Gongol.com Archives: October 2005
Brian Gongol



Agriculture (10.7.2005)
FDA Likely to OK Sales of Clone Meat, Milk
The products themselves are unlikely to pose any real health threat to the consumer. The real questions are instead ethical (is it right to clone living beings?) and practical (if clones are susceptible to certain abnormalities, are they more likely to die prematurely?).

Aviation News (10.7.2005)
Huge Project to Overhaul O'Hare Airport Approved
9 million pages of documentation. That should be a point of embarrassment, not pride. The full report takes quite some time to download, if it's even possible.
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Aviation News (10.7.2005)
FAA Privatizing Some Operations
One significant rule behind every privatization is that it must take advantage of private-sector competition; that is, there must be multiple vendors capable of providing the same service. Otherwise, it's too easy for privatization to slip into graft.

Business and Finance (10.7.2005)
More Internet Bubble Fun
AOL buys out an "expert" weblog site. They were thinking of spending up to $25 million.

Threats to Western Civilization (10.7.2005)
Dispute Over Whether NYC Bomb Plot Suspect is In US
FBI, Homeland Security in open dispute over who's in charge of the investigation. From a Federalist model, it's a job for the NYPD to investigate with the assistance of national authorities. The President claims that ten Al Qaeda plots have been derailed by US efforts, but it's a number without any meaningful value, since there's nothing to compare it to. A restaurant could claim that ten people might have choked, but didn't -- yet that doesn't tell us whether they would have choked if they'd been sitting in a different restaurant, nor whether they only almost choked because of how their food was prepared.

Aviation News (10.7.2005)
302 Airline Passengers Had to be Smacked Down Last Year
FAA statistics on "unruly passengers" show pretty consistent figures for 2000 through 2004. 2005 looking like it may be a down year, with 119 incidents as of mid-September.

Agriculture (10.7.2005)
Creepy European Hunting Fly Arrives in US
Though the arrival was accidental, some people may be pleased with it since the fly kills several kinds of insect pests