Word: crude
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Have lunch on the back patio of Fiesta Villa on Main Avenue and watch the railroad cars packed with coal go by - and by and by - and you'll start to understand why. Last year was a great one for energy and agriculture: corn, crude oil, coal and wheat are major state exports. The boom helped push energy outfit MDU Resources onto the Fortune 500 (the first North Dakota firm to make the list) and the state budget to a $1.2 billion surplus. State workers around the country are being told to sit at home without pay to trim costs...
...regulation--regulators are likely to mess up, so why bother? But it can also point toward an approach based not so much on discretion as on rules, the simpler the better. I first encountered this argument last fall in the work of left-leaning blogger Matthew Yglesias--he advocated "crude measures" like the old ban on interstate banking. Lately, though, I've been hearing similar suggestions from those of a conservative, University of Chicago bent. "When you give a lot of discretion to regulators, they don't use the tools that are given to them," Chicago economist Gary Becker said...
That skepticism seemed fair based on early attempts. In 1884, a German inventor created crude moving images by filtering light through a spinning disk punched with holes. In the early 1920s, engineers in the U.S. and U.K. sent still pictures and moving silhouettes using radio waves. In 1928, General Electric broadcast the first TV drama: a modified small spinning disk and bright lamp produced off-center, blurry pictures of cigarette-toting actors gallivanting around what was supposed to be Europe (but was actually Schenectady, N.Y.). It was one of the best offerings at the time. Other must-see TV included...
...years, living a quiet life as an artist and architect until he re-emerged as a polite prototype of the north Tehran élite. These were people - like the two former Presidents who backed his campaign, Rafsanjani and Mohammed Khatami - who seemed as concerned with Ahmadinejad's crude populist style as with his crude populist economics. Mousavi's wife inadvertently made plain the mind-set when I asked her about her husband's art and she told me, "Artists exist at the very top of a society. When an artist becomes President, it is a step down. But there...
...Ahmadinejad's advisers were even more adamant than the reformers. When I asked Mehdi Kalhor, Ahmadinejad's top communications adviser, what he thought of Obama, he made a crude attempt at humor. "Only the skin color has changed" from George W. Bush, he said. "Now the color is chocolate. Chocolate is sweet. Children like it, but I don't very much." We met in Kalhor's office. He was wearing a red golf shirt, and his long hair was tied in a ponytail. "We understand Obama is different from Bush," he said, more seriously. "But you need these negotiations more...