Marginal Revolution

Who is the most powerful member of Congress?

Guess.  This metric offers a clear first pick.

Excellent sentences

To think more objectively, become less allied.

That is Robin Hanson, the rest of the post is interesting as well.  Don't forget that: "people ignore info more when they feel powerful."

I also like this (older) sentence from Megan Non-McArdle:

Once you believe your opponents are disproportionately powerful liars, you have completed the Devil Shift.

Here is more.

The economic impact of Arctic melt

The world is about to get a lot more real estate and also some new water lanes:

The shipping shortcuts of the Northern Sea Route (over Eurasia) and the Northwest Passage (over North America) would cut existing oceanic transit times by days, saving shipping companies -- not to mention navies and smugglers -- thousands of miles in travel. The Northern Sea Route would reduce the sailing distance between Rotterdam and Yokohama from 11,200 nautical miles -- via the current route, through the Suez Canal -- to only 6,500 nautical miles, a savings of more than 40 percent. Likewise, the Northwest Passage would trim a voyage from Seattle to Rotterdam by 2,000 nautical miles, making it nearly 25 percent shorter than the current route, via the Panama Canal. Taking into account canal fees, fuel costs, and other variables that determine freight rates, these shortcuts could cut the cost of a single voyage by a large container ship by as much as 20 percent -- from approximately $17.5 million to $14 million -- saving the shipping industry billions of dollars a year. The savings would be even greater for the megaships that are unable to fit through the Panama and Suez Canals and so currently sail around the Cape of Good Hope and Cape Horn.

Here is the full article, which is interesting throughout; if you read only five magazine-like articles this year, this should be one of them.  How about this bit?

Between 1958 and 1992, Russia dumped 18 nuclear reactors into the Arctic Ocean, several of them still fully loaded with nuclear fuel.

I might add that, historically, struggles over new territory tend to bring conflict.  The creation of new Arctic "territory" is one of the most important issues in the world right now.

Deliberately derivative blogging

I want to link to two posts I liked, here, and here.  Here too.  Think of this post as my equivalent of expressive voting.  No, I'm not feeling rage but my calmness in such matters is probably just my personal defect and general lack of manliness when it comes to politics.

Kevin Drum wonders why Clinton and Obama supporters get so worked up at each other.  Any fan of Dr. Seuss will know that policy similarity hardly matters.  The two candidates represent two diametrically opposed portraits of the relationship between aesthetics and politics.  Should we expect beauty, grace and universality, or should we derive our feel-good sentiments about politics from righteousness, confrontation, and sheer dogged persistence and feelings of ultimate desert?  Given his desire for partisan confrontation, Paul Krugman is quite consistent in his skepticism about Barack Obama.  The far more conservative but also far more aestheticized Andrew Sullivan is quite consistent in liking and indeed at times almost loving Obama.  There really is a lot at stake in the Democratic primary; it's our current sense of the aesthetic, and of desert, that drives what our substantive policy views will be twenty or thirty years from now.  Given the high turnout (never an accident), in an odd way there may be more at stake in the Democratic primary than there would be in a Clinton vs. McCain general election.

As an outsider, the dilemma is whether to side with the values you admire or whether that is a kind of fool's gold.  If nothing else, we have Hillary Clinton to thank for reminding us (again) this week that politics is ultimately about power.