• Does the world need defense spending (or at least this much of it)?

• Why technology doesn't make education cheaper.

• Noam Scheiber considers the stress tests.

• The 1994 scenario -- on cap and trade.

In response to yesterday's post suggesting that Washington do more to attract out-of-work finance types, a smart financy type who recently came to Washington e-mails:

I totally agree with you that the progressive community needs to be pushing ahead much more aggressively on reg reform. One thing you didn't mention is that the fin. services community has basically largely been dusting off their old "competitiveness"/deregulation proposals from 2004-7 and recasting them as "regulatory reform" proposals now. Paulson's original blueprint was totally cut from this cloth, and contained a number of wishlist items.

Maybe some of them. I rather like Ruth Reichl's take on Twitter:

Twitter is a sort of public diary; figurative scraps of paper. Are you enjoying it?

Enormously. As I wrote in my first book, privacy is overrated. My mother’s scraps of paper were shouts into the void, and I think she would have been much happier if she could have sent them into the world instead of sticking them in a box. We all want, very much, to be seen and understood.

Eliot Spitzer expounds on one of my favorite topics: The astonishing composition of the New York Federal Reserve:

I never understand the fuss over Supreme Court nominations. The president holds all the power. That's even more true if his party controls the Senate. So when conservative groups "concede that they have little chance of derailing Obama's choice, barring a scandal," what does it mean? If they derail Obama's choice, he'll just make another choice. It's not like defeating his first nominee would make him lose a turn, or let Mitch McConnell choose the next candidate. Bush, for instance, got beat on Harriett Miers, and then nominated a more conservative justice in her stead. The hubbub is baffling. The opposition can't win. They can only delay losing.

The administration's argument for the stress tests' stringency is made on page seven of the results. There's even a helpful graph:

I wouldn't call the new jobs numbers good economic news, per se. They're more like not-as-bad economic news. Recently, we've average 650,000 jobs losses a month. April saw a "mere" 539,000 lost jobs. And a lot of the jobs created were on the federal-side of the ledge. The private sector lost 611,000 jobs in April. So we lost a lot of jobs. But not as many jobs as we've been losing. Which is to say that the news is bad but the trend is good.