Silicon Valley Redneck

Being There

(Not related to Chauncey Gardiner.  Or is it?  I ramble, you decipher.)

At WaPo, Jennifer Rubin quotes Elliott Abrams:

The argument seems to be that peace is possible because Kerry has relationships with leaders, Kerry is trusted, Kerry was in the Senate for 30 years, Kerry chaired the Foreign Relations Committee, and Kerry was on the White House lawn when Rabin shook hands with Arafat. So our job is to have faith in him, and if we believe that peace is possible, it will come.

Abrams calls this the "Tinkerbell Effect", and follows it in one direction.

I'll just go off on a tangent here, and point to the Being There effect.  Kerry Was In All The Right Places.  Just as Hillary Was In All The Right Places.  Having been in all the right places, and in the same room with Important People, makes one competent, does it not?

By which logic, of course, hanging out at filksings makes me a songwriter.  And associating with retired soldiers makes me an expert military adviser.

Unfortunately, this sort of competence-by-association seems to be common in the wonderful world of social networking, which dominates politics (regardless of party) and business (outside, perhaps, of a few fields in which actual competence can readily be assessed*).

And that's how we end up with the political class we have.  And the management class**.

 

* It's easy to screen, e.g., actors and concert violinists for competence.  Some companies try to screen engineers before hiring them; I've occasionally been involved in the process, from both sides.  But a CEO?  You'd think his track record would matter, but that appears not to be the case, given the walking disaster areas who keep finding new employment even as the companies in their care implode.

** I know my management skills are basically nonexistent.  Managers are highly confident in their skills, because they've been to the right schools and taken the right classes; the concept of outcome-based evaluation does not apply, so there's no cause for doubt.

Now, here's an exercise in irrelevance

Mr. Justice Stevens proposes to insert a few words into the Second Amendment, thus:

“A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms when serving in the Militia shall not be infringed.”

Now, this goes to the heart of the collective-rights interpretation of the Second Amendment... and the reason this interpretation is absurd in the first place.

According to the Collectivists, the Second Amendment is only meant to prevent the Federal Government from disarming the various State militias.  But, since the State militia powers were already spelled out in the body of the constitution, this makes no sense, unless one believes that those powers might only apply to some sort of unarmed militia, whatever that might be*.

So: were we to make the proposed change, what, exactly, would the New! Improved! Second Amendment mean?

1. The Federal Government is forbidden to disarm itself?
2. Soldiers on active duty are allowed to carry weapons?

OK, so interpretation (2) is already being violated.  So this totally makes sense, right?  The whole purpose of the Second Amendment is to prevent military bases becoming victim-disarmament zones?

 

And here's a happy thought:

Constitutional provisions that curtail the legislative power to govern in this area unquestionably do more harm than good.

For any currently fashionable value of "this area", right?

 

Considering some of the logic that comes out of the courts, maybe we should pick judges at random out of phone books.  Hey, if we have that Constitutional Convention, there's an amendment I'd like to suggest**!

 

* I suppose I shouldn't laugh; considering some of the amazing feats of sophistry demonstrated by the Court over the past couple of centuries, "unarmed militia" might not be much of a stretch.

** Along with picking legislators the same way.  And going back to picking juries that way, as opposed to carefully screening them.

Ponderment: occupational qualifications

Let's have a look at some trades, and the consequences of a mistake.

• If a surgeon makes a mistake, the patient may die.
• If an aeronautical engineer makes a mistake, a few hundred people may die.
• Likewise, an airline pilot.
• If a civil engineer makes a mistake, thousands may die (poorly designed office tower, large apartment complex, or similar, in the event of a fire, earthquake, or other sudden complication).
• If a social engineer (politician, diplomat, or central planner) makes a mistake, millions may die (WWI, WWII, Great Leap Forward, Holodomor, ...).

Now, look back at that list and ponder the academic background typical for each trade, and the occupational training and licensing requirements.  And consider which courses of study have rigid standards, and which are subject to grade inflation.

This ponderment brought to you by The Silicon Graybeard and Coyote Blog.

On staying home

Da Tech Guy has a poll, for GOP / Tea Party types: which potential Presidential candidates would make you stay home and let the Democrat win by default?

Results are pretty much in line with the way I voted, plus a few upvoted losers whose names I vaguely recognize without actually knowing enough to reject them out of hand.  Note that prominent SoCons seems to be getting a lot of reject-votes.

And: ordinarily, while I wouldn't put Allen West in "stay home" territory, I'd figure he needs to mellow considerably before I'd want him as President.  And, maybe, he'll be ready by 2016.  But, right now?  Maybe what we need in the White House now, indeed last year, is a patriotic hothead with a good supply of levelheaded (and competent) advisers.

Only vaguely off topic: I just had a chat with a twentysomething who, after a careful exchange of coded countersigns, turned out to be a minarchist with plans to relocate to Montana.  Going for the younger, high-information voters?  Don't be Big Brother.

This calls for a song parody

The latest Actively Disengaged comic is just crying out for "The Terrorist", to the tune of "The Idiot" by Stan Rogers.

But I like being free and that makes me a terrorist, I suppose.

Sorry, nothing beyond that one line just now.  Needs someone with time on his hands.  And, maybe, talent or something.  Fill in NH, or TX, or perhaps TN, ND, or SD as the destination, and CA as the origin....

Afterthought, after putting on a Stan Rogers CD en route to morning walkies: the perspective needs reversing, too, from "it's dry, dusty, brown, and horribly industrial here, but at least I have a job" to "it's all green, and I have elbow room, and the cost of living is low, but at least I can go out at night to look at the stars without getting arrested."

Sensationalism

Three years since that incident in Japan, there's this:

To be precise, three reactors had outright meltdowns or, more correctly, melt-throughs. One, Reactor No. 4, broke beyond repair and posed further catastrophe. Two others simply stopped dead. Within hours, one of the melt-throughs exploded, spewing lethal radioactive waste into the air, soil, underground water veins and, steadily, into the Pacific. Some eighteen thousand and five hundred souls died that cold March day. Many of the dead remain missing even now.

Nice juxtaposition there.  Nuke plants broken, 18500 people dead.  'Course, the body count where actual nuclear power plants were involved was, if memory, serves, one: a worker hit by falling debris.

Onward!

Why were the spent rods—so many of them—stored on top of the reactors? Who at General Electric was responsible for that design innovation? Was it conceived for expediency, to save money, or from an attitude of utter hubris against the force of nature?

Or maybe... just maybe... the short-term storage pools were placed right next to the top of the reactor (where the used fuel comes out) to minimize handling and exposure of fresh, high-level waste...?  Nah.  Too implausible.  Must be some nefarious reason.

During all that time, invisible odorless particles with unspeakable consequences have been descending over the region every time rain or snow falls.

ZOMG!  Radioactive COOTIES!  Wait, is this the H. P. Lovecraft memorial writing competition?

Man!  This whole thing needs a righteous fisking by someone who really speaks nuke power and isn't trying to eat his lunch.  Maybe I'll refer it to the W.O.R.M.

Update: W.O.R.M. sighting!

Afterthought: Hoover doesn't usally publish stuff that sucks like this.  I think that's normally left to the Electrolux Foundation.

Ah, the voice of a special interest

From this item at El Reg:

According to Doerr, it would be a "game-changer" to exempt fiber installation from environmental laws. "Property values would go up," he said. "Create more jobs. Create more competition. All good."

Uh-huh.  Environmental laws make business unreasonably difficult... so my favored business should have an exemption.  Everybody else should continue struggling.

You want a conspiracy theory?

It seems 9/11 trutherism is alive and well, and newly respectable or something.

Tales are cropping up, again, of how even a bloody huge fire couldn't have brought down a modern skyscraper, what with its huge safety margins, so the towers must have been intentionally weakened in the months leading up to the attacks.

And the work of weakening the structures, placing demolition charges, and so on, effectively concealed from the thousands of people who worked there every freaking day.

Try this on for size. Look at the remains of the #1-#4 reactor buildings at Fukushima Daiichi, e.g., here.  Note that two of these things are not like the others.  And, were you to dig around, you'd find that the #1 building (and, apparently, #2) was built according to the standard design.  #3 and #4 were built very differently, and without the ability to vent overpressure from a hydrogen explosion.

So, big safety issue with the basic construction of the later buildings.  And no one squawked at the time.  At a freaking nuclear power plant.  Presumably concrete castings all the way up was cheaper and easier than having the special panels-over-framework structure for the top story, but it's not the way it's supposed to be built, and there's a reason for that.

Back to the World Trade Center.  Which is more plausible: that the buildings were intentionally weakened in great secrecy from all the people working there in 2001... or that they were built weak in the first place?

Suppose you're a skyscraper builder.  Which is more profitable: to build exactly according to spec, with the very finest materials and an absurd safety margin, or to build more cheaply, with a good-enough safety margin, and bribe every building inspector in the city?

Think carefully.

And, were it true that the Twin Towers were of substandard construction... ya think the whole thing would be hushed up?  Because it would involve epic corruption, and maybe a lot of other skyscrapers weren't built to spec?

No, I don't have any insight as to the plausibility of the Standard Model (i.e., the impacts and fires weakened the built-as-designed structures until they collapsed as seen) vs. the notion that there had to be something else involved.

But, if you're going to insist that the buildings must have been tampered with, I think this is a more plausible explanation.

One might think so, but...

Jonah Goldberg sez:

Moreover, when rich people get their way at the local level, people usually know who they are and why they are doing things. And you can bend their ear at the supermarket or at soccer practice.

Methinks he doth misunderestimate the cunning of our rulers.

Around here, decisions one might normally expect to be made by elected city councils, such as zoning, are increasingly driven by metagovernmental agencies whose members never appear on any ballot seen by ordinary voters.

Thus do the plutocrats hide their involvement - that, and supporting "public interest" groups that advocate policies that just happen to benefit the very rich at the expense of the rest of us.

Zero-sum thinking

Via Slashdot, I see this gem from Richard Stallman:

The existence of LLVM is a terrible setback for our community precisely because it is not copylefted and can be used as the basis for nonfree compilers -- so that all contribution to LLVM directly helps proprietary software as much as it helps us.

Got that?  Something that benefits everyone equally is morally wrong.  To be righteous, it must help us and hurt them.

And if you look into your local, state, or federal sausage factory, you'll see much the same attitude at work, especially (but by no means exclusively) from the "left".

Thing is... once you start playing that game, you'll soon find that it's ever so much easier to hurt them than it is to help us.  The whole thing deteriorates into a negative-sum game, and escalating destruction.

Because everything should be a federal case

Public comment to the FCC is overwhelmingly opposed to allowing people to talk on cellphones in flight.

Because annoying.

Which, naturally, can't be left to the airlines, to adopt and advertise phoning vs. non-phoning policies.  Oh, no.  We need a one-size-fits-all government regulation.

And then there are the grand fantasies of how allowing voice calls on planes will inevitably lead to disaster: the usual "think how much worse it would be if we didn't have Big Brother looking out for us!" argument.

Yup.  The people who talk loudest are the ones who want to impose their personal preferences on everyone, by force.

Also quotable today

From Roger L. Simon, regarding billionaire Democrats:

They are the “Soros Socialists,” successful people who want to stay rich and powerful.  They do this by espousing social programs and making pronouncements, few of which affect them even minimally.

Or, as I call it: the "I've got mine!" crowd, busily pulling up the ladder after themselves.

Around here, we see the big corporations building ever-bigger and -shinier facilities, while the space for shoestring-budget startups has been bulldozed out of existence to make room for the dense-pack condos being built for megacorp employee housing, as decreed by meta-governmental agencies made up of people who already have their mansions in the hills and now adopt policies which prevent the rabble from ever becoming landowners.

So, yeah.  "Progressives" are really standing up for the interests of the rich and powerful, and pushing the policies of social and economic stagnation.

Expanding on one sentence...

...in this piece on Christopher Hitchens:

The world of ideas needs more people like Hitchens: People who speak up for their beliefs, debate them openly and honestly, and have the courage to change their positions when they come to new understandings.

A prerequisite to this is: people understanding their beliefs.  Which in turn calls for: people having their own beliefs.

Over the decades, I've encountered no end of people (of various alignments) who argue aggressively for beliefs to which they hold firmly, but which are not their own.  Rather, they've chosen a Tribe (often drifting into one by default), and they take the beliefs handed to them by the Tribal Elders as absolute truth which must be defended, and propagated, at all costs.

When enough people attach their tribal identity to political factions rather than to, say, churches, we end up with tribal warfare in government: just as we see now in D.C., Sacramento, and elsewhere.  The Party's political positions of the moment assume the role of religious dogma, and must be unquestioningly upheld!

Upper-class twit of the year: no contest!

This here photo:


proves beyond any possible doubt that Obama is The One.

Except: upper-class twit?  The infamous state-funeral selfie shows President Zaphod Hussein Некультурный Beeblebrox to be a no-class twit.

And, to have two sophistercated Euro-peon Prime Ministers participating in the clowning-around?  Our modern ruling class doesn't even bother keeping up appearances.  I don't think they have any conception of appropriate behavior.

Hey, guys?  There's a reason we have a Vice-President.  Wearing a dark suit and acting respectfully somber at state funerals is his job.  (Oh, wait.  It's Biden.  never mind.)

Afterthought: just in case anyone failed to match the title with the pose, here's the official YouTube vid.

Life in Glorious People's Republic of Kalifornia!

This was the season's first really nippy morning, worthy of breaking out the long pants and ushanka, and it was the first morning for something else, too:

The frosty windshield!  De-icing it with warm water worked temporarily, but it re-froze as I was driving off, and I had to pull over and wait for the defroster to do its job.

Last winter, when frosty-windshield season started, I went looking for winter windshield washer fluid, which I was quite certain I'd seen in stores before.  'Twas not to be found.

This morning, I had a suspicion about that, and, after the morning drive, a quick Internet search confirms it: windshield de-icing fluid is generally banned from sale in California, by order of the CARB.  Because Volatile Organic Compounds.

I'm sure our esteemed and benevolent masters could suggest alternatives, such as:

• Always park your car in a garage, where it won't get frosty.
• Upgrade to a fine European car with a powerful defroster.
• Have your valet start the car early and run the defroster for a while.
• Don't drive early in the morning; start your work day after 10 AM.

These work for all of us, right?

Mutter mutter isopropyl mutter... hey, the Sierra Club seems to think using isopropyl alcohol in the windshield washer is a good idea, so it must be legit, right?

Centralized efficiency

With all the talk of how much better Single Payer would be than Obamacaid (because it'd all be run by the Feral Gummint, and therefore inherently much more efficient than a haphazard quasi-private health-care payment sytem)...

Y'know, we have an example of Single Payer in the U.S.

We have Single Payer Military Procurement.

Which, with its wondrous efficiency, has recently brought us LCS, F-35A/B/C, NLOS-C, ... er.  Not such great examples?

And various targeted contracts, whereby, e.g., the Army contracts with a preferred bidder (i.e., the one whose owner checks the most boxes on the "oppressed minority" form), which has no ability to deliver on the contract, and just passes it through to some non-minority-owned company, all facilitated by a group of rich white Beltway Bandits.

And the infamous $600 hammer ($10 for the hammer, and $590 for the paperwork to prove that the Government isn't getting ripped off).

(No, the Air Force's expensive Mr. Coffee doesn't exactly belong here.  That wasn't a Mr. Coffee.  'Twas a restaurant-grade coffeemaker, plus a requirement to operate on a moving aircraft without splling hot coffee all over everywhere.  Mostly bona fide operational requirements, and not at all comparable to a household appliance.)

Still utterly missing the point

From here:

I continue to believe, and [I am] absolutely convinced, that at the end of the day, people are going to look back at the work we’ve done to make sure that in this country you don’t go bankrupt when you get sick, that families have that security,” Obama said. “That is going be a legacy I am extraordinarily proud of.”

Uh, right.  Except:

1. The insane premiums resulting from mandatory participation in the crooked system (plus the coverage mandates and other misfeatures that raise prices still further) mean a lot of families, if they actually sign up and pay the premiums, will have trouble eating.
2. Obamacare fails in any way to address the real illness-to-bankruptcy path, which runs via loss of income.
3. By the way: if you get sick and lose your income?  Guess what else you lose if you can't keep up the premiums.

The happy-shiny is all image, so the ruling class can feel good about itself.  The reality is that, once again, the working class gets the short end of the stick.  And, if you get seriously sick and don't have a large cash reserve (and good luck building one while paying big bucks for your health-plan premiums), you'll end up bankrupt.

The ACLU needs to rethink its fundraising

Not only do they not get any money from me because, as I said right at the beginning of the call, I don't have any money to spare at this point....

Their fundraiser went right ahead and pissed me off by reciting the stock litany of Democrat gripes about the silly little crap* the "extremists" are forever trying to pull in Republican states (plus the over-the-top Democrat panic over arguably legitimate measures such as voter ID laws)...

...while totally ignoring the massive attacks on civil liberties being perpetrated by the crooks in power in, e.g, D.C. and Sacramento.

OK, guys.  If you want to be a narrowly partisan organization, go right ahead.  But you'll go without me.

 

* Like, oh, trying to impose Swedish-style restrictions on abortion.

Beyond spin, and well into twirl

According to this in the NYT:

But unlike Mr. Bush, who faced confrontational but occasionally cooperative Democrats, Mr. Obama is battling a Republican opposition that has refused to open the door to any legislative fixes to the health care law....

Hello?  Until a couple of weeks ago, 'twere Obama who refused to consider legislative fixes that might involve Republicans.  True, when the Republicans were trying to delay the individual mandate through legislation (y'know, legally), they were really bent on killing the whole thing... but now that Obama is proposing to delay it by executive fiat (i.e., illegally), suddenly Republican opposition to changing the law is the problem?

"Cost sharing"

So you've bought yourself an Obamacare Bronze health plan.  Congratulations!  Now consider: what if you get sick?

Let's assume for the moment that you've chosen a plan that actually covers visits to real doctors, in your area, who are accepting patients.  Your expenses are 60% covered!  What, really, does that mean?

Well... consider this.  If you had one of those nasty old plans with 100% coverage, you'd pay nothing out of pocket, and the third-party payer (I refuse to call them "insurance companies" in this context) would pay... er... right around 10% of the bill, typically.  The other 90% of the bill, nobody really expected to be paid anyway.

With your modern comprehensive "real insurance" plan's 60% coverage, you have 40% "coinsurance", i.e., you pay 40% of the bill.

Which is four times the total amount that would have been paid under the old plan, right?

And it seems that the ACPA's fine print somehow repealed long-standing laws against kickbacks... anyone wondering what's going to happen?  Anyone?

Nobody from either party seems to be questioning what things ought to cost, as, e.g., Tom McClintock did with regard to education budgets a few years back.  Well, his work was widely ignored, so perhaps there's no point.

Just for kicks, though, let's make some wild assumptions and try to get a handle on what a routine doctor visit ought to cost.

Let's see, now.  We've got one high-skill worker and one medium-skill worker, each with continuing-education requirements.  Call the annual cost of employment, say, $200K and $125K respectively.

We've got an examining room.  Basically a broom closet, in a building with a receptionist.  Call it 100 square feet at $10/sq ft/month, so $12K/year.

We've got some moderately-specialized equipment, with useful lifetimes from 3 years to 25 years.  Allow $50K/year depreciation for the lot.

This comes to $387K/year.  Call it $400K.

If we assume 2000 working hours/year for doctor, nurse, room, and equipment, this gives us $200/hour.

Since routine doctor visits are scheduled in quarter-hour chunks, one quarter-hour visit ought to cost about $50.

Eternal Emperor's list price for an office visit this year is $331, whereof 40% is $132.40.

So, by my BOTE calculation, they're only overbilling (for a routine visit) by a bit over a factor of six; assuming the price doesn't change next year (yeah, right), the Bronze Plan $60 copay for the first three visits should actually be the entire payment, including profit, while the 40% coinsurance after that is about 2.6 times what a doctor visit would cost if we just burned down the whole damn third-party payer system and paid cash for routine health care at free-market prices.

And that, kids, is why, in the Great Recession and with people losing their jobs and their employer-provided health plans left and right, it was necessary to pass this monstrosity of lobbyist-written legislation to force everyone back into The System.  Because otherwise we'd be seeing spontaneous, free-market reform, and the masses might realize that they didn't need The System, and hadn't all along.