The failure that really hurt in New Orleans was the failure of the levees. Apparently the lake was higher than usual after the storm passed, causing multiple breeches to the levee system. (It's also possible that the storm itself damaged the levees, though that sounds less plausible to me.) Were these failures preventable? Could more solidly constructed levees have held their own? Or might it be that better levees could have protected in this case, but not in the case of the "direct hit"?
Given the topology of this metropolitan area, it will always be at risk of catastrophic flooding unless an unbreechable levee system can be created. If such a system is impossible to build, should New Orleans be reconstructed on the same site?
All these are questions we'll need aswers to in the coming months/years.

Posted at August 30, 2005 11:32 PM in response to Hope Still Not A Plan

I'm sympathetic to Matt's point of view, but I'm pretty doubtful that it'll be possible to impose simple categories on the varied ways people create, distribute and consume content. Without that, it's going to be hard to create the safe harbors Matt wants for the benefit of hardware makers.
Suppose we decide that we'll make a legal differentiation between music and movies, with different levels of infringement defined for each. What, then about concert DVD's? Are television shows going to be defined as movies? Or only dramas, but not reality shows? What about sitcoms? Maybe we should only give the "movie" designation to stuff that gets shown in a theater. In that case, does it lose the designation once the movie's been shown on TV? If it doesn't, what's to prevent television producers from screening their shows once at a pretend "theater" to get the "movie" designation? And how is the hardware supposed to be able to tell this has happened?
You could simply continue as we have up to now, with all copyrighted works given the same designation. However I don't see where this gives the hardware makers any sort of safe harbor.
Digital Rights Management built into the hardware can solve this, but the problem there is that nothing stands in the way of the most expansive possible regime of copyright protection, given that the DRM will be established by the content creators. Nothing, that is, except government regulatory bodies, which in this political climate is effectively the same as nothing.
So at this point it looks a bit all-or-nothing to me. Either we have a digital arnarchy, or we have a digital 1984. Neither is very tempting.

Posted at June 27, 2005 11:12 PM in response to What's At Stake

As the father of very young kids I can tell you that nothing is more sure to get a laugh out of them than a cartoonish pratfall. Drop a stuffed animal on the floor and blow a raspberry as it hits, and they'll be howling with mirth.
It's always seems a bit strange to me that we use the same words for the stuff that happens to Wile E Coyote as with what happens to say, annoying teens in slasher movies. The consequences of the acts (none, in Wile E Coyote's case) and the tone with which they are presented make the violence in the two cases an utterly different thing.
And it's not as if it's a simple binary - cartoon vs. real. The slasher-movie violence is intended to be maximally gory and frightening, but it's also completely unreal. Nobody is ever actually killed by red-faces demons in a hat that come from your dreams. Such depictions are as different from more factual depictions of violence as they are from the cartoon. In fact, I'd venture to say that each portrayal of violence needs to be taken as a separate moral case, with the full context considered.
Yet bureaucracies demand metrics, as do rule-based systems of classification. At least the screenwriters can know what the metrics are, even if they are stupid and arbitrary. The alternative is requiring people to think and use good judgement, which these days is apparently an impossible thing to ask.

Posted at June 19, 2005 11:25 PM in response to Bad Language

For crying out loud, what is it with D.C. that makes people stupid? The war was started by incompetent liars, it's been waged in such a way as to cause maximum destruction to both Iraq and to the U.S. armed forces conducting it, and it isn't heading anywhere good. By now there is no positive role for the U.S. even if we weren't being led by an administration of psychos.
Roberto hits it on the head - we out in the hinterlands could see this was a trainwreck right from the beginning. Dems who enabled this mess should pay the price. What's the worst that could happen - that we'll be out of power? WE ALREADY ARE.
The media won't save us. Their corporate heads are up the right wing's nether regions, and they wouldn't recognize the truth if it were screaming in their collective faces. The good news is the magnitude of the disaster is slowly dawning on middle america no matter what the chatterers say.
Democrats need to take a stand for truth. The truth is this war is lost, and the country is headed for very bad times. Idiotic happy talk and pie-in-the-sky plans for victory are neither credible nor helpful. Tell the truth without flinching, and when the future arrives we'll be in a position to do something about it. All the rest is nonsense.

Posted at June 3, 2005 8:54 AM in response to The Democrats' Dilemma

One of the iron laws of right-wing discourse is that once you have a factoid that favors your side, you quote it endlessly, even if it has already been debunked. At no point do you explicitly disavow a lost talking point; instead, force your opponent to go through some long-winded refutation, and then change the subject.

Posted at May 31, 2005 6:56 AM in response to Talking Point Down