There are no mistakes, no coincidences.
All events are blessings given to us to learn from.
Elisabeth Kübler-Ross
Obama's Quote of the Day
"You cannot sleep well when you think it’s all paid by the government."
Japan’s finance minister Taro Aso
Not at all a problem for Barry, whom gets his fair share of sleep despite spending $5.8T he doesn't have: Obama cannot sleep well when he thinks it's not being spent by the government.
These ARE the Good Old Days
I think John Stossel is pointing out a valid point. (We're not talking about the punch-drunk economy, but crime statistics.) My mom will say about some evil things in the headlines (say, e.g., the pedophilia scandals) that these things didn't happen when she was young. (They did; they just didn't get publicized.) In a nation of 310 million, the press exaggerates events (e.g., the Newtown Massacre). I'm not arguing the tragedy, but consider, for instance, 500 people were murdered last year in Chicago--more than American fatalities in Afghanistan or Newtown victims. But even with the Chicago death toll, across the country as a whole, violence has not been eliminated but is tapering off.
Reason's Nanny of the Month
I've never smoked ANYTHING. (I'm too cheap; I have had other vices like not enough diet and exercise.) I don't go around and get into people's faces about their vices. My maternal grandfather and uncle used to smoke cigars on Sunday afternoon, and to be honest, I liked the smell, and what kid didn't want a cigar band? My Dad used to smoke cigarettes, a bad habit he picked up in the military overseas with his buddies. Fr. Lonergan at OLL used to smoke his pipe in his office; he had Bernstein playing on the phonograph--and that's the moment I decided I wanted to be a college professor. My baby brother had a thing for chewing tobacco, which to be honest I find a little gross. But jail sentences for using a legal product?
Grayson's Legacy
To provide context, a significant amount (about a third) of overall health care costs occur in the last year of life. Senior entitlements (retirement pension and healthcare) are a serious problem for most of the advanced democracies. As Addison and Bonner note: "All citizens of Western industrial democracies (including Japan) have ‘pay-as-you-go’ funding for their government-guaranteed retirement and medical insurance systems. Yet every Western nation has a birth rate lower than 2.1 children per family. The number of workers coming into the economy is not enough to fund the old-age systems".
Fitch elaborates:
Whilst a successful resolution of the current fiscal crisis remains the most important driver for many advanced-economy ratings, without further reform to address the impact of long-term ageing these economies face a second, longer-term fiscal shock. Without reforms to boost labour productivity and/or participation rates in many other advanced economies, population ageing will cause potential GDP growth to decline over the long-term, exacerbating the fiscal challenge,Japan has a mandatory participation universal health care system (business/government) with means-tested cost sharing of medical fees and capped out-of-pocket costs. Medical costs amount to about a half of what the US pays (about 17% of GDP and climbing). I'm not going to go into an apple and oranges comparison here (for one thing, there is a quality/cost trade-off, there are differences in medical approaches (say, medical treatment of preborn babies with health challenges vs. eugenic abortion), subjective ideological rating factors, exogenous factors (cultural, dietary, etc.), and so on: Cato Institute's Michael Tanner does a good job outlining some of the salient factors here.
Now I don't want to renew the death panel debate, but the Aso quote really puts Grayson's point on its head. Grayson is implying for-profit plans would put profits over the expense of a loved one.It's not profits but cost containment. Japan has already designed profit out of the situation (e,g,, hospital). In defense of Aso, he is also saying, I don't want the government extending my life artificially with a low quality. For example, I may choose to spend my last days in a hospice versus the government and doctors extending my life for a few more painful days.
This is Rep. Alan Grayson (2009) discussing the GOP plan for health care. Part one, don't get sick. Part two, if you do get sick... Part three, die quickly.
Don't Know About the Economy
The outspoken Mr. Aso did not win many votes among Japan’s swelling elderly with his remarks at a meeting of the national council on social security reforms. They should “hurry up and die” to relieve pressure on the government to pay their medical bills, he said. “Heaven forbid if you are forced to live on when you want to die. I would wake up feeling increasingly bad knowing that [treatment] was all being paid for by the government.”
The video is a little dated; I do have some bones to pick with the economist in the video and Stossel as well, regarding the "normal" employment for college graduates. The "official" employment number he's referencing includes overqualified and/or part-time workers and excludes discouraged/long-term unemployed people. I can speak in terms of my own experience because I've been in the market during the Great Recession. Yet on paper an 18-year DBA, a former IT professor whom has worked for companies like Oracle and IBM, has been willing to travel or relocate or negotiate compensation, often finds himself filtered out by arbitrary criteria (e.g., x years with a specific version of Oracle software), I don't hold a DoD clearance, etc. Most employers or clients won't consider out of area applicants, expect them to pick up travel or relocation costs, and routinely reject "overqualified" candidates.
What organization tried the hardest to recruit me during the recession--an IT services company, a university? No, a well-known supplemental insurance company--not for my technical skills but for p position as a commissioned sales agent. It was like being stalked--unsolicited, multiple phone calls, emails, even employment ads on my cable. No joke--over the past week, I actually got an email with the heading "Are you ready to quack yet?" No, but I wonder if it's too late for me to take up duck hunting...
Another pet peeve is when John Stossel or Mark Perry of Carpe Diem start bringing up the classified ad counts. Let me point out a couple of methodological problems. For example. suppose one of the GSE's recruits a DBA subcontractor. (I know this from personal experience.) They'll make the posting available to local agencies, all of them posting Internet ads--for the same position. I will sometimes get a half dozen calls about the same position within 24 hours. (They usually don't identify the client but will reveal the location. And there are enough distinctive requirements for me to realize the duplication.) Second, a lot of times they are shopping glorified wish lists and certain in-demand skills
Let me give a brief example. You can think of a database instance as a set of processes on a database server which enables user actions against a database. A database is normally connected or mounted exclusively on a single database server. However, if there is a problem with the database server (or some maintenance is being done), users can't access the database. If you are running a store on the Internet, that's not good; you can lose sales if the database isn't available. Oracle has a different, twice-the-cost license called RAC--Real Application Clusters. In essence RAC enables multiple instances (say, on different database servers) to access the same database. From a practical standpoint, there are ways to shuttle users to other instances in the event of a database server outage, some protocols if users connected to different instances try to act on the same data--but it essentially guarantees 24x7 operation, e.g., for an Internet shop.
I have modest exposure to RAC and a relevant prior technology, Oracle Parallel Server, but none of my government clients used RAC--it was overkill and too expensive. Even for National Archives, if I needed, say, to install a database security patch, my colleagues would put up something like "we'll be back in an hour" on the web server. RAC is somewhat more nuanced in terms of setups and patching, but not a big deal for an experienced DBA. But especially when you are interfacing with nontechnical recruiters whom treat a job wishlist like a fast food order. It makes perfect sense to filter out an 18-year DBA in favor of a 4-year junior DBA whom started out in a RAC shop. Dealing with recruiters can be comical. For example, I once saw a job description asked for 5 years of 10G version experience, and 10G had been in release 2 years.
I mentioned a similar problem when my academic career stalled out in the early 1990's. On paper I was an obvious choice: degree in hand, good publication record, and several courses taught over 8 years, 5 as a full-time professor. But what happened was, schools that used to get 12 candidates, would offer campus visits to their top 3 candidates and hope one would accept an offer suddenly got 80-100 resumes. And you saw filtering strategies, often clustering on a hot area, say networking. Another popular criterion was adding a female MIS faculty member. There's not much I could do about the latter, but I could easily teach other courses. I never programmed in COBOL professionally, but I taught COBOL 5 semesters.
Musical Interlude: My Favorite Groups
Steely Dan, "Deacon Blues"
