About Me 0110: Money Making Secrets

Over the past two weeks we've upped our budget travel coverage here at Gadling. We've published stories on budget-friendly Caribbean destinations, budget-friendly European destinations, Thanksgiving hotel deals, hardcore budget travel suggestions, New York City budget travel tips, local budget travel secrets, cheap local fast food worldwide, great sites for planning budget-friendly European travel, and how to find affordable ski deals.

Our recent hyperactivity around budget travel is no accident. We want to improve Gadling's standing as budget travel resource, as a go-to site for budget travel tips, information, and inspiration.

In order to give this new resolve some oomph, a Gadling budget travel manifesto is in order. The goal here is to intervene in a travel media landscape that sees luxury travel as the universal objective of all travelers by glorifying budget travel and budget travelers. Budget travel is exciting and sophisticated and it needs to be recognized as such.

The lure of aspirational travel

People love to read about expensive resorts and impossibly dear travel accessories because they're exciting to contemplate. In this respect, they fulfill a function not a million miles from pornography. And like porn, they're also a lot of fun. The problem is that just as pornography does not provide a good map for most human relations, aspirational travel does not offer a useable guide for most forms of travel. Worse yet, aspirational travel often comes to cloud impressions of travel and actually convince many, many people that travel is an endeavor that can only be engaged at unmanageably high price points.

The focus on aspirational travel in the travel media creates all sorts of strange situations. Reading through a typical American travel magazine or even the weekend travel section of big newspaper, one might believe that $500 per night is a reasonable mid-range rate for a night's hotel accommodation. Honestly, this is outrageous. When push comes to shove, how many people can actually afford such rates?

Budget travel can mean many things. It can mean finding a deal on a hotel, cruise, or air journey. It can mean traveling with very little money and simply making do. It can mean organizing travel around friendship networks, or joining home exchange or couchsurfing membership programs. But however it might be defined, it doesn't include hotel rooms that run $500 per night.

Budget travel is sophisticated travel

Here are three assertions about budget travel in general and in relation to luxury travel that might at first seem counterintuitive.

1. Budget travel enables better interaction with local culture than does luxury travel.

2. Budget travel is more sophisticated than luxury travel.

3. Budget travelers are more creative than luxury travelers.

I'll anticipate a few knee-jerk criticisms and try to answer them here in advance. Obviously not all budget travelers are savvy. Many are in fact the opposite. But it is just as certain that many, many (most?) luxury travelers are not at all sophisticated--not truly and fully in the spirit of cultural engagement and courageous exploration.

Prof. Steven Vladek testified about the Espionage Act in front of the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Terrorism and Homeland Security on 5/1210.

Here is a link to his written statement :

http://kyl.senate.gov/legis_center/subdocs/051210_Vladeck.pdf

Here is his faculty page at Washington College of Law:

http://www.wcl.american.edu/faculty/vladeck/

The testemony is informative. Here’s part of the conclusion:

In short, then, although it is not my place to make specific recommendations to this Subcommittee with regard to how the Espionage Act might be updated, it seems clear that the current state of the law is counterproductive regardless of the specific policy goals one might seek to pursue. As Judge Ellis observed in the AIPAC case,

The conclusion that the statute is constitutionally permissible does not reflect a judgment about whether Congress could strike a more appropriate balance between these competing interests, or whether a more carefully drawn statute could better serve both the national security and the value of public debate. . . . [Changes in the nature of threats to our national security over the last few decades] should suggest to even the most casual observer that the time is ripe for Congress to engage in a thorough review and revision of these provisions to ensure that they reflect both these changes, and contemporary views about the appropriate balance between our nation’s security and our citizens’ ability to engage in public debate about the United States’ conduct in the society of nations.

To that end, if Congress were ultimately to conclude that the Espionage Act should be limited to cases of classic espionage and perhaps other malicious disclosures of classified information, my suggestion would be to focus carefully on the mens rea in the statute, and to consider the adoption of something akin to a specific intent requirement—that the offender not just know that the disclosure would be harmful to our national security, but that he or she actually intend such harm. If Congress were ultimately to conclude that the Espionage Act should instead apply to all cases of legally unauthorized disclosures of classified information, then my view is that much of the current statutory language is superfluous and unnecessary, and that a far simpler prohibition, combined with clear indicia as to the provision’s scope, would avoid the myriad vagueness and overbreadth issues that currently plague the statute.

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Wednesday, December 8, 2010

Money Making Secrets

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