I love how apologists for socialism cite the abundance of "doctors" and "PhDs" produced by places like Cuba and North Korea. Interesting that these systems are adept at producing that which can be created by the stroke of a pen and abject failures at producing, you know, enough food to ward off malnutrition.
[Ben H.: 5/4/10 19:16]
March Through the Institutions
Chan's comments marked a significant change from the assessment of her predecessor, Gro Harlem Brundtland, who said in 2001 that North Korea's health system was near collapse.
A suspect has been apprehended. Let's see whether you're a bigot. Do you think the suspect was:
A) An angry Amish
B) A belligerent Buddhist
C) A mad Muslim
E) Yours truly, after trying to find a parking space for an hour
[Ben H.: 5/4/10 08:53]
Katrina and Deepwater Horizon
There have been a lot of superficial comparisons of the two, even though the similarities are mostly superficial -- they both came out of the Gulf of Mexico and fucked up Lousiana. Let me add one. I think in both cases, people are too quick to blame the federal government for reacting belatedly. In the case of Katrina, the principal responsibility for dealing with heavy weather rested with the city of NO and the state of LA. Moreover, it wasn't until after the storm had passed, at a lower intensity than feared, that the levies ruptured and got the real catastrophe started. Likewise, BP and Transocean had the most powerful incentives, the more specific knowledge, and the assets on the scene to spearhead the response to the initial explosion. As in the case of Katrina, the initial understanding of the nature of the disaster differed from what the disaster ultimately turned out to be -- namely, not just an explosion and surface contamination from the sinking of the rig, but an uncontrolled blowout at the wellhead and a failure of the blowout-preventer.
[Ben H.: 5/3/10 15:13]
Rush is so right about this spill -- NATURE created this oil! NATURE can deal with it! "Oh the ecosystem, the fishing industry," boo hoo. You know what? If you eat seafood you're a PUSSY!! How about some MEAT, you liberal pussy? USA! USA!
[Gombrecht the Irrefrugnable: 5/3/10 10:02]
...and the tranquil waterway leading to the uttermost ends of the earth flowed sombre under an overcast sky—seemed to lead into the heart of an immense darkness.
I would not doom Vasquez on the basis of twenty innings. Schilling correctly notes the chasm between pitching in the NL and the AL East (witness Halladay's ongoing slaughter of NL lineups), but Vasquez was an effective pitcher in Chicago for several years. He should perform adequately for the Yankees.
For the Red Sox, I fear, a one month sample may be enough to knock them from contention in the AL East. Dark days.
Have we seen enough to conclude that the Yankees' granting of a second chance to Javier Vazquez was not a great idea? We're admittedly talking about a small sample size, but a 1-3, 9.78 ERA is hard enough for a good pitcher to rack up over even a few games that I swear its the rational Bayesian in me (and not the frustrated fan of the losing side in Game 7 of the 2003 ALCS) booing.
I find that my earlier misgivings about Vazquez are shared with Curt Schilling. Vazquez just can't cut it as an AL pitcher.
[Ben H.: 5/1/10 18:55]
Authenticity
Ben A, you will have received the latest Restoration Hardware catalog, as we did. On the cover there's a faux-antique chair with a faux-antique throw pillow. The pillow has a Parisian address printed on it -- was it "restored" from an old French bag? Probably not, since in that case it would say "8, Rue du Cherche-Midi" instead of "8, Rue de Cherche-Midi."
Bonus fun to be had inside the front cover, where the CEO writes how his company is inspired by "Thoreau's original, authentic voice."
[Gombrecht the Irrefrugnable: 5/1/10 12:59]
Red State News
From the Times: The oil slick was only three miles offshore on Thursday afternoon and was expected to hit coastal Louisiana as early as Thursday night, prompting Gov. Bobby Jindal to declare a state of emergency and to request the participation of the National Guard in response efforts. Uh, is that the same Bobby Jindal whose famous speech blamed the Katrina disaster on meddling government types who thwarted the "enterprising spirit of our citizens" in its attempt to provide market-based disaster relief?? What a total Republican!! (I think that term now exceeds in defamatory power the one I had initially thought to put, "cockwad.")
[Gombrecht the Irrefrugnable: 4/29/10 23:46]
Small-Scale Finance
We decided to buy an expensive Manhattan apartment. We sign the contract tomorrow. The Excel models and probabilistic forecasts were equivocal at best. What trumps them are two simple observations. One, the debtors of today's world have more clout and more bombs than the creditors, so you might as well join them; two, you can never go wrong in America casting your lot with the very rich.
[Gombrecht the Irrefrugnable: 4/29/10 21:32]
We Have A Large Block Of Feta Cheese
Fantastic. Looks like we have to add "director" to your list of accomplishments. This really does make plain the enormity of what Greece is asking for. The U.S. government bailed out G.M. and Citibank, but in return it got ... G.M. and Citibank! What does Germany get? I'd hold out for Santorini and Mykonos.
[Gombrecht the Irrefrugnable: 4/29/10 21:16]
1. Joyce demolishes Beckett in the battle of experimental Irishmen.
2. Memorable last lines are rarer than one would imagine, and certainly rarer than memorable first lines. Contrast to movies, where last lines are generally far better known than first lines. Indeed, what movies can you remember the first lines of?
3. It's always nice to see a strong showing by hometown favorite Albert Camus
[Ben A.: 4/26/10 17:34]
My Volvo has given me nothing but trouble. Perhaps it can detect my political affiliation and wants to frustrate me until I sell it to a suitable tweed-jacketed tenured hippie. The most persistent and annoying problem has been the tendency for the battery to die if the car is left undriven for more than a couple of days. It's a particularly galling problem in the way it seems tailor-made to vex me -- someone who only drives his car on rare occasions, paying an exorbitant per-mile cost of ownership to have a vehicle always available. Pity that the vehicle won't start about 50% of the time. Since getting the thing fixed requires a odyssey to far-off Bay Ridge, I've come up with a variety of kluges to deal with the problem, most recently stowing a big Ford car battery and jumper cables out in my parking lot. It almost takes one back to the days of hand-crank starters.
Anyhow, I have indeed managed to take the car in for this problem a few times. The first time, I told the service manager that he'd probably find that the battery was shot (letting a battery fully discharge over and over will ruin it), but that he should consider this merely a symptom rather than a problem. When I came to pick up the car, the technicial told me that they checked the car out and the battery seemed to be the only problem. That solved the issue for, oh, about a month. Too lazy to spend the day going back to Bay Ridge, I instead bought a plug-in battery charger and a 50ft extension cord. That tided me over for a while, until the radio started randomly switching on and off and I got a warning that the alarm system needed service. The battery by this point was shot enough that it wouldn't even take a charge from my plug-in device. I caved and took the car in again. They found that the alarm system had some physical defect that somehow also implicated the stereo, and they replaced it. That solved the problem for, oh, about two weeks. Just yesterday, I made the sad drive out to Bay Ridge one more time. I explained the whole story again, but showed enough ire to get taken a little more seriously.
Today, the dealership called and said that they had been stumped and talked to Volvo gurus from the company. Apparently, my problem was caused by a software bug (!!). The highly computerized audio system has a problem with its code such that under certain circumstances it doesn't shut down properly and continues to drain the battery even after the car has been switched off! I've mocked the "victims" of Toyota sudden acceleration and their far-fetched theories of HAL-like behavior of the electronic throttle-control system. But after this... well, maybe I shouldn't be so dismissive!
[Ben H.: 4/20/10 18:02]
We are moving back into our old place today. And by 'we' I mean moving guys. They don't look so different from you or I, yet even as I type, they are performing feats of strength beyond my comprehension.
[Ben A.: 4/16/10 11:56]
We Await Silent Tristero's Empire
From a new Times poll/analysis: But in follow-up interviews, Tea Party supporters said they did not want to cut Medicare or Social Security — the biggest domestic programs, suggesting instead a focus on "waste." Ah, WASTE ... we seem about as likely as Pynchon's protagonists to get our hands on this mysterious conspiracy ...
[Gombrecht the Irrefrugnable: 4/14/10 21:35]
Hamantaschen = Purim treat. And yes, there are about a half-dozen exegeses of how the shape or ingredients or cooking process of the hamantaschen symbolizes some aspect of the message or historical plot of Purim. There ought to be a chapter in Judaism for Dummies that trains the reader how to load simple foods with heavy symbolism. I'm not a huge fan of traditional Jewish food, so I'm pretty much on my own as to the meaning of my own favorite foods.
*The Twizzler is made from ingredients that in no way resemble the end product, symbolizing the transformative power of science. And like the products of science, it is both sweet in itself (like knowledge) and at the same time capable of practical use (the Twizzler, if bittin off at both ends, can function as a straw).
[Ben H.: 4/13/10 07:01]
Dow 11,000
Huzzah! I'm starting to sell off my stock funds now.
This reminds me of a comment I intended to make about Ben A's recommendation of "The Forever War": sometimes New Yorker reporters are too good at apocalyptic, look-what-American-folly-has-wrought writing. I'm thinking of the Nick Paumgarten piece from the bottom of the market (I know Ben H mentioned knowing one of the financial wizards in it). It gave the impression (through its approving portraits of people who said so in so many words) that everybody with half a brain had abandoned equities completely. I didn't sell immediately upon reading this article, but it was influential in my decision to sell quite a bit once the market got up to about 8500. Curses! (I shrugged and got back in at about 10,000.)
[Gombrecht the Irrefrugnable: 4/12/10 20:48]
Harvard Alum Tracking
Excellent idea. I think I've posted before that every time I hear of NASA launching a shuttle with a "classified" payload, I assume it's a Harvard-designed satellite dedicated to tracking potential donors.
[Gombrecht the Irrefrugnable: 4/12/10 20:33]
Incidentally I did realize, seeing Fairway still devoid of hamantaschen after three days, that these pastries, far from being sought-after Passover treats, must violate the most basic rules of that holiday. (Isn't it kind of racist to deprive Gentiles though?) My instinct now is to make some comment that seems to make my incomprehension of Judaism less than total. Alas, it is total. So I am going to buy myself Judaism For Dummies with balance of the Amazon gift certificate my uncle gave me for the holiday commemorating the birth of the King of the Jews. Now, this purchase too is motivated mostly by amour-propre, but not as fully as the blog comment I was initially thinking of posting. Also there could be another personal reason for reading up on the subject. Having concluded, after devoting much of my life to seeking fundamental laws of mathematics and physics, that I have about one-eighth the requisite skills to succeed in this endeavor, I conclude as a corollary that I should be about one-eighth Jewish. It's not a completely preposterous idea: my maternal grandmother hailed from Marijampole in Lithuania, which was then a big Jewish center of Eastern Europe. Now I know that the Jews and Gentiles of that time and place tended to stay apart. There is more reason to think my ancestors were beating up on the Jews than worshipping with them. But if I'm fully 50% ethnically Lithuanian, how do you explain my total lack of basketball skills??
[Gombrecht the Irrefrugnable: 4/12/10 20:27]
Putting Evil To Work For Good
For no reason better than inertia, I still have a landline at my place in Brooklyn. When it rings, it means a call from one of two possible categories of caller: a political campaign (as part of my old employers efforts to make the partnership more politically active, I gave to politicians of all political stripes, landing myself on about the broadest range of lists possible; and the politicians have, not surprisingly, exempted themselves from the Do-Not-Call-List law) or Harvard fundraisers. The latter, though, have given up on me. Instead, they call for Colby. The weird thing is that Colby swears she has never given them her phone number, nor even told them that she moved away from her old apartment. The best we can figure it is that Harvard got her new address from the Post Office change-of-address system and then surmised that she might have the same phone number as me because her new address is the same as the address they have on file for me. Harvard's efficiency in tracking people rises almost to the level of creepiness. At the same time, it occurs to me that such people-tracking prowess could prove useful. What if we took the CIA terrorist watchlist and delivered it to Harvard, telling the development office that it was a list of wealthy Arab potential donors? Do you think anyone on that list would ever manage to disappear ever again?
[Ben H.: 4/12/10 20:02]
I may just be a unfrozen caveman former bond trader, but I do know this:
The U.S. net international investment position (foreign assets owned by domestic parties minus U.S. assets owned by foreign parties) is on the order of negative 3.5 trillion. The NIIP includes both public and private claims, debt and equity.
If you look just as federal government debt, foreign holdings run to $3.7 trillion (out of total of around $11 trillion). Around $2.7 trillion of that $3.7 trillion is held by the foreign official sector (i.e. foreign central banks) and the remainder by foreign private parties (like foreign banks, pension funds, and individuals). Around $900bio of that is China, $800bio is Japan. Among domestic holders, the Social Security trust fund dominates (something like $4 trillion), which really means our parents. Private pension funds have in the $200-300bio range. Mutual funds, insurance companies, and public pension funds are all in the $100-200bio range. The U.S. banking system holds $750 billion of Treasuries. The banking systems is really just its depositors, mainly ordinary people and companies. It's pretty clear that there is no simple netting exercise to deal with the debt. Wipe out the debt and you screw the Chinese, the Japanese, people and companies with US bank balances, public-sector and private-sector retirees and near-retirees, and baby boomers expecting social security, assuming you believe the SS Trust Fund is more than just a notional accounting entry. The winner, assuming taxes were reduced proportionally to offset the gains from debt reduction, would be future high-earners*.
*That assumption is, of course, totally unrealistic. You really think social security payments won't get made because the trust fund got vaporized?
[Ben H.: 4/8/10 15:09]
Boston: What a Town
David Ortiz has no hits in the first two games of the season. Naturally, reporters unfamiliar with the concept of sample size are asking him about his slump. Naturally!
I endorse his response:
"Two [expletive] games, and already you [expletives] are going crazy. "What's up with that, man? [Expletive]. [Expletive] 160 games left. That's a [expletive]. One of you [expletives] got to go ahead and hit for me." [Ben A.: 4/7/10 09:06]
Irrational
I do not play for the Red Sox. I did not bet on the Red Sox. None of the Red Sox are friends of mine. And yet, I feel fantastic. Absurd.
[Ben A.: 4/5/10 02:02]
That was an interesting interview. It clarified the location of one of the chief unclarities in my understanding of the economic situation, namely, to whom is all this debt owed? I mean, it's immediately plausible to me that too much debt is a bad thing, but I can't start to gauge how the badness will play out until I see a breakdown of all the creditors and debtors, and all the "moves" available to them in this worldwide game. If you had a closed system where all parties owed about the same amount, you could get to a solution where everyone simultaneously forgives the debt, or the central bank parcels out new money to everyone in order to reduce the debt, or some other symmetric solution. The situation is of course far more complex now. You've got the Federal government, municipal/state governments, U.S. corporations and the big pension funds, U.S. households, the BRIC nations, their central banks, German dentists, etc. etc. What would be awesome is a well-thought-out infographic showing the worldwide creditor/debtor relationships. Until I see that I will have nothing much of value to say on the topic.
[Gombrecht the Irrefrugnable: 4/3/10 23:28]
2. Remember when Sinead O'Connor was musical guest and ended her set by ripping up a picture of the pope? "Fight the real enemy!" she said. I concluded that she was some disturbed left-wing wacko. Sorry Sinead, it turns out you were right. I stick by my assessment of you as a musician, though (annoying freak).
[Gombrecht the Irrefrugnable: 4/3/10 23:09]
Indeed. I had a friend/colleague who said if she could be born into any life in any era, she'd be a Japanese teenager circa 1999.
[Gombrecht the Irrefrugnable: 4/3/10 21:19]
Dao's current job is head of product development (I think that's the title) for Fins.com, a Dow-Jones-backed financial-industry jobs site. She points out that their latest offering is noteworthy.
[Gombrecht the Irrefrugnable: 4/1/10 13:56]
Thank goodness I can measure my remaining time in NYC in weeks. It's already a pain to get around, especially from Brooklyn. Massive service cuts by the MTA won't help matters.
Incidentally, I had my first experiences with the Austin public transit system, Capital Metro. It's mostly bus-based. A one-seat ride from the airport to a stop five blocks from my house took 30 minutes and cost $1. The next day I took the bus to the car dealership. The bus left two blocks from my house and dropped me off about a 10 minute walk from the dealership. 35 minutes and $1.
One clue as to what's so wrong with the MTA: labor costs amount to nearly 60% of total expenses. Here in Austin, it's more like 40%, and that's for a system which should by all rights have much lower capital costs (subways require more capital and less labor than buses). The highest paid employee (the CEO) in Austin makes less than some repairmen at the MTA who've mastered the art of overtime abuse. Only about a dozen people in the entire Austin system make more than $100k per year. Over 10% of MTA employees do. Austin's bus drivers make $12-$20/hr, while the MTA's make between $20-$29/hr. The MTA's pension scheme is substantially more generous than the one in Austin.
In looking into this, I had to laugh at what I read about local attitudes toward Capital Metro. It's widely perceived to be a bloated, mismanaged mess. Critics decry the overgenerous pay scales (its drivers have the highest pay in Texas). The authority has made an expensive foray into light rail, which has come in behind schedule and overbudget. If only they knew about the MTA!
Like you (but maybe, given my armchair bellicosity, not quite so much) I'd prefer the government spend a trillion bucks on health care (or subways or research or rainbows or sugar-and-spice-and-everything-nice) than on blowing shit up and killing people. The unfortunate difference from a strictly fiscal perspective between a trillion-dollar war and a trillion-dollar entitlement is that while at some point the war winds down (as Iraq has), the entitlement goes on. You can indeed monetize the debt accrued to pay for that war, suffer some inflation, and move on. Fool the bond buyers once, shame on them. The trillion dollars* of that entitlement refers only to the first ten years of its operation. You have to resort not just to monetizing debt, but ongoing expenses. You need ever-increasing rates of inflation, which means hyperinflation. Fool the bond buyers twice -- well, you can't, at least not if you try to do it without giving them some love in between the attempts. In other words, funding an entitlement out of the inflation tax is not sustainable.
So, in a sense, Doug, I hope you are right that this reform is a path, via the gateway of unsustainability, to a budget-capped single-payer system. For my own sake and the sake of medical innovation, I hope that people will be permitted to opt out and pay for their own healthcare if they so choose. Better this reform lead to socialized medicine than to hyperinflationary collapse**.
*And that's just a very wishy-washy estimate. The 20-year ahead forecast for Medicare costs at the time of the bill's passage wound-up being too low by a factor of 10.
**Obviously, we may get to hyperfinflationary collapse via other government idiocy.
[Ben H.: 3/24/10 13:09]
I expanded/edited the post below, but apparently my reasoning is so bad that the server is rejecting the edits. Will try to debug this tomorrow (it's strange; other posts are editable). [Update: I did manage to make the update. The post apparently did fail because of its content, though in reality probably not because of its reasoning. It was not just too long or anything. I replaced the word "u p s e t" [note I can't even write it without spaces here!] with "angry" and one two-hyphen dash with an m-dash like this —. And that fixed it. My curiosity about the world (or at least about computers) has waned to the point that I'm not investigating further. But I welcome any hypotheses.]
[Gombrecht the Irrefrugnable: 3/23/10 23:54]
Ben H, your health-status vs. health-event distinction sounds like a useful one. Whether our laws should enshrine the distinction by designating separate insurance markets for them is a tough question, one that quickly gets tangled into all the other aspects of health policy. And who really wants to think through all of that again? I myself am more at home in gauzy generalities, so I'll provide some in response to your (and Ben A's) earlier comments about the health bill's passage. You say that the bill sets up a system that's just as "crazy and cumbersome" as the current one, and Ben A thinks that's because it further tangles the current system rather than changing it fundamentally. That sounds right to me. You, Ben H, give an excellent one-paragraph description of a better system that we might have adopted, where the government provides basic bare-bones insurance and everything beyond that is handled by private markets. I agree: much better. But your plan, rather than the one being enacted, seems more deserving to me of the name "Grand Unified Theory". It would sweep away pointless inefficient redundancies and replace much of the current mess with a single bureaucracy. And it's this use of a government-run insurer that made it politically impossible. The bill that actually passed looks anything but unified. Grand I grant you; but just as frigged up as the current system because there was no political margin for disappointing any of the existing stakeholders/highway robbers. (Because the Republicans were committed from the start to their "if-we-can't-govern-alone-then-nobody-will-govern" obstructionist tantrum.)
If the actual bill is so bad, why do I salute its passage? First, I mostly agree with the many pundits out there who say it makes near-universal-coverage a nearly-irreversible political fact (un acquis social as we like to say in France!) while leaving open the possibility that coverage may someday be delivered in a sane way. Second, it shows that America's majority of non-rich citizens can still vote for candidates who promise to make their lives better in specific ways and then have their hopes fulfilled. Suffice it to say that the years 2000-2008 made many of us despair on this issue. (And I'm still half-expecting the GOP gang on the supreme court to concoct some reason why this reform bill is unconstitutional!)
On the sustainability question — yeah, you're surely right that we can't go on piling up U.S. debt like this. But I'm less angry at spending a trillion dollars to give people medical care than at, say, launching an asinine trillion-dollar war. In any case the ultimate solution is the same, print more dollars to pay the debt.
I'm with you on the supply-side issue. To me the medical profession seems like a medieval guild that sets up artificial barriers to entry mainly to ensure its members can charge whatever they want. And the med schools, which nobody talks about, have to be a part of this problem.
One thing I wanted to clear up since I expressed myself poorly — I didn't mean that poor sick people are currently kicked out of emergency rooms, but that a system based strictly on personal responsibility would have to kick them out in order to avoid the free rider problem.
[Gombrecht the Irrefrugnable: 3/23/10 23:19]
Now that I've just complained that health reformers foolishly ignore the supply side of industry to focus only on the insurance market, predictably I remembered a point I wanted to make about the insurance market!
It seems to me that all participants in the debate miss a subtle but crucial distinction between two kinds of risk participants in the insurance market are exposed to. The insurance market (especially the individual market) really only has a structure conducive to underwriting one of those risks. As it turns out, the other form of risk causes people just as much worry, and therefore a lot of the hostility toward and dissatisfaction with health insurance arises from the insurance market's failure to deal with this particular form of risk. The distinction I propose is really more a continuum than a truly qualitative difference, and it relates to the differential arrival times of information about an insured party's health and an insured party's incurrence of cash costs.
What I'll call health event risk is when a health problem is discovered and the costs associated with it incurred almost simultaneously. For example, you suffer a deep cut and you pretty much immediately incur the cost of an emergency room visit, stitches etc. Or you have a heart attack and you pretty much immediately incur the costs of catheterization, etc.
What I'll call health status risk is when a health problem is discovered such that an insured party's future lifetime health costs increase significantly, but minimal cash costs are incurred in the short term. For example, a patient is diagnosed with diabetes or Parkinson's disease.
The health insurance market doesn't do a bad job of underwriting health event risk. The health care system more broadly, too, handles this well. Whether you're insured or not, if you show up at the emergency room with a bleeding gash, it will get stitched up. On the other hand, our health insurance plans offer very little protection against health status risk. A contract that renews on a yearly basis isn't designed to protect against a long-term shift an insured's expected medical loss. The insured knows that with his diagnosis, he's taken a huge net-present-value loss. Yet he has no bill to present to his insurer. A rational insurer will have to charge that insured party a much higher premium the next time his contract comes up for renewal. Even if the government instituted some kind of mandatory renewal, you still have the problem of leaving the insured forever wedded that one insurance company. So many of the health insurance horror stories and complaints that I heard about during the reform debate related to the way that even people with health insurance remain largely uninsured against health status risk.
I've been thinking that maybe a helpful change in the health insurance system would be to try to make explicit the distinction between these two kinds of health risks; to admit that our current form of health insurance only really covers health event risk; and to try to start up a separate market for health status insurance. Think of it as an analogy between short-dated term life insurance and whole life insurance. People can carry both kinds of policies: short-dated term life for hit-by-a-bus risk, and term life insurance as a savings vehicle.
One nice thing about trying to create a health status insurance market is that the government already bears the largest and most predictable health status risk for most people: senescence. At 62 or 65 or whatever, people go on Medicare. So really, the market that needs to be created is one for health status changes pre-senescence. The way I envision it, it would work somewhat like long-term disability insurance. You buy a long-term health status insurance contract. It might run 10,20 or even 30 years (there are term life policies that run this long). To get it, you will probably need to undergo an examination, to protect against adverse selection, but since you are buying a policy for a very long term, that up-front cost can be amortized over a sufficiently long period so as to have a negligible effect on annual premiums. To the extent you undergo any of a list of health status changes, the insurance company will have to start paying you an annuity designed to compensate for the difference in price between an average health event risk policy for someone of your impaired health status and the price for a normal person of the same age, gender, geography, etc. Because a change in health status would involve a very large payout in NPV terms, it is something that could require examination/verification by doctor-arbitrators. At the same time, a health status change is a rare enough occurence (as compared to health events like a doctor visit, or a procedure, that our current insurance covers) that the system can afford that degree of verification cost.
[Ben H.: 3/23/10 09:15]
Liberals love to talk about "sustainability" when it comes to the environment. With respect to the fisc, less so. This bill creates a system that will prove just as cumbersome and crazy as the current system (neutral to slightly negative), slightly more equitable (positive -- but Doug, really, you should know that mothers and their children today don't get kicked out of the hospital, no matter how irresponsible they've been; in fact, the more irresponsible the better, because the fewer assets you have, the less likely the hospital will even bother to chase you for payment), but most importantly, less sustainable than the current system. However generous, humane, noble or fair you rate the reformed system, it doesn't matter much if the system as constituted can't last.
It feels to me that you could get more bang for your buck on the "equity" question if you just created a basic-tier single payer system and let anybody who wanted posher, more crazily invasive/wackily risk-averse, more customer-service oriented care pay for it themselves or buy private insurance. You could impose global budgeting for the single-payer system, a la Canada, and, so long as you can sustain the budget limit politically, you would be sure not to let the system bankrupt the state. It's not unlike what we do for another class of product we're not entirely comfortable leaving to the market, namely education.
Unfortunately, the reformers went for a grand unified solution, one that purports to serve the cause of equity at the same time as "bending the cost curve". And they had just enough fear of the (bogus, I believe, in spite of my position on the bill) label "socialized medicine" to try to shoehorn the equity program into our byzantine semi-private system, further complicating it; but not enough fear of the (fair, in my opinion) charge of "nanny statism" to try for reforms that at least push the 60-75% (in my estimate) of Americans who are indeed capable of taking more responsibility for managing their own care and its cost from doing so. The result, I fear, will be to bollox up the individual insurance market, increase costs, push the balance of power a little more in favor of the state at the expense of civil society, and make the long-term challenges of fiscal retrenchment that much harder.
And even if reasonable people disagree about the right path for health insurance reform, I think it is unreasonable to overlook the complete absence of any address of the supply-side of healthcare in this reform. For it is incontrovertible that given a meaningful enough shift in the supply curve (however that might be brought about -- the specific means are not important to this limited argument), we could solve the cost problem and free up sufficient resources to easily deal with the equity problem. That the U.S. spends a higher proportion of GDP on healthcare* that other countries could stem from either differences in the way we produce healthcare or because of our insurance system. Well, if it is the former, this bill doesn't address it; if it is the latter, this reform only puts more people into that dysfunctional system, by subsidizing it.
*although less than supposed, because of statistical distortions we've discussed early
My Health Care Policy is to Support Any Team Playing the New York Yankees
Far be it from me to criticize supporting policy on the basis of the loathsomeness of its opponents. That's a solid decision criterion. I am less sure that this bill represents a significant moving away from our current, flawed system. Rather, it seems more likely to weld our current, flawed system securely in place. Let's hope I'm wrong and that's just my gold-covered talons talking...
[Ben A.: 3/22/10 14:48]
Just want to register my satisfaction that a health reform bill passed. The Republicans once again showed themselves to be a party of pure vileness, and you have to be happy when vileness is crushed. Of course there are principled reasons down beneath the lies, the venality, the corruption, and the spite, for which a Republican can oppose near-universal health insurance. The strongest of these is a vision of an America where people take responsibility for themselves rather than relying on a nanny state. I recognize the value of this vision despite the manifest inability of the current generation of Americans to be responsible for anything at all. So I recognize the health bill as a significant loss on this account. What more than makes up for this loss is the fact that the current system is insane and huge drag on our quality of life, and the reform is a big step toward reversing that. Maturity means consciously giving up valuable things because they aren't compatible with other things you decide you value more. And unfettered "personal responsibility" in the health care sphere is incompatible with far too much of American reality to take seriously -- incompatible, just to take one example, with a widespread belief that a mother who takes her sick daughter to a hospital should not be kicked out the door because she has been insufficiently responsible. This reminds me of Mansfield Park, of all things. Some people take Jane Austen to be a simple moralist there -- the chaste, self-effacing Fanny Price is good, and the worldly, partying cousins (or whoever they were, I don't remember their names) are bad. Ultimately I agree that Austen wants to show that Fanny Price is good, but she really goes out of her way to show how unbelievably dull she is, and how likable the cousins are, how much poorer the world would be without people like them. Sometimes you have to make hard choices. Despite the specter of dullness, we should sooner choose to base our world on traditional Christian values than on promiscuity. And we should sooner base our health-insurance system on compassion than on personal responsibility.
[Gombrecht the Irrefrugnable: 3/22/10 10:01]
Foreign Policy Minute
My instincts align with yours, Ben A. Unfortunately, following them leaves us roughly with Joe Biden's preferred approach. And since Joe Biden has a nearly perfect record of not merely getting foreign policy questions wrong, but, as they say in the markets, bottom-ticking the sale (see his Iraq partition scheme), our instincts must be leading us astray.
Another question: is there a circular reference in the formula for a stable Pakistan that has as its principal ingredient a stable Afghanistan? For, isn't it also conventional wisdom that it is the Pakistani regime that is allowing or even encouraging the destabilization of Afghanistan?
[Ben H.: 3/17/10 19:43]
Foreign Policy Minute
The web is clearly crying out for more ill-informed foreign policy theorizing. But here's mine. Afghanistan: is this really a significant strategic interest of the United States? It seems what we really want w.r.t Afghanistan is a) to make sure Pakistan doesn't get destabilized, b) to be able to kill Al Queda guys if they set up shop. Neither of these seem to obviously require a major counter-insurgency, population protection effort. It just requires that the regime not fall.
But various generally capable people with whom I am inclined to agree think that a significant counter-insurgency effort in Afghanistan is important to America's national interest. How come?
[Ben A.: 3/17/10 19:27]
We don't know how much they would have stolen without the deal! Also, Tazuin made sure that gangs of thieves wouldn't be able to negotiate medicare drug prices. So net-net...
[Ben A.: 3/17/10 19:14]
The irony is that Billy Tauzin boasted to the members of PhRMA that he had a deal with that gang! I guess he got hoodwinked!
[Ben H.: 3/17/10 18:49]
Maybe Dao can answer this question -- do speakers of tonal languages make puns out words that are homophonic except for tone?
[Ben H.: 3/15/10 18:58]
As you probably know, the most difficult thing about learning Vietnamese is that, like Chinese, it's a tonal language: the same syllable is different words depending on the pitch at which you pronounce it. In Vietnamese there are five tones besides the neutral one -- up, down, kind of swooping down, sharply down-up, and sort of croaking down -- and I think Mandarin has a similar number. Well, anyone interested in learning Vietnamese should stay away from our house, because our kid now think it's hilarious to deliberately pronounce words with the wrong pitch.
[Gombrecht the Irrefrugnable: 3/14/10 23:53]
You Don't Have to Go to Florida to Ride Space Mountain
The spot box on the announcer's face at 0:51 really makes the video for me.
[Ben A.: 3/11/10 09:39]
Gret-Gret
That's what Dealbreaker calls Gretchen M. of the Times, and though it may sound like a term of endearment, it's typically attached to disaparaging comments. She's an exponent of the paranoid style (apologies to Prof. Hofstader) in opinion journalism. Everything is a swindle, a trick, a conspiracy. I do wonder about the psychology of someone who decides to make a life covering finance while harbouring ineradicable hostility toward its practitioners. It's kind of like joining the Anti-Masonic Party -- you hate Masons so much you can't help but make them the center of your life. It doesn't strike me as a formula for a happy life, although I suppose one could feel a duty to slay a monster that one has the unique powers to identify as such. The difference is that Gret-Gret is at least ostensibly supposes to be reporting and observing finance (albeit without any pretense of objectivity), rather than leading a movement against it. Why wouldn't she choose some other beat that wouldn't drive her to paroxysms of rage?
[Ben H.: 3/9/10 19:52]
Stuff Like This Will Make Become a Self-Hating Jew
I know the Soviets doctored photos without compunction, airbrushing into nothingness the politically disfavored. But your video, Ben A., suggests that they also resorted early to the dark art of lip-synching!
[Ben H.: 3/8/10 18:22]
I'm not going to deny that Tim McCarver is a bozo, who could best improve as an announcer by inserting a sock in his mouth. That said, complaints about him will not receive much sympathy chez Ben H. I grew up a Yankee fan and had to get my play-by-play from Phil Rizutto. I remember one game during which Scooter wandered off the topic of baseball to relate a long and involved recipe for pesto, completely missing Dave Winfield's clubbing a home run. The range of his commentary didn't extend much beyond the different volumes at which he could shout "Holy cow!"
[Ben H.: 3/6/10 19:58]
I would have bet my life that you knew that word. I would have bet the life of 10 innocents that Ben H used it in a Crimson column. It's a good thing I don't bet.
Chain of Reasoning
So I just watched the great new Ok Go "Rube Goldberg" video, and the person from whom I got the link hat-tipped the magnificent web genius, Ken Tremendous, who used to blog at "Fire Joe Morgan." This, in turn, reminded me of how great a blog that was. A sample:
Several of you sent in this bizarro-world pearl of wisdom from my close friend Tim McCarver during today's Fox broadcast:
"We had our friends at Stats, Inc. check and see whether more multi-run innings came with a lead off homer or a lead off walk. You would think that a lead off walk would lead to more big innings than a lead off home run. Not true. A lead off home run, this year, has lead to more multi-run innings than lead off walks. It's against conventional thinking."
It's against conventional thinking. Really.
In my mind, conventional thinking on this subject goes like this: if the first hitter in the inning scores one run all by himself, it's more likely that his team will score two+ runs that inning than if he does not. Because in that situation, in order to achieve a multiple-run inning, the team has only to score one additional run. Instead of two runs. See how that works?
McCarver has been obsessed with this subject before. Do a search for him on this very blog, and you will find some real gems.
I like to imagine the guy at Stats, Inc. who had to field that call.
McCarver: So, basically, we want to know which situation leads to more multiple-run innings. A lead-off home run, or a lead-off walk.
Chet, Over at Scouts Inc.: ...Who is this?
McCarver: Timothy Chadwick McCarver, sir, at your service.
Chet: And you want to know whether a team is more likely to score two runs in an inning --
McCarver: Correct.
Chet: -- if the lead-off guy homers, as opposed to walking?
McCarver: Correct.
Chet: It's if he homers.
McCarver: How did you research that so fast? I didn't even hear typing.
Chet: Okay. Hang on. (Sound of obviously fast and nonsensical typing for two seconds) Yup, there it is. It's if he homers.
McCarver: I'll be the son of a monkey's uncle! That goes against conventional thinking!
My failure to produce any songs for either of my existing hip-hop personae has not stopped me from inventing a new duo: Mel Odious and D.J. Chill Blaine.
[Gombrecht the Irrefrugnable: 2/28/10 23:31]
It's Hard Out There For a Defender of Bourgeois Capitalism
President Robert Zimmer is dating a faculty member after separating from his wife and moving out of the President’s house in September. Zimmer’s wife, Terese, is a director at the Urban Education Institute and will continue to live in the president’s house in Zimmer’s absence...Crain’s Chicago Business connected Classics professor Shadi Bartsch with Zimmer in an article Friday.
Now, some might react to this revelation with sentiments like "disgust" or "indignation" and think maybe cheating on one's wife with a colleague is not "appropriate behavior" for a university president, but these people would clearly be wrong. As everyone in this article insists, all the policies designed to keep things under control have been complied with[Ben A.: 2/22/10 22:41]
Bad Metrics Are Worse Than No Metrics, Part N of an N^123 Part Series
We visited Maui (very briefly), Lanai, and then Honolulu. I realize that Honoulu as a tourist destination exists mainly to edify the shopping fetish of the Japanese, but Colby has a college friend who lives there; her husband is a Navy SEAL stationed on Oahu at the moment. I loved Hawaii, although Colby's friend assures us it is a much better place to visit than to live in. I'm not sure if that would apply to a retiree. As I looked out the window of the plane on its approach to New York, the colors seemed drained of vibrancy, like a Polaroid left too long in the sun. The patent ugliness made me wonder why, if places like Hawaii exist, anybody who can get out still chooses to live here. I'll have to take Colby's friend's word for it that Hawaii's perfection is only apparent.
[Ben H.: 2/21/10 10:39]
Hawaii is paradise. Where are you guys?
I need to construct some excuse for not solving the cryptics. I got as far as thinking "what's a 9-letter disney heroine? Esmerelda?" And then quitting. Under current grading standards, I think that merits an A-.
[Ben A.: 2/20/10 22:19]
I'm busy here in Hawaii. That vitamin D doesn't make itself, you know!
[Ben H.: 2/16/10 23:43]
While you guys are sitting on your asses Carl V and John G are solving all these clues -- which, in fairness to everyone, I should admit are imperfect. S (INHALES) E, C+YPRES+SHILL, STI (MULAN) T. Carl also points out that I was in error when I said the opus 131 quartet was Beethoven's last work.
[Gombrecht the Irrefrugnable: 2/15/10 23:46]
I've often regretted not knowing any words that rhyme with "smegma," so much in fact that I've been driven to invent the word "jegma" when improvising, usually not out loud, songs involving smegma. This morning I was flipping through a dictionary and found the word "bregma" meaning an intersection of bones in the skull. Not a great word but it will do.
[Gombrecht the Irrefrugnable: 2/9/10 11:23]
Late Beethoven And The Chinese Room
Our friend Min plays in a string quartet. We went to hear them at Alice Tully Hall at Lincoln Center today, where they did three Beethoven quartets. For an informed critique of their performance you should probably ask someone with a better and better-trained ear; I thought they played beautifully, and where the music was intrinsically accessible, they made it engaging. To me, while they do shine in the fast virtuoso passages, they shine even more in the slow lyrical ones. The most moving parts for me were the conclusions (I think) of the slow second movements of the first two quartets they played, opus 74 and opus 18 no. 2. A short cadence is played in a major key, and then nearly the same phrase is played in a related minor key. In earlier composers this is usually a signal that the "development" section is starting: the composer is done with the exposition of the main themes and now he's going to spool them out in exciting new directions. So I got ready for this to happen (not knowing these pieces well). But here, the movements come very soon to a hushed conclusion, still in the minor key. The way they played it today it had a very haunting effect.
My main point here is about the last piece they played, the one that necessitated the qualification "where the music was intrinsically accessible" above. It's Beethoven's last work, opus 131. Late Beethoven is something that gets talked about a lot, even, due to the human drama of the deafness story, in non-specialist settings. You hear words like "strange," "ethereal," "otherworldly," "beyond our sublunary ken." Actually I made up sublunary ken but if you know what I'm talking about you know it's not out of place. Anyway I warned Dao that this piece would be relatively inaccessible. And after the performance, she said she quite liked it, and didn't understand what I was warning her about. This got me thinking about better ways to characterize late Beethoven: I think Dao assumed I was trying to steel her against an onslaught of dissonance or something. It's not dissonant -- none of his late works have ever struck me as dissonant. The problem, I think, is the intelligibility of medium- and large-scale phrases. I just don't grasp where he's going, or why. Now, on a very short scale, everything is fine. I hypothesize that a five or ten second snippet from a late work would be hard to distinguish from other late Classical or early Romantic music (experts can feel free to smack me down here if I'm full of BS). It's on a sixty- or six-hundred-second scale that the logic escapes me. Borderline banal phrases get repeated with slight variations, without building up the momentum, the drive, that's so characteristic of his earlier music. Let me attempt an analogy with the philosophical thought experiment called the "Chinese Room." Some professor (John Searle?) tried to disprove the idea that the brain's linguistic function is ultimately computational, by imagining people in a room taking in Chinese characters in through a slot, passing other it and other bits of paper (or mah-jongg tiles or something) around according to some rule book, and then passing some Chinese characters out through another slot by way of response. It just seemed crazy to Searle that this room and the workers in it could constitute a conscious, communicating being. Others have objected that this arguments proves only the insufficiency of Searle's mind to grasp the millionfold neural complexity of the computational program responsible for consciousness. Now, I have no strong opinion about this argument per se (other than a general feeling that it would be best if the disputants on both sides stopped wasting our nation's education dollars and took up plumbing or house-painting instead). But the set-up seems analogous to late Beethoven. I just don't see how all these notes getting swapped around for minute upon minute upon minute can add up to music. And on the other hand I cannot discount the possibility that a musical genius (Beethoven himself, say) could digest an hour's worth of music the same way that I can digest a four-measure snippet, that the brilliant architectonic structure could shine through to him as he sits listening in the concert hall, that at as the last cadence sounds he can process all the cosmic noodling that came before and understand the great man's final message to his brethren, "So long and thanks for all the Wienerschnitzel," presumably.
[Gombrecht the Irrefrugnable: 2/8/10 01:18]
An Actually Helpful Journalistic Analysis
Of course, it's a trivial topic: Leno vs. Conan. But it's just refreshing to an arrangement of facts in an interpretable pattern.
Funny you should have posted that just as I was about to post a Nietzsche quote. Iris threw "Untimely Meditations" at me (without provocation) and I opened to a random page which, like most of his pages, offered concise proof of his brilliance as a polemicist.
The masses seem to me to deserve notice in three respects only: first as faded copies of great men produced on poor paper with worn-out plates, then as a force of resistance to great men, finally as instruments in the hands of great men; for the rest, let the Devil and statistics take them!
Perhaps the test of a great quip is that it retains its punch in translation -- the last clause here certainly does.
Incidientally, this makes me think of a French douchebag who was a great media darling when I left, a philosophy professor named -- actually, it's to my credit here that I can't remember his name, but he described himself as a "Nietzschean of the Left." This quote alone shows this person to be a complete fraud.
[Gombrecht the Irrefrugnable: 2/4/10 21:31]
Immanuel Kant, Sometimes I Love You
Even if a Civil Society resolved to dissolve itself with the consent of all its members—as might be supposed in the case of a People inhabiting an island resolving to separate and scatter themselves throughout the whole world—the last Murderer lying in the prison ought to be executed before the resolution was carried out. This ought to be done in order that every one may realize the desert of his deeds, and that bloodguiltiness may not remain upon the people; for otherwise they might all be regarded as participators in the murder as a public violation of Justice.[Ben A.: 2/4/10 20:39]
Last night, I went to a fundraiser for n+1 Magazine. The n+1 guys had persuaded Gladwell to serve as one of the co-hosts, which duty he discharged graciously (I guess he's had at least 10,000 hours practice at fundraiser chitchat). As often happens at these kinds of events, the very few non-literary-world people end up clustering. I was chatting to a Barclays high-grade credit trader who had been brought along by his girlfriend. Gladwell passed behind us on his way to the canapes, and the Barclays guy gave him a look-over. He turns back to me and says, "hey, who invited Sideshow Bob?" A look of horror crosses his girlfriend's face. "That's Malcolm Gladwell," she hisses. He looks at me with a helpless smile and shrugs. "Dude," I say, "I know we just met, but would you permit me to give you a high-five?"
[Ben H.: 2/3/10 18:47]
Hawaii
Iris has good taste. Isn't it paradisaical? Deb and I often talk about moving to the big island. They need pediatric endocrinologists there! Biotech guys, less so.
[Ben A.: 2/3/10 14:13]
Mozart: The Man
I think I have referred to the story of Allegri's Miserere before. Briefly, the Miserere was performed annually in the Cistine chapel, and all transcriptions were strictly forbidden. Then the 14-year-old Mozart visits Rome, hears the piece, and bam! -- writes it down from memory that night.
I guess Malcolm Gladwell would say he was able to this because he had practiced for 10,000 hours.
That's very cool -- thanks for posting it. There's a letter of Mozart's, I think, where he talks about being able to perceive music pieces in their entirety, in the same way that regular people can walk around a statue and perceive it. This goes some distance toward helping the rest of us do this.
Incidentally, Iris is in the background saying "I want to go to Hawaii again" ...
Graphical Representation of Beethoven's 7th, Second Movement.
This is a great tool for musical illiterates (or near-illiterates) like me. This was an odd song to hear in the mall yesterday. One doesn't like to be reminded of one's mortality while looking for a suit.
[Ben A.: 1/31/10 16:01]
Though I now spend my days separated from "Wall Street" by a river (and at least as much psychic as geographic distance), I did manage to hear a faint sound of screaming in the minutes after newswires reported Obama's proposal to ban proprietary trading at commercial banks. All those prop desk BSDs who jumped on the Obama radical-chic cool train are wishing they could take their campaign contributions back. Did I say, "give me your vote?" No, I clearly remember saying, "kindly sign your own professional death-warrant!" The wages of class treason are... lower than Wall Street prop desk wages, let's say!
But I should put schadenfreude aside for a moment (I'll have months to savor it; my barbed bloomberg messages to a few of said BSDs are just the amuse bouche to the schadenfreude feast), and tell you what I think of the President's proposal. I think sharply restricting proprietary trading at big, deposit-funded, FDIC-insured, too-big-to-fail commercial banks is absolutely the right idea. Some people say that this is just the reinstatement of Glass-Steagal. I think Gramm-Leach-Bliley (the repeal of G-S) remains a good call. It's not a question of separating commercial banking and equity underwriting. These are both legitimate customer businesses, and nothing in this crisis argues for their separation. In point of fact, it's also quite difficult to see how proprietary trading contributed much to the current crisis. Prop traders didn't load up on subprime paper. However, it is quite easy to see how prop trading could blow up a bank (I'm lookin' at you, Goldman! Luck don't run furever!) and likewise clear that deposit insurance or informal government credit backstops should not funnel capital to high-risk, high-return-to-shareholders-and-employees speculative trading*. The plan does follow from the recent crisis (as opposed to merely addressing a longstanding and latent threat) in that a few large and notable prop-trading heavy investment banks (GS and MS) turned themselves into commercial banks in order to avail themselves of Fed support facilities. Incidentally, I wish the regulators good luck at defining proprietary trading. It's a labile concept and its practitioners are pretty slippery, too. "Yes, Mr. Regulator, it's true that in my book I'm holding $1bb face of Smegcorp bonds, but it's not a proprietary position! I need inventory to accomodate customer flow!"
I think the bank liability tax the Administration has proposed also makes some sense, though I don't share the stated reasoning and have reservations about the disposition of the proceeds. If the failure of large financial institutions causes multiplicative economic damage, then broadly disseminated exposure to large financial institutions creates a negative externality. Either the government (i.e. the taxpayer) needs to rescue improvident or unlucky TBTF institutions or the citizenry (i.e. the same taxpayers) bear some small out-of-the-money risk of financial damage via financial institution failure. A small tax on liabilities of these institutions (outside those the institutions already pay fees to the FDIC to insure) is a pretty sensible Pigovian tax. It's worth pointing out, though, that much of the fear during the recent crisis related to off-balance-sheet/contingent liabilities, such as CDS. Some of the risk associated with these liabilities will be mitigated by centralized clearing, but if the liability tax misses them entirely, expect the banks to shift as much funding as they can off the balance sheet. It would be wise to plug this hole at the outset.
Where I think the Administration proposal is off base is in the rhetoric it uses to justify the tax. "We intend to get paid back." Well, the Capital Purchase Program of the TARP has made the government a decent profit. It's the autos, AIG, and the GSEs that still owe money and will likely inflict a loss. They aren't getting hit with this tax. The Administration will reply that the TARP banks made a mint because the government saved the financial system. The benefits derived from the TARP go beyond the capital committed under the program. True, but the near-death of several of these institutions was also a consequence of government actions. Not every TARP bank was Bear Stearns or Lehman, stuffed to the gills with subprime garbage. Plenty of these banks were quite solvent, and suffered runs and instability due to a generalized crisis. That crisis was in meaningful part the making of dumbass government policies like the Community Reinvestment Act, Fannie and Freddie retained portfolios, etc. The argument that "the government did it" cuts both ways. The Pigovian argument is sufficient justification for a liability tax. The Administration should leave it at that. Of course, doing so might raise uncomfortable questions about how, in fact, the government intends to get paid back for its bailout of the autos, Fannie and Freddie, and AIG. It also muddies the water about the appropriate use of the proceeds of the liability tax. If you believe, as I do, that the tax ought to internalize externalities related to the operations of large, interconnected commercial banks, then it is folly to toss the proceeds of the tax into the general government coffers. These externalities take the form of rare, large drains on the Treasury. The tax ought to be used to build up savings from which these large drains can be met. I don't mean a bogus account like the Social Security "Trust Fund", which, invested in US Treasury Bonds, merely functions as current tax revenue under another accounting concept. In a future financial crisis, the dollar may well come under pressure. It would be useful at a time like that for the US fisc to have claims on the rest of the world. Therefore, I think it would be appropriate for the proceeds of the liability tax to go to the purchase of foreign securities. Who could manage that trust fund... well, ahem, I know a certain somebody with a little free time!!
*Some critics of limits on prop trading remonstrate that there isn't a meaningful difference between proprietary trading and straight-up lending. If it's OK for a bank to take deposits and make long-term loans to homeowners or property developers, how is that different from taking deposits and making purchases of high yield bonds, commodities, or whatever else prop traders want to dabble in. I would refer them to Potter Stewart on how to recognize pornography. Moreover, lending officers don't get paid (a) 12-15% of the profits of their lending activity (b) on a mark-to-market basis (c) annually.
[Ben H.: 1/21/10 17:26]
Citizens United
The First Amendments kinda, uh, means what it says. Currrraaaaazy! My compliments to your uncle, Doug!
[Ben H.: 1/21/10 17:05]
Vindication!
Congratulations to my uncle, whom I watched 20 years ago argue the corporate campaign spending case whose initial ruling got overturned today. Other than the impressive curtains in the main room of the Supreme Court, I don't remember anything about the case. That includes any feelings about the rightness of one side or the other; I don't have time to read up on it and see if I have any feelings about it now, so I'll just stick with the family angle and say that, when it comes to sophistry -- er, juridical insight -- mine is tops!
[Gombrecht the Irrefrugnable: 1/21/10 12:58]
Wouldn't it be great if political pundits delivered analysis in the same way athletes do?
You know, what this election was all about, it was about getting more votes in the ballot box than the other side. They got more votes in there early, but the key was that when the polls closed, we got more votes. Also, we gave it 110% and it was a team effort.
I'm reminded of a little cartoon that Doug once drew about Massachusetts elections. Right about now, the Mass Democratic Party is probably wishing it had followed the lead of Doug's old cartoon and nominated a bag of Ted Kennedy's feces.
[Ben H.: 1/20/10 12:01]
Although it involves hardly any exertion, the shoulder stand (sarvanga-asana) is surely the best position for weight loss. Because it wrenches your head down so that you're looking directly into your belly, whose fat hangs upside-down right in your face, disgusting you into a more intense workout afterwards.
"The historian who refuses to believe in Satan labors at a crippling professional disadvantage"
Whereas Pat Robertson enjoys full mastery!
"And you know, Kristi, something happened a long time ago in Haiti, and people might not want to talk about it. They were under the heel of the French, you know, Napoleon the Third and whatever, and they got together and swore a pact to the devil. They said, 'We will serve you if you'll get us free from the French.' True story. And so the devil said, 'O.K., it's a deal.' "
