| A Comment on Healthcare |
[Sep. 11th, 2009|10:17 pm] |
I wrote this as a comment on ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) lordbrand's journal, but it was above the 4300 character limit for comments, so I'm posting it here. It's my attempt to summarize my current thinking on healthcare. If you're interested, there's about 10000 characters below the fold.
( Read more... ) |
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| Political Oatmeal |
[Jun. 11th, 2009|04:30 pm] |
I'm not happy about having to say this -- I've spent the last week being as irresponsible as I can responsibly manage -- but I think it's time:
You should read this article about health care costs.
There's about to be a big debate in the US about health care -- why it costs so much, whether we should have a national system, etc -- and it can't hurt to be familiar with some of the facts of the current system. |
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| Different Angle on Tank Man Shows Huge Cojones |
[Jun. 4th, 2009|10:55 am] |
Terril Jones snapped the first photo below during the Tienemman Square protests. The guy on the left in the distance, standing there waiting for the tanks, is the one shown in the second photo below.
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| Sotomayor & "Affirmative Action" |
[May. 31st, 2009|10:17 am] |
A quick thought about Sonia Sotomayor: I've seen a lot of chatter on the internutz (and I'll bet there's even more of this on the broadcast media) about whether Sotomayor is an affirmative action pick. She isn't.
She's definitely a first-in-her-demographic. But she's not affirmative action in the usual meaning of the term. The whole idea of affirmative action is that we can tilt some of the power imbalances in our society by promoting members of demographic groups which don't usually have easy access to social and political power.
That's not what the Sotomayor pick is about. This much is apparent in the comitragedy of Republican reaction. You can see them thinking, "Hmm...we should probably keep our mouths shut on this one. We really can't afford to piss off Hispanic voters. They're the biggest minority group in the country, they're the fastest growing, and they're already swinging into the Democratic column....Awww screw it! She's a racist! La Raza is the brown people's KKK! Affirmative Action! Ricci!"
The first impulse is correct: Obama's selection of Sotomayor is a recognition of the growing political power of her demographic. It's not an attempt to right imbalances; there are plenty of other choices that would have done that equally well. Rather, it's part of the Democrat's attempt to seal their hold on political power by allying with a powerful political constituency. |
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| Bandwagon |
[May. 21st, 2009|09:28 am] |
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I decided to jump on the bandwagon. I'm now on twitter. Same username: cityofgates. You can follow me, if you're really curious how often I get the urge to yell "FAAAART!" in a crowded room. |
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| Also amusing |
[Apr. 17th, 2009|01:18 pm] |
Warped plot summaries of famous stories.
My personal favorites:
- LORD OF THE RINGS: Midget destroys stolen property.
- GHOSTBUSTERS: Unemployed college professors destroy hotel with nuclear weapons.
The second one sounds pretty good actually... |
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| Step 1 is Admitting... |
[Apr. 6th, 2009|03:35 pm] |
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Some of you who are reading this post instead of working on your PhD thesis, might find this piece of software very useful. Even those who aren't might find it interesting to think about how thoroughly communications technology has infiltrated our lives. |
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| 2009: The Year the Newspaper Extinction Really Took Off? |
[Mar. 16th, 2009|12:03 pm] |
It's becoming increasingly clear that the internet is killing the newspaper business model, by undercutting their local advertising. Why use the personals section when there's craigslist? Why buy adspace when you can target consumers with Google? The list of newspapers which have stopped printing papers in the last few years is pretty amazing: The Rocky Mountain News, the Seattle Post Intelligencer, the Baltimore Examiner, the Christian Science Monitor. The SF Chronicle is up for sale, and probably about to fire half of its staff. (Can we expect even more articles about tiger attacks?) Even the New York Times is in trouble. They're a $1B in debt, and draining the equity out of their real estate to hold on.
So the big question is: What's going to replace the newspapers? Society may not need newspapers, but it almost certainly needs journalists. How are we going to pay them?
Clay Shirky has a really good article about this, which I definitely recommend reading. In a nutshell, his argument is that _nothing_ is going to replace the newspapers for a while. Their business model is screwed, but there's not yet a viable one to replace it. It's going to be chaotic for a while, and we'll just have to deal with it.
I think he's essentially right, which has me wondering: What features do I want to see in the next generation news media? What would I be willing to pay for?
The first thing that springs to mind is good editorial judgement. I don't want to have to sort the entire newstream myself. I'd rather have a handful of websites, each offering different perspectives and emphases. Talking Points Memo is a pretty good example of what I have in mind. They're a left-leaning, politics-centered news site that mixes reporting (with a special focus on muck-raking and crowd-sourcing), commentary, and discussion. They're not perfect, of course; many of their articles are rather short, and their commenters are lousy. But they're pretty good, and they rarely get distracted by emphemera. They're also usually ahead of the crowd; they were digging into AIG's Financial Products division well before the current "retension bonuses" scandal broke.
So, good editorial judgement. What else? Well, I don't know if the business model works -- it seems likely that advertising-supported media have a competitive advantage -- but I'd be happy to pay for advertising-free media. One of the worst things about contemporary newspapers is that the people who read the papers aren't the customers. They're the product. The advertisers pay for eyeballs, and the newspapers have to do something to deliver them. I'm probably not alone in thinking that this pushes the papers towards short-sighted coverage and a makes them reluctant to deal with hard truths.
None of this answers the question of how we're going to pay reporters, or who'll they'll be. But you wouldn't be expecting closure at this end of this post if you'd bothered to read Shirky's article, now would you? |
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| My Own Pet Peeve |
[Mar. 13th, 2009|10:44 am] |
I just realized that I ran afoul of one of my own pet peeves: comparing sums of money from different years without adjusting for inflation.
Specifically: In last week's post about where the floor of the Dow Jones average might be, I forgot to adjust for inflation. If you do this, you find that we've already dropped below 1980s levels. Gives you some idea how scared the traders are.
Not clear to me that the rallies this week are real. There's still a few more rounds of bad news to come. |
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| Que? |
[Mar. 12th, 2009|07:21 pm] |
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| Useful Meme |
[Mar. 12th, 2009|08:58 am] |
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Verizon has recently opted all of its customers into a "personal data sharing" program. If you want to opt out, sign in to your online account and go to this page. |
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| Let's see if I can do a better job than CNBC |
[Mar. 5th, 2009|10:08 am] |
As I'm writing this, the Dow Jones Industrial Average has dropped about 3% for the day. Which leads me to wonder: How much farther can we expect the stock market to drop, now that the finance bubble has popped? What's the lowest it can plausibly go?
I'd speculate (probably literally at some point) that stocks will continue to drop until they're more or less in line with the consumer economy, with people's purchasing power. Equivalently, one can try to guess how long finance has been facing a bubble. My best guess is that the bubble started somewhere in the mid-90s. Some of the economic growth then was real, and people's wages were rising then. And some of it was pure bubble. Not sure why anyone thought that Netscape was a sensible investment. This fits anyways with my sense that real wages have been mostly stagnant since the mid-90s. (They've been stagnant longer for blue collar workers, shorter for white-collar. Remember all that Angry White Man rhetoric from the Clinton years?)
So, fifteen years. What does that get us. Well, the DJIA was rising pretty rapidly from mid-1994 to mid-1999, so our answer is going to be pretty sensitive to the exact date. Let's say mid-1996, plus/minus a year. That puts our DJIA floor between 5000 and 7000. Given that we've already dropped below 7000, I'd bet that we end up on the low end of that. I might actually buy in if the market drops below 6000.
I'll add this, too: We'd better hope that the lefty economists who say that real wages haven't grown in 30 years are wrong. If they are, we could be looking at a floor in the 2000 range. |
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| Albion |
[Feb. 27th, 2009|12:27 pm] |
Phillip Pullman published something rather extraordinary in The Times today, an amazing attack directed at the new "homeland security" laws that have been passed in Britain recently and at the culture of fear that breeds such affronts to liberty. The article has vanished from the Times Online's website, so I'm reproducing it in its entirety here.
( It's here ) |
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| Sign of the Times |
[Feb. 20th, 2009|01:55 pm] |
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In the economics blogosphere, Friday Cat Blogging has been replaced by Bank Failure Friday. |
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