COLLEGE ANGST? Don’t blame Tiger Mom.

CAMILLE PAGLIA RATES THE GOP DEBATERS: Mostly stylistic, but style matters too. (See our Cato Unbound discussion of visual persuasion in politics.)

“HARBINGERS OF FAILURE:” Some people seem to have a knack for buying losing products. Wonder how this analysis would apply to political candidates.

DANIEL DREZNER: Pixar movies ranked by “feels.”

THIS IS EXACTLY WHAT HEALTH INSURANCE IS FOR: Unexpected medical catastrophes, especially treatable ones, not routine checkups and fully foreseeable contraception. I faced similar “you’re stealing from the common pot” criticisms when I wrote about my own cancer and the expensive but miraculous drug Herceptin back in 2009. (She’s terribly naive about the British system, however.)

WHAT HAPPENS WHEN IT’S SUDDENLY ILLEGAL TO MOVE MONEY OUT OF YOUR COUNTRY? Basic Internet services disappear.

Just as individual Greeks are losing access to Apple’s iCloud, as the Athens staff of Bloomberg News recently discovered, so companies are finding themselves cut off from services critical to their ongoing operations.

The problem demonstrates a hidden risk in today’s otherwise efficient vertical disintegration. Taking for granted the easy flow of money across borders, system designers never foresaw a situation in which companies with adequate funds would find that they couldn’t pay foreign vendors.

“Greek companies are not able at this moment to pay for hosting (Amazon), storage (Dropbox), email services (MailChimp) and many other services,” says Jon Vlachogiannis, a Bay Area entrepreneur, in an email. Without these services, otherwise viable businesses are in trouble.

Vlachogiannis and other expats are stepping up to pay the bills from California, rescuing companies with astonishingly small amounts.

ARE RIGHT-WING EXTREMISTS REALLY A BIGGER THREAT THAN JIHADIS? The NYT says yes. After looking at its evidence, Megan McArdle isn’t so sure.

THAT’S NO STRATEGY. THAT’S A LIST. “Much of what passes for ‘big picture’ thinking in the White House is purely reactionary.”

THEY DIDN’T JUST TWEET A PHOTO: As Ed Driscoll reports below, when TSA flack Lisa Farbstein tweeted a photo of the contents of a passenger’s luggage–$75,000 in cash–with a snarky comment, the gratuitous invasion of privacy generated quite a bit of public backlash. But the story gets worse. The TSA took a photo, but other federal agents took the money. Christopher Ingraham of the Washington Post‘s Wonkblog reports:

In this case, the cash was seized by a federal agency, most likely the Drug Enforcement Agency, according to Richmond airport spokesman Troy Bell. “I don’t believe the person was issued a summons or a citation,” he said. “The traveler was allowed to continue on his way.”

No charges. No citation. No due process. Just perfectly legal theft.

DON’T CARRY CASH, THE FEDS MIGHT STEAL IT: A New York City nail salon owner tried to take his life savings of $44,000 to help his siblings in California. The DEA took it from him at JFK airport, without so much as issuing a citation. Now he’s suing to get it back–but he has very little chance of succeeding. Read the whole sad story, including a copy of the lawsuit, here. From the article:

Nevertheless, the DEA took all of Do’s money under the assumption that he’s involved in the drug business, despite being more than willing to let him go without even a citation. Do had planned to take his money to California to help his financially-struggling siblings out, but ran into the DEA first.

Then there’s this:

The Plaintiff did not know that it was a violation of Federal regulations to carry cash in excess of $5,000 at the time of the seizure.There’s a good reason for not knowing this. There is no federal regulation prohibiting citizens from walking around (or boarding planes) with any amount of cash. Asset forfeiture laws make this practice unwise, but nothing in federal law says Do was forbidden from boarding a plane with his $44,000.

As Institute for Justice attorney Darpana Sheth said about IJ’s latest civil forfeiture case, “Carrying cash is not a crime. No one should lose their life savings when no drugs or evidence of any crime are found on them or their belongings.”

IT’S NOT JUST GREECE: Puerto Rico is expected to default on more than $70 billion in debt, four times what Detroit owed when it went bankrupt. A report by economists Anne Krueger, Ranjit Teja, and Andrew Wolfe, nicely summarized in this WaPo explainer, points to the sort of fiscal mismanagement you’d expect in such a bankruptcy but also to federal policies that make things especially difficult for the island: the Jones Act, which requires all goods come on U.S. merchant marine vessels, thereby doubling shipping costs compared to nearby islands, and a minimum wage way too high for local conditions. (The WaPo’s Max Ehrenfreund finds the latter “surprising,” which is the opposite of what it is.) The population has been leaving in droves, presumably to more economically promising places.

“PIZZA COULD BE AS POPULAR…AS THE HAMBURGER IF AMERICANS ONLY KNEW MORE ABOUT IT.”

“FROM TEA PARTY STAR TO A LEADER OF THE NEW SOUTH” is how a Washington Post headline describes Nikki Haley, as if there’s some contradiction. I don’t see one (unless you’re referring to the various tax breaks New South politicians have long used to lure corporations to relocate).

ECONOMIC FUTURES: The Mercatus Center has announced its fall lineup for “Conversations with Tyler,” in which Tyler Cowen, of Marginal Revolution blogging fame, will discuss the future of capitalism with Luigi Zigales, the future of globalization with Dani Rodrik, and the future of money with Cliff Asness. If you’re in DC, you can attend in person (info at the link). Otherwise, the conversations will be available online. Earlier, Tyler talked with Peter Thiel about the future of innovation and with Jeffrey Sachs about the future of economic development. (You can watch those videos at the links.)

IT TAKES A LOT OF LOBBYISTS to do something new in America, at least if it involves atoms as well as bits. Here’s a (rather disapproving) account of how Uber became legal in Portland.

JONATHAN RAUCH: HOW MY PREDICTIONS ABOUT GAY MARRIAGE TURNED OUT. A thoughtful early advocate of gay marriage (and a strong advocate of marriage in general), writes about what he got right, what he got wrong, and what remains to be seen. Worth a read, regardless of your views on the issue.

MEGAN MCARDLE: HEALTH INSURANCE IS A FINANCIAL PRODUCT. It may not save lives–recent studies suggest it doesn’t–but, like other forms of insurance, it forestalls financial catastrophe.

Medical expenses really are different from other kinds of public policy programs, because they can be so wildly variable; 99 families out of 100 would be better off if you gave them cash instead of insurance, but the 100th will be hit by an expense that they could never realistically pay.

And that is what insurance is really for. As a health-care economist pointed out to me when the Oregon results came out, they were not actually all that surprising. Insurance is a financial product. It handles financial problems very well. We don’t expect car insurance to make us better drivers, or homeowner’s insurance to keep our house from burning down. Sure, insurance may change some behavior on the margins. But the direction of that change is not necessarily clear: Do you drive more safely to keep your rates down, or take more chances, because someone else will pay the bill if you damage another car? And whatever changes insurance produces are probably pretty marginal. Mostly what insurance does is protect us from financial ruin … and thereby, let us sleep a little easier at night.

The question, then, is “What program would you design if you wanted to give people the benefits that we know insurance confers?”

See her ideas here.

YES, IT’S POSSIBLE TO TALK SENSIBLY ABOUT THE CONFEDERATE FLAG: Here’s an example. (Trigger warning to Southern partisans: Talking sensibly doesn’t mean defending the white supremacists who waved it in the 19th and 20th centuries–or pretending they weren’t in fact white supremacists.)

YES, LET’S TALK ABOUT SEMICOLONS: Commenting on John Tierney’s tampons post, Charlie Martin writes:

I’d rather start a conversation about semicolons. People don’t give semicolons enough respect. Semicolons make lists clearer; they break complex thoughts into readable stages; they provide a stronger separation than the comma without implying a parenthetical — although the long dash was used in that way in earlier times. And they don’t even have their own names: “semicolon” as if they were a defective, smaller colon, when in fact they are actually bigger and have more interesting contours. I think we need a national conversation about semicolons.

Then we can start on the oxford comma.

This University of Bristol page endorses the semicolon as “a hugely powerful punctuation mark. Getting it right will not only impress your tutors and future employers, it will allow you to express your ideas and opinions with more subtlety and precision than ever before.” Ah, so maybe the semicolon is a British affectation and thus un-American? I suspect some copyeditors think so. I’m with Charlie. (And I’m always trying to sneak Oxford commas into Bloomberg View.)

“A FUNDAMENTAL CHANGE:” Q&A with Senator Mark Warner about the sharing/gig economy, which he (correctly) believes challenges the employment model built into most public policies. Is it good for policy makers to start thinking about this? I’m ambivalent. But at least Warner isn’t taking the French view.

What is your concern about the sharing economy?

Warner: This is a fundamental change, and yet what I find is that policy makers may not have even heard about the “Gig economy” or sharing-economy. We have 25 people running for president, and no one is talking about the fastest-growing area of work in our country. What I don’t want to do is impose a Washington top-down solution, yet I don’t think this should be left to a patchwork of court decisions either.

Full interview here.

TEXTILES AND TECHNOLOGY: I discuss my recent Aeon article with Australian radio here. From the article:

‘The important improvements and innovations in clothes for the World of Tomorrow will be in the fabrics themselves,’ declared Raymond Loewy, one of the [1939] Vogue contributors. His fellow visionaries agreed. Every single one talked about textile advances. Many of their designs specified yet-to-be-invented materials that could adjust to temperature, change colour or be crushed into suitcases without wrinkling. Without exception, everyone foretelling the ‘World of Tomorrow’ believed that an exciting future meant innovative new fabrics.

They all understood something we’ve largely forgotten: that textiles are technology, more ancient than bronze and as contemporary as nanowires. We hairless apes co-evolved with our apparel. But, to reverse Arthur C Clarke’s adage, any sufficiently familiar technology is indistinguishable from nature. It seems intuitive, obvious – so woven into the fabric of our lives that we take it for granted.

We drag out heirloom metaphors – ‘on tenterhooks’, ‘tow-headed’, ‘frazzled’ – with no idea that we’re talking about fabric and fibres. We repeat threadbare clichés: ‘whole cloth’, ‘hanging by a thread’, ‘dyed in the wool’. We catch airline shuttles, weave through traffic, follow comment threads. We talk of lifespans and spin‑offs and never wonder why drawing out fibres and twirling them into thread looms so large in our language.

The story of technology is in fact the story of textiles. From the most ancient times to the present, so too is the story of economic development and global trade. The origins of chemistry lie in the colouring and finishing of cloth. The textile business funded the Italian Renaissance and the Mughal Empire; it left us double-entry bookkeeping and letters of credit, Michelangelo’s David and the Taj Mahal. As much as spices or gold, the quest for fabrics and dyestuffs drew sailors across strange seas. In ways both subtle and obvious, textiles made our world.

Read the whole thing here. And here’s a related article on Google’s Project Jacquard.

AMERICAN HISTORY SALE: One-day Kindle deals include Black Hawk Down, David Hackett Fischer’s Washington’s Crossing and Paul Revere’s Ride, Amity Shlaes’s Coolidge, and more. Check them out here.

“DOES FRANCE FEAR INNOVATION?” asks Imran Amed, the Canadian-British founder of Business of Fashion, an influential website that started as a blog. Turns out that anti-Uber strike coincides with the week for men’s fashion shows.

Only in Paris would it be acceptable (or logical) for taxi drivers to go on strike and block train stations and airports and think it would create support for them amongst the public. Harassing Uber drivers who are just trying to do their jobs and haranguing customers who should have the right to choose how they get around only does their cause a disservice. Instead of inconveniencing a whole city, they should offer a better service, use technology and get with the times.

When I recounted my situation on Instagram, the response from the BoF community came fast and furious.

“Think about the people that have to live with that nonsense everyday,” commented Le Monde’s Carine Bizet.

“Absolutely typical of the French Government who do not acknowledge the fashion industry as something REAL,” added Lady Amanda Harlech, muse to Karl Lagerfeld.

Indeed, not only was it a terrible start to Fashion Week, it also made me wonder about what is happening generally in France — one of the most important nodes in the global fashion industry — and the country’s archaic and self-defeating approach to innovation and change.

Worth a quick read.

DOES “LOCHNER” EQUAL “LIBERTY?” I’ll leave it to the lawyers to discuss the substance and merits of the many opinions in the gay-marriage case, but Chief Justice Roberts’s Lochner obsession reads to this layperson like “Ewwww, liberty–Justice Kennedy said a bad word.” Maybe that explains the many separate dissents.

ON THE NET’S LOST ISLAND, THE INTERNET COMES ON A THUMB DRIVE: Backchannel’s Susan Crawford has a fascinating report from Cuba.

By way of an informal but extraordinarily lucrative distribution chain — one guy told me the system generates $5 million in payments a month — anyone in Cuba who can pay can watch telenovelas, first-run Hollywood movies, brand-new episodes of Game of Thrones, and even search for a romantic partner. It’s called El Packete, and it arrives weekly in the form of thumb drives loaded with enormous digital files. Those drives make their way across the island from hand to hand, by bus, and by 1957 Chevy, their contents copied and the drive handed on.

In a sense, El Packete is a very slow high-capacity Internet access connection; someone (no one knows who) loads up those drives with online glitz and gets them to Cuban shores….

 The real riddle is why this rogue system can operate under the tight governing regime. The Cuban government has to know that this underground operation impinges on its monopoly on information. The secret police calls people in all the time to find out what’s going on. But for some reason El Packete isn’t a problem, while actual Internet access is.

Why?

Read the whole thing. (How long before Hollywood starts campaigning for a crackdown on this blatant piracy?) Here’s the documentary she mentions at the end.

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