lines in the sand

Will they take my Impala in trade?

I wonder why I can't find this on Ebay.

Lost in Translation

Being a translator can't be easy.  Mark Liberman explains this one.

More CAFE = More Driving

OpinionJournal - Hot Topic

...the indirect tax of mileage standards is an exceptionally inefficient way to influence consumption. CAFE doesn't affect how many vehicles are on the road (a figure that keeps going up). And by making cars and trucks more fuel-efficient, it may encourage people to drive more. If you get more miles to the gallon, then driving becomes cheaper, so driving demand goes up and offsets any overall efficiency gains.

When it costs more to drive a mile I tend to drive fewer miles, which is just another way to say when it costs less I drive more.  There are probably others who behave that way too, I suspect a lot of them.  As a result, higher mileage standards have less effect on carbon emissions, oil dependency and other wonderful things they get credit for.

As long as oil is the cheapest source of energy, it will be the main source of energy.  If we are serious about using less of it there needs to be a smaller gap between its cost and the cost of alternatives.  There are only two ways for that to happen: oil becomes costlier or alternatives get cheaper.

The Journal piece suggests one approach:

Yet the quickest and most efficient way to deter gasoline consumption... higher gasoline prices--i.e., through a carbon tax

Greg Mankiw's Pigou Club notwithstanding, my gut doesn't like having government accustomed to the revenue from such "sin taxes".

Anyone who has bought gasoline this week knows that it's getting more expensive without government help and the trend is only going to continue as Chinese and Indian industry grows.  The gap is narrowing naturally, making real alternatives to oil more feasable.

They Gets Another Vote

Anne Curzan is an English professor at the University of Michigan and is on the American Heritage Dictionary's usage panel.  From a chat with her at Visual Thesaurus :

VT: Interesting. You mentioned the singular "they."

Anne: Yes, I feel very strongly about that one.

VT: Pro or con?

Anne: Pro. It's a very efficient and natural solution to he/she. In fact, English speakers have been using the singular they for centuries. I've done research on the history of gender constructions in English, and you can find the singular they back into at least Middle English.. English speakers and writers have been using this solution for years. It wasn't until the end of the 18th century when we got the first prescription about it from the grammarian Lindley Murray. He advocated the singular generic he and that got picked up in other grammars. So we had a rule prescribing singular generic he until the 1980's, when feminists urged a different solution, the result being he or she. But in the spoken language we say they all the time.

VT: They seems much more elegant than he or she.

Anne: Most people don't notice it. Imagine if I said, "I was talking to a friend of mine, and they said it was a terrible movie." That would be under the radar for most of us. Occasionally I will have people say to me: "But they is plural, so it doesn't work." My response is that in the example I just gave, they is clearly sinsingular, because it's referring to a friend. My second defense of the construction is that in the course of English history, the pronoun you has done exactly the same thing. We used it to make a singular/plural distinction between thou and you. Then thou died out over time, and you took on both the singular and plural functions. And it does so with the same verb: we still say "you are," even in the singular. They has done exactly the same thing, which is to take on a singular function in addition to a plural function.

Keeping Healthcare Costly

Nemours wants to open a children's hospital in Orlando but has been meeting opposition from, you guessed it, other hospitals.  A reader's opinion in the Orlando Sentinel explains why:

Of course they don't want Nemours in Orlando -- they don't want the competition. I would like to hear more from those this decision will truly affect: the patients.

The patients are the customers and should have the freedom to decide if they want an additional hospital in their area. With the debate over Nemours, Florida should re-evaluate the "Certificate of Need" process.

The state's health care rationing system doesn't permit new options in an area where it determines a need is already being met.  There are already two children's hospitals here so obviously no more are needed.

Or are they?

I doubt Nemours would be trying to enter this market unless it believed that it could either serve patients who are not currently being served or provide better service than current patients are receiving.  Such competition can only benefit the community and should be welcomed.

There are claims, of course, that hospitals are not businesses and shouldn't be subject to marketplace incentives.  They may not be 'for profit' organizations but I will consider them businesses as long as I keep seeing billboards along I-4 going after customers for this ER or that heart team.

Sergey goes home

After the Russian revolution, composer Sergey Prokefiev returned to live inRussia, unlike compatriots Stravinsky and Rachmaninoff.  The Distributed Republic tells what happened there, best summed up in one sentence:

No wonder Prokofiev vented in piano sonatas—where one man could sit by himself with the keyboard.