Glibertarians.com 2017 Archive

Author: Derpetologist

  • How to Understand the Middle East

    That’s not how carpets work

    For most Americans, the Middle East is an exotic and mysterious place. Like the Persian carpets made there, it is a complex weave of nations, tribes, languages, and religions. And like a Persian carpet, you can’t pull on one thread without pulling on many others.

    However, if you study the history of the region, certain patterns emerge. I studied the history and cultures of the region for many years until I had my eureka moment. I had discovered what I call the Grand Unified Theory of the Middle East. It is a unifying principle which explains every event there since the beginning of history. Once you learn this theory, you will instantly understand everything that happens there.

    Here is my Grand Unified Theory of the Middle East: Everyone hates everyone.

    The Arabs and Persians hate each other. The Turks and the Kurds hate each other.The Sunni and the Shia hate each other. The Bedouins and the Berbers hate each other. The Muslims and Christians hate each other. And all of them hate the Jews. The Jews, not wanting to be outdone in the hating game, boldly up the ante by hating both themselves and other Jews, mostly because they are either too Jewish or not Jewish enough.

    Democracy at work

    Could this geopolitical dumpster fire possibly get any worse? Yes, it can! Democracy in the Middle East, where it exists at all, tends to get into a rut. Generally, there is a two-party system which is a fierce duel between the Islamic Party of Islam for Muslims against the Very Very Very Islamic Party. In such a situation, it is difficult to find common ground.

    So what should the US do? I suggest treating the place like a nest of killer bees. The farther away you are, the less likely you are to get stung. And if you insist on getting close and throwing rocks at the hive, throw really big rocks. In 1983, Reagan withdrew US forces from Lebanon after a truck bomb killed 241 Marines. He said:

    “Perhaps we didn’t appreciate fully enough the depth of the hatred and the complexity of the problems that made the Middle East such a jungle. Perhaps the idea of a suicide car bomber committing mass murder to gain instant entry to Paradise was so foreign to our own values and consciousness that it did not create in us the concern for the marines’ safety that it should have.”

  • The Grand Unified Theory of Derp

    Often I have asked myself: what do all forms of stupidity have in common?

    I have concluded that despite its myriad forms, derp has but one source: lack of curiosity. This attitude is exemplified in the cliche “perception is reality,” a phrase which makes me wonder if the people who use it have ever seen a magic trick.

    The whole point of thinking is to look past what is obvious. That’s why we say (and should say more often) “don’t judge a book by its cover.” Synonyms for “think” in English include words like “ponder,” “examine,” “consider,” all of these words are derived from Latin words that mean to weigh or look at closely. Thinking means to test ideas, not just have them.

    Our natural instinct is to make quick decisions and judgements based on first impressions and to stick with them. This approach works in most but not all situations. Even when faced with disproving evidence, most people are much more likely to look for information that confirms what they believe than evidence which contradicts it.

    Does Not Compute

    My favorite example of this is the broken calculator experiment. In it, high schools students and adults who had passed a math test were asked to estimate the answers to some arithmetic questions and check their answers with a calculator. The calculator was rigged to give answers that were off by about 25% – a difference big enough that a numerate person would know something is wrong. Yet in the experiment, about half the participants at the end said they believed calculators do not make mistakes.

    In an even more depressing example, 19 college professors with PhDs in sciences were asked to evaluate a geometry lesson on calculating the volume of sphere. First, they were given an orientation on finding the volume by calculation and by measurement. The next day, they were given an incorrect formula which gives a sphere a 50% larger than normal volume. Then they were given actual spheres which they filled with water and then measured the volume with graduated cylinders. Incredibly, none of the participants questioned the formula. They reasoned they must have measured wrong or the equipment was labeled incorrectly.

    So why do people persist in error? For the same reason people do many other wrong things – because doing the right thing is uncomfortable. The good news is that false beliefs cannot outlive the people who hold them, and so they tend to die off eventually.

     

    When the decisive facts did at length obtrude themselves upon my notice, it was very slowly, and with great hesitation, that I yielded to the evidence of my senses.

    -Joseph Priestley

    Leo Tolstoy

    The most difficult subjects can be explained to the most slow-witted man if he has not formed any idea of them already; but the simplest thing cannot be made clear to the most intelligent man if he is firmly persuaded that he knows already, without a shadow of doubt, what is laid before him.

    -Leo Tolstoy

    The main hindrance for the search for truth is probably the inability to abandon a present belief and adopt a better one when it comes along.

    -Peter Elbow

    The desire to be right and the desire to have been right are two desires, and the sooner we separate them the better off we are. The desire to be right is the thirst for truth. On all counts, both practical and theoretical, there is nothing but good to be said for it. The desire to have been right, on the other hand, is the pride that goeth before a fall. It stands in the way of our seeing we were wrong, and thus blocks the progress of our knowledge.

    -Willard V Quine and J. S. Ullian

  • Understanding Money

    New car, caviar, four star daydream, think I'll buy me a football team.
    It’s a gas

    There are a lot of people who do not understand money. This is unfortunate since it is the cause of much grief.

    The most important thing to know about money is that it has no intrinsic value. You can’t eat it, wear it, or build a house out of it. You can use it to make a fire, but people don’t usually do that unless very, very stupid people get in charge of the government. More on that later.

    Many things have been used for money, but those things all had certain features in common. To be useful, money must be durable, portable, divisible, recognizable, and most importantly, scarce.

    The reason things like gold and silver have been used as money around the world and throughout history is because they have all the above features. Recently, shoplifters have been stealing brand name laundry detergent to use as money – for the same reasons given above.

    Many people very stupidly think that since money can be exchanged for goods and services, creating money will somehow conjure more goods and services into existence. What actually happens is that price of everything goes up. This is called “inflation” and has been a problem for nearly every currency in history. The British pound, for example, is the world’s oldest continuously used currency, and it has lost about 99% of its value since 1751. You’d need 200 pounds today to buy the same amount that 1 pound did in 1751. The US dollar is even worse. It has lost about 97% of its value since 1913, the year the Federal Reserve banking system was created. The dollar lost about 2/3 of its value since 1971, the year the US officially went off the gold standard.

    The second most important thing to realize about money is that is a symbol. It is both a symbol of desire and a way of measuring it. For the only way to measure how much someone wants something is to ask what they are willing to trade for it. Money is what makes this trade possible.

    Prices are the way we measure desire. They are critical information about how much a good or service is worth and how much demand there is for it. Many very stupid people think that the government can somehow raise or lower prices by decree. The only result of such decrees is economic chaos. In countries like Venezuela and Zimbabwe, socialist governments attempting to help the poor set low prices for food and fuel. However, since they set them too low, those goods are in short supply and what goods do exist are only available on the black market for much higher prices. In Venezuela, many people earn a living by standing in line to buy goods for the official price just so they can sell it on the black market for a higher price.

    51st Emperor of The Roman Empire

    This is not the first time this has happened, 1700 years ago, a Roman emperor named Diocletian didn’t have enough money to pay for everything. He ordered the mint to decrease the amount of silver in each coin so he could buy more. It worked initially, but then prices rose because it did not take long for people to figure out the coins were worth less than before. So Diocletian then decreed that it was illegal for merchants to raise prices. One historian at the time wrote that Diocletian might as well have commanded the winds not to blow.

    Just like today, the inflation was blamed on everything except the government. Diocletian blamed speculators, money lenders, and foreigners for the inflation. Sound familiar?

    Inflation can only come from a government creating more money, and there are numerous examples of this.

    So why then does a trained economist like Paul Krugman think that minting trillion dollar coins would be a good idea? My only answer is that someone who knows economics but not history will invariably be dumber than a person who has studied neither. This is probably why Krugman also thinks the US economy could be jump-started by a fake alien invasion.

  • The Derponomicon: Part 5

    This is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is the end of the beginning. Let us press onward. There’s another 40 miles of bad road ahead.

    In this installment, the prog responds to the broken window fallacy and the parable of the pool. The broken window fallacy was first explained by Bastiat. He said that while a broken window is beneficial for glass making and window repair, it is harmful to the owner of the window, because the owner could have spent that money on something more productive than repairing the window.

    The best recent example of the broken window fallacy was the Cash for Clunkers program, which paid people to destroy perfectly good cars in order to stimulate demand for new ones. The main result of that program is that the price of a used car rose by about $900.

    Once again, the broken window fallacy is, well, a fallacy. Another false comparison, unless of course you are speaking specifically of the Iraq/Afghanistan wars, which netted BILLIONS in taxpayer dollars for defense contractors that were providing the weaponry to blow up schools and bridges, and the contractors to repair those roads and bridges, and the private security forces to protect them at 5 times the rate of the US Military. All of which, of course was completely orchestrated and designed by said corporations, that are foreign multi-nationals, that were mapping out plans for war from day one of the Bush presidency and arguably had a hand in allowing 9/11 to happen unobstructed. Cheney’s company alone has made 50 billion+ to date and he inevitably profited handsomely from it. That is where the broken window fallacy makes sense. When it comes to roads and bridges and crumbling infrastructure or the post office or other necessary and needed services the comparison doesn’t really apply, because those things actually have to be maintained and fixed. Not to say there isn’t a lot of superfluous and unnecessary spending going on in government, but about 90% of that is on non essential military spending. Keeping troops stationed in hundreds of bases around the world and spending billions on planes and weaponry that are never going to be used and we’re never needed in the first place as well as spending billions if not trillions rebuilding countries we destroyed in the first place unnecessarily is the TRUE broken window fallacy in US government.

    So there you have it. According to him, 90% of unnecessary govt spending is for the military. Pay no attention to the fact that the military is about 20% of total US federal govt spending.

    Some background on the parable of the pool: according to the parable, trying to enrich the poor by taxing the rich is like taking water out of the deep end of a pool and pouring it into the shallow end. Just as the depths do not change, so the relative wealth of the two groups will not change. Of course, some water gets spilled along the way. This represents the indirect cost of govt transfer programs.

    On the pool analogy. Once again, a completely false and misleading comparison. Our economy is far from a pool that we are all in together. There are TRILLIONS taken out of our economy by the very wealthy and corporations every year and put in offshore investments and bank accounts. A true analogy would be that the people in the deep end are taking thousands of buckets of water a day and pouring them into a series of tanker trucks that drive away with it, whereas everyone else is slowly pouring thimbles full of water into the shallow end. Once again this “redistribution of wealth” conservatives are always screaming about isn’t about taking money from the rich and giving it to the poor, it’s about leveling the playing field that the rich constructed in their favor over the last 3 decades where all the wealth gets redistributed to THEM. This isn’t rocket science. 97% of all economic growth has gone to the top 1%, when the top half of the 99% are the ones putting in all the hard work and effort. If you can’t understand that taking more and more FROM the economy and giving less and less back to the economy causes and enormous rift, no amount of poorly constructed half baked videos are going to help you understand. Just like anything else that is alive and grows, if it is not managed properly, it dies. If you cut down all the trees in the forest, without planting new ones, guess what? The forest dies. If you keep extracting more from.the economy than you give back to it, guess what? It dies. The economy should be treated like a business of any kind, or a well.managed forest, you give back to it as you take from it to help it grow and thrive. Too many people at the top are treating it more like a strip mine, and we all know what that has done for West Virginia.

    Well, he’s right about trillions being taken out of the economy- except it’s by the govt. Sort of. Still more zero-sum game economics.

  • In Search of Equality

    Most people care a lot about equality. References to it abound in national mottoes and constitutions. But what do people really mean when they talk about equality?

    Surely they know people are unequal in countless ways already: strength, intelligence, looks, height, gender, age, and so on. It is impossible to equalize people in these areas, outside of science fiction. So the only way people can be equal in a meaningful way is if they are held to the same standard.

    But some people don’t like that. In particular, it bothers them a great deal that some are rich and others are poor. Others demand that people they perceive as inferior be treated differently.

    I once saw a very interesting video of an experiment with monkeys. There were two monkeys in separate cages but close enough to see each other. They had tokens in their cages, and the trainers had taught the monkeys to hand them the tokens in exchange for a cucumber slice. But then they started giving one monkey grapes instead of cucumbers. Monkeys like cucumbers, but they love grapes. The other monkey began throwing back the cucumber slices at the trainers when it was not getting “equal pay for equal work.”

    It appears that primates have a kind of instinct for fairness. People are similar, except that they become angry in response to things they merely *perceive* as unfair. Social justice has become the new catchphrase for this group, though they most shy away from explaining how it differs from regular justice.

    Imagine your boss calls you to his office and tells you you’ve been doing great work this year and so decides to give you a bonus of $5,000. You walk out of the office feeling amazing. A coworker notices and asks what you’re so happy about. You tell him about the bonus and he replies, “Oh, I got $10,000 and so did everyone else.” You would probably instantly become angry. But why? You’re still richer than you were before. Why would it upset you that others are doing better? Their greater success did not cause your lesser success. You’d probably be angry because you’d say to yourself you’re just as good as them and so deserve the same – even if this wasn’t true.

    The easiest way to be unhappy is to compare yourself to other people. This is why many religions teach that envy is a sin.

    Communist countries, too, tried to eliminate envy by making everyone equal. There was an inherent contradiction in this. If you put a group in charge of equalizing people, you have created a new form of inequality. There are many jokes about this from the USSR:

    In the US, the rich become powerful, but in the USSR, the powerful become rich.

    In capitalism, man exploits man, but in socialism, it’s the other way around.

    One joke I particularly like is the story of a bunch of triumphant Bolsheviks rejoicing in the streets after they hear of the revolution. They ask an old woman why she isn’t rejoicing, that soon there will be no more rich people. The old woman says “I thought the point of the revolution was that there would be no more *poor* people.”

    Although it often rubs us the wrong way when we see someone doing better than us, it’s important to resist the urge to bring them down. When people are free to be the best they can be, the result is better goods and services for everyone.

    Finally, it’s important to realize that money and power always find each other, no matter how hard we try to keep them apart. The only answer to this is for people to believe that there should be strict limits on the government’s power and that people should be free to live as they want. Aristotle said justice consists of“treating equals equally, and unequals unequally.” Anything else is unjust and stupid.

    Freedom does not guarantee happiness, but forced equality guarantees misery.

  • The Derponomicon: Part 4

    Welcome once more to my magnificent nightmare.

    I will devote this installment to the prog’s views on science and the environment.

    His response to this article on failed Earth Day predictions:

    Don’t forget to pack a wife.

    The problem with your “ridiculous predictions” article, is that most of them AREN’T ridiculous, and actually have more than a grain of truth in them. For instance there IS a worldwide hunger and famine epidemic all across Africa and Asia, much of which is caused by extreme droughts and desertification caused by climate change. Thousands of people die every day from starvation and famine on this planet. That’s not even debatable. Many of these are just general statements….like number 3 saying we need toconserve our resources or face possible extinction. That’s a factual, true, logical statement. There is no arguing that using all our resources would lead to extinction. For instance if we had no fresh water, or couldn’t grow crops…we would die. This is not ridiculous or untrue. People DO die from air pollution, all the time, cancer rates have been increasing for decades due to increased exposure, asthma is at an all time high. These are all problems caused by the environment in which we live. Most of the rest of these are just unsubstantiated claims made in no official scientific capacity or have no specific time frame attached to them. So quite frankly, I call bullshit on ALL of those. None of them are ridiculous and most of them are mere logical statements of fact.

    No attempt made to rebut any of the claims, just lots of hand-waving.

    His response to the skeptic’s case against climate change:

    Have you ever felt giant teeth crushing your pelvis?

    On the climate change thing; The common misconception among deniers is that climate change science is coming from the government, which is just about as accurate as saying vaccination science is coming from the government, or evolutionary science is coming from the government. Just because the government accepts the widely researched scientific concensus on a subject and adopts policy to reflect that, does not at all mean that information is coming from “the government”. Climate change has been widely researched since the 1970s, and ALL of the effects that were widely discussed then ARE happening now. We are seeing climate change happening, as predicted decades ago. The official position of EVERY government in the entire world has accepted the fact that not only is climate change real, but is being greatly exacerbated by human activity. The ironic thing is that everyone that claims that this is all an agenda of the government’s of all the world’s nations is somehow rooted in some evil grab for power, when in fact the only entity fighting against the science is the most powerful corporations in human history. In fact literally every single source that refutes climate science can be traced back to the most wealthy and monied and nefarious interests in known history, big oil and coal. Literally every single source, there is not one credible source that refutes AGW that is not linked to the most monied interests of all. The very small amount of credible peer review scientists that actually do deny AGW, don’t even deny It at all, they simply speculate that it may not be as bad as it has been thought to be, or that the amount of it being influenced by man is up for debate. But there is literally not one single credible scientific source in the entire world that flat out denies AGW. It IS happening, we see it in the strange weather extremes, the shifting on animal migratory patterns, breeding habits, growth patterns of fungi and plants. These are not things that have an agenda. Because I am out in nature all the time and speak with a multitude of biologists and nature hobbyists of all kinds and EVERY single one of them agrees that these changes are happening exactly as predicted, I have no reason whatsoever to even for a moment consider that oil lobbyists are right.

    Note how he fails to address any of the claims made. I originally sent him a video version instead of text because I didn’t think he was capable of reading it all.

    A response to this video on food irradiation (or, for those who prefer to read):

    (Food not pictured.)

    On food irradiation….Like everything else conservatives support the misinformation is coming directly from lobbyists and the corporations that seek to profit off of the ignorance of the public. Just like climate change denial, the ONLY studies that are saying food irradiation is safe is the lobbyists and companies paying for the studies in their favor in the first place. You would be hard pressed to find any legitimate scientist or biologist that would advise eating food that has been exposed to radiation. The real problem of course, is the corporate factory farms and fast food restaurants using substandard practices and cleaning procedures to process their food. Almost all the major food poisoning outbreaks of the last few years have come from these large scale agri-businesses and fast food restaurants improperly handling the product or knowingly using tainted water or meat. Much like the recent cancerous cows recall. You know which farms very rarely if ever cause any of these kinds of problems? Small family owned farms, that have caring people and proper oversight running them. Irradiating all of the food to stop food poisoning is trading in one problem for another. Small levels of radiation in some carrots or a hamburger probably aren’t a big deal, but if EVERYTHING you ate was exposed to radiation eventually it would have very adverse and widespread effects. And that’s not even up for debate.

    Hmm… some No True Scotsmen and question-begging. And of course, deflection. Note also that he has not the faintest idea of how food irradiation works. But that doesn’t stop him from having an opinion on it.

    At the time of our correspondence, I was working as a process engineer in a food packaging factory. I tried in vain to explain to him that most plastic food packaging is exposed to radiation during its manufacture. The process is called electronic cross-linking. The plastic is “cooked” with a beam of electrons which makes the plastic tougher. While the radiation released by this process can be harmful without proper shielding, the plastic is harmless. It does not become radioactive.

    Worrying about irradiated food is just as stupid as worrying that cooking food in a microwave will make it radioactive.

    I also tried to explain to him that the smoke detectors in his house contain the radioactive isotope americium 241, which releases alpha and gamma radiation as it decays.

    It was no use. Like guns, radiation and nuclear energy are just an evil totems for progs.

  • The Limits of Law

    Everything has a limit. The natural world is full of them. For example, there is no such thing as an unboilable liquid. Every liquid will boil if you heat it up enough. The same holds true for man-made things. It is impossible to build a mile-high brick tower with parallel sides, because after a few hundred feet, the weight of the bricks on top would crush the ones at the base.

    (Source: physbot.co.uk)

    There are mental and emotional limits as well. There is a limit to how much a person can remember or learn. There is a limit to how much stress a person can take, and so on.

    Laws have limits, too. Many people mistakenly think laws are magic spells that alter behavior. Nothing could be further from the truth. Take speed limits, for example. How many people drive the speed limit? Hardly anyone. Almost everyone drives over the speed limit – most by a little, some by a lot.

    If there were no speed limits, most people would drive faster, but only up to a point. This is because there are mechanical limits to how fast it a car can go, as well as psychological limits – such as the driver’s sense of fear.

    Many people do not realize what a law is. Laws are not suggestions or friendly pieces of advice. They are enforced with violence. A law is essentially a formal threat. “Do this or else.”

    People weigh risk when they make any decision, including whether to follow a law. Even if a law carries a very harsh punishment, it will not deter many people if there is a low risk of being caught. For example, in 19th century England, many minor crimes such as theft were punishable by death. Thieves were hanged in public before huge crowds. And while those people were gawking, pickpockets would take advantage of the distraction to steal.

    In brief, laws are like language – they only work when a community is in near universal agreement on them. Imagine if each person in a town spoke a language differently. That language would be useless because the same word would mean different things to different people.

    Fuck this guy.

    Another point to consider is that since laws are made by imperfect people, there will be imperfect laws. Things which were once illegal are now legal and vice-versa. And in many cases, those bad laws were only repealed because many people were breaking them, and this put pressure on politicians to change them. All moral progress comes from lawbreakers – the abolitionists who defied slavery laws, the suffragettes who defied sexist laws, the anti-war protesters who defied draft laws, and so on. The United States itself was founded by outlaws.

    Shakespeare wrote, “None call treason as treason if it prospers.” So it is with laws. If a group of outlaws are successful in getting a law repealed, they are no longer outlaws.

    One last point to consider: there are limits to how well a law can be enforced. There is only so much that can be spent on police, courts, jails, and so on. Given that, the sensible thing would be to focus those scarce resources on preventing actual crimes – the kind that actually have a victim.

    Laws can also have awful side-effects. In Boulder, CO, for example, the city built many speed bumps in residential areas to prevent speeding cars from hitting children. Unfortunately, those speed bumps also forced ambulances to slow down, and for heart attacks, a minute or two can make the difference between life and death. The speed bumps lead to a great increase in heart attack mortality.

    Research in the USA supports these claims. One report from Boulder, Colorado suggests that for every life saved by traffic calming, as many as 85 people may die because emergency vehicles are delayed. It found response times are typically extended by 14% by speed-reduction measures. Another study conducted by the fire department in Austin, Texas showed an increase in the travel time of ambulances when transporting victims of up to 100%.

    There are no solutions, only trade-offs. If you want to make A better, you will make B worse.

    When most people hear of a problem, they reflexively say “there ought to be a law.” They ought to remember these words:

    “The wise know that foolish legislation is a rope of sand which perishes in the twisting; that the State must follow and not lead the character and progress of the citizen;… that the form of government which prevails is the expression of what cultivation exists in the population which permits it. The law is only a memorandum.”
    ―Ralph Waldo Emerson

  • Understanding Insurance

    “Harrumph, harrumph,” grumbled the crowd, “This place used to be better when you could beat the waiters.”

    The purpose of insurance is to provide protection from low-risk, high-cost events like car accidents and medical emergencies. The first major insurance company was Lloyd’s of London in 1688. It began in a coffee shop popular with sailors and merchants, so it was a good place to get news on sea trade. The sea was a dangerous place at that time (hint: AARGH! SHIVER ME TIMBERS!) and merchants wanted protection from losses. Speculators began offering to pay for potential losses according to the perceived risk in exchange for fees from the merchants. Basically, they were gambling on which ships would sink. If the ship sank, the merchant won, and if it didn’t, the speculator won. This practice later spread to other activities. Then the government got involved – with predictable results. Crop insurance came to the US in 1938 and flood insurance in 1968. Like everything else the government does, its insurance programs are costly and heavily in debt. More on this later.

    Insurance companies work only as long as the value of the claims paid is less than the revenue (premiums) they get from their customers. In short, there are only so many things they can pay for and stay in business. If the government required car insurance companies to pay for oil changes, car insurance would become much more expensive and every car insurance companies would go bankrupt. And it would be impossible to find a mechanic on Saturday.

    This situation is similar to what has been happening with health insurance. Most people do not spend much on healthcare between the ages of 1 and 60. For an average person in the US, about $9,000 is spent on healthcare in the first year of life, and about $3,000 per year until the age of 60. Costs rise steeply after that. For a typical American, about 30% of all the money spent on healthcare in their life is spent in their last year of life and about 80% in their last 15 years of life. For this reason, in countries with government-run healthcare, old and seriously ill people often face very long wait times for medical treatment. The bureaucrats hope that they will die before the government must pay for their treatment. This isn’t a conspiracy theory. Britain’s National Healthcare Service freely admits to rationing care such as cancer drugs and hip replacements to fix the hole in its budget.

    Dr Mark Porter, leader of the British Medical Association, said: “The NHS is being forced to choose between which patients to treat, with some facing delays in treatment and others being denied some treatments entirely. This survey lays bare the extreme pressure across the system and the distress caused to patients as a result.”

    Those of us in the US hear constantly about how greedy heartless health insurance companies are because they won’t pay for this or that (often a highly questionable this or that, Sandra Fluke). But it’s important to realize that NO insurance system, whether private or public, can pay for everything. The whole point of insurance is that many people pay in some often and a few take out a lot rarely. This isn’t politics. It’s arithmetic. And for those who claim that Britain or Canada’s system is better because it is cheaper, the reason it is cheaper is not because it is more efficient. It’s because they decide in advance how much to spend each year. It’s easy to keep costs down when you decide you will only spend so much and keep people waiting for as long as possible.

    Again, insurance can only work when it is used for low-risk, high-cost events. For health insurance, this means that the only things that ought to be covered are things like surgeries and expensive medicines. Some people might choose to buy extra health insurance, just as some people with pricey cars buy extra car insurance. But if you drive a regular car, there is no point to fancy car insurance, and if you are healthy, you do not need fancy health insurance. In short, if you want to fix America’s healthcare system, the best thing to do would be to let consumers buy whatever level of coverage they want. For most people, this would mean a cheap plan with a high deductible–the so-called substandard and junk policies.

    President Obama has repeatedly referred to the 4.7 million discontinued policies as “substandard.”[3] When the President announced his administrative “fix” that attempted to allow those with canceled plans to keep their existing plans for another year, Senator Tom Harkin (D–IA) said he was still “concerned about people having policies which don’t do anything. They’re just junk policies.”[4]

    The only kind of junk insurance is the kind you can’t afford and are forced to buy.

    Now let’s go back to the US government’s insurance programs. The US govt flood insurance program is currently $25 billion in debt. If it was a private company, it would have gone bankrupt decades ago. The Federal Crop Insurance program has done better since it was partially privatized in 1980. The government is still paying about 60% of its $12 billion cost.

    The lesson: whatever the good or service, it is always cheaper and better through the market than through the government.

  • The Derponomicon: Part 3

    Like, all Magnum P.I. up in here.In this installment, I asked the prog about Detroit and the case of Abner Schoenwetter, whose story was featured on the John Stossel special “Illegal Everything”.

    A response to this article on Detroit:

    I am not really well versed enough in the policies or politics of Detroit or much of upper Michigan for that matter. Conservatives like to claim that Detroit is a failure of liberal policies because of the rampant crime and poverty prevalent there. But a lot of Detroit’s problems are rooted in the fact that it was built around the auto industry, and the auto industry took a big hit with the advent of the foreign car boom in the early 70s. In fact, if you look at the popularity of foreign cars and their rise, you can see a correlating decline of the US auto industry, and with it, Detroit. Detroit also used to have a booming music industry. The issue is, in most of these major cities that are crumbling, is the industries that were once holding them up, abandoned them. And for every example of “liberal failures” that conservatives love to harp on so much, look to all the southern red states. Your home state of West Virginia for instance, has the worst education and poverty in the country yet the coal industry is thriving there. Mississippi, Georgia, Louisiana, Alabama, etc. Are all failures as well. In fact there are more rural whites in red states on welfare and food stamps than any other group. For every Detroit, there is an entire red state that is failing due to the polar opposite policies of suppressing workers rights, civil rights, education, minimum wage, etc. Perhaps the answer is in a healthy balance.

    He sort of punted on this one, but at least he hinted that Team Blue may not have all the answers. He correctly traces the problem to industries leaving cities but never elaborates as to why. Better just to pivot to a tu quoque, I guess.

    As many have noticed, this guy can barely put a sentence together without making a fallacy. I tried many, many times to explain what he was doing wrong but it never took. I even tried to boil it down to something simpler. I told him there are many ways to argue dishonestly, but the only ways to argue honestly are to show the errors in your opponent’s facts or logic.

    His next topic was this Stossel video:

    The video reports the case of seafood businessman Abner (Abbie) Schoenwetter. He was charged, convicted, and sent to prison for 6 1/2 years by federal prosecutors because he used plastic instead of cardboard to ship lobsters, which violated an obscure Honduran regulation.

    So here is my response to the Stossel piece: While it is true there are likely dozens and dozens of superfluous and burdensome laws on the books, they are almost never acted upon by law enforcement. Very rarely if ever will police officers waste their time enforcing lemonade stand or girl scout cookie sales kids soliciting laws unless there is a complaint, or several complaints from other citizens. Just like police would never on their own accord enforce a noise ordinance unless there was a complaint. So it is not superfluous and burdensome laws that are to blame in these situations, but asshole citizens who want to ruin everyone else’s fun and just need to complain about something. Every neighborhood has that one nosy, crochety, old asshole that has nothing to do all day but call the police on skateboarders and teens talking to loudly as they walk through the neighborhood. You, I, and everyone that was ever a child has fell victim to these types of people, who basically annoy the police into enforcing dumb laws that exist that they would rather not enforce. And in general soliciting laws, and I am sure lobster container laws, exist for a purpose….

    For instance, to keep every street corner from having guys selling everything from knockoff bags and jewelry to stereos and socks put of their vans on every street corner. Here in Chicago you have probably seen the many street carts of fried foods, ice cream, and pickup trucks selling fruit on the side of North Avenue. Almost none of those people have licenses to sell that stuff, or have passed proper health inspections, but even in a revenue hungry city like Chicago, the police drive right past them and don’t bother wasting their time, unless of course, some old bored asshole calls to complain.

    I must say I was stunned that he would even attempt to justify the govt’s actions shown in the video. When I pressed him if he really thought a man should go to jail over lobster boxes, he said this:

    Sure it is, but like I said, things like that don’t happen without reason usually. Perhaps the guy was warned or fined time and time again and continued to skirt the law. In some cities you can be arrested for not mowing your lawn if you continue to ignore the ordinance and refuse to pay associated fines. Do I think that’s dumb? Yes. Sure. But these types of examples are extreme and rare. I mean I wouldn’t say I was a victim of the system, but I certainly believe their should be a distinction between grabbing girls asses, and child rape. Or that a 19 year old dating a 17 year old should be charged with statutory rape. More often than not, when these things happen, it’s because the person on the receiving end pissed off the wrong person. In my case for instance, one of my victims, was the court stenographers daughter, and the prosecutor was a rape victim. So they really wanted to throw the boom at me and pretty much saddled me with as much as the could for misdemeanors. But that doesn’t mean I believe there shouldn’t be sex offender registration or laws for these kinds of things. In most cases, the system just needs to be revised and amended, not torn down. If your boat is leaking, you try to patch the leak, not sink the whole damn thing.

    He's like the President, only from behind.I forgot to mention this guy is convicted sex offender. He spent the ages from 17 to 20 grabbing the asses of dozens of random women. Yet last time on I checked, he spends most of his time virtue-signalling on Derpbook. Go figure.

    There is a saying that a thief thinks everybody steals. Maybe it’s the same with him. That is, the only thing that keeps him in line is punishment so he assumes everyone else is the same way, and that is why he supports harsh laws and punishments despite being a criminal himself.

  • The Derponomicon: Part 2

    "Please kill me," the book of the dead wailed.
    I’ll swallow your derp!

    On the name Derponomicon: it is a combination of derp and the Greek words nomos (law) and ikona (image). Thus, the name may be translated as “an image of the laws of the dumb.”

    A few years ago, I compiled The Derponomicon from a series of dialogs with a prog who was by far the most infuriatingly stupid person I have ever known. His responses are below. I did not correct his typos.

    In this excerpt, his topic was the following quote from Augustine of Hippo:

    “Justice being taken away, then, what are kingdoms but great robberies? For what are robberies themselves, but little kingdoms? The band itself is made up of men; it is ruled by the authority of a prince, it is knit together by the pact of the confederacy; the booty is divided by the law agreed on. If, by the admittance of abandoned men, this evil increases to such a degree that it holds places, fixes abodes, takes possession of cities, and subdues peoples, it assumes more plainly the name of a kingdom, because the reality is now manifestly conferred on it, not by the removal of covetousness, but by the addition of impunity. Indeed, that was an apt and true reply which was given to Alexander the Great by a pirate who had been seized. For when that king had asked the man what he meant by keeping hostile possession of the sea, he answered with bold pride, ‘What thou meanest by seizing the whole earth; but because I do it with a petty ship, I am called a robber, whilst thou who dost it with a great fleet art styled emperor.’”

    As far at the Augustine of Hippo quote, it is most certainly in reference to a mideval kingdom system of government. Equating a mideval kingdoms system of government to the modern day US government is once again, like comparing apples and hippos. In modern day US, tax dollars pay for roads, bridges, air traffic safety, clean air, clean water, inspected food, the military, satellites, the infrastructure of plumbing/electric/utilities/etc. we all enjoy, and about a zillion other things. In a kingdom, the people were lucky to get a water source. You literally cannot exist in modern society without taking advantage of what society (I.e. The government) provides. When you step on a sidewalk, or use electricity, or drive on a street in a car that isn’t exploding, etc. You are taking advantage of what the government provided to you.

    Ignorance of history, a conflation of society with govt, and an argument from ignorance.

    A response to my favorite Sowell quote:

    “The first lesson of economics is scarcity: there is never enough of anything to fully satisfy all those who want it. The first lesson of politics is to disregard the first lesson of economics.”

    -Thomas Sowell

    On the Thomas Sowell quote, As I have mentioned before, he is a favorite of the white supremacist crowd, which really says a lot about who he speaks to. Of course the lesson of economics is a finite amount of everything, otherwise no one would need to buy it. But that general statement isn’t new casserole true. The first lesson of economics is laziness. People will pay for anything that requires the least amount of work. When people are given the choice between growing their own food for free in their backyard, or buying food at a restaurant or a prepared meal, what will most people choose? When given the choice between paying for produce and meat and making food yourself, and ordering a pizza, what will most people choose? MOST aspects of our economy are built on taking advantage of people’s laziness. People are willing to pay for any product or service that will make their life easier. So generally speaking there is pretty much an unlimited amount of goods and services that Americans are willing to buy if they can afford it, from a service that cleans up dog shit in your yard, to custom hats for your baby. So in America that rule doesn’t really apply. What does however have a finite amount to go around is wealth, and the more wealth we hand up to the top percentages, who know how to manipulate and hide it, in the most literal way takes from everyone else. There are only so many slices of the pie to go around, and when the richest people get the most pieces of pie, that leaves nothing but a slice and some crumbs for everyone else to fight over.

    More baseless smears, more deflection, more yammering that the economy is a zero-sum game. The denial of scarcity is the cherry on top.