One of the side benefits of all this "spying" showed up in the news in the West Palm Beach, Florida, area last week. Kids in high and middle schools are using their cell phone cameras to photograph and put on the net pictures of students doing drugs on campus. My daughter complained about the druggies when she was at Dwyer HS about eight years ago (students shooting up heroin in the girls bathrooms...and Dwyer has a mostly white, middle and upper middle class student body), but school officials wouldn't do anything. I haven't heard much since then, but the media tend to ignore or suppress bad news about the schools.

Sounds like fodder for an episode in the Law and Order franchise.

Philips still would like to tweak the California bill so that new types of higher-efficiency incandescent halogen bulbs could be sold after 2012.

A Philips halogen bulb that uses 50% less electricity, he said, will be available this year.

Levine, the legislator, says he's open to looking at new technologies if they become commercially viable.

In the meantime, California shouldn't try to mandate compact fluorescent bulbs for every household use, said Severin Borenstein, director of the University of California Energy Institute in Berkeley.

Borenstein burns both types of bulbs at his home in the Bay Area community of Orinda but has discovered that fluorescents don't work as well as incandescent bulbs with recessed lighting fixtures, spotlights and ultra-low dimming switches.

"There are a lot of places we really should be using compact fluorescents more," he said. "But there are a lot of situations where incandescent still makes a lot of sense."

Virginia Postrel, a renowned libertarian, draws on "Last Best Gifts," by an economic sociologist, Kieran Healy (Jan. 28), to argue that the altruistic "ideology" of giving the gift of life stands in the way of developing a market in organs.

Actually, what we need is more, not fewer, evocations of our moral responsibilities....

...if the market steps in, we know from experience in other nations that the rich would purchase the organs and the poor would risk their health by selling theirs. One can be a market zealot and still argue for keeping the money-changers out of this temple.

While I appreciate being referred to as "renowned" (if only), Etzioni's letter beautifully illustrates Healy's point: that the debate over organs (and blood, which I didn't have room to discuss) unnecessarily and inaccurately posits a sharp split between market exchange and social and cultural commitments. Although Etzioni wants to box me in as a "market zealot," that's an absurdly--and deliberately--reductionist view of my thought on this issue and many others. The letter also demonstrates that Etzioni is not a particularly careful reader or at least isn't interested in the hard empirical facts of the kidney crisis. Rising to the bait, I sent him the following email:

Dear Amitai,
Thanks for calling me renowned. We can only wish...

Alas, while your proposal might help the relatively short waiting list for hearts, it wouldn't do much for the 60,000-plus Americans waiting for kidneys. The numbers simply don't add up. Only living donors can make up the difference. I've contributed a kidney. How about you?
Virginia

That last line is pretty snarky, especially since I'm well aware that Etzioni is too old to be an organ donor. But, like many other people, he treats kidney donation as an inconceivable risk to one's health and the idea of taking money for it as therefore inherently exploitative. Hence it's worth pointing out that I'm not advocating paying people for something I wasn't willing to do for free.

His response is telling, since it contradicts his anti-market propaganda in the Times.

dear viriginia
I wish my organs would be useable. I salute your donation which I am sure was made out of moral motives and not a transaction. I am not against a "market" as long as we first do as much as we can with donations, as we do with blood.
best amitai

So why, other than self-promotion, did he bother spilling ink in the Timees and defaming the idea of any incentives for organs? I suspect that the question answers itself.

On a more positive note, it looks like House will vote on Tuesday to pass the Living Organ Kidney Donation Clarification Act, which I blogged about here. The bill, sponsored by Rep. Jay Inslee and the late Rep. Charlie Norwood, will make it clear that "paired donations" are legal. Let's hope the Senate follows suit right away.

Instead of movie passes, as "winner" John Tabin reported on his own blog, "FedEx...dropped off a couple of Ghost Rider hats and wallets. Yeah, I know you can hardly contain your jealousy." Sony provided no explanation either to the winners or to me. When I inquired, the publicist told me, "What happened was that it was difficult for Sony Pictures' to find a screening location in your winners' cities. Basically, their respective city did not offer any screening locations so what we did was send out Ghost Rider promotions such as shirts, caps, etc. Therefore, your winners received the products instead of the unavailable screening passes."

Both winners live in the Washington, DC, area--hardly an obscure hamlet in flyover land. The publicity firm (not to be confused with deadbeat Sony) says they'll try to send passes to the next movie they promote. That's nice of them, but not what we had in mind.

I'll give winner David Noziglia the last word: "And the gifts, if they ask, suck. Thank you for selecting me, but there should be some word out there that Sony can't be trusted. By that I mean that they lied to you."

Soviet citizens did not, of course, necessarily "tolerate" the rest of that propaganda. They simply had no way to avoid it. (I shot the pillowcase design from the book, which accounts for the glare.) More likely, the propagandistic purposes undercut the graphic appeal of the designs, which are quite beautiful or at least charming, when taken out of their political context. Disconnected from central planning and totalitarian government, they might be celebratory rather than propagandistic. Hammers and sickles aside, many of them wouldn't be out of place in a mid-century American boy's bedroom. Here are a couple from the press kit, which unfortunately didn't include any of the great flight-oriented designs on display.

In the United States, similar designs were voluntarily produced and bought by willing consumers--who, of course, had plenty of traditionalist choices. These two examples are from an exhibit at the Museum at FIT, which gave me special permission to shoot photos for my glamour file. The top one features pictures of Charles Lindbergh.

For more-geometric and multicolor patterns, you'd need to look at later textile designs, which I don't have on file. Here's an example on Ebay.

How 1999. Another approach is simply to ignore old ideas about privacy and make your private life public. In New York magazine, Emily Nussbaum argues that today's young people are doing exactly that and, in the process, completely redefining the idea of privacy.

[W]hat we're discussing is something more radical if only because it is more ordinary: the fact that we are in the sticky center of a vast psychological experiment, one that's only just begun to show results. More young people are putting more personal information out in public than any older person ever would--and yet they seem mysteriously healthy and normal, save for an entirely different definition of privacy. From their perspective, it's the extreme caution of the earlier generation that’s the narcissistic thing. Or, as Kitty put it to me, "Why not? What’s the worst that's going to happen? Twenty years down the road, someone's gonna find your picture? Just make sure it's a great picture."

And after all, there is another way to look at this shift. Younger people, one could point out, are the only ones for whom it seems to have sunk in that the idea of a truly private life is already an illusion. Every street in New York has a surveillance camera. Each time you swipe your debit card at Duane Reade or use your MetroCard, that transaction is tracked. Your employer owns your e-mails. The NSA owns your phone calls. Your life is being lived in public whether you choose to acknowledge it or not.

So it may be time to consider the possibility that young people who behave as if privacy doesn’t exist are actually the sane people, not the insane ones. For someone like me, who grew up sealing my diary with a literal lock, this may be tough to accept. But under current circumstances, a defiant belief in holding things close to your chest might not be high-minded. It might be an artifact--quaint and naïve, like a determined faith that virginity keeps ladies pure. Or at least that might be true for someone who has grown up "putting themselves out there" and found that the benefits of being transparent make the risks worth it....

In essence, every young person in America has become, in the literal sense, a public figure. And so they have adopted the skills that celebrities learn in order not to go crazy: enjoying the attention instead of fighting it--and doing their own publicity before somebody does it for them.

As an old fogy, I find this behavior weird. Aside from the old-fashioned notion that some parts of life don't belong in public, I don't want to live in a small town where everyone knows everyone's business, and I wouldn't want my teenage persona following me around forever. But there is a certain kind of logic here.

The problem comes not from old-fashioned embarrassment but from adult policing. As Greg Lukianoff, the president of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, and his colleague Officer Will Creeley write in the Boston Phoenix, colleges are using their speech codes to attack students for what they post on Facebook and other online sites:

Students, be warned: the college of your choice may be watching you, and will more than likely be keeping an eye on you once you enter the hallowed campus gates. America’s institutions of higher education are increasingly monitoring students’ activity online and scrutinizing profiles, not only for illegal behavior, but also for what they deem to be inappropriate speech.

Contrary to popular misconceptions, the speech codes, censorship, and double standards of the culture-wars heyday of the '80s and '90s are alive and kicking, and they are now colliding with the latest explosion of communication technology. Sites like Facebook and MySpace are becoming the largest battleground yet for student free speech. Whatever campus administrators' intentions (and they are often mixed), students need to know that online jokes, photos, and comments can get them in hot water, no matter how effusively their schools claim to respect free speech. The long arm of campus officialdom is reaching far beyond the bounds of its buildings and grounds and into the shadowy realm of cyberspace.

Like Nussbaum's New York piece, this is a must-read article full of specifics. As online communication erodes the boundary between private conversation and public speech, the repressive nature of speech codes is becoming more and more apparent. (Take a look at this scary example.) They are, in fact, designed to squelch free speech--to prevent students from saying what they think, from using irony or humor in ways that might be taken as offensive, and to police not just speech but, ultimately, thought itself. (I serve on the board of FIRE, which is a great organization that deserves your support. It's watching the watchers.)

Like his friend David Hume, Smith was, as Brad says, a rare genius, and he is far too little read. You don't need P.J. O'Rourke to translate. The 18th century was a great era for English prose and while the sentences are a lot longer than contemporary conventions advise, they're a lot easier to read than plenty of academic writing--whether from postmodern theorists or neoclassical economists.

Hoping to trim one of his biggest remaining expenses, electricity, he contacted the Department of Water and Power. "They told me if I could shut down by 1 p.m., they could give me a much better rate," Shugar said. He moved the plant's starting time back to 5 a.m. to meet the cutoff time, resulting in 40% savings.

One of his most valuable assets was his mechanical engineer, Cheng Lim, who came to Shugar from Jergens when that company closed its Burbank plant in 1992. Lim could have stayed with the giant company, based in Cincinnati, but "my wife did not want to go," he said. "Too cold there."

Lim adapted the Shugar production line for use by fewer employees.

For example, a worker once stood at a conveyer belt to pick up the finished bars of soap, one by one, and turn them 90 degrees in preparation for the wrapping machine. Lim divided the belt into two strips, with one traveling slightly faster than the other. The bars thus turned without human intervention.

"Without him," Shugar said, "I would have to move to China."

UPDATE: MSNBC reader comments suggest a lot of people think Wal-Marts need more customer service staff and more frequent cleanings.

UPDATE: Peter Hoh explains why he prefers Target. One comment that echoes those posted on the MSNBC site: "Line length at checkout is a big deal. Bigger than price, as far as I'm concerned. When a Target store has long checkout lines, I can tell that managers are trying to scramble to remedy the problem. I never get that sense at Walmart." Wal-Marts are, I suspect, traditionally organized for customers who have more time (or patience) than money. Maybe they'll change that along with the decor.

I'm sure the article will enrage many readers, since lots of people seem to believe that recognizing the excellence of others requires denigrating oneself. But it shouldn't be any more offensive to say some people are more beautiful than others than to say that some people are taller, or smarter, or more agile than others. The genetic lottery isn't fair, and the truly beautiful are genetic freaks. Nor do I see how pretending that everyone is beautiful or, worse, that beauty is the same as personality or character or goodness makes for more happiness. You certainly won't fool teenagers with the former lie--they take their cues from each other, not Oprah--while the latter one is likely to backfire, giving undue moral weight to physical appearance: "If you really had a nice personality, people would think you're beautiful. If they don't think you're beautiful, there must be something wrong with the inner you."

Dove has gotten a lot of positive press from (Miss Black Tennessee 1971) Oprah Winfrey's enthusiastic endorsement of its campaign. What you rarely hear is that Dove is paying for that support. In a WSJ interview published October 5, 2005 (online only if you pay for it separately), Silvia Lagnado, who was then Unilever's global brand director for Dove, said, "Just last week, we started a relationship with Oprah. We are sponsoring her show. She mentioned the Dove products on the show and had the women in our ads in their underwear on the show." (Emphasis added.) I'm sure Oprah really does like the ads, but I doubt that the "Dove girls" would be on the show without Unilever's advertising checks. Dove also just happened to choose Oprah's best friend, Gayle King, to receive the first Dove Real Beauty Award.

And how effective are the ads at actually moving Dove products? Here's a bit of business reporting that wound up on The Atlantic's cutting room floor:

After it rolled out the U.S. campaign, sales of [ Dove's] health and beauty products jumped 12.5 percent, to $535 million in 2005 from $476 million the previous year, according to Information Resources Inc., which tracks consumer packaged goods. That's impressive--except it isn't clear that the campaign is the cause. For the same period, competitor Olay's skin care lines enjoyed a sales increase of 24.5 percent, to $386 million from $310 million in 2004. The comparison is inexact, but it's safe to say that 2005 was a good year for the whole category.

New products probably had more to do with growing sales than did high-profile advertising.

One of the nice things about the free-agent life is that I can work at night, go to bed late, and take naps--a much better rhythm for me than the normal workday.

Severe drought in the 1970s and ’80s, coupled with a population explosion and destructive farming and livestock practices, was denuding vast swaths of land. The desert seemed determined to swallow everything. So Mr. Danjimo and other farmers in Guidan Bakoye took a small but radical step. No longer would they clear the saplings from their fields before planting, as they had for generations. Instead they would protect and nurture them, carefully plowing around them when sowing millet, sorghum, peanuts and beans.

Today, the success in growing new trees suggests that the harm to much of the Sahel may not have been permanent, but a temporary loss of fertility. The evidence, scientists say, demonstrates how relatively small changes in human behavior can transform the regional ecology, restoring its biodiversity and productivity.

The new attitude toward trees also changed local customs and institutions and, eventually, official law.

Another change was the way trees were regarded by law. From colonial times, all trees in Niger had been regarded as the property of the state, which gave farmers little incentive to protect them. Trees were chopped for firewood or construction without regard to the environmental costs. Government foresters were supposed to make sure the trees were properly managed, but there were not enough of them to police a country nearly twice the size of Texas.

But over time, farmers began to regard the trees in their fields as their property, and in recent years the government has recognized the benefits of that outlook by allowing individuals to own trees. Farmers make money from the trees by selling branches, pods, fruit and bark. Because those sales are more lucrative over time than simply chopping down the tree for firewood, the farmers preserve them.

Note that the behavioral change came first and was ratified by law--a process that is more likely to succeed than a new property-rights regime imposed from outside. This success story is a good example of what William Easterly calls "Searchers" (versus "Planners") in The White Man's Burden, which I reviewed in the NYTBR.

"It may not be rocket science, but it actually comes pretty close when it comes to making lighting products that are acceptable and safe," said Earl Jones, a senior counsel for GE's consumer and industrial division. "There are technology challenges to get them done by 2012."

One example is the small chandelier light bulb that is in the shape of a candle light, he said. Currently, there is no compact fluorescent replacement that is similarly shaped. Another challenge is dimmable compact fluorescents, which are difficult to make without having them flicker or create a low-humming buzzing sound if the switch is not turned up all the way.

Besides, more people are replacing the warm glow of the incandescent bulbs with the cooler compact fluorescents anyway, and lawmakers should let consumers vote with their wallets, Jones said.

"The market is already transitioning and transforming itself, and for the legislature to come in and dictate, or try to change that pattern with five years' notice, is just wrong," he said.

And Sac Bee columnist Steve Wiegand raised some obvious problems with making a common household item illegal:

Do you really want to open up a light bulb black market, where Californians are clandestinely purchasing incandescent bulbs via shady Internet sites, or driving to the border towns of Arizona and Nevada to buy bulbs, along with cheap cigarettes and fireworks?

Do you really want to make college students and others whose lives tend to be transitory have to pack up fragile light bulbs each time they move because they are too costly to leave behind?

And aren't there are other issues more worthy of heavy-handed government intrusion? How about banning the sale of all tobacco products instead? What about making it a felony to drive more than 250 yards with the turn signal on? Why not a substantial fine for 12 items in the 10-items-or-less line?

It's likely these well-intentioned-but-you-should-mind-your-own-business light bulb proposals won't go anywhere, unless it's in the form of a legislative suggestion.

That's good. Because when incandescent bulbs are outlawed, only outlaws will have incandescent bulbs.

Kate Folmar's one-sided original report in the San Jose Mercury News is looking more and more like an embarrassing press release. Judging from the reader comments, it's not hard to find objections.

Thanks to everyone who emailed reasons you should get passes to Ghost Rider. I'm sorry we couldn't accommodate everyone, but even big-time radio stations have to ration their passes. The winners are...

John Tabin, who wrote:

I should totally get a Ghost Rider screening pass.
1. I both blog and write professionally, so I'll definitely squeeze a review out of it one way or another.
2. In the past I've enjoyed dumb action movies starring Nicolas Cage, like Con Air and The Rock, so there's a better-than-even chance it'll be a good review.
3. When I saw the Ghost Rider trailer and expressed interest in seeing the movie, my wife suggested waiting for it to come to cable. If I have a screening pass, nothing can stop me from seeing it in theaters.
4. If I don't get a pass, it can only be interpreted as a blow to The Future, and a victory for Its Enemies.
5. I have both Substance and Style.

And David Noziglia, who wrote:

There are two reasons it would be a good idea to give me tickets to see this movie.

The most important reason is that I just forgot our anniversary, and I could really use a special treat for my wife. It would especially help if it didn't cost too much money, for the reason below.

Not that I'm looking for sympathy, but the second reason is that I have just been laid off from my job at SAIC, and I need something to get my mind off the situation and help me recharge while I am looking for a new position. I can't think of anything better for that than going to a movie to laugh at Nicolas Cage overacting in a rediculous situation, while the film makers get the whole idea of the Ghost Rider completely wrong.

I will, however, be willing to pay for dinner afterward.

Laughter is the best medicine, no?

Again, thanks to all the entrants, and to Sony for the chance to give away freebies.

And for you trivia buffs, I recently learned that Eugene Volokh was in a journalism class with Nicolas Cage at Beverly Hills High. Maybe they should send some guest passes to the Volokh Conspiracy.

Paired donation could significantly increase the number of kidney transplants, and there have already been some remarkable successes. But it could also be illegal. Federal law prohibits giving someone "valuable consideration" for an organ donation, and what could be more valuable than an organ to save a loved one? A bill, H.R.710, introduced by Reps. Charlie Norwood (R-Georgia) and Jay Inslee (D-Wash.) would explicitly exempt paired donations from the prohibition. The bill is currently in the House Committee on Energy and Commerce. If your representative is a member, particularly of the subcommittee on health, please write to him or her urging that this bill be expedited. A similar bill died last year, despite little opposition. A Senate version is sponsored by Carl Levin (D-Mich.) and Kit Bond (R-Mo.).

The good folks at Sony Pictures are promoting the new film Ghost Rider (and a related online game) and, apparently knowing of this site's interest in comic book heroes, have offered me a (very) small allotment of screening passes to give away. Send me an email at vp-at-dynamist.com explaining why you should get a pass, and I'll pick the best two. Your reasons should involve going to this movie, not flattering the blogger (though flattery is always welcome). Include your mailing address, so we can send you the tickets if you win. According to the publicist, "The tickets are valid in the United States and specific to the winner's location. There will be a specific theater for the winner to go to, corresponding to their city. The viewing will be a couple days before the release on Feb 16, 2007."

Any entries may be posted here, and my decision is arbitrary and final. The deadline for entries is 11:59 p.m. Central Time on Wednesday, February 7. Winners will be announced on Friday, February 9.