Oh, I can't believe I didn't see this clip before. This is John McCain back in Iowa on whether he's ever not had government healthcare.
Check it out!
8/23/2009
8/16/2009
a tale of two brits
(P) I found these two articles from British outlets deliciously contrasting in their presentation of the healthcare debate in America.
First, from the Economist, we have "Friend or Foe? It is not wise for Democrats to bash America's health insurers".
Then, from the Independent UK, we have "The brutal truth about America’s healthcare: An extraordinary report from Guy Adams in Los Angeles at the music arena that has been turned into a makeshift medical centre".
Can you guess from the title which one is the concern troll about bashing health insurance companies, and which one is the detailed reporting about the lack of access to quality medical care in the United States?
Let's play a little game. Guess which article the quotes come from.
1. "For one thing, the punters at these meetings often have poignant and unscripted personal tales that explain their distrust of proposed reforms. Also, numerous polls now confirm that scepticism among Americans at large—and independents in particular—is growing about health reform."
2. "They came in their thousands, queuing through the night to secure one of the coveted wristbands offering entry into a strange parallel universe where medical care is a free and basic right and not an expensive luxury. Some of these Americans had walked miles simply to have their blood pressure checked, some had slept in their cars in the hope of getting an eye-test or a mammogram, others had brought their children for immunizations that could end up saving their life."
3. "The more underhanded gambit is the decision to bash the insurance industry at every turn. Ms Pelosi now calls its bosses “villains”, while Mr Obama wags a disapproving finger. This will score some political points, as many Americans have a deep (and often well-founded) distrust of health insurers. But the tactic could ultimately hobble or even doom reform."
4. "Although the Americans spend more on medicine than any nation on earth, there are an estimated 50 million with no health insurance at all. Many of those who have jobs can't afford coverage, and even those with standard policies often find it doesn't cover commonplace procedures. California's unemployed - who rely on Medicaid - had their dental care axed last month."
5. "Though it has a shameful history, the insurance industry has done a U-turn of late. It now accepts the need for a radical overhaul of insurance markets through measures such as guaranteed issue of coverage and the creation of health insurance “exchanges”. But its leaders are increasingly unhappy about the shrill attacks. Can Mr Obama continue to bash the insurers one day and rely on them the next?"
6. "I've been very conservative in my outlook for the whole of my life. I've been described as being about 90,000 miles to the right of Attila the Hun. But I think one reaches the reality that something doesn't work... In this country something has to be done. And as a proud member of the US community but a loyal British subject to the core, I would say that if Britain could fix it in 1944, surely we could fix it here in America."
Hint: this test is designed to be easy. It goes E/I/E/I/E/I. Oh, but you probably figured that out already.
First, from the Economist, we have "Friend or Foe? It is not wise for Democrats to bash America's health insurers".
Then, from the Independent UK, we have "The brutal truth about America’s healthcare: An extraordinary report from Guy Adams in Los Angeles at the music arena that has been turned into a makeshift medical centre".
Can you guess from the title which one is the concern troll about bashing health insurance companies, and which one is the detailed reporting about the lack of access to quality medical care in the United States?
Let's play a little game. Guess which article the quotes come from.
1. "For one thing, the punters at these meetings often have poignant and unscripted personal tales that explain their distrust of proposed reforms. Also, numerous polls now confirm that scepticism among Americans at large—and independents in particular—is growing about health reform."
2. "They came in their thousands, queuing through the night to secure one of the coveted wristbands offering entry into a strange parallel universe where medical care is a free and basic right and not an expensive luxury. Some of these Americans had walked miles simply to have their blood pressure checked, some had slept in their cars in the hope of getting an eye-test or a mammogram, others had brought their children for immunizations that could end up saving their life."
3. "The more underhanded gambit is the decision to bash the insurance industry at every turn. Ms Pelosi now calls its bosses “villains”, while Mr Obama wags a disapproving finger. This will score some political points, as many Americans have a deep (and often well-founded) distrust of health insurers. But the tactic could ultimately hobble or even doom reform."
4. "Although the Americans spend more on medicine than any nation on earth, there are an estimated 50 million with no health insurance at all. Many of those who have jobs can't afford coverage, and even those with standard policies often find it doesn't cover commonplace procedures. California's unemployed - who rely on Medicaid - had their dental care axed last month."
5. "Though it has a shameful history, the insurance industry has done a U-turn of late. It now accepts the need for a radical overhaul of insurance markets through measures such as guaranteed issue of coverage and the creation of health insurance “exchanges”. But its leaders are increasingly unhappy about the shrill attacks. Can Mr Obama continue to bash the insurers one day and rely on them the next?"
6. "I've been very conservative in my outlook for the whole of my life. I've been described as being about 90,000 miles to the right of Attila the Hun. But I think one reaches the reality that something doesn't work... In this country something has to be done. And as a proud member of the US community but a loyal British subject to the core, I would say that if Britain could fix it in 1944, surely we could fix it here in America."
Hint: this test is designed to be easy. It goes E/I/E/I/E/I. Oh, but you probably figured that out already.
8/04/2009
unsanitizing torture
(P) I personally tend to be more discrete and diplomatic in my communication, but I wanted to highlight somebody being a little more direct in telling it like it is. The notion that our prison policies have been anything but immoral, illegal, and counterproductive is pretty funny.
Some articles have a way of just lettin' it all hang out, leaving little to the imagination. The graphic alone makes reading this story worth it.
I would normally give a warning that this is mature content, but this is what our government is doing in our name to real human beings. How can conduct be so horrific we should shelter our kids from it, but at the same time, not be worth investigating and prosecuting? That's a rhetorical question, of course. Of the millions of Americans who have been arrested in the last few years, few have committed crimes even remotely as disgusting or an as large a scale as the senior officials of the Bush Administration.
For your reading pleasure, Whores on Terror by Allan Uthman.
A snippet:
Some articles have a way of just lettin' it all hang out, leaving little to the imagination. The graphic alone makes reading this story worth it.
I would normally give a warning that this is mature content, but this is what our government is doing in our name to real human beings. How can conduct be so horrific we should shelter our kids from it, but at the same time, not be worth investigating and prosecuting? That's a rhetorical question, of course. Of the millions of Americans who have been arrested in the last few years, few have committed crimes even remotely as disgusting or an as large a scale as the senior officials of the Bush Administration.
For your reading pleasure, Whores on Terror by Allan Uthman.
A snippet:
I don’t want to come off as minimizing the horror of controlled drowning. It’s just that there’s something about forcible anal rape that brings the torture issue into sharp focus. Just once, I’d like to hear one of these American Enterprise Institute psychos, the ones that always trot out to defend the Neocons’ freakish obsessions, have to defend shoving a flashlight up a guy’s ass. I want to hear Frank Gaffney or Jonah Goldberg tell me why I shouldn’t be fucking mortified that raping prisoners was considered within tolerable interrogation practices by my country. I want Glenn Beck to justify butt-raping a suspect.
7/26/2009
pop quiz for the day
(R) So, you just walked into Finance 101 and the professor hands you a quiz.
Don't worry, it's not a bad dream! It's multiple choice, so you've got good odds. Much better odds than the ratings agencies seem to have of rating things.
The assertion that pricing for various financial products (stocks, commodities, derivatives, etc) is normally distributed (ie, bell curve, Gaussian, etc) is best described as
a. True
b. False
If you chose B, you're correct! (Note, if you wrote in choice c. So wrecklessly false that the regulators should be fired and the corporate executives prosecuted for threatening our national security, that answer would also be acceptable. Please be aware the NSA has been notified of your opinion, so they can forward that to Goldman Sachs, who is requesting that the FBI begin an investigation of you.)
I've been doing a little reading of book reviews to add some items to my Amazon wish list (hint, it's right here), and I have enjoyed the commentary mocking our esteemed Masters of the Universe (no, not this).
I've never excelled at the probability and statistics arena. Perhaps that's part of what makes it so juicily delicious that the guys who thought they did understand screwed up so royally. Being part of a tail, an outlier, one develops an appreciation for other outliers. The way I figure it, if you can recognize when the professor puts up the data points for the test that you're an outlier and calculate that your score was in the bottom 5% because you were over two standard deviations from the mean, that should mean you understand the material. But alas, I digress.
The point of this diatribe isn't to look back fondly upon those lovely two semesters of stats ('Quantitative Business Analysis' in the Olin lingo du jour). Rather, the point is to serve as a reminder that common sense is a bedrock principle for designing policies in the real world. The mathematics itself is rarely flawed. Unfortunately, real people have a tendency to apply math in ways where the real world doesn't match the academic assumptions. When this is done accidentally, it's sad enough.
When this is coordinated policy at some of the most powerful corporations in the country, it's infuriating. And dangerous, a threat to our welfare and even our democracy.
Perhaps the most skewered comment by an executive back in 2007 when all this was unfolding was offered by David Viniar, Goldman Sachs' Chief Financial Officer. See if you can spot the crazy.
He followed that with, oh, and the Kansas City Royals are going to win the next 5 World Series.
For the book review from Naked Capitalism on Lecturing Birds on Flying, click here. For some handy concise definitions and charts, Risk Glossary is very nice. For regulators/executives/both I'm not too fond of, see Hank 'the banks are sound' Paulson, Gary 'don't regulate derivatives' Gensler, Ed 'AIG bonus contracts are sacred' Liddy, or Lloyd 'we're fully hedged but put me in the meeting anyway' Blankfein.
And those are just the recent Goldman visionaries.
Don't even get me started on Robert 'see, Dems can represent corporate America, too' Rubin, Larry 'don't ask who paid me money when it looked like I was going to be close to the new President' Summers, Tim 'I couldn't possibly be responsible for anything, all I did was run the NY Fed' Geithner, or Ben 'at least I'm not Alan' Bernanke.
/(R) That does feel a lot better.
Now if we could just please have our trillions of tax dollars back please.
Don't worry, it's not a bad dream! It's multiple choice, so you've got good odds. Much better odds than the ratings agencies seem to have of rating things.
The assertion that pricing for various financial products (stocks, commodities, derivatives, etc) is normally distributed (ie, bell curve, Gaussian, etc) is best described as
a. True
b. False
If you chose B, you're correct! (Note, if you wrote in choice c. So wrecklessly false that the regulators should be fired and the corporate executives prosecuted for threatening our national security, that answer would also be acceptable. Please be aware the NSA has been notified of your opinion, so they can forward that to Goldman Sachs, who is requesting that the FBI begin an investigation of you.)
I've been doing a little reading of book reviews to add some items to my Amazon wish list (hint, it's right here), and I have enjoyed the commentary mocking our esteemed Masters of the Universe (no, not this).
I've never excelled at the probability and statistics arena. Perhaps that's part of what makes it so juicily delicious that the guys who thought they did understand screwed up so royally. Being part of a tail, an outlier, one develops an appreciation for other outliers. The way I figure it, if you can recognize when the professor puts up the data points for the test that you're an outlier and calculate that your score was in the bottom 5% because you were over two standard deviations from the mean, that should mean you understand the material. But alas, I digress.
The point of this diatribe isn't to look back fondly upon those lovely two semesters of stats ('Quantitative Business Analysis' in the Olin lingo du jour). Rather, the point is to serve as a reminder that common sense is a bedrock principle for designing policies in the real world. The mathematics itself is rarely flawed. Unfortunately, real people have a tendency to apply math in ways where the real world doesn't match the academic assumptions. When this is done accidentally, it's sad enough.
When this is coordinated policy at some of the most powerful corporations in the country, it's infuriating. And dangerous, a threat to our welfare and even our democracy.
Perhaps the most skewered comment by an executive back in 2007 when all this was unfolding was offered by David Viniar, Goldman Sachs' Chief Financial Officer. See if you can spot the crazy.
“We were seeing things that were 25-standard deviation moves, several days in a row,” said David Viniar, Goldman’s chief financial officer.
He followed that with, oh, and the Kansas City Royals are going to win the next 5 World Series.
For the book review from Naked Capitalism on Lecturing Birds on Flying, click here. For some handy concise definitions and charts, Risk Glossary is very nice. For regulators/executives/both I'm not too fond of, see Hank 'the banks are sound' Paulson, Gary 'don't regulate derivatives' Gensler, Ed 'AIG bonus contracts are sacred' Liddy, or Lloyd 'we're fully hedged but put me in the meeting anyway' Blankfein.
And those are just the recent Goldman visionaries.
Don't even get me started on Robert 'see, Dems can represent corporate America, too' Rubin, Larry 'don't ask who paid me money when it looked like I was going to be close to the new President' Summers, Tim 'I couldn't possibly be responsible for anything, all I did was run the NY Fed' Geithner, or Ben 'at least I'm not Alan' Bernanke.
/(R) That does feel a lot better.
Now if we could just please have our trillions of tax dollars back please.
7/22/2009
7/19/2009
i heart matt taibbi
There's a writer/journalist/all-around-troublemaker who has been particularly focused and intense recently that I think is very worthwhile reading if you are not familiar with him.
Matt Taibbi's blog can be found at True/Slant, and he has had some large pieces in outlets like Rolling Stone.
I wanted to point him out because he's been hitting a nerve that's a lot of why I went to business school. There has been such a void of real leadership in the business community that a lot of anger and outrage and disgust has been generated in society. Pew did a study recently that asked people to rank various professions that contribute to the well-being of society. The category for 'business executives' saw only 21% agree with an assessment of contributing a lot. Even lawyers were more widely regarded as contributors.
We're more and more confronting a crossroads, a major fork, of the whole concept of economics as it works in the United States. If you agree with Taibbi's general thrust, his reading is some of the most fun and in-depth you'll find anywhere. If you don't agree, I would argue, his stuff is that much more important to be aware of, because he's one of the writers that takes the time to spell out in detail his positions without losing the bluntness and passion that many people feel without being able to articulate quite so clearly.
If those of us who want to largely save a capitalist, market-based system don't deal with the factors that cause such disgust with the whole system, then ultimately we are going to face a much larger period of transition and dislocation. The longer we deny that excessive feeding of ego and greed cause systemic problems, the less credibility we have in offering tweaks to the system in the face of calls to overhaul the whole thing in favor of something much different.
Matt Taibbi's blog can be found at True/Slant, and he has had some large pieces in outlets like Rolling Stone.
I wanted to point him out because he's been hitting a nerve that's a lot of why I went to business school. There has been such a void of real leadership in the business community that a lot of anger and outrage and disgust has been generated in society. Pew did a study recently that asked people to rank various professions that contribute to the well-being of society. The category for 'business executives' saw only 21% agree with an assessment of contributing a lot. Even lawyers were more widely regarded as contributors.
We're more and more confronting a crossroads, a major fork, of the whole concept of economics as it works in the United States. If you agree with Taibbi's general thrust, his reading is some of the most fun and in-depth you'll find anywhere. If you don't agree, I would argue, his stuff is that much more important to be aware of, because he's one of the writers that takes the time to spell out in detail his positions without losing the bluntness and passion that many people feel without being able to articulate quite so clearly.
If those of us who want to largely save a capitalist, market-based system don't deal with the factors that cause such disgust with the whole system, then ultimately we are going to face a much larger period of transition and dislocation. The longer we deny that excessive feeding of ego and greed cause systemic problems, the less credibility we have in offering tweaks to the system in the face of calls to overhaul the whole thing in favor of something much different.
7/04/2009
happy independence day
A patriot is somebody who says what needs to be said, does what needs to be done, even if it means personal risk and sacrifice.
Fortunately, we have many American patriots showing us how to do it today.
Fortunately, we have many American patriots showing us how to do it today.
6/08/2009
goodbye apartment
Thanks to everyone who came by this weekend. It was a wonderful sendoff for the apartment and a great start to the summer!
5/29/2009
not cool enough for the central west end
But I'm moving there anyway. Ha.
This will be interesting. And you can see the cathedral basilica from my window.
Moving help appreciated on Saturday, June 13th :)
This will be interesting. And you can see the cathedral basilica from my window.
Moving help appreciated on Saturday, June 13th :)
5/06/2009
is this really happening
A month into the season, can the stats really look like this?
All five AL Central teams in the top half of baseball? Two in the top five? And what's that? Is that the Royals leading the division, garnering spot #3?
This must be a misprint, a mistake, a misunderstanding. At least, it's May.
And that's kind of exciting. Maybe, just maybe, they can keep this up.
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