Dispatches from District 48
...This is the sensation of the moment, from Barack Obama's Twitter account (apparently real and not a spoof)
Expect this to be the most photo-shopped image of the next 24 hours. My guess is that this is the new punishment for not being insured -- they send this guy to your house to watch MSNBC with you all day.
Somehow I screwed this up before. Here is the offer (pdf): Ballet Arizona Nutcracker - Up to 50% off
I had a percent sign in the URL which screwed everything up, I think.
Kevin Drum can't believe the folks at the National Review are still calling global warming science a "myth". As is usual for global warming supporters, he wraps himself in the mantle of science while implying that those who don't toe the line on the declared consensus are somehow anti-science.
Readers will know that as a lukewarmer, I have as little patience with outright CO2 warming deniers as I do with those declaring a catastrophe (for my views read this and this). But if you are going to simply be thunderstruck that some people don't trust climate scientists, then don't post a chart that is a great example of why people think that a lot of global warming science is garbage. Here is Drum's chart:
The problem is that his chart is a splice of multiple data series with very different time resolutions. The series up to about 1850 has data points taken at best every 50 years and likely at 100-200 year or more intervals. It is smoothed so that temperature shifts less than 200 years or so in length won't show up and are smoothed out.
In contrast, the data series after 1850 has data sampled every day or even hour. It has a sampling interval 6 orders of magnitude (over a million times) more frequent. It by definition is smoothed on a time scale substantially shorter than the rest of the data.
In addition, these two data sets use entirely different measurement techniques. The modern data comes from thermometers and satellites, measurement approaches that we understand fairly well. The earlier data comes from some sort of proxy analysis (ice cores, tree rings, sediments, etc.) While we know these proxies generally change with temperature, there are still a lot of questions as to their accuracy and, perhaps more importantly for us here, whether they vary linearly or have any sort of attenuation of the peaks. For example, recent warming has not shown up as strongly in tree ring proxies, raising the question of whether they may also be missing rapid temperature changes or peaks in earlier data for which we don't have thermometers to back-check them (this is an oft-discussed problem called proxy divergence).
The problem is not the accuracy of the data for the last 100 years, though we could quibble this it is perhaps exaggerated by a few tenths of a degree. The problem is with the historic data and using it as a valid comparison to recent data. Even a 100 year increase of about a degree would, in the data series before 1850, be at most a single data point. If the sampling is on 200 year intervals, there is a 50-50 chance a 100 year spike would be missed entirely in the historic data. And even if it were in the data as a single data point, it would be smoothed out at this data scale.
Do you really think that there was never a 100-year period in those last 10,000 years where the temperatures varied by more than 0.1F, as implied by this chart? This chart has a data set that is smoothed to signals no finer than about 200 years and compares it to recent data with no such filter. It is like comparing the annualized GDP increase for the last quarter to the average annual GDP increase for the entire 19th century. It is easy to demonstrate how silly this is. If you cut the chart off at say 1950, before much anthropogenic effect will have occurred, it would still look like this, with an anomalous spike at the right (just a bit shorter). If you believe this analysis, you have to believe that there is an unprecedented spike at the end even without anthropogenic effects.
There are several other issues with this chart that makes it laughably bad for someone to use in the context of arguing that he is the true defender of scientific integrity
Update: Kevin Drum posted a defense of this chart on Twitter. Here it is: "It was published in Science." Well folks, there is climate debate in a nutshell. An 1000-word dissection of what appears to be wrong with a particular analysis retorted by a five-word appeal to authority.
Update #2: I have explained the issue with a parallel flawed analysis from politics where Drum is more likely to see the flaws.
The American Studies Association has voted to initiate an academic boycott of Israel ostensibly to protest its denial of civil rights to Palestinians in the occupied territories. Forgetting for a moment Israel's unique security concerns (what would the US do if Mexico routinely lobbed rockets and artillery shells into US border towns), the implication is that the Palestinians in Israels have it worse than any other group in the world, since this is the first and only such boycott the ASA has ever entered into. Is it really worse to be a Palestinian in Israel than, say, a woman anywhere in the Arab world** or about anyone in North Korea? Do academics in Cuba have more ability to write honestly than they do in Israel? I doubt it.
The only statement the ASA makes on the subject that I can find is in their FAQ on the boycott
7) Does the boycott resolution unfairly single out Israel? After all there are many unjust states in the world.
The boycott resolution responds to a request from the Palestinian people, including Palestinian academics and students, to act in solidarity. Because the U.S. contributes materially to the Israeli occupation, through significant financial and military aid - and, as such, is an important ally of the Israeli state - and because the occupation daily confiscates Palestinian land and devastates Palestinian lives, it is urgent to act now.
A couple of thoughts. First, I am not sure why US material aid is relevant to choosing a boycott target. I suppose the implication is that this boycott is aimed more at the US than at Israel itself. But the question still stands as to why countries like Saudi Arabia, which receives a lot of US material aid as well, get a pass. Second, the fact that Palestinian academics can seek international help tends to disprove that their situation is really the worst in the world. I don't think the fact that the ASA is not hearing cries for help from liberal-minded academics in North Korea means that there is less of a problem in North Korea. It means there is more of a problem.
I am not a student of anti-semitism, so I can't comment on how much it may explain this decision. However, I think it is perfectly possible to explain the ASA's actions without resorting to anti-semitism as an explanation. As background, remember that it is important for their social standing and prestige for liberal academics to take public positions to help the downtrodden in other countries. This is fine -- not a bad incentive system to feel social pressure to speak out against injustice. But the problem is that most sources of injustice are all either a) Leftish regimes the Left hesitates to criticize for ideological reasons or b) Islamic countries that the left hesitates to criticize because they have invested so much in calling conservatives Islamophobic.
So these leftish academics have a need to criticize, but feel constrained to only strongly criticizing center-right or right regimes. The problem is that most of these are gone. Allende, the Shah, Franco, South Africa -- all gone or changed. All that's left is Israel (which is odd because it is actually fairly socialist but for some reason never treated as such by the Left). So if we consider the universe of appropriate targets -- countries with civil rights and minority rights issues that are not leftish or socialist governments and not Islamic, then the ASA has been perfectly consistent, targeting every single country in that universe.
** To this day I am amazed how little heat the gender apartheid in the Arab world generates in the West in comparison to race apartheid in South Africa. I am not an expert on either, but from what I have read I believe it is a true statement to say that blacks in apartheid South Africa had more freedom than women have today in Saudi Arabia. Thoughts?
Update: I twice emailed the ASA for a list of other countries or groups they have boycotted and twice got a blurb justifying why Israel was selected but with no direct answer to my question. I guess I will take that as confirmation this is the first and only country they have ever targeted. They did want to emphasize that the reason Israel was selected (I presume vs. other countries but they did not word it thus) had a lot to do with he fact that Israel was the number one recipient of US aid money (mostly military) and that it was this American connection given they represent American studies professors that made the difference. Why Pakistan or Afghanistan, who treat their women far worse than Israel treats Palestinians, and which receive a lot of US aid, were not selected or considered or mentioned is not explained. Basically, I would explain it thus: "all the cool kids are doing it, and we determined that to remain among the cool kids we needed to do it too". This is a prestige and signalling exercise, and it makes a lot more sense in that context, because then one can ask about the preferences of those to whom they are signalling, rather than try to figure out why Israel is somehow the worst human rights offender in the world.
By the way, by the ASA logic, it should be perfectly reasonable, even necessary, for European academic institutions to boycott US academic institutions because the US government gives aid to such a bad country like Israel. This seems like it would be unfair to US academics who may even disagree with US policy, but no more unfair than to Israeli academics who are being punished for their government's policies. I wonder how US academics would feel about being boycotted from European events and scholarship over US government policy?
Glen Reynolds brings us this bit from a letter to the WSJ about the IRS and 501c4's:
For example, if an IRS official subjects citizens to incredibly burdensome demands for irrelevant information just to harass them for their political or religious beliefs, no 501(c)(4) group could later criticize that official’s nomination to be IRS commissioner, without engaging in restricted activity. That’s because the IRS’s proposed regulation defines even unelected government officials, like agency heads and judges, as “candidates” if they have been nominated for a position requiring Senate confirmation. The IRS’s proposed rules are an attack on the First Amendment that will make it easier for the government to get away with harassing political dissenters and whistleblowers in the future.
The part about classifying Senate-confirmed officials as "candidates" seems to be part of the same initiative as the changes to the filibuster to make it easier for the President to confirm controversial judges and administrators. I wonder if this is a general effort or battlespace preparation for a specific confirmation battle.
Less than 12 hours after CBS aired is horrid, uncritical infomercial for the NSA, a federal judge has ruled that the NSA likely violated the Fourth Amendment with its domestic wiretapping and data gathering.
This weekend our family dog, the world's largest Maltese at over 12 pounds but still a small dog, was attacked by a coyote. They redid the golf course nearby into a links course and ever since we have had an enormous pack of coyotes out there -- the other night I saw a dozen hanging out together.
Yesterday the coyote got into a fenced area and grabbed Snuggles (please no name jokes today) in its jaws and was carrying her off when my daughter saw it and screamed and yelled until it dropped our dog and went away. If my daughter had had a gun, that coyote would have been blown away -- my daughter was in total mama bear mode.
We took the dog to the emergency animal hospital, and eventually to their surgery center. Snuggles was put on oxygen and an IV and within a few hours had a surgeon operate on her chest, stitching closed holes in her chest wall on both sides of her body. So that is how we spent our weekend.
Today she is doing OK, but is still sluggish and won't eat. We are hoping for the best, and that she will beat the odds (most dogs this size are DOA from coyote attacks). Here she is with her pink bandages, still in the oxygen tent.
Postscript: It was interesting to go through the process of getting emergency care in the veterinary world. At each step of the process we got a detailed cost estimate in advance of the charges we could expect. We were able to request her medical records at any time, and they were both detailed and impressive. Every step was documented. We saw her x-rays and got pictures and video from the surgery to show us exactly what damage had to be repaired and how they did it. The two locations we have been to (the local hospital and the surgery center) both are part of VCA, It has not been cheap, but the care has been impressive.
One odd conclusion to this is that there is something to be said for the old-style communal hospital ward vs. the private rooms of today. One of the reasons I feel good that they are keeping an eye on Snuggs (as the men of the household call her to avoid embarassment) is that all the critical animals are essentially in cages and enclosures in the same room, where someone always is there to see immediately if they are in distress.
Update: Got the bill today for the surgery. Pretty much exactly what they promised in advance. Not cheap -- I think I am going to rename this dog Steve Austin
Update #2: I don't really blame the coyote - nature red in tooth and claw and all that. Anger at the coyote is just cover for my personal guilt that we did not make things safer for her. We are making changes right now to give her a safer area to run around and do her business.
One thing I think I have never mentioned before on this site is that in college, I was a fanatical bridge player. I developed this odd social life of bridge in the afternoon and beer pong at night. When I got tired of playing other students, my friend and I would go into town and play the local residents, who were sharks.
Anyway, people new to bridge are always intimidated by bidding, and certainly there is a learning curve there (which I made worse by using the Precision rather than the Goren standard system). But with some time, bidding becomes rote. Only perhaps in one in ten or twenty hands is the last increment of bidding expertise really useful, and then usually only when playing duplicate where even a few extra points really matter.
Once your bidding is mostly up to snuff, the game is all about card play. A good player will play out the entire hand, with guesses as to which cards are held by which players, before the first card is led.
The single best book I have ever read on card play is Card Play Technique by Mollo and Gardener. Thirty years ago there was about one source for this often out-of-print book and I bought a dozen copies, slowly giving most of them away over time. Now, however, it is back in print. If you play bridge, you have probably read this book, but if not, buy yourself a copy for Christmas.
When people ask me about my business, one of the things that is hard to explain is just how deep and visceral the skepticism of private enterprise can be. I constantly have people take single words I might have uttered in the immediacy of a live TV interview and try to craft straw man positions for me out of them**. Sometimes it is not even something I said, but something where some lazy journalist has poorly paraphrased my position.
Here is a great example, where a Flagstaff writer (who by the way knows me and my phone number quite well but did not bother to interview me) tries to take my opposition to the government shutdown to paint me with some sort of entitlement. She lectures me that I don't actually own the land on which I operate, as if that is somehow news to me. You can read my comments if you are interested, but the issue with the shutdown was the lawlessness of Administration officials, not any sense that I am entitled to the land any more than my lease contract allows me to be. (As an aside, she seems to be expressing a strong theory of landlord rights, that my landlord (the US Forest Service) should have the absolute right to shut me down whenever they want. Why is it that I don't think she has the same position vis a vis other tenants and landlords?)
By the way, compare her straw man to my actual position on public land, which is likely to the Left of many of my readers:
In my history of public discussions on private operation of public parks, it is no surprise that I run into a lot of skepticism about having any private role at all. But I also run into the opposite -- folks who ask (or demand) that the government sell all the parks to private buyers. So why shouldn't privatization of parks just consist of a massive land sale?
The answer has to do with profit potential. Over time, if in private hands, a piece of land will naturally migrate towards the use which can generate the highest returns. And often, for a unique piece of land, this most profitable use might not be a picnic area with a $6 entrance fee -- it might instead be something very exclusive which only a few can enjoy, like an expensive resort or a luxury home development (think: Aspen or Jackson Hole). The public has asked its government to own certain unique lands in order to control their development and the public access to them.
Public ownership of unique lands, then, tends to have the goal of allowing access to and enjoyment of a particular piece of land for all of the public, not just a few. Typically this entails a public agency owning the land and controlling the types of uses allowed on the land and the nature and style of facility development. I call these state activities controlling the "character" of the land and its use. (One could legitimately argue that private land trusts could fulfill the same role, and in fact I have personally been a supporter of and donor to private land trusts. However, I am not an expert in this field and will leave this discussion to others).
Having established a role for the government in setting the character of the lands we call "parks," we can then legitimately ask, "does this goal require that government employees actually staff the parks and clean the bathrooms?"
** Postscript: A couple of years ago I was asked to do an interview with Glen Beck on my proposal to keep open, via private operation, a number of Arizona parks slated for closure. It was the first time I ever did live TV, and a national show to boot. I had never seen his show but he had the reputation of being freaky and unpredictable, which just made me more nervous. Anyway, during the interview I said that typically an agency would contract with us for a group of parks, instead of just one, so the stars could help cover the cost of the dogs. This terminology is from a framework many business school students learn early, often called a BCG matrix (named after the Boston Consulting Group). It is a two by two matrix with market share or profitability on one axis and market growth on the other. Anyway, the profitable high revenue units within a company are stars and the unprofitable stagnant ones are called dogs (the profitable stagnant ones were cash cows and I can't actually remember what was in the fourth box). You can see this nomenclature is so established they actually put little pictures of stars and dogs in the boxes.
Anyway, it was a poor choice of wording, but the nomenclature is wired do deep in my now it just came out. The context of the entire interview was that I cared deeply about the parks and that I was offended that the legislature was going to let them close when there was an easy solution at hand. No matter. The #2 guy at Arizona State Parks took the video and make the rounds of the state park staff, highlighting my use of the word "dog" and inflaming their rank and file that I thought their parks were bad places and I was bent on destroying them, or something. Anyway, none of the Arizona Park Staff I have ever talked to has ever seen an operations manual for their parks but they have all seen the video of me saying "dogs."
Postscript #2: Don't ever think that consulting is different from any other business. When I was an McKinsey, we had piles of frameworks we used (the 7S organization framework being perhaps the most common and actually fairly useful, as its intent was to take focus away from structure alone in organizational work). Anyway, McKinsey had to have a growth-share matrix, but to try to differentiate this product a bit they had a 3x3 matrix rather than a 2x2.
Since I am somehow oddly onto a consulting tangent here, the single most useful thing I garnered from McKinsey was the pyramid principle in persuasive and analytical writing. I have talked to a lot of other ex-McKinsey folks, and almost all of them wonder why the pyramid principle is not taught in high school. I am not a believer in business books -- I am looking around my office and I don't think I see even one here. But if I had to offer one book for someone who wanted a business book, this is it.
Many in New York’s professional and cultural elite have long supported President Obama’s health care plan. But now, to their surprise, thousands of writers, opera singers, music teachers, photographers, doctors, lawyers and others are learning that their health insurance plans are being canceled and they may have to pay more to get comparable coverage, if they can find it.
They are part of an unusual informal health insurance system that has developed in New York in which independent practitioners were able to get lower insurance rates through group plans, typically set up by their professional associations or chambers of commerce. That allowed them to avoid the sky-high rates in New York’s individual insurance market, historically among the most expensive in the country....
The predicament is similar to that of millions of Americans who discovered this fall that their existing policies were being canceled because of the Affordable Care Act. Thecrescendo of outrage led to Mr. Obama’s offer to restore their policies, though some states that have their own exchanges, like California and New York, have said they will not do so.
But while those policies, by and large, had been canceled because they did not meet the law’s requirements for minimum coverage, many of the New York policies being canceled meet and often exceed the standards, brokers say. The rationale for disqualifying those policies, said Larry Levitt, a health policy expert at the Kaiser Family Foundation, was to prevent associations from selling insurance to healthy members who are needed to keep the new health exchanges financially viable.
Siphoning those people, Mr. Levitt said, would leave the pool of health exchange customers “smaller and disproportionately sicker,” and would drive up rates.
Alicia Hartinger, a spokeswoman for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, said independent practitioners “will generally have an equal level of protection in the individual market as they would have if they were buying in the small-group market.” She said the president’s offer to temporarily restore canceled polices applied to association coverage, if states and insurers agreed. New York has no plans to do so.
Donna Frescatore, executive director of New York State of Health, the state insurance exchange, said that on a positive note, about half of those affected would qualify for subsidized insurance under the new health exchange because they had incomes under 400 percent of the poverty level, about $46,000 for an individual.
I still do not understand how anyone could consider it a "positive" that 50% of people who were previously self-reliant now become wards of the state.
I am not sure the exact date it started, but our embargo on Cuba is over fifty years old. At what point do we declare failure?
Sure, the communists and Castro and Che Guevara all suck. But how much longer are we going to punish Cuba's leaders by making their citizens miserable? History has shown that communist countries become less communist by interacting with the (quasi) capitalist democracies. The most stable dictatorships (think North Korea) are those who are the most obsessive in masking alternatives from their citizens. How much longer are we going to continue doing the Castros' work for them?
Open up our relations with Cuba, not because they have somehow gotten better or deserve our respect but because this is the only way they are going to get better.
Ross Douthat in the NYT quoting Patrick Brennan
About one-fourth of the people who have entered their income information on their applications were deemed eligible for subsidies on the exchanges (about 900,000 out of about 3.6 million), which is lower than the number we saw in October alone and remains really far from what was projected. The CBO projected that just 1 million out of the 7 million people to enroll in the exchanges in the first year would be ineligible for subsidies, so the ratio is way off from what was expected (15–75 vs. 75–25). I had some thoughts on that surprising fact a month ago, and I’ll add a couple now: Unsubsidized customers (basically, those above the national median income) are generally savvier and more likely to have the resources to enroll and make their payments ahead of time, so maybe this is understandable and doesn’t say anything about who will eventually enroll. On the other hand, it may demonstrate that the people to whom insurance was supposed to be expanded — the uninsured, who tend to be low-income and not well educated — aren’t getting to the exchanges at all, and covering them will be a much longer term project.
There is a huge, enormous analytical problem with this-- they are looking at entirely the wrong numbers. Incredibly, Meghan McArdle makes this same mistake, and I generally respect her analysis of things. I am going to pull out my summary chart of the Exchange numbers to try to make things clear (click to enlarge):
There are 3 major mistakes, each worse than the one before.
MISTAKE 1: The 3.6 million total applicants number is in line 3 (3,692,599). This is the wrong number. The number he should use is line 4, the number of people who have had their eligibility processed. So the denominator should be 3.1 million, not 3.6 million.
MISTAKE 2: He leaves out the Medicaid piece. Seriously, if we looking at numbers that are partially subsidized, why leave out numbers (Medicaid and CHIP) that are entirely subsidized? This means the applicants eligible for subsidy are 803,077 + 944,531 or 1,747,608 which is 56% of the processed applicant pool. The subsidy number may be lower than expected but I get the sense that the Medicaid percentage is higher than expected.
MISTAKE 3: They are looking at the application pool, not the sign-up or enrollment pool. That is understandable, because the Administration refuses to give the subsidy percentage breakdown of those who have selected a plan (a number which they certainly must have). My guess is that people are putting in applications just to see if they are eligible for subsidies. If not, they quit the exchange process and go back to their broker. That is what I will probably do (out of curiosity, I would never accept taxpayer money for something I am willing to pay for myself). The people who actually sign up for coverage are almost certainly going to skew more towards subsidized than does the applicant pool.
Making reasonable assumptions about the mix of subsidies in the "selected a plan" group, one actually gets numbers of 80-90% Medicare and CHIP and subsidies in the enrollment pool.
I do think McArdle is correct in saying that the uninsured numbers were both exaggerated and mis-characterized. I have been saying that for years.
I can understand the man bites dog appeal of a story about the press turning on Obama. But seriously, their biggest problem with this President's transparency is that he does not allow enough pictures of himself?
I may have mentioned in the past that my wife is on the Board of Ballet Arizona. Phoenix has a reputation as a cultural wasteland, but our Ballet is certainly an exception to this. Our artistic director Ib Andersen is fabulous, garnering top reviews even from the fussy New York press. We have several young dancers, including one young lady who recently defected from Cuba, who are astonishing and whom you should frankly come see now before they are lured away to the bright lights of New York or Washington.
Anyway, they have a promotion running for the Nutcracker this holiday season and have allowed me to offer this same promotion to our readers, with discounts up to 50% on tickets. See this pdf for details: Link Fixed to Ballet Arizona Offer.
I have found home routers to be hugely problematic. Typically, they do OK at basic wired network routing functions, but they often have awful reliability in their wireless connections. Go to any review site, and find their top-rated routers. Then go to Newegg or Amazon and read the reviews for even these best devices -- you will see a litany of unreliability, particularly with the wireless functionality.
Some of this can be chalked up to interference issues, but I possess moderately sophisticated tools for ferreting this out. A bigger problem for me is with routers that have to be reboot every 2-3 days to keep them working. My most recent router I purchased had some software issue where mobile devices like iphones could not access Google.com and a few large sites through the wireless, a problem I eventually decided was due to some issue with handling sites that have dual ipv4 and ipv6 functionality (which I could never fix). My Cisco E3000, otherwise a fairly solid modem, had an awful setup program whose first time settings for things like the guest network could never be altered.
So I finally in desperation burned dd-wrt onto my pile of unsatisfactory routers. DD-WRT is a third-party, free, presumably open-source firmware that works with many commercial routers. So far, all of my old routers now work great, and the prior problems I saw are all gone. DD-WRT lacks the friendly automated setup routines of commercial firmware, and a few things are harder than I would wish them to be (it would be nice to have one-click reservation of an IP address to a device, rather than having to retype its MAC address). But the defaults tend to work fine and it is a huge relief to come home from work and not have to immediatley help diagnose some family network issue. I have been able to re-purpose one of the old routers into a bridge so I can get wireless in my backyard now.
If you have reliability problems with your router or home wireless, this might be something to try. For certain routers, like my Cisco E3000, the process of flashing to DD-WRT is a bit complex. There are lots of web sites and ebay retailers who will sell you modems with dd-wrt already installed, and I think that Buffalo is actually selling a dd-wrt version of one of their routers.
As I did in October, here are the Obamacare Exchange activity numbers to date, based on their recent report. Hopefully this presentation is a lot clearer than the report.
I know the nomenclature is kludgy, but it is the report that is a pain to work with. No CEO would ever let one of his business units get away with this garbage. The report shifts from visitors and applications to people covered by applications, presumably to pump the numbers up. This means, for example, that the 364,682 number of people who have selected a plan is actually the number of people covered by plans that have been selected (yeah, awkward, I know). Given that they have on average 2 people covered per plan in their application pool, the actual number of selected plans is half this number.
That is the kind of cr*p one has to put up with in this report. Further, there is no actual enrollment data, just number of people who have put a plan in their online shopping cart. Worse, they have a split of subdidized vs. unsubsidized in their applicant pool, but not for the plan selections. How many of the selected plans are subsidized. My bet is that it is a high percentage, which is why they won't tell us. Someday we will find that few of these people are actually selecting plans they intend to pay for with their own money.
From the recent exchange activity report (I can't call it their enrollment report because they do not actually report enrollment numbers)
The Administration knows, but refuses to tell us what percentage of the 364,682 are eligible for subsidies. By the unfailing rule of political life, this means the news is bad (ie the percentage subsidized is high). We do know the percentage of applicants who were determined to be eligible for subsidies: 41%. Since a lot of people who go through the process are doing it just to see if they get a subsidy, there is good reason to believe that applicants who actually are selecting policies will be subsidized at a higher rate, but certainly no less than 41%. So using that number we come up with
So, at best, only 18% of the people enrolling** in an exchange are doing so with their own money. 82% or more are doing so partially or entirely with taxpayer money. Note that these are all people, by definition, who were paying for their own health care before, so the one thing the exchanges are definitely doing is converting independent citizens to government dependents at an 80% rate.
By the way, I am pretty sure the CBO did not score the PPACA as being "deficit neutral" based on more than double as many Medicaid applicants as private applicants and a less than 20% unsubisidized rate.
** These are not actual enrollments until the customer pays. Essentially these are the number of people who have put a plan in their online shopping cart.
Three cheers for Greg Patterson holding the media accountable for their past support of costly corporate welfare.
You may have seen the recent Wall Street Journal Story about the financial fiasco that is Glendale Arizona.
Here's the Republic's take on it.
Glendale ranked second in the U.S., according to the story, thanks to a $26.6 million negative fund balance at the close of fiscal 2012, due largely to sports-related debt.
Glendale has made a lot of mistakes, but I think that there is near universal agreement that the critical error was their decision to build the hockey arena.
Yep. I have written about the egregious hockey deals that have bankrupted Glendale on several occasions. George Will even quoted me on the topic.
Greg Patterson went back and looked at what the Arizona Republic was writing before the Glendale deals went so noticeably bad. I have written before about how the media goes into full cheerleader mode on those crony stadium deals.
Before Glendale bankrupted itself to subsidize the hockey team, Scottsdale was offered the "opportunity" to do so and turned it down. The local paper Arizona Republic excoriated Scottsdale for passing on the chance to subsidize rich sports team owners, saying that "Once-in-a-lifetime projects are just that". Here is the best quote from the 2004 Republic editorial:
Our view is that Scottsdale's mishandling of the arena idea was a leadership blunder of biblical proportions. Enough with the blame game. We hope that Scottsdale at least has learned some tough lessons from the disaster.
And this is classic:
Some city officials seemed content to nitpick, complain, second-guess and haggle over details. They're right to be diligent. Certainly nobody endorses a Pollyanna-ish panel of rubber-stampers. But at the same time, people who are forever looking for stuff to complain about always seem to find it.
I bet Glendale wishes it had more second-guessers on its city council. The whole thing is worth reading.
Postscript: This is one recommendation from the Republic I can agree with:
Think twice about ever launching a redevelopment effort like this again. Sensing that the Los Arcos Mall area was hurting economically, the council formed the Los Arcos Redevelopment District in December 1995. The council adopted a redevelopment plan the following July, and the Ellman Cos. subsequently acquired the 42-acre site. Not too surprisingly, Ellman was the only one to answer the city's request for proposals.
Ellman owns the Los Arcos property. That gives him a lot of advantages, including a position of negotiating authority. It allows him to stoke political outrage by wearing down the patience of neighbors who would like to see something built on this key corner. Got a great idea about what should be done at Los Arcos? Too bad. Ellman still owns it. Condemnation is not a viable political or financial course for the city, and Ellman knows it.
Redevelopment almost always means "crony giveaway" nowadays.
I wrote below about Chinese pollution, but here is one other thought. Shifting Chinese focus from reducing CO2 with unproven 21st century technology to reducing particulates with 1970s technology would be a great boon for its citizens. But it could well have one other effect:
It might reverse the warming in the Arctic.
The reduction of Arctic ice sheet size in the summer, and the warming of the Arctic over the last several decades, is generally attributed to greenhouse warming. But there are reasons to doubt that Co2 is the whole story. One is that the sea ice extent in Antarctica has actually been growing at the same time the Arctic sea ice cover has been shrinking. Maybe there is another explanation, one that affects only the northern hemisphere and not the southern?
I don't know if you have snow right now or even ever get snow. If you do, find some black dust, like coal dust or dark dirt, and sprinkle it on a patch of snow. Then come back tomorrow. What will you find? The patch of snow you sprinkled in dark dust melted a lot in comparison to the rest of the snow. This is an albedo effect. Snow takes a while to melt because it reflects rather than absorbs solar radiation. Putting black dust on it changes that equation, and suddenly solar radiation is adsorbed as heat, and the now melts. Fast. I know this because I run a sledding hill in the wintertime, where snow falls on a black cinder hill. The snow will last until even the smallest patch of black cinders is exposed. Once exposed, that small hole will grow like a cancer, as it absorbs solar energy and pumps it into the surrounding ground.
By the way, if you have not snow, Accuweather.com did the experiment for you. See here. Very nice pictures that make the story really clear.
So consider this mess:
Eventually that mess blows away. Where does it end up? Well, a lot of it ends up deposited in the Arctic, on top of the sea ice and Greenland ice sheet.
There is a growing hypothesis that this black carbon deposited on the ice from China is causing much of the sea ice to melt faster. And as the ice sheet melts faster, this lowers the albedo of the arctic, and creates warming. In this hypothesis, warming follows from ice melting, rather than vice versa.
How do we test this? Well, the best way would be to go out and actually measure the deposits and calculate the albedo changes from this. My sense is that this work is starting to be done (example), but it has been slow, because everyone who is interested in Arctic ice of late are strong global warming proponents who have incentives not to find an alternative explanation for melting ice.
But here are two quick mental experiments we can do:
This is by no means a proof -- there are other explanations for the same data. But I am convinced we would see at least a partial sea ice recovery in the Arctic if China could get their particulate emissions under control.
Update: Melt ponds in Greenland are black with coal dust
I have not written much about climate of late because my interest, err, runs hot and cold. As most readers know, I am in the lukewarmer camp, meaning that I accept that Co2 is a greenhouse gas but believe that catastrophic warming forecasts are greatly exaggerated (in large part by scientifically unsupportable assumptions of strong net positive feedback in the climate system). If what I just said is in any way news to you, read this and this for background.
Anyway, one thing I have been saying for about 8 years is that when the history of the environmental movement is written, the global warming obsession will be considered a great folly. This is because global warming has sucked all the air out of almost anything else in the environmental movement. For God sakes, the other day the Obama Administration OK'd the wind industry killing more protected birds in a month than the oil industry has killed in its entire history. Every day the rain forest in the Amazon is cleared away a bit further to make room for ethanol-making crops.
This picture demonstrates a great example of what I mean. Here is a recent photo from China:
You might reasonably say, well that pollution is from the burning of fossil fuels, and the global warming folks want to reduce fossil fuel use, so aren't they trying to fight this? And the answer is yes, tangentially. But here is the problem: It is an order of magnitude or more cheaper to eliminate polluting byproducts of fossil fuel combustion than it is to eliminate fossil fuel combustion altogether.
What do I mean? China gets a lot of pressure to reduce its carbon emissions, since it is the largest emitter in the world. So it might build a wind project, or some solar, or some expensive high speed rail to reduce fossil fuel use. Let's say any one of these actions reduces smog and sulfur dioxide and particulate pollution (as seen in this photo) by X through reduction in fossil fuel use. Now, let's take whatever money we spent in, say, a wind project to get X improvement and instead invest it in emissions control technologies that the US has used for decades (coal plant scrubbers, gasoline blending changes, etc) -- invest in making fossil fuel use cleaner, not in eliminating it altogether. This same money invested in this way would get 10X, maybe even up to 100X improvement in these emissions.
By pressuring China on carbon, we have unwittingly helped enable their pollution problem. We are trying to get them to do 21st century things that the US can't even figure out how to do economically when in actuality what they really need to be doing is 1970's things that would be relatively easy to do and would have a much bigger impact on their citizen's well-being.
Local blogger Greg Patterson writes:
The Wall Street Journal is reporting that Gannett will soon be adding USA Today to it's local papers.
With this change, the Republic and USA Today are essentially a hybrid. As print revenue continues to slide the USA Today side will grow and the Republic side will shrink. Eventually, your morning Republic will consist of a copy of USA Today with enhanced local coverage.
This is a change I have expected for a long time. The wire services have always existed as an attempt by local papers to share costs in national and international news gathering, but I would have expected this next step of national consolidation some time ago. The internet allows not just the text, but the entire layout of newspapers to be transmitted instantly across the country.
The whole situation reminds me of television broadcasting, where local affiliates exist mainly as a byproduct of past technological limitations in signal transmission. Satellite and cable have eliminated these restrictions, but still local affiliates exist, in part because there is some demand for local content but in part because of the fact that the government protects their existence (by law, cable and satellite operators must give you the local affiliate, they cannot give you the national feed).
This is what I wrote back in 2009
I actually think the problem with newspapers like the Washington Post is the "Washington" part. Local business models dominated for decades in fields where technology made national distribution difficult or where technology did not allow for anything but a very local economy of scale. Newspapers, delivery of television programming, auto sales, beverage bottling and distribution, book selling, etc. were all mainly local businesses. But you can see with this list that technology is changing everything. TV can now be delivered via sattelite and does not require local re-distribution via line of sight broadcast towers or cable systems. Amazon dominated book selling via the Internet. Many of these businesses (e.g. liquor, auto dealers, TV broadcasting) would have de-localized faster if it had not been for politicians in the pocket of a few powerful companies passing laws to lock in outdated business or technological models.
Newspapers are ripe for a restructuring. How can one support a great Science page or Book Review section or International Bureau on local circulation? How much effort do the NY Times, Washington Post, LA Times, SF Chronicle, etc. duplicate every day? People tell me, "that's what the wire services are for." Bah. The AP is 160 years old! It is a pre-Civil War solution to this problem. Can it really be that technology and changing markets have not facilitated a better solution?
The future is almost certainly a number of national papers (ala the WSJ and USA Today) printed locally with perhaps local offices to provide some local customization or special local section. Paradoxically, such a massive consolidation from hundreds of local papers to a few national papers would actually increase competition. While we might get a few less stories about cats being saved from trees in the local paper, we could well end up not with one paper selection (as we have today in most cities) but five or six different papers to choose from (just look at Britain). Some of these papers might choose to sell political neutrality while some might compete on political affiliation.
Nothing seems to obsess general managers (and fans) as much as the home run. And with the steroid era (maybe) in the past, there are a lot fewer of those out there to find. Which means that given the perhaps irrationally high demand and the declining supply, the price for them is going to go up. Which is a very good reason to be skeptical of deals for power hitters.
Unfortunately, the Diamondbacks just can't quite get over their sense that they need more power on the team. So they have made a deal to acquire Mark Trumbo from the Angels. To my eye, Trumbo is the reincarnation of former Diamondback Mark Reynolds -- 30-35 home runs, a batting average south of .250, and nearly 200 strikeouts a year. I wouldn't take this kind of player if you gave him to me. He is an inning killer who manages to hit one out of the park every five games or so. I suppose he is cheap in money terms (has a couple of years until free agency) but we traded two good players who had down years last year. In stock market terms, we are selling at the bottom and buying at the top.
I have a new column up at Forbes.com, and it addresses an issue that has bothered me for a while, specifically:
Do we really care about income inequality, or do we care about absolute well-being of our citizens? Because as I will show today, these are not necessarily the same thing.
What has always frustrated me about income inequality arguments is that no one ever seems to compare the actual income numbers of the poor between countries. Sure, the US is more unequal, and I suppose from this we are supposed to infer that the poor in the US are worse off than in “more equal” countries, but is this so? Why do we almost never see a comparison across countries of absolute well-being?
I have never been able to find a good data source to do this analysis, though I must admit I probably did not look that hard. But then Kevin Drum (in a post titled “America is the stingiest rich country in the world”) and John Cassidy in the New Yorker pointed me to something called the LIS database, which has cross-country income and demographic data. I can't vouch for the data quality, but it has the income distribution data and it struck me as appropriate to respond to Drum and Cassidy with their own data.
In short, Cassidy made the point that the Gini coefficient (a statistical measure of income inequality) was higher in the US than for most other wealthy western countries. Drum made the further point that the US is "stingy" because we do the least to coercively alter this pattern through forced redistribution.
But all we ever see are Gini's are ratios. We never, ever see a direct comparison of income levels between countries. So I did that with the data. I won't reiterate the whole article here, but here is a sample of the analysis, in this case for Sweden which has one of the lowest Gini ratios of western nations and which Drum ranks as among the least "stingy". This is the model to which the Left wants us to aspire:
I argue that the purchasing power parity(ppp) numbers are the right way to look at this since we are comparing well-being, and on this basis Sweden may be more equal, but more than 90% of the people in the US are better off. Sweden does not have a lower Gini because their poor are better off (in fact, if you consider the bottom quartile, the poor are better off in the US).
We are going to see months of obsession by the Left and Obama over income inequality -- but which country would you rather live in, even if you were poor?
Read the whole thing, there are lots of other interesting charts.
Diana Wang accepted a job. The terms of that employment were very clear up front -- like most interns, she would be paid in skills and experience and resume fodder rather than money. The employer provided exactly the promised terms. So Diana Wang sued her employer. Now she is having trouble finding anyone to hire her. Wow, that is sure unexpected. Maybe she could go work for Obama's OFA, except (lol) they don't pay their interns either.
Because the government exempts itself from the most basic rules that apply to private companies.
Raising concerns about consumer privacy, California's health exchange has given insurance agents the names and contact information for tens of thousands of people who went online to check out coverage but didn't ask to be contacted.
The Covered California exchange said it started handing out this consumer information this week as part of a pilot program to help people enroll ahead of a Dec. 23 deadline to have health insurance in place by Jan. 1.
State officials said they are only trying to help potential customers find insurance and sign up in time. But some insurance brokers and consumers who were contacted said they were astonished by the state's move.
"I'm shocked and dumbfounded," said Sam Smith, an Encino insurance broker and president of the California Assn. of Health Underwriters, an industry group.
Smith said he was under the impression from the exchange that these consumers had requested assistance. He received the names of two consumers this week but has not yet contacted them.
"These people would have a legitimate complaint," Smith said.
The names provided include people who started an insurance application on the Covered California website since enrollment launched Oct. 1, but for whatever reason never picked a health plan or completed the sign-up process.
The state said it provided information on tens of thousands of people who logged into the state's website, but it didn't know the exact number.
The exchange said agents were given names, addresses, phone numbers and email addresses if available.
