I'm only keeping up with the "fiscal cliff" discussions for reasons of amusement, since everything that is in public at this point is nonsense and sensationalism. What's fun is watching everyone freak out about it. My favorite at the moment is a reaction of one commenter on a relatively secluded blog to a criticism of Obama, asking "How dare you cut the ground out from under President Obama in the middle of his negotiations?"
Yes, I'm sure every Republican member of Congress read that comment and will act based upon the content of it. Come on people, how big a shovel do you think any one of us has? I suspect the ground under Obama is pretty firm no matter how vigorously my little shovel pecks away at it.
Wednesday, December 19, 2012
Tuesday, December 18, 2012
Safety Last
The greatest fear in a ship at sea is fire. That is as true on the steel ships of today as it was on the wooden ships in the age of sail. Especially on a submarine submerged, but on any ship at sea, when you are faced with fire there is nowhere to run. Fire can back you into a dead end in a heartbeat, and it can run through passageways faster than the most fleet of foot. Fire is the nightmare that makes you wake up screaming.
There was a reason that our shipboard uniforms were 100% cotton. Synthetic fabric melts before it burns. It melts into the flesh of the person wearing it, and then it burns within that flesh, inflicting deep and terrible burns, often right down to the bone.
Today’s Navy has gone deeply stupid, because I read today that those idiotic camouflage working uniforms that they wear today are 50% nylon and only 50% cotton. Not surprisingly, they burn, and our sailors wear
them every day on US Navy ships at sea.
From rock and tempest, fire and foe,
Protect them wheresoe'er they go;
Oh, hear us when we cry to Thee,
For those in peril on the sea.
Not to mention from the fucking idiots who specify and buy their uniforms.
There was a reason that our shipboard uniforms were 100% cotton. Synthetic fabric melts before it burns. It melts into the flesh of the person wearing it, and then it burns within that flesh, inflicting deep and terrible burns, often right down to the bone.
Today’s Navy has gone deeply stupid, because I read today that those idiotic camouflage working uniforms that they wear today are 50% nylon and only 50% cotton. Not surprisingly, they burn, and our sailors wear
them every day on US Navy ships at sea.
From rock and tempest, fire and foe,Protect them wheresoe'er they go;
Oh, hear us when we cry to Thee,
For those in peril on the sea.
Not to mention from the fucking idiots who specify and buy their uniforms.
Math Without Numbers
I had a thermodynamics instructor in Nuclear Power school who would set up a heat transfer problem on the blackboard, cross out the numbers, and then proceed to solve the problem with nothing but the units of measure. He claimed that numbers didn’t matter. No, his name was not Paul Krugman.
Krugman has a blog post today that discusses the merits of the “budget deal” that appears to be on the table at the moment. Read it and see if you can point out the huge glaring error that pervades the whole thing. It’s an elephant, sitting so squarely in the middle that you cannot miss it. Give up?
He makes almost no mention whatever of the effect that any aspect of the deal will have on the federal budget or the deficit. He posits initially that “the question is whether the end justifies the means,” and then he discusses the means and never weighs them against the end.
This is supposed to be about federal deficit reduction, but only once does he talk about how effectively any part of the deal will actually reduce the federal deficit, and even then only nonspecifically, when he says that “there’s more revenue in this deal than you get from letting the high-end tax cuts expire after the cliff.” Other than that his discussion is about the social fairness of one tax cut versus another, without evaluating which one will have more impact on the budget.
There’s also a rather high degree of idiocy in that “letting the high-end tax cuts expire after the cliff” thing. Those “high end” tax cuts cannot expire without all the rest of the Bush tax cuts expiring along with them, so Obama cannot, as Krugman suggests, simply “let the high-end tax cuts expire after the cliff.”
And when Krugman gets to Social Security he fails to observe that it should not even be part of this discussion because Social Security is not part of the federal budget and has no impact on the federal deficit at all. Cutting Social Security to reduce the deficit is like saying that you are going to mow your lawn in order to save electricity, or buy a car to save water in your home. Paul Krugman fails to say that, he merely says that switching to the “chained CPI” for cost of living increases for Social Security “doesn’t affect benefits immediately after retirement.”
He does go on to advocate against this suggestion “because the savings won’t have any significant impact on the underlying budget issues,” whatever the hell that means. The proper argument is not some mealy mouthed economic gibberish, but rather a clear statement that “Social Security has nothing whatever to do with the federal deficit.”
Paul Krugman does know that fact, right?
Few people remember that when the Simpson-Bowles commission was formed to come up with ways to balance the federal budget, Social Security was specifically excluded from their purview because it is not part of the federal budget. They decided to include it in their report anyway; the reasons for that are a whole different subject, but their report was not supposed to include the Social Security program.
So Krugman’s position is that the budget negotiations should be conducted based on how socially fair the components are, and not on how effectively they serve the purpose for which the discussions are being held. Yes, Krugman would think that.
Krugman has a blog post today that discusses the merits of the “budget deal” that appears to be on the table at the moment. Read it and see if you can point out the huge glaring error that pervades the whole thing. It’s an elephant, sitting so squarely in the middle that you cannot miss it. Give up?
He makes almost no mention whatever of the effect that any aspect of the deal will have on the federal budget or the deficit. He posits initially that “the question is whether the end justifies the means,” and then he discusses the means and never weighs them against the end.
This is supposed to be about federal deficit reduction, but only once does he talk about how effectively any part of the deal will actually reduce the federal deficit, and even then only nonspecifically, when he says that “there’s more revenue in this deal than you get from letting the high-end tax cuts expire after the cliff.” Other than that his discussion is about the social fairness of one tax cut versus another, without evaluating which one will have more impact on the budget.
There’s also a rather high degree of idiocy in that “letting the high-end tax cuts expire after the cliff” thing. Those “high end” tax cuts cannot expire without all the rest of the Bush tax cuts expiring along with them, so Obama cannot, as Krugman suggests, simply “let the high-end tax cuts expire after the cliff.”
And when Krugman gets to Social Security he fails to observe that it should not even be part of this discussion because Social Security is not part of the federal budget and has no impact on the federal deficit at all. Cutting Social Security to reduce the deficit is like saying that you are going to mow your lawn in order to save electricity, or buy a car to save water in your home. Paul Krugman fails to say that, he merely says that switching to the “chained CPI” for cost of living increases for Social Security “doesn’t affect benefits immediately after retirement.”
He does go on to advocate against this suggestion “because the savings won’t have any significant impact on the underlying budget issues,” whatever the hell that means. The proper argument is not some mealy mouthed economic gibberish, but rather a clear statement that “Social Security has nothing whatever to do with the federal deficit.”
Paul Krugman does know that fact, right?
Few people remember that when the Simpson-Bowles commission was formed to come up with ways to balance the federal budget, Social Security was specifically excluded from their purview because it is not part of the federal budget. They decided to include it in their report anyway; the reasons for that are a whole different subject, but their report was not supposed to include the Social Security program.
So Krugman’s position is that the budget negotiations should be conducted based on how socially fair the components are, and not on how effectively they serve the purpose for which the discussions are being held. Yes, Krugman would think that.
Monday, December 17, 2012
Militias and Armies
Again we are embroiled in heated discussion about gun control, something about which I have no particularly strong opinion. Perhaps it would be better to say that my opinion is sufficiently divided, having to do with preservation of constitutional civil liberties, reality and practicality, that I simply prefer to leave the discussion alone.
And again the meaning of the phrase about “a well regulated militia” in the second amendment is being argued vociferously. The argument is moot, since the Supreme Court ruled some time ago that the amendment clearly guarantees the right to individuals, but still we argue as to what the founders meant by that clause.
I flunked mind reading in high school, something that has frequently played havoc with my dating career (and we won’t talk about its effect on my marriage), so I won’t claim to know what they meant by it.
I do know that the founders had a major revulsion to the new nation maintaining a standing army, something which they forbade in the body of the constitution, so I have to wonder if that had something to do with it. Maybe they just saw an opportunity to make sure that a militia was maintained as a hedge against the government finding an excuse to create a standing army.
Obviously that didn’t work out very well, but…
And again the meaning of the phrase about “a well regulated militia” in the second amendment is being argued vociferously. The argument is moot, since the Supreme Court ruled some time ago that the amendment clearly guarantees the right to individuals, but still we argue as to what the founders meant by that clause.
I flunked mind reading in high school, something that has frequently played havoc with my dating career (and we won’t talk about its effect on my marriage), so I won’t claim to know what they meant by it.
I do know that the founders had a major revulsion to the new nation maintaining a standing army, something which they forbade in the body of the constitution, so I have to wonder if that had something to do with it. Maybe they just saw an opportunity to make sure that a militia was maintained as a hedge against the government finding an excuse to create a standing army.
Obviously that didn’t work out very well, but…
Sunday, December 16, 2012
Voodoo Economics
Paul Krugman is still using voodoo economics to explain why we should endlessly borrow money to operate the government at a deficit. I don’t know where he gets this stuff, but he certainly did not get it from John Maynard Keynes. In his blog yesterday he says that, “For starters, we need to be aware that we don’t need a balanced budget to have a stable fiscal situation; all we need is for debt to grow no faster than GDP.”
This is his theory that suggests that if your boss gives you a raise you should immediately go out and borrow more money, because the more money you make the more money you should owe. He’s not alone in this, many economists think the same, but everyone believes him because he’s from Princeton and he has a Nobel Prize. So does Barack Obama, for spreading peace around the world.
There might be a shred of validity to his theory if GDP measured wealth, but it doesn’t; it measures cash flow. If I’m paying you $10 to mow my lawn and you decide to charge $15 instead, then my contribution to the GDP has increased, but no capital has been accumulated and no wealth has been created by that change. There is merely half again as much money flowing.
So what Krugman is saying is that the more money you spend the more you should owe. There is some truth to that, because the more money you spend the more money you will owe unless your income goes up, which is sort of what budgets are all about. Who budgets with the intention of going ever deeper into debt? If I can’t afford to pay you $15 to mow my lawn then I should not agree to the increased charge unless I get a pay raise. What I should not do is borrow $5 every time you mow my damned lawn.
Not to mention that the GDP includes the deficit spending, so Krugman is including the increase in the deficit spending to justify the increase in borrowing, which is sort of a self licking ice cream cone. We are spending more borrowed money, therefor we should borrow more money. I just shot myself in the foot, therefor I need more bullets.
And just to burn the toast a little more, an increase in GDP can be and often is caused by nothing more than inflation, which John Maynard Keynes abhorred. In fact half of the GDP growth that Krugman illustrates is inflation, as he says, “estimates of long-run growth and inflation put them at a bit more than 2 and 2 respectively,” and then claims GDP growth of 4% annually in his argument. So if the economy is weakened by inflation, lets use that as justification to weaken it further by increasing the federal deficit. Or to put it another way, our borrowed money no longer buys as much so lets borrow more money.
He has not yet claimed that we should borrow more money because the Sun is still rising in the East, but I have no doubt he’ll get there soon.
This is his theory that suggests that if your boss gives you a raise you should immediately go out and borrow more money, because the more money you make the more money you should owe. He’s not alone in this, many economists think the same, but everyone believes him because he’s from Princeton and he has a Nobel Prize. So does Barack Obama, for spreading peace around the world.
There might be a shred of validity to his theory if GDP measured wealth, but it doesn’t; it measures cash flow. If I’m paying you $10 to mow my lawn and you decide to charge $15 instead, then my contribution to the GDP has increased, but no capital has been accumulated and no wealth has been created by that change. There is merely half again as much money flowing.
So what Krugman is saying is that the more money you spend the more you should owe. There is some truth to that, because the more money you spend the more money you will owe unless your income goes up, which is sort of what budgets are all about. Who budgets with the intention of going ever deeper into debt? If I can’t afford to pay you $15 to mow my lawn then I should not agree to the increased charge unless I get a pay raise. What I should not do is borrow $5 every time you mow my damned lawn.
Not to mention that the GDP includes the deficit spending, so Krugman is including the increase in the deficit spending to justify the increase in borrowing, which is sort of a self licking ice cream cone. We are spending more borrowed money, therefor we should borrow more money. I just shot myself in the foot, therefor I need more bullets.
And just to burn the toast a little more, an increase in GDP can be and often is caused by nothing more than inflation, which John Maynard Keynes abhorred. In fact half of the GDP growth that Krugman illustrates is inflation, as he says, “estimates of long-run growth and inflation put them at a bit more than 2 and 2 respectively,” and then claims GDP growth of 4% annually in his argument. So if the economy is weakened by inflation, lets use that as justification to weaken it further by increasing the federal deficit. Or to put it another way, our borrowed money no longer buys as much so lets borrow more money.
He has not yet claimed that we should borrow more money because the Sun is still rising in the East, but I have no doubt he’ll get there soon.
Saturday, December 15, 2012
Start At The Top
Of the Portland shooting it was said that “it could have been so much worse,” and then in Connecticut it was so much worse. As the lady responded when asked what could you say to a parent who had lost a child, “There are no words.” And yet President Obama found just the right words. He was genuine and moving, and it was one of the few times recently that I felt a real connection with him
While I am not opposed to gun control, own no guns myself, am only indifferently supportive of the second amendment, and utterly loathe the NRA, I think the problem goes deeper than guns. A sickness is creeping over this country and one symptom of that illness is an ever growing worship of violence and death.
We use assassination as an instrument of foreign policy. Our president used “Osama bin Laden is dead” as a campaign slogan; a slogan which everywhere met with great cheers. We strongly support the raining down of Hellfire missiles into villages of nations with which we are not at war, targeting people whose names we do not even know. Our president meets weekly to manage the “kill list” of those we do know, ordering execution without any process of law. We support the use of torture when it is done for the purpose of “keeping us safe.”
Our government has been engaged in continuous wars for more than a decade; wars that are demonstrably unjust or for which no meaningful reason can be given. We cannot even name the number of people who have been killed, injured or driven out of their home countries by our wars, other than that it is in the tens of millions. We have, and continue to maintain, a war machine bigger than the rest of the world combined, and we use it as a threat to implement “regime change” for any nation that displeases us.
At home we imprison more people than any nation in the world, do so in inhumane conditions, and we use capital punishment.
Government and the media endlessly warn us of terrorists, foreign and domestic, lurking everywhere waiting for the moment when they can deploy their “weapons of mass destruction” and kill us all. They make dramatic presentations of mass death and destruction which they have prevented with their “stings” here at home, and write news items of the “suspected militants” that were killed by Hellfire missiles overseas. They seldom mention the women and children who were slaughtered by those missiles.
We do not have discussions of differing ideas, we spew intolerance and hatred, regard those who disagree with us as evil and call them terrorists. We pontificate on the victimization of the common man, one side painting government as the evil party, and the other demonizing big business and the rich, but both portraying the vanishing middle class as the powerless and helpless party being preyed upon by others.
The fear and frustration, the sense of helplessness, turns all too often to irrational anger, and then to rage. Perhaps we should be grateful that such rage does not get unleashed more often.
But to reduce violence we need to start at the top. Start by eliminating the violence engaged in by our leaders. Stop the violence and death which is being done in our name.
While I am not opposed to gun control, own no guns myself, am only indifferently supportive of the second amendment, and utterly loathe the NRA, I think the problem goes deeper than guns. A sickness is creeping over this country and one symptom of that illness is an ever growing worship of violence and death.
We use assassination as an instrument of foreign policy. Our president used “Osama bin Laden is dead” as a campaign slogan; a slogan which everywhere met with great cheers. We strongly support the raining down of Hellfire missiles into villages of nations with which we are not at war, targeting people whose names we do not even know. Our president meets weekly to manage the “kill list” of those we do know, ordering execution without any process of law. We support the use of torture when it is done for the purpose of “keeping us safe.”
Our government has been engaged in continuous wars for more than a decade; wars that are demonstrably unjust or for which no meaningful reason can be given. We cannot even name the number of people who have been killed, injured or driven out of their home countries by our wars, other than that it is in the tens of millions. We have, and continue to maintain, a war machine bigger than the rest of the world combined, and we use it as a threat to implement “regime change” for any nation that displeases us.
At home we imprison more people than any nation in the world, do so in inhumane conditions, and we use capital punishment.
Government and the media endlessly warn us of terrorists, foreign and domestic, lurking everywhere waiting for the moment when they can deploy their “weapons of mass destruction” and kill us all. They make dramatic presentations of mass death and destruction which they have prevented with their “stings” here at home, and write news items of the “suspected militants” that were killed by Hellfire missiles overseas. They seldom mention the women and children who were slaughtered by those missiles.
We do not have discussions of differing ideas, we spew intolerance and hatred, regard those who disagree with us as evil and call them terrorists. We pontificate on the victimization of the common man, one side painting government as the evil party, and the other demonizing big business and the rich, but both portraying the vanishing middle class as the powerless and helpless party being preyed upon by others.
The fear and frustration, the sense of helplessness, turns all too often to irrational anger, and then to rage. Perhaps we should be grateful that such rage does not get unleashed more often.
But to reduce violence we need to start at the top. Start by eliminating the violence engaged in by our leaders. Stop the violence and death which is being done in our name.
Friday, December 14, 2012
Illiberal Discourse
I was sufficiently optimistic to suppose that once the election was past that the overheated rhetoric would calm down. For some, sadly, it has become even more heated. A liberal blogger that I have enjoyed following for some time today compares modern conservatives to the slave holders of 1861, and equates Republican leadership to the mass murderers of 9/11. When I said I thought he was going to an extreme, his response was to "stand by what I said." He has a right to do that of course, and I have a right to quit reading him and to remove him from my blogroll.
Blogging is becoming more difficult these days, in part because of the environment in which I do it. Writing is hard work, and too often any more the only ones willing to engage in it are people whose source of energy is irrational rage directed at anyone who disagrees with them.
I have always tried to inject a note of reason into heated discourse, but increasingly discourse has strayed so far from reality that I am sensing that reason is not wanted; that irrationality has become the purpose of discourse. I may write less frequently for a few days and think about why I'm doing this.
Blogging is becoming more difficult these days, in part because of the environment in which I do it. Writing is hard work, and too often any more the only ones willing to engage in it are people whose source of energy is irrational rage directed at anyone who disagrees with them.
I have always tried to inject a note of reason into heated discourse, but increasingly discourse has strayed so far from reality that I am sensing that reason is not wanted; that irrationality has become the purpose of discourse. I may write less frequently for a few days and think about why I'm doing this.
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