Phew

SVN 2 : 2 USA.

I'll take it, but Team America were clearly robbed on that free kick. And Findley shouldn't have gotten a yellow card. Lots of grit from the Yanks to come back in the second half.

At this point, assuming England handle Algeria, a 2-goal margin in our third match against Algeria guarantees advancing out of group play. Alternatively, if the ENG-SLV matchup ends in anything other than a draw (corrected), any victory against the North African side would be enough to advance.

There Will Be Escrow Funds

BP's voluntary agreement to put $20B into an escrow fund earmarked for spill damages is, I think, a rather underappreciated development. It means that BP now has an incentive to resolve spill claims quickly rather than slowly. And keep in mind that "slowly" for an oil company means "until the claimants start dying". It took twenty years for Exxon-Mobil to pay out any claims from the Valdez spill. But now BP is in a situation where it has more interest in getting as many claims processed as possible, with the hope that those claims will total less than the size of the escrow fund and they can get a few bucks back. This is absolutely the right approach and it will mean that the residents of the Gulf Coast will see justice significantly faster than Alaskans.

The Future Is Here Bleg

Dear Lazyweb,

There's a somewhat famous article written in ... oh I don't know when ... where people talk about what they think the future will look like. One thing they say is that people won't go shopping; goods will be delivered to their house through a network of pneumatic tubes. This ends up leading to jokes about how they got it right, only the series of tubes was the Internet but we still have trucks to deliver the goods.

Does anyone know what I'm talking about? Can you find a link to the original article, or an excerpt?

Update: Wow, somehow remembered the source: Ladies Home Journal.

Chipotle

A lot of Chipotle CEO Steve Ells' Senate testimony a few months ago in favor of the Preservation of Antibiotics for Medical Treatment Act reads like ad copy, but when you've set up a big fast-food chain that mostly uses naturally raised meat, you've earned the right to boast. More Chipotle-style fast food and less McDonalds-style fast food would be tastier and better for animal welfare. (McDonalds, incidentally, once owned a majority interest in Chipotle, but sold it all in 2006 to focus on their core business.) I haven't thought very much about the factory-farming antibiotic-resistance issue in the past, something it has in common with banking crises pre-2008 and giant oil spills pre-2010.

I guess the only real criticism of Chipotle that comes to mind is that I'd like to see smaller portion sizes made available, but that's mostly on behalf of other people. I'm a pretty big eater, and back in grad school I'd often eat two big meals a day, one of which was a burrito bowl. It's pretty high in sodium, too, but a drinking man needs his electrolytes.

GOP 2012 Chaos

I don't really have many specific things to say about David Bernstein's rankings of the 2012 GOP contenders, because I generally don't have views on who the Republican Party is going to pick in 2012. It's a chaotic situation, largely because the candidates are pretty bad.

The 2008 Democratic primary was a model of stability. For a very long time, the conventional wisdom was that Hillary, Obama, and Edwards were 1-2-3 with everybody else in a big mess behind them. That stayed pretty stable until Obama slowly pushed ahead over the course of the 2008 contests. Part of the reason for the stability is that (setting aside the ticking scandal bomb attached to Edwards) they were all very good candidates. Other than Al Gore, who made the wise choice not to run and thus maintained the implicit threat of making or breaking a campaign with an endorsement or a curse, there was nobody out there who could upset the order as it was.

It's basically the opposite situation with in the Republican primary. Everybody has some combination of general-election weakness, a very low public profile, or unacceptability to a large portion of the Republican base. The success of a campaign will depend in large part on who else is running and cutting into your territory.

I guess the only direct criticism I'll make of Bernstein is that you can't count Sarah Palin out in a race like this. Since she has a hardcore fanclub that's going to vote for her over anybody in her niche, she can easily be one of the last 4 or 5 candidates standing if she wants to. She'll need lots of luck to get the rest of the way, but so does everybody else at some stage or another.