I’ve been reading a lot about financial reform. Here are a few videos on the subject:
Katie Couric interviews Charles Ferguson, creator of “Inside Job”
Long before the meltdown, one woman tried to warn about a threat to the financial system
Warren Buffett wrote an op-ed recently that suggested that the top 0.3% of yearly earners were paying too little in taxes.
One of his favorite illustrations of this point is that his secretary pays a much higher tax rate than he does.
His prescription is:
The idea that a secretary should not pay a higher tax rate than their billionaire boss
is hard to argue with and shows the power of “framing”.
Here’s an other tax framing idea:
It is often said that we don’t want to push the burden of current spending onto future generations.
Reihan Salam: During the Bush years, it was often said that the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts represented redistribution from future taxpayers to current taxpayers.
You might reframe this as:
Those older Americans, who can afford it, should not get a better deal their grandchildren’s generation
But how would Frank Luntz say it?
In late 2006, A List Apart had an article about “Adaptive Layout“,
which they described as an improvement over liquid CSS layouts because it is optimized for multiple screen resolutions and adjusts automatically.
I was intrigued, so I decided to experiment with an adaptive blog template that automatically adjusts itself to different screen resolutions, from an iPhone to a 1920×1200 monitor.
The result isn’t very “polished”, but I finally got around to posting my own “adaptive blog layout”, which uses javascript to tell the browser to use a different body css class, depending upon the reader’s screen resolution.
The template could be improved by paying better attention to the most common browser resolutions and developing grid-based versions tailored to specific resolutions. I did the opposite — I started with the content and defined CSS rules to fit my text and images.
Last year the New York times had a short article proposing that instead of thinking about fuel economy in “miles per gallon”, we should think about “gallons per mile“.
The reasoning behind this poposals is that stating fuel economy in MPG “leads consumers to significantly underestimate the gains in fuel efficiency that can be achieved by trading in very low m.p.g. vehicles — even for one that gets only a few more miles per gallon.”
Larrick emphasizes that his long-term goal is to get everyone into the most fuel-efficient vehicles that exist. But right now, he says, “as a national-policy question, the urgency is getting people out of the 14-m.p.g. vehicles.” And m.p.g. ratings aren’t the most useful prod, largely because the real significance of differences in m.p.g. is often counterintuitive. The jump from 10 to 20 m.p.g., for example, saves more gas than the one from 20 to 40 m.p.g. The move from 10 to 11 m.p.g. can save nearly as much as the leap from 33 to 50 m.p.g.
People often scoff at the idea of hybrid trucks or SUVs like the Cadillac Escalade that only improve MGP from 14 to 20. But if you do the math, over 10,000 miles, this decreases the number of gallons used from 714 gallons to 500 gallons. This is a savings of 214 gallons,
By comparison improving a Toyota Prius’s mileage from 46MPG to 70MG only saves 75 gallons over 10,000 miles.
Here is the comparison of “miles per gallon” (MPG) and “gallons per 10,000 miles” (GP10K):
| Vehicle | MPG | GP10K |
|---|---|---|
| Cadillac Escallade AWD | 14 | 714 |
| Cadillac Escallade Hybrid | 20 | 500 |
| Toyota Prius | 46 | 217 |
| Hypothetical Hybrid | 70 | 143 |
To illustrate the point further, I put together a spreadsheet
using actual fuel economy figures for some current models, along with some extreme cases.
Sources
