I need to start thinking seriously about what to do about my devices. I've got an old flip phone, an old iPod Nano plugged into the auxiliary port in my car, a Nexus 7 running Android for which Google has MD'ed official support, and an old Lenovo laptop running Kubuntu (with lots of traditional "UNIX" software installed on top of that. The tablet gets used largely as an e-book reader, occasionally as a browser. I find myself increasingly frustrated by the app-centric handling of data and lack of file system on the smaller ones. Just fishin' put the MP3 files in one place in an honest-to-deity file system (available to my Mac as well) and run the player software of my choice. And I've got some of my own software written in Perl and Python that I'd like to run on it. Wishful thinking that I might get a single device that's not too big to do all those things?
As I recall, the decision was much more complicated than just stay or go. The Iraqi government wouldn't give permission for the troops to stay unless they were under Iraqi civilian control over deployments, with soldiers/contractors responsible for civilian deaths potentially charged with murder and tried in Iraqi courts. The alternative to that is to say "we're an occupying power," but then you're liable for a whole lot of the care and feeding of the civilian population: food, water, keeping the electricity on, etc.
I guess there's the alternative that Israel uses in the West Bank: they say they're not an occupying power but reserve the right to run whatever military operations they like. Having a Security Council veto power do that is a really scary precedent. Russia could roll into Ukraine, or China into Vietnam, saying "Security. We're not an occupying power, but we reserve the right to deploy our military."
There are thousands of colleges across the country, more than enough to create a “free market”.... If parents don’t like the content, the kids can go elsewhere.
If you're a Missouri parent, though, there are very few places in the country that will give you the same deal on tuition that the UoM schools do. Within the state, for some majors, there may be only one or two choices, or one stand-out program from among a few.
I admit that I'm old, and old-fashioned. What I remember about Novembers from my own undergraduate days was trying to find enough hours in the day to deal with mid-terms and impending final projects. There wasn't enough time to go protest and still pass.
The defunding that Freddy fears is apt to be selective. In my state legislature -- and I have no reason to think it's atypical -- the membership from both parties is stuffed with graduates of the two flagship state universities and the public law school. The Republicans are likely to want to trim the offerings rather than cut funding broadly. Anything of the form "X studies" will be high on their list.
I mean, suppose you are a young person interested in video game design, or programming, or network design. What labor union would you turn to in order to get apprenticeship? Would Apple or Google or Microsoft support a labor union that attempted to organize their workers to supply apprenticeships?
Why unions? Some states simply say "Practicing profession X requires a state license, or that the work is done under the supervision of someone with a state license." For some types of engineering, in most states, you can't hang out a shingle to practice as a professional engineer without a state license.
It's not that states haven't tried doing this for more contemporary technical fields, though, like electronics and software. Within my working career, the state of NJ had hearings on legislation to require just that. The heads of Bell Labs and RCA Sarnoff Labs went to Trenton to testify. What they told them was basically: (1) our currently unlicensed staff are inventing the things that you'll be testing on in five years. Or if you're not testing on them, then your tests will be meaningless because our stuff is what people will be using. (2) We recruit nationally; adding a requirement that people can't do useful work until they obtain a NJ license to design circuits or write code kills that. (3) Given (1) and (2), we'll relocate the whole damned business to another state before we'll do it your way.
Here's an interesting mental exercise. Imagine a world where, if you want to change a formula in a spreadsheet, you have to hire someone from the union or call in one of the apprentices from over in IT. In the latter case, you can't actually use the changed spreadsheet until the guy with a license signs off on it. Things can get almost that ridiculous. When my tech organization moved into a building still under construction in NJ, under union contract rules, we had to go get one of the union electricians to supervise while we plugged a piece of equipment into a different outlet. I took the site foreman out for a drink after work one day and said something like, "My folks are tired of annoying your people, and I'm sure your folks are tired of being annoyed. I understand you have some apprentices on site studying for their next-level exams. If I provide them with a quiet well-lit study area in our lab, is that enough supervision for us to unplug equipment?"
By the way, welcome back, counselor. Not to nag, but I'm expecting a deep piece on the six top cases on the Supreme Court docket for this session. Next week would be nice. And I think I owe you a beer, so I'll have to figure out how to pay for that.
I think the font restrictions my software imposes actually startled me more than the ads. Here's an image with a couple of simple examples from my notes. The top row is before-and-after for a piece of The Atlantic's front page at the time I was writing the software; the bottom row from The Daily Beast's front page at the same time.
I really do tend to forget that there are individual pages out there that use six fonts in sizes ranging from overwhelming to unreadably small.
Absolutely. I have in-laws that hang on desperately in the dying small town where they seem to be related to half the population. My wife is unusual in that she left. On the cost of living thing, you can sometimes live in an old farm house for free there, because the owners just want someone living in it to keep an eye on things. OTOH, in my family, in my parents' generation and mine, most of the time none of the siblings lived within a hundred miles of one another, or their parents. Seems to be a tradition -- in the part of the Cain family tree that I know anything about, each generation moved another few hundred miles west from the previous one. Farthest I've traced that is to a Solomon Cain in eastern Kentucky in 1820.
My list for "innocuous" is rather long these days. Not obscene. Not overly garish. Doesn't take up much bandwidth. Loads promptly, and doesn't force a page reflow if it does get loaded. Doesn't include Javascript or Flash or anything else that executes. Doesn't include tracking cookies. Limited number per page.
With respect to that last one, when I go to the NYTimes front page, my ad blocker blocks 14% of the page elements. For the Seattle Times, it's 25%. The blocker keeps a running count of the amount of stuff blocked since it was installed -- 11% of page elements!
I was looking over my wife's shoulder the other day while she was asking questions about something. Between my ad blocker and my piece of Javascript that enforces considerable uniformity of font faces and sizes, it's really interesting just how different my view of the web is from hers.
"Living in SF" is relevant. There are plenty of good reasons to live in SF -- affordability is not one of them. She could undoubtedly do better in Minneapolis or Durham, both of which regularly make the lists of top cities for a combination of above-average income, low unemployment, and modest cost of living. At an extreme, Omaha's unemployment rate has dropped below 3% and her share of an SF apartment might rent her a small townhouse there. Admittedly, you do give up a lot of things moving from California to Nebraska :^)
About that time, there were similar conversations going on inside the companies that were spending tens of billions of dollars to build the commercial internet-access networks. The usual separation was into content creators, content consumers, aggregators, and gatekeepers. Pre-internet, there was reasonable money to be made as an aggregator or gatekeeper (the two functions often being intertwined). Post-internet, we're still waiting to see whether that's possible. Despite Wallace's assertion, there seem to be darned few people willing to pay for those functions.
Medicaid expansion. When I worked for the state government, and had to speak on a live mic about Medicaid and Medicare and the impacts those had on how our state information systems had to work, I sometimes wondered if people noticed the pause in my speech while I made sure that my mouth was saying the right one :^)
Alsotoo: I’m very curious to see what becomes of this CO single payer initiative.
I'm particularly interested to see how it's marketed, and received, in the rural parts of the state. It doesn't address the fundamental problem in rural health care -- lack of providers -- but it does presumably deal with the ACA's problem in rural areas. Which is that the insurance companies aren't interested in those areas, resulting in few choices and high prices. Single payer reduces the choices further, but should result in the rural folks getting the same premium as the Front Range suburbs.
OTOH, the results of Kynect and the Medicaid expansion have been quite popular in rural Kentucky, which just voted for a new governor campaigning on dismantling those.
But IIRC, they're fixed. On days when I'm feeling cynical, I think that this is one of the things Chief Justice Roberts has on his mind in supporting the ACA. Big corporations replace shopping across multiple states for health insurance plans that have shown a long-term trend to double-digit inflation rates with a simple fixed payment to the federal government.
I have no idea why we have HSA, MSA, HRA and FSA options with different rules for solving roughly the same set of problems.
At the risk of hijacking the discussion on my own post... In the US, government assistance comes with restrictions. Lots of restrictions. There is a portion of the political class whose price for passing some form of assistance is almost always to limit how much assistance, what it can be used for, and who can get it. Using the tax code to implement assistance -- eg, allowing the use of pre-tax dollars -- is just such a restriction, limiting the benefit to people who are generally employed.
The larger-scale version of your question is why does the federal government buy health care for people using all of Medicare, Medicaid, CHP+, the VA, Tri-Care, and the employer share for government civilian employees? Why not just pay some portion of the bills for health care for all those people? The revenue sources are, in practice, immaterial -- that's just accounting and the computers are damned good at that. Why not use that scope for leverage on service providers? "Our clients are (roughly) 50% of your business, we pay promptly, and since we can print money we're good for it; we insist that you give us at least the best price that you give anyone else."
Living in an initiative state for a long time now, I've gotten to where I pay more attention to those than the Republican or Democratic things. Ohio was a mixed bag this year -- the badly-flawed marijuana initiative lost, but the redistricting initiative won overwhelmingly. In my suburban county in Colorado, the initiative picture was pretty rosy for progressives -- let the state keep the excess revenue from the marijuana tax*, raise taxes for the public library system and guarantee that the county commissioners have to keep their hands off of that, and a message to people thinking about being on the school board to not mess with the AP students and their parents. The first item for the 2016 ballot cleared the signature hurdle last week -- state single-payer health insurance.
* The initiative passed in every county in the state, which is pretty much unheard of.
Indeed. My cousin is an organizer -- among other things -- for the Teamsters. He lives in a right-to-work state and seems to spend most of his time in other right-to-work states. His FB feed regularly includes successful efforts.
This. Right at the end of my technical career, I was acquired by a large corporation that didn't ever make a profit*. But the CEO/COB took home his $3-5M and a zillion stock options every year.
* They had a huge cash flow and were, under the rules at that time, allowed to depreciate their large capital base at a rate much faster than it would actually wear out. Their financial statements barely mentioned profit and loss; it was all about EBIDA, baby, and that cash flow.
Certainly any comparison that involves options or stock grants given to employees would be suspect. Those aren't investments by the employee, those are (deferred) compensation provided by the employer. The key question in your second example boils down to "Is Kolohe, a purely passive investor, hiring you to provide special knowledge/labor/whatever?" The middle-class outrage over the tax treatment is because in most cases, they think the answer is "Damn right he is!" no matter how the paperwork may be structured.
...something like 40% of the remaining untapped energy reserves in the US are located under federal lands...
I might have guessed higher than that: everything more than three miles offshore; the federal land holdings in the West; on the order of another 100 million acres where the feds have disposed of the land but retained the mineral rights (eg, most of the land given to the railroads in the 1870s). Not just oil, natural gas, and coal, either. Most of the uranium and thorium reserves are on federal land. Some of the best wind resources in the West are on federal land (as well as offshore wind in the Atlantic). There's significant undeveloped conventional hydro in the West (significant in terms of the size of Western Interconnect demand), but much of it's unavailable because it would affect lands held in trust by the BIA. Lots of the best places for commercial-scale solar are federally owned. By far the best geothermal resource in the country is Yellowstone National Park :^)
The amusing thing is that Transcanada could have very quietly built the added capacity years ago along existing right-of-way, using an existing border crossing. Instead, it looks like they just drew a straight line with no regard to what that crossed. I've always assumed that Dick Cheney told them "Just use the straight-line route, we've got your back." But the route was such that it pissed off some of the Native Americans, and cut across one of the few pieces of real estate that the Nebraska environmental groups would care about particularly. That got it caught up in the courts, and the Nebraska state government, and before things got settled Dick wasn't in position to have anyone's back.
I seem to recall that Tolkien cautiously believed that "hobbit" was a new word, but that there is at least one use of it in 19th century northern European mythology. Obscure enough that it's unlikely any court would rule that characters resembling Bilbo, Frodo, Sam, etc aren't infringement on the trademark.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.
On “Weekend!”
I need to start thinking seriously about what to do about my devices. I've got an old flip phone, an old iPod Nano plugged into the auxiliary port in my car, a Nexus 7 running Android for which Google has MD'ed official support, and an old Lenovo laptop running Kubuntu (with lots of traditional "UNIX" software installed on top of that. The tablet gets used largely as an e-book reader, occasionally as a browser. I find myself increasingly frustrated by the app-centric handling of data and lack of file system on the smaller ones. Just fishin' put the MP3 files in one place in an honest-to-deity file system (available to my Mac as well) and run the player software of my choice. And I've got some of my own software written in Perl and Python that I'd like to run on it. Wishful thinking that I might get a single device that's not too big to do all those things?
On “Thoughts and prayers for the people of Paris”
As I recall, the decision was much more complicated than just stay or go. The Iraqi government wouldn't give permission for the troops to stay unless they were under Iraqi civilian control over deployments, with soldiers/contractors responsible for civilian deaths potentially charged with murder and tried in Iraqi courts. The alternative to that is to say "we're an occupying power," but then you're liable for a whole lot of the care and feeding of the civilian population: food, water, keeping the electricity on, etc.
I guess there's the alternative that Israel uses in the West Bank: they say they're not an occupying power but reserve the right to run whatever military operations they like. Having a Security Council veto power do that is a really scary precedent. Russia could roll into Ukraine, or China into Vietnam, saying "Security. We're not an occupying power, but we reserve the right to deploy our military."
On “Enough Already, with the College Students This and the College Students That”
There are thousands of colleges across the country, more than enough to create a “free market”.... If parents don’t like the content, the kids can go elsewhere.
If you're a Missouri parent, though, there are very few places in the country that will give you the same deal on tuition that the UoM schools do. Within the state, for some majors, there may be only one or two choices, or one stand-out program from among a few.
I admit that I'm old, and old-fashioned. What I remember about Novembers from my own undergraduate days was trying to find enough hours in the day to deal with mid-terms and impending final projects. There wasn't enough time to go protest and still pass.
On “Safe Spaces”
The defunding that Freddy fears is apt to be selective. In my state legislature -- and I have no reason to think it's atypical -- the membership from both parties is stuffed with graduates of the two flagship state universities and the public law school. The Republicans are likely to want to trim the offerings rather than cut funding broadly. Anything of the form "X studies" will be high on their list.
On “Linky Friday #140: Criminal Ed”
Please. I haven't had supper yet.
"
Aye. You can have guilds, and you can have giant corporations, but I'm pretty much sure that you can't have both at the same time in the same system.
"
I mean, suppose you are a young person interested in video game design, or programming, or network design. What labor union would you turn to in order to get apprenticeship? Would Apple or Google or Microsoft support a labor union that attempted to organize their workers to supply apprenticeships?
Why unions? Some states simply say "Practicing profession X requires a state license, or that the work is done under the supervision of someone with a state license." For some types of engineering, in most states, you can't hang out a shingle to practice as a professional engineer without a state license.
It's not that states haven't tried doing this for more contemporary technical fields, though, like electronics and software. Within my working career, the state of NJ had hearings on legislation to require just that. The heads of Bell Labs and RCA Sarnoff Labs went to Trenton to testify. What they told them was basically: (1) our currently unlicensed staff are inventing the things that you'll be testing on in five years. Or if you're not testing on them, then your tests will be meaningless because our stuff is what people will be using. (2) We recruit nationally; adding a requirement that people can't do useful work until they obtain a NJ license to design circuits or write code kills that. (3) Given (1) and (2), we'll relocate the whole damned business to another state before we'll do it your way.
Here's an interesting mental exercise. Imagine a world where, if you want to change a formula in a spreadsheet, you have to hire someone from the union or call in one of the apprentices from over in IT. In the latter case, you can't actually use the changed spreadsheet until the guy with a license signs off on it. Things can get almost that ridiculous. When my tech organization moved into a building still under construction in NJ, under union contract rules, we had to go get one of the union electricians to supervise while we plugged a piece of equipment into a different outlet. I took the site foreman out for a drink after work one day and said something like, "My folks are tired of annoying your people, and I'm sure your folks are tired of being annoyed. I understand you have some apprentices on site studying for their next-level exams. If I provide them with a quiet well-lit study area in our lab, is that enough supervision for us to unplug equipment?"
On “End of Sabbatical Report”
By the way, welcome back, counselor. Not to nag, but I'm expecting a deep piece on the six top cases on the Supreme Court docket for this session. Next week would be nice. And I think I owe you a beer, so I'll have to figure out how to pay for that.
"
I think the font restrictions my software imposes actually startled me more than the ads. Here's an image with a couple of simple examples from my notes. The top row is before-and-after for a piece of The Atlantic's front page at the time I was writing the software; the bottom row from The Daily Beast's front page at the same time.
I really do tend to forget that there are individual pages out there that use six fonts in sizes ranging from overwhelming to unreadably small.
On “Linky Friday #140: Criminal Ed”
Absolutely. I have in-laws that hang on desperately in the dying small town where they seem to be related to half the population. My wife is unusual in that she left. On the cost of living thing, you can sometimes live in an old farm house for free there, because the owners just want someone living in it to keep an eye on things. OTOH, in my family, in my parents' generation and mine, most of the time none of the siblings lived within a hundred miles of one another, or their parents. Seems to be a tradition -- in the part of the Cain family tree that I know anything about, each generation moved another few hundred miles west from the previous one. Farthest I've traced that is to a Solomon Cain in eastern Kentucky in 1820.
On “End of Sabbatical Report”
My list for "innocuous" is rather long these days. Not obscene. Not overly garish. Doesn't take up much bandwidth. Loads promptly, and doesn't force a page reflow if it does get loaded. Doesn't include Javascript or Flash or anything else that executes. Doesn't include tracking cookies. Limited number per page.
With respect to that last one, when I go to the NYTimes front page, my ad blocker blocks 14% of the page elements. For the Seattle Times, it's 25%. The blocker keeps a running count of the amount of stuff blocked since it was installed -- 11% of page elements!
I was looking over my wife's shoulder the other day while she was asking questions about something. Between my ad blocker and my piece of Javascript that enforces considerable uniformity of font faces and sizes, it's really interesting just how different my view of the web is from hers.
On “Linky Friday #140: Criminal Ed”
"Living in SF" is relevant. There are plenty of good reasons to live in SF -- affordability is not one of them. She could undoubtedly do better in Minneapolis or Durham, both of which regularly make the lists of top cities for a combination of above-average income, low unemployment, and modest cost of living. At an extreme, Omaha's unemployment rate has dropped below 3% and her share of an SF apartment might rent her a small townhouse there. Admittedly, you do give up a lot of things moving from California to Nebraska :^)
On “End of Sabbatical Report”
About that time, there were similar conversations going on inside the companies that were spending tens of billions of dollars to build the commercial internet-access networks. The usual separation was into content creators, content consumers, aggregators, and gatekeepers. Pre-internet, there was reasonable money to be made as an aggregator or gatekeeper (the two functions often being intertwined). Post-internet, we're still waiting to see whether that's possible. Despite Wallace's assertion, there seem to be darned few people willing to pay for those functions.
On “A Few Post-Debate Observations”
Medicaid expansion. When I worked for the state government, and had to speak on a live mic about Medicaid and Medicare and the impacts those had on how our state information systems had to work, I sometimes wondered if people noticed the pause in my speech while I made sure that my mouth was saying the right one :^)
On “My Health Insurance Premium Is Going Down”
Alsotoo: I’m very curious to see what becomes of this CO single payer initiative.
I'm particularly interested to see how it's marketed, and received, in the rural parts of the state. It doesn't address the fundamental problem in rural health care -- lack of providers -- but it does presumably deal with the ACA's problem in rural areas. Which is that the insurance companies aren't interested in those areas, resulting in few choices and high prices. Single payer reduces the choices further, but should result in the rural folks getting the same premium as the Front Range suburbs.
OTOH, the results of Kynect and the Medicaid expansion have been quite popular in rural Kentucky, which just voted for a new governor campaigning on dismantling those.
"
But IIRC, they're fixed. On days when I'm feeling cynical, I think that this is one of the things Chief Justice Roberts has on his mind in supporting the ACA. Big corporations replace shopping across multiple states for health insurance plans that have shown a long-term trend to double-digit inflation rates with a simple fixed payment to the federal government.
"
I have no idea why we have HSA, MSA, HRA and FSA options with different rules for solving roughly the same set of problems.
At the risk of hijacking the discussion on my own post... In the US, government assistance comes with restrictions. Lots of restrictions. There is a portion of the political class whose price for passing some form of assistance is almost always to limit how much assistance, what it can be used for, and who can get it. Using the tax code to implement assistance -- eg, allowing the use of pre-tax dollars -- is just such a restriction, limiting the benefit to people who are generally employed.
The larger-scale version of your question is why does the federal government buy health care for people using all of Medicare, Medicaid, CHP+, the VA, Tri-Care, and the employer share for government civilian employees? Why not just pay some portion of the bills for health care for all those people? The revenue sources are, in practice, immaterial -- that's just accounting and the computers are damned good at that. Why not use that scope for leverage on service providers? "Our clients are (roughly) 50% of your business, we pay promptly, and since we can print money we're good for it; we insist that you give us at least the best price that you give anyone else."
On “Our lazy media: More curious liberal bashing”
Living in an initiative state for a long time now, I've gotten to where I pay more attention to those than the Republican or Democratic things. Ohio was a mixed bag this year -- the badly-flawed marijuana initiative lost, but the redistricting initiative won overwhelmingly. In my suburban county in Colorado, the initiative picture was pretty rosy for progressives -- let the state keep the excess revenue from the marijuana tax*, raise taxes for the public library system and guarantee that the county commissioners have to keep their hands off of that, and a message to people thinking about being on the school board to not mess with the AP students and their parents. The first item for the 2016 ballot cleared the signature hurdle last week -- state single-payer health insurance.
* The initiative passed in every county in the state, which is pretty much unheard of.
On “America Indentured, Part II: Villains”
Indeed. My cousin is an organizer -- among other things -- for the Teamsters. He lives in a right-to-work state and seems to spend most of his time in other right-to-work states. His FB feed regularly includes successful efforts.
"
This. Right at the end of my technical career, I was acquired by a large corporation that didn't ever make a profit*. But the CEO/COB took home his $3-5M and a zillion stock options every year.
* They had a huge cash flow and were, under the rules at that time, allowed to depreciate their large capital base at a rate much faster than it would actually wear out. Their financial statements barely mentioned profit and loss; it was all about EBIDA, baby, and that cash flow.
On “Carried Interest is Not Labor Income – The Capital Structure Perspective”
That's a very nice clarification, thanks.
"
Certainly any comparison that involves options or stock grants given to employees would be suspect. Those aren't investments by the employee, those are (deferred) compensation provided by the employer. The key question in your second example boils down to "Is Kolohe, a purely passive investor, hiring you to provide special knowledge/labor/whatever?" The middle-class outrage over the tax treatment is because in most cases, they think the answer is "Damn right he is!" no matter how the paperwork may be structured.
On “Linky Friday #139: Humans, Robots, & Onions”
...something like 40% of the remaining untapped energy reserves in the US are located under federal lands...
I might have guessed higher than that: everything more than three miles offshore; the federal land holdings in the West; on the order of another 100 million acres where the feds have disposed of the land but retained the mineral rights (eg, most of the land given to the railroads in the 1870s). Not just oil, natural gas, and coal, either. Most of the uranium and thorium reserves are on federal land. Some of the best wind resources in the West are on federal land (as well as offshore wind in the Atlantic). There's significant undeveloped conventional hydro in the West (significant in terms of the size of Western Interconnect demand), but much of it's unavailable because it would affect lands held in trust by the BIA. Lots of the best places for commercial-scale solar are federally owned. By far the best geothermal resource in the country is Yellowstone National Park :^)
"
The amusing thing is that Transcanada could have very quietly built the added capacity years ago along existing right-of-way, using an existing border crossing. Instead, it looks like they just drew a straight line with no regard to what that crossed. I've always assumed that Dick Cheney told them "Just use the straight-line route, we've got your back." But the route was such that it pissed off some of the Native Americans, and cut across one of the few pieces of real estate that the Nebraska environmental groups would care about particularly. That got it caught up in the courts, and the Nebraska state government, and before things got settled Dick wasn't in position to have anyone's back.
"
I seem to recall that Tolkien cautiously believed that "hobbit" was a new word, but that there is at least one use of it in 19th century northern European mythology. Obscure enough that it's unlikely any court would rule that characters resembling Bilbo, Frodo, Sam, etc aren't infringement on the trademark.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.