Leftovers from 2008

I just excavated my home office this weekend and found all the news articles I meant to write about but didn't.

So rather than a year in review, I thought I would post some 2008 leftovers -- bits and pieces on topics that snagged my attention (but not quite enough to get their own posts). Time to get them out of the filing cabinet, up into the cloud, and then into the recycling bin!

"The U.S. is the only country in the developed world where teens are less likely to graduate from high school than their parents were." (One of the Star Tribune's little front page factoids a few weeks ago; no more detail, no attribution.)

"Rarely mentioned in the current debate [about bailing out GM, Ford and Chrysler] is that labor costs make up only 10 percent of the price of a vehicle, and unionized car plants use less labor per vehicle assembled than their non-union counterparts." (From Another South-North Fight Over Labor, Dec. 17, 2008 op-ed in the Pioneer Press by David Morris, vice president of the Institute for Local Self-Reliance.)

"For the first time in U.S. history, more than one in every 100 adults is in jail or prison, said a new report documenting the U.S.'s rank as the world's No. 1 incarcerator..." according to a report by the Pew Center. Total cost per year: $50 billion to the states, $5 billion to the federal government. "The rate of increase for prison costs was six times greater than for higher education spending..." Star Tribune, from news services, February 29, 2008.

"More than 50 years into the Information Age, computers are still getting confused by [names that include an] apostrophe. It's a problem familiar to O'Connors, D'Angelos, N'Dours and D'Artagnans across America." Even a space, such as in a name like van Campen, or a hyphen can mess things up. In the Michigan caucuses in 2004, thousands of people with names like these didn't get their votes counted. (Associated Press, February 22. I originally saw it in the Star Tribune, but here's a link to it on the CBC website.)

Pubs across Ireland are closing as people commute more, have more money to spend on distant vacations and home amusements, and are no longer allowed to smoke indoors. About a thousand pubs have closed across the country in the past three years, according to a Washington Post story I originally saw in the Strib on April 27, 2008 (see the full story on the Boston Globe site).

Another Pew report from April 30, 2008 (this time from the Pew Charitable Trusts and Johns Hopkins School of Public Health) found that factory farming takes a hidden toll on human health and the environment. What's more, the economies of scale used to justify factory farming "are largely an illusion, perpetuated by a failure to account for a raft of associated costs." In a Washington Post story reported that the commission of experts made a series of tough recommendations, unusual considering it came from a committee and had to go through rounds of review by a range of interests. Recommended: phasing out antibiotic use in farm animals, phasing out animal confinement, and tighter regulation of farm waste. And get this: "it appears that the vast majority of U.S. antibiotic use is for animals, the commission noted, adding that because of lack of government oversigh, even regulators can only estimate how many drugs are being given to animals."

On October 12, the Pioneer Press carried this depressing story from AP: "Mexican Pot Cartels Ravaging U.S. Parks." Not only are they digging up the parks, they're polluting them with banned herbicides, plant growth hormones that end up in streams, and rat poison. First documented in 1998, the problem has gotten a lot worse since border security was tightened after Sept. 11, 2001. Full story on the MSNBC site.

All I could do was shake my head when I read this Los Angeles Times story in the Oct. 10, 2008 Strib: Linguists employed by the National Security Agency were tasked to listen in on conversations of American citizens calling abroad, even when everyone knew there was no possible national security interest in the calls. One linguist said, "We identified phone numbers belonging to nonthreatening groups, including the Red Cross. We could have blocked their numbers, but we didn't, and we were told to listen to them just in case." This included monitoring calls between members of the U.S. military and their loved ones back in the States. Another linguist recalled, "I observed people writing down, word for word, very embarrassing conversations... People would say, 'Hey, check this out; you're not going to believe what I heard.' "

And finally, this from the New York Times. Parents are coughing up $149 for a genetic test that they think will tell them if their child has the potential to be a world-class athlete, and if so, whether the child's "gifts" lie in speed and power or endurance. The story's lead was enough to make you sick: "When Donna Campiglia learned recently that a genetic test might be able to determine which sports suit the talents of her 2 1/2-year-old son, Noah, she instantly said, 'Where can I get it, and how much does it cost?' "