links for 2010-06-18

• Aswad: Don't Turn Around
• Aswad: Don't Turn Around
• Reactions of the Group 1 elements with water
• Stephen Gordon: Worthwhile Canadian Initiative: On the lessons to be learned from the elimination of the Canadian federal deficit in the 1990s
  SG: "It would appear that there is a significant constituency in both the US and in Europe agitating for immediate efforts to reduce their respective governments' deficits, and some are pointing to the Canadian experience of the 1990s. If Canada could make the swift transition from decades of large and chronic deficits to being the poster child of fiscal rectitude with no apparent ill effects, then why can't everyone else? The answer is that Europe and the US in 2010 is not Canada in 1995, in pretty much every way that matters."
• Matthew Yglesias: Learning English
  MY: "One of the weirder ideas that many people have managed to get into their heads is that today’s immigrants—or perhaps just immigrants from Mexico—are engaged in some kind of willful campaign to refuse to learn English. Less parochial Americans will be aware that if you travel to pretty much any country on the planet lots of people who have no particular intention of emigrating at all are trying to learn English, since it’s an extremely useful skill irrespective of migration issues. And Americans who’ve ever tried to learn a foreign language will be aware that learning foreign languages is hard, especially for adults. If immigrants don’t speak English, it’s almost certainly because it’s difficult to do, not because of some perverse refusal to try. Lisa Wade has a good chart which shows that contrary to perception, today’s immigrants are somewhat more English-capable (perhaps because of the global trend toward English) than those of the previous major migration episodes."
• Paul Krugman: Fiscal Fantasies
  PK: "It’s really amazing to see how quickly the notion that contractionary fiscal policy is actually expansionary is spreading. As I noted yesterday, the Panglossian view has now become official doctrine at the ECB. So what does this view rest on?... [V]ague ideas about credibility and confidence; but largely on the supposed lessons of experience, of countries that saw economic expansion after major austerity programs. Yet... every one turns out to involve key elements that make it useless as a precedent for our current situation... says that you can have fiscal contraction without depressing the economy IF the depressing effects are offset by huge moves into trade surplus and/or sharp declines in interest rates. Since the world as a whole can’t move into surplus, and since major economies already have very low interest rates, none of this is relevant to our current situation. Yet these cases are being cited as reasons not to worry as austerity becomes the rule."
• Nicole Belle: Fareed Zakaria Chastises The Media For Focusing On Wanting Obama Appear Angry Rather Than Solutions To Oil Spill
  FZ: "This whole discussion is a terrible example of how the media can trivialize political discussion. The presidency is a serious job, the most serious job in the country. And here we are, asking the man to dress the part, to play-act the emotions. Give us satisfaction by just doing something, even if it’s all phony stuff, designed to give the impression of action."
• Dan Froomkin: Obama's Speech: Not The Turning Point He Had In Mind
• James Hamilton: The Christian Science Monitor details 5 decisions by BP on the Deep Horizon drilling that saved costs but added to risks
  JH: "(1) foregoing section casing and tiebacks, (2) using only 1/3 the recommended number of stabilizers, (3) failure to test the cement seal, (4) implementing only partial mud circulation, and (5) failure to secure the wellhead. And they don't even mention the acoustic shut-off switch."