All big things in this world are done by people who are naive
and have an idea that is obviously impossible.
Dr. Frank Richards
Image of the Day
Continuing the Celebration
HT: IPI
Cover-Up of Corruption in the NY Prison Break?
The Art of Giving/Taking Criticism
A two-part series from one of my favorite websites and Facebook channels. I have mentioned in the past I often worked very hard on critiquing student work; I never used sarcasm or openly criticized a student in front of his peers. I would not say I never challenged a student. I recall in a DSS class I, then a teaching fellow, taught at UH, I had the students make group presentations. I remember an amusing incident; in this one case, this one male student always came to class in jeans and unshaven. The morning of his group's presentation, he came in clean shaven, in a business suit, and I literally did not recognize him. In this one presentation they were describing a business model for running a video rental business, probably doing some Monte Carlo simulations with IFPS. I remember wanting to flesh out their business model and asked them, for instance, whether they had considered doing VCR rentals or sales (yes, I know this sounds ancient in today's cloud-based architectures and streaming videos). They gave a flippant response, "Yeah, of course, we thought of that, and we agreed that it was a really stupid idea." (Note to college students: if you exhibit that behavior in a professional meeting, you may find yourselves discharged.) I allowed students to demo all or part of their presentations connected to IFPS, but explicitly reminded them they needed to be prepared in the event there was a related outage. Another group did not have a contingency plan when an outage occurred during their presentation. I refrained from rebuking the groups.
I will sometimes call out the trolls to libertarian group forums, and I don't suffer fools gladly. It depends on the context. If I think a commentator's question is innocent but sincere, I'll be patient. If it comes across as political spin or poorly toned, I may decide to confront it. I often use some colorful signature language, like a phrase I coined "political whore". Whereas I don't believe all legislators are necessarily corrupt, I particularly loathe demagoguery, especially from anti-trade and anti-immigrant forces. On a recent immigration post, probably (as usual) about 90% of comments were anti-immigrant, and I started my own comment (not in response to some anti-immigrant flame). This one jerk opined, "Your use of profanity [political whore] doesn't add any credibility to your [worthless] opinion." Note that he didn't address one substantive point of my comment; I decided to respond to the flame by pointing out he was a xenophobe. [Anti-immigrants are thin-skilled about being called xenophobes, insisting they are favorable to "legal" immigrants.] Another anti-immigrant joined the battle, saying that he didn't see the first troll write anything xenophobic. [It was an inference based on the flame; he wasn't pro-immigrant.] There are 2-3 "progressive" trolls on IPI who similarly respond to polls with purely personal attacks, and another on Reason, I believe, who has zero tolerance for anyone with politically incorrect stands on "gay marriage" and has twice commented that he is looking forward to my death. I grant that an escalation of a flame war does not win me friends and influence people; I don't like being bullied. If I feel I've made my point, I'll let it go; on one occasion, I even deleted a thread. I've not gone into a "progressive" thread looking to take personal shots at other people. I'm more interested in the free market of ideas. Personally, I think when others resort to personal attacks, they've already conceded the battle. (I grant one of my favorite phases is "economically illiterate", but that's based on the argument that being advanced, and I quite often spell out why I consider a comment to be that.)
Facebook Corner
(Reason). The level of fearmongering on display in Chris Christie's comments about Rand Paul is really quite remarkable.
Christie, by participating in trite, exaggerated neo-con claims and attacks on the Pauls, adds nothing to the conversation. Rand Paul's cautions about meddling in the affairs of northern Africa and the Middle East have been prescient, and Christie seems all too willing to embrace the authoritarian impulses in unduly hyping terrorist risks, throwing the Bill of Rights under the bus in the process. The fact, for example, that the extremely expensive metadata program has been ineffective and thus a waste of taxpayer money is not addressed, and Christie has not addressed the risks of an unsustainable federal budget , the infeasibility of open-ended domestic and/or foreign interventionist policies. Rand Paul has provided by far the most distinct policy portfolio of the 2016 candidates; instead of assuming the same old same old failed policies over the past 2 administrations are to be pursued or bashing another candidate in personal terms, Christie needs to present his own vision in positive terms.
(Independent Institute). You don’t need to be an accountant or a mathematician to know that if something you are buying is growing faster than your income it will crowd out everything else you are consuming. Health care spending will take more and more of the family budget; it will take an ever larger share of workers’ gross pay. The Affordable Care Act (ACA) did not create this problem. But it limits our ability to manage it by restricting our ability to choose a smaller package of benefits, more cost sharing, etc."
Reducing the Insurers pay, reducing the cost of insurance, optimizing medical care, eliminating GMO's and other poisons used in our environment will all reduce costs. But ultimately a single payer plan such as or modeled after Medicare is what we need
The economically illiterate fascist OP provides a crackpot list of populist "fixes". The fact is that he is anti-science with the ignorant anti-GMO crap tips you off right away. A centralized plan is the LAST thing we need (this guy is just so totally ignorant, you wonder if it's really a satirist writing the absolute most absurd ideas he could think of.); Not only has he failed to notice that the rise in costs has coincided with government intervention in the sector, but he ignores the fundamental notion in economics that competition stimulates more innovation, lower prices, and greater variety. He ignores the fact that government policies like coverage of ordinary expenses, guaranteed issue and community rating are not risk-based constructs, the latter two redistribution (de facto indirect taxation), constructs, that "free" benefits and the failure of the status quo to directly vest the consumer more directly in expenditures exacerbate and obfuscate costs. No, government is not the solution but the primary problem, and the antidote is restored economic liberty, free of incompetent government meddling, in the sector. Finally, this morally corrupt Politics of Envy thing about executive compensation: first of all, health insurers are something similar to the supermarket industry in the sense they operate on thin margins; shareholders are directly vested in cost controls, including bloated administrative costs. Executive compensation is largely based on supply and demand for relevant skills as well as executive performance. Even "progressive" Ben and Jerry's had to modify their executive compensation caps in order to attract and/or retain managerial talent. Hiring inferior managers is the surest way to bankruptcy; a talented executive more than pays for his own costs to the company. Case in point: the incompetent POTUS will nearly double the entire federal debt through Bush while the economy is still sputtering despite unprecedented easy Fed policy and 6 years into the "recovery"--while doing absolutely nothing about exploding entitlements. In the private sector, he would have been fired for cause years ago--some savings because of a modest $400K salary (not to mention a six-figure pension for life).
Marriage and Family
Political Cartoon
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| Courtesy of Dana Summers via Townhall |
Dionne Warwick, "I Know I'll Never Love This Way Again"
