Letters to the Editor
jebldmm
Published Letters: 933 Editor's Choice: 164
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The perils of embedding reporters
[Read the article: Michael Gordon, the administration's best friend at the Times]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Having reporters work exclusively from within the system is great for the government, but I'm not so sure it's great for the reporter. It sounds as if Mr. Gordon has lost his objectivity. I wonder how large an effect living with troops has on a reporter's ability to stand up to authority? The entire structure of military life is geared toward following authority. It would take a very strong person to live, sleep, and eat with soldiers for months without losing some of their independence. How objective can a reporter be when he has seen men whome he has broken bread with kill and be killed?
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I have a theory about right wing comedians
[Read the article: Fox's answer to "The Daily Show"]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]I don't think that they can be really funny. Every incidence of right wing humor I've seen was tinged with hatred. They don't seem to be able to see the humor in life and laugh at themselves. If you look at "liberal" comedy, it generally includes a significant amount of self-flagellation along with attacks on the right. We laugh at everybody, because "funny" isn't really partisan. The most popular humor has an "I'm not laughing at you, I'm laughing with you" quality. Heck, the Daily Show and the Colbert Report spend a lot of time making fun of liberals. I'm betting that whatever Fox comes up with, it will appeal only to the most extreme right wingers and won't draw the kind of broad support they are probably hoping for.
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This would be a good place for private enterprise
[Read the article: Dictatorship and barley in Eritrea]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]If a company wanted to really help the world, they could set up a program to save the seeds. Of course, it's possible that the Eritrean dictator would not allow this to happen if he wasn't given a significant amount of money. In fact, it's likely that he would hold the seeds hostage for his own benefit. I wouldn't trust him for a minute to actually use any donated money for the benefit of mankind.
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It's not just taxes on homes that are effected
[Read the article: Housing starts: The bottom falls out]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]There are a lot of taxes related to the housing industry. Income taxes for construction workers, loan officers, and mortgage brokers. Corporate taxes for lending companies and construction companies. Taxes paid on goods that go into the construction of a home, and taxes paid by the corporations that make those goods. There are also secondary taxes - taxes paid on goods purchased by people who recently bought homes and need to furnish and decorate them.
I don't know how bad the housing market "bust" will get. I suspect that it will be worse than the optimists hopes and not as bad as the pessimists expectations. I'd be really interested in reading about how widespread refinancing was during the boom and how many people are actually exposed to financial hardships through ARM's. People who have been in their homes a long time and didn't max out their refinancing in unsustainable ways will not be severely impacted by declining home values. A lot depends on how many people can simply wait out the next few years and sell their home when prices rise again, and how many will be forced to sell because they took out a bad loan.
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No good deed goes unpunished
[Read the article: Gathering of the science tribes]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]This all sounds lovely. Let's solve the world's energy problems by using every last bit of open space to produce biofuels. Except that there are already animals and plants using a lot of that open space to ... live. I'm not against progress, I'd just like to be sure that people are considering the repercussions of their actions before they act, not 20 years down the road. I was just reading an article about how much damage was done to oceans due to attempts to use old tires as artificial reefs. The tires break apart and scrape the bottom of the ocean clean, release toxins into the ocean, and they don't even provide a suitable substrate for reef creatures. Now, we are spending millions digging up old tires from the ocean floor. The message is that we should start small and test ideas for a while before jumping into new technology, no matter how good the ideas seem to be.
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Russian jets...
[Read the article: Ask the pilot]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Don't know if this will quell some of the concerns of travellers who might be flying on Russian aircraft, but... the Soviets had the habit of over-engineering everything. Mig-25s (ostensibly those aircraft designed to combat F15s) were designed so that they could land on level grass fields and roads in western Europe. And their in-flight performance, while never as good as the F15 or F14s of our service, was good enough to make us envy the performance it did give for all it's robustness. The Soviets knew that the likelihood of there being pristine runways in Germany after a full assault, was non-existant. The Russians' ...oops... Soviets' penchant for over-designing durability into their aircraft, was one of the reasons why they were able to absorb so much damage and were/are so damned hard to shoot down. Of course, they drank gas faster than anything we ever built. I'd worry a lot more about an Airbus holding together than I would an Illyushin, Tupolev, or Antonov.