Obsidian Wings: When Tigers step on tigers

Clueless is as clueless does. I do believe it is utter cluelessness. I sincerely doubt that either Cruz, Lee or the majority of their staffs have any clue as to any environmental issue beyond the "fact" that environmental regulation is a bad thing that cripples the economy.

Politicians for Pot

The Daily Beast reports on politicians who are making the legalization of marijuana part of their campaigns. I would think that any candidate who is really and truly fiscally responsible should be able to run on that platform because this is the most inane and fiscally irresponsible part of the War on Drugs. The amount of money wasted on prosecuting and incarcerating people who use or even sell marijuana is huge. I just don't buy into the arguments that it is more harmful than alcohol. Even if you could prove that it is marginally more harmful the problem would still be the big fail that is the attempt to handle it through criminalizing it. Cross posted at The Moderate Voice

A Debt Ceiling Petition

After the near disasters in 2011 and earlier this month I've come to believe that the only way to avoid this kind of idiocy is to take away the political toy that is the debt ceiling. No political party should be able to threaten the economy of the nation for an instant whether it's to extort concessions from their opponents or to "make a point". We don't have to default to create potential economic problems and it should just not come up. I was surprised to find on the We the People site at whitehouse.gov that no one had yet thought of this but they hadn't so I created a petition on the site that reads as follows:

WE PETITION THE OBAMA ADMINISTRATION TO: work with Congress to eliminate the debt ceiling Since the budgetary processes that have been in place since 1974 serve the same purposes as those originally envisioned by the legislators who wrote the 2nd Liberty Bond law in 1917 and also those of the members of Congress who modified it in 1939 to cover all general debt of the United States government the law should be eliminated or superseded by new legislation that would provide long term stability to purchasers of debt of the United States government. The law currently seems suitable only as a political Sword of Damocles that both political parties have used with varying degrees of responsibility. Since that level of responsibility has noticeably decreased in recent history no political party should have this "weapon" available any longer so it should be removed.

If you're interested in signing it the link is here. Cross posted at The Moderate Voice

The Bogus High-Tech Worker Shortage

PBS Newshour's blog has a guest column on an issue that really bugs me. The executives of tech companies gripe about how few workers they have who meet their needs. Do they really? How exacting are the job descriptions they use? Do the people they bring in using H1-B visas really meet those requirements or are they just useful in that they'll do anything to keep those visas including working absolutely insane hours, having no family or social life and never even thinking about asking for a raise? After all, if you hire an American they might do something entirely unreasonable like taking time off, expecting reasonable compensation given their expertise or some other shocking and completely unacceptable behavior for an employee. I've read articles about this issue online at sites like ComputerWorld, CIO and others and have seen IT professionals in the comments section mention that they don't recommend to their own children that they consider IT as a career. If you want students to consider STEM careers, do something about what's happening to the employees in STEM fields.

So Much for Sunshine

Brendan Greeley at BusinessWeek writes about Congress's really classified work, giving a whole new meaning to "I've Got a Secret". Apparently the big favors some legislators would like to do for their friends and big contributors should be something that none of the voters should be able to find out about.

RealClearPolitics forgets a major factor in article on female GOP candidates for President

RealClearPolitics has a speculative article on the GOP's problem fielding female candidates but misses a huge point that also affects their male candidates. The reporters point out that current GOP women who hold office in blue leaning states are quite successful. But they fail to mention that to make it as a nominee for President from the Republican Party these women from blue or purple states would have to veer far to the right, abandoning much of what made them popular enough in their home states to win and what they need to avoid alienating a lot of independents and moderate Republicans in the general election. But the GOP base currently still seems convinced that they lost to Obama because they weren't conservative enough. Personally I think that's still a recipe for continuing failure.

Russia - Not a good place to do business

Vladimir Putin's allies prove that successful businesses depend on the rule of law. Businesses should realize this by now yet they tend to ignore it in their desire to expand in countries that just aren't there yet, like Russia and China. India is a red tape nightmare that makes the worst of U.S. bureaucracy seem like a dream of efficiency. Yet the pundits of the business world extoll the virtues of emerging markets like they are all equal in opportunity.

STEM education and STEM jobs aren't a silver bullet for U.S. unemployment

Computerworld writes about some of the facts concerning tech jobs. While software jobs and some other math related professions are doing OK they're not really booming. But engineering jobs in the more technical areas of the profession like electronics engineering are declining. Even the status of jobs in chemistry isn't as rosy as a general push for STEM education would seem to make it. Remember that the government is cutting back on funding for scientific research and most modern corporations are doing the same. Something that has the greatest potential to provide for our future well-being is being slowly strangled in the name of short term gain.

Self-Regulation as Scam: The Aluminum 'Merry-Go-Round' | The Business Desk with Paul Solman | PBS NewsHour | PBS

Some merry-go-rounds are bad things. The constant motion of people between government and the private sector companies they'd been involved with is one of them. I wonder if it could be made a crime for someone formerly in the government who uses their knowledge from their government employment to help their current employers dodge regulations?

Ken Cuccinelli, the Republican candidate for governor in Virginia, wants to ban oral sex.

Amanda Marcotte at Slate lets us know how Ken Cuccinelli is fighting hard to do the right thing. Well, that is, if you think pushing hard for a law that outlaws common sexual practices of consenting adults is the right thing. Of course he says that this is for the sake of the children but no sane people are buying into that one. How's that rebranding of the GOP going?

GOP lawmakers link Sebelius calls to IPAB concerns

Next up: GOP calls for investigation as to why any members of the Obama administration are still breathing.

Blame Congress For the IRS-Tea Party Mess | Mother Jones

Among all the faux outrage, the claims of paranoia being justified and attempts to link the IRS actions in Cincinnati to the White House,remember this essential truth, that the single entity most responsible for what happened is most likely Congress itself for passing such a vague, even mushy law.

Were the Benghazi emails altered | The Moderate Voice

The Moderate Voice links to reports that it appears that the emails GOP critics of the administration are trying to seize upon as evidence of a cover up appear to have been altered. This is on top of revelations that in fact these emails had been shown to intelligence committee members, including some of the Republicans who'd been attacking the Obama administration back in March and dismissed as not really proving anything.

Even if all of these allegations against President Obama are thoroughly disproven, including the ones concerning the IRS I have absolutely no doubt that the Republican faithful will be talking about how everyone knows that Obama was responsible for the deaths in Benghazi and used the IRS against his political enemies for many years to come.

Senators’ boycott blocks action to confirm EPA head

Yet another meaningless obstruction of an action by the Obama administration by the GOP. I am admittedly an anti-Republican. Things like this just make me think that I am correct in my choice of political affiliation. Block everything the guy in the White House tries to do no matter what is does not make one a useful public servant in our form of government. But I don't think that the fanatics with all of the influence in the current GOP really care.

Medicare Pulls Back Curtain On Hospital Bills

While NPR tells us that Medicare has pulled back the curtain it might be more apt to say it shows how hospitals pull bills out of the hat. It is, after all, an area in which illusion and delusion run rampant. The NPR talk show Talk of the Nation had guests discussing this issue and one of them made the point that the hospitals actually have no idea what the actual cost of the services they provide is to them. There is no health care system in this country. There is health care chaos that works in spite of itself. So far.

Will Business Step In to End a Sequester-Driven Research Funding Gap?

A writer on Scientific American blogs asks the question. I feel fairly safe in saying the answer is no. Even if they did fund more research, the nature of research for private business where discoveries become trade secrets, means that it won't contribute to science the same way more open scientific research does.

No, technology is not an unmixed blessing

Jaron Lanier cautions against the common wisdom that technology will replace the jobs it eliminates. His new book, Who Owns the Future? he tries to make this point among others.

A rather good example is mentioned in this article from Time.

The bankruptcy of the photography-giant Kodak occurred within months of Facebook‘s billion-dollar acquisition of the photo-sharing site Instagram. This would be just one example of the destructive dynamism of American capitalism, a process through which old companies are overtaken by new technology and new firms more in tune with the needs of customers — and that arguably benefits us all.

Except for one thing, that is: Whereas Kodak employed 140,000 workers during its heyday, Instagram employed just 13 people when it was purchased in April 2012.

“Where did all those jobs disappear to?” Lanier asks. “And what happened to the wealth that those middle-class jobs created?” Lanier’s answer is that the new “information economy,” which is now superseding the manufacturing economy, is developing in such a way that the rewards are filtering to an elite few at the expense of everybody else.

Anyone who has read a variety of posts I've made for a while now in various places will realize that this ties in to what I've believed for a while. The new economy just doesn't need as many people to produce things. Data centers of thousands of square feet might employ a hundred people. For a comparison Facebook is currently valued at $67.8 billion as of February according to Forbes and employees 4619 people according to an article on TechCrunch whereas Ford Motor is valued at $55.6 billion and employs 171,000 people. This is fairly typical so far as I can tell.

But it's not just the differing nature of technology companies versus manufacturing. There is also another way in which technology affects jobs in the modern world. As noted in the article:

One popular view of the American economy’s recent troubles is that we’ve become too decadent, that we no longer make anything the rest of the world wants, and that our economy will not recover until we can learn to overcome our addiction to debt and cheap, foreign-made goods. And if one were to look at where the average American gets his paycheck these days, there’s evidence to support this worldview. Fewer and fewer Americans are employed in making physical goods — just 9% of the population works in manufacturing, compared with 40% during World War Two. But total manufacturing output – that is, the dollar-value of all the things American companies make — has continued to increase. In fact, by some measures the U.S. produces more stuff than any other country in the world, including China.

The missing variable in this equation is automation. We’re still making a ton of stuff here; it’s just that machines are doing more and more of the making. As a technologist, this dynamic is obvious to Lanier, though it tends to sneak up on the rest of us.

Do these changes inevitably portend doom for our society as we know it? Well, probably. But that isn't necessarily a bad thing if for once we admit to ourselves that this is a possible outcome of what lots of people and businesses are doing and try to adapt without judgement or labels, just by looking for something that works.

Summers v. Hubbard - And the result just isn't very suprising.

Adam Davidson in the New York Times Magazine writes about Larry Summers and Glenn Hubbard, interviews them and even brings them together for a talk.

The most striking thing about each of them is how early experience formed their attitudes towards their field of study. They, like most economists, are creatures of their time and place. In spite of how hard many economists have tried to present their field as one capable of disciplined mathematical analysis and rigor separate from social and psychological considerations Summers and Hubbard show how little that view has to do with reality.

I freely admit that I find Hubbard's worldview the less realistic of the two. Why? Because he's conservative? Well, if by conservative you mean everything comes down to a very basic and simple philosophy wherein the government is the primary bad actor in the economy then yes, it's because he's conservative. Consider this from the article:

His views all seemed to coalesce around a fairly simple idea: the U.S. economy is better off when the government gets out of the way. Cutting the entitle­ment programs was an extension of this. It could free up more capital to further enable virtually everyone to contribute to the economy.

This simple belief just doesn't seem to be supported by the facts. Is our current economic malaise related to a lack of capital? Somehow I don't think so. Try the internet, Mr. Hubbard. Google "corporate cash on hand 2012". There is plenty of capital available for large companies and not much credit for small businesses or individuals. Still. Cutting government programs so that taxes can be cut isn't going to do a thing to change things for the better. It's faith in the answers he thinks he found in Hayek's work that powers every thought Hubbard has about economics and Hayek and most economists of his time don't have answers capable of standing up to the drastic changes that have swept over the world in recent decades.

One thing I think this article shows is that in order to understand where anyone stands when it comes to opinions on economics you need to understand the most basic core belief they have about it and where it might lead them. My most basic belief about economics is "Things change". Many people might see that and have a "Well, duh!" reaction. But it leads me to question beliefs and attitudes in the field that seem to be based on an acceptance of inherited wisdom and things that many consider to have always been true and that always will be true.

Consider the concept of comparative advantage. There are people who still believe in it. It was put forward in the early 19th century. Even then, though, David Ricardo acknowledged that there were limitations to the idea when capital could flow freely between nations. Does it really benefit both parties in today's environment where capital can flow as fast as electrons, knowledge is both power and commodity and factories can migrate like laborers as their owners seek lower wages and "friendly" regulatory environments. The answer is not necessarily. Every individual situation has to be examined to determine the answer to that question and rather than freely admitting that basic truth the desire for some kind of truth that can be broadly applied still seems to rule and rule badly. That's where I stand. That's what you should consider when reading my viewpoint on economic issues.

Weird Anti-Science

Two different articles on Slate point out different aspects of Republican dislike of science. First Phil Plait on his Bad Astronomy blog addresses the broad anti-science agenda expressed by multiple GOP politicians, especially Lamar Smith who apparently thinks that peer review is highly overrated when compared with political review. The other article is actually linked to by Plait's article but is more focused on the dislike of research in the social sciences.

I consider it reasonable to judge some of those attitudes by those who hold them and one of the Republican members of the house mentioned in the article on the attacks on social science research is a real gem. When Rep. Bill Posey had been in office for a whole two months he became the first Republican to propose a birther bill, one of those masterpieces of legislation whose sole purpose was to legitimize those who thought Barack Obama was the result of a strange conspiracy to put a non-citizen in the White House. Basically he criticized multiple research studies on the basis of them not being vital to national security or our national interest. Apparently the concept that learning new things is inherently in our best interest lies somewhere beyond the ability of his mind to grasp. It's also rather sad that apparently Posey believes this doozy of a claim:

Posey slightly softened his tone. “I'm not advocating we stop all the social-science study spending,” he said. “I just think it might be appropriate that much of that be left to the private sector.” How much, though? Someone should probably conduct a study.

I'm not aware of any private sector funding for real research in these fields that isn't interested in predetermined answers, are you?

It's not Capitalism, it's EXTREME Capitalism

Paul B. Farrell at MarketWatch decries capitalism for killing our morals and our future. Of course what he is referring to as capitalism is just one version of it. Unfortunately it's the version we currently practice. If you read the comments on this article you'll notice that as is normal there are those who take any critique of our current economic religion as indicating a belief in Marxism or Socialism. Do you think any of those making these types of claims understand that even Adam Smith expressed distrust of unfettered profit seeking? I tend to think not.

People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices. It is impossible indeed to prevent such meetings, by any law which either could be executed, or would be consistent with liberty or justice. But though the law cannot hinder people of the same trade from sometimes assembling together, it ought to do nothing to facilitate such assemblies; much less to render them necessary.

Adam Smith