Relax, Everything Is Deeply Intertwingled

Bloviating Blogs Cost

After reading Straun's calculation of cost per CPU cycle, I've determined that I, too, should stop writing rambling and bloviating blog posts because:

• Unless you are Google then server side processing has to be lightweight.
• Client side processing is cheap, therefore peer networks are cheap.
• Moore's Law will soon make even the time spent to write this blog seem costly.

On the other hand, I don't know how to not write rambling and bloviating blog posts...

W not an X? Y? Let's Z...

Dear President George W. Bush,

I didn't vote for you, and neither did more than 55 million other voters, but that doesn't matter, because you're going to be my President until January 20, 2009. Which means we'll be spending the next 1524 days together. I, for one, am ready to let the healing begin.

I see that you've wasted no time in picking Alberto Gonzales as Attorney General for your second term, thereby freeing up a great patriot, John Ashcroft, for a Supreme Court appointment once one of those pesky liberal judges kicks the bucket in your second term. Thanks for thinking ahead.

Also, I see that you're replacing that way too liberal General Colin Powell with the wonderfully compassionate Condoleeza Rice as Secretary of State for your second term. We always knew Powell was odd man out.

Lately I've been thinking about the platform on which you were elected; what follows is a list of requests to follow through on that platform, since your winning this election is clearly a mandate.

Please keep all the tax cuts you put into place in your first term. If possible, please double the tax cuts. A half trillion dollar a year federal deficit seems so small in this day and age, especially for the most powerful nation in the world. Crank it up, and you'll provide a wonderful stimulus to the economy that will usher in the next boom.

Please reduce the corporate tax rate to 0% and eliminate the federal minimum wage, so that United States corporations don't feel compelled to move offshore just to save a few dollars. Corporations aren't alive, and the nonliving should not be forced to pay taxes. Slate tells me that "corporate tax breaks worth more than $300 billion, 'representing well over one-third of the total value of all U.S. profits,' are set to expire in 2005" -- and you have the power to assuage that.

Please completely privatize social security. Everybody knows that the government cannot be trusted to manage my money, and everybody knows that what I pay into social security is *my* money. Rather than just allowing me to invest my social security funds in things like Google stock, please give me the option to invest in more creative things like Internet gambling and glorious Multi-Level Marketing arrangements.

Please pass a constitutional amendment banning same sex marriage. I cannot believe the Founding Fathers would leave such a gaping hole in such an important document. I wonder if those people believed in values at all. While we're thinking about the United States Constitution, please promote Clarence Thomas to Supreme Court Chief Justice -- he is only 54, so he can serve for three conservative decades to protect democracy, truth, and the American way.

Please extend the Patriot Act so that we can protect America by any means necessary. The rights of individuals should not interfere with our ability to protect ourselves, our country, and our planet. To that end, please expand Second Amendment rights to allow American citizens to carry not just automatic weapons, but also war-grade arsenal-fodder such as bazookas, short- and long-range missiles, and nuclear weapons. We can never be too careful when it comes to protecting our families from criminals and terrorists; thank goodness the NRA works hard so we all can protect ourselves.

Please make as many forms of abortion as illegal as possible. Citizenship begins at conception, and it is the duty of the United States Government to protect the rights of the citizens who need Government to protect them: the ones who cannot speak for themselves because they haven't yet undergone the birth process.

On a related note, please make stem cell research completely illegal so we can protect our unprotected stem cell citizens as well. We need to be the moral leaders of the world and lead by example; we can begin by blocking California's attempt to fund $3b in stem cell research by ballot initiative. The Lord gave us diseases and suffering for a reason, and we have a moral obligation not to mess with the Divine Plan by experimenting with stem cells.

Please don't change the American healthcare system at all. It certainly doesn't need a government bureaucracy meddling with it. More than 200 million Americans have health care benefits, so we're mostly covered. And don't let people buy their drugs from Canada and other countries; there's no way to know if those drugs are safe. While we're at it, please remove all the government programs that help the poor, the sick, and the unemployed. They need to learn personal responsibility rather than ask for handouts.

Please remove all the government strictures on using the natural resources on nationally protected lands and wildlife refuges. We need to start drilling, cutting down trees, killing wildlife, mining, and developing all those areas ASAP, so we can remain competitive in the world. Besides, we can make up some of our aforementioned budget deficits by selling those lands and resources to private industry. While we're at it, please continue to tell the rest of the world they're completely overreacting when they panic about global warming; just think about how cold it was last winter in Washington -- clearly, the world isn't warm enough yet.

Please attack at least one more oil-producing nation. Preferably Iran, since we already have plenty of troops deployed right next door in Iraq. We shouldn't have to justify what we do; what's good for America is good for the world, and they all know it.

I know that if you fulfill my requests that history will see you the way I see you. Thank you for your time, and thank you for serving this great country.

Sincerely,

Adam Rifkin

Offshoring

McKinsey Report on Offshoring: "Widely cited figures predict that by 2015, roughly 3.3 million U.S. business-processing jobs will have moved abroad. As of July 2003, around 400,000 jobs already had. Other research suggests that the number of U.S. service jobs lost to "offshoring" will accelerate at a rate of 30 percent to 40 percent annually during the next five years. Vast wage differentials are prompting companies to move their labor-intensive service jobs to countries with low labor costs: For instance, software developers, who cost $60 an hour in the United States--the country that does the most offshoring of jobs--cost only $6 an hour in India, the biggest market for offshore services. "

Post-Capitalism

I keep thinking about this post from Joyce: "This Drucker book I'm reading, which posits that capitalism as we have understood it is as dead as a parrot -- but post-capitalist society is not yet clearly delineated. The classic capitalist was someone who used accrued profits (or sometimes rent) to procure and direct the essential means of production -- meaning machinery -- and labor, which was supposed to be as fungible as possible. Today, the essential means of production is knowledge residing with the worker. Machines are simply tools under the control of the knowledge worker -- often relatively cheap tools, like PCs -- rather than unattainable bottlenecks. But perhaps most importantly, the capital is ultimately coming from the workers themselves, in the form of deferred wages invested in pension funds.

"Many of the functions of the capitalist have been split up between the professional managers of the corporation on the one hand, and of the investment fund on the other. The nominal owners of the fund's assets, the people who actual provide the capital in the first place, are now the group with the least control over business activities. Pension fund owners have not yet learned how to exert control over fund managers; and fund managers have not yet learned how to exert control over corporate managers. The mechanisms we have can mostly reward or punish short-term performance without doing anything effective about what a pension fund should care about most -- which is long-term performance.

"The purported reason that VCs are upset with public revelation of their performance numbers is that they feel ordinary long-term investors are unable to understand the logic of long-term (which for them means 10 - 12 years) investment. Oddly enough, when workers in VC controlled firms complain about VCs, the main problem is always about the unrelenting focus on the quick flip at the expense of institution-building. I can understand why private equity firms would resist opening their books, especially in such a politically-charged atmosphere -- but no one can fight structural change forever."

Powerless In California

Paul Krugman: "When the E.P.A. makes our air dirtier, or the Interior Department opens a wilderness to mining companies, or the Labor Department strips workers of some more rights, the announcement always comes late on Friday — when the news is most likely to be ignored on TV and nearly ignored by major newspapers. Last Friday the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, known as FERC, announced settlements with energy companies accused of manipulating markets during the California energy crisis. Why on Friday? Because the settlements were a joke: the companies got away with only token payments. It was yet another demonstration of how electricity deregulation has gone wrong... The average Californian was bilked of more than $250, but the state will receive compensation of about 3 cents... Though investigators have found a few smoking guns — control room tapes, e-mail, memos — a power shutdown designed to increase prices is usually indistinguishable from a shutdown for genuine technical reasons... There is a theoretical case for a deregulated electricity market. But making such a market work, it's now clear, requires at least three preconditions. First, it requires a robust transmission system, yet the recent blackout made it clear that we have now created a system in which nobody has clear responsibility for the transmission network. Second, it needs a watchdog agency with adequate powers to prevent and punish price manipulation; FERC doesn't have those powers. Third, that watchdog must not be an agent of the very companies it's supposed to be policing. Enough said."

Not Your Average Economist

Rohit FoRKed a New York Times article on dismal scientist Steven Levitt:

• "If drug dealers make so much money, why do they still live with their mothers? Which is more dangerous, a gun or a swimming pool? What really caused crime rates to plunge during the past decade? Do real-estate agents have their clients' best interests at heart? Why do black parents give their children names that may hurt their career prospects? Do schoolteachers cheat to meet high-stakes testing standards? Is sumo wrestling corrupt? And how does a homeless man afford $50 headphones?"
• "His paper linking a rise in abortion to a drop in crime has made more noise than the rest combined. Levitt and his co-author, John Donohue of Stanford Law School, argued that as much as 50 percent of the huge drop in crime since the early 1990's can be traced to Roe v. Wade. Their thinking goes like this: the women most likely to seek an abortion -- poor, single, black or teenage mothers -- were the very women whose children, if born, have been shown most likely to become criminals. But since those children weren't born, crime began to decrease during the years they would have entered their criminal prime. In conversation, Levitt reduces the theory to a tidy syllogism: Unwantedness
  leads to high crime; abortion leads to less unwantedness; abortion leads to less crime. ... The very topic managed to offend nearly everyone. Conservatives were enraged that abortion could be construed as a crime-fighting tool. Liberals were aghast that poor and black women were singled out. Economists grumbled that Levitt's methodology was not sound."
• "Then there is his coming Understanding Why Crime Fell in the 1990's: Four Factors That Explain the Decline and Seven That Do Not. The entire drop in crime, Levitt says, was due to more police officers, more prisoners, the waning crack epidemic and Roe v. Wade."
• "If you own a gun and have a swimming pool in the yard, the swimming pool is almost 100 times more likely to kill a child than the gun is."
• "While negotiating to buy old houses, he found that the seller's agent often encouraged him, albeit cagily, to underbid. This seemed odd: didn't the agent represent the seller's best interest? ... Like a stockbroker churning commissions or a bookie grabbing his vig, an agent was simply looking to make a deal, any deal. So he would push homeowners to sell too fast and too cheap."

Prisons As A Growth Industry

Criminon.org: "National Institute of Justice claimed that illiteracy was the primary cause of crime. And it's no wonder; if one cannot learn, where can he or she turn in order to survive? A recent study of juvenile offenders placed them, on average, at a third grade reading level. Jobs were simply not an option; they simply did not have, and could not learn, the necessary skills. And thus they were absorbed into the gangs, and the attendant drugs and crime."

Representative Tom Trail: "Dr. Bob Barr of Boise State University stresses the importance of helping 3rd grade students read at grade level. Dr. Barr reports that a child not reading at grade level by grade 3 stands almost a zero chance of graduating from high school. Studies of the students who don't reach reading at grade level by the end of grade 3 -- years later -- find that they are generally unemployed, under employed, or unemployable. The State of Indiana, in making projections for future prison construction, bases their estimates on the number of students failing reading at the third grade level. The social and economic consequences of failing to learn to read is dramatic."

Energy Lethargy

Paul Krugman: "Because effective competition in [energy] transmission wasn't possible, the companies providing transmission still had to be regulated. But because regulation limited their profits, they had little financial incentive to invest in maintaining and upgrading the system. And because of deregulation elsewhere, responsibility was diffused: nobody had a strong stake in keeping the system reliable. The result was a failure not just to add capacity, but to maintain and upgrade capacity that already existed."