This Site Has Moved!

Because “Cosmopolis” has wound up focusing more on economics than geography, I have decided to morph the site, changing its name and moving it to another location.

Nothing else has changed. Not even the theme.

You can now get your fix – for what it’s worth – at

http://www.thedismalscientist.wordpress.com

Thank you for spending time here, and I hope to see you soon!

Amazon Kindle 2

If it were not for those annoying obligations that press on everyone – eating, drinking, getting an education – I would have spent all of yesterday morning standing at my own door in wait for my Amazon Kindle 2. Around noon, with a rude knock from the UPS man, it finally arrived. After a day and a half with Kindle, I want to share my experience and thoughts, with the goal of helping someone who is considering buying a Kindle but isn’t sure if the investment will pay off.

I have never been enthralled by gadgets and gizmos, but when I heard about the Kindle, I thought, “Now there’s a device designed for me”. I had reservations, of course (particularly about the rather hefty price tag), so I did some research. Reading is at the center of my life, and I wanted to know if this little machine would make things easier for me.

Kindle is heavily marketed to readers of fiction: Tom Clancy, Danielle Steel, etc. With a few snobbish exceptions, I do not read fiction. I read scholarly material (journals), blogs, and nonfiction books that are mostly old, out-of-print, or designed for classroom use. Would Kindle work for me?

Thus far, it has. Wonderfully. In fact, I don’t even know where to start. OK, first, what is Kindle? It is an electronic device built specifically for reading. It is not a phone, not a PC, not a Blackberry. Kindle is for the shrinking number of people who read whole paragraphs at a time and do not abbreviate evrthng n sght.

Weighing in at a very comfortable 10.2 oz and slender as a thick magazine, Kindle is sleek, simple, and elegant in appearance. More importantly, it is incredibly comfortable in the hands. For those who love the physical massiveness, suppleness, and often-charming fragrance of actual books, Kindle offers none of that.

Now let’s talk about Kindle’s display technology. Don’t assume that because Kindle is electronic it must read like a PC monitor and boggle your eyes. Nothing could be further from the truth. Kindle’s screen is incredibly easy on the eyes, and you can read it no matter where you are and no matter what the lighting (as long as lighting is sufficient, of course; Kindle doesn’t glow). This means no glare! So reading Kindle is not like reading a computer screen, but it isn’t like reading a book, either. It falls somewhere between the two. Warmer than a computer screen but cooler than a book, and cleaner than either.

Kindle’s learning curve is as low as could be desired. The machine has only a few buttons, along with a “5-way controller”, all of which are readily accessible to the fingers and easy to use. Also, Kindle has a small keyboard below the screen for entering searches and notes.

How large a digital library can Kindle hold? In my estimation, this is one of Kindle’s greatest features. Not only does the machine itself hold roughly 1500 e-books, but Amazon will actually store your “offline” library, any document of which can then be re-downloaded into your Kindle with speed and without cost. In practice, then, your Kindle storage is infinite. How cool is that?

What sorts of material can you read on your Kindle? First, of course, there are e-books, available for purchase from Amazon’s Kindle Store or download from such sites as Project Gutenberg. NYT bestseller titles go for about ten dollars per digital book. Lesser-known titles come much cheaper, while text-books and other, more scholarly books range from thirty-five dollars to upwards of a hundred.

Books, though, are only the beginning of what Kindle offers to the dedicated reader. Also available from Amazon are newspaper and blog subscriptions, ranging from one to two dollars per month. For that price, you get your newspaper wirelessly delivered to you by the time you wake up (before everybody else gets it) and your favorite blogs updated all day, every day. The whole thing is so painless, you’ll almost feel guilty. Almost.

In addition to books, newspapers, and blogs, you can also put personal documents into your Kindle. “Personal documents” means “any text file in your computer that is in Kindle-compatible format”. So you can download your emails from Aunt Josephine, your Master’s thesis, your letters to the editor, your saved copies of journal articles – just about anything. (Remember, though, that Kindle does not support all file-types.)

Last but not least, Kindle comes equipped with 3G web service, so you can search the web anywhere that your cell-phone would work. Kindle’s browser is very basic and supports only text-driven websites. Also, Kindle does not come in color, so don’t expect to get much out of, say, a photography website. Nonetheless, with Kindle’s web capabilities, you don’t have to pay to read your daily blogs or papers; just bookmark them and voila! You’re in the blogosphere, baby!

In short, for a dedicated reader there are lots of reasons to purchase a Kindle 2, and very few reasons not to. Here are the lists:

Reasons to buy a Kindle 2:
1. Save incredible amounts of space and time by digitizing your library and accessing it from a slender, slight, and very pretty device. Carry all your books and papers with you wherever you go!
2. Save money by taking advantage of the increasingly low cost of electronic storage and transfer.
3. Wireless internet almost anywhere you want it, from a machine that’s more pleasant to handle than any but the sleekest smartphones. Keep up with your favorite blogs and newspapers.
4. Digitize and store your personal documents along with your library of copyrighted material, at low cost. They are instantly accessible and totally safe.
5. Create a document of personal notes on your documents and highlighted selections for instant, easy reference. No page turning!
6. Technical support is competent, quick, and helpful. (I know from personal experience.)
7. Kindle comes with a digital version of the New Oxford American Dictionary. If you come across a word you don’t know, just click the cursor and a definition appears at the bottom of the screen.

Reasons not to buy a Kindle 2:

1. $359 before tax and shipping.
2. Not interactive – no texting, emailing, messaging, etc.
3. Kindle cannot serve all your literary needs. Cross-referencing is particularly difficult.
4. As with other download services, Kindle is so cheap and easy that it would be rather easy to overspend. It may not feel like you’re spending money, but you are. And though conversion and download is only a dime per document, the dimes can add up.

In short, if, like me, you depend on literature and are not sentimentally bonded to the physical attributes of paper, you should buy a Kindle 2. It will revolutionize your reading.

For a Lark

I don’t usually go in for online intelligence tests, but this one’s pretty clever and fun.

Thoma: “Confusing American Companies with American Jobs”

Thoma on Reich on Stimulus and Bailout:

Robert Reich:

The Perils of Confusing American Companies With American Jobs, by Robert Reich: Do not confuse American companies with American jobs. The new stimulus bill, for example, requires that the money be used for production in the United States. Foreign governments, along with large U.S. multinationals concerned about possible foreign retaliation, charge this favors American-based companies. That’s not quite true. Foreign companies are eligible to receive stimulus money for things they make here… For example, Alstom, the French engineering company, is eligible to receive stimulus funds for the power turbines it produces in Tennessee… On the other hand, U.S. Steel may not be eligible for stimulus money for the steel slabs it casts in Ontario, Canada.

I’m not defending the “buy American” provisions… I’m just saying they’re not the same as “buy from American companies.” And although these provisions skate close to protectionism and risk foreign retaliation, at least a case can be made that if American taxpayers are footing the bill…, the jobs should be created, well, here in America.

The same confusion haunts the debate over the auto bailout. Advocates of bailing out GM and Chrysler, and most likely Ford, say America can’t afford to lose “its” auto industry. But … foreign-owned automakers, already producing cars here in the United States, employ – directly or indirectly – hundreds of thousands of Americans. …

Meanwhile, the Big Three themselves are global. A Pontiac G8 shipped by GM from Australia has less American content than a BMW X5 assembled in the United States. …

I’m not arguing against an auto bailout. But it ought to be focused on helping American auto workers rather than helping global auto companies headquartered in America. Why pay the Big Three billions of taxpayer dollars … when, even after being bailed out, they cut tens of thousands of American jobs, slash wages, and shrink their American operations…?

That’s backwards. The auto bailout should help American autoworkers keep their jobs or get new ones that pay almost as well.

Whether it’s stimulus or bailout, policy makers must remember that American companies aren’t the same as American workers – and our first responsibility is to the latter.

“I’m not defending the ‘buy American’ provisions…” Neither am I.

Well-Lit Corners of the World?

Further proof (as if any was needed) that sometimes, when you lose, you win. But of course, sometimes when you win, you lose.

So sometimes when you lose, you lose. Wait, doesn’t that happen all the time?

Great Tool for Math Students!

Any math students out there may find this useful. And it’s free! (Once you’ve paid your Internet bill, of course.)

Cute in an Ugly Sort of Way

People aren’t the only victims of the fires in Australia. Our thoughts are with all the nation’s creatures.

Good Sense, Served Warm

Mark Thoma (of Economist’s View) posted this pearl of wisdom:

Jeff Sachs:

5 Points on the Critical State of the Economy, by Jeff Sachs: Here is my general assessment of where we are from an economic point of view, putting the political dynamics mostly aside for the moment. ….

(1) There is no room, nor case, for broad-based personal or corporate income tax cuts or credits or rebates. … The deficit is hemorrhaging… Despite some ideological claims to the contrary, there will be no scope for sizeable cuts in spending as a percent of GDP… We will … need increased not decreased taxes. Finally, note that temporary tax cuts are likely to have little stimulus effect, even if they could be afforded;

(2) Immediate and sizeable spending increases in the stimulus package should be directed to a few areas: significant support for our crisis-ridden state and local governments, especially for health (Medicaid), education, and other urgent public services; income support (unemployment, anti-poverty including food stamps and child nutrition); health care coverage for the uninsured (as well as adequate Medicaid funding…); and a significant multi-year rollout of infrastructure of all sorts (roads, rail, other mass transit, ports, water, energy, broadband, etc.)

(3) Future taxes (and revenues as a share of GDP) will have to increase, partly by rolling back the Bush tax cuts…, and partly by introducing new revenues on carbon … and eventually I believe by introducing a VAT or something similar.

(4) The claim that we should reject infrastructure spending because it rolls out over several years is disastrously wrongheaded. We need a buildup of serious high-return public investments, and we can and should start now. … The most rapid spending will come from sizeable immediate transfers to state and local governments, to the poor, to those without health insurance, and the start-up of some infrastructure spending, and this initial boost will be enough to “buy time” for a sustained and meaningful growth in infrastructure in later years.

(5) We need a medium-term expenditure framework in which budget and tax policies are presented with a five-year time horizon. In such a medium-term framework, we would have significant deficit spending this year … but then falling over time by a programmed step-by-step increase in government revenues… The spending side will eventually taper off in certain categories…

Of course, to give the administration its real due, it might be impossible to achieve anything if the opposition proves unmovable to this kind of package, so taking something highly flawed now rather than a better framework that is never enacted (!) would make sense. I regret and worry, however, that we haven’t yet had the kind of public discussion about what’s really needed … and how we can get there. I don’t really know if it’s “now or never.” If that’s true, let’s have the legislation now. It just doesn’t feel right to me, however. And I do worry that the tax cuts and coming mega-deficits might well frustrate a subsequent convergence on a more meaningful and sustainable trajectory in the coming months and years.

Finally, this is not meant to be a comprehensive agenda… We need major systemic reforms in health, energy systems, foreign policy, science and technology, and much more, which will have significant budgetary implications, but which requires ample public debate and policy formulation. …