It was both entirely predictable, and predicted.
Speaking of which, Bruce Webster has some interesting thoughts on the thermocline of truth.
Category Archives: Business
Obama’s Refusal To Negotiate
That’s what’s unprecedented:
Obama would like the public to think he can’t negotiate and that to do so would be unheard of. But in this, as in so many other things, he’s lying. What is actually going on here is that, in the past, presidents who have had to deal with divided government (as Obama is; the House is in Republican hands) have always known that in such a situation they must negotiate. Whichever party they have been affiliated with, and whether you think they were good presidents or bad ones, they have kept faith with the basic gentleman’s/woman’s agreement on which our government has always run, and that is that if the other side was duly elected to be in control of another branch of government, that group has some legitimate power and must be negotiated with.
Obama is different. He had the brilliant idea that, although Republicans are in control of the House right now, they have no power unless they agree with him, and it is okay for him to defy them because it will have no repercussions on either him or his party (which is largely aligned with him). Therefore he can Just Say No to whatever Republican demands might be, and blame them for the failure to come to any sort of agreement. And the reason he is able to get away with this is a simple one: he knows the media will not call him on it, but will instead support him and amplify his message.
It’s a toxic combination, and that’s what’s “unprecedented”—at least in this country.
He’s a pretty toxic president.
The ObamaCare Contractors
OK, call me crazy, and I haven’t looked into this at all. But would anyone be at all surprised if they were selected on how much they filled Democrat campaign coffers rather than track record or competence?
Fusion
There’s still a long way to go. The fusion reaction will need to release many times more energy than it consumes to be viable on a commercial scale. But this is still worth getting excited about. Figuring out fusion would be a game-changer, and breakthroughs like this one remind us of the dangers of predicting the future based on current technology. The rate of technological change is accelerating, and the only ones who stand to lose are the prophets of doom.
They’ll ignore it.
The ObamaCare Web Interface
What we see is the web portal, which is a mess. It’s even worse behind the wizard’s curtain. I love the train-wreck animated gifs.
When the administration says they don’t know how many have signed up, they’re either lying, or their technical incompetence knows no bounds.
Getting Tech Wrong
Save The Planet
..by keeping calm. Bjorn Lomborg says, once again, cool it:
When you look at these issues properly, the results are surprising. Climate change, for example, has had a net benefit for the world. From 1900 to 2025, it has increased global welfare by up to 1.5 per cent of GDP per year. Why? Because it has mixed effects – and when warming is moderate, the benefits prevail (even if they are unevenly distributed between nations).
Increased levels of atmospheric CO2 have improved agriculture, because the gas works as a fertiliser; we have avoided more deaths from cold than have been caused by extra heat; and we have saved more from lower heating bills than we have lost to an increased need for air conditioning.
But that doesn’t give the socialists the control over our lives that they continue to crave.
Gerry Griffin
…proposes a giant leap for all mankind:
Mr. Griffin reminds us that space is a dangerous business. One of his biggest jobs at NASA was to manage the risk in a reasonable way. Risk can never be taken to zero; that would mean humans do nothing. Astronauts have died in space, but to put this in context, people in the aerospace community have also been killed on the highway on their way to work. Transportation, in any form, does not currently have zero risk. Safety is important. An early failure, such as the Apollo Launch pad fire, would be a problem for commercial viability. Design will require a reasonable middle ground with some redundancy, but not to the point of adding massive weight or prohibitive costs. Technology is so much better today and designers have fifty years of operating history to guide them. The physical demands of working in space are so intense that a momentary distraction could prove fatal. However, more is known about human error factors and training could better manage those.
Gee, someone should write a book about that. Yes, I know, Real Soon Now. Had a last-minute glitch, but it’s happening this month.
Washington Is Broken
Comparing the America that works with the one that doesn’t.
California’s Economy
Meet the new feudalism, same as the old feudalism:
As late as the 80s, California was democratic in a fundamental sense, a place for outsiders and, increasingly, immigrants—roughly 60 percent of the population was considered middle class. Now, instead of a land of opportunity, California has become increasingly feudal. According to recent census estimates, the state suffers some of the highest levels of inequality in the country. By some estimates, the state’s level of inequality compares with that of such global models as the Dominican Republic, Gambia, and the Republic of the Congo.
At the same time, the Golden State now suffers the highest level of poverty in the country—23.5 percent compared to 16 percent nationally—worse than long-term hard luck cases like Mississippi. It is also now home to roughly one-third of the nation’s welfare recipients, almost three times its proportion of the nation’s population.
Like medieval serfs, increasing numbers of Californians are downwardly mobile, and doing worse than their parents: native born Latinos actually have shorter lifespans than their parents, according to one recent report. Nor are things expected to get better any time soon. According to a recent Hoover Institution survey, most Californians expect their incomes to stagnate in the coming six months, a sense widely shared among the young, whites, Latinos, females, and the less educated.
Some of these trends can be found nationwide, but they have become pronounced and are metastasizing more quickly in the Golden State. As late as the 80s, the state was about as egalitarian as the rest of the country. Now, for the first time in decades, the middle class is a minority, according to the Public Policy Institute of California.
Read the whole thing, especially about how the economically ignorant techno-oligarchs in Silicon Valley are perfectly content to wreck the economy in the rest of the state.
I wonder, though, if that poverty number is real poverty, or fake poverty?
There are two things that make this correction really rather important. The first being that everyone else measures poverty after all the things that are done to alleviate it. Thus any comparison across countries is going to leave the US looking very bad indeed: for others are talking about the residual poverty left after trying to do something about it and the US is talking about the poverty before alleviation. Very different things I hope you’ll agree.
The second reason it’s important is that the only way anyone’s ever really found to reduce the number living in poverty is to give the poor money n’stuff so that they’re no longer living in poverty. But if we don’t count the money n’stuff that is being given to the poor then we’re not going to be able to show that giving the poor money n’stuff alleviates poverty, are we?
They don’t want to show that. If people realized the programs were actually working to keep people out of poverty (though they also have the effect of reducing higher aspirations), then it would be hard to justify ever-growing big government.