25. March 2010 by admin.

From time to time, I get a message that someone has registered with this Web site to post comments.  Most of the e-mail addresses seem genuinely strange, as if not actually belonging to a person, and I’ve never received any actual comments.

The other day I tried to register and post a comment, and found that I couldn’t, or at least I couldn’t find the magic link that enabled one to post a comment.  I could register, and sign in, but then I couldn’t actually do anything.

So we’ll have to use an old-school fix.  Long ago, before magic blogging software, I kept what was known at the time as a ‘Web journal,’   and I posted an e-mail address for comments.

And indeed, I got comments; I also got vast quantities of spam.  To avoid the spam, I now have to play a stupid little game:

Please write me at some_guy _at_ harderworld.com.

If I include the actual @ in the address, the robots of the world conclude, ‘Aha! An e-mail address!’  and proceed to send me dubious ads for Canadian drugs.

And I’ll see about getting the magic blog software kicked in the pants so that you can send real comments.

Posted in Computers, Networking (computer) | No Comments »

24. March 2010 by admin.

Alas, the President signed health care reform into law yesterday in an elaborate ceremony with 22 pens.  It isn’t the end of the world; it isn’t even the end of the US republic.

But it will drive preposterously high insurance premiums still higher, and ultimately affect the care and insurance arrangements we currently have in effect (Our Fearless Leader’s assertions to the contrary notwithstanding).

I’m still on the Barack Obama mailing list, and I received a missive Monday that asserted:

…every American will finally be guaranteed high quality, affordable health care coverage.

No, what we’re guaranteed is access to health insurance, because we’ll be required to buy it.  What the insurance will ultimately be good for–and even what the insurance we currently carry will be good for–is another question.

Arbitrary premium hikes, insurance cancellations, and discrimination against pre-existing conditions will now be gone forever.

In fairness, some of these represent genuine problems.  It clearly isn’t right for an insurance company to initially provide coverage and then, when you get seriously ill, refer to your adolescent acne, or something similarly irrelevant, as a ‘pre-existing condition’ and rescind your coverage.   And nobody likes arbitrary premium increases.

But premiums rise to reflect increases in the cost of providing care, which has gone up far faster than the general rate of inflation.  Unless you do something to actually reduce health care costs, what about the non-arbitrary premium hikes?

And if insurance companies can’t discriminate against pre-existing conditions at all, and insurance will still be expensive, what will prevent people from waiting to purchase insurance until they’re seriously ill?  This will result in substantial, non-arbitrary premium increases.

And we’ll finally start reducing the cost of care — creating millions of jobs, preventing families and businesses from plunging into bankruptcy, and removing over a trillion dollars of debt from the backs of our children.

Just one question: how?  We’re going to mobilize trillions of dollars of private and taxpayer funds to pay for health care.  How does that make costs go down?

Posted in Health Care, Barack Obama | No Comments »

21. March 2010 by admin.

Friday night, I watched the Michal Moore film, Capitalism: A Love Story.  In it, he describes some of the excesses of modern capitalism, and asks some priests what they think of it.  They call capitalism ‘evil.’

Well, thank you!  I’m a capitalist, and I’m proud of it!  I run a small business; I earn a good living at it (not ‘riches,’ but it keeps food on the table, a roof over our heads, and power at the socket);  I have enough demand for my services that I’m contemplating the next step: hiring others to help me accomplish more and better things.  Am I evil, too?

Probably not.  Moore talks about his upbringing in Michigan, as the son of an auto worker.  Capitalism put food on his table as a kid; as a filmmaker, he is one of the obvious beneficiaries of the free market.

But something happened.  Once, capitalism supported vast industries, employing millions of people, and getting useful work done.  Now, capitalism has become an end in itself,  consuming everything it touches and not leaving so much as fertilizer behind.

About 20 years ago, I came across a book about ‘the coming economic crisis.’  It posited a world in which the dollar would implode from deficit spending, driven by ‘the Acquisitors,’ who would suck all the money out of the economy and leave nothing for the rest of us.  At the time, it seemed a little silly: after all, the economy was so vast, how could a small group of rich people simply take it all over?

But it actually seems to be happening….

Posted in Money | No Comments »

13. March 2010 by admin.

One of the failures in my life that I sometimes fret over is that I’ve never owned my house or apartment.  My parents rented all through my upbringing, and only bought a house after they retired.  For my part, my first wife spent like a maniac; I got divorced, which left me thoroughly broke; then the price of real estate skyrocketed, such that it would take me 10 years to assemble a down payment, and would then have to spend the next 30 years turning what was left after taxes to the bank.  Basically, I missed my shot.

Since 2003, I’ve rented an apartment in Carroll Gardens, near the Gowanus Canal.  A couple of times, the owners of the building contemplated turning it into a co-op, but the plans were never completed.  It would still have been preposterously expensive to buy the apartment, but I would have been interested.

But now I’m relieved that it never happened: I dodged a bullet.  Last week, the federal Environmental Protection Administration declared the Gowanus Canal a toxic Superfund site.

It’s not as if the canal, and the surrounding area, was a secret.  It’s common knowledge that the industries that used to be located along the canal left all sorts of toxic waste on the site.  But the city, working with private developers, was working on it.  Some years ago, the city repaired the flushing tunnel that kept water flowing through the canal, cleaning up the water, and private developers were starting to clean up the land in anticipation of new construction.

But now that’s all over.  The Superfund designation means that lenders won’t be willing to provide mortgages.  So the developers have dropped the place like a hot rock.  The city had plans to further improve the canal; those are dropped, as well.

Now the Feds are going to chase after everyone who owned land in the area for the last 150 years and sue them for the money to clean up the place.  They’ll draw up the plans, hire the contractors, and clean it up.  Note that, despite the name, a Superfund site isn’t cleaned up with taxpayer money.  It’s whatever the EPA can sue from the former owners.

The EPA estimates the process will take 10-12 years, which seems overly optimistic.  They’ve already indicated it will take 2-4 years just to draw up plans for the cleanup.

So if I had bought my apartment, its market value would have dropped at least 25%.  Since it’s within 3000′ of the canal, I would have to declare the Superfund designation when selling the apartment, and the buyer’s bank would take that into consideration when determining whether to grant a mortgage.

Now note that the site itself hasn’t changed from two weeks ago.   But since the Feds now say it’s toxic–so thoroughly toxic that the Feds must manage the cleanup–we have to take their word for it.

Posted in Environment | No Comments »

12. March 2010 by admin.

It looks like Our Fearless Leader will get his way and ‘health care reform’ will soon be the law of the land.  Heaven help us.

Health care reform–the campaign promise–was intended to address a practical problem: it costs too much.  It costs the government; it costs private insurers (who pass the cost along); and woe unto that poor soul who gets seriously ill without insurance.  He’ll end up broke: lacking the clout to negotiate a better deal, he will have to pay full price.

Imagine a community beset by monsters, who come out at night, wreck buildings, eat the cows and chickens, and the occasional small child.

To deal with this obvious danger, the government mandates that everyone carry monster insurance.  It works like this: when monsters attack your home, you call for help, and within three minutes, the Monster Insurance crew arrives at your home in a truck with a tank of strawberry-flavored Ensure.  The monster is hosed down with Ensure; he licks it off his belly; and contented, he slinks back into the night.

What will this do the population of monsters?   They’ll find it easier to feed, and grow stronger, and reproduce in greater numbers.  The Monster Insurance crews will need bigger trucks, and premiums will go up.  Moreover, when the monsters get tired of strawberry-flavored Ensure, the crew will have to bring other flavors.

‘But wait!’ I hear you scream.  ‘We’re not talking about monsters, we’re talking about medical treatments that save people’s lives!’  That’s true.  But what kind of life is it if all you’re going is earning money to pay for health care?  And what happens when all your taxes–if you’re healthy enough to earn a living–go to pay for other people’s health care… and the government still can’t balance its books?  (We’re closer to that in New York State than most people care to admit.)

Right now, health care is about one-sixth of the economy, considerably more than in other industrialized countries.   I’ll predict that if health care reform passes, within ten years, health care will be at least one-quarter of the economy, and the cost will still be bankrupting all of us.

Now is the time to face the monsters, rather than figure out better ways of feeding them.

Posted in Health Care, Dysfunctional Government, Barack Obama | No Comments »

6. March 2010 by admin.

I’ve wanted to write something about ‘global warming’ or ‘climate change’ or whatever it is that we’re supposed to call it.  Is it a threat to human existence, or a fraudulent scheme to separate us from our industrial civilization?

Parts of the issue are beyond doubt: we, as humans, are putting more carbon dioxide in the air than natural systems can remove, leading to rising levels in the atmosphere.  And carbon dioxide functions to trap heat.

In the 1960s and early 1970s, it was thought that air pollution might cool the planet rather than heat it, chiefly through particulates and other specific forms of pollution that would reflect solar radiation back into space.  But that view was in the minority back then, although a couple of examples made it to the popular press at the time, which are waved today about by the opponents of global warming.  Moreover, the Clean Air Act and other similar law and regulation worldwide substantially limited particulates and other pollutants, although not carbon dioxide, substantially abating whatever cooling effects our industrial activities might have.

So now we have excess carbon dioxide, without particulates, and global warming.  But how much?  At this point, not very much: perhaps a fraction of a degree Celsius.  It’s still small relative to variations in climate related to solar activity, which is why the opponents of global warming have been able to seize upon a drop in temperatures in recent years as evidence that the phenomenon is not real.

But the small magnitude of the change to date doesn’t mean that it can be ignored.  As a simple example, consider a block of ice at the freezing point.  It takes a certain amount of energy to melt the ice and turn it to water, still at the freezing point.  If that same amount of energy is then applied to the liquid water, it will be heated most of the way to the boiling point.  In other words, ice must absorb a considerable amount of energy before it melts.  There are many elements in our world that work similarly to absorb the excess energy trapped in our atmosphere and limit actual warming.  But if the excess energy continues, ultimately it will have to result in warming, and the ice will melt.

So global warming is real, although the effects of it aren’t clearly apparent yet.  It is the sort of problem where government regulation is actually useful: when the effects of global warming are clearly apparent, it will be too late, so we need rules now to limit the future damage.  But what should those rules consist of?  Should we strangle our industrial civilization and go back to the 19th Century?

Probably not.  Besides the obvious impracticality and popular resistance to such a plan, there are other, longer term, reasons why such drastic measures are not necessary:

1. The runup in carbon dioxide levels was caused by burning fossil fuels.  But these are finite, and we’ve consumed a decent fraction of them.  Eventually they will become too valuable to simply burn.
2. It would be a stretch for 2010 technology, but still possible, to provide a technological solution to the problem by reflecting a portion of the sunlight reaching the Earth back into space.  But technology marches on, and such a solution will be practical soon enough to be relevant.

In the meantime, we should do the obvious: take practical measures to limit our consumption of fossil fuels, and develop new sources of energy.  I’d like to believe that this could be accomplished through the market, without need of government regulation, but I know that isn’t practical.  Money, alas, is lazy.

But what the government regulations should consist of is a subject for another day.

Posted in Fearmongering, Environment | No Comments »