Wednesday, January 5, 2011

The Latest from Boing Boing

The Latest from Boing Boing

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Donuts, genocide, and the American dream

Posted: 05 Jan 2011 12:18 AM PST

Most visitors to Los Angeles and the west coast are struck by the number of donut shops, but few know that the vast majority of local donut shops are owned by Cambodian refugees who fled the killing fields of Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge. This is also the case in many other parts of the west. Through an interesting set of circumstances, Cambodian families got a foothold in the market, then helped other families through traditional loan systems and sharing of knowledge so they could earn their own piece of the American dream. These are people who have experienced unspeakable atrocities in their immediate families, and bust their asses (often 364+ days a year) to make a better life for their children in North America. So go enjoy a decadent donut sometime soon, and be extra friendly to the remarkable people who make these deceptively quotidian treats. The best documentary on the subject is Cambodian Doughnut Dreams , although the hygiene-averse dude in The Darkside of Donuts teaser trailer best articulates my own relationship with that quintessential American delight. [Video link]

Video of people enjoying winter in Dutch town

Posted: 04 Jan 2011 10:57 PM PST

Dutch Winter from Kasper Bak on Vimeo. In the winter the waters around the town of Lemmer in the Netherlands freeze over and everyone spends the next several months blissfully skating from place to place. (Thanks, Simon!)

Asus loads shotgun with tablets large and small

Posted: 04 Jan 2011 10:04 PM PST

asuseeeslate.jpgAsus offered its response to Apple's iPad at CES today, and it came in forms large and small. The flagship model is a Windows 7 monster described as "the most powerful tablet in the world." That it is named the Asus Slate seems immediately suspect, Microsoft's branding efforts already having been tarnished by the dismal HP Slate that CEO Steve Ballmer offered up last year. That said, Asus' is such a powerful beast that its uniqueness makes guessing a mug's game: an i5 CPU, a 12.1" multitouch screen, 64GB SSD and 4GB RAM put it in a league of its own, where HP's Slate contained the same feeble Atom CPU as cheap netbooks. If nothing else, this will be a litmus test for the usual complaints about how Windows never works as a touch OS: if this epic tablet still feels less responsive and finger-friendly than an iPad, we can safely say that the decade-long quest to sell consumers tablet PCs running desktop editions of Windows has finally, irremediably soiled the bed. And if it works, yay! Awesome tablet time. Pricing isn't final, but you can sign up already for notification at Amazon. Engadget says it'll be $1000 and up. But this is was just the beginning today: Asus also announced up a 10" model running Android 3 that has a slide-out keyboard, a 7-inch "Eee Memo" model with a Snapdragon CPU, and what looks like a Fujitsu-style convertible tablet laptop. Asus' lean toward larger displays is interesting, as Samsung's teeny 7" Galaxy Tab turned out to be 2010's only strong answer to Apple in what analysts imaginatively described as the "tablet market." The expectation was that others would follow suit, but Asus is clearly unsure what will stick. Critics smell weakness in this sort of shotgun strategy, but it's good for customer choice.

The nightmare queue to enter CES:Unveiled

Posted: 04 Jan 2011 09:16 PM PST

VIDEO LINK The first big event at the annual Consumer Electronics Show in Vegas is CES: Unveiled, a press event designed to show off some of the year's best new items. In practice, it's often a bit of a letdown (Gizmodo's Brian Lam found this year's thin pickings engendered a sense of "crippling cynicism") because the best stuff is announced the next day at individual press conferences. But that doesn't stop the attending hordes forming a queue hours before the doors are set to open! And this is nothing on the "Keynote Speech" queue, which traditionally has to be organized by teams of ushers over several floors of the Venetian/Sands Expo complex. Mercifully, the video compression here conceals the 'fractal vomit' carpet design that is mandatory in hotels and casinos in the state of Nevada.

Sky Prodigy telescope knows position of 4000 celestial bodies

Posted: 04 Jan 2011 08:14 PM PST

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Photo: Heather Beschizza

Celestron's new Sky Prodigy 130 wasn't much use within CES Unveiled's carpeted ballroom, but the $800 telescope promises to track celestial bodies by itself to deliver instant gratification to observers. "In three minutes, you're an instant astronomer," said Celestron's Michelle Meskill. "You don't need to have a computer, and 4,000 bodies are in its database." Its 130mm lens and 5" mirror are powerful enough to offer a look at Saturn's rings and the Galilean moons. I'm conflicted about these gadgets. When I was a kid, I sat on Worthing beach at night, filling in an already-ancient copy of the I Spy the Sky workbook with the aid of a pair of bad-ass but very plain binoculars. Some analog experiences are such that computerization doesn't appeal much to me, even though my life is computerized up to the eyeballs. That's ridiculous in all the most obvious ways, I know! But it's the way I feel; actually going there being out of the question, getting as far I as I can without help is part of the fun.

Your new cyberpunk goggles

Posted: 04 Jan 2011 07:43 PM PST

gogglesCES.jpg Recon Instruments' $430 CAD "Transcend" goggles include a GPS receiver and a heads-up display. According to the website, it is "completely non-obtrusive for front and peripheral vision, making this real-time head mounted display the ultimate solution for use in fast-paced environments." On the HUD are speed and distance traveled, a virtual odometer, temperature and location. You can also hook it up to a computer to download GPS-tracked records of your visits to Stambul and Freeside. They're taking pre-orders at the official site, but my feeling is this is something that needs to be experienced first-hand before even thinking of plunking cash down. Product Page [Recon Instruments]

Unpleasant Carpet

Posted: 04 Jan 2011 07:19 PM PST

carpetCES.jpg I am at CES Unveiled, the press event which kicks off the biggest consumer electronics trade show of the year. This is its carpet.

The cutest Mame cabinet you ever did see

Posted: 04 Jan 2011 09:06 PM PST

minimamecabinet.jpg Ever built your own Mame cabinet? Owning and anachrofitting an old Jamma box is great fun -- as is the satisfaction of being able to answer the question "What arcade game is that?" by saying "Every one of them!" But it gets old: the huge, 300 pound cabinet; the heavy TV screen or monitor crudely mounted within; and the noisy old PC lurking inside, gobbling energy like a broken fridge. Enter Dean Liou of Envador, who hand-crafted a compact cabinet that rests easily on a desktop and shows off authentic arcade controls and some clever design. "Usually, you have to dedicate a machine to it," Liou said. "Here you just put in your regular laptop and go." The Happ arcade controls are hooked up with an i-Pac USB adapter, and there's a slide-out tray at the bottom to hide a keyboard and mouse.Dreams of owning certain valuable rarities aside, this seems the perfect blend of old and new. It's a one-off, but Liou said he'd consider making one for about $2,000. Here's the story behind it and some video.

Weather.com Text Alerts

Posted: 04 Jan 2011 08:33 PM PST

weather-channel-logo.jpeg I used to be a weather idiot. When it was going to rain, I usually found out by getting wet or by seeing everyone else holding an umbrella or rain coat on public transportation. I wanted something that informed me when it was going to rain (but not something that I had to look for). I wondered if there was a text message alert system for when it rained. I did some searching and found weather.com's text message alerts. I signed up for Rain Alert's and get a text message at 4 pm anytime rain is expected the next day (you can customize the time). It's fantastic. You can have them send a rain alert for "Any Rain (which I use)," "Moderate or Heavy Rain" or "Heavy Rain only." I also get the daily forecast every morning at 6, which gives me enough time to grab a jacket before heading to work if the text says I need one. You can sign up for e-mail or text or both messages, and customize times. They have a bunch of other options as well, like pollen alerts, extreme heat or cold alerts, surf conditions. The alerts are free, but you have to pay whatever text message fees your phone company regularly gouges you for. The alerts do seem to get messed up by an hour when the time changes (as do I, I suppose) and I have to go online and change them on my account. I've been using this for two years now and am now better prepared (and happier) when it does rain (plus I get to impress my friends if my pocket buzzes at 4 by announcing it's going to rain tomorrow). I don't know if another service like this exists, but I couldn't find another one when I looked before. -- Matt Salazar Weather.com Text Alerts Free Be sure to check out comments from other weatherbugs at Cool Tools. Or, submit a tool!

Make mine Kolache

Posted: 04 Jan 2011 06:12 PM PST

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My experience of kolaches, the crazy delicious doughnut-like pastries brought to the central US by Slavic immigrants, is limited to a couple of places in Fredericksburg, TX. But there doesn't appear to be a single thing wrong with Kolache Kitchen in Oklahoma City, which Erin Meister of Serious Eats recently visited. Meister accurately points out that the genius of the kolache is its bready base, which approximates that of a dinner roll. What gets slathered on top or baked into the middle can be either sweet or savory -- Meister likes Kolache Kitchen's apricot/sweet cheese, cinnamon/apple and poppy seed versions, because what person in their right mind wouldn't. The result, especially when consumed fresh from the oven after a long day's drive, can be life-changing. Kolache Kitchen also serves lunch, apparently, but you have to wonder why. (Photo by Erin Meister for Serious Eats.)

The design misery of stickers

Posted: 04 Jan 2011 06:23 PM PST

u260.jpg The IdeaPad U260 is, in the words of Lenovo's Stephen Miller, "modeled on a leather journal." It's a gorgeous machine, cast in a bronze-like metal and complete with a leathery texture where the palms rest. It weighs 3 pounds and has a 12.5" display, making it lighter than recent ultraportables like the 13" MBA, even though it runs a relatively powerful i5 CPU. Nice. But his presentation's key moment--flipping the machine over to show off the beautiful underside and its exquisitely cut air vents--was a sad trombone moment for me. What's the point if it's just going to get covered in ugly partner stickers? We all mocked HP for the flip-out sticker tray on its Slate tablet, but you know what? At least it took a lick at solving the problem!

CES: Hands-on with Lenovo's ThinkPad X120e

Posted: 04 Jan 2011 08:18 PM PST

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Photo: Heather Beschizza
Lenovo's ThinkPad x120e succeeds the x100e, its entry in the 11" super-netbook category that took off last year. I just played with it a little and am quite impressed, especially given its $399 price tag. But what I really want is to get my paws on a better-specced model.


See, I own an x100. It's a perfectly good machine, and I got it because standard netbooks just don't cut it. But I never really felt it deserved the ThinkPad imprimatur, and the love just wasn't there. Anyone familiar with superior models in the line is liable to be tempted but it, then vaguely disappointed. Though pitched as an upgrade on netbooks, which it rather succeeds in being (along with similar 11" models from Asus, Acer and so on) it's still a pale shadow of great subnotes like Lenovo's own ThinkPad x200.

The new one felt responsive to use and solid to the touch, and if you just want a decent netbook, the new price makes the x120 attractive, especially if you're into that ThinkPad look 'n' feel. Stephen Miller, Lenovo's man at the CES Unveiled, said that the new model's big advantage is in its new AMD graphics chipset.

"You get the battery life and cool temperatures of integrated graphics with the performance of a discrete CPU," he said. "That's been the problem in this family of PCs: the graphics."

He's talking about HD YouTubes just not working that great, among other things, and it's true that this is a common complaint of netbooks that use Intel's Atom CPUs and the last-gen AMD chips used in the x100.

But where I'm thinking it'll really shine is with the SSD option, newly offered with the fresh model. It's expensive and hard to explain why its advantages -- fast-booting apps and a general feeling of snappiness -- are worth paying double for. But with the AMD Fusion CPU and plenty of RAM, that could make for a Windows "netbook" that gives the 11" MacBook Air a real run for its money at a cheaper price. Watch for a full review ASAP.

Memorex + AC/DC (Boing Boing Flickr Pool)

Posted: 04 Jan 2011 08:32 PM PST

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Photograph contributed to the Boing Boing Flickr Pool by BB reader Ken Fager (website) of Whitewater, Wisconsin.

The Price of Everything

Posted: 04 Jan 2011 09:45 PM PST

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"According to Eduardo Porter of The New York Times editorial board, prices are more interesting than most of us realize. And the prices that never appear on a price tag are the most fascinating of all. In his new book The Price of Everything: Solving the Mystery of Why We Pay What We Do (2010, Portfolio), Porter explores the surprising ways prices affect every aspect of our lives, including where we live, who we marry, how many kids we have, and even how religious we are."

Here is the introduction to Porter's book.

PRICES ARE EVERYWHERE

Anybody who has visited a garbage dump in the developing world knows that value is an ambiguous concept. To most people in the developed world, household waste is worthless, of course. That's why we throw it away. Apparently, Norwegians are willing to pay about $114 a ton for somebody else to sort their recyclables from the general garbage. A survey of families in the Carter community of Tennessee several years ago found they were willing to pay $363 a year, in today's money, to avoid having a landfill nearby.

But slightly beyond our immediate experience, waste becomes a valuable commodity. In Kamboinsé, outside Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso, farmers pay municipal trash haulers to dump unsorted solid waste on their sorghum and millet fields as fertilizer -- bits of plastic included. The going rate in 2003 was 400 francs per ton. In New Delhi, a study in 2002 found that waste pickers earned two rupees per kilo of PET soda bottles and seven rupees per kilo of hard plastic shampoo bottles. A child working on foot on Delhi's dumps could make twenty to thirty rupees per day.

Waste, in fact, confronts us with the same value proposition as anything else. The price we put on it -- what we will trade to have it, or have it go away -- is a function of its attendant benefits or costs. A bagful of two-rupee PET bottles is more valuable to an Indian child who hasn't eaten today than to me, a well-fed journalist in New York. What she must do to get it -- spend a day scavenging among the detritus of India's capital, putting her life and health at risk -- is, to her, not too high a price to pay because life is pretty much the only thing she has. She has little choice but to risk it for food, clothing, shelter, and whatever else she needs. I, by contrast, have many things. I have a reasonable income. If there's one thing I have too little of, it is free time. The five cents I could get for an empty PET bottle at the supermarket's recycling kiosk are not worth the trouble of redeeming it.

The purpose of this comparison is not to underscore that the rich have more opportunities than the poor. It is that the poor choose among their options the same way the rich do, assessing the prices of their alternatives. The relative costs and benefits of the paths open to them determine the behavior of the poorest Indian girl and the richest American man. These values are shaped by the opportunities they have and the constraints they face. The price we put on things -- what we will trade for our lives or our refuse -- says a lot about who we are.

The price of garbage provides a guide to civilization. Pollution is cheapest in poor countries. Their citizens are more readily willing to accept filth in exchange for economic growth. Yet the relative price of pollution rises as people become richer. Eventually it be comes expensive enough that it can alter the path of development. China is a dirty place. Yet underlying its dismal air and foul water is a choice that balances the costs of pollution in bad health, poisonous rivers, and so forth against the cost of cutting back production or retooling plants to control their effluvia. It is a different choice from that of Switzerland, where preserving environmental assets -- clean air, trees, wild animals -- is considered more valuable than providing manufacturing jobs to unemployed farmers. Twice as many Swiss as Chinese are members of environmental organizations. More than a third of the Swiss population believes environmental pollution is the most important problem facing the nation; only 16 percent of Chinese feel the same.

But as China grows, the price of building one more coal-fired power plant, measured in terms of its contribution to acid rain, global warming, and the rest will one day exceed the value the Chinese place on the extra output. As it keeps growing, it will likely evolve out of the most noxious industries, like steel and chemicals, into less polluting sectors, like medical and financial services. It may even one day buy its steel and chemicals from poorer countries with a higher tolerance of foul water and air. In other words, it will behave more like Switzerland or the United States. One study concluded that emissions of sulfur dioxide peak when a country's income per person reaches around $8,900 to $10,500. In the United States, sulfur-dioxide emissions soared until the passage in 1970 of the Clean Air Act. Since then, emissions have fallen by half.

HEREIN LIES THE central claim of this book: every choice we make is shaped by the prices of the options laid out before us -- what we assess to be their relative costs -- measured up against their benefits. Sometimes the trade-offs are transparent and straightforward -- such as when we pick the beer on sale over our favorite brand. But the Indian scavenger girl may not be aware of the nature of her transaction. Knowing where to look for the prices steering our lives--and understanding the influence of our actions on the prices arrayed before us--will not only help us better assess our decisions. The prices we face as individuals and societies--how they move us, how they change as we follow one path or another--provide a powerful vantage point upon the unfolding of history.

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Nearly two decades ago, when he was chief economist of the World Bank, Lawrence Summers, President Barack Obama's former top economic adviser, signed his name to a memo suggesting it would make sense for rich countries to export their garbage to poor ones. Because wages are lower in poor countries, he said, they would suffer a lesser loss if workers got sick or died. "I think the economic logic behind dumping a load of toxic waste in the lowest wage country is impeccable and we should face up to that," it said. Moreover, pollution mattered less in a poor country with other problems: "The concern over an agent that causes a one in a million change in the odds of prostate cancer is obviously going to be much higher in a country where people survive to get prostate cancer than in a country where under 5 mortality is 200 per thousand."

Leaked a few months before the 1992 United Nations Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, the memo confirmed to critics that the World Bank believed poor countries were dumps. The reasoning "is perfectly logical but totally insane," wrote the late José Lutzenberger, then Brazil's environment minister, in a letter to Summers. Furious, Vice President Al Gore torpedoed Summers's chance to become chairman of then-president Bill Clinton's Council of Economic Advisers. Summers apologized, explaining the memo as an attempt to offer "sardonic counterpoint" to sharpen analytical thinking about the trash trade.

Lutzenberger had a point. Wages are not the only benchmark of people's value. The price of dealing with garbage in impoverished countries is often zero not because their citizens care nothing about pollution, but because their governments don't enforce pollution-related laws. But Summers had a powerful point too: in poorer countries, an untainted environment is less valuable than other things that are more abundant in richer nations--schools, for instance. Many developing nations would serve their interests best by trading trash for the chance to build an extra one.

THE PRICE OF CROSSING BORDERS

Most of us think of prices in the context of shopping expeditions. In the marketplace, prices ration what we consume, guiding how we allocate resources among our many wants. They prompt us to set priorities within the limits of our budgets. Just as prices steer our purchasing patterns, they steer the decisions of the companies that make what we buy, enabling them to meet our demand with their supply. That's how markets organize a capitalist economy.

But prices are all over the place, not only attached to things we buy in a store. At every crossroads, prices nudge us to take one course of action or another. In a way, this is obvious: every decision amounts to a choice among options to which we assign different values. But identifying these prices allows us to understand more fully our decisions. They can be measured in money, cash, or credit. But costs and benefits can also be set in love, toil, or time. Our most important currency is, in fact, opportunity. The cost of taking any action or embracing any path consists of the alternatives that were available to us at the time. The price of a five-dollar slice of pizza is all the other things we could have done with the five dollars. The price of marriage includes all the things we would have done had we remained single. One day we succumb to the allure of love and companionship. Years later we wonder what happened to the freedom we traded away at the altar. Economists call this the "opportunity cost." By evaluating opportunity costs, we organize our lives.

Just to be born, the scavenger girl in Delhi had to overcome Indian parents' entrenched bias against girls -- which has led to widespread abortions of female fetuses. The Indian census of 2001 recorded 927 girls aged six or less per 1,000 boys. This compares to 1,026 girls per thousand boys in Brazil and 1,029 in the United States. The bias is due to a deeply unfavorable cost-benefit analysis: while boys are meant to take over the family property and care for their parents in old age, daughters must be married off, which requires an onerous dowry. To redress the balance of incentives, regional governments across India have been experimenting with antipoverty programs aimed at increasing parents' appetite for girls. In 2008, Delhi launched a program to deposit 10,000 rupees into the account of newly born girls in poor families--making subsequent deposits as they progress in school. The objective is to build a cushion of resources for them to marry or pursue higher education. A social insurance program launched in 2006 in Haryana pays parents who only have daughters 500 rupees a month between the age of forty-five and the age of sixty, when it is replaced by the general public pension.

I remember a conversation I had a few years ago with an illegal immigrant in Stockton, California. I worked at the Wall Street Journal writing about the Hispanic population of the United States. The immigrant was educating me about the relative merits of having his two young children smuggled from Mexico "por el monte" -- a grueling hike across the desert -- or "por la línea," across a regular checkpoint using forged documents. The choice was hard. He couldn't have made more than $8 or $9 an hour, picking asparagus, cherries, and everything else that grew in California's San Joaquin Valley. He would have to pay about $1,500 each for a "coyote" to guide his kids across the desert. Yet he figured that getting a smuggler with fake documents to bring them across a border checkpoint would put him back about $5,000 per child. The conversation laid in stark relief the type of bare-knuckle cost-benefit analyses that steer people's lives.

Over the last decade and a half, the Border Patrol's budget has grown roughly fivefold. Average coyote fees increased accordingly, to about $2,600 in 2008. Yet the price that rose most sharply is measured in the odds of dying on the way, as a border crossing that used to take less than a day around San Diego became a three- to four-day trek through the Arizona desert, evading thieves and the Border Patrol, lugging jugs of water. In 1994, 24 migrants died trying to cross the border. By 2008, the death toll was 725. The calculation of the immigrant I spoke to was straightforward enough. To bring his children into the United States through a checkpoint, he would have to work longer to earn the price of passage. But it would lower the risk that his children would perish along the way.

The debate among Americans about illegal immigration is itself a discussion about prices. Critics charge that illegal immigrants lower the price of natives' labor by offering to do the job for less. They argue that immigrants impose a burden on natives when they consume public services, like education for their children and emergency medical care.

These arguments are weaker than they seem. Most illegal immigrants work on the books using false IDs, and have taxes withheld from their paychecks like any other worker. They can't draw benefits from most government programs. And there is scant evidence that immigrants lower the wages of American workers. Some industries only exist because of cheap immigrant labor -- California's agricultural industry comes to mind. Absent the immigrants, the farm jobs would disappear too, along with an array of jobs from the fields to the packing plant. We would import the asparagus and the strawberries instead.

Illegal immigrants do affect prices in the United States. One study calculated that the surge in immigration experienced between 1980 and 2000 reduced the average price of services such as housekeeping or gardening by more than 9 percent, mainly by undercutting wages. Still, it had a negligible impact on natives' wages because poor illegal immigrants compete in the job market with other poor illegal immigrants.

Immigration policy has always been determined by who bears its costs and who draws its benefits. Illegal immigrants are tolerated by the political system because their cheap labor is useful for agribusiness and other industries. It provides affordable nannies to middle-class Americans. This suggests that despite presidential lip service to the need to reform immigration law, nothing much is likely to be done. Creating a legal path for illegal immigrants to work in the United States would be politically risky and could provide a big incentive for more illegal flows. By contrast, cutting illegal immigration entirely would be prohibitively costly. The status quo is too comfortable to bear tinkering like that.

The ebb and flow of immigration will continue to be determined by potential immigrants' measuring the prospect of a minimum' wage job -- perhaps a first step up the ladder of prosperity -- against the costs imposed by the harsh border. The price may occasionally be too high. As joblessness soared following the financial crisis of 2008, many potential immigrants decided to stay at home. The Department of Homeland Security estimates the illegal immigrant population dropped by 1 million from its peak in 2007 to 10.8 million in 2009. But this will prove to be no more than a blip in the broad historical trend.

PRICES RULE

Considering the capacity of prices to shape people's choices, it is rather surprising that governments do not use them more often to steer the behavior of the governed. For instance, public-health campaigns might be a nice way to educate people about the risks of certain behaviors, such as smoking and drug abuse. But they are nowhere near as effective as prices when it comes to making people stop. Four decades after President Richard Nixon launched his "War on Drugs," drug abuse remains stubbornly popular. Between 1988 and 2009, the share of twelfth graders who admitted having done drugs in the last month increased from 16 to 23 percent. The share of teens who had smoked a cigarette in the same period fell from 28 to 20 percent.

This is a paradox. Though it is illegal for minors to purchase cigarettes, adults can readily get them. Drugs, by contrast, are illegal for everybody. Being caught with even a smidgen of cocaine in the state of Illinois can lead to one to three years in jail. Yet the difference is less paradoxical considering how the price of these vices has evolved. A battery of city, state, and federal taxes has roughly doubled the price of a pack of cigarettes since 1990, to about $5.20 on average. On July 1, 2010, the minimum price of a pack of cigarettes in New York City rose $1.60 to $10.80--of which $7.50 are taxes. By contrast, the retail price of a gram of cocaine on New York's streets cost $101 in 2007, about 27 percent less than in 1991. The price of heroin collapsed 41 percent to $320 a gram. Falling prices refltect the failure of policies to stop the supply of illegal drugs into the American market. But it also suggests a potential solution: at a sufficiently high price, teens would cut back. Compared with a failed drug war, legalizing, regulating, and taxing drugs might be the more effective route to curtail abuse.

Consider what we could achieve by tinkering with the price of gas. In the United States, cheap gas allowed people to move to bigger homes farther from work, school, and shopping. Just in the last decade or so, Americans' median commute to work rose from nine to eleven miles. The typical home grew from 1,750 to 1,807 square feet.

Europe rarely sprawled so. Its cities were constrained by history. They were built hundreds of years ago, when moving long distances was costly in time and effort. During the French Revolution, it took King Louis XVI twenty-one hours to flee 150 miles from Paris to Varennes. Modern sprawl was contained by gas taxes. Europeans pay two to three times as much as Americans for gas. That's partly why Houston in Texas has roughly the same population as the German port city of Hamburg but 2,500 fewer people per square mile.

For all the differences between the configuration of American and Western European cities, they are both strikingly different from development in the Soviet bloc, where market prices played little or no role in allocating land. Seventy years of communist allocation by bureaucratic fiat produced an urban scene pockmarked by old factories decaying on prime locations downtown while residential housing becomes denser farther from the center, through rings of Stalin-era, Khrushchev-era, and Brezhnev-era apartments.

A study by World Bank urban planning and housing finance experts after the collapse of the Soviet Union found that 31.5 percent of the built-up area in Moscow was occupied by industries, compared to 6 percent in Seoul and 5 percent in Hong Kong and Paris. In Paris, where people pay a premium price to live near downtown's amenities, the population density peaks some three kilometers from the center of town. In Moscow it peaked fifteen kilometers away.

Prices make sense of many disparate dynamics over the span of human history. Advances in transportation technology that reduced the cost of distance enabled the first great wave of economic globalization in the nineteenth century. The obesity pandemic was bound to happen when bodies designed to survive in an environment of scarce food by gorging themselves whenever they could found themselves awash in cheap and abundant calories brought by modern technology.

There are few better ways to understand the power of prices than to visit the places where they are not allowed to do their jobs. During a trip to Santiago de Cuba a few years ago I was driven around town by a bedraggled woman who, to my surprise, turned out to be a pediatrician at the city's main hospital. She had a witchlike quality--knotty and thin as a reed. Two of her front teeth were missing. She told me they fell out during a bout of malnutrition that swept through the island after the Soviet collapse in 1991 cut off Cuba's economic lifeline. The doctor owned a beat-up Lada. She was very smart. But otherwise her life seemed no different from that of any street urchin, living off the black market at the limit of endurance, peddling a ride or a box of cigars that fell off the back of a truck. She charged ten dollars for driving me around town all day. I couldn't help wondering how the collective decisions that shaped Cuba's possibilities at the time could make it so a pediatrician found this to be a worthwhile deal.

WHEN PRICES MISFIRE

As with anything powerful, prices must be handled with care. Tinkering can produce unintended consequences. Concerned about low birthrates, in May 2004 the Australian government announced it would pay a "baby bonus" of three thousand Australian dollars to children born after July 1. The response was immediate. Expectant mothers near their due dates delayed planned cesarean sections and did anything in their power to hold their babies back. Births declined throughout June. And on July 1, Australia experienced more births than on any single date in the previous three decades.

Taxing families based on the number of windows in their homes must have seemed like a good idea when King William III introduced the window tax in England in 1696. Homes with up to ten windows paid two shillings. Properties with ten to twenty windows paid four shillings and those with more than twenty paid eight.

The tax was logical. Windows being easy to count, it was easy to levy. It was fairish: richer people were likely to have bigger houses with more windows, and thus pay more. And it got around people's intense hostility to an income tax. But the king didn't count on people's reaction. They blocked up windows in their homes in order to pay less. Today, blocked-out windows in Edinburgh are known as Pitt's Pictures, after William Pitt, who brought the tax to Scotland in 1784.

Seemingly modest actions can reverberate throughout society by altering, if only slightly, people's evaluations of costs and benefits. Such is the case of the 55 mph speed limit imposed across the United States in 1974 as a way to conserve gasoline in the wake of the first oil crisis, when Arab countries proclaimed an oil embargo in response to the United States' decision to resupply the Israeli military after the Yom Kippur War.

Conserving gas was a reasonable objective at the time. The strategy, however, was fatally flawed because it ignored the value of drivers' time. At the new legal limit, a seventy-mile trip would take about one hour and sixteen minutes--sixteen minutes more than at 70 mph. Considering that the wages of production workers in 1974 averaged around $4.30 an hour, those sixteen minutes to commute to and from work would cost a typical worker about $1.15.

In 1974, a gallon of leaded gas cost fifty-three cents. To break even, an average driver would need to save 2.17 gallons per trip. For this to happen would have required a big leap in fuel economy: a 22 percent increase in the fuel efficiency of a Chevy Suburban, for example, or a doubling of the fuel efficiency of a Honda Civic. Of course, lowering the speed limit did not achieve this improvement. So drivers ignored the new rule.

In 1984, drivers on interstate highways in New York were found to flout the 55 mph limit 83 percent of the time. They dished out $50 to $300 to buy CB radios to warn one another about cops nearby. Between 1966 and 1973 there were about 800,000 CB licenses issued by the Federal Communications Commission. By 1977 there were 12.25 million CBs on the road. Cops then reacted to the reaction, installing radar. Drivers reacted with radar detectors. Some states passed laws making radar detectors illegal. I doubt the United States Congress expected this chain of events when it passed the 1974 Emergency Highway Energy Conservation Act. By 1987 it increased the maximum limit to 65 mph and in 1995 it repealed the federal speed limit altogether.

WHERE WILL PRICES TAKE US?

Archimedes of Syracuse, the great mathematician from the third century BC, said that to move the earth he needed only a lever, a fulcrum, and a firm place to stand. Moving people requires a price. The marriage rate has fallen not because of changing fashions but because of its rising price, measured in terms of the sacrifice it entails. We have fewer children because they are costlier. Economists suggest that the Catholic Church has been losing adherents not because people stopped believing in God but because membership became too cheap compared with evangelical Christianity, which demands a bigger investment in its churches from members and thus inspire more loyalty.

The Price of Everything will take us to the store, where we will discover how price tags operate on our psychology, subtly inviting us to buy. But we will endeavor beyond quotidian commercial transactions, to investigate how other prices affect the way people live. In many cultures, husbands pay for multiple brides to amass as many as possible and increase their reproductive success. In others, parents abort female fetuses to avoid the cost they would incur to marry off their daughters. Many behaviors that we ascribe to "cultural change" arise, in fact, as we adapt our budgets to changing prices. We will ponder why employers pay for workers rather than enslave them. We will discuss why it is that as we become progressively richer, the commodity that increases most in value is our scarce free time. And we will find that despite clinging to the notion that life is priceless, we often put a rather low price on our lives.

And we will find that prices can steer us the wrong way too. We still don't know how much we will have to pay, as a civilization, for the economic distortions caused by the upward spiral in the price of American homes between 2000 and 2006. A century down the road, the cheap gasoline of the 1900s might come to be seen as the cause of incalculable environmental damage. Prices can be dangerous too.

Copyright 2010 Eduardo Porter


Eduardo Porter has been on the staff of The New York Times since January 2004, covering economics, and joined the paper's editorial board in July 2007. He began his journalism career in 1990 as a financial reporter for Notimex, the Mexican news agency, in Mexico City. He was a correspondent in Tokyo (1991-1992) and in London (1992-1996). In 1996, Porter was appointed editor of the Brazilian edition of América Economía, a business and economics magazine based in Sao Paulo. In 2000, he became senior special writer for The Wall Street Journal, based in Los Angeles, covering the Hispanic population in the United States. He is a graduate of the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México. He has an MSc in quantum fields and fundamental forces from Imperial College of Science, Technology and Medicine in London.

I haven't used soap or shampoo in a year, and it's awesome: personal experiment update

Posted: 04 Jan 2011 05:54 PM PST

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I stopped using soap a year ago. It was easily one of the best moves I've ever made in my entire flippin' life.

About this time last year I read an article (which Mark mentioned here as well) extolling the virtues of a soap-free bathing experience. TL;DR version: Your body is designed to regulate itself. Smearing chemicals all over it wrecks its own built-in processes, and screws with naturally balanced pH levels. This made sense to me and I thought I'd give it a shot for a month.

At the beginning of February 2010, I blogged about the results I'd seen so far. I didn't stink at all (confirmed by friends, family and random people I ended up sitting next to on various forms of public transit), my skin felt better, oily and dry patches had all but disappeared and the light dandruff I'd had my entire life was almost gone. I was pleased with the results of my month experiment and decided I'd run with it for a while longer. As of January 1, 2011: it's been a year now, and I can't imagine ever going back.

More on the results I've seen: As I just mentioned, my skin feels better than ever before. Not that it ever felt bad, really, but it feels awesome now. Still no stink at all, I swear even when I'm really active and sweating I don't notice any B.O., and I used to be über self-conscious about this and would think I was stinking if I walked up a flight of stairs too quickly. So this is a huge improvement for sure. And with the exception of changing climates drastically, even the dandruff is history. My previously wavy and mostly unmanageable hair now seems much more willing to bend to my will, a dream of mine since I first looked in a mirror, brush in hand, then tried and failed to make any sense of that monster. So I approve for sure.

And speaking of hair, that was actually a perfect test. Sometime mid-summer I stopped by a barber and before I'd realized it he'd squirted a glob of shampoo onto my head. It was too late to protest, so I just sat through the scrubbing. For the following 2 weeks my hair was a mess: full of dandruff and totally uncontrollable. Once things balanced back out to the previously established no-soap norms, all was good again.

Unexpected bonus: travel is much easier. Now that I'm not lugging shampoo and conditioner with me on the road, there's that much less for TSA to hassle me about and more room in my luggage (which I quickly filled with coffee stuff, natch). Not that I always carried lots of liquid toiletries with me, but now I don't even have to think about what the hotel I'm going to might provide, or worry about having to borrow something from a friend until I can get to a store and buy my own stuff. Those details are gone. I love it.

The future? I will definitely be sticking with this. I'm still annoyed it took me 35 years to learn what I clearly already knew as a baby kicking and screaming when my parents tried to wash my hair. At least that's what I want to assume I knew back then. I know now, but I'd still rather not think about how much I spent on soap and shampoo and related products over the years when they were likely causing all the problems I was trying to protect against.

If you don't believe me, you can totally smell me when you see me in public. Really. Just ask. It won't be weird at all. Okay, maybe a little bit.

Street artists laser graffitti LA MOCA to protest commissioned-then-censored public art

Posted: 04 Jan 2011 07:38 PM PST

Boing Boing reader Revurt says,

Though commissioned by him, MOCA director Jeffery Deitch had this antiwar mural by Blu whitewashed, deeming it "offensive" — a clear act of censorship and a blow to our freedom of speech. This is a short series of interviews with some folks who care. They are protesting with laser graffiti on the bare wall.
Video Link, and related Los Angeles Times article.

The artist whose work was destroyed by Deitch and Moca, Blu, comments here.

Earlier coverage on Blogging.LA.

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Real-life league of superheroes in Seattle?

Posted: 04 Jan 2011 03:34 PM PST

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Cosplay with a purpose in Seattle, WA, over the holidays: "A local man said he came within seconds of having his car broken into, and perhaps stolen, until a real-life "superhero" came to his aid, wearing tights, a mask and a skin-tight super suit."

Ladies and gentlemen: "Phoenix Jones" (above left with mystified cop) and the "Rain City Superhero Movement." Start here.

(thanks, Jason Weisberger)

CA court okays cellphone search without a warrant

Posted: 04 Jan 2011 08:33 PM PST

In a 5-2 ruling Monday, the California Supreme Court allowed police to search the cell phones of people who are arrested even without possessing a warrant, saying defendants lose their privacy rights for any items they're carrying when taken into custody. So, if you're arrested unfairly for some reason, cops can still search your smartphone and presumably copy, say, all your contacts or emails or phone or text records, all without a warrant. No possible abuse scenarios there, right?

Philippines: Murdered politician photographed his killer before he was shot

Posted: 04 Jan 2011 03:03 PM PST

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A local councilman shot to death on New Year's Eve in the Philippines accidentally photographed his killer pointing a gun at him just before pulling the trigger. In the photo above, victim Reynaldo Dagsa's smiling family members are posed against a car; the alleged killer is at left, and an alleged lookout is at right. The photo led to the arrest of two suspects, one of whom was a car thief out on bail, presumed to be looking for revenge against Dagsa.

More at the Washington Post, and still more at The Inquirer (Philippines)

(photograph by Reynaldo Dagsa, courtesy of his family)

We're at CES and there will be gadget blogging

Posted: 04 Jan 2011 02:43 PM PST

RTXW6W6.JPG The first moments of CES blend Vegas' superficial glamor with the anxiety of knowing busy days lie ahead -- an anxiety heightened by cellular networks choked half-dead by the concentration of reporters, bloggers and techfolk. Three things happen in Vegas during CES week and, by the end of it, you're only too happy to leave them there. First, there is queueing. Queueing for the official lanyard that allows access to the events. Queueing for the keynote speeches. Queueing for taxis and buses, to shuttle you from hotel to show floor to private PR shmoozing in furry-walled temporary offices and suites. Queueing for the vile ichor served as coffee in the convention center's vast and crowded lobby. Then, there is walking. You could say the city's majesty (casinos notwithstanding!) is revealed not in the fiberglass statues and epic shows but the maze of hallways and corridors linking everything to everything. The beige carpet beneath one's feet is matched in its sinister inoffensiveness by the relentless light jazz playing overhead, spiteful in its ubiquity. One year, I wandered somewhere the light jazz did not play: instantly, I knew I was lost, somewhere I should not be. Finally, there are the toys! This year promises a few things of interest and we'll be checking them out in the coming days, between the queueing and walking. This is the part you're interested in, and the part we shall endeavor to serve with blurry incandescent-orange cellphone photos and half-baked opinions on 7000 nearly-identical Android tablets. Last year, CES attracted about 110,000 people, and that was deemed an off year. It's not really clear if things will be 'better' this time around, though the industry expects so and there's always something interesting to report when this many people gather in one place, for one purpose. Failing all else, there will be show-offs in silly costumes, slick marketing folk fluffing their lines, and the warm glowing hope that epic drama will occur as boredom, fatigue and frustration takes over the pack. If you've gotten this far, you'll enjoy two more pre-CES thoughts from two you know well: Gizmodo's Joel Johnson explains Why you should and shouldn't care about CES and Gearfuse's John Brownlee explains Why CES is Hell. It's not all that bad, really. And if there's anything in particular you want covered here, fire away in the comments.

Anne Francis, sci-fi ultravixen, RIP

Posted: 04 Jan 2011 02:42 PM PST

[Video Link: "Forbidden Planet" trailer]

Lest this slip by unmentioned, here's a tribute to one of the greatest sci-fi hotties of the 20th century. Anne Francis starred with Leslie Nielsen (eulogized here late last year) in Forbidden Planet, the vastly influential 1956 flick. Her skinny dip scene probably made your dad or grandpa (and maybe mom or grandma) a little tingly. Francis' turn as Alta Morbius, the hot yet innocent daughter of Dr. Morbius, was followed up by many other memorable roles, including the mod classic Honey West and two memorable Twilight Zone eps, "Jess-Belle" and "The After Hours." All are worth checking out, but especially Forbidden Planet.

In Egypt, an iPrayer

Posted: 04 Jan 2011 10:18 AM PST

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Egypt: A Coptic Orthodox priest uses his Apple iPhone before conducting a prayer for the relatives of the victims who died after Saturday's bomb attack, in a house in Alexandria January 3, 2011. The bomb killed 21 people outside a Coptic Orthodox Christian church early on New Year's Day and a security source said seven people have been held for questioning.

(REUTERS/Asmaa Waguih)

Toppling the statue of Saddam in Iraq: a media moment, revisited

Posted: 04 Jan 2011 10:15 AM PST

"Propaganda has been a staple of warfare for ages, but the notion of creating events on the battlefield, as opposed to repackaging real ones after the fact, is a modern development." In the New Yorker, a re-examination of the events surrounding the toppling of the Saddam Hussein statue in Iraq, and American media's complicity in a set-up: great moments in staged military propaganda.

Cute, friendly, non-threatening bear hat

Posted: 04 Jan 2011 10:16 AM PST

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Adorable! Wait... O_o

Get your hands all over one from CatchaKuma for $24.99.

You may be cold, but you are not as cold as these two gentlemen

Posted: 04 Jan 2011 10:21 AM PST

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Chen Kecai (L) and Jin Songhao (R) are seen in glass containers during a cold endurance competition on the Tianmen Mountain in Zhangjiajie, Hubei province. Chen and Jin competed by staying in a glass container filled with ice wearing only a pair of shorts. Jin won the competition with 120 minutes in the container, which outscored Chen's 118 minutes. Chen set the Guinness record for the longest time spent in direct full body contact with ice on March 14, 2010 with 1 hour 48 minutes 21 seconds, local media reported.

(Photograph taken on January 3, 2011, via REUTERS)

Wikileaks: cables show that US diplomats are key part of Boeing sales force

Posted: 04 Jan 2011 10:00 AM PST

State Dept. cables newly released by WikiLeaks show that U.S. diplomats served as deal-brokers, pressuring world leaders to purchase billions of dollars worth of Boeing jets (instead of European competitor Airbus). "To a greater degree than previously known, diplomats are a big part of the sales force." Here's the actual cable, and here's the NYT article.

Another rain of dead birds, 300 miles away from Friday's rain of dead birds

Posted: 04 Jan 2011 09:59 AM PST

It looks like some sort of phenomenon happened again: "Around 500 dead birds have fallen from the sky in Louisiana, found scattered along a quarter-mile portion of highway in Point Coupee Parish, the AP reports. The discovery is approximately 300 miles south of Beebe, Arkansas, where just days earlier thousands of the same species of birds also fell from the sky."

State of the World 2011: Bruce Sterling and Jon Lebkowsky

Posted: 04 Jan 2011 09:54 AM PST

Bruce Sterling and Jon Lebkowsky have once again produced a beginning-of-the-year "State of the World" conversation, their eleventh annual edition on The Well.

Jim Woodring will perform with giant ink pen in Seattle, Jan. 9, 2011

Posted: 04 Jan 2011 12:59 PM PST

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Millions of people will flock to the Skinner Auditorium at the Gage Academy of Art in Seattle, WA to watch Jim Woodring use Nibbus Maximus, his giant pen.

Seattle cartoonist Jim Woodring, author Frank Comics and the acclaimed Weathercraft, has built a seven-foot-long pen-and-penholder, a giant version of the steel dip pen nib and wooden handle used by artists and calligraphers. The pen will make its debut in the Skinner Auditorium of Gage Academy of Art on Sunday, January 9 from 1pm to 4pm.

The nib is sixteen inches long and made of brass-pated, hand-engraved cold-rolled steel. The handle is lathe-turned poplar, painted with black lacquer. The ink is a specially formulated acrylic blend. A vase functions as an inkwell.

When this project was announced earlier this year it was met with heavy skepticism. Many felt a pen this size could not function because the relationship between scale and fluid dynamics. Woodring was convinced it could be done and the nib has performed well in tests with prototypes. This will be the first public demonstration of the finished product.

Woodring will be making large ink drawings (up to 4 x 6 feet) on a specially built drawing board and conversing with the audience as he works. Regulation pen-and-ink supplies will be on hand for interested audience members to use; members of Seattle's Friends of the Nib will provide instruction for beginners.

The Giant Pen was built with finds raised through United States Artists Special Projects, 2010. Free paper, pen and ink supplies provided by D

Nibbus Maximus
Sunday, January 9 · 1:00pm - 4:00pm
Location Skinner Auditorium, Gage Academy of Art
1501 10th Avenue East

More images after the jump.


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Great Moments in Pedantry: Octopuses, octopi, octopodes

Posted: 04 Jan 2011 11:28 AM PST

Merriam-Webster editor Kory Stamper explains the fascinating history behind my favorite hair-pulling, knee-capping Internet debate. Two surprising lessons here. First, all three plural forms of octopus can be considered correct. That's right, everybody. We can stop having this argument now.

Second, and more embarrassingly, it turns out that I've been mispronouncing "octopodes" for years. Whoops.

Further embarrassment: Looks like Lisa posted this same video last summer. I'll go ahead and leave it up, because the comments are new and fun. But my apologies to those forced to watch it twice.

Via Nerdy Christie
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