The Daily Cannibal |
- Welcome To The New Cannibal
- Older, Not Wiser?
- RIP OWS
- Worth 1000 Words
- Job Creation, American Style
- Sick Leave
| Posted: 10 Jul 2012 08:13 PM PDT We have changed our page design considerably here at The Daily Cannibal, making it more reader-friendly and easier to use. The previous “scroll-down” format has been replaced with a “slider” at the top. The slider presents the five most recent stories in a slide-show graphic. Prior stories are displayed chronologically in “thumbnail” grid that displays the opening graphic and a few lines of text. All this enables our readers to see a much larger amount of different content on one page, enabling them to pick topics of interest to them with just a few screenviews rather than requiring an ongoing “scrolldown.” There is also a vastly expanded menu of one-click social media options for readers who want to share our posts on these sites. This is unabashedly self-serving, as it is aimed chiefly at expanding our readership through the unsubtle device of making it easier for our readers to do it for us. We have reduced our “categories” menu considerably, and restricted ourselves to one category per post, instead of the multi-category slaw we had employed. We did this because our advisers told us to. Form does not always follow function, and we decided to trade detail for simplicity. This should impart a new brevity to our efforts, which we dislike intensely. Over the next few days/weeks, we will be learning how to use this new thingie, meaning that there will likely be hilarious glitches and strange jumps and starts to the page. People with teenage children will be familar with this kind of behavior. We thank Erik and Gillian Salit for their unflagging efforts to bring this project to completion. Gillian did the design, and Erik did the plumbing, often at wee hours of the morning after strange discussions with the Editor, whose most common comment was “I don’t understand….” We thought we could do this in a month. It has taken at least six. Part of this owes to the editor’s strange habits of communication, which are desultory at best. The rest has to do with the behavior of electrons, which are notoriously hard to pin down, existing, as they do, in an amorphous smear of probabilities — much like The Daily Cannibal itself, whose position and/or momentum resist all efforts at simultaneous quantification. And so we careen down the tunnels of journalism with an unknown fate, uncertain direction and disputable mass. Sounds familiar. We hope you enjoy our transformation, and, please, tell all your friends. The one thing we haven’t changed is our shameless appetite for attention, dispute, tumult and general mischief-making. We’re enjoying the ride, and we’re glad to have you along.  |
| Posted: 24 Jun 2012 08:29 PM PDT  It's their future, grandad. As people age, do they become more conservative? They evidence seems to say they do. Many opinions have been ventured about why that is, but no one reallly knows — like many of life’s imponderables, the topic remains shrouded in speculation masquerading as informed analysis. In today’s New York Times, David Leonhardt tries to impart some measure of science to the discussion by presenting a statistical potpourri that seems to demonstrate that there is a new “”generation gap” in the US, and that the division is sharply characterized by an increasing liberal/conservative divide between young and old:
Seems strange, though, doesn’t it? After all, we are faced with an appparent contradiction between a couple of time-honored ideas: 1. People get wiser as they get older. 2. All the smart people are liberals. But there may be a sensible and understandable explanation for this, and that focuses more on risk than politics: As people age, they are less likely to favor policies and programs that promise social upheaval. The risk is too high. If you are young, you may be willing to tolerate a much larger probability that experiments and untested ideas may not work. First of all, you have more time to fix things if they break, and second, you have a lot less to lose — your accumulated wealth is not great, and taking a sizable whack to your nest egg, if you have one, can be much easier to repair. Of course, some also claim that as we age, we have the benefit of having watched all manner of noble schemes emerge and founder, either because of their naivete, their poor design, or the complexities of their implementation — and often because of all three. Does this make us too averse to change of any sort? Maybe. As we age, we also have a greater stake in the social constructs that promote security for the elderly — Medicare and Social Security chiefly, but also things like New York’s “stop and frisk” policy, which improves the apparent security of the weaker and more prosperous at the expense of the dignity and liberty of the younger and less Caucasian. While a younger version of ourselves might bristle at the notion that officers can detain, search and imprison young people for possession of a few grams of marijuana, the older citizen might shrug and write it off as the price of civil order, even at the expense of civil rights. Still, we wonder if there might not be some way to balance the needs of the 40+ population for stability with the desire of the under-40 set to seek bold solutions for newer and larger problems sets: climate change, population growth, wealth inequality, job creation — all of which will have a much greater impact on the young than the older. Here we have a novel proposal. Society has no difficulty accepting the idea that its older citizens require a greater degree of society’s output than younger ones. As Leonhradt points out:
Should we not have some sort of compensatory mechanism that recognizes the greater stake the young have in the future than the old, who will be necessarily be spending less time in it? This seems to make sense — and therein lies a solution: Let voting, whether for president, congress, mayor or dogcatcher – be proportional inversely to the voter’s age. That is, an 18 year old would have a vote of 1/18, a 19 year old a vote of 1/19, and so on. Each succeeding year of age decreases the value of that person’s vote, so that a 36 year old would have 1/2 the vote of an 18 ear old, a 54 year old would have 1/3, a 72 year old 1/4, and so on. This principle of “reciprocal representation” would concentrate electoral power in those with the greatest stake in the future, in exchange for the economic contribution each is required to make to secure the safe retirement of the increasingly elderly. Some might argue that giving the 18 to 36 year old segment of the population such disproportionate power would be unwise — even foolhardy. Indeed, it seems likely that there would be a period in which society would face stresses, but this kind of thing has happened before, as new voters adjusted to their franchise and learned to use their power responsibly. In the past, the right to vote has been extended several times in our republic — from landowners to the male adult population, to non-whites, and most recently, to women and voters between the ages of 18 and 21. Each time, large numbers of new voters with specific special interests were absorbed by the electorate with no longer-term disruption to the democratic process, and, ultimately, to the greater benefit of our democratic society. Each time, this extension required courage and vision. Now, when our youngest citizens face new and more complex challenges that have less and less impact on those whose futures are more secure, and will remain so through the labor and output of the young, it seems to make sense to give them more to say about the future they will inherit.
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| Posted: 22 Jun 2012 10:10 PM PDT  Someone's mother? Didn't think so. Sez Zombie over at PJ Media.com:
Yup. The Occupy folks have taken the position that any action that involves police suppressing our natural urges is indefensible, and that kids selling their own bodies is really just kind of natural, ya dig, so f**k da police and you know the rest. Back in the late 60s, SDS Harvard recognized that Nixon’s treacherous unwinding of the Viet Nam war was clearly just a ploy to deprive SDS of a cause to rally the troops, so they set off in search of a new one. Suddenly the campus was littered in flyers demanding another general strike. A strike against injustice. A strike against the capitalist pigs. Right on! What were they striking for? Well, for painter’s apprentices. It obtains that Harvard, that imperialist bastion of privilege, was paying the apprentices to the painters that kept Harvard looking bright and spiffy (and a very good job of it they do, too) a lower salary than (gasp) the painters themselves. Outrage flared. The clarion sounded. The students yawned. That was the end of SDS. It’s a shame, in a way. We always had a soft spot for the original core of OWS, because we thought they had a point, which they were very smart to keep very simple. They just said “Help! We’re hurting. We’ve lost jobs, we’ve lost funding, and we need some assistance here.” When people said “Well, what’s your agenda? What solutions do you have?” OWS quite properly said “WHAT??!! Are you kidding me?” “We knew you guys were having a ball, making piles of money, playing fast and loose with everything from mortgages to money supply, but as long as we got some of it, we left you alone. Now you’ve crashed and burned, and you turn to us and ask us what to do? YOU GUYS ARE IN CHARGE! DO SOMETHING!” Then it all turned into the predictably silly fiasco of absurd agendas, like “forgive all student loans.” Right. Like the US taxpayer can take on another $1 trillion of debt. The largely sentient core of the original lights slowly drifted away and left parkfulls of drifters, drug addicts, con men and lunatics, so we’re left with the sad remnants, the litter and human detritus, of something that might actually have amounted to something. The good news: It’s late June, and there is no meaningful reappearance of the magpies the cold and sleet chased away last year. With any luck, OWS is as much of a relic in 2012 as Solyndra. (Thanks to Bill Quick at the DP for the heads up.)
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| Posted: 22 Jun 2012 08:17 PM PDT  |
| Posted: 22 Jun 2012 01:12 AM PDT  Only eighty more boxes to go... Megan Gordon is a young woman with a master’s degree in English literature from the University of Colorado. She wanted to be a teacher at one point, like her mom, but that didn’t work out the way she had hoped — so she moved from Boston back home to the Bay Area and started baking pies. She took the pies to farmers’ markets in San Francisco, and people liked them, so she rented space in a commercial kitchen, filled out the blizzard of paperwork that presumably guarantees innocent consumers that they are not eating more than the allowable portion of insect parts, and put up a website to advertise her new “bakery” — which existed only online and wherever she set up a card table. She named her business “Marge,” after her grandmother, who knew a thing or two about pies. And what a great time to start a business! The economy was setting new records. By this, I mean that people were losing jobs at rates unseen since the Depression, housing foreclosures were hitting new highs, people were spending money with the reckless abandon of an Amish aunt, and the government was doing its usual wonderful job of looking after itself. But Marge putted along, doing well enough to keep Megan optimistic that it could be a success. Not having any connection with green energy or high speed light rail, Marge didn’t qualify for any stimulus assistance. It wasn’t likely that its rates of production could be expanded to any large scale level. A pie is either homemade or it’s not. And the internet did not seem likely to help, as it’s very hard to deliver pies by UPS. Then two things happened. Before starting Marge, Megan published a cooking/baking blog called A Sweet Spoonful, which combines very well-written short essays with recipes and some marvelous photography. (Go look, or don’t. You’ll get hungry if you do.) A publisher who had been impressed contacted her with a book contract. Then, her granola took off. That photo up top shows Megan sitting in front of only one-quarter of the orders she had boxed up a few days ago for shipment to a national clientele. Granola, it obtains, can be delivered by UPS. Granola? You bet. The pies were just fine, but for the last year or so, Marge has been rapidly earning a reputation for making the best damn granola you can find. So Megan dropped the pie, moved to Seattle (boyfriend), and focused on just the granola. What makes it special? Let her tell you:
Last week, the Wall Street Journal featured Marge’s Granola in its “Bits and Bites” section, and the orders really started rolling in. People buy it online, or by phone (Megan answers). Stores are stocking it. Is Marge the next Ben and Jerry’s? Maybe, maybe not. But it’s off to a helluva start. And there you have it. An overnight success. All it took was years of hard work, gritty determination and an understanding that if you make something really good, people will find a way to buy it, no matter how broke they are. These are things we used to understand in this country. Maybe we will again, if enough Megans start enough Marges and enough people see what it takes to make something out of nothing.  |
| Posted: 21 Jun 2012 09:24 PM PDT
What she did not expect was that 12 years into the new century, only 17% of Congress and the same proportion of corporate board members would be female, or that women would be making only 77 cents to a man’s dollar. But that’s the reality she sees, hence the need for a new feminist agenda. In one of those happy coincidences that sometimes punctuate a news junkie’s day, just as I was listening to a radio interview with Governor Kunin I spotted this headline from Europe: “EU court: Workers sick on leave can get extra time off.” Seems a court has decided that workers in the European Union, whose companies must already give them four weeks of paid vacation, are entitled to additional paid leave as compensation if they get sick during their vacation. Though this does raise the question of how to prevent fraud, it seems a logical conclusion – if, that is, you consider time off work a fairly basic right, rather than a grudging privilege as it is in the U.S., where workers’ rights are relatively trivialized. Gov. Kunin cited a conversation she had with women visiting from Ecuador who were shocked that our government didn’t guarantee paid maternity leave. Welcome to Benightistan, ladies.  |
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