Category: Current Affairs

Sometimes it's so bad that the cars can't even more, at least not without external assistance:

…heads begin to appear between the hoods and trunks.

Motivated by a meeting they wish to keep, men wade into the fray,
examining the crystalline structure of the traffic, looking for gaps,
irregularities, wiggle room. Because there’s always wiggle room. Six
inches here, a foot there, and this makes all the difference. It’s
reverse Tetris: move one this way, move another that way, and suddenly
some cars are free.

The amazing thing is this: these men don’t coordinate their actions.
They don’t formulate strategies. In fact, they probably think they’re
working against each other–as passengers in trapped cars, they care
about helping the other cars move only insofar as it helps get their
own car on its way.

The article is here and I thank Dave Prager for the pointer.  Here is one photo of a Delhi traffic jam.

The article is interesting throughout, here is one good bit:

The foremost difficulty is immigration. In English we'd call it "migration," but our translators unfailingly used the word "immigration," and I began to see that it was the more accurate description of what was happening. Just as developed countries like the United States and members of the European Union face an influx of workers from the developing world, so does China: it's just that China contains both the developed and developing worlds within its borders.

The way China regulates this flow is not that different from the way nation states do. There is a residence permit called a hukou that anchors people to their home region by tying social services (healthcare, pension and, most important, schooling) to that area. But just as walls and laws have a hard time restricting human traffic from Mexico to the United States when the economic incentives are so extreme, so do the internal regulations of the Chinese state.

And this:

Pick any major city in America and start adding 500,000 people a year. It wouldn't be long before it broke under the strain.

Buy your own android double:

They will be built by Japanese robotics firm Kokoro, which is best known for its line of attractive Actroid receptionist humanoids.

The company will create the sitting robot out of silicone with the same face, body shape, hair and eyes of the recipient. Their speech will be based on recordings of the owner's voice.

The android's facial expressions and upper body will be modeled on the movements of the buyer.

Do check out the photos of the female models and the video is a must.  They're not cheap:

The mechanical doppelgangers will be on offer at Sogo, Seibu, and Robinson retailers for the princely sum of 20.1million yen or £139,000.

But they are pretty good, here is one (male) example:

For the pointer I thank Bob Cottrell at The Browser.

I know that not everything reported in the newspaper about terrorist sting operations is reliable information, but still this passage struck me as noteworthy:

Pakistani authorities on Saturday zeroed in on the alleged mastermind of a plot to send five Northern Virginia men to Afghanistan to kill U.S. troops,

Is that how you would allocate the five men?  Yet even that was not allowed:

Saifullah was unsuccessful in convincing al-Qaeda commanders that the men were not part of a CIA plot to infiltrate the terrorist network. As a result, they were marooned for days in the eastern city of Sargodha, far from the forbidding mountains of the northwest that have become a terrorist haven.

I'm not pretending to know the real story, but "remove them from proximity to packed U.S. shopping malls, send them to Sargodha" is a strategy I can live with.  Alternatively, you can take this as evidence that they really were CIA plants.  In which case you can ease up about all the media stories today on homegrown U.S. terrorists, etc. 

One of them was an accounting student at GMU; I wonder which one of us he had for Principles?

Some people are saying they're the worst decade ever, but that's more true for the global relations of the United States than for the level of human well-being in the world as a whole.  Even in the U.S., a lot of social indicators improved.  Elsewhere Chinese growth continued, Indian growth moved into the big time (in the gross reckoning we're already at well over two billion people), a lot of Eastern Europe was successfully absorbed into the EU,  Indonesia made slow but steady progress.  Brazil may have turned a corner, and Africa had a better-than-lately decade in terms of economic growth.  Communism didn't really come back.  Admittedly the Middle East is a tougher call.  Canada did strikingly well, as did Australia.  There was lots of progress on public health, including in the war against AIDS.  The internet truly blossomed and human creativity continued.

For a lot of you it feels bad, but it's not obvious that the naughties have been such a terrible decade overall.  By the way, that home prices fell was overall a good thing; the roofs on those homes still keep out the rain.

I thank Bryan Caplan for a discussion related to this post.

Why are we spending a multiple of Afghanistan’s total GDP on fighting a war in the country?

Some follow-ups are:

Couldn’t more be done, for cheaper, with cash for bribes and development? How is it that it doesn’t take the Taliban years to train competent soldiers?

That is all from Matt Yglesias.