The Blog of Record

Poverty kills, and Chile has much less of it that Haiti:

Canadian aid groups say Chile is in a better position than Haiti was to weather an earthquake, despite the enormous magnitude of the quake that struck early Saturday.

While the Chilean earthquake was magnitude 8.8, 500 to 1,000 times more powerful than the Jan. 12 earthquake in Haiti, Chile has strict building codes, better infrastructure and a stable government that make it able to manage an emergency.

The earthquake also struck deeper beneath the surface, meaning less damage than had it hit closer.

“The needs are not on the same scale at all,” said Jean-Pierre Taschereau, senior manager of emergency response at the Canadian Red Cross.

Taschereau, who has worked in Chile after previous natural disasters, said there’s a lot of infrastructure damage that will mean a “high material cost.”

“There was a lot of [loss of life] in Haiti but there’s not a lot in Chile because of good preparation, good risk reduction activities, solid building codes, a strong state apparatus.”

From the Washington Post, April 4, 1905, via Shorpy (go there for the photo):

        Richmond, Va., April 3 — Thousands of Negroes observed Emancipation Day in Virginia to-day. The occasion resulted in an outpouring of the race never before equaled, armed with miniature United States flags and attended by brass bands.

        In addition, there was a unique feature to-night, the inauguration of a colored President. At True Reformers’ Hall the interior of the White House was reproduced, and all the ceremonies incident to the induction of a Chief Magistrate into office were gone through with.

        To-day was also the fortieth anniversary of the evacuation of Richmond by the Confederate forces and the partial destruction of the city by fire.

Click the image to enlarge.

From here.

The forced vehicle recall for no reason whatsoever, that is:

To this day the public believes there might have been a problem with the Audi 5000, but it’s not true. They believe the Suzuki Samurai rolled over easily, and that’s not true either. They think Ford built an unsafe Crown Victoria, when all evidence shows that the other driver’s extreme high-speed impact was actually to blame. Firestone is remembered as the world’s worst manufacturer of tires, but that was far from the truth: In the vast majority of Firestones’ tread-loss incidents, the culprits were old tires, improper inflation, and driving too fast in hot weather. Exactly the conditions that cause all tires to lose their treads.

The Audi official who said his company had investigated those complaints and found nothing was telling the truth. So was Ford when it maintained that Crown Vics could actually take a worse rear-end impact than virtually any other car on the road. Suzuki officials’ pleas that their Samurai was incredibly stable fell on deaf ears—but it was.

Today, no one remembers any of that.

Now it’s Toyota’s turn. They investigated the complaints, found a number of small problems and said that’s the only problems they could find, and moved relatively fast to fix those issues. The only way Toyota could be in trouble now is if, in a Nixonian moment, it was discovered that they’d lied or covered up another defect. The likelihood of that happening is low.

Or maybe Toyota could be in trouble until Government Motors and Chrysler have gained enough market share. “Nice little business you got there. Shame if something should happen to it.”

Evidence hints that the Challenger 7 survived the explosion that destroyed the shuttle and were alive and conscious in their intact crew cabin during the fall. It was probably the smash into the sea that killed them. 

Was there no way to fit an emergency parachute to the crew compartment such that it would still be functioning after such an explosion? I wonder if the doomed astronauts were thinking about this in the 2 minutes and 45 seconds it took them to plummet down to their deaths from 65,000 feet.

U.S.-owned automakers get more complaints per car than Toyota but, funnily, we don’t hear about any GM or Chrysler recalls being forced by the Obama administration:

NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) — Despite a torrent of high-profile recalls that have tarnished Toyota’s once stellar reputation, a study published Wednesday reveals that the automaker actually gets fewer customer complaints per car than the majority of its competitors.

Edmunds.com reviewed more than 200,000 complaints filed with the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) over the last decade and found that Toyota ranked 17th among the top 20 automakers in the overall number of complaints per vehicle sold. 

According to the study, Toyota had fewer complaints than its American rivals.

The only automakers to receive fewer complaints than Toyota were Mercedes-Benz, Porsche and the BMW-made* Smart Car.

Another forced recall, and it may begin to seem – to the cynics among us – that the U.S. government has it in for Toyota, for some mysterious reason. I am sure the fact that the government owns two of Toyota’s main competitors, GM and Chrysler, has nothing to do with it whatsoever.

* The Smart, of course,  is made by Mercedes-Benz. If I know that, why doesn’t CNN?

Get ready for a jump in unemployment:

Employers are getting hit with a massive tax hike at a time when they can least afford it.Companies in at least 35 states will have to fork over more in unemployment insurance taxes this year, according to the National Association of State Workforce Agencies.

The median increase will be 27.5%. And employers in places such as Hawaii and Florida could see levies skyrocket more than ten-fold.

Many of these hikes happened automatically as prolonged joblessness triggered state laws governing their unemployment insurance systems. But at least seven states voted to raise their taxable wage bases, the level of income subject to unemployment tax. And another 10 are looking at upping the wage bases or tax rates.

When you raise the cost of employing workers, do you think businesses will employ more of them, or fewer? The answer is obvious, right? Well, not for lawmakers:

When lawmakers [in Florida] approved an increase in unemployment taxes a year ago, they didn’t realize what the impact would be, said Rep. Dave Murzin, who heads the state’s Economic Development & Community Affairs Policy Council. The state’s unemployment rate was 7.6% at the end of 2008, versus 11.8% in December.

If there is a rule with no exceptions, it’s the law of unintended consequences of government decisions. Especially when the people making the decisions are as dim as those Florida lawmakers.

From here.

Just following NBC’s example in celebrating Black History Month. More: The NBC cafeteria’s white supremacist chef speaks.

A Pew Research Center phone survey has found that Republicans have more political and economic knowledge than Democrats.

A guy develops artificial-intelligence technology and the only marketable application he’s been able to find for it is a 5-foot-7, 120-pound talking sex robot. Or so he says.