Gongol.com Archives: July 2014
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Nobody is eager to get into a new confrontation...but is the risk of inaction even worse?

Chicago is a great city for many reasons, but its red tape makes business formation a huge uphill battle. And that's entirely the fault of local government.

One has to applaud the initiative to hold the authorities accountable for the product they're selling to the public

One of the little charms of living in Iowa is that sometimes the local news is really anything but newsworthy


How to tell when someone's trying to persuade you of something that's totally wrong

(Video - containing strong language)



Paying millions for some artist's "messy bed" just shows that some people have more cash than brains

Which is a bitter pill to swallow for a town rebuilding after a devastating tornado

A satirical news program with segments longer than those on "60 Minutes"

A dashboard tracking the metrics Janet Yellen says will tell them about the progress of economic recovery

The Illinois Supreme Court appears to have cemented their fates




Just one more amony many small signs that the era of low-skill jobs for humans is over






An absurdly violent holiday weekend should have people saying that enough is enough



Of course, the practice of catering to interest groups is neither new nor avoidable, but its results may cause us to need to push the "reset" button

(Video) In an unscripted moment, the public face of astronomy points out that it's adults who have the stupid beliefs, not kids

At least, that's the current plan. That may be a rather abrupt stop for a lot of people who aren't expecting it.


Some people in Grundy County barely escaped serious injury because they didn't have time to fully react. Related: Public tornado shelters may be on the verge of becoming a widespread thing.

Meanwhile, speculation has it that News Corp. is looking at buying the Tribune newspapers.


It's an ongoing development (one that's been underway for generations), but we only tend to notice it when there are periodic down-cycles in the economy...and we've recently been through one of those. The challenge is to think and act upon ways to accommodate the inevitable during the up-cycle, when we have the available surplus resources to invest.

New bullpens, more signs






And a hot spot is melting an asphalt road. We ignore the hazards beneath the magnificent national park at our own peril.

Someone call Eric Cartman, hippie exterminator

They're big investments in equipment with a small impact on the labor market, which is exactly the kind of thing a company like Microsoft is wise to invest in.

A dispatch from Omaha

A staffer is assigned to carefully track what press corps reporters are saying in addition to their conventionally published reports

(Video) One of his best pieces of work, and that's saying something

Everything from 1847 to 1991 is now available.

Microsoft is laying off 18,000 people over the next year. Some think the company's internal announcement could have used a little more direct language.

There's no better draw than great content. But great content is hard to create.

Their new show "Weather Geeks" is being spun as a show for the real science fiends out there. It's to be hosted by a university professor.

One writer came up with a list of 17 things that could change. There are undoubtedly many, many more.

Almost 1,000 people have gotten it (in Guinea, Liberia, and Sierra Leone), and the majority are now dead. This is a very serious problem.

The same government that can lose all kinds of e-mails from high-level IRS officials somehow manages to keep incredible amounts of data on airline passengers


Salk Institute scientists think they've found a gene that signals a cell to stop moving...and when that gene is turned off, it permits the cell to move freely -- which is what causes cancer metastasis.

New Jersey will lose a bunch of white-collar jobs over the deal. And did the nation gain anything as a whole? Nope. It's a net loss to the public when states battle each other like this.



An estimated 300 cattle were killed, and lots of buildings and equipment were destroyed, too. The damage to grain bins is visible from the nearby highway.


That's the population of a fair-sized American city like West Des Moines. It is significant but it also shouldn't overwhelm our capacity to respond in a humane manner. Bloomberg reports that they'll have to wait an average of 587 days for a court hearing -- which is anything but swift justice. ■ We really have to think through this situation: The level of desperation that parents would have to feel to send their minor children on a trip from Central America through Mexico and through a heavily-guarded border, entirely in the "care" of human traffickers suggests that the situation in their homelands is terrible. Americans don't even send their kids unsupervised to the park without facing charges of neglect. The disparity is troubling -- we're talking about thousands of children under the age of 12, as well as teenagers (and we shouldn't forget that America doesn't even recognize its own teenagers as being mature enough to do thousands of things that fall far short of traveling across an entire country to try to cross a border illegally.) ■ It's worth bearing in mind that "America", in the minds of the parents who try to send their children here, must be so much better than home that it's worth the enormous risk and the inconceivable heartbreak of those children leaving home. That should give us some pause to consider just how fortunate we are to be here. ■ We clearly need to revise our immigration strategy. That people would want so badly to be here -- and that we don't have a system that welcomes more of them through planned, deliberate, and legal means -- tells us that it has to be fixed. There's plenty of room in America (ever been to one of our many places home to only one person per square mile?) -- we just need to put the right system in place for accepting more immigrants in a humane and sustainable manner.

And not when he was a kid, either

Forbes says it's the #2 city for business and careers in America. Lincoln (Neb.) is 6th, and Omaha is in the top 25.


Cultural and political issues notwithstanding, the Mideast isn't going to be a peaceful place if the economics aren't fixed. There's always instability wherever lots of young men are unemployed.

A number of American companies have used (or considered) mergers with foreign companies as a strategy for reducing their tax burdens. The President finds this an appealing subject on which to score political points by talking vaguely about things like "economic patriotism" instead of actually fixing the problem, which is that America has the highest official corporate tax rate in the world. This official rate isn't the one that gets paid -- the effective rate is lower because so many companies chase loopholes, credits, tax breaks, and other exceptions in order to reduce the actual amount paid. The international mergers of which the President speaks are just an especially visible method of tax avoidance. ■ It's not really a matter of patriotism (or un-patriotism) -- it's that the companies are behaving rationally (trying to reduce their tax rates) within the boundaries of a tax system that is completely irrational. But actually fixing the problem rather than grandstanding would require the President to stop capitalizing on anti-capital rhetoric, and he's not about to do that. He's not a Communist, but he and his team are terribly anti-capital. ■ The payoff (in political terms) is quick and easy -- it whips up voter enthusiasm against "fat cats" and "big corporations" -- while the consequences are hard to see. But the consequences are real: Every corporation is owned, in the end, by individual people. If the profits of the corporation are taxed directly at the corporate level, and again at the individual level when paid out as dividends -- both times at high rates -- then people are going to make other decisions. ■ Anything short of a 100% tax rate won't halt investment completely, but high rates have at least some effect that discourages investment at the margins. Investment, in turn, is what keeps businesses afloat, and that keeps people employed. Nevermind, though, because the explanation is far less viscerally satisfying to some members of the left wing than villifying those who have accumulated capital and blaming them for what goes wrong.

A very compelling argument on the nature of our relationship with Putin's Russia -- less Cold War 2, more Mafia-versus-Feds

The home of Iowa City and the University of Iowa wants to become a test site

Dubai plans to build an entirely climate-controlled city

A group including Google and others is offering a million dollars for someone to build a better power inverter. Prizes for defined outcomes are probably the most efficient way to get really interesting public (and sometimes non-public) goods developed.

And here we all used to trust Buzzfeed for its penetrating analysis and copious footnotes. The site has always been fluff posted as clickbait, and that's fine enough -- but it's never really been an authoritative source on anything, so we shouldn't be surprised when it falls short of high standards.

Chicago tries not to stack poor people in awful public-housing tenements like they used to, so they've turned to voucher programs. And, in an acknowledgement of reality, they've also seen that it's important to get people away from crime and low opportunity if they are to break out of cycles of poverty. But it's hard not to be taken aback a bit when hearing that some vouchers are being used for rents as high as $3,000 a month. Each individual step in the decision process appears to make sense, but the result sounds crazy.

If so, why? And how much is enough?





(Video)

Success is never perpetually assured


They want people to use a standalone app for chatting, rather than the built-in service previously used inside Facebook

That this story even makes the news is a good sign that troubles aren't nearly what they could be in the Quad Cities

(Video - language not appropriate for some audiences)