Quotulatiousness

April 16, 2010

Exposing the truth about government-run Ponzi schemes

Filed under: Economics, Government, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 09:22

Kathy Shaidle is exactly right in her analysis of the key weakness of the Tea Party movement:

The Tea party movement contains the seed of its own failure

It preaches self-reliance and small government, but old people still want their pittance of gubmit cheese, ie Social Security.

If they/we were intellectually honest, we would be calling on the raising of the eligibility age to 90, which is more in line with Bismark’s original plan: a little pension for those who were never expected to live long enough to ever get it.

It was meant to be a “look how generous I am” gesture with no real impact; the original designers never thought we’d live long enough to cash the checks.

Older Tea Partiers (and all of us) should be petitioning the government to write everyone a one time check for the exact amount they were forced to contribute, plus maybe 5% interest if that is do-able.

And then the program should be abolished.

I hope most of my readers are not depending on their “government benefits” to get them through in their retirement years: the economics of the situation almost certainly won’t allow it. There are several problems with government-run retirement schemes, starting with the fact that most of them are not in any sense of the word “funded”. Most governments have been using the contributions as a giant low-interest revolving fund: you contribute, they withdraw and leave a promissary note in the kitty. The promissary note is drawn on you and your children. There is, technically speaking, no money in the kitty.

The people who will be worst hurt by the necessary changes to government pension schemes are the ones who earned too little (or spent too much) during their working lives and didn’t make any private provision for retirement. As Kathy points out, the first government pensions were designed so that most potential recipients would be unable to collect, because the start date of the pension income was set beyond the average lifespan of the population. Looking forward to a pension would be much less realistic today if the official “retirement age” was set to 90!

QotD: Blog Post EULA

Filed under: Humour, Law, Quotations, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 09:05

READ CAREFULLY. By reading this blog post, you agree, on behalf of your employer, to release me from all obligations and waivers arising from any and all NON-NEGOTIATED agreements, licenses, terms-of-service, shrinkwrap, clickwrap, browsewrap, confidentiality, non-disclosure, non-compete and acceptable use policies (“BOGUS AGREEMENTS”) that I have entered into with your employer, its partners, licensors, agents and assigns, in perpetuity, without prejudice to my ongoing rights and privileges. You further represent that you have the authority to release me from any BOGUS AGREEMENTS on behalf of your employer.

Cory Doctorow, “Video-game shoppers surrender their immortal souls”, BoingBoing, 2010-04-16

April 15, 2010

A very disturbing notion

Filed under: Economics, Europe, Government, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 12:59

The Cato Institute’s Richard W. Rahn speculates about some very disturbing notions:

Politicians in developed countries have found that their citizens often get upset when inflation reaches high levels and then tend to vote out the culprits. You may recall that the less-than-astute Jimmy Carter lost his re-election campaign, in part, because inflation at one point reached 14 percent and the prime interest rate hit 21 percent.

An insightful European banker suggested to me over breakfast a couple of weeks ago that the European political class would use selective expropriation, rather than inflation, to avoid paying back all of the debt. The way this would be done would be that the political leaders would announce they would only pay back those bonds with full interest that were held by labor unions and other “politically correct” interest groups but not the bonds held by “greedy bankers” and rich people. Maturities would be extended and promised interest rates lowered – effectively reducing the value of the bonds.

My initial reaction was that, yes, such a selective expropriation might work in Europe, but not in the United States. As I thought more about it, however, looked at what was happening and heard President Obama’s rhetoric attacking “greedy” bankers and insurance companies, I began to think that not only was my European friend right about Europe, but his scenario was equally valid here.

The Obama administration has already indicated that it’s quite comfortable with protecting unions at the expense of other contracting parties (in the Government Motors case, at the very least), so it’s not much of a stretch to see this as a possibility in larger matters.

QotD: Chinese espionage in Canada

Filed under: Cancon, China, Economics, Quotations — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 12:39

China’s not buying our oil; it’s buying the reliable flow of Canadian corporate profits and our stable economic outlook.

Is it a national security risk to Canada?

No, again. It is true that, according to CSIS, the Chinese government represents the largest espionage threat to Canada, stealing the equivalent of $1-billion a month from our country in industrial secrets. (That’s more than our annual exports to China.)

But that espionage is done illegally by Chinese students, expats and other sympathizers, not through the legal ownership of share certificates. No doubt our high-tech energy secrets are being stolen and will continue to be stolen, but that is not happening because of a Wall Street deal. The central strategic value of the oil sands is not at risk.

Ezra Levant, “Pipeline to Asia”, National Post, 2010-04-15

The technical term is “totally insane”

Filed under: Law, Media, Technology — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 12:12

Cory Doctorow has a horrible dystopian future in mind. No, it’s not the background to his next science fiction novel — it’s what the MPAA and RIAA think our future should be like:

The MPAA and RIAA have submitted their master plan for enforcing copyright to the new Office of Intellectual Property Enforcement. As the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Richard Esguerra points out, it’s a startlingly distopian work of science fiction. The entertainment industry calls for:

* spyware on your computer that detects and deletes infringing materials;
* mandatory censorware on all Internet connections to interdict transfers of infringing material;
* border searches of personal media players, laptops and thumb-drives;
* international bullying to force other countries to implement the same policies;
* and free copyright enforcement provided by Fed cops and agencies (including the Department of Homeland Security!).

There’s a technical term for this in policy circles. I believe it’s “Totally insane.”

I find the audacity of (as Cory calls ’em) “Big Content” to be breathtaking: it’s as if they’ve never heard of fairness or privacy. If they get their wish, we’ll never hear of ’em again either.

As Greg Sandoval points out, there’s almost no reliable data to quantify the problem all this draconian lawmaking and enforcement is supposed to address:

“Three widely cited U.S. government estimates of economic losses resulting from counterfeiting cannot be substantiated due to the absence of underlying studies,” the GAO said. “Each method (of measuring) has limitations, and most experts observed that it is difficult, if not impossible, to quantify the economy-wide impacts.”

In what appears to be a setback for Hollywood and the recording industry, the government said that it sees problems with the methodology used in studies those sectors have long relied on to support claims that piracy was destructive to their businesses. The accountability office even noted the existence of data that shows piracy may benefit consumers in some cases.

[. . .]

“Consumers may use pirated goods to ‘sample’ music, movies, software, or electronic games before purchasing legitimate copies,” the GAO continued. “(This) may lead to increased sales of legitimate goods.”

Volcano eruptions, historically speaking

Filed under: Science — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 12:06

An interesting slideshow at New Scientist shows that the eruption of Eyjafjallajökull-Fimmvörduháls in Iceland barely even ranks as an eruption, compared to past geological events (not limited to volcanic action).

Incidentally, if you want to know how to pronounce Eyjafjallajökull, there’s a Wikimedia file here. To be honest, even after hearing it pronounced correctly, I can’t reproduce it . . .

“Wolf! Wolf! Wolf! Oh, never mind . . .”

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Health, Media — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:04

Marni Soupcoff points out that the World Health Organization should have been far more forthcoming after their intial “the sky is falling” announcements caused panic last year over H1N1:

Admit your mistakes before others exaggerate them. That’s the oft-quoted wry advice of writer and retired surgeon Dr. Andrew V. Mason. Perhaps the World Health Organization (WHO) was trying to follow it this week by convening a three-day meeting of outside experts to review the organization’s handling of the recent swine flu outbreak. The problem is, despite claiming to want to know what went wrong as much as what went right, the WHO seems unwilling to even entertain the possibility that it created a counterproductive panic by labelling H1N1 a pandemic of the highest order (“level 6”).

Swine flu, as you’ve probably realized by now, has turned out to be a mild, not particularly deadly virus — it’s certainly far less deadly than the regular seasonal flu that most of us consider a mundane part of everyday life. If one were feeling charitable toward the WHO, one could point out that it didn’t know back in the spring of last year — when it shouted “level 6!” from the rooftops — that H1N1 would prove to be such a relatively innocuous bug. But it’s precisely because it didn’t know that the WHO should have been more cautious with its labelling. You don’t shout “fire” in a crowded theatre just because it smells like the popcorn might be a little on the burnt side. It’s not worth the chaos and alarm you might cause. (Or in this case, the run on vaccines and the resorting to quacks and sketchy “home” remedies.)

Between the unrestrained use of the term “pandemic” and the noted ability of the mass media to hype real and imagined risks, it’s almost surprising we didn’t have doomsday-style cults spring up over H1N1.

Properly defining what are “public goods”

Filed under: Economics, Law, Media, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 07:50

Milena Popova, guest-blogging while Charles Stross is out experiencing Japan, has a long discussion up about public goods and why content (digitally speaking) is a classic example:

There’s a theory in economics about things called “public goods”. To understand the distinction between private goods, public goods and the couple of shades of grey in between, you first need to get your head around two concepts: rival and excludable.

Rival: (Wikipedia seems to call this “rivalrous”, but when I were a young economist lass we used to call it rival so I’ll stick with that.) A good is rival if my consumption of it diminishes the amount of the good that you can consume. Say we had 10 apples, and I ate one. There would now be 9 apples left which you could eat. If we had one apple and I ate all of it, tough luck, no apples for you. Knowing whether a good is rival or not tells you whether you want to use the market (if I were a good economist that would possibly be capital-M Market 😉 to allocate access to that good. If it’s rival, then the market is an efficient way of allocating the good; if it’s not, then you might want to think about other ways of getting your good to people. Remember that scary anti-piracy clip at the start of your DVDs which says “You wouldn’t steal a handbag”? Hold that thought for a minute.

Excludable: A good is excludable if you physically have a way of stopping people from consuming it. Back to the apples: if they’re in my fridge, inside my locked house and you don’t have a key, you can’t have my apples. (Yes, yes, you could break in. The law provides additional protection here, but ultimately there’s probably a better way for you to obtain an apple than breaking into my house, right?) Knowing whether a good is excludable tells you whether you can use the market to distribute the good. If your good is excludable, go ahead and sell it on the open market; if it’s not — you might struggle because you can’t stop people from just taking it for free.

So. Most of the goods you deal with in your day-to-day life are both rival and excludable. We call them pure private goods. But there’s a few things here and there that aren’t as clear-cut, and this is where it gets a little messy.

Uninhabited islands could be flashpoint in Sino-Japanese conflict

Filed under: China, Japan, Military — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 07:35

A group of uninhabited islands south of Okinawa have the potential to increase tensions between China and Japan. The Senkaku island group is subject to overlapping claims from China, Taiwan, and Japan:

Japan reports that, for the third time in the past 18 months, Chinese warships have been spotted south of the Japanese Island of Okinawa. This time, it was two Chinese submarines, running on the surface. That had never been seen before, in the area near the Senkaku islands (which are claimed by China, Taiwan and Japan). The Senkakus are eight uninhabited islands, which in the past were only used occasionally by fishermen. The Senkakus are 220 kilometers from Taiwan, 360 kilometers from China and 360 kilometers from Okinawa (which is part of Japan).

[. . .]

Five years ago, a Chinese oil drilling platform, in disputed waters halfway between China and the Japanese island of Okinawa, began producing natural gas, despite ongoing negotiations over who owns what in that patch of ocean. The Chinese spent two years building that platform, in waters claimed by Japan. A second platform was later built, as well as an underwater oil pipeline for both platforms. China regularly sends groups of warships to patrol the area, to underline their belief that this bit of water is under Chinese control. Japan would probably win any naval war with China, but since China has nuclear weapons, and Japan does not (at least not right now), such a war could go seriously against Japan. This has been brought up in Japan before, and it is feared that the issue may lead to Japan secretly, or openly, building nuclear weapons (which it could certainly do, and quite quickly.)

I’m certainly hoping that this is just speculation on the part of Strategy Page (the bit about nuclear weapons), as territorial disputes over islands do have a way of getting out of hand (see Falkland Islands, for example).

April 14, 2010

Poll shows Obama would beat Ron Paul . . . by 1%

Filed under: Liberty, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 12:18

Rasmussen Reports has an amusing poll of voting intentions for 2012 if Barack Obama faced Ron Paul:

Election 2012: Barack Obama 42%, Ron Paul 41%

Pit maverick Republican Congressman Ron Paul against President Obama in a hypothetical 2012 election match-up, and the race is — virtually dead even.

A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey of likely voters finds Obama with 42% support and Paul with 41% of the vote. Eleven percent (11%) prefer some other candidate, and six percent (6%) are undecided.

Ask the Political Class, though, and it’s a blowout. While 58% of Mainstream voters favor Paul, 95% of the Political Class vote for Obama.

But Republican voters also have decidedly mixed feelings about Paul, who has been an outspoken critic of the party establishment.

Obama earns 79% support from Democrats, but Paul gets just 66% of GOP votes. Voters not affiliated with either major party give Paul a 47% to 28% edge over the president.

Paul, a anti-big government libertarian who engenders unusually strong feelings among his supporters, was an unsuccessful candidate for the Republican presidential nomination in 2008. But he continues to have a solid following, especially in the growing Tea Party movement.

Frank J. on saving Guam

Filed under: Humour, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 09:57

Frank J. takes a moment to cast an admiring glance towards one of the best and brightest politicians in the world today:

Could Guam capsize? This is not a question a lot of people would think to ask. People just go about their little lives, eating Cheetos, watching Jersey Shore, and never once stopping to think what would happen if a U.S. territory flipped over in the water.

Guam is home to an estimated 178,000 people, and if they and all their homes were thrown into the ocean, it would be one of the greatest disasters in history. There would be loss of life, destruction of property, and permanent damage to the ocean’s ecology. This is a potentially huge problem, but most people are too busy with their new iPads to give it even simple consideration.

[. . .]

The average citizen probably wouldn’t have even studied the issue, other than maybe looking Guam up on Wikipedia, seeing its president has the odd name of “Barack Obama,” and dismissing it as an enemy Muslim nation. But Representative Hank Johnson, who we can only assume is the smartest person out of the more than 600,000 people in his district in Georgia, was focused enough to have concerns about Guam capsizing and has potentially saved thousands of lives. They might name a street after him.

You can almost hear the “Real Men of Genius” theme music playing, can’t you?

QotD: The environmental conspiracy theorists

Filed under: Environment, Media, Quotations — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:39

In the conventional wisdom, conspiracy theorists are stubble-faced old coots missing every third tooth, who live in backwoods shacks and claim the Pope (who is really Hitler’s love child) is in league with the Freemasons and the World Economic Forum to enslave us all through the cashless society.

Environmentalists, on the other hand, live in low-energy townhouses in upscale neighbourhoods, drink fair-trade coffee from 100% post-consumer recyclable cups, drive hybrid cars and eat only organic food grown within 100 kilometres of their homes. They are trendy, tony, highly educated and socially conscious with small carbon footprints. So, surely, they can’t be conspiracy theorists.

But they are.

In his new book, for instance, Mr. McKibben spins a tale about a vast web of shadowy payoffs to for-hire scientists, and intense pressure placed on politicians and editors by powerful lobbyists. He, like many environmentalists, sees himself and his colleagues as the little guys battling an enormous, unseen disinformation machine funded by Big Oil and Big Coal that is keeping the people from hearing the truth about the coming climate catastrophe.

They fancy themselves the underdogs when in fact they are the overdogs.

Lorne Gunter, “Green paranoia on parade”, National Post, 2010-04-14

Unexpected findings on delaying or avoiding PTSD

Filed under: Health, Military — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 08:58

With American troops being deployed so frequently to combat missions over the last few years, efforts to diagnose and treat Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) have become far more urgent. The risk of troops suffering from PTSD goes up the longer they are in combat or combat-like situations. The repeat deployments can’t be avoided, but other things can be done to reduce the risks:

The U.S. Army has found that PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder) often does not appear immediately after combat, but gradually, over a longer (5-10 year) period. Short term, the army has found that 14 percent of troops on their first combat tour have stress problems. That goes to 18 percent for those on their second tour, and 31 percent for those on their third. But in the longer term (after five years of being in combat), 24 percent of troops who have served 12 months (one tour) in a combat zone will develop some PTSD. That goes to 39 percent for those who serve two tours and 64 percent for those who do three. The army wants to limit the number of troops suffering from PTSD. This is essential if the army is to maintain an experienced combat force.

[. . .]

Once a soldier has PTSD, they are usually no longer fit for combat, and many troops headed for Afghanistan are falling into this category. PTSD makes it difficult for people to function, or get along with others. With treatment (medication, and therapy), you can recover from PTSD. But this can take months or years. In extreme cases, there is no recovery. And while being treated, you stay away from the combat zone.

The army has found that PTSD can be delayed, or even avoided, by providing the troops with what previous generations of soldiers would have considered luxuries. For example, when possible, combat troops sleep in air conditioned rooms, and have access to the Internet and video games, as well as good food and other amenities. The video games and Internet resulted in an unexpected positive effect. The surveys found that troops that spent 2-4 hours a day on the Internet or playing video games (even violent ones) had far fewer stress problems. Having exercise facilities available also helped, despite the physically strenuous nature of combat in Afghanistan. While the combat troops spend most of their time out in the countryside, living rough, their commanders know what even a few days back at a larger base, with all the goodies, makes a big difference in attitudes, morale and combat effectiveness.

April 13, 2010

Yay! There will be a Season 4!

Filed under: Gaming — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 17:09

Never let it be said that Microsoft doesn’t do some good things:

We’re pleased to announce that Season 4 of The Guild is official — Microsoft has renewed the show for another season and new episodes of The Guild will be coming to Xbox, Zune and PCs this summer.

Felicia is putting the finishing touches on the script for Season 4, which will pick up where Season 3 left off. Pre-production is underway, keeping producer Kim Evey and Streamy Award winning director Sean Becker very busy as cameras are set to roll sometime in May. Seasons 1 through 3 are currently available on watchtheguild.com, iTunes, Amazon and YouTube.

Even if you know nothing about MMORPG, you’ll find The Guild to be well worth watching.

Why you should be worried about ACTA

Filed under: Law, Liberty, Media — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 12:33

H/T to BoingBoing.

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