“What’s next?” Colorado Democrat Jared Polis mused in the House of Representatives on Thursday. “Are Twinkies going to be considered a vegetable?” Probably not, even though shortly after Polis yielded the floor, the House voted 298-121 that a slice of pizza spread with two tablespoons of tomato paste should be counted as a vegetable, at least when it’s fed to schoolchildren. Obama signed the bill into law on Friday.
The episode inevitably brings to mind the Reagan administration’s brief advocacy, in the fall of 1981, for the vegetable status of ketchup. It shows how far we’ve come as a culture, I guess, that pizza sauce instead of ketchup was at issue this time around. It’s also a significant victory for food manufacturers, who can continue to market frozen pizza to schools by pointing out that for every slice of pizza the school district can put on a student’s plate, the government will reimburse them for their promotion of good health. It’s absurd to call pizza a vegetable, of course, but not for the reasons you think. Pizza may not be a vegetable, but that’s only because vegetables do not exist.
I was made aware of this surprising fact in my early 20s while working as a cook and waiter at a restaurant that served mostly vegetarian food. One day, I was bringing a salad to one of the regulars, a botanist named Tim. Being young, I was in a questioning mode, and asked Tim to weigh in on a controversy that I thought had been discovered by my generation: Were tomatoes fruits or vegetables? He told me they were fruits, and that moreover I was begging the question. (Tim was a professor.) To a botanist, he said, there’s no such thing as a “vegetable.” The word has no scientific meaning. The question I was asking presented a false choice.

As the ripened ovary of a pollinated flower, the tomato is most assuredly a fruit. So is the seemingly vegetal zucchini, the eggplant, and the pumpkin, as well as the nutty chestnut (but not the peanut, which is a bean). The foodstuffs we usually call “vegetables” can be fruits, but they can also be roots, stems, stalks, seeds, or indeed any part of a plant that we find edible. Now, a catch-all category such as “vegetable,” though imaginary, is not without its uses: Carrots and celery may have almost nothing in common other than their both being plants, but they do share a certain gestalt; so while calling one a taproot and the other a petiole might be correct in the botanist’s sense, it would probably strike your average eater as somewhat beside the point.
In the absence of scientific rigor, we slog through the marsh of culture. One of the squishy criteria used to determine whether a plant is a vegetable is how sweet it is before it’s cooked. Thus the controversy over tomatoes, which seem to be in a gray area when it comes to raw sweetness, but the lack of controversy over butternut squash, a fruit (universally acknowledged as a vegetable) that tastes like candy after a long roasting.
With the exception of salad greens (stems, leaves, sprouts), we tend to cook vegetables to make them palatable. But the cooking process cuts both ways: It also has the power to transform vegetables into junk food. Most people don’t consider a raw potato an edible food, but they’d still probably call it a vegetable. How many parents would call a French-fried potato the same? The same doesn’t apply to other food groups—drop a breaded cube steak in the same fryer and it’s still meat.
On some level, then, we sense that “vegetables” belong to a made-up category and are therefore ours to define. It was by means of this fuzzy botany that, 20 years ago, the frozen-foods lobby was first granted an exemption in the USDA’s school-lunch regulations when it came to tomato paste. The industry-friendly rules allowed two tablespoons of tomato paste, the amount on a typical slice of pizza, to be counted as equal to half a cup of whole tomatoes. Half a cup also happens to be the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s definition of a full serving of a vegetable. This dispensation, specifically, is one of the provisions that the Obama USDA had recommended doing away with but which the food lobby defeated.
“It was Schwan and ConAgra that were lobbying the issue,” says Margo Wootan, director of the Center for Science in the Public Interest. “If two tablespoons of tomato paste counts as a vegetable, pizza is a reimbursable meal. Because the crust counts as a grain, the sauce is the vegetable, and the cheese and pepperoni have protein. But two tablespoons of tomato paste isn’t a vegetable.”
Suddenly all vegetables, not just the zucchini, are pornographic: We know ‘em when we see ’em. I asked a spokesperson for the Food and Nutrition Service, the USDA body that oversees the school-lunch program, how they defined a vegetable. “When it comes to defining foods, we hew to the FDA’s standards.” But Janet McDonald, an FDA spokeswoman, told me that such fundamentals were out of FDA purview: “We don’t have a definition of vegetables. Probably it’s under the USDA.”
Governments haven’t always been so inclined to pass the buck on vegetables. In 1893, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in a customs case that the tomato should count as a vegetable. “Botanically speaking, tomatoes are the fruit of a vine, just as are cucumbers, squashes, beans, and peas. But in the common language of the people … all these are vegetables which are grown in kitchen gardens,“ the opinion said, before adding that “the attempt to class tomatoes as fruit is not unlike a recent attempt to class beans as seeds.“ (The latter was also rejected.) In 2001, the European Union decided that, for its own purposes of trade, a tomato is a fruit. But the Obama administration has failed in its effort to enforce its own reasonable, but ultimately vacuous, definition of vegetablehood upon on food-industry fat cats and our country’s fat schoolchildren. And if, heaven forfend, Hermain Cain is elected to the White House, one expects the pizza industry will be manufacturing federally sanctioned “vegetables” for another four years at least: As Cain opined in a recent interview with GQ, “A manly man don’t want it piled high with vegetables. He would call that a sissy pie.”

By Victoria Ward and Nick Collins6:20AM GMT 18 Nov 2011

EU officials concluded that, following a three-year investigation, there was no evidence to prove the previously undisputed fact.
Producers of bottled water are now forbidden by law from making the claim and will face a two-year jail sentence if they defy the edict, which comes into force in the UK next month.
Last night, critics claimed the EU was at odds with both science and common sense. Conservative MEP Roger Helmer said: “This is stupidity writ large.

“The euro is burning, the EU is falling apart and yet here they are: highly-paid, highly-pensioned officials worrying about the obvious qualities of water and trying to deny us the right to say what is patently true.

“If ever there were an episode which demonstrates the folly of the great European project then this is it.”

NHS health guidelines state clearly that drinking water helps avoid dehydration, and that Britons should drink at least 1.2 litres per day.
The Department for Health disputed the wisdom of the new law. A spokesman said: “Of course water hydrates. While we support the EU in preventing false claims about products, we need to exercise common sense as far as possible.”
German professors Dr Andreas Hahn and Dr Moritz Hagenmeyer, who advise food manufacturers on how to advertise their products, asked the European Commission if the claim could be made on labels.
They compiled what they assumed was an uncontroversial statement in order to test new laws which allow products to claim they can reduce the risk of disease, subject to EU approval.
They applied for the right to state that “regular consumption of significant amounts of water can reduce the risk of development of dehydration” as well as preventing a decrease in performance.
However, last February, the European Food Standards Authority (EFSA) refused to approve the statement.
A meeting of 21 scientists in Parma, Italy, concluded that reduced water content in the body was a symptom of dehydration and not something that drinking water could subsequently control.
Now the EFSA verdict has been turned into an EU directive which was issued on Wednesday.
Ukip MEP Paul Nuttall said the ruling made the “bendy banana law” look “positively sane”.
He said: “I had to read this four or five times before I believed it. It is a perfect example of what Brussels does best. Spend three years, with 20 separate pieces of correspondence before summoning 21 professors to Parma where they decide with great solemnity that drinking water cannot be sold as a way to combat dehydration.
“Then they make this judgment law and make it clear that if anybody dares sell water claiming that it is effective against dehydration they could get into serious legal bother.
EU regulations, which aim to uphold food standards across member states, are frequently criticised.
Rules banning bent bananas and curved cucumbers were scrapped in 2008 after causing international ridicule.
Prof Hahn, from the Institute for Food Science and Human Nutrition at Hanover Leibniz University, said the European Commission had made another mistake with its latest ruling.
“What is our reaction to the outcome? Let us put it this way: We are neither surprised nor delighted.
“The European Commission is wrong; it should have authorised the claim. That should be more than clear to anyone who has consumed water in the past, and who has not? We fear there is something wrong in the state of Europe.”
Prof Brian Ratcliffe, spokesman for the Nutrition Society, said dehydration was usually caused by a clinical condition and that one could remain adequately hydrated without drinking water.
He said: “The EU is saying that this does not reduce the risk of dehydration and that is correct.
“This claim is trying to imply that there is something special about bottled water which is not a reasonable claim.”

http://www.worldwidewords.org/nl/drnk.htm#N2

Naysayer, for a person who denies or opposes some matter or who is often negative in his views, comes from the ancient nay, one of two words of negation, the other being no. Which you used depended on the way in which the question was put to you. If it was framed affirmatively but you wanted to deny its truth, you used nay, much as we might today respond with “definitely not” or “on the contrary”. If it was framed in the negative and you agreed with it, you used no. This agrees with its origin from ne aye, not yes. The reverse used yea and yes. Confusingly, yea was the simple term of agreement, while yes was the equivalent of nay, meaning “it is so”. So somebody who asked you “Is he an honest man?” needed the reply “nay” if you thought that, on the contrary, he was a crook but “yea” if you agreed that he was indeed trustworthy. If the query was framed in reverse, “Is he a dishonest man?”, the answers would be either “no” or “yes”. We have long ago lost this extended system, though it survives in other languages, such as the French si, which like oui means “yes”, but emphatically contradicts a question posed in negative form. Nay survives in Scotland and

Last year, NPR put together a serial on the mobile-office revolution. The second of the three-part series was titled “The End of 9-to-5,” a profile of workplaces that had adopted what’s called a Results-Only Work Environment—or ROWE—which “gives everyone in a company the freedom to do their job when and where they want, as long as the work gets done.” Employees worked from their kitchen tables at midnight; they telecommuted from coffee shops; and they could manage their work lives to fit in with the daily routines of school drop-off and cooking dinner.

Is there a workers’ paradise on the horizon for the cubicle dwellers of the world, or is it just another utopian vision that will join the cubicle and other office innovations as the object of ridicule in Dilbert cartoons and derision by those on the receiving end of ROWE’s good intentions? Is the mobile office one of those rare free lunches that boost productivity and let employees lead happier lives?

For at least some of those with soul-destroying morning commutes, liberation may indeed be at hand. A preliminary presentation posted by Stanford University researchers describes the effects of allowing customer service employees at a billion-dollar Chinese company to work from home: Productivity went up, as did hours worked, and employees seemed happier for it.

If it sounds like a no-brainer that everyone is better off when employees are empowered to get things done on their own time, that’s because people tend to think only of the benefits of telecommuting rather than the costs. A Google image search of “working from home” certainly gives one pause, with pictures of Homer Simpson lazing about in a muumuu, moms and dads struggling to type while managing babies and toddlers, and cartoons describing the decay of sanity and social skills after too much time alone. The modern office, for all its shortcomings, remains an effective way of making sure work gets done, and keeping employees engaged with their employer and also each other.

Precisely because of this uncertainty over whether the benefits outweighed the distractions and other downsides of providing the work-at-home option, the chairman of a Chinese online travel agency (and Stanford economics Ph.D. student) sought out collaborators to assess whether it made sense for his thousands of customer service agents.

The company chose to run the experiment at its airfare and ticketing office in Shanghai, where more than a thousand employees spent an average of 80 minutes—and nearly 10 percent of their salaries—commuting to endless rows of identical gray cubicles in two hangar-sized call centers. All employees who had their own room at home and at least six months’ experience with the company were given the option of enrolling in the study, which gave them a 50 percent shot at working from the house for four of their five weekly shifts over an eight-month span starting near the end of 2010. The study enrollees who didn’t get to stay at home would serve as a control group to ensure that any changes in the productivity of the telecommuters could be attributed to their new arrangement, rather than other random changes to the company’s environment. Two-hundred-fifty-five employees—a little more than one-half of those who were eligible—chose to participate; those with even-numbered birthdays were given home-office setups courtesy of the company, while those with odd-numbered birthdays stayed on with their daily commutes.

Within a few weeks, the performance of the telecommuting group started to pull away from their cubicle-bound counterparts. Over the duration of the experiment, home workers answered 15 percent more calls, partly because each hour was 4 percent more productive, and partly because home office employees spent 11 percent more time answering phone calls. (Home workers took fewer breaks and sick days, rarely arrived late to their desks, and had fewer distractions.) While answering more calls, the distractions of home life had no impact on the quality of service: The home-work group converted phone calls into sales at exactly the same rate as those in the office. And employees themselves liked the arrangement better, making it look like a win-win for the company. The home-work group reported less “work exhaustion,” a more positive attitude towards their jobs, and were nearly 50 percent less likely to say they were planning to quit at the end of the eight months. (In fact the quit rate among home-office workers during the experiment was about one-half of what it was for those making the commute.)

Before concluding that the end of 9-to-5 is really here, it’s worth considering the postscript to the Chinese telecommuting experiment. Given its smashing success, the company decided to roll out the home-office setup to the entire company. Surprisingly, only about one-half of the employees agreed to the deal, and many of those involved in the original experiment decided that they’d had enough, preferring the hours in commute in exchange for the human interaction of office life and a fixed beginning and end to each work day. The home office isn’t for everyone.

Not every task is particularly well-suited to the home office. A Results-Only Work Environment only makes sense for the subset of relatively solitary tasks where results can easily be tracked and measured—like answering customer calls at a Chinese travel agency—and those where stuff can get done with relatively little face-to-face interaction.
Yet for the right job—one that can be done in fits and starts, and the results easily monitored and evaluated from afar—the advent of mobile computing does have the power to transform the workplace. The NPR story profiles a Minnesota public service agency that reduced its response time from two-and-a-half weeks to just five days. One of the Chinese telecommuting study’s co-author’s, Stanford professor Nick Bloom, tells of his discussions with flex-time employees at JetBlue, which has been able to put highly-educated moms back to work by offering them the flexibility to work between child-care obligations, logging in and out as necessary. Without the flex-time option, JetBlue could never have attracted the same caliber of employee.

Perhaps we’re not witnessing the end of 9-to-5. But the age of flex-time may indeed be at hand.

From Wikipedia:

High-speed walkways

Variable High speed ThyssenKrupp walkway in Pearson airport, Toronto[citation needed]
In the 1970s Dunlop developed the Speedaway system.[1] It was in fact an invention by Gabriel Bouladon and Paul Zuppiger of the Battelle Memorial Institute in Geneva (Switzerland). A prototype was built and demonstrated at the Battelle Institute in Geneva in the early 1970s, as can be attested by a (French-speaking) Swiss television program entitled Un Jour une Heure aired in October 1974. The great advantage of the Speedaway, as compared to the then existing systems, was that the embarking/disembarking zone was both wide and slow moving (up to 4 passengers could embark simultaneously, allowing for a large number of passengers, up to 10,000 per hour), whereas the transportation zone was narrower and fast moving.
The entrance to the system was like a very wide escalator, with broad metal tread plates of a parallelogram shape. After a short distance the tread plates were accelerated to one side, sliding past one another to form progressively into a narrower but faster moving track which travelled at almost a right-angle to the entry section. The passenger was accelerated through a parabolic path to a maximum design speed of 15 km/h (9 mph). The experience was unfamiliar to passengers, who needed to understand how to use the system to be able to do so safely. Developing a moving hand-rail for the system presented a challenge, also solved by the Battelle team. The Speedaway was intended to be used as a stand alone system over short distances or to form acceleration and deceleration units providing entry and exit means for a parallel conventional (but fast running) Starglide walkway which covered longer distances. The system was still in development in 1975 but never went into commercial production.
Another attempt at an accelerated walkway in the 1980s was the TRAX (Trottoir Roulant Accéléré), which was developed by Dassault and RATP and whose prototype was installed in the Paris Invalides metro station. The speed at entry and exit was 3 km/h (2 mph), while the maximum speed was 15 km/h (9 mph). It was a technical failure due to its complexity, and was never commercially exploited.
In the mid 1990s the Loderway Moving Walkway company patented and licenced a design to a number of larger moving walkway manufacturers [2]. Trial systems were installed at Flinders Street Station in Melbourne and Brisbane Airport Australia. These met with a positive response from the public, but no permanent installations were made. This system is of the belt type, with a sequence of belts moving at different speeds to accelerate and decelerate riders. A sequence of different speed handrails is also used. A video of the trials systems can be found at the following link [3].

Experimental 185 metre long high-speed moving walkway on the Paris Métro, France
In 2002, the first successful high-speed walkway was installed in the Montparnasse—Bienvenüe Métro station in Paris. At first it operated at 12 km/h (7 mph) but due to people losing their balance, the speed was reduced to 9 km/h (6 mph). It has been estimated that commuters using a walkway such as this twice a day would save 15 minutes per week and 10 hours a year.[citation needed]
Using the high-speed walkway is like using any other moving walkway, except that for safety there are special procedures to follow when joining or leaving. When this walkway was introduced, staff (seen here in yellow jackets) determined who could and who could not use it. As riders must have at least one hand free to hold the handrail, those carrying bags, shopping, etc., or who are infirm, must use the ordinary walkway nearby.
On entering, there is a 10-metre acceleration zone where the ‘ground’ is a series of metal rollers. Riders stand still with both feet on these rollers and use one hand to hold the handrail and let it pull them so that they glide over the rollers. The idea is to accelerate the riders so that they will be traveling fast enough to step onto the moving walkway belt. Riders who try to walk on these rollers are at significant risk of falling over.
Once on the walkway, riders can stand or walk. Owing to Newton’s laws of motion, there is no special sensation of travelling at speed, except for headwind.
At the exit, the same technique is used to decelerate the riders. Users step on to a series of rollers which decelerate them slowly, rather than the abrupt halt which would otherwise take place.
In 2007, a similar high-speed walkway was opened in the newly opened Pier F of Pearson International Airport in Toronto, Canada. This walkway is of the pallet type rather than the belt type. The pallets “intermesh” with a comb and slot arrangement. They expand out of each other when speeding up, and compress into each other when slowing down. The handrailings work in a similar manner. The walkway moves at roughly 2 km/h when riders step onto it, speeds up to approximately 7 km/h for the bulk of the length, and slows to 2 km/h again at the end.
In May 2009 it was announced that because of its unreliability and the number of users having accidents, in 2011 the Parisian high-speed moving walkway will be replaced with a standard moving walkway.

One reason for this is America’s federal system of government, the product of the failure of the first attempt at national government, the Articles of Confederation (established in 1777, soon after the US Declaration of Independence, but only ratified in 1781). Under the Articles of Confederation, the thirteen original States retained most of their sovereignty, with a very weak central government. Given the failure of this form of government to deal with relations between the US and other countries, and more importantly among the various States, it was decided in 1787 to reform the Articles of Confederation. As is often the case, instead of modifying the Articles of Confederation, the Constitutional Congress decided to start from scratch, inventing a new form of government embodied in the Constitution that has continued to be the law of the land since its ratification in 1788.

The Constitution is the result of these historical tensions between the various States and the central government, between the North and the South, between the interests of the commercial and industrial cities and the agricultural countryside, between small States and large States. Each of these tensions led to various compromises without which the Constitution would never have been written and ratified, and without which the United States would probably not exist today. For example, the issue of the balance of power between small and large States was settled by the division of the legislature into two houses: the Senate and the House of Representatives. The Senate protects the interests of small States, as each State is represented by two Senators, giving each State equal weight. The House of Representatives, on the other hand, reflects the balance of population, with each State entitled to a number of Representatives proportionate to its population. The approval of both houses is required to make a law, and each house has specific powers (taxation bills must be initiated by the House of Representatives, the Senate must approve the President’s nominations for federal and Supreme Court judges, for members of the Cabinet, and for other offices).

The issue of slavery was a source of contestation from the very beginning of the country. In terms of representation, the southern States wanted their slaves to be counted as part of the population. The North refused to grant representation on the basis of slaves who had no status as citizens. With slaves counting, the population of the South would have been greater than that of the North. Without slaves counting, the opposite would have been true. The compromise, known as the “3/5 Compromise” was to count each slave as 3/5 of a free citizen for purposes of representation. The result appeared (and appears) shocking, but gave a balance in electoral weight between North and South without which the Constitution could not have existed.

The Americans had just fought a long war for freedom from tyranny, and were very concerned with safeguarding their sovereignty and rights, both the rights of individuals to be protected from government, and from the States to be protected from the central government. The Constitution established a balance of powers between the legislature (itself divided between Senate and House of Representatives), the executive branch (President) and to a lesser degree, the judiciary (the Supreme Court and the federal court system). The Constitution gives only certain powers to the federal government, with all remaining powers retained by the sovereign States (but over time, the historical trend has been to find justification within the Constitution for a progressive increase in the power of the federal government that the writers of the Constitution would probably not approve of).

The Constitution deals mostly with the relations between the States and the federal government, and we can see this in the elections for national office. Each State is the master of these elections, and it can be said that there are in fact no national elections in the US. The most extreme example of this is the Presidential election, in which the popular vote across the country has absolutely no importance for the designation of the President. In the beginning, the legislature of each State, and not the people of the State, would vote on the presidential candidates. Although the vote is now in the hands of the people, the tradition remains that the popular vote in each State determines the vote for the entire State (“winner takes all”). This is translated to the presidential election through the Electoral College, in which each State has a number of Electors equal to the number of Senators and Representatives of the State. Each State thus designates all of its electors for only one candidate, meaning that even a small majority for a particular candidate results in that candidate winning all of the Electors of the State (there are only two exceptions to this, Maine and Nebraska, which divide their Electors on a geographical basis).

While there were originally logistical reasons for the creation of the Electoral College, given the long distances and the difficulties of transportation and communication in early America, the primary reason for creating such a means of electing the President was to translate two of the historic Constitutional compromises from the legislative to the executive branch. Small States are over-represented, as they benefit automatically from two Electors (the number of Senators from each State), along with a number of Electors proportionate to its population (number of Representatives). A small State like Wyoming, for example, has only one Representative, but has three times the number of Electors it population would warrant (1 Representative + 2 Senators = 3 Electors). Likewise, thanks to the attribution of Electors on the basis of the number of Representatives, the 3/5 Compromise can be found in the Presidential election. (Thomas Jefferson, the third President, was the first to benefit from this, as he was elected with a majority of Electors from slave States, despite losing the popular vote by a significant majority.) It must of course be noted that the 3/5 Compromise is no longer in effect (slavery was abolished thanks to the victory of the North in the Civil War in 1865), but the Electoral College can be seen as a sort of constitutional fossil remains of this measure.

Each State is in charge of its own elections, including the Presidential election by which each State designates its list of Electors to the Electoral College. In general, the officer in charge of elections in each State is the Secretary of State, who in some States is named by the Governor, and in others is directly elected. A great deal of authority and responsibility is given to lower levels of government. In some States, the counties are in charge of the organization of elections. As a result, there can be different methods of voting even within a given State. The great number of elections held on the same day (dozens in most places) means that some sort of automation is desirable. Various solutions have been adopted: mechanical machines, optical card readers, punch cards, and now, touch-screen electronic voting machines. As you may have seen in some of the articles I have sent over the last year, these machines are a source of great concern, due to their lack of security (easy to hack), their ability to be tampered with (“trafiquer”), and the refusal of manufacturers to include basic safeguards such as a paper copy of the vote.

With regard to the presidential election, each State totals its vote, and the candidate receiving the majority (absolute or simple) receives all the Electoral College votes for the State (except in Maine and Nebraska, where the votes can be divided; there is currently a referendum scheduled to do the same in Colorado). As a result, the presence of a strong third party candidate can mean that a presidential candidate receives all the State’s Electoral College votes without winning an absolute majority of the popular vote. In practice, these Electoral College votes are people who are proposed by each candidate or party. If the candidate wins the popular vote in a State, his list in that State becomes the official list for the State. It is possible for an Elector not to vote as he has promised to vote (“faithless voter”), but this is rare, and in certain States such a betrayal can be punished by law. The Electors transmit their votes in January, and the President elected by the Electoral College takes office on January 25. The period between the election in early November and the inauguration of the new President serves as a transition period for the establishment of a new administration.

We usually hear only about the candidates of the Republican and Democratic parties, but in each presidential election there are many more who get little attention, and few votes. It is not easy to be present on ballots across the country, and each State has its own rules on who can be present as a candidate. Established parties have a great advantage as their past performance gives them automatic representation. Candidates running as individuals or for small parties can have much more difficulty being present in each State. In the 2004 elections there were battles throughout the US concerning the presence of Ralph Nader on ballots, with the Republicans providing financial and logistical help for Nader who is certain to take votes from Kerry, and with the Democrats opposing his presence in the Courts (this strategy doesn’t always work, as in Florida, where Governor Jeb Bush, the brother of George W, has overrode a court decision barring Nader from the ballot due to irregularities in his petitions).

The country is divided almost 50-50 between Democrats and Republicans, but in most states the outcome is clear from the start. The result is that the candidates concentrate their campaigns on a few “swing” states that could go either way. Because of this division, the outcome of the election is hard to determine, and the presence of a strong independent or third-party candidate like Nader can have a big impact.

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Primaries

There is no limit on the number of political parties in the US, but in practice, most elections are contested by representatives of either the Republican or Democratic parties. Parties are weaker in the US, and have little role in designating “their” candidates.

From Wikipedia:

There is no provision for the role of political parties in the United States Constitution. Before 1820, members of Congress would nominate a single candidate from their party. That system collapsed in 1824, and since 1832 the preferred mechanism for nomination has been a national convention.
Delegates to the national convention were usually selected at state conventions whose own delegates were chosen by district conventions. Sometimes they were dominated by intrigue between political bosses who controlled delegates; the national convention was far from democratic or transparent. Progressive Era reformers looked to the primary election as a way to measure popular opinion of candidates, as opposed to the opinion of the bosses. In 1910, Oregon became the first state to establish a presidential preference primary, which requires delegates to the National Convention to support the winner of the primary at the convention. By 1912, twelve states either selected delegates in primaries, used a preferential primary, or both. By 1920 there were 20 states with primaries, but some went back, and from 1936 to 1968,12 states used them.
The primary received its first major test in the 1912 election pitting incumbent President William Howard Taft against challengers Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson. Roosevelt proved the most popular candidate, but as most primaries were non-binding “preference” shows and held in only fourteen of the-then forty-eight states, the Republican nomination went to Taft, who controlled the convention.
Seeking to boost voter turnout, New Hampshire simplified its ballot access laws in 1949. In the ensuing “beauty contest” of 1952, Republican Dwight Eisenhower demonstrated his broad voter appeal by out-polling the favored Robert A. Taft, “Mr. Republican.” Also, Democrat Estes Kefauver defeated incumbent President Harry S. Truman, leading the latter to decide not to run for another term. The first-in-the-nation New Hampshire primary has since become a widely-observed test of candidates’ viability.
The impetus for national adoption of the binding primary election was the chaotic 1968 Democratic National Convention. Vice President Hubert Humphrey secured the nomination despite primary victories and other shows of support for Senator Eugene McCarthy, running against Humphrey on a strong anti-Vietnam War platform. After this, a Democratic National Committee-commissioned panel led by Senator George McGovern – the McGovern–Fraser Commission – recommended that states adopt new rules to assure wider participation. A large number of states, faced with the need to conform to more detailed rules for the selection of national delegates, chose a presidential primary as an easier way to come into compliance with the new national Democratic Party rules. The result was that many more future delegates would be selected by a state presidential primary. The Republicans also adopted many more state presidential primaries.
With the broadened use of the primary system, states have tried to increase their influence in the nomination process. One tactic has been to create geographic blocs to encourage candidates to spend time in a region. Vermont and Massachusetts attempted to stage a joint New England primary on the first Tuesday of March, but New Hampshire refused to participate so it could retain its traditional place as the first primary. The first successful regional primary was Super Tuesday of March 8, 1988, in which nine Southern states united in the hope that the Democrats would select a candidate in line with Southern interests.[13]
Another trend is to stage earlier and earlier primaries, given impetus by Super Tuesday and the mid-1990s move (since repealed) of the California primary and its bloc of votes—the largest in the nation—from June to March. To retain its tradition as the first primary in the country (and adhere to a state law which requires it to be), New Hampshire moved their primary forward, from early March to early January.

In contemporary times, each party holds a national convention in the summer before the presidential election.  The party organization in each state sends delegates to the convention, based on formulas devised by the party (for example, the Democratic party allocates delegates based on population of the state, the power of the party in the state, along with additional delegates (“super delegates”) who represent the party power structure.

Each party establishes its own rules on voting at this convention, but as a rule, the party organization in each state has liberty to choose its delegates. Many choose primaries (usually an obligation of their state law), while others use conventions and caucuses.

Conventions and caucuses are meetings of members of the party. Typically there is a first series at a very local level, which designates delegates to a county convention, which then designate delegates to a state convention that chooses the state’s delegates to the national convention for the party.

Primaries also depend on the state that organizes them. Some are open: any registered voter can participate. Others are closed: only voters registered with the appropriate party affiliation can participate. There are other possible configurations, such as primaries which are open to anyone except voters registered as members of another party.

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President: Elected every four years by the Electoral College. Presidents can serve two terms.

Vice-President: Elected with the President. Presides the Senate. Replaces the President in case of death or removal from office. If he serves more than two years of the President’s term, he is limited to only one more term.

Senators: Two from each State. Elected for a six-year term by the entire population of each State. Each two years a third of the Senate comes up for election.

Representatives: Since 1911 the number of Representatives has been set at 435. These seats are apportioned according to the population of each State. Each State is divided into a number of districts equal to its number of Representatives (one for small States like Alaska or Wyoming, dozens for big States like New York or California). These districts have nothing to do with geographical considerations, and everything to do with ensuring that the party that controls the State legislature has the best chance of winning the greatest number of seats. All Representatives serve a two-year term, so they are perpetual candidates.

Charlie is heading off to work one fall morning and, as he does every morning, he passes a pharmacy with a sign that displays the current temperature in Fahrenheit on the left, and the temperature in Celsius on the right, and the time in the center.

He notices both temperatures, and thinks, ‘It’s a pretty nice day for late fall,’ but, as the day progresses, a monstrous cold front hits town. On his way home, Charlie passes the temperature billboard again, and finds that the Fahrenheit temperature is now 36 degrees colder than it was that morning. So, when he drove in it was one temperature, and now it’s that temperature minus 36.

But, when he looks at the Celsius temperature he’s confused, because it reads exactly the same as it did that morning. Charlie figures that the display must be stuck, because it’s certainly much colder on his ride home.

In fact, it was not stuck. But there was indeed something wrong with the Celsius sign.

What was the problem and how cold was it?

What Happened to Columbus Day?
In the old days, we had the day off.

By Will Oremus|Posted Monday, Oct. 10, 2011, at 2:04 PM ET

In Manhattan this morning, it was 70 degrees and sunny, and a fresh breeze rustled the elm trees in the park as the Explainer hustled to the office. It’s bad enough having to work on a perfect autumn day. But it’s downright galling when that perfect day also happens to be a federal holiday. When did Columbus Day become just another Monday?

In the early 1990s. Congress planned a “Quincentennial Jubilee” in 1992 to celebrate the 500th anniversary of Christopher Columbus’ Oct. 12 landing on the Bahamas. The festivities were to have sent a replica Nina, Pinta, and Santa Maria sailing beneath the Golden Gate Bridge in a fatuous re-enactment of the Italian explorer’s “discovery of America,” but Native American leaders joined with liberals and environmentalists to protest the celebration. Corporate sponsors never materialized, and the voyage was canceled. The same year, Berkeley, Calif., renamed the holiday “Indigenous People’s Day” in recognition of the civilizations that were nearly wiped out in the centuries following Columbus’ arrival. In most other places, Columbus Day simply withered over the years, with the political controversy serving as cover for employers to deny workers a paid vacation day.
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Perhaps the holiday’s lowest moment since 1992 came in 2009, at the height of the recession. That’s the year Baltimore and Philadelphia canceled their long-running Columbus Day parades and California dropped the holiday as a paid day off for government workers—citing budget woes, not ethical misgivings.

Federal workers and the employees of 24 states still get the holiday, but they’re now in the minority. Even the Explainer’s parents, school administrators in Ohio’s capital city, are at work today. When a place called Columbus stops celebrating Columbus Day, it’s clear the holiday is out of favor.

Those who chafe at being required to work on one of the nation’s 10 federal holidays can take some solace knowing that it didn’t even exist until 1907. That’s when Italian-Americans in Denver convinced the state of Colorado to declare Columbus Day a holiday, partly in celebration of their heritage. The Knights of Columbus successfully lobbied President Franklin D. Roosevelt to make it a federal holiday in the 1930s. Today, Italian-American groups still hold Columbus Day marches in several cities, including Denver, where they are routinely attended by angry protesters.

VO:
The Economics of Occupy Wall Street
The protesters say the top 1 percent of Americans have gotten too rich. Are they right?

It is not easy to say just what Occupy Wall Street wants; there is no concise list of specific demands. But the gist of the quickly snowballing movement is clear. Wall Street has not accepted responsibility for its role in the financial crisis and ensuing recession. It has done more harm than good for average citizens and businesses. On top of all that, average Americans are “getting nothing while the other 1 percent is getting everything. We are the 99 percent.”

One thing is inarguably true: The 99 percent don’t have 99 percent of anything, money-wise, in the United States. But just how bad is the skew toward the top 1 percent?

Let’s start with income—the money you make from things like wages, salary, interest payments, and collected rent. According to an analysis (XLS) of Internal Revenue Service data by the economists Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez, the 99 percent account for 79 percent of income in 2008, with the top 1 percent taking the other 21 percent.

“That’s not that bad,” you might say. “Of course, some people are going to be richer than others.” Perhaps. But the 1 percent has been eating a bigger and bigger share of the pie over time. Back in the 1970s, the 99 percent were earning about 90 percent of income, for instance. The top 1 percent of households took a bigger share of overall income in 2007 than they did at any time since 1928.

Moreover, Piketty and Saez show that in the most recent business cycle, from 2002 until 2007, about two-thirds of all income gains went to the top 1 percent of households. The top 1 percent saw their incomes increase more than 10 percent per year, adjusted for inflation. The 99 percent saw their incomes increase a measly 1.3 percent per year. And the trend goes back further. As noted by Tim Noah in his excellent Slate series on inequality, from 1980 until 2005, the 99 percent saw just one-fifth of the overall gains in income.

The 1 percent’s income did take a knock during the Great Recession: It dropped 20 percent, whereas the 99 percent took a 7 percent hit. But that mostly was caused by the stock market crash and falling capital-gains earnings among the rich, not by salary cuts.

The 99 percent’s fortunes look even worse if you focus on wealth, rather than income—the total value of a household or individual’s assets, such their house and their investment funds. According to data compiled by economist Edward Wolff (PDF), in 2007, the 99 percent held about two-thirds of American wealth, meaning the top 1 percent has nearly one-third.

The sustained woes of the housing market may skew those numbers even further in the coming years, because the 99 percent rely on homes for a bigger proportion of their wealth than the 1 percent do. Before the crash, the middle of the income distribution had about 90 percent of their assets in their homes. Housing prices have cratered across the country. That means trillions in lost housing value and a hefty debt burden for underwater homeowners to boot.

The 1 percent has about 43 percent of all the nonhousing wealth, which has held up comparatively better. Sociologist William Domhoff reports that the 99 percent hold just 38 percent of equity in businesses, 40 percent of financial securities, and 62 percent of stocks and mutual funds. Among the 99 percent, about one in three households has more than $10,000 in stock. Among the 1 percent, nearly nine in 10 households do.

In short, inequality has increased in the past decade, leaving the 99 percent with smaller and smaller proportions of income and wealth. And it has many economists, public policy wonks, and, well, protesters very, very worried. As put by Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz, “growing inequality is the flip side of something else: shrinking opportunity. Whenever we diminish equality of opportunity, it means that we are not using some of our most valuable assets—our people—in the most productive way possible.”

Whether Occupy Wall Street can help to rectify that imbalance—who knows. But there is certainly value in at least making sure Americans know just how unequal the country is.

http://www.slate.fr/story/44957/indignes-wall-street

VF:
Les indignés de Wall Street possèdent-ils si peu?
Selon les manifestants, le 1% le plus riche de la population américaine est trop riche. C’est vrai?
Difficile de dire ce que veut «Occupy Wall Street» («occuper Wall Street»), il n’y a pas de liste précise de revendications. Mais le cœur du message de ce mouvement qui prend rapidement de l’ampleur est clair. Wall Street n’a pas admis sa responsabilité dans la crise financière et dans la récession qui a suivi et a fait plus de mal que de bien au citoyen et à l’entreprise moyens. Qui plus est, alors que les Américains ordinaires «n’en tirent rien, 1% de la population prend tout.» Et les manifestants de proclamer: «nous sommes les 99%» («We are the 99%»).

Ce qui est incontestable, c’est que ces 99% n’ont pas 99% de l’argent des Etats-Unis. Mais quel est exactement le décalage avec le pour cent du haut de la pyramide?

Commençons avec les revenus – l’argent tiré des salaires ou encore des intérêts et des loyers perçus. Selon une analyse de l’administration fiscale américaine, réalisée par les économistes Thomas Piketty et Emmanuel Saez (fichier Excel), les 99% ont représenté en 2008 79% des revenus totaux et le pourcent restant a engrangé le reste.

«Pas si mal», pourrait-on dire. «Il y a forcément des gens plus riches que d’autres.» Peut-être. Mais avec le temps, ce «1%» mange une part de plus en plus grosse du gâteau. Dans les années 1970, les 99% gagnaient par exemple quelque 90% des revenus. En 2007, la part du revenu global engrangée par le pour cent le plus riche fut la plus élevée jamais enregistrée depuis 1928.

Ces deux économistes montrent en outre que pendant le dernier cycle économique, de 2002 à 2007, les deux tiers environ de la hausse des revenus ont profité au pour cent le plus riche. Celui-ci a vu ses revenus grimper de plus de 10% par an, si l’on prend en compte l’inflation. Quant aux 99%, ils ont vu leurs revenus augmenter d’un misérable 1,3% annuel. Cette tendance remonte en fait à plus longtemps. Comme l’a indiqué Tim Noah dans son excellente série d’articles consacrée aux inégalités, publiée sur Slate, les fameux 99% n’ont bénéficié, de 1980 à 2005, que d’un cinquième de la hausse globale des revenus.

Les revenus du pour cent le plus riche de la population en ont pris un coup pendant la «Grande Récession»: ils ont chuté de 20% alors que ceux des 99% baissaient de 7%. La principale cause n’est pas la diminution des salaires, mais le krach boursier et la baisse des revenus du capital.

Le sort des 99% semble pire encore si l’on observe non pas le revenu, mais la richesse – la valeur totale du patrimoine d’un individu ou d’un ménage, par exemple sa maison et son épargne. Selon les chiffres présentés par l’économiste Edward Wolff (PDF), les 99% détenaient en 2007 un peu plus des deux tiers de la richesse américaine, ce qui veut dire que le pourcent restant en avait près d’un tiers.

Les malheurs qui se succèdent sur le marché de l’immobilier pourraient empirer encore la situation des 99% dans les années à venir, la richesse de ceux-ci dépendant en effet davantage de l’immobilier que celle des plus riches. Avant le krach, les logements représentaient 90% du patrimoine au sein de la population aux revenus moyens. Leurs prix se sont effondrés dans tout le pays. Avec, à la clé, des milliards de milliards de valeur immobilière partis en fumée et une dette considérable sur les épaules des propriétaires «sous l’eau».

Le pour cent le plus riche de la population détient environ 43% de la richesse hors immobilier, et cette dernière a été moins affectée. Le sociologue William Domhoff explique que les 99% possèdent seulement 38% des parts des entreprises, 40% des titres financiers et 62% des actions et des fonds communs de placement. Et parmi eux, seul un ménage sur 3 détient plus de 10.000 dollars d’actions – c’est 9 sur 10 parmi les «1%».

Les inégalités se sont donc accrues durant la dernière décennie, laissant aux 99% une part des revenus et des richesses toujours moindres. Ce qui inquiète nombre d’économistes, de spécialistes des politiques publiques et, désormais, de manifestants. Comme l’a dit le prix Nobel Joseph Stiglitz, «l’accroissement des inégalités constitue la face B d’un autre phénomène: le déclin des opportunités. Chaque fois que l’égalité des chances n’est pas assurée, cela implique que nous n’utilisons pas une partie de notre plus précieux atout – notre peuple – de la façon la plus efficace possible».

Le mouvement «Occupy Wall Street» peut-il contribuer à corriger ces déséquilibres? Je ne sais pas. Mais il n’est certainement pas inutile de s’assurer que les Américains savent à quel point le pays est inégalitaire.

Water, Water Everywhere
What’s the best-tasting kind of water?
By Julia Felsenthal|Posted Wednesday, Oct. 12, 2011, at 4:57 AM ET

If you were born before the year 1990, you may remember the days when bottled water meant a choice between Evian (on the tennis court), Perrier (as an aperitif), and Hinckley and Schmidt (in a paper cup at your doctor’s office). You may remember that when you went for bike rides you inserted into your water holder not a bottle of fresh mineral spring water, but unfiltered tap water held in a mildly carcinogenic plastic squeeze bottle. You may even remember the advent of Clearly Canadian, a drink that rolled around in 1988, and tried, far ahead of the curve, to make drinking water not just a practical necessity, but a sugary party in your mouth.

These days, the experience of shopping for bottled water is akin to the experience of shopping for luxury denim in the mid-aughts, or cupcakes since Sex and the City aired: The market is completely saturated, prices are inflated, and it’s pretty hard to determine where the value is. A quick search for bottled water on Amazon.com reveals nearly 200 distinct brands. Would you like your water caffeinated? Or extracted from 3,000 feet under the sea? How about infused with anti-aging chemicals? No problem!

Even when it comes to the most basic of unflavored bottled waters, the range of options can be confusing. Everyone has an opinion about which brand represents that platonic ideal of water-drinking and which brands fall short. But how deep does brand loyalty go when you have no idea what you’re drinking? We decided to put 11 Slate staffers to the test—to a blind taste test, specifically—to determine if anyone can really taste the difference.

Our methodology was simple: Out of the 11 water brands with the highest market share in the basic, un-enhanced category (based on a Beverage Digest report from May 26, 2011), we chose the four whose names were best known: Aquafina, Poland Spring, Dasani, and Evian. From the enhanced/flavor water category, we chose the unflavored brand with the highest market share: Smartwater. And then we pitted all five against unfiltered New York City tap water. We served these six waters to our colleagues in plain Solo cups, with no indication of which brand was which. We asked each guinea pig to list his or her favorite and least favorite bottled water brands; to rate each anonymous sample on the basis of deliciousness on a scale of one to five; to describe the water’s taste; and to guess which water it might be.

The results, from dirty dishwater to purest elixir of life, are below.

Evian
Average deliciousness rating: 1.45/5
1 liter for $1.99 from D’Agostino
Unless you are referring to the liquid that pools at the bottom of a bong, dank is not a desirable descriptor of water. But that’s how one Slate staffer referred to the well-heeled grandfather of all bottled waters. Evian, which hails from the town of Evian-les-Bains in the French Alps, has been sold in the United States since 1978. In the ‘80s and ’90s, Evian made a name for itself as the sportier—yet still swanky—alternative to carbonated waters like Perrier and San Pellegrino. Though, according to a 1989 article in Ad Age, Michael Jackson and David Lee Roth were both Evian devotees, our panel of taste-testers was not similarly taken by this water’s charms. They described Evian as “salty,” “chalky,” and “soft,” and compared it to water-fountain water, rain-ditch water, pool water, and, my personal favorite: the water “wrung out from sweaty socks.” Of the 11 tasters, eight thought this was the worst water of the bunch. And of the 11, three were able to correctly identify this sample as Evian—meaning that Evian’s taste, if not delicious, is certainly distinctive.

Tap Water
Average deliciousness rating: 2.05/5
1 liter for approximately $.002 (according to 2009 estimates)
In my early days of living in New York, I had a roommate who liked to wax poetic on the wonderful quality of New York City drinking water. (When I met his father, who also liked to wax poetic on the wonderful quality of New York City drinking water, I saw where he got it from). They had a point; New York city water is considered exceptionally good—so good, in fact, that one enterprising young man named Craig Zucker recently decided to start bottling and selling it as an alternative to spring water, under the name Tap’d NY. Slate taste testers, ever contrarian, did not agree with my friend and his father. These intrepid folks described the tap water sample as “chlorinic and bleachy,” “slimy,” “sour,” “briny,” and “tongue coating.” One taster even commented that it had a “bad sewer aftertaste.” When asked which water they thought this might be, nobody guessed tap. Three people mistook the sample for Dasani, and one person guessed that it might actually be cleaning water from a bucket.

Dasani
Average deliciousness rating: 2.95/5
1 liter for $1.79 at D’Agostino
Though Tap’d NY founder Zucker may have gotten some positive press for his innovative idea, he was actually just following in the footsteps of several major American beverage brands. Coca-Cola’s contribution to the bottled water market is Dasani, which calls itself “purified water,” and which is, in fact, tap water, filtered through reverse osmosis, and then fortified with various minerals (Coca-Cola offers a more thorough explanation of the process here). The minerals that are added back in—magnesium sulfate, potassium chloride, and salt—are what give Dasani its unique flavor, a flavor that Dasani brass described as distinctively “crisp” back in 2006. Slate’s tasters did not pick up on Dasani’s signature crispness, or if they did, they found more creative ways to describe it: “slightly spicy,” “somewhat metallic,” and “mineral-y” were popular comments. Several of our tasters, in fact, noted Dasani’s lack of taste, instead describing it as “rinse-y” or “good at cleaning mouth.” Nobody was able to identify this sample as Dasani, and though it was one person’s favorite sample, it was nobody’s least favorite. The takeaway? Dasani is either completely generic, or it simply tastes the way people think water tastes.

Aquafina
Average deliciousness rating: 3.1/5
1 liter for $1.87 from CVS
Like Dasani, Aquafina, which is owned by Pepsi Co., bottles municipal tap water that has been treated through reverse osmosis (here’s Pepsi’s diagram of its water purification process). Unlike Coke, however, Pepsi does not pump minerals back into its purified product. Despite Dasani’s wager on the American predilection for crispness, Aquafina actually had the higher market share as of May 2011. (It also, as the New York Times pointed out in 2007, was the choice of the candidate who won the last Democratic presidential nomination; the losing candidate drank Dasani.) So what did our testers make of Aquafina? Although Aquafina scored higher than Dasani, it was actually the more polarizing choice; three people ranked Aquafina highest on their list, and one person ranked it lowest. Much like Dasani, nobody was able to identify Aquafina. Slate tasters repeatedly described this water as “soft,” “metallic,” and a bit “muddy.”One person declared it “the most neutral of the waters.” And one whimsical colleague thought it tasted “vaguely floral.”

Poland Spring
Average deliciousness rating: 3.95/5
1 liter for $0.99 at D’Agostino
Nestlé has distinguished itself by bottling actual spring water from springs across the country and selling that water under regionally specific names (Zephyrhills for Florida, Ice Mountain for the Midwest, etc.). Still, Nestlé’s best-selling spring water is Poland Spring, which is from Maine. Poland Spring bottled water has been around since 1845 (it won the medal of excellence at the Chicago World Fair in 1893), though the brand was bought by Perrier in 1980 and was then absorbed into Nestlé in 1987. These days, Poland Spring water doesn’t actually all come from Poland Spring itself (if you believe a 2003 class-action lawsuit against Nestlé, that spring hasn’t actually flowed since 1967) but, as the brand’s website puts it, from several spring water sources in Maine, each with “a taste and mineral composition similar to our original spring.” Slate tasters remarked on Poland Spring’s high minerality, its slight saltiness, its heaviness on the tongue, and its overall clean taste. Only one person objected to this water, finding it “dirty,” “saltier,” “slightly sour,” and “disconcertingly milky.” Even so, Poland Spring did not qualify as anyone’s lowest rank pick, and it was the favorite of four tasters.

Smartwater
Average deliciousness rating: 4.0/5
1 liter for $2.19 at Kings Pharmacy
Over the course of the ‘90s, drinking bottled water went from niche practice to mainstream habit (sales of the stuff went from $115 million to $4 billion between 1990 and 1997). In the early aughts, bottled water gave birth to a whole new subcategory: enhanced bottled water. Enhanced bottled water is water infused with something else: flavor, color, vitamins, herbs, or even caffeine. Though the health benefits of enhanced water have been the subject of great debate, Smartwater, one of the first enhanced waters on the market, has been a success. Jennifer Aniston became an investor and eventually the face of the brand—and in 2007, the company that invented Smartwater was sold to Coca-Cola for $4.1 billion.

So what exactly is Smartwater? It’s distilled, purified water, extracted mostly from municipal water sources, which, once purified, is re-infused with the electrolytes calcium chloride, magnesium chloride, and potassium bicarbonate. According to Slate taste testers, this mix of electrolytes gave smartwater a nice balance of saltiness and sweetness, and a clean, light, and pure taste. Two tasters made reference to a tannic undertone. An unprecedented five tasters ranked this enhanced water as their favorite, and none ranked it as least favorite. One taster summed up the collective opinion, by calling Smartwater—appropriately, the most expensive of all the options—“the champagne of waters.”