. There are no iPhone shortages, as prices fluctuate to meet demand. The received wisdom is that around 2 million iPhones are in the Chinese wild; I’ve personally seen a good many of them here in Shanghai, where they are much in evidence among the eliterati. Still, this is a minuscule portion of the 700 million odd phones in use in China, of which a small but growing portion is smartphones.

Unfortunately, an ill-conceived Chinese law forbids selling mobile phones containing wifi functionality (unless it is the wifi variety developed in China that nobody uses) so if Apple wants to sell iPhones in China, it has to first cripple them.

Why anyone would buy a wifiless iPhone beats me, especially if it is more expensive than the arbitraged unlocked Hong Kong model. Apple seems to think the same thing, because it is not revenue-sharing with China Unicom, the local vendor, but selling the iPhones outright to them. It is up to China Unicom to flog them in China.

And that’s what China Unicom is trying to do. China Unicom stores all have iPhone banners up; I’ve passed several China Unicom road shows stopping by Shanghai extolling the iPhone. The iPhone is being talked about widely. But so is the fact that the China Unicom iPhone is crippled — the Chinese are sophisticated consumers; forget this at your own peril.

The upshot: anecdotal reports tell of aftermarket prices increasing for Hong Kong iPhones these past few weeks, as demand increased. Clearly, the advertising is working, even if China Unicom’s sales of wifiless iPhones are anaemic.

There is a certain poetic justice to the whole spectacle: China Unicom, a state-owned company, forced to sell inferior iPhones in a porous market due to stupid laws promulgated by the Chinese state, spending on advertising that mainly benefits the aftermarket for Hong Kong iPhones.

It’s now in China Unicom’s interests to have the anti-wifi law changed, so that they can sell a larger portion of the iPhones ending up in Chinese hands. That kind of incentive makes me optimistic. Apple has already cracked the Chinese market for wifi-enabled phones — via Hong Kong. Now China Unicom needs to do the same — by getting its owner to change the law.

3:16pm: Zhu Zhu Pets™ name.
Anyone know if the name is actually Mandarin, and if so what characters? I know they're made in China but that doesn't mean anything, as nearly all toys are made in China now. They used to be called Go Go Pets™, and in some markets they apparently still are, but while their blog's oldest post asks "Why did Go Go Pets™ become Zhu Zhu Pets™?" they don't say why, or what the name comes from.

The manufacturer's site (warning, annoying intro page, complete with music) says nothing about where the name came from. Perhaps they're too busy turning them out by the hundreds of thousands (CEPIA Produces 220,000 Zhu Zhu Pets Per Day And They Are Still Out Of Stock) to put something up on the site.

The toy's site is equally annoying, but no more informative about the name.

Edit: Bloomberg did an article on them today, but nothing about the name either.

11:40pm: Stains out of a dress shirt? (Southern New England)
So, I have two shirts which have stains. Mostly, I think it's that dirt is adhering to the sticky bits that held the clear, peel-off size labels on.

In any case, they've been through the wash a couple of times and nothing's taken them off. Anyone have any pointers to someone, professional or not, who can get these stains off my shirt? They're right on the front pocket, so they're really obvious. Otherwise the shirts are fine.

Thanks in advance!

2:03pm: A cool cell size and scale visualization, from the Genetic Science Learning Center of the University of Utah, via Felix Salmon's blog.

(It's Flash, but it's a pretty decent use of it.)

4:18pm: Daniel Larison replies to a recent post by Caroline Glick:

But at least you always knew that Bush loved America and that he loved Americans. You knew that he valued America’s allies even if he didn’t always do right by them. You knew that his values were American values.

You can’t say any of that about his successor. ~Caroline Glick

Yes, this is what you would expect from Glick (or from anyone, for that matter, who thinks that the last two years of Bush’s foreign policy were his worst), but it’s offensive all the same. As tempting and easy as it would be to turn this formulation around on one of the worst Presidents of all time, I don’t assume that Bush did any of the things he did because he didn’t have “American values” or didn’t love his country. I don’t assume that he trashed our relations with Europe, Turkey and Russia because he wanted America to be isolated or because he loathed these other nations. It is certainly true that he harmed American interests, weakened American power, wrecked our fiscal house and isolated us from many of our allies and potential partners, but the world is full of stories of people who harm that which they love. Bush’s problem wasn’t that he didn’t love America. The problem was that he had no idea what he was doing and substituted ideological fantasies in place of understanding.

( ... )

It may be that Obama will prove to be a poor President, and he could inaugurate policies that will fail as spectacularly as Bush’s did, but we would not be able to conclude from this that he did not love his country or share American values. If we could conclude such things from what politicians do, surely the man who launched aggressive wars, and who sanctioned illegal, arbitrary detention, illegal wiretapping and torture would not come out looking very good at all.

3:51pm: It's all data, really. Sure, some of it's unwelcome and painful. But I'd rather know than look away and stick my fingers in my ears. Most of the time.

3:21pm: A spirited midday drive up the Northeast corridor really does get the juices flowing.

11:29pm: I hate it when a paper deletes a post I linked to.
The Times appears to have pulled the rant I referenced in my previous post. However, this is the Internet. I found a copy on a right-wing site, and as far as I can tell the copy is unedited.

He and P. J. would get along just fine.

( His full politically incorrect rant follows behind this cut. )

11:02pm: It only occurs to me now after reading Jeremy Clarkson's latest rant and a review of P. J. O'Rourke's latest car book that it's a bit of a shame the two of them never got to do a car program together before P. J.'s cancer took so much out of him.

12:15pm: If you live in Philadelphia, you already know this, but...
...SEPTA went out on strike at 3AM this morning.

From http://www.philly.com/dailynews/local/67620912.html:

What SEPTA Service Will Not Run?

Market-Frankford Line

Broad Street Line/Broad Ridge Spur Line

ALL City bus routes, trolley, and trackless-trolley routes

Frontier bus routes

No service on bus routes 90 through 99, 124, 127-132, 134, 139, 150, 201, 206 and 304.

What SEPTA Service Will Run?

Regional Rail:

Train service will be the best choice for travel in and around Philadelphia

Suburban Transit:

Bus, trolley, and route 100 lines will not be affected.However route service will change for those buses that normally travel into the City (See the Suburban Transit section)

LUCY (Loop through University City):

Green and Gold Loop service will operate from 30th Street Station to selected University City destinations.

CCT Connect: Regular service will operate for, registered ADA and shared- ride customers. There may be some delays due to increased demand and local street traffic.

Good luck, people.

6:49am: Are you with me Doctor Wu
Are you really just a shadow
Of the man that I once knew
Are you crazy are you high
Or just an ordinary guy
Have you done all you can do
Are you with me Doctor
(1975)

6:46am: Time...to spend in whatever way you like. That is the greatest luxury.

7:50am: Bay Bridge status:
Still closed.

(BART will run overnight again Saturday night through Sunday morning if Caltrans doesn't open the bridge before 3PM Saturday.)

6:01am: If I were a Springer-Verlag Graduate Text in Mathematics...

If I were a Springer-Verlag Graduate Text in Mathematics, I would be J.L. Doob's Measure Theory. I am different from other books on measure theory in that I accept probability theory as an essential part of measure theory. This means that many examples are taken from probability; that probabilistic concepts such as independence, Markov processes, and conditional expectations are integrated into me rather than being relegated to an appendix; that more attention is paid to the role of algebras than is customary; and that the metric defining the distance between sets as the measure of their symmetric difference is exploited more than is customary. Which Springer GTM would you be? The Springer GTM Test

Thanks to frotz.

4:59am: French Ideal of Bicycle-Sharing Meets Reality
Vélib’ in Paris seems to be having more trouble than BIXI in Montréal, if the NY Times is to be believed.

From http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/31/world/europe/31bikes.html?_r=1&hp=&pagewanted=all:

Many of the specially designed bikes, which cost $3,500 each, are showing up on black markets in Eastern Europe and northern Africa. Many others are being spirited away for urban joy rides, then ditched by roadsides, their wheels bent and tires stripped.


Renters of Vélib' bicycles in Paris say it can be a challenge to find functioning ones among those that have been vandalized.
With 80 percent of the initial 20,600 bicycles stolen or damaged, the program’s organizers have had to hire several hundred people just to fix them. And along with the dent in the city-subsidized budget has been a blow to the Parisian psyche.

The heavy, sandy-bronze Vélib’ bicycles are seen as an accoutrement of the “bobos,” or “bourgeois-bohèmes,” the trendy urban middle class, and they stir resentment and covetousness. They are often being vandalized in a socially divided Paris by resentful, angry or anarchic youth, the police and sociologists say.

Bruno Marzloff, a sociologist who specializes in transportation, said, “One must relate this to other incivilities, and especially the burning of cars,” referring to gangs of immigrant youths burning cars during riots in the suburbs in 2005.

He said he believed there was social revolt behind Vélib’ vandalism, especially for suburban residents, many of them poor immigrants who feel excluded from the glamorous side of Paris.

“We miscalculated the damage and the theft,” said Albert Asséraf, director of strategy, research and marketing at JCDecaux, the outdoor-advertising company that is a major financer and organizer of the project. “But we had no reference point in the world for this kind of initiative.”

At least 8,000 bikes have been stolen and 8,000 damaged so badly that they had to be replaced — nearly 80 percent of the initial stock, Mr. Asséraf said.

JCDecaux must repair some 1,500 bicycles a day. The company maintains 10 repair shops and a workshop on a boat that moves up and down the Seine.

The Daily Telegraph says:

It is rare to find a Parisian who has not pulled a Vélib’ out of its docking bay ready to pedal off only to find that the chain was missing or the wheels were blocked. At one stage, it was easy to spot a faulty bike, as a previous user would have obligingly turned the saddle round. Now that there are so many ruined bikes, the backwards saddle rule is no longer reliable; only a thorough prior examination before choosing a cycle will suffice.

As for thefts, JCDecaux even has full-time employees who do nothing but scour the capital for stolen or abandoned bikes; they pick up around 20 every day from the streets or police stations, though many are taken further afield. At least one has been found in Romania. Many are stolen and customised almost beyond recognition.

On the one hand, I am suspicious of any analysis that blames problems on France's immigrants, because that often seems to be the favorite French explanation for social dysfunction. Disaffected French youth in general strikes me as more plausible. On the other hand, I haven't been in Paris since the Vélib’ system rolled out, so I don't know from direct experience how bad things actually are. But the numbers sound pretty awful, given that they started with 20,000 bikes.

Certainly the condition of BIXI bikes and stations were nowhere near as bad in Montréal this summer. Perhaps young Québeçois are less angry and resentful than French youths? Boy, wouldn't the French hate that comparison.

I guess we'll see how things go when they roll out the system in Boston next year.

Edit: bikeradar.com suggests that JCDecaux is exaggerating the scale of the problem in order to get a better deal out of the city.

Also, that $3,500 price seems out of line.

4:34am: CRUNCH: the game for utter bankers

From http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/04/07/go-fish-for-capitalists/:

Inspired by the credit crisis, a new satirical card game in Britain invites players to take the role of banking executives, secretly embezzle their banks’ assets, pay themselves gigantic bonuses and use government bailouts to secure as much personal wealth as possible while ensuring their customers’ trust.

The card game, called “Crunch,” is the brainchild of the Web designer Andrew Sheerin (from Cambridge, England), his friend Andy Tompkins and the children’s book illustrator Tom Morgan-Jones.

The game, which is for two to four players, is “a mixture of strategy,” Mr. Sheerin says, “which comes from running your bank well, and real skill, which comes from actually removing cards from the table without anyone noticing.”

The Digital Money Forum blog says:

The game served a dual purpose, both of which left me delighted with it. First of all, it was fun to play. Basically, you build up your bank's lending against assets (ranging from shares in listed companies to Nazi gold) and then when a crunch comes you trade in trust for government bailouts. It didn't take long to learn, and both the kids and adults enjoyed it. It had an unexpected second purpose, though. I bought it for fun, but in playing it the kids asked a lot of questions about the credit crunch, about the relationship between assets and debt, and about the idea of deliberately growing your workforce and assets to become too big to fail (adding "workforce" cards also gains you "trust" cards).

Funagain Games has it for $12.99, a bit less than the £8.99 the game company charges. Cheaper than Amazon's price of $14.08, too.


I have no connection with either the game's publisher, TerrorBull Games, or that retailer, Funagain Games. I just think the game looks fun.