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Monday, November 23, 2015

Miscellany: 11/23/15

Quote of the Day
The most important thing I have learned over the years is
the difference between taking one's work seriously and 
taking one's self seriously. 
The first is imperative, and 
the second disastrous.
Margaret Fontey

Chart of the Day


Tweet of the Day

Image of the Day
Sick of Lawsuits's photo.

 Patriotism Is NOT Tyranny



Guest Post Comment: "Transpacific Crony-capitalist Cartel"

This is little more than a sophistic, incompetent analysis, at best, and far from a free market perspective--in fact, all the comments I read are little more than window dressing of Donald Trump's economic illiterate economic nationalist bullshit. All REAL free marketers, including myself, support TPP, not because it's perfect free trade--after all, you don't need to negotiate free trade--you just get the hell out of the way--BUT BECAUSE IT IMPROVES THE STATUS QUO, YOU RETARDS! It IMPROVES the lot of consumers ACROSS THE BOARD, multilaterally. It improves prices, increases access to goods and services. That's the bottom line, period; all the stuff you are citing is peripheral bullshit. If I'm going to listen to a free market economist on this issue, it's Donald Boudreaux or Tyler Cowen (spouting economic gains of $1.9T) who publish quality blogs, not some second-rate hack with a political agenda.

 Crony capitalism my ass. You guys don't know the meaning of the concept. Crony capitalism is what happens when you give political whores a chance to sabotage a trade agreement for their own parochial interests, usually at the expense of trading partners, thereby instigating sabotage or a trade war. Get off your propaganda kick! Talk about audacity!

[The OP basically counterattacks one of Cowen's sources, among other points arguing that it's dated and fails to reflect the current agreement. He basically deflects the point on tariffs and argues that the agreement is replete with protectionist quotas and other mercantist agreements. Basically he's just repeating the points he had made earlier.]

You failed to address the core point, which deals with improving the status quo. Tyler Cowen has reviewed multiple models. He's written more than one post on TPP. Does the agreement reduce barriers? Yes. Is it perfect? No. That's a straw man. All trade agreements are managed by definition. But the US has violated trade agreements on multiple occasions, like Bush's tariff on steel imports, there have been tariffs slapped on Brazilian ethanol, Japanese car import quotas. Of course, we have crony Big Sugar and marketing orders since the Depression.

Choose Life: Baby Sister Wakes Up Big Brother: Little Sisters Are Gifts From God



Government and Your Own Privacy

For those of you who have never gone through a government background check, this is a simple but telling anecdotal example.  For about a month before moving from the Baltimore suburbs to northern West Virgina, I commuted over weekends. On my first trip, I hadn't rented an apartment yet and rented a hotel room for a week. I actually found and rented a furnished apartment after my first day on the job, but the apartment didn't have cable and I needed access to the Internet for new employee orientation and other job requirements. The best I could arrange was a one-week appointment with the local cable company, so I stayed at the Internet-equipped hotel for the remainder of the first week.

Several months later, for certain unrelated (to my job) security paperwork, I had an excruciating long interview with a government investigator, where we went into tedious details over a more than 50-page application, including most of the places I lived over the prior decade. She later called me once or twice to complain my landlady wasn't returning her calls. She must have eventually gotten in touch with her because the next thing I know I'm getting a call from her reading me the riot act for 'failing to disclose' I had stayed in a hotel my first week in WV. She then told me thst she would need to come down from Morgantown to personally interview the hotel manager where I had stayed. [I kept my reaction to myself, but are you kidding me? I offered to send her my hotel receipt--no dice. Temporary living quarters are typical when you move out of state--I did it in the Navy when I moved to Orlando after OIS, when I moved to California, Illinois, and Maryland, among other places. Not to mention I've had jobs where I lived the life of a road warrior, maybe going home every weekend or two. The application had specifically noted I moved out of MD 3 weeks later. There was no intent to mislead the investigator; I never had my mail forwarded to the hotel. If I had to include every time I stayed at a hotel on business over the past decade, that would have added dozens of pages to the application--assuming I still had records/receipts.]

On a side note: the job requiring the investigation eventually got put on hold (a risk when you're dealing with government gigs), which meant my long-overdue sponsored investigation got put on the shelf. Well, last week, I got contacted by the relevant government agency to warn me my application, among others, may have been compromised in a relevant hack--including my fingerprints. [Even that was a hassle. The contractor wanted me to go to New York (on my own dime?) to do fingerprints. Never mind the fact I had fingerprints done for the WV gig only months earlier--but the two government agencies don't talk to each other... I finally convinced the contractors to have them done at their Pittsburgh facility--about a 90-mile drive away.]

In fact, just a few weeks ago, I got word from Veteran Benefits that my earlier data had also been compromised. And this is the same government which wants security software developers to create government-accessible defects (as if they were hacker-proof!) and we want to trust with health and/or other data? NOT A CHANCE!

Political Cartoon

Courtesy of Bob Gorrell via Townhall
Musical Interlude: My Favorite Vocalists

Aretha Franklin, "Until You Come Back to Me (That's What I'm Gonna Do)". One of her signature tunes. I'll likely suspend my Franklin retrospective a few hits shy on Thanksgiving (to do my traditional blog holiday music interlude) and resume after the New Year.

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