A continuation of my article one year ago on the bailout:

But in the late Nineties, a few years before Cassano took over AIGFP, all that changed. The Democrats, tired of getting slaughtered in the fundraising arena by Republicans, decided to throw off their old reliance on unions and interest groups and become more “business-friendly.” Wall Street responded by flooding Washington with money, buying allies in both parties.
—Mark Taibbi for Rolling Stone

Paul Krugman and Obama never will see eye to eye on economics. Liberals are not the same, and Obama’s people comes from the Chicago school—the part that was the mess Clinton made, not other half of the Chicago school that made the mess than Bush and Reagan created. No matter which administration it was under, this school of thought has held the econo-political power for the last thirty years in this country.

Given that, I find that the fact that Krugman says “this budget looks very, very good” very positive. The other shoe finally dropped, and Paul Krugman continued articles against the bailout plan is now engendering attacks on the blogs from the right and left.

But I find some of the reactions truly atrocious. Here is one example:

Does Krugman, or any of these media monkeys jabbering their opinions on the administration’s plan to resolve the biggest crises facing our nation since the Great Depression, have access to the inner circles and behind doors meetings regarding what’s really happening in the financial industry?
—passerby on Balloon Juice

Careful there. You’re starting to sound exactly like some administration official that assured us that if we didn’t invade Iraq, “the smoking gun would be a mushroom cloud.” and we didn’t have the information they had to argue that the all those brains in the Pentagon wasn’t preparing for the aftermath of that war.

Obama was supposed to (and I believe is honestly trying) to usher a new era of transparency. But the amount of transparency he’s given us here so far has told nearly every economist worth their salt that the bailout plan has a good chance of being a very costly ineffectiveness.

Why not address those valid criticism without resorting to “trust us”?

Continue reading about Arguing from the left after the jump.

I noticed the red light on Bay and Jones is out. The reason why is it’s one of the only incandescent traffic lights left in the city. I like to call it my reference light because it reminds me of what traffic lights used to look like: dim and a slightly different shade of green and amber. We’ll not see them anymore.

I remember the excitement when the first LED traffic lights came up. Back then they only replaced the red bulbs because nobody had perfected the p-n junction blue LED. But soon, those were mass produced and soon all lights in the the traffic lights were LEDs. You recognized them because LEDs were so small that the lights were composed of an array of them with little lenses in front of them. Imagine what a change we’ve wrought!

A typical incandescent light lasts just under a year—8000 hours. This means that for every 110 traffic lights in the city, one is in need of replacement every day. Maybe your entire job is to replace street lights alone. An LED run correctly will last between 50,000 and 100,000 hours—almost 10x longer. Imagine that. Add to that the LED light uses between 6-20x less power depending on which generation and that’s probably a huge power savings for the city to boot.

Maybe about a half million dollars a year in labor and power for a medium sized city!

Another thing I miss is the heating time. LEDs turn on instantly, incandescents take a fraction of a second for the filament to heat on and start emitting light. In the early days that was how they tried to convince car companies to replace your red tail light with LEDs because that fraction of a second would make the car safer for rear end collisions. It didn’t work.

Finally they just pointed out that with LEDs you could make taillights in almost any shape and they started to sell like hot cakes.

I’ll miss the old traffic light. But it won’t stop me from e-mailing the city

Time marches forward.