The last Chevy big block has rolled off the line. I rebuilt one or two of those, in my day, including a 454 in a Vette.
Category Archives: Business
Give Me Liberty
…or give me ObamaCare:
Obamacare would require Americans to buy government-approved health insurance. It would make it illegal to offer choices in insurance plans beyond the handful of very similar ones that the government would allow. It would become illegal to offer new and innovative plans. Under any of the government-approved plans, it would become illegal to pay your doctor directly for more than a certain percentage of your care. Higher deductible, consumer-driven plans would be severely altered or eliminated. By law, a greater percentage of money would have to be paid in insurance premiums, rather than directly for care. Competition and choice would diminish tremendously. One-size-fits-all conformity would rule the day.
At its core, what Obamacare really means is a loss of freedom.
Apparently, human liberty is an antiquated concept.
Punishing Us For Our Sins
High AGW Priest Tom Friedman thinks that we deserve to be hit by a massive storm:
Absent such a storm that literally parts the Red Sea again and drives home to all the doubters that catastrophic climate change is a clear and present danger, the domestic pressures in every country to avoid legally binding and verifiable carbon reductions will remain very powerful.
That will be our come-to-Gaia moment.
[Update a few minutes later]
Is global warming a dead issue?
It may well be. We’re now too broke to be able to afford such an ostentatious, gaudy and pointless religion.
[Update a few minutes later]
I kind of buried the lede in the link above — it cites a paper claiming that global temperature is more influenced by CFCs and cosmic rays than CO2. It’s peer reviewed, too.
If the biggest problems are cosmic rays and solar radiation, it’s hard to see how the power-hungry bureaucrats are going to leverage that into taking over the global economy.
The Tyranny Of Ambiguity
How ObamaCare will result in limitless and arbitrary intrusions into our lives:
Does a law or a bill constrain the power of officials — both elected and appointed — by the principles of the law? Or does it empower the officials to define the meaning of the law as they wish, to apply it in an open-ended manner, and to write regulations in order to expand their power?
…we will not be free to escape either the regulations which a faceless bureaucracy will write in order to enforce its edicts, or the decisions made by such bureaucrats over our lives.
If you are an employer, you will not escape punishment if a bureaucrat decides that your health plan is not “acceptable” and that you must be fined for your failure to meet his decision. If you are an individual who does not want to purchase full-coverage health insurance, but would rather buy catastrophic insurance that covers hospitalization only, your decision will not be “acceptable” and you may face a government audit and a new tax.
Do you have a serious disease? Does your doctor wish to readmit you to the hospital? A bureaucrat will decide whether or not you get treatment, based on a statistical analysis of the number of such readmissions by the bureaucrats: “excess readmissions shall not include readmissions for an applicable condition for which there are fewer than a minimum number (as determined by the secretary) of discharges for such applicable condition for the applicable period and such hospital” (Sec. 1151).
The scope of power here extends to the very definitions of terms within the law. This leaves the meaning of the law fluid and subject to the will of the bureaucrats.
Just the way they want it.
The New Utilities
Trust busting, or cartel building?
if you think monopoly bargaining is the problem in health care, our cost problem is going to get worse, not better. Think of the one area where we see the most customer complaints: quasi-public utilities like the cable and phone companies. They also have a rather ponderous rate of innovation, and no particular interest in controlling their costs. That’s not an accident; it’s a feature of a regulatory structure that starts from provider costs and works up to what extra percentage they will be allowed to charge essentially captive consumers.
The notion that we need the government to “compete” with insurance companies is economically insane. As I’ve said before, if they need competition, let them compete with each other. That they don’t is a result of flawed government policy, which the lunacy that is passing the Congress will only make much worse.
As a commenter there notes, this bill will essentially ban true private insurance. If this becomes law, expect to see an underground economy and black market in health care.
The Politicization
…of peer review:
What these and other episodes reveal was that there was a concerted effort to stage-manage the appearance of an ironclad consensus at the expense of the scientific process. Rather than make an open and honest argument that, despite persistent uncertainties, there is substantial theoretical and empirical evidence to support the hypothesis that human activity is contributing to a gradual warming of the atmosphere, they focused on squelching dissenting scientific views, corrupting science in the process.
Unfortunately, as a commenter there notes, there isn’t anything really new about this. Kuhn understood it over half a century ago. This episode simply provided an ugly window into it, and in a case where the science is deeply consequential. It doesn’t “prove” that the earth is not anthropogenically warming (and people who think that science “proves” things in general simply demonstrate their lack of understanding of science). What it does show is that the people who have been telling us that it does are not to be trusted, and that a thorough, and transparent, review of the evidence is in order before we base major policy on their preferences.
[Update a few minutes later]
Another good point in comments, and you should really read all the comments over there. It is in response to the comment that we shouldn’t throw out all of the good science and scientists based on these bad apples:
100% of the scientists with like conclusions who have had their emails and code exposed to the world seem to have engaged in bad behaviour. Furthermore, very few of the scientists with like conclusions condemned the bad behaviour, instead beginning by defending it. Given these facts, I think we should say that we don’t know whether other scientist with like conclusions have engaged in bad behaviour, rather than just assuming that they haven’t.
Also:
…it is critical to examine the influence the bad apples have had over everything subsequent. To do that you first need to realize that although there are reams of studies on AGW indeed, they are almost all based off a shocking small group of data. Historic temperature wise, there are 3 major datasets in the world, and (apparently now that CRU has lost theirs) one repository for raw data. These datasets are references in a staggering amount of research, and their creators and care takers are the exact people in question here. Doug [sic] Jones being the godfather. The Wegman report warmed of how a small group of climate scientists from a small number of institutes were working too closely together to hope for any independent analysis. That has proved entirely true.
Slightly OT, but that first comment reminds me of the national, even global exchange we’ve had over the past eight years:
Defense: Not all Muslims are terrorists.
Retort: Yes, but to first order, at least lately, all terrorists have been Muslim.
Sadly for those scientists with integrity working in this field (and we don’t know how many there are — perhaps most of those with integrity have been chased out by now), this scandal has tainted them all, even if the media continues to misreport or ignore it.
Not Fascist Enough
Naomi Klein is complaining about the president:
Obama, it’s worth remembering, also came to office with the big banks on their knees — it took real effort not to nationalize them. Once again, if Obama had dared to use the power that was handed to him by history, he could have mandated the banks to provide the loans for factories to be retrofitted and new green infrastructure to be built. Instead he declared that the government shouldn’t tell the failed banks how to run their businesses. Green businesses report that it’s harder than ever to get a loan.
Imagine if these three huge economic engines — the banks, the auto companies, the stimulus bill — had been harnessed to a common green vision. If that had happened, demand for a complementary energy bill would have been part of a coherent transformative agenda.
Imagine. It’s easy if you try.
Rogues’ Gallery
Here is a list of the bribes that Harry Reid paid with our money to buy votes on this monstrosity. At least lobbyists use their own money. As Mark Steyn writes:
You can’t even dignify this squalid racket as bribery: If I try to buy a cop, I have to use my own money. But, when Harry Reid buys a senator, he uses my money, too. It doesn’t ‘border on immoral’: it drives straight through the frontier post and heads for the dark heartland of immoral.
And when you see things like this, the blood just boils:
Sen. Carl Levin (D., Mich.), Sen. Debbie Stabenow (D., Mich.)
—Exemption from the non-profit excise tax for Michigan insurers. Michigan and Nebraska were the only two states so exempted.
Is such blatant favoritism to particular states even constitutional? Is there precedent for it? Don’t other states have a right to protest this inequality under the law?
[Update a few minutes later]
Five reasons it still may not pass. Let’s hope.
[Late morning update]
Why the Reid bill is unconstitutional. Even without the payoffs to Michigan and Nebraska.
If anything resembling this planned man-caused disaster passes, I expect to see lots of legal challenges, many of them successful.
[Early evening update]
The ostensible beneficiaries of Senator Nelson’s corruption don’t seem to be very happy about it, especially after he tried to deflect blame onto others:
Gov. Dave Heineman “contacted me and he said this is another unfunded federal mandate and it’s going to stress the state budget, and I agreed with him,” the Nebraska Democrat said. “I said to the leader and others that this is something that has to be fixed. I didn’t participate in the way it was fixed.”
But Heineman expressed anything but gratitude, saying he had nothing to do with the compromise and calling the overhaul bill “bad news for Nebraska and bad news for America.”
“Nebraskans did not ask for a special deal, only a fair deal,” Heineman said in a statement Sunday.
That criticism is only a taste of what Nelson has received since announcing Saturday that he would become the 60th vote needed to advance the landmark legislation.
I wonder if this could influence his vote in the final after reconciliation? Unfortunately, it will be hard to change without looking as craven as he undoubtedly is, unless what comes out of conference is different.
Oh, and here’s a perfect example of the false choice fallacy that I talked about last week:
The Nebraska Democratic Party chairman called Nelson’s decision “courageous” and dismissed Republican criticism of it.
“Whatever he did, they would be critical,” Vic Covalt said. “They have no program and they have nothing to offer us other than more of the same.”
Just as I said:
There is a variation on this fallacy, in fact. It goes: There is a crisis; something must be done! What we propose to do is something. Therefore, it must be done!
This invalid argument is otherwise known as false choice, of course, because the alternative to the particular something being proposed is not nothing (even if one accepts the initial premise that there is a crisis about which something must be done) — it is a variety of other somethings, some of which may be the something that is actually key to solving the problem, even if their own is not necessarily.
We saw this last January when many of the same people promoting AGW hysteria also used it to ram through the failed “stimulus” bill without reading it. It is now being used to justify taking over the sixth of the US economy represented by the health care industry. All the while, these people have been lambasting their political opponents who offer more sensible alternatives as proposing that we do “nothing.”
Liars.
Global Warming Models
…should be treated like horoscopes.
We now know that the models can’t even forecast the past (and they’re extremely shoddy work on inspection), and they want us to rely on them to make trillion-dollar decisions?
Running A Failed State
…can sure be expensive.
I was born and raised in Michigan, but I’ve felt like a Californian for the past thirty years or so. I weep when I see what corrupt politicians and ignorant voters have done to a once-great state.