pundit4sale

(P) Something that has fascinated me for several years now is how easily some Democratic pundits seem to shift their principles based upon how the wind blows from party leaders. In the short term, it does provide them significant cover in that it is difficult to discern whether they're bought off or honestly believe what they're blathering. But over time, the only value added Dems bring to the equation is inhabiting the reality-based world, in being interested in doing what works.

It's utter nonsense like this spewed by Matthew Yglesias last week - on a Think Progress blog, no less - that starts warranting comparisons to folks like Rush Limbaugh and Bill O'Reilly and Michelle Malkin. Yglesias is actively proposing that powerful people should be above the law. That's a direct assault on the Constitution, not to mention a market-based economy.

So here's the question. Is Yglesias bought and paid for, knowing that the rule of law is a good thing but being willing to shill for criminals nonetheless? Or does he honestly believe that poor people should go to prison for petty crimes while the rich and powerful should maintain their liberty no matter how heinous the consequences of their actions?

I'm obviously a little partial to the Heartland, but the one-two transpartisan punch of Bill Black at UMKC and Tom Hoenig at the KCFRB over the past couple years has been much more interesting than most of the 'liberal' commentary from Inside the Beltway about how we need to Protect the Financial Fraudsters for the Good of us All.

I eagerly anticipate wittiness from Yglesias in favor of the rule of law. Oh wait, just look to the Bush years.

Like this commentary on Attorney General Mukasey.
Or this one on Bush lawbreaking more generally.

Black's response is worth reading in full. And here is the underlying New York Times article from Gretchen Morgenson and Louise Story that set off Yglesias' defense of our rotten system. By the way, how's that for turnabout? The corporate media runs a big story highlighting a major problem, and the 'liberal' blogger Yglesias defends the status quo!

This is also a good place to tie in some commentary from Barry Ritholtz about another NYT article - yes, that's two positive references from me regarding the Times in the same post! Even as the overall US prison population has exploded, the Bush and Obama Justice Departments radically reduced annual referrals of white collar crimes for prosecution. You know, despite the mid-90s having no systemic domestic financial collapse, while a decade plus later, we confront Armageddon that Requires us to Give Rich People Money.

let me see if i have this right

(P) Over the past couple years, Democratic President Barack Obama has argued that the deficit is a serious problem of an urgent nature. To address the presented problem, the Administration has created a fiscal responsibility commission and advocated various approaches like tax cuts, wage freezes, health insurance exchanges, increased out of pocket costs, and so forth. However, the President's budgets haven't actually proposed that revenue equal expenses. After all, the tax cuts, bank bailouts, and military spending have all increased the deficit.

Republican Representative Paul Ryan has also argued that the deficit is a serious problem of an urgent nature. To address the presented problem, he has proposed a budget that advocates various policy options like tax cuts, wage freezes, health insurance exchanges, increased out of pocket costs, and so forth. However, Representative Ryan's budget doesn't actually show how revenue will equal expenses. After all, an actual budget shows not just how much revenue and expenses are projected, but also, what those sources of revenue and expenses are planned to be.

So, uh, what's this about Moments of Truth and Serious Debate and whatnot?

It sounds like we're not even talking about solutions to the purported problem, let alone exchanging ideas about different kinds of solutions.

closet artsy fartsy

So I'm on the mailing list for both the St. Louis Symphony and the Opera Theater of St. Louis. It makes sense in that I have bought tickets to both venues and do happen to reside in St. Louis.

However, no one would mistake me for having any insight whatsoever into orchestral pieces, choral arrangements, or opera productions.

Yesterday this officially got out of hand. I received a pretty fancy full color fold out mailer from the Artistic Director of the Des Moines Metro Opera. I don't take Julie to enough shows within close driving distance. I'm pretty sure I'm not driving hundreds of miles to do so. And if we were to travel, there's a slightly half decent chance it would be to a theatrical production of a certain relative of the Schroeder clan...

here is a riddle

I haven't pondered before. Your friendly state-issued photo driver ID is now demanded for all sorts of nondriving purposes. It can get ya booze and cigarettes. It can prove identity to the Feds, from employment to flying. You can see gory movies and rent porn.

Apparently, though, it's not useful for its most basic purpose: proving identification for driving purposes to the state that issued you the ID.

I say all this because I seem to have temporarily accidentally placed my passport in a clearly defined known unknown nonkinetic position, and I don't wish to cause a squirmish at the DMV 36 hours before I have to have my license renewed.

Hopefully the birth certificate isn't stuck in an open-ended commitment to hiding itself.

P.S. This is why you never wait to the last day to do things. You wait until the next to the last day.

budgeting post script

Time to whip out the Excel charting function one more time.

Apparently, according to Reuters, top Federal Reserve official Bill Dudley was trying to relate to the common man. I suppose he gets props for effort; at least he mentioned something the average American has heard of in a question and answer session that involved more questioning than stenography.

Answer:

"Today you can buy an iPad 2 that costs the same as an iPad 1 that is twice as powerful," he said referring to Apple Inc's (AAPL.O) latest handheld tablet computer hitting stories on Friday.

"You have to look at the prices of all things," he said.

Now, there are a number of interesting questions that might elicit such a response. Something about technology, or innovation, or business strategy, or upsetting Reggie Middleton, or when your real question is censored so all you can ask is Mac or PC.

However, here's the actual Question to which Dudley responded:

But in Queens, New York, on Friday, William Dudley was bombarded with questions about food inflation, and his attempt to put rising commodity prices into a broader economic context only made things worse.

"When was the last time, sir, that you went grocery shopping?" one audience member asked.

So, a questioner asks about this part of the budget (food):


And he answered with this (computers):


What a perfect illustration of how people ask questions about the important things and our leaders talk about the trivial items. And of course, my personal budget probably puts more emphasis on computing than the average household budget.

Keep that in mind the next time some Important Serious Person says they can balance the budget (or any budget, for that matter). It's really not that complicated. Individual households need decent wages and affordable housing, food, healthcare, education, transportation, and energy. Federal and state governments need some combination of increased taxes on the wealthy and reduced spending on the military, financial industry, fossil fuels, prisons, agribusiness, and healthcare. The final combination of those options is determined by the particular political economy we wish to deliver; there's no one 'right' solution to fiscal responsibility.

But talking about much else, from iPads to public broadcasting, from the NEA to the NEA, is a combination of ignorance and malice, varying in relative proportion from pundit to pundit.

By the way, did you notice the typo in that Reuters quote? I don't know how English teachers can possibly compete for students when the corporate media itself has been busy dismantling all writing standards from ethics to proofreading. Reuters is one of the Good Guys of our traditional media outlets, and it appears they pay about as much attention to an article as I do to a blog post.

Maybe they'd have more advertising dollars and readers if the media had spent more time the past couple decades making our leaders answer serious questions with serious answers.

the world is changing

Are you excited for the future?

Or fighting it?

the superiority of social insurance

(P) So I'm testing out the online reporting system for medical information at my work. It's pretty standard and works reasonably well. They brag about how it saves you having to fill out 27 pieces of paper every year.

Whoopdeedoo.

This processs reminds me of one of the basic failures of private health insurance: a fragmented system is extremely inefficient. Take identification. How do insurance companies identify you?

The answer, of course, is that they don't. They panic and run to the obvious solution - socialized medicine [cue scary music].

Here's my challenge of the day for those who believe government should not provide basic social insurance coverages, like health insurance and unemployment insurance. If the government is so inefficient, why do private companies use ID numbers created by the Social Security Administration?

fun on the big screen

For a little pre-Oscars partying I've hooked up my laptop to Julie's TV. Pretty sweet.

So what's a guy to do with a screen 3x his laptop but play around some with Excel's pie chart creator? I mean, after using Office XP/03/04 for so long, 2010/2011 is practically fun to use.

I had been reading up a little bit about oil and budgeting and how speculation and sudden price changes impact personal finances, and there's nothing quite like seeing pie charts as big as your head. While I used to keep a detailed budget when first developing my own financial habits, after a few years now I'm comfortable in the gray(er) area of approximations and estimates. So in rough terms, I thought I'd try and match approximately what my budget looks like compared to the average household put together by John Lohman.

First, here's a snippet of the chart specifically on household expenditures:



I matched his categories and came up with this:



But that left me dissatisfied for a couple of reasons. First, 'other' is way too big a category. Second, this approach doesn't really help sort out what's variable and what's fixed. In other words, what could be changed easily, and what would require a radical departure from present living arrangements?

So a little more playing around in Excel led me to this:



It still has the Big One - housing - and it still has a few small categories of 2 or 3 percent. The improvement is there are now half a dozen categories of in between size that show how my personal expenditures might be changed were a sudden shock to occur. Changing the thermostat is a different degree of change than changing the address. Not traveling to Florida or Washington is a different degree of change than not having a car to drive to the grocery store and not ever going out to see a movie.

I would also use it as a reminder that things like oil shocks and peak oil aren't as big a problem as they are often hyped to be. We possess a variety of simple adaptations which would rapidly become widespread substitutes were there to be serious limitation on our access to cheap oil. Some of these are so mundane, like carpooling, telecommuting, four day workweeks, and bicycling, that we don't even think about them when contemplating high-tech solutions for the 21st century. Others involve a repricing of resources - like increasing the value of abandoned urban property relative to far flung suburban developments - while still others require more centralized, long-term planning, but they're well established technologies, like rail travel. It wasn't cheap oil that helped the Noth in the Civil War or enabled the original ecotourism of the National Parks. It was cheap transportation, and amidst all the fearmongering about the future, don't forget those are two different concepts.

Cheap oil won't last forever, no. But we have plenty of alternatives. Some of them are even improvements on how development has occurred over the past half century.

But of course, we're nowhere near that stage. Oil isn't getting more expensive for companies like ExxonMobil and ConocoPhillips. They're simply making larger profits. Funny what happens when you follow the money.

Or for one last chart, here's the war budget (just Overseas Contingency Operations, not the 'regular' security spending, which is 4x larger) next to the Amtrak budget:

sony to stop charging fees

So I watch the Grammy's Sunday night and have fun with Valentine's Day yesterday, and I find out tonight that the world is up in arms about Sony and friends charging licensing fees to use Blu-Ray technology.

I mean, like, demanding money in exchange for nothing. The greed! The arrogance!

Oh, wait, sorry.

It's Sony and friends complaining that Apple wants to charge Sony and friends money in exchange for providing back office support and access to one of the most lucrative store fronts ever created.

It's flabbergasting how hugely massively enormous Apple's victory has been. If I started Nate's Emporium of Digital Magazines, Time Inc wouldn't go around whining that I was charging them 50% for placement in my store; they wouldn't care, because my store doesn't add any value to them.

Why is it that publishers care about the App Store? Aren't we all supposed to be doing everything 'in the cloud'? Aren't there mega transnational corporations that offer an alternative to Apple's ancient 20th century idea of having actual consumers pay actual money for actual content?

Hello?

google's next step

I'm increasingly curious to see where the new old management wants to take Google. Google's core business, Search, is now over a decade old. The concept that supposedly was behind Google's efforts to grow beyond search is the notion of doing everything on the web, 'in the cloud', so to speak. Instead of purchasing specific pieces of software to run on specific pieces of hardware, our data would be accessible everywhere for whatever we wanted to do with it. Users of Google products would provide their personal information for currency rather than paying money for products. After all, Google's core innovation is that they're not a tech company per se, but are rather an advertising company.

Facebook, a closed social network with similar monetization challenges as an advertiser, and Apple, a closed hardware vendor left for dead, have both grown faster than Google over the past few years.The classic knock on Microsoft is that they haven't developed growth strategies beyond Windows and Office. But the thing is, that's at least two products, with the Xbox business looking increasingly relevant, too.

Google's second big thing, their Office suite to the core Windows portfolio of Search, is Android and Chromium; at least, that's what Google has invested heavily in advancing. They've talked incessantly about the superiority of the cloud, of not making dedicated software for dedicated hardware. But now that these operating systems are out in the wild, actually being used by actual customers and developers, Google confronts a strategic landscape looking an awful lot more similar to the one Apple has spent the past few years hammering into consumer heads, not to mention other vendors making their own software, like RIM, HP/Web OS, and Microsoft/Nokia.

Far from being open, Google has been making explicit decisions to exclude support for certain standards in Chromium. And far from dismissing apps as being irrelevant to the web-based life, Android is being pushed for phones and tablets precisely via vehicles that emphasize specialized software separate from the browser. Or to say it differently, what's the point of Android Market in a world where computing happens in the browser, not independent applications!?!

'There's an App for that' has worked so effectively for Apple that even people in disputes with Apple over the future development of the business model use Apple's framework for computing. Specifically, Time announced they were releasing a special Android app for their Sports Illustrated subscribers. Now, the marketing folks may love that, because superficially, it's a public spat. Look, we have apps Apple doesn't.

But here's the scary question for Google strategy folks. Is that the message you want people to hear? That apps, not the browser, is the future? That Android is valuable because of the software developers provide outside the web, not because of its integration with the web?

I never dreamed Apple's digital hub strategy would have been this successful at redefining the computing landscape. It continues to surprise me how deeply the iPhone and now iPad are burrowing into our collective awareness; virtually every smartphone and tablet now looks and feels like Apple's products. I'm beginning to wonder if Google really has an alternative strategy in mind at all, or if they do, why they're having such difficulty communicating it to their partners.

Does this video still describe corporate strategy at Google in the post Eric Schmidt era? It will be an interesting year.