World debt comparison: The global debt clock Introducing Simple Tiles: Our New Mapping Library Newsrooms have been publishing maps for a long time. However, mapping on the web is very difficult due to the sheer amount of data involved. Some of the largest datasets available to journalists are geospatial. The U.S. TIGER/Line roads database, for example, tips the scale at 9.2 gigabytes, and the USGS’s national hydrography data set is 17 gigabytes compressed. The data needed to analyze legislative redistricting is similarly huge. So we wrote a mapping framework of our own called Simple Tiles, which we are open sourcing today. How it Works Maps on the web are made up of thousands of square images, which are dynamically loaded into your browser as you drag around a map or zoom to different zoom levels. Simple Tiles creates such images, called tiles, from spatial data, and provides an easy way to generate each map tile based on x, y, and z coordinates. Simple Tiles is designed to be very lightweight, and will continue to be so. The Simple Tiles API is small and easy to use.
We're A Country. Deal With It. Again and again (and again and again) we hear -- and learn the hard way -- that our "keep government out of it" approach to economic and manufacturing policy is hurting us. The countries that see themselves as countries and therefore have national strategies -- where the ecosystem of an industry and/or sector is coordinated and nurtured by government strategies -- are doing much better than the countries where leaders think "government interference" is a problem. We send our companies out to compete against organized national systems, and the result is we lose our jobs, factories, infustrues and economy. And maybe one day our country, too. We're A Country. Deal With It. Here's the important thing to understand, even if you think the idea of "countries" is out of date, and don't think of the United States as a country is important anymore: Others see themselves as countries and they organize their countries to win as countries. This Time, Brookings Is Saying It
From Cellphones To Cigarettes: The Long Arm Of The Chinese Government : Planet Money hide captionHow many government-owned businesses do you see in this picture? Ed Jones/AFP/Getty Images The streets of Beijing and Shanghai feel like an entrepreneurial free-for-all, full of mom-and-pop stores and street vendors selling snacks and cheap toys. But when you pull back the curtain, you see a different picture: a country where the government still controls huge swaths of the economy. When you're in China, there's a good chance you're doing business with the government every time you: make a call on your cellphone (the government owns the country's biggest cellphone network) buy gas for your car (the two biggest oil companies are owned by the government) smoke a cigarette (biggest tobacco company, also state-owned) get money from an ATM (from any of the nation's four biggest banks, all of which are state owned) fly on a plane (the government owns the country's three biggest airlines) This system, known as state capitalism, has worked well for China so far.
What’s Really Pushing Up the Price of Gas? Is the Fed’s “Easy Money” policy pushing up the price of gas? The editors of the seem to think so. Here’s how they summed it up in an article last week: “Oil is traded in dollars, and its price therefore rises when the value of the dollar falls, all else being equal. The Federal Reserve throughout Mr. “Oil staged its last price surge along with other commodity prices when the Fed revved up its second burst of “quantitative easing” in 2010-2011. “Another surge” for commodity prices? Not exactly. The WSJ is correct in saying that quantitative easing (QE2) did push up food and energy prices, but is that really what’s driving oil prices higher today? Probably not. “Phil Flynn, a senior market analyst at PFGBest Research in Chicago, offered this interpretation: So, is panic buying driving up the price of gas or does it have more to do with a gradually improving economic picture that’s increasing demand around the world? “These people are not there to be heroes.
Oil Price Panic: Seven And A Half Things To Know Thing One: Let's All Panic About Oil: The oil market is as jittery as Rick Santorum in a sex toy shop. Case in point: Yesterday a sketchy "news" report flashed around the Interwebs that an oil pipeline in Saudi Arabia's restive Eastern Province had exploded. The oil market did not wait to find out if this was true. It promptly jumped on a chair and started shrieking and did not stop until long after Saudi Arabia denied the report. By the logic of the drill-baby-drill crowd, higher oil prices should not be happening, or should not matter. Meanwhile, there's also reason to cheer soaring oil prices: Maybe that will help us use less of the stuff. Thing Two: Let's Also Panic About China: OMG, everybody, China is diversifying its foreign-currency reserves. Thing Four: No Data For You! Also on HuffPost:
The Friday Podcast: China's Giant Pool Of Money : Planet Money hide captionRosalia Yang, at the factory where her company makes imitation-wood flooring. Jacob Goldstein/NPR Today on the show, we visit a giant pool of money — worth trillions of U.S. dollars! — at the People's Bank of China, the country's central bank. To understand how the money got there, we talk to Jacky Jiang and Rosalia Yang, a pair of very friendly exporters who show us around a factory where they make fake-wood flooring. They tell us about the changes China is going through, and explain why that pool of money might soon start flowing back to the U.S. This is third podcast from our recent trip to China.
War Tax at the Gas Pump It’s hard to miss the higher cost of gas every time we fill up our cars these days, but the News Media doesn’t do a very good job of explaining why. There isn’t any mystery, though, if you read the financial press and oil industry sources: We’re paying extra for gas because of rising tensions in the Middle East and especially the scare over a possible US or Israeli attack on Iran. In effect, we’re paying a “war tax” at the gas pump, and the cost will only get higher unless we put aside the talk of war and get down to serious diplomacy to settle the differences in the region. Here’s what the Wall Street Journal had to say recently, under the headline Oil Rise Imperils Budding Recovery: Rising oil prices are emerging once again as a threat to the U.S. economic recovery just as it appears to be gaining momentum. The world market price for oil is headed upward of $110 a barrel, which could translate into $4 gasoline before too long. But an even higher war tax on gas is not inevitable.