Letters to the Editor
Amity
Published Letters: 1114 Editor's Choice: 106
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Lisa Jervis needs to get current
[Read the article: Quote of the day]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]A number of recent (and now not-so-recent) American economic surveys have shown that women who do equal work do get equal pay as men. (In fact, in some demographic subgroups, women get paid more for equivalent work.) The achievement of this equality in basically a generation has been one of the great triumphs of American feminism, and of American egalitarianism in general.
The reason for continuing overall wage inequality between men and women, these surveys suggest, is that women and men in America don't do equal work — a trend which appears to be increasing over time, not decreasing, as fewer young women go into career tracks that lead into high finance, high tech, and business management, which are where all the money is.
It's understandable for feminist voices to shy away from acknowledging this — or even being aware of it. Those who worked for the hard-earned gains of the last quarter century don't want to risk reactive undermining through complacency, and maybe they're right. But it seems that understanding how American society has — and hasn't — changed, and focusing on the crux of continuing inequality on the level of opportunity, rather than workplace legalities, is essential to continued progress.
Anyway, Jervis is wrong on a more basic level. The idea that you don't strive for something because if you attain it people will scoff at you anyway is juvenile, and frankly surprising from someone with her reputation.
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All in the fiber
[Read the article: Who's winning the broadband sweepstakes?]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Implied in the OECD's statistics is the assertion that Japan's data infrastructure is almost entirely fiber. I would love to know more about amount of fiber laid in Japan versus the United States, say, and how that compares to Europe.
The conventional wisdom is that the rest of the world lagged behind the United States after the middle of the last century predominantly because of the world war — yet by the 1980s the advantage the Americans enjoyed because their copper wire infrastructure was so extensive and still completely intact became a burden to progress, since it was hard to justify replacing something that already worked.
The Japanese and Europeans, continues this view, had the advantage of having much more ad hoc systems, and leapt to embrace the new fiber optic technology as, essentially, their first real organized postwar telecom buildout. (This conventional wisdom also explains why the United States lags in wireless capacity. If you have enough underground copper cable to count as one of the largest copper mines in the world, why build towers too?)
So is that true? Is that what happened? Or is there something more dysfunctional about American telecom policies? Are we, indeed, more interested in controlling access to content in the United States than in genuine technological progress? Is the "can do, but won't" mentality of the unregulated telecom monopolies to blame here? Most Europeans seem to blithely say that "we just did it," without expressing any great curiosity as to difference in outcomes. I'd love to learn where to start digging deeper.
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How Bizarre?
[Read the article: Bamboo shoots and trees]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]In the bizarre math of global economics, it takes less diesel fuel to ship something to California across the ocean from China than via truck or train from New York...
Surely diesel fuel consumption isn't an economic function, but a mechanical one — and surely there's nothing bizarre about a turbine-powered cargo supercarrier being more fuel efficient (way more, I would imagine) per ton-mile than a truck, or even a train.
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Timberman on the DCCC
[Read the article: Mukasey's nomination and the sudden opposition to "waterboarding"]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]If I'm reading sites like FDL and Kos correctly, this is happening all over the country, particularly in the red and transitional states. I don't think that this is good for the party or for the country's future, even if the DCCC's assessments of electability prove to be correct in the end.
What you describe is exactly MoveOn's strategy this election — if the "same old same old" is the problem with the Democratic Party, then it's time to focus on getting new blood in during the primaries. It would indeed seem to be happening all over the country.
And why is that a bad thing? The Democratic donkey can sometimes be motivated with carrots but sometimes you need a stick. The best way to persuade the party that its membership is actually alert, sober, and capable of asserting its self-interest is by tossing out some of the dead weight in favor of energetic progressives.
Bill Clinton did that as presidential nominee in 1992 as did Howard Dean as DNC chair in 2005. (Tom Daschle did something similar in reverse, by having his ass handed to him the year before.)
Have any of those developments crippled the party? Far from it. Howard Dean and the Clintons are all still regarded with some suspicion by the party's establishment, but that hasn't stopped them from doing a lot of good in terms of advancing progressive causes, and it hasn't stopped the Democrats from retaking Congress. I would go so far as to say that the Democratic Party is competitive today to exactly the extent that it's embraced these feisty outsiders, and I see no reason why that principle won't continue to hold true.
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Timberman on the 50-state strategy
[Read the article: Mukasey's nomination and the sudden opposition to "waterboarding"]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]If you know what's afoot with the DNC's 50-state strategy, I can't see how you can miss the nature, or the seriousness of the struggle going on.
Well, I must not know what's afoot then. The last I knew, James Carville was complaining that Dean's strategy wasn't winning enough, that's about it. Carville is no hack and deserves to have his viewed considered, and for all I know he's right, Dean could have done better. But really... what's the issue? Is anyone in the Democratic Party going to complain if they actually take the White House? Or win a majority in the Senate? Or solidify their lead in the House?
These aren't partisan schoolchildren. They have their disagreements but by and large the party aparatchiks seem to be on board the success wagon. Am I wrong?