Quotulatiousness

July 29, 2013

“Junk food costs as little as $1.76 per 1,000 calories, whereas fresh veggies … cost more than 10 times as much”

Filed under: Economics, Food, Health, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 10:35

Making a case for the McDonald’s McDouble as the greatest food in human history:

What is “the cheapest, most nutritious and bountiful food that has ever existed in human history” Hint: It has 390 calories. It contains 23g, or half a daily serving, of protein, plus 7% of daily fiber, 20% of daily calcium and so on.

Also, you can get it in 14,000 locations in the US and it usually costs $1. Presenting one of the unsung wonders of modern life, the McDonald’s McDouble cheeseburger.

The argument above was made by a commenter on the Freakonomics blog run by economics writer Stephen Dubner and professor Steven Leavitt, who co-wrote the million-selling books on the hidden side of everything.

Dubner mischievously built an episode of his highly amusing weekly podcast around the debate. Many huffy back-to-the-earth types wrote in to suggest the alternative meal of boiled lentils. Great idea. Now go open a restaurant called McBoiled Lentils and see how many customers line up.

But we all know fast food makes us fat, right? Not necessarily. People who eat out tend to eat less at home that day in partial compensation; the net gain, according to a 2008 study out of Berkeley and Northwestern, is only about 24 calories a day.

The outraged replies to the notion of McDouble supremacy — if it’s not the cheapest, most nutritious and most bountiful food in human history, it has to be pretty close — comes from the usual coalition of class snobs, locavore foodies and militant anti-corporate types. I say usual because these people are forever proclaiming their support for the poor and for higher minimum wages that would supposedly benefit McDonald’s workers. But they’re completely heartless when it comes to the other side of the equation: cost.

Update, 30 July: Stephen Dubner notes that the Kyle Smith story has triggered “about one zillion” media requests for more comment on the original post, but that he’s too busy writing to take time out to respond.

Spanish border guards stage virtual blockade of Gibraltar

Filed under: Britain, Europe, Military — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 10:18

The Spanish claim to Gibraltar is being pursued by other means, it would seem:

Spanish police stopped every one of 10,000 vehicles leaving Gibraltar for the mainland yesterday, causing six-hour traffic jams in the latest escalation in the standoff over the Rock.

Officers from the Royal Gibraltar Police were forced to impose diversions and create beachside holding areas as Spanish authorities ‘choked’ the border, causing massive tailbacks in 30C heat.

It was the second day that border guards had blocked links to the mainland, in a move that seemed calculated to bring Gibraltar to a standstill.

[…]

Most recently Spanish fishermen sparked a stand-off with the Royal Navy as they attempted to disrupt the creation of an artificial reef in the Bay of Gibraltar last week.

The fishermen used fast boats to weave in between British vessels involved in the reef-laying operation in a bid to create large waves to disrupt the work, the Sunday Express reported.

Intervention by a Royal Navy patrol boat brought an end to the protests. A Gibraltar government spokesman has accused Spain of launching the ‘draconian’ border checks which continued yesterday in ‘retaliation’.

He said the decision to lay the reef, which consists of large concrete blocks sunk to the bottom of the bay, had been taken on environmental grounds.

However, he added, it had infuriated Spanish fishermen since it would also foil any attempts by their vessels to carry out illegal trawling of the bottom of the Bay of Gibraltar.

Criticising the Spanish government’s response, the spokesman added to the Sunday Express: ‘Not only are these measures affecting thousands of innocent Spanish workers who make their living on Gibraltar, but we are extremely concerned about pensioners and families with young children being forced to suffer in this way just because they want to visit the mainland.’

Ten questions with Evernote CEO Phil Libin

Filed under: Business, Technology — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:36

Wired‘s Ryan Tate sat down to talk to Phil Libin of Evernote:

Evernote is known for its eponymous note-taking app, a seemingly modest piece of software that has brought in a heap of money. Evernote has topped 10 million downloads in the iOS and Android app stores and accumulated more than 65 million users across its mobile, web, and desktop versions.

CEO and serial tech entrepreneur Phil Libin used to bristle when people would refer to Evernote as a digital notebook. He sees the product as an extension of the mind, albeit one that’s only about 5 percent complete. These days, though, he’s learned to embrace the pigeonholing. After all, it was humble note-takers who brought Redwood City, California-based Evernote to profitability in 2011 by upgrading en masse to a premium version that includes optical character recognition (handy for pictures of business cards and receipts) and collaborative note editing (great for workgroups).

This year, Evernote is in the red again as the company scales up to reach Libin’s bigger ambition — becoming something like Microsoft Office for mobile devices. Or, as Libin put it in an hourlong interview with WIRED, “like Nike for your mind.”

Evernote’s staff of 330 is divided into teams of no more than eight members — small enough, as Libin sees it, to sit around a dinner table and have a single conversation. No team project can last more than nine months, and none of the teams share any code, which is something close to sacrilege among the software priests of Silicon Valley. One recent sunny Friday, while programmers behind him raced to rewrite the iPhone and iPad versions of Evernote from scratch, we pelted Libin with questions about the past, present, and future of his company.

Why Germany is the venue for the loudest denunciations of NSA surveillance

Filed under: Europe, Germany, Government, Media, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 09:14

Alex Harrowell explains the deep suspicions among Germans which long predate the NSA surveillance revelations:

Obviously, privacy and data protection are especially sensitive in Germany. After the Stasi, the centrality of big databases to the West German state’s response to the left-wing terrorists of the 1970s, and the extensive Nazi use of telephone intercepts during the seizure of power, it couldn’t really be otherwise. Privacy and digital activism is older and better established in Germany than anywhere else — in the US, for example, I consider the founding text of the movement to be the FBI vs. Steve Jackson Games case from 1990 or thereabouts, while the key text in Germany is the court judgment on the national census from ten years earlier. But the UK has a (strong) data protection act and no-one seems anywhere near as exercised, although they probably should be.

So here’s an important German word, which we could well import into English: Deutungshoheit. This translates literally as “interpretative superiority” and is analogous to “air superiority”. Deutungshoheit is what politicians and their spin doctors attempt to win by putting forward their interpretations and framings of the semirandom events that constitute the “news”. In this case, the key event was Snowden’s disclosure of the BOUNDLESS INFORMANT slides, which show that the NSA’s Internet surveillance operations collect large amounts of information from sources in Germany.

The slides don’t say anything about how, whether this was information on German customers handed over by US cloud companies under PRISM orders, tapped from cables elsewhere, somehow collected inside Germany, or perhaps shared with the NSA by German intelligence. This last option is by far the most controversial and the most illegal in Germany. The battle for Deutungshoheit, therefore, consisted in denying any German involvement and projecting the German government, like the people in question, as passive victims of US intrusion.

On the other hand, Snowden’s support-network in the Berlin digital activist world, centred around Jacob “ioerror” Applebaum, strove to imply that in fact German agencies had been active participants, and Snowden’s own choice of further disclosures seems to have been guided by an intent to influence German politicians. Der Spiegel, rather than the Guardian, has been getting documents first and their content is mostly about Germany.

In this second phase, the German political elite has shifted its feet; rather than trying to deny any involvement whatsoever, they have instead tried to interpret the possibility of something really outrageous as being necessary for your security, and part of fundamental alliance commitments which cannot be questioned within the limits of respectable discourse. The ur-text here is Die Zeit‘s interview with Angela Merkel, in which Merkel argues that she knew nothing, further that there was a balance to strike between freedom and security, that although some kinds of spying were unacceptable, the alliance came first. The effectiveness of this, at least in the context of the interview, can be measured by astonishingly uncritical questions like the one in which she was asked “what additional efforts were necessary from the Germans to maintain their competitiveness”.

H/T to Tyler Cowen for the link.

It’s the same joke over and over again … but it’s funny because it’s true

Filed under: Government, Humour, Media, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 07:54

H/T to Nick Gillespie for the link.

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