Car Trains?

Reihan Salan posts concerning the future of cars: possibly we'll have car trains: if  the car becomes intelligent enough to travel synchronized with another car, you can imagine trains of 100 cars motoring away at high speeds.  Here's an earlier Discovery post on the idea.  What threw me at first was the idea of how does a car leave such a train, wouldn't the cars behind follow the car leaving the train?   But I suppose you could have an algorithm or a communication method to handle that.  Still strikes me as something I'm too old to adapt to.

Republican Budget for Agriculture

Here's the summary, though to be honest I don't understand it.  Some of the yellow highlighted rows appear to be totals of the rows below, as for Conservation, but not for others, as Farm Programs.  Here's the text of the bill, which I skimmed and didn't see anything I thought noteworthy.

A Compromise on Voter ID

Seems to me there's a relatively easy compromise available for liberals and conservatives over Voter-ID, which the cons want and libs don't.  Phase in the damn thing (phasing tends to be my solution for many things).  The problem liberals have is that many people don't have photo ID's (like my mother-in-law). So update your voter registration database to show people who do have photo ID's and require them to present them when voting.  For those on the list who don't have ID's, give them one free vote, and offer photo-ID's at the voting station.  In other words, m-o-l shows up to vote, the list shows she doesn't have a photo-ID that's valid, so she can vote but she must get a photo-id before leaving (or at the DMV before the next election) to vote again.

Yes, this is a step towards identity cards for everyone, but I can live with that in exchange for the gains in effectiveness of programs.

Tracking People, Cover Stories, Registries, and Ankle Bracelets

I've noticed and sometimes blogged about a modern trend towards tracking people.  Lots of states, maybe all states, have registries for sex offenders.  There was an article the other day on a proposal to extend such registries to other types of offenders.  Facebook and other Internet sites are making it impossible to create good cover stories for our undercover agents; Valerie Plame is one of the last native-born agents we'll have, or so it seems.  Dominique Straus-Kahn was released only after posting bail and agreeing to wear an ankle bracelet. Now Conan Friedersdorf proposes that, if any convicts are released early in California as a result of the Supreme Court's decision yesterday they would have to wear an ankle bracelet that doesn't expire until the end of their original sentence.

Perhaps more benignly, in the past there's been legislation to track parents who are in arrears on child-support.  I've seen discussion on cross-state tracking of doctors and nurses whose licenses were revoked in one state. Given today's headline that contractors who received stimulus funds from the government, or from state and local governments, are in arrears on $750 million worth of taxes, I'd expect a tracking proposal to arise there. 

The list goes on and on.  As a general proposition I tend to agree with the proposals; I view transparency as good and it's certainly less onerous to wear a bracelet than to be in an overcrowded jail.  I wonder, though, where's the discussion of this and what are the limits and guidelines we should use.

French School Lunches

Andrew Gelman posts on American versus French school lunches.  Apparently in France you can't bring your lunch, but payments for the schools and the lunches come from the state and the mayor respectively, putting the mayor on the spot if the lunches aren't good.

Is the Justice System the Last Redoubt of the Secretary?

From Orin Kerr's advice to judicial interns at Volokh Conspiracy:

1) Be incredibly nice to the secretaries. You might think judges run judicial chambers. For the most part, though, they don’t: Judges’ secretaries run judicial chambers. Judges often keep secretaries for decades, and they rely heavily on them. If you’re working for a judge for a summer, the judge’s lead secretary (or only secretary, if the judge only has one) is going to be your friend or your enemy. Make sure the secretary is your friend. And don’t think for a second that the secretary works for you. You’re just an intern, and you work for the secretary and everyone else who will still be there when the summer is over.

Sounds like USDA in the 1970's.

The Future of Books

Ezra Klein is a convert to e-books, particularly enjoying the instant access anywhere.

Megan McArdle weighs in here, betting on the logic of innovation, arguing (as in the Innovator's Dilemma) that advantages in some areas are sufficient for innovations to succeed.

The posts were triggered by the report Amazon is selling more e-books than printed books.

James Suroweicki in the New Yorker (not now available on-line) argues part of the reason the US does well is we've got a lot of consumers who are willing to take the risk of buying innovative products.  

Personally I don't have a Kindle, though I do have the app on my PC.  One of the things on my to-do list is to look at the Fairfax County library's e-book program, which doesn't yet extend to Amazon.  Probably I'll buy a reader when it looks as though I can get more books faster from the library that way.  As I get older I get less interested in innovations. I'm not sure whether that's age or the idea the upfront costs in time and energy compared to the benefits over a limited life-span become more and more daunting.

Federal Bureaucrats Are Liberal

Everyone knows federal bureaucrats are liberal.  I was certainly one. So this post by John Sides at The Monkey Cage is a wee bit surprising.  As I read the graph, during 2007-8, Bush appointees are more conservative than Democrats in either House or Senate, a bit more liberal than Bush himself (who is about as conservative as House and Senate Republicans, and a bit more conservative than career bureaucrats.  The career bureaucrats sit between the Democrats and Republicans, in other words exactly middle of the road.  Unexplained is the fact the career bureaucrats distribution curve is almost tri-modal. 

Funny Sentence of the End of the World

No, there's no relation to the rapture, except for one bare end, but I had to differentiate the title:

" In short, we must have looked like the white trash triplets."  From Butterfly Moments

Vertical Garden

I've been skeptical of vertical gardens for vegetables, so it's only fair to recognize they seemingly can work for ornament.  Treehugger has a 4-year later followup on a vertical wall in Madrid.  Being cynical I wanted to check when the photos were taken because it wasn't clear.  But I finally did see a photo of the garden as originally installed, and it's definitely different than the one in the treehugger post.  They do mention an irrigation system, but apparently it's fairly carefree.