Half Changed World

I’ve had my Kindle for about a month, so here are some initial reactions.

• The screen really is very comfortable to read, far more so than a computer screen for extended periods. It’s not great in dim light, such as some of the metro platforms — enough so that I bought a reading light that fits in the case with it.
• It’s a great one-handed reading experience — far better than a book or newspaper for standing on the metro reading with one hand and holding onto the pole with the other.  I think Apple is just wrong is saying that buttons are bad.  (It doesn’t solve the problem of what to do when the train is so packed that there’s no room to read anything — podcasts are still the best solution for that.)
• I still have a pile of unread books (the pulp and ink kind) next to my bed.
• I’ve only bought a few books for it so far — but there are plenty of public domain books available through Feedbooks.  While the publishers think Amazon is selling books for way too little, most readers seem to think they’re charging too much for something with no physical production or distribution costs.
• Traveling with it is terrific, as I read fast and get tired of hauling books around.  But it’s annoying to be told to turn it off for takeoff and landing.
• I have been using it for a fair amount of work reading, rather than printing out stacks of paper to carry back and forth.  Almost always, this means sending a .pdf or .doc file to Amazon to convert.  They do a good job with text, and images come through fine, but tables are a mess.  While it can now read .pdf files directly, the text winds up very small, which I can’t tolerate for very long.    And there’s no zoom function.   When I know a document has tables that I’m going to need, I’ve been loading both the pdf and converted versions so I can flip between the two.  It’s pretty kludgy.
• The most annoying part of using it for technical reading is that there’s no way to flip to the endnotes or references and back– I hadn’t been aware of how much I do that until I couldn’t do it.   It may be possible to do this with documents that have been “published” for the Kindle, as opposed to converted pdfs, but I don’t know of any research shop that is putting out ebook versions in addition to pdf.  (I’ll be interested in seeing tomorrow whether anyone quickly converts the budget documents into ebooks.)
• I bought a case for it, although I’m not sure that one is really needed.

Update: The budget documents don’t appear to be posted as ebooks anywhere, but the Economic Report of the President is.  I approve.

While the first posts on the new site have all been political, I actually think it was the book reviews that I missed most while I was offline.  I found myself writing them in my head as I considered the books that I was reading.  I also felt a bit guilty about not getting to post a review of The Glass Room, by Simon Mawer, because the publishers sent me a review copy.

The Glass Room, which was a finalist for the Booker Prize, is a fictionalized version of the lives of the owners and residents of the Villa Tugendhat, a very modernistic house built in Czechoslovakia on the verge of the Nazi invasion.  The first part of the story follows the original owners, a wealthy Jewish (part Jewish, actually) family from their honeymoon, where they get the idea of building this house, into exile in Switzerland, South America and finally the United States, and then loops back to see what’s happening in the house under Nazi and Communist domination over Czechoslovakia.

The first part of the story totally hooked me.  I stayed up way too late the first night I got it, reading.  I believed in the characters, the house, and was haunted by their naive belief that they were members of a truly modern, international, forward looking society, even as the known conclusion moved ever closer.  Mawer’s imagining of how Chamberlain’s appeasement speech (where he says “However much we may sympathize with a small nation confronted by a big and powerful neighbor, we cannot in all circumstances undertake to involve the whole British Empire in war simply on her account. If we have to fight it must be on larger issues than that.”) was highly effective.  The metaphor of the Glass Room of the title — the house that exposes all of its secrets — is perhaps pushed a bit too far — but Mawer knows it and plays with the edge.

I was less enthralled by the rest of the book.  The writing remained elegant, but the years sped by too fast, and I never cared about any of the characters who were not introduced in the first section.  And I found myself feeling somewhat manipulated by the references to the Holocaust and by the neat tying up of loose ends through implausible coincidences.

But I think I’d still recommend it, all in all.

Ok, I’m going to give liveblogging the state of the union address a crack.  Folding laundry at the same time…

How rare is it not to begin with “the state of the union is strong?”

Mention of “those who were already facing poverty” and “the challenges of American families” in the first few minutes.

Immediately points out that the problems are not new since his presidency. “Change has not come fast enough.”

Ok, here it is: “Despite our hardships, our union is strong.”

Boo, banks.  Yay tax cuts.  Yay recovery act.

Need a new jobs bill.  Yes we do.   I’m really skeptical about the small business job creation tax cut.  Infrastructure, high speed rail.  Ok.

Some red meat language about the need for financial reform, and how the lobbyists are trying to kill it.  We’ve already agreed that the banks are an easy target, right.

Energy discussion.  Interesting to start off with the parts that the R’s like the most — nuclear power plants, additional drilling — and then move to comprehensive climate change.

Goal of doubling exports over the next five years!  Wow — not clear how we do this.   Seek new markets.  Are we going to get the Chinese to allow the dollar to fall against the Yuan?

“best anti-poverty program is a world-class education.”

Revitalize community colleges — hey, that’s the bill my colleagues have  been working on (SAFRA).  $10k tax credit for 4 years of colleges — wonder if that is supposed to be refundable.  Capping loan repayment — that’s a good idea, because loans are on average a good investment, but they’re a lot more risky than generally acknowledged.

9:43 and he finally mentioned health insurance reform.

Wow, Michelle’s smile is tight.

Good strong language on health care.  Talks about what it does — vast improvement over the status quo.

Switching over to talk about deficits.  Points out the surplus in 2000.   Deficit caused by two wars, two tax cuts, and the prescription drug benefits.

Threatens a veto to enforce spending caps.  The claim is this is to offset the increased deficit since start of Obama administration.  Repeats call to extend middle class tax cuts, cancel others.  Bipartisan spending commission.  PayGo.  Freeze won’t start until next year.

“common sense — a novel idea.”  A bit snarky here.  I wonder how that plays to the public.

Campaign finance reform. Earmark reform.  “Reform how we work together.”

Stop the holds on nominations.  That would be good.  Republicans can’t just keep saying no, need to share responsibility of governing.

Somewhat awkward pivot to national security.  All our troops are coming home from Iraq.  Didn’t  hear a date there.  Support troops when they return.

Arms control, disarmament.  G-20.  Bioterrorism. This is important stuff, but the rhetoric is pretty dull.  Is he losing people?  Helping the people of Haiti rebuild.

Civil rights division that actually does something.  End don’t ask don’t tell.  Enforce equal pay laws. Good stuff, but I missed the transition — why is this coming after the national security stuff?  immigration reform. This is feeling like a bit of an afterthought.

I like the content, but think it dragged too long.  Need to see what’s actually in the budget next week.

David Brooks seems to like it, which is probably a bad sign.  “General tone of moderation.”  But I just don’t see the R’s giving an inch.

Last week I read about deficit spending from a variety of perspectives, ranging from the Pew-Peterson Commission on Budget Reform to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities to  the Economic Policy Institute.  These are groups that are usually depicted in the media as being on opposite sides of the budget debate, so I was pretty surprised at how many points of consensus there were:

• The US government’s long-term budget trajectory leads to unsustainable levels of debt.  These are bad both because government borrowing will crowd out private investment, and because the interest payments will consume an unacceptable share of the federal budget.
• Pew-Peterson call for a goal of the debt stabilizing at no more than 60 percent of GDP.  (I gather the National Academy of Sciences has issued a report with the same goal.)  CBPP notes that there’s no evidence for supporting that particular target, and argues that a goal of 70 percent of GDP is more achievable, and doesn’t require such painful cuts that everyone just says it’s impossible and gives up.  EPI doesn’t set a specific target.
• However, it does not make sense to try to balance the budget in the next year or so, while we’re still recovering from the recession.  Cutting spending sharply now would put us back into a recession.  Even Pew-Peterson says that policy changes shouldn’t be implemented until 2012.
• The major drivers of the long-term problem are 1) the growing costs of Medicare, Medicaid (especially the portion of Medicaid that pays for nursing homes), and to a lesser degree Social Security and 2) the large 2001 and 2003 tax cuts.  (EPI and CBPP note that Medicare and Medicaid are actually growing slightly slower than overall health care costs, and argue that the solution has to include overall control of health care costs.)
• The hole is too big to fill either by just cutting spending, or by just raising taxes, but will require a combination of the two.

That said, why the heck is Obama calling for a three-year freeze in domestic discretionary spending? Everyone agrees that domestic discretionary spending isn’t the problem — and if you cut it in half, we’d still run long-term budget deficits — and cause a great deal of harm in the process.  Paul Krugman is scathing — and accurately so.  It’s bad economics, distracts from the real challenges, and feeds into the Republican message machine.  I truly don’t get it.  Poking around the web, it sounds like the kindest thing that anyone is saying is that it’s just posturing and won’t really result in horrible cuts, but I’m not sure that’s any better.

More good reading:  How to Spot a Deficit Peacock, from the Center for American Progress.

The theme I chose for this version of the blog lets you upload your own photo for the frame in the heading (it originally had a truly adorable picture of a little girl).  I spent a while trying to decide what picture might represent a half-changed world, and then picked the one that’s there, which I took on Inauguration Day last year. One year later (well, plus 5 days), I do think we’re living in a half-changed world.  Not as much changed as I wanted, as I believed was coming, but changed.  If you had told me four years ago that we’d be at this stage, I’d have been pretty darn pleased.

I think this Administration has messed some things up.  If they hadn’t wasted so much time over the summer trying to be all bipartisan, health care would have been passed by now.  They seem to have just been blindsided by the populist rage over TARP.   I grind my teeth every time the President suggests that small-business tax cuts should be part of the jobs bill and ducks talking about direct job creation.   And while the public doesn’t care that there are still significant unfilled positions in the agencies waiting for political appointments, it’s a bad sign, and makes it hard for the government to do its job.  They’re not as smart as they think they are, and they’re trying to thread some awfully tight needles.

But I don’t have any reason to think that Clinton would have done any better over the past year, and I’m quite confident that McCain would have done a lot worse.  I think under a Republican administration, we’d have wound up with a “recovery” bill that was nothing but tax cuts, and we’d have national unemployment levels that look like Michigan’s.  It’s hard to rally the troops under a banner cry of “it could have been worse!” but it could have been a lot worse.

Update: Schmitt and Perlstein are far more thoughtful than I am.

Ok, hopefully this time it will work for real.  We’re still trying to get the permalinks to work (wordpress and typepad have slightly different default structures), but you can always try the search box in the sidebar.  Update: I think they’re working.  If you run into any broken links, please let me know.

Other than the conversion issues, I’ve been very impressed with WordPress — if I were starting a new blog now, I would definitely go with  WordPress.com for free hosted blogs with nearly all the functionality that TypePad charges for.  (The only thing I found was that you can’t have ads on wordpress.com, and you do need to pay for custom domains.)

In case anyone was wondering, the main issue was that Web.com, which is the hosting company T was using because they bought up his previous provider, doesn’t actually support multiple domains/sites on a single account unless you go to their much more expensive line.  We switched to InMotion Hosting and did in an afternoon what we had wasted hours upon hours trying to do previously.  Obviously, web.com can charge what they want, but it’s maddening that none of their customer service agents could tell us what the problem was.  If they had just said “you can’t do that with this account,” we’d have been fine.  But instead they kept on telling us the problem was with GoDaddy (where my domain is registered) or that we hadn’t given the change enough time to propagate.   They’ve got terrible online reviews, and deservedly so.   A secondary issue, of interest only to others who are switching from Typepad to another site, is that you need to turn domain mapping off from the premium site, as there’s no way to do it from the free site.  I assumed that downgrading to the free version (which doesn’t support domain mapping) would do it automatically, but that’s not the case.

I don't want to jinx us, and I certainly don't want to make light of the H1N1 flu, which has knocked several people of my acquaintance on their backsides, but so far this fall my family has been far less sick than in the average year.  And it's not just me — Fairfax county schools are reporting a 3.6 percent absenteeism rate, down from an average of 4.03 percent.  My theory is that everyone is being so good about washing hands, and not coming to work/school when they're sick, that they're passing around a lot fewer colds than usual.

[For the record, we did get both boys vaccinated last weekend.  The Fairfax health department mass clinic was amazingly efficient.   Vaccines have not yet been available for non-priority populations in this area, so neither T. nor I have been vaccinated.]

I listened to the health care debate in Congress on and off today while driving around to soccer fields and the mass flu vaccination site, and for the last hour I've had c-span on while sorting my clothes.  Although I know that there's still a long while to go before we actually get a law, and this bill is truly an act of sausage making, I'm still fascinated by the process.

Wow, the margin is a lot closer than I would have guessed– they've got exactly the 218 votes needed, with only one D not yet recorded.  I'll be interested to see how many of the Dems voting no are on the left.

Ok, here's the roll call results.  I'm not an expert on all members of Congress, but the only nos that jump out at me as being from the left are Kucinich, and maybe Artur Davis.

So, the big news of the evening was probably the passage of the Stupak amendment, which says that any insurance plan purchased through the "exchange" can't cover abortion.  My understanding is that this would NOT affect coverage under employer-provided insurance.   When I looked into this last year, I found out that about half of employer-provided plans do cover abortions. 

I think this is bad policy, for precisely the same reason that I think the Hyde amendment, which bans coverage of abortion under Medicaid, is bad policy.  It pushes abortions into the second trimester, which is more dangerous and more expensive.  But I'm not particularly surprised by it.  Fundamentally, I'd rather health insurance reform that didn't cover abortion than no health insurance reform.  And with such a thin margin, I'm not sure Pelosi had a choice.

The cynic in me wonders if maybe more of the public will holler when it's their insurance that is affected, not just poor women's coverage.

Update:  I listened to this NPR story on the Stupak amendment on my way home tonight, and now I'm even more confused.  They say that it doesn't prevent the exchange from including plans that cover abortion (although insurers would have to offer plans that were otherwise identical but didn't cover abortion) as long as you're paying with only your own money and don't receive a tax subsidy for the insurance.

So what I'm confused about is what are the rules for employer-provided insurance, which is also tax-subsidized.   Is it covered by the Stupak amendment?  Or are they pretending that employer-provided insurance isn't subsidized by taxpayers?

Update 2: Nice analysis of the D's who voted no from the NY Times.

I just finished Lev Grossman’s The Magicians.  Wow, this one was depressing.  The content was depressing, but I was also depressed because I kept on waiting for the payoff for slogging through this, and it never came.  I had heard a rave review of it on NPR, and at least one blogger I read loved it.  (Sorry, can’t find the link — feel free to speak up to defend it.)

Cory Doctorow liked it, and says that it’s a book of wonder without awe or sentimentality.  I guess that’s right.  It’s a scathing revisionist take on both Harry Potter and the Narnia books, (with some random references to The Once and Future King, and Dungeons and Dragons) imaging a magical school that is tedious and incomprehensible, and a journey through fantasy where people react realistically to being under attack for no obvious reason.   Oh, and the characters drink and curse and have sex.  The main character is miserable in his pre-magic life, miserable at school, and miserable when he gets to live out his fantasy.  The epigram to the book is Prospero breaking his wand, but it should have been Hamlet’s “there is nothing either good or
bad, but thinking makes it so.”  I wanted to give him a kick in the pants for much of the book.

There were also major plot holes that irritated me.  Why have the two main characters randomly promoted a year at  school other than that the author had decided to make school last 5 years rather than 4, but were too lazy to come up with material to fill another year?  Why spend a huge chunk of time telling how the main character survived naked in Antartica, and then have the characters obsess about whether to bring their parkas to Narnia/Fillory?