The Wall Street Journal reports that state and local budget woes are leading to rougher road surfaces:

Paved roads, historical emblems of American achievement, are being torn up across rural America and replaced with gravel or other rough surfaces as counties struggle with tight budgets and dwindling state and federal revenue. State money for local roads was cut in many places amid budget shortfalls.

In Michigan, at least 38 of the 83 counties have converted some asphalt roads to gravel in recent years. Last year, South Dakota turned at least 100 miles of asphalt road surfaces to gravel. Counties in Alabama and Pennsylvania have begun downgrading asphalt roads to cheaper chip-and-seal road, also known as “poor man’s pavement.” Some counties in Ohio are simply letting roads erode to gravel.

It sounds like a temporary solution to recession-induced budget woes–cutting back on road maintenance costs while tax receipts are down. Thing is, changing a road surface isn’t all that temporary,. like furloughing a worker. If you’re grinding up the asphalt, you’re likely doing away with the pavement for years to come.
There’s another factor suggesting this may be a long-term trend rather than a quick budget fix: higher energy prices have made petroleum-based asphalt more expensive. Asphalt is made from bitumen, a by-product of oil distillation. Although bitumen is still quite readily-available, the recent surge in oil prices has made it more expensive to obtain and process the raw ingredients needed to pave roads. When the 2008 oil bubble hit, many counties and municipalities started cutting back on or deferring road projects before they saw a cataclysmic drop in tax revenues. I suspect that even if/when local governments are able to right their balance sheets, $80+ oil means we’re not going to see repaving on the scale we once did.
The WSJ piece credits the automobile for the creation of our paved road system:

Paving grew in popularity in the early 20th century as more cars hit streets and spread when the federal government built the Interstate Highway System.

That’s not entirely correct. Bicyclists actually who started the movement to pave America’s roads:

The bicycle, quite literally, paved the road for automobiles. The explosive popularity of the human-powered, two-wheeled vehicle sparked road construction across the Western world’s cities. The League of American Wheelmen was a major vector for the political will necessary to build better roads with more than one million members (out of a mere 75 million people) at its peak. Sure they engaged in silliness like racing and bicycle polo (!) but at heart, the group was a potent, progressive social force that inadvertently helped bring about its own end by getting roads paved, thus making long distance “touring” possible in automobiles.

This is where the rubber meets the road for me. I don’t often drive on remote, rural roads that are at risk for going gravel. But I occasionally bicycle them. And bicycles don’t mix well with gravel, or chip-and-seal, or even potholes. So I hope graveling doesn’t rear its ugly head in East Tennessee . . . at least not on any roads that matter.

I was listening to comedian Rush Limbaugh’s rant against preventive medicine (Obamacare includes it, therefore it must be evil!) when I heard this beauty. It exemplifies the type of logical fallacy his listeners are constantly bombarded with:

And about this behavioral business, “Oh, yeah, we’ve really had a lot of success there.” Remember when they told us, “You get people to quit smoking, and you get rid of secondhand smoke, and look at the health care cost savings that we’ll have.” Remember that? Oh, I do. I remember everything these little commie twits say.
I remember it, folks, because it’s all BS. It is. Everything that comes out of their controlling, little, small minds is BS. So, “We can’t have second-hand smoke, and if people will just quit smoking look at the cost savings in health care.” Well, we’ve had a whole bunch of people quit smoking. In fact, it’s very odd to see a smoker. The most commonplace to see a smoker is in a movie. On the screen not in the theater. Actors and actresses. That’s where most smoking takes place these days. Yet last I heard, health care costs were skyrocketing at such a rate that we needed Obamacare to reduce the deficit. We’ve been successful with behavioral control. We have succeeded in convincing a vast majority of former smokers to give it up. Our health care costs, fshew! skyrocketed, as they continue to skyrocket.

In short, anti-smoking health policy advocates are wrong because they talked about cost-savings and health care now costs more than ever.
What’s wrong with this analysis? For one thing it supposes that the only change accounting for a variation in health care costs between the 1960s and today is that now we have fewer smokers. In reality, there are plenty of non-smoking-related factors that have driven up the cost of care. Think of all the drugs, tests, therapies, machines, and specialists we use now that didn’t exist forty years ago All of that stuff costs money.
The other problem with this take–symptomatic to talk radio–is the information it omits. There actually is research showing that the total lifetime medical costs for smokers are not more than those for non-smokers. It seems counterintuitive–smokers have higher insurance rates, after all–but that’s what the studies say.
Here’s the catch: the reason smokers don’t cost more is because they tend to die ten years earlier than non-smokers. Presumably anti-smoking health care advocates view death as a bad thing. That’s one of the reasons they want people to stop.
Perhaps Rush (and his target audience) views premature death differently. Perhaps they welcome it. If I had to listen to that nonsense day after day, I might welcome it too.

Last Thursday’s USA Today had a cover story examining where genetic research stands a decade after the first draft of the human genome was mapped out. (See also N.Y. Times).
You might recall how at the time that milestone was heralded as an earthshaking biological advancement–how it was going to usher in the age of personalized medicine where doctors knew in advance what health problems patients are genetically predisposed to develop and could treat them accordingly.
Ten years later that promise has yet to be fulfilled. Researchers still cannot tell which genetic markers are linked to heart disease or cancer. By and large, a simple family history remains a better forecasting tool for some conditions than genetic code.
So has the Human Genome Project has been a bust? Was all the hype akin to the mid-twentieth-century predictions of flying cars?
Not exactly. Geneticists have made notable progress in their ability to plot the genome, they just haven’t been able to figure out exactly what the markers mean. They’re starting to find that some common genetic variations are statistically linked to certain diseases, but thus far those discoveries have only turned out to be one of a number of risk factors in predicting the disease.
What researchers need to do is map out many complete genomes to see if they can link rare genetic variations to diseases. Fortunately, this has now become technologically feasible:

Stunning advances in sequencing technology have cut the time it takes to decode a genome from a decade to a couple of weeks. The cost has dropped from $3 billion, about $1 for each of the genome’s 3 billion chemical components, to less than $10,000, with the $1,000 genome in sight.

Geneticists will soon have a lot more data to crunch–whether or not it leads to meaningful advances in therapeutic medicine in the next decade remains to be seen.
Whenever this topic is raised one question I ask myself is this: How much do I want to know about my DNA? Do I really want to know that I have a strong chance of getting cancer, for example, particularly if there’s little that can be done to prevent it?
A few years ago I would decisively said, “I want to know.” And still today, on balance, I probably want to know. But a recent incident gives me more pause.
A few months ago I was experiencing some physical discomfort, so I went through WebMD and a couple other medical sites and looked up nearly all the diseases and conditions that might account for my symptoms. In the course of my investigation, I diagnosed myself with a number of serious–some even fatal–afflictions.
Suffice it to say, I don’t have any of those diseases. But I got worried that I did. And, taken overboard, that reaction can be counterproductive.
If I’m getting worked up over the mere possibility of contracting a disease, even when I know the odds against it are high, imagine what kind of worrywart I might become if I’m armed with a little knowledge about my genetic predispositions? I can see myself going into red alert mode every time I experienced a fleeting symptom. It would be unhealthy for my emotional wellbeing.
For now it’s a moot concern, since I haven’t taken a DNA test. Perhaps by the time I do researchers will have found a cure for whatever disease that threatens me. Then I won’t have to worry about it.

You know those people who say they will leave the country if candidate X wins the next presidential election? Now they have another excuse not to follow through with their threat: the expense.
I was surprised to learn from a NPR story on State Department fee increases (including passports) that beginning next Tuesday it will cost $450.00 to renounce one’s U.S. citizenship.
Why does it cost so much? Congress has mandated that fees match the cost of services. Apparently a renunciation of U.S. citizenship generates a lot of work for a consular officer–it’s a more involved process than simply deleting your name from the citizen list.
Incidentally, if you’re curious just how one goes about renouncing citizenship, here’s the general process:

A person who is a national of the United States whether, by birth or naturalization, shall lose his nationality by voluntarily performing any of the following acts with the intention of relinquishing United States nationality:

(5) making a formal renunciation of nationality before a diplomatic or consular officer of the United States in a foreign state, in such form as may be prescribed by the Secretary of State; or
(6) making in the United States a formal written renunciation of nationality in such form as may be prescribed by, and before such officer as may be designated by, the Attorney General, whenever the United States shall be in a state of war and the Attorney General shall approve such renunciation as not contrary to the interests of national defense.

In most cases this requires that you make the renunciation outside the United States. It’s possible to render yourself stateless if you renounce U.S. citizenship without having already acquired another nationality. With a few exceptions, renunciation of U.S. citizenship is an irrevocable–you cannot simply take it back if you change your mind.
So if you want to flee America to escape a Death Panel or some other threat, those are a few of the rules. But you better get cracking–come Tuesday it will cost you $450.00 more.

I usually find old newsreel movies to be interesting and/or entertaining. They offer a unique insight into how people at the time viewed the world, or at least how the powers-that-be wanted them to view the world. Often, they’re also corny, whether unintentionally or by design.
(via Zero Hedge) Here’s a 1933 film on how inflation can help lift the nation out of the Great Depression. At the time (as you can see in the nifty graphs) deflation was a millstone around the economy’s neck. With prices falling, people had less of an incentive to make purchases immediately, so they hoarded instead of spent. And so the vicious cycle continued. Inflation was viewed as a means of getting money flowing again.
Watch:


Today we see some economic parallels to 1930s deflation. Since the housing bubble burst, we’ve had significant monetary and credit contraction. Core CPI growth has remained below the Fed’s target rate for price stability. People are saving rather than making the discretionary purchases that they used to make. It’s a tough funk to get out of when you have a lot of extra productive capacity.
So we could use more inflation, and the federal government and the Fed have certainly adopted spending and monetary policies to promote it. The problem is–black and white propaganda film not withstanding–it’s not something that policy makers can easily switch on or off whenever they desire. If it was, we won’t have gotten in this mess to begin with. It’s more like trying to turn around an aircraft carrier in a pond. They may or may not be able to turn the ship in the right direction. And, even if they do, they might not be able to keep it from running aground.
If only solutions were as easy as the newsreels made them out to be.