A friend of mine passed on a link to this great little primer that explains how the subprime mortgage crisis got started, in stick-figure cartoon format. (Some strong language.) The only thing it’s missing is a few more panels where the borrower is told he’s in at least as bad a situation as the investor. If you’re looking for more a more formal and detailed review of the situation, there’s an article at Wikipedia.

Like oil, meat is subsidized by the federal government. Like oil, meat is subject to accelerating demand as nations become wealthier, and this, in turn, sends prices higher. Finally — like oil — meat is something people are encouraged to consume less of, as the toll exacted by industrial production increases, and becomes increasingly visible.

We hear from time to time that there are drawbacks to the kind of meat production industry that has developed in the United States and elsewhere, but this article follows the relationships between those drawbacks clearly and succinctly. Bonus points to Bittman for quoting Tyler Cowen, one of the authors of the illuminating blog Marginal Revolution:

“I just don’t think we can count on market prices to reduce our meat consumption,” he [Cowen] said. “There may be a temporary spike in food prices, but it will almost certainly be reversed and then some. But if all the burden is put on eaters, that’s not a tragic state of affairs.”

I wonder if we’ll see follow-up comments from Cowen on his blog, as sometimes happens after he has been quoted in the press.

Bittman is the author of the very useful cookbook How to Cook Everything, among other things. His byline on the NYT article indicates that although he’s written a vegetarian cookbook, he’s not a vegetarian, in an apparent effort to fend off any allegations of anti-meat bias.

*Update — 1/29/08: And here is Tyler Cowen’s follow-up. He wonders whether, if one considers the environment and animal cruelty, is it better to eat cows or pigs, if one is going to eat one or the other.

But I’m guessing that anyone else who has run into this problem already knows how to fix it because they post more often than I do. (It wouldn’t take much.)

This decline, [author Richard] Florida argued, is rooted in a broader shift in definitions of success, essentially, a realignment of the pillars. Especially among young people, professional status is now inextricably linked to ideas of flexibility and creativity, concepts alien to seemingly everyone but art students even a generation ago.

"There used to be this idea of having a separate work self and home self," he said. "Now they just want to be themselves. It's almost as if they're interviewing places to see if they fit them."

You think?

With that in mind, we turn to the more recent article, Who's Cuddly Now? Law Firms, which relates how large law firms are trying to stanch the bleeding of associate turnover by allowing associates to take reduced billable hour requirements in exchange for salary reductions, increasing parental leave, and taking other steps

I tend to agree with Enrico Schaefer when he says,

Let me say it again. As bad as hourly billing is for clients, it's worse for lawyers. To live your life as though each minute spent doing something else besides billing the client was a wasted moment is a waste of life.

As a partner I know in a respected Denver firm recently remarked, "I'd gladly give up 20% of my income not to have to deal with billable hours."

Will my generation finally get law firms to rethink the life-affecting tradeoffs they make in clinging to the billable-hour system? Maybe. I hope so. But I wonder how these seeds of change will be affected by the threat of economic instability. Gerry Riskin has been warning of doom and gloom for the legal profession and warns against thinking of law practice in terms of business as usual. Bruce McEwen sees law firms as having a less cyclical business and suggests that some features of law practice are likely to change but that the upheaval may be less dramatic than one might think.

I think it will be interesting to see how all these dynamics flow together, and I hope that economic instability does not quash efforts to make it easier to practice law and still have a well-rounded life.

Remember bird flu? It seems like a year or so ago much attention was given to the fact that the H5N1 flu virus, which was spreading, well, virulently among bird populations (especially in Asia), might spread to humans, creating the next flu pandemic. And, as predicted, some humans who worked with infected bird species did get sick, and many of the ones who got sick died. I even remember hearing questions about whether some of them had transmitted the virus to their families.

But since then, we seem to have gotten our heads planted comfortably back in the sand. Yet outbreaks continue, and the situation continues to look dire.

Now, we have an outbreak in Pakistan where, from the currently available evidence, it appears that a veterinarian working with infected birds caught the virus and transmitted it to at least one of his brothers. Two men died ten days apart (one of whom may have been the vet, or maybe not — it's not clear from the reports). The ten-day lag tends to indicate that the disease spread from one person, to another, to another. There have also been recent cluster infections in other Asian countries where human to human transmission is suspected.

When it can do that easily is when all hell will break loose.

I've heard of various interagency "drills" promoted as evidence that governments and health providers are getting ready for the outbreak of pandemic. Those drills mainly seem to be exercises in vaccinating a whole lot of people at once, a capability that will be nice to have but which is useless at the forefront of an outbreak because a vaccine won't exist until weeks, maybe months, after an outbreak begins.

What I haven't heard of are the kinds of preparations that will actually help reduce transmission: for example, the stockpiling of masks, gloves, disinfectants, and other simple tools to help reduce public exposure. There will be a run on such supplies the moment an outbreak is confirmed, and there's no reason to think that manufacturing plans have such excess capacity that they will be able to increase production to anything resembling the scale that will be demanded in a crisis. There won't be enough to go around, and yet we will need to count on practical measures like masks and hand-washing, and not Tamiflu or vaccine, to save people in the first wave of a flu pandemic. (Also interesting - Scott McPherson thinks telecommuting won't work in a pandemic.)

The flu is going to kill many more people than terrorism will, but preventive measures against the flu will never get the kind of funding and support antiterrorism measures do. I expect this will prove to be a mistake.

She arrived the evening of December 5, and since then has been keeping everyone up nights with her entertaining (?) antics.

Seriously, she's a pretty cooperative baby so far, as they go. Having to feed her every 3 hours for a while is just part of the drill. We're very happy she's here, and she seems to be okay with it, too.

No one who has actually spent time in Second Life should be surprised. The creations of Second Life's more ordinary users are far more interesting than those of real-world companies.

One of the more intriguing features of Second Life is that it allows users to design, program and trade objects amongst themselves. Everything from avatar accoutrements (clothing, hair, jewelry) to buildings, vehicles, plants — the whole Second Life world is populated with the creations of its users, fueling an entire in-world economy lubricated by a so-called "limited license right to ... participate in the virtual economy" of Second Life called the Linden Dollar (L$).

The creations of Second Life users are meant for use in Second Life. They advance the stories that people play out when they use Second Life. They add to the social context of Second Life. By contrast, real-world companies' presences in Second Life tend to look like nothing more than corporate advertising. And not just any advertising at that, but advertising that has no social role in that context. IBM may buck the trend in that it gets a lot of traffic in its Second Life regions, but that's primarily because the software running those areas runs on high-powered, well-connected servers, features Second Life residents can use to their advantage when designing and creating objects. It doesn't make much sense to venture into an artificial world to advertise products that are useless there.