Category Archives: View

View 796 Monday, October 28, 2013

“Transparency and the rule of law will be the touchstones of this presidency.”

President Barack Obama, January 31, 2009

Christians to Beirut. Alawites to the grave.

Syrian Freedom Fighters

What we have now is all we will ever have.

Conservationist motto

I have more or less recovered from the Flu, the horrid stuff is off my face, and I look a bit as if I’d joined one of the Studeneinkorps in Heidelberg, but I am recovering well. Again my thanks to all who subscribed during the Pledge Week, and apologies for bugging out for about a week immediately thereafter. I simply haven’t had much in the way of energy for a while. That too is changing.

I am now down to a couple of tasks that have to take some precedence. First is getting the last of the introductory material together for the Sixth Grade Reader. This is the official California Sixth Grade Reader for 1914, meaning that nearly all the work in it was public domain at the time it was written; it is important for several reason. First you can gauge for yourself the caliber of instruction in the schools for then and now: the sheer “difficulty” of the material that sixth grade students were expected to read, complete with poems that they were to memorize and recite, should be informative. Remember that in California of that time nearly everyone was expected to get through sixth grade. They might not all go to High School, but Sixth Grade? It will also be useful to home schoolers. The poems in the book will be thought difficult by today’s students and many will simply not go through them, but for those who take the trouble the reward is great: one of the great intellectual pleasures of life is good poetry, but it is an acquired taste. We used to make everyone expose themselves to it on the theory that some would like it. It is also a good way to learn to speak the English language well.

We have also decided to reissue the 1981 Anthology Survival of Freedom, which has 375 pages of stories and essays on the title theme. It sold well when it was first published, and lasted a while: and I think there is a place for it again. It contains stories and essays by me, Harlan Ellison, Larry Niven, Poul Anderson, Ursula Le Guin, Norman Spinrad, Robert Heinlein, and others, all still quite relevant to today’s world despite all the technological changes and the end of the Cold War.

I’ve also been absorbed in a certain amount of time wasting, but my study is nearly cleaned up, and I’m planning a tea party. Not political, just some writer friends over for tea. I haven’t been able to do that for years because my place began to look like one of those hoarder’s mazes where the police find the owner ten years after he died behind a stack of useless junk. That’s mostly thanks to my friend Peter with some help from Eric. There’s still work to be done, but it is not possible to visualize an ending,.

So I haven’t vanished from the Earth, and I am catching up. I know I keep saying Real Soon Now, but I really have made progress. And I look all right except for the dueling scars…

Some numbers to contemplate:

                                 Expenditures in 2011 (Billions of Dollars):

New Homes                    $337 Billion

Automobiles                    $328 Billion

Computers                      $375 Billion

Comply with Tax Code     $392 Billion

These are interesting numbers, and show something of the structure of our national economy. Now contemplate that in 2011 we spent $392 Billion complying with the U.S. Tax Code. That’s not what was paid in taxes. It’s what it cost to pay the taxes and prove they had been properly paid: record keeping, bookkeeping, compliance officers and consultants, legal fees, tax consultants, tax accountants – all the myriad ways that it costs money to fill out and check all the forms that have to be filed with the IRS.

Where your treasure is, there will your heart be also; is this where the nation’s heart truly ought to be? I will have more on this subject another time when I have a bit more energy.

We have considerable mail, and more to say about the health care situation: I invite you ton continue to consider why anyone ought to pay for someone else’s health care. I don’t mean pubic health and sanitation, which are local matters anyway, or communicable diseases. We have seen in the past weeks a ton of stories about people unable to get health insurance because they had pre-existing conditions – which is to say, they were already sick, so no sane insurance company would undertake to pay for their medical care without charging a premium equal to or greater than the expected cost of their care. The remedy in the Affordable Care Act is to require the companies to issue the sick person an insurance policy and charge no more for it than the company charges a well person. This means that the well person must pay a great deal more for his insurance since the policy must also cover some sick people as well. The Affordable Care Act solves that problem by requiring everyone to buy an insurance policy at the new price that covers everyone. This means a enormous increase in the cost of insurance for the young and healthy, who aren’t going to want to pay that much so that someone else’s grandma can have a year in the Intensive Care ward, or the child born with a defective heart can get a heart transplant. That’s a wonderful boon for the parents of the child, but a large burden on the parents of the child not born with a heart defect.

But all that assumes that they young and healthy may grumble, but can be coerced into buying the insurance because the IRS will see to it that they buy it; and that assumes that the economy is vigorous enough to allow all the young people – not just those who manage to grow up and get an education and acquire job skills and find a job, but all of them – will have, inherit, or somehow acquire the money to buy that insurance policy. This does not seem as likely as perhaps it did in boom times.

There are other such matters to consider, and they are not trivial questions. They will have to be answered, once the Federal Exchanges begin working properly.

News items

I remember when the Sony reader was preferable to the Kindle. Now:

http://blog.the-ebook-reader.com/2013/10/26/sony-withdrawing-from-ebook-reader-market-entirely-in-us/

Then we have:

http://www.publisher…e-the-norm.html

First the electronic rights become worth something.  We noted that back in the BYTE days when computers were rare, and that sparked the debates about information wants to be free, and perhaps electronic rights should not be worth anything to the writers because that exploits the readers, and those who long for information but can’t afford it.  Before that was settled, electronic rights grew in value to the authors, and grew and grew, and some of us observed that electronic rights were now worth as much — yea, verily more — than print rights.

And now the print rights aren’t even being exercised….   Turn the page.  Oops. We don’t do that any more.

Saturday Morning we managed to get up, breakfast, and make our way to a local movie house where we saw a live performance of the Metropolitan Opera production of Shostakovich’s The Nose, an opera based on the absurd short story of the same name by Nicolai Gogol. I remember reading this as an undergraduate and finding it amusing, and it is amusing as an opera: indeed it is quit faithful to Gogol’s story. As with most modern opera there are no tunes to whistle or hum after you leave the theater, but some of the imagery will stick with you for – well in my case, a day or so. You may be more fortunate. I am not sorry to have gone;. The Los Angeles Opera has hit a doldrums period I fear. The Met will broadcast live Dvorak’s Rusalka in a couple of weeks, with Rene Fleming, and I intend to go see that. If it sounds as if I am still unhappy about the LA Opera spending everything it had on a surreal production of the Ring with staging so bad that one soprano suggested they simply use her CD since no one would hear her in the mask with her face turned away anyway – well, yes. Wagner was not trying for an opera of the absurd and his source was not Gogol.

Query: I keep hearing and seeing news to the effect that Kaiser cancelled the memberships of 160,000 members in California, but I cannot find an actual source to that story, nor anything about who they were, or why the cancellation.  Does anyone know, or is this a rumor?

View 795 Monday, October 21, 2013

“Transparency and the rule of law will be the touchstones of this presidency.”

President Barack Obama, January 31, 2009

Christians to Beirut. Alawites to the grave.

Syrian Freedom Fighters

What we have now is all we will ever have.

Conservationist motto

I got the stitches taken out of my face today, and we managed to get in a better than half hour walk, with Sable, so we can count it a good day and I am recovering. I am still in a situation to say that you really don’t want to fall out of bed and tear holes in your face.

The stories continue to pour in of government officials – particularly for some reason Parks Department employees including Rangers – taking care to make life miserable for citizens as a matter of policy. Precisely where this policy originated is not known, but considerable money was spent on the operation. The World War II, Viet Nam War, and Korean War monuments on the Mall are not attended and are open for anyone to stroll through, and they are meaningful to the veterans of those wars. The nearest barricades would be in some Park Department storage place a good way from the Mall. Had the government shut down simply removed the park people from the site, it would have cost nothing to ask the American Legion, WFW, and other such outfits to provide monitors; but it was very costly to bring out the barricades and post park police around those monuments to keep the veterans away from them. Yet that was done.

The same with the access off-ramp to the privately owned parking lot at the privately owned and operated Mount Vernon: it costs nothing to operate and no one parks on government property; but at considerable expense barricades were put up to block the off ramp, and federal employees were sent to enforce the shutdown of the turnoff. Same story for the off highway viewpoints for Mount Rushmore; at considerable expense they were closed. And tourists on a tour bus that stopped to look were forbidden to “recreate” by taking photographs of Old Faithful; it took people on duty to do that. This wasn’t saving money, this was intended to be hard on people, presumably so they would blame the Republicans for shutting down the government.

Now you might argue that these acts originated in low level management, but after the first couple of days the President and every senior officer in government had to be aware of them, but nothing was done. Apparently it was decided that this was a reasonable policy. It would seem to be a good subject for investigation with possible firing of government employees under the Hatch Act, but I suppose all the teeth were taken out of that a long time ago. Civil Servants are supposed to be officially politically neutral in exchange for job security when administrations change; clearly that is not working today, and something ought to be done about it. The theory of civil service is that it beats the spoils system by keeping experienced and efficient officials on the job when administrations change. It has a cost: under the “spoils system” it is much easier to hold elected officials responsible for the actions of government. We seem to be working out a system that has all the disadvantages of both.

Rights, etc.

The cardiologist quoted by Mark makes a number of important points. One of them in particular got my attention.

"Why do many Americans think that healthcare is not a right for its own taxpaying citizens?"

What made the author think that it isn’t a right? Please define "right". It is a word that is bandied about a lot, too often by people who manifestly have no notion of its actual meaning. Simply put, a right is something that you can do without requiring the permission of another. Therefore, a right is an action, not an entitlement.

That may sound pedantic, but it is really important. I have the right to be an astronaut, in that no one can forbid me outright. Does that mean I can demand that NASA send me up on the next available flight (whenever that will be)? Of course not. There are other considerations.

By the same token, everyone has the right to high-quality health care, a superior education, comfortable housing, etc. No one can be denied, "just because". If I can pay for it, it’s mine. If I can’t pay for it, I can certainly govern myself ("self-government", see?) so that I can accumulate whatever resources I need to have what I want. That is my right.

It is also my right to be a lazy, indigent, wastrel. No one can force me to be responsible. Can I then demand that others provide me with what I refuse to provide for myself?

That is the central question of economic policy in the modern age.

(I’m so proud I thought of that. I never spent even a nanosecond in an economics class.)

Richard White

Austin, Texas

The Constitution of the United States does not confer positive rights in the sense of welfare, pensions, and health care. The Bill of Rights was negative and prohibited the Federal government from certain actions — Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion did not prohibit the seven states that had established churches in 1787 from maintaining them, and indeed the last state church was not disestablished until well into the 19^th Century.. The Civil War Amendments did prohibit the states from certain actions, but whether they, by sort of incorporating the Bill of Rights into prohibitions on the state government, forbade what amount to socialism was not settled until the Roosevelt Administration and then not by anything like unanimous consent. Child Labor Amendments were proposed and failed, as were Amendments allowing Congress to set minimum wages. Eventually the Warren court worked its revolution to the point that State Senates, modeled after the US Senate, were forced to change their districting by the Federal government, and mysteriously Child Labor Laws and minimum wages became constitutional without an amendment.

The point being that it is only recently than anyone could or would dream that anyone had a federal right to health care. It’s not in the Constitution. Neither is education.

And because these “rights” have been sort of decided to sort of apply, but that was done without the debates of a Constitutional Amendment, and there is nothing like agreement as to what rights one gets because your father lay with your mother: how that obligates someone not related to you at all; whether it is enough just to live here to get the right to be paid for being disabled (or being able to pretend to be disabled for that matter) – all of these are matters never really debated, and not really settled.

Your view of ‘right’ is about that of the Framers, and what used to be meant when we said “It’s a free country.” I can do that because there is no one with the authority to say I can’t. It’s my right to shout my opinions, although there are limits (I can’t yell Fire! in a crowded theater). But now we talk of a right to an education, which is odd because the word is not in the Constitution and no one in 1792 had any idea of a right to an education. And the right to a doctor who would be paid by someone else simply did not occur to anyone at all. That was what charities were for.

Now no one is surprised when we speak of a right to health care, but what it really means is that someone else has an obligation to pay your doctor and hospital bills. You need not worry about who that would be. Vaguely “the rich” I suppose, but in fact soaking the rich won’t solve that problem.

Enslaving the doctors and nurses might accomplish that goal, but no one is suggesting that.

And why a person who eats fats and sweets until he is morbidly obese while smoking cigarettes and drinking rum should have free “health care” has not been established by anyone I know. Of course this chap has a right to his fats and sweets and tobacco and rum in the sense that “it’s a free country”, but what entitles him to have his health care paid for by you and me is not clear. (Note that you are free to support him if you like, probably through a charity; that is your right because it’s a free country. Our discussion is where he acquired a right to your involuntary support, that right to be enforced by the tax collector and if you resist by armed police.)

Just as it is not clear why Social Security which at least attempts to look like savings/insurance –you enroll in it and pay into it so long as you can, in order for you, or your dependents to get something out of it – should make payments to someone who has never worked because he is disabled has never been established. Sure, a guy works for years and is disabled has some claim on Social Security as either insurance or savings, but someone who is simply emotionally unstable and cannot work and has never worked? Even if the permanently disabled have a “right” to be supported, why should it be from the forced savings of those who work? Shouldn’t that be from the general fund? Veterans have earned benefits, but not from Social Security. If we are going to fund the disabled it ought to be from a special appropriation, not something extracted from social security or veteran’s affairs.

As I said earlier, the question of health care cannot be separated from the obligation of the society to support the poor – and that brings us to the question of the ‘deserving’ and ‘undeserving’ poor; and does not settle just who is now obligated to pay, and at what level the payment should be. And until all these issues are debated we will not even understand the question, much less come to an agreement.

It’s late, and I am tired. This will have to do for the day. My thanks to all those who responded to last week’s Pledge Drive and subscribed or renewed.

View 794 Thursday, October 17, 2013

“Transparency and the rule of law will be the touchstones of this presidency.”

President Barack Obama, January 31, 2009

Christians to Beirut. Alawites to the grave.

Syrian Freedom Fighters

What we have now is all we will ever have.

Conservationist motto

Rejoice. The Bunny Inspectors, after a two week paid vacation, are back on the job. They will be paid for their “furlough” as if they had worked full time, with no loss of time off, and they can go back to watching stage magic shows to be certain that no thaumaturgist uses a rabbit in his performance without a Federal license from the Department of Agriculture, unless, of course, the rabbit is killed as part of the performance in which case no Federal license is required. I wish I were making all this up, but I am not. It’s the law. They will also inspect back yard rabbit cages where people who keep pet rabbits have their stock, and if anyone sells a pet rabbit without a Federal license the cost is about $5000 per bunny. If your kids keep rabbits, make sure they give them away rather than sell them. It is possible that they can sell rabbits for slaughter without a Federal license, but check with your lawyer before they do it.

So rejoice. The awful majesty of the Federal Government, for which Patriot blood was shed at Bunker Hill and Cowpens and Yorktown, will come down hard on those who dare use rabbits in public performance without a Federal license; and they will not be getting away with it, since the Inspectors are on the job.

The barriers are being taken down from the unattended turnaround at Mount Vernon, and the Veterans will once again be allowed to visit the World War II Memorial out on the National Mall; and tourists on busses will be able to “recreate” and even take pictures at Old Faithful. God reigns, and the Government at Washington lives again. At least until next February, when the Kabuki resumes. And for this we pay Members of Congress $170,000 a year plus plenty much beaucoup benefits and perks, only they are about to vote themselves a raise to compensate for their strenuous efforts in the Kabuki.

And the beat goes on.

I am scheduled to go back out to Kaiser in a few minutes where they will remove the stitches in my cheek (both outside and inside my mouth) and I am not really looking forward to it. And of course the various impacts bumps and bruises of my precipitation from bed to nightstand to floor early Tuesday morning are beginning to manifest themselves. It has not be a pleasant experience. Thanks for all the good wishes.

I’m fine if a bit disgruntled. The President is now castigating the Congress for not showing leadership in this crisis. I can’t think of a suitable comment.

The good news is that somehow the sequestration was kept intact so the government will spend less this year than it did last year. Not a lot less, certainly not enough less that we will not have to borrow money in order to pay the Bunny Inspectors for the paid vacation, but less. The budget deficit is decreasing. The Debt grows monotonically of course. We must borrow money to pay our debts, a situation that does not seem to be abating, but the deficit is marginally decreasing. This is a situation that the President intends to change; he has plenty of new places to spend money.

This is pledge week at KUSC, the LA Good Music station and that makes it a week of subscription drive at Chaos Manor. I don’t normally bug you about subscriptions, but when KUSC asks for money I do; which is to say, I operate this place on the Public Radio model. It’s free. I don’t allow chatter but I do select letter for publication and this place has one of the best letter sections on the web – admittedly I am a bit behind, but I will catch up on the mail. This is a place for rational discussion; think of it as a place for rational thought about the impact of technology on society. Politically I am a former protégé of Russell Kirk and Stefan Possony, a former Cold Warrior, and that tends to color my views, but I am fairly skeptical about political theories as practiced by most political parties – and I have had enough experience managing political campaigns including for a Democratic Party Mayor of Los Angeles (Yorty) to know that no political theory is much use when it comes to government of real places in real times. Leaving me as a political skeptic.

Anyway if you do not subscribe this would be a good time to do so, and my thanks to the many new subscribers this week. And if you haven’t renewed your subscription in a while it’s never too late (or too early for that matter) to do so. Do it now while you’re thinking about it.

http://www.jerrypournelle.com/paying.html

And Roberta tells me it is time to go out to Kaiser and get stuck with needles. Sigh.

View 794 Tuesday, October 15, 2013

“Transparency and the rule of law will be the touchstones of this presidency.”

President Barack Obama, January 31, 2009

Christians to Beirut. Alawites to the grave.

Syrian Freedom Fighters

What we have now is all we will ever have.

Conservationist motto

At about 0515 this morning I managed to fall out of bed, smashing my face on the open drawer of the nightstand. There was less blood than I would have expected, and I was never unconscious. I don’t have much memory of how it happened – I presume I must have been trying to get up to go to the can – but I remembered everything that happened after I hit, so there’s no permanent damage.

Roberta decided it was Emergency Room time, and I was going to argue until I looked at myself in the mirror, so half an hour later we were in the Kaiser Emergency Room at Woodman and Roscoe, where once again I decided that what the United States needs is more Kaiser members. There was no shortage of technicians, nurses, equipment, and when needed a physician who sewed up the cut in my cheek both outside and inside my mouth since it had gone all the way through.

It also got me thinking. How many years has it been since something that severe can happen to you at 0515 and you’re on the way back home, all sewed up, with a new tetanus shot, a bottle of anti-biotic tablets, and nothing worse than some dull pain by 0950?

I got there at shift change time so I managed to meet a number of nurses and technicians (only one physician – first to shoot me up with Novocain in about seven places, then, after technicians cleaned everything out and got it all ready, he showed up again to do the actual stitching. It hasn’t been a pleasant day, but it could have been a lot worse.

Meanwhile progress in Washington seems to be a bit slower. I still think that the only way to start reducing the deficit is to stop spending more money than you’re taking in, meaning that while we must fully service the debt, we can sure start reducing government expenses by 1% a year. We can also eliminate bunny inspectors and other federal tasks that may or may not be worth doing, but are almost certainly not worth borrowing money to do. Of course none of this will happen. The nation has become accustomed to obedience to the ruling class and there is a large political interest group who wants to continue to increase entitlement spending – not only those who get the entitlements, but those who make their living collecting and paying them. We seem to be approaching a point of no return.

Of course if something can’t go on forever, it will stop.

Of course the pledge drive continues. I want to thank the new subscribers who have responded, and all the long time subscribers who have renewed. Some had forgotten about renewal for a while and came back aboard. Some renew regularly. Thanks to all.

Chaos Manor operates on the Public Radio model: it’s free, but it will only stay open if it has enough subscribers to make it worthwhile keeping it open. So far it has done so, and again thanks. For those who have not subscribed, this would be a good time to do that. http://www.jerrypournelle.com/paying.html For those who have subscribed but haven’t renewed your subscription for a while – if, for instance, you can’t remember when you renewed – this would be a great time to renew. http://www.jerrypournelle.com/paying.html I’m not encouraging those who read this place and don’t feel they can support it to stop reading it. I am encouraging everyone to subscribe if you can. I’m not after eating money or rent money. I am asking for beer and wine money…

I’ll have to get to bed early. It has been a long day. I’m fine – well, better than you might expect for what has happened to me – and the good news is that I am recovering from the cold I had. Now all I have is a lot of bruises and stitches. And of course a shingles shot, a flu shot, and today a tetanus shot. Ain’t modern medicine grand?

And I am serious about Kaiser as the model we ought to be following. My experiences have been very positive.

Scaling up — misspent funds

Dr. Pournelle,

You wrote "I do think that if part of the TARP funds had been invested in raising the quantity of those going through health care training, many of our health care problems wouldn’t exist."

I remember Mr. Heinlein, in an essay, proposed putting nuclear power plants offshore and under U. S. Navy control — his (fictional) hypothesis being that Naval engineering quality could be used in a different context than submarine and carriers, even out-of-scope, as a method of preventing nuclear accidents. His argument seems similar to yours.

While I’ve met many good-to-excellent military health care professionals, and agree that we would benefit by applying that quality of care across the board, I don’t think the specific issue you are discussing could be repaired with more medical technicians, nor would the level of quality scale up to the number needed for public health care needs. I think we may have had a similar discussion some years ago regarding applying DODDS school system standards to the District of Columbia, or even the entire country. Military discipline, regulations, and/or civilian support, have seldom been exported out of that strict context under which they are normally applied, in my experience, and just do not scale up well. IMO, the military contractor and outsourcing programs have pretty much destroyed what little integrity may have remained in DOD.

It also seems we’ve both stated elsewhere that quantity and quality are often enemies.

I agree with your point: that the economic incentive money spent has been squandered in particularly useless ways. Spending it on energy or directly on healthcare training couldn’t have done any worse, but I’ve my doubts about any such spree actually "solving" either of those families of problems.

-d

I think you have misunderstood my point.  I do not think we can or should replace free enterprise with something else.  My model for prosperity requires economic freedom – and it is helped by low cost energy.  Of Roosevelt’s anti-depression programs, many were successful. The County Agent system of distributing modernized agricultural methods and techniques is an example. One of the most expensive, was TVA – but it also brought cheap energy to the South and ushered in a new industrial revolution there.

If we determined to spend money on TARP and “stimulus” programs, then let it be spent on something that produces results.  Low cost energy is one of them.  A big expansion in trained workers in key trades is another.  A national medical technician training program would not seek to train everyone – only those who want to be in the program and thus will put up with being trained by methods the military has known for a long time.  Spend the money on something that will get results. It isn’t as if we would swamp the land with too many well trained and competent workers.  By do not scale you seem to mean a much larger upscale operation than I have in mind.

And yes, I very much understand that quality and quantity are often enemies – and giving any organization a monopoly will produce a bureaucracy subject to the Iron Law, as witness the results of giving the power of credentials to an organization monopoly. 

You’ve probably already seen it, but just in case – the newest SpaceX Grasshopper video

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=9ZDkItO-0a4

There is still hope. Despair is a sin.