Category: Philosophy

It is Called Price Gouging, You Moronic Free Market Mousketeer!

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The latest poster boys for techno-Libertarians is the taxi service Uber, which is a smartphone based car hire service.

At the core of their business model is the idea that there is no need for any pesky regulations, because ……… Internet.

Ignoring for the moment supply restrictions like New York City’s Medallion* system, there is a reason that cabs, and cabbies, are regulated.

There is a need to ensure that the cars are safe, that the cabbies are properly trained,† and that pricing is consistent and transparent, so, for example, we do not see price gouging, on New Year’s eve, or during a rain storm.

So, what does Uber do?  It triples rates for New Year’s Eve, and Randroid morons like Rob Leathern, the Chief Product Officer of Brand Networks, has this is not like price gouging at all, because ……… Internet:

Uber’s pricing isn’t price gouging. It’s just in an area we are deeply conflicted about, and missing some transparency that would increase consumer trust. They could certainly give all or some more of their excess surge profits to the drivers, or show us more of the extensive data their Math Team produces but doesn’t yet share– if their algorithms are as sophisticated as they claim then the benefit they get from sharing information with customers will outweigh any competitive concerns.

Bullsh%$.

This is price gouging, and it has been defined as such throughout the developed world for something over 80 years.

One of the reasons that we as a society make laws against this is because it is unethical, and dishonest.

I really hope that if he ever has a heart attack, that Mr. Leathern does not find an ambulance driver who jacks up the rate to take him to the hospital.

*Apart from that Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play? The medallion system sucks.
†Uber has already had at least 1 rape allegation attached to its service so far, and it turns out that rape by gypsy cab drivers is endemic.

2014 is Coming, and US Broadband Still Sucks Wet Farts From Dead Pigeons

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Yes, our, “market based solution,” continues to overprice and under perform:

San Antonio is the seventh-largest city in the United States, a progressive and economically vibrant metropolis of 1.4 million people sprawled across south-central Texas. But the speed of its Internet service is no match for the Latvian capital, Riga, a city of 700,000 on the Baltic Sea.

Riga’s average Internet speed is at least two-and-a-half times that of San Antonio’s, according to Ookla, a research firm that measures broadband speeds around the globe. In other words, downloading a two-hour high-definition movie takes, on average, 35 minutes in San Antonio — and 13 in Riga.

And the cost of Riga’s service is about one-fourth that of San Antonio.

The United States, the country that invented the Internet, is falling dangerously behind in offering high-speed, affordable broadband service to businesses and consumers, according to technology experts and an array of recent studies.

In terms of Internet speed and cost, “ours seems completely out of whack with what we see in the rest of the world,” said Susan Crawford, a law professor at Yeshiva University in Manhattan, a former Obama administration technology adviser and a leading critic of American broadband.

The problem is the market based solutions.  It’s more profitable to create and extract monopoly rants than it is to provide better and cheaper service, so they do that.

It’s economics 101.

The free market mousketeers screw us again.

Rand Corp. Study Finds that Joint Aircraft Costs More than Service Specific Aircraft

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Comparing Apples to Apples

Considering the history of multi-service fighter programs, the F-111 comes to mind, but there is also the JPATS, JSTARS and the Osprey tilt-rotor, it should surprise no one that Rand Corp’s analysis of the such programs shows that there are no savings. In fact, it shows that developing aircraft variants separately is less expensively than a common aircraft with service-specific variants.

The theoretical savings are a mirage:

A Rand Corp. report produced to guide future U.S. Air Force program plans has concluded that the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter program will cost more than three single-service programs would have done. That conclusion drew a sharp riposte from Lockheed Martin, which accused the report’s authors of using “outdated data” that overstated the F-35’s projected operating costs by a factor of two.

 Lockheed Martin based its criticism on numbers that cannot be found in the report. The company declined to give a source for those numbers, stating that they were “government data.” The Joint Strike Fighter program office distanced itself from the argument, saying it had “no real issues” with the report, and did not confirm any of the company’s figures.

 Rand’s Project Air Force team produced the report, which was requested in 2012 by then-commander of Air Force Materiel Command Gen. Donald Hoffman, as it became clear the JSF would be running many years behind the schedule that was planned up to 2010.

The study was based on historic data up to November 2011, including the fiscal year 2010 selected acquisition report (SAR). Rand, a think tank founded by the Air Force and still closely associated with the service, did not use the fiscal year 2011 SAR (issued in March 2012) which disclosed a three-year slip in development and actually reported higher cost projections than the 2010 report.

Because the JSF program is incomplete, and because no other joint fighter program has been completed as planned, the researchers used data from a variety of programs—from the F/A-18E/F and F-22 fighters to the T-6A turboprop trainer and E-8C surveillance platform—to gauge the historical cost increases in joint and single-service programs.

They did not focus on absolute costs, but on the percentage growth of estimated costs between the launch of a full-scale development program (Milestone B; MS B) and points five and nine years after MS B, the latter corresponding to the most recent JSF data available in late 2011.

………

Researchers compared the actual growth of F-35 estimates at the nine-year mark with growth rates for three separate programs based on historic growth with the F-22, the most comparable single-service fighter program. The same adjustments were applied to O&S costs, although a later and higher estimate of F-22 operational costs (at 14 years after MS B) was also included.

The study’s conclusion: The JSF estimated life-cycle cost (LCC) in 2010 was already higher than that of three single-service programs. “Under none of the plausible conditions that we analyzed did JSF have a lower LCC than the notional single-service programs.” The report does not recommend any changes to the JSF program, but advises the Air Force to avoid joint projects in future.

Of course, this does not answer why this is so.

One could argue that it is typically ambitious of joint programs, since the military’s goal of getting more bang for the buck is almost always more bang, not less buck, but if that were the case, the JPATS, the T-6 Texan II, where an extant turboprop trainer was adapted to a tri-service primary trainer would not have had a greater cost growth than the T-45 Goshawk, a naval advanced trainer, where an advanced jet was fully navalized to to land on carriers, but it did have a greater percentage cost growth.

When you further add the specifics of the JSF, specifically the Marine Corps requirement for STOVL, which f%$#s up the other variants in some very profound ways.

Economists Unconnected to Reality

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You know the ones, the “fresh water” economists, the free-market mousketeer conservatives for whom the rational actor acting in an unconstrained laissez-faire system is king.

It is a matter of faith, completely unsupported by reality, that regulating a market will always be counter productive.

As it pertains to consumer protections for credit cards, to paraphrase the Bard, “There are more things in heaven and earth, than are dreamt of in their philosophy.

Much to ths shock of right wing economists, adding consumer protections to credit cards worked:

Four years ago, Congress decided to force down the hidden fees that credit card companies collect from their customers. It passed a law called the 2009 Credit Card Accountability Responsibility and Disclosure Act — a name chosen so the law would be known as the Card Act.

When Neale Mahoney, an economist at the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business, set out to evaluate the effect of that law, he was confident he knew what he and his colleagues would find: It didn’t work.

“I went into the project with this sort of conventional wisdom that well-intentioned regulators would force down fees and that other fees and charges would increase in response,” he told me this week, comparing hapless rule makers to the carnival visitors playing the game known as Whac-a-Mole, where a mole springs up somewhere else as soon as one is knocked down.

But his expectation was wrong. The study came to a conclusion that surprised Mr. Mahoney and his colleagues: The regulation worked. It cut down the costs of credit cards, particularly for borrowers with poor credit. And, the researchers concluded, “we find no evidence of an increase in interest charges or a reduction to access to credit.”

The study, whose other authors are Sumit Agarwal of the National University of Singapore, Souphala Chomsisengphet of the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency and Johannes Stroebel of New York University’s Stern School of Business, estimates that the law is saving American consumers $20.8 billion a year.

There are a number of theories as to why this occurred, but the most likely is that regulation, when properly executed, simply works, though an argument could be made (though probably not by the credit card companies) that this worked because much of the credit card companies’ business model is parasitic, and as such they are unwilling to walk from “free” money.

This Just In: Devil Asks Rush Limbaugh to Tone It Down. He Doesn’t Want Him in Hell, It Would Ruin the Neighborhood.

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Yes, Limbaugh is calling the Pope a Marxist, and I do not mean Groucho, Chico, Harp, Zeppo, or Gummo:

Conservative radio host Rush Limbaugh last week called Pope Francis’ economic views laid out in his Vatican mission statement “pure marxism.”

“I have been numerous times to the Vatican. It wouldn’t exist without tons of money,” Limbaugh said in a show titled “It’s Sad How Wrong Pope Francis Is (Unless It’s a Deliberate Mistranslation By Leftists).” “But regardless, what this is, somebody has either written this for him or gotten to him. This is just pure Marxism coming out of the mouth of the Pope.”

Stay classy, at least when you are not doing sex tourism in the Dominican Republic.

I Guess that You Get il Papa Buono About Once Every 50 Years

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Pope Francis just went rhetorically postal on Anglo-Saxon hyper capitalism:

Pope Francis on Tuesday sharply criticized growing economic inequality and unfettered markets in a wide-ranging and decidedly populist teaching that revealed how he plans to reshape the Catholic Church.

In his most authoritative writings as pontiff, Francis decried an “idolatry of money” in secular culture and warned that it would lead to “a new tyranny.” But he reserved a large part of his critique for what he sees as an excessively top-down Catholic Church hierarchy, calling for more local governance and greater inclusiveness — including “broader opportunities for a more incisive female presence in the Church.”

………

On Tuesday, he showed a willingness to use tough language in attacking what he views as the excesses of capitalism. Using a phrase with special resonance in the United States, he strongly criticized an economic theory — often affiliated with conservatives — that discourages taxation and regulation.

“Some people continue to defend trickle-down theories which assume that economic growth, encouraged by a free market, will inevitably succeed in bringing about greater justice and inclusiveness in the world,” Francis wrote in the papal statement. “This opinion, which has never been confirmed by the facts, expresses a crude and naive trust in the goodness of those wielding economic power and in the sacra­lized workings of the prevailing economic system.”

“Meanwhile,” he added, “the excluded are still waiting.”

Although Francis has previously raised concerns about the growing gap between the wealthy and the poor, the direct reference to “trickle-down” economics in the English translation of his statement is striking.

The phrase has often been used derisively to describe a popular version of conservative economic philosophy that argues that allowing the wealthy to run their businesses unencumbered by regulation or taxation bears economic benefits that lead to more jobs and income for the rest of society. Liberals and Democratic officials have rejected the theory, saying it is contradicted by economic evidence.

………

Francis’s language on the economy has been far more accessible than that of Benedict, a theologian who wrote primarily in thick books hard to untangle for the regular lay­person. And Pope John Paul II’s warnings on economic inequality were swallowed at times by his war on Communism, a far more dangerous problem in the church’s eyes because of its anti-religious bent.

John Paul II’s “war on Communism” was a reactionary war against the idea that the church was to be a countervailing force against the excesses of capitalism.

It’s nice to see that some of the less antediluvian members of the Catholic clergy managed to avoid JP II’s purges.

Today’s Must Read

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Writing in Jacobin magazine, economist and blogger John Quiggen makes a cogent artument that, “Wall Street Isn’t Worth It.”

David Graeber’s denunciation of “bullshit jobs” resonated with many, producing a string of responses. Alex Tabarrok and Brad DeLong have suggested that the apparent inverse relationship between earnings and the social value of work done is simply an illustration of “diamond-water” paradox, that prices and wages are determined by marginal, rather than absolute values and that marginal values reflect scarcity as well as utility. Peter Frase refutes this claim in both empirical terms (noting for example the fact that the price of diamonds is set by the De Beers cartel rather than pure market forces) and as a resurrection of the discredited marginal productivity ethics of the 19th century.

I’d like to look at a specific question raised by the discussion of private returns and social value, namely: can Wall Street, in its present form, be justified? That is, does the share of income flowing to corporations and professional workers in the financial sector reflect their marginal contribution to the total value of social output, so that, if their work ceased to be done and their skills were allocated elsewhere, we would all be worse off?

I argue that society as a whole would be better off if the financial sector were smaller, and received much smaller returns. A political strategy based on cutting the financial sector down to size has more promise for the Left than any alternative approach now on offer, and is a necessary precondition for a broader attempt to make the distribution of wealth and power more equal.

Read the rest.

It’s a dense read, but I think that it makes the point quite well.

Go read.

Rob Ford Just Stopped Being Funny

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Everyone’s (Or at least Jon Stewart and his writing team’s) favorite Chris Farley tribute band, Toronto Mayor Rob Ford has put on quite a show over the past few months.

I’ve not written about him, because I had nothing to add that The Daily Show has already covered.

Well, we now have credible reports that he was beating his wife:

New details from a months-old police report revealed on Friday indicated that Mayor Rob Ford’s wife, Renata, displayed bruises indicative of domestic violence and was possibly inebriated, according to a Toronto Star story published by columnist Rosie DiManno.

“The mayor’s wife was slurring her words and belligerent with the driver. She either refused to pay the fare or did not have the money,” DiManno wrote. “Their argument became so heated that the cabbie called for police assistance.” The columnist said the incident occurred “nearly a year ago” and began with a dispute between Renata Ford and a cab driver outside her parents’ home.

When police arrived, DiManno wrote that they “observed that Mrs. Ford appeared to have bruising on her limbs.”

“When asked about it, she refused to say how the injuries had been suffered. She was, in fact, too incoherent to say much of anything — either inebriated or on drugs,” explained DiManno.

According to DiManno, no one was charged after the argument between Renata Ford and the driver. However, DiManno said police “tried following up” with Renata Ford afterward because they were concerned “domestic abuse may be involved.” DiManno described Renata Ford as having been “not cooperative” with the police.

This is not the first time there have been questions about domestic violence in the Ford household. In 2008, Ford, then a member of the City Council, was charged with assault and making a death threat against his wife. Those charges were dropped after prosecutors found inconsistencies in Renata Ford’s allegations that they said raised “credibility issues.”

The Toronto Star has pulled the story, saying that it wasn’t ready for release, but is serves to reinforce something we should all be aware of when we are tempted to make jokes: There are people who are collateral damage to this sort of bullsh%$, and I am not referring to the embarrassment suffered by the citizens of Toronto.

I’m no particularly surprised by this.  Ford is a product of the sort of nihilistic self-destructive hostile populism that was detailed in Mark Ames’ magnificent essay, Spite the Vote.

What he is, and what he does, is not motivated by a desire to fix things, but by a hatred by the other, which in his case are mass transit users and bicyclists. (?!?)

It is an illustration of the old Chinese adage, “If you are out for revenge, dig two graves.

Here is Jon Stewart is weighing in on the distinguished Mr. Ford:

What, You Mean that Gazillionaires Won’t Leave New York City for Orlando, Florida for Lower Taxes

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So not surprised.

Studies show that the idle rich do not relocate over their tax levels:

It is not news that New York’s political and media elites worship the extremely rich. You can see this when in a tough economy the New York Times publishes a “Wealth” section fronted by a how-to piece on buying Irish castles. You can see it when you hear the city’s billionaire mayor insisting that critics of wealth inequality should be quiet because they interfere with his dream to “get all the Russian billionaires to move here.” And you can see it when you behold Gov. Andrew Cuomo, D-N.Y., slamming a modest initiative to slightly increase taxes on the Big Apple’s millionaires.

Again, none of this unto itself is all that newsy because it isn’t all that new. New York’s “let them eat cake” culture has been around for a long time in a city where almost half of all residents live below or near the poverty line. However, what is news is the extent to which this wealth-obsessed environment helps strengthen the mythologies that distort economic reality.

Cuomo’s attack, in particular, perfectly illustrates this trend. Fresh off raising millions from wealthy donors for his political front group, the governor slammed Democratic mayoral nominee Bill de Blasio’s tax hike proposal, claiming it will drive Cuomo’s beloved millionaires out of the state.

“What they fear is that they’re in a place where the taxes will continually go up and there will be a ceiling and they’ll say, ‘I’m going to Florida,’” Cuomo said of the rich. “I believe that.”

Before you join Cuomo in weeping for the Manhattan fat cats supposedly forced to flee from economic persecution, remember that his story is a fantastical fact-free fable — one that conveniently serves the political interests of the aristocracy, but has nothing to do with reality.

Rich people leaving New Jersey and California actually fell after taxes rose, and the decrease in millionaires in New York happened because their wages fell after the financial crisis.

Economists are Douchebags

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A business school professor at Wharton has found that not only are economists more selfish and more likely to cheat, but that even just the study of economics and business has a criminogenic effect.

The quick bullet points are:

  • Less charitable giving
  • More deception for personal gain
  • Greater acceptance of greed
  • Less concern for fairness

He wonders if there is a problem with how we teach economics.

Gee,  you think?

Go read the rest.

H/t Salon.

OK, I’m Really Beginning to Like Pope Francis a Lot

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He is now talking about how excessive focus on doctrine is a “serious illness in the Churgh”:

Speaking at daily Mass last Thursday, Pope Francis warned Christians against turning their faith into a rigid ideology.

“The faith passes, so to speak, through a distiller and becomes ideology,” he said, according to Radio Vatican. “And ideology does not beckon [people]. In ideologies there is not Jesus: in his tenderness, his love, his meekness. And ideologies are rigid, always. Of every sign: rigid.

“And when a Christian becomes a disciple of the ideology, he has lost the faith: he is no longer a disciple of Jesus, he is a disciple of this attitude of thought… For this reason Jesus said to them: ‘You have taken away the key of knowledge.’ The knowledge of Jesus is transformed into an ideological and also moralistic knowledge, because these close the door with many requirements.”

I’m wondering where this is all going to lead.

Notwithstanding the cries of outrage sure to arise from conservatives, I see this as an unalloyed good.

We Might All Be in Hell

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NPR just finished a series where it talked to prominent theologians about the nature of the afterlife.

One of the segments was immediately followed (it might have been preceeded) by a story about the government shutdown and potential debt default.

Then it hit me:  No one that they had talked to even mentioned the possibility that we might already be in hell.

Of course, Gnosticism, the religion that most closely hews to this philosophy, no longer exists as an organized religion, but it does seem to me that this is a reasonable conclusion.

As a Jew, I find the discussion of the afterlife largely irrelevant.   The afterlife is simply not a significant of Jewish theology.

The consensus on the afterlife in Judaism is, “Yes,” with some people going with a conventional heaven and hell, and some people, particularly Kabbalists, believe in reincarnation, and a whole range in between.

In Judaism, the important thing is that to whatever degree our world resembles hell, it is our job to fix it.

This concept is called Tikkun olam (תיקון עולם).

This reminds me of an old joke:

A Shmuel dies and is sent to hell, and he boards an elevator going down.

The elevator operators calls out, “Hell, level 1, all Atheists and Agnostics out.”

Shmuel looks out, and sees a bleak landscape, black sands, and a merciless sun beating down, and the air smells like.

The elevator moves further downward, and comes to a stop.

“Hell, level 2, all Muslims out.”

Shmuel smells brimstone, hears screams, and sees rivers of flowing lava under a black sky.

Shmuel is now rather concerned.

The doors close with a sepulchral finality, and the elevator drops.

“Hell, all Christians out.”

The door opens, and Shmuel can see nothing but flames in front of the door. He can feel his skin blisters from the heat even as he pushes himself against the back of the elevator.

As the doors close, Shmuel is now terrified.

“Hell, all Jews out.

The doors open, Shmuel feels a cool breeze on his face. He sees lush, green rolling hills. He smells citrus in the air.

Shmuel is stunned. To no one in particular, he says, “But ……… I thought it would be worse!”

The elevator operator looks up, and says, “It was. You cannot believe what they can do with irrigation.

Perhaps we should all spend some more time irrigating.

How Restaurant Management Explains the Republican Party

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The New York Times has a rather interesting article on restaurants moving away from tips in 2008.

I don’t mean a service charge with an option to tip, I mean a full service restaurant that has a service charge, but does not accept tips at all, the Linkery, which operated for 8 years* in the San Diego.

Its proprietor closed up shop and moved to the Bay Area this Summer, he’s starting a new restaurant shortly, and he penned took the free time to pen a fascinating series on his experiences with his experiment. (It’s a long read that I highly recommend but the nickel tour is that he sees it as an unalloyed success.)

What is interesting about all this is his observation that there are some (mostly unlamentedly former) customers who were in an absolute rage about the fact that they no longer can tip. (Part 5 of his series)

This is where it gets interesting to me:

“This isn’t about money,” the man would say.  [Almost always a man — MGS]

 He’d be the one person in a thousand, or in ten thousand, who’d get angry about our fixed service charge. Angry about his lack of control over the price, angry about not being the final arbiter of our service. You could count on him being male, at least when we’re talking about public scenes. (I’ve heard of a few women who got pretty mad about it in private.)

 And his go-to line was so predictable, we would wait for it, anticipate it. “I always tip way more than twenty percent!”

 If that was the case, why were these guys so mad about paying only 18%, far less than they otherwise would? What was it about not choosing the amount they tipped, that infuriated them, even when they were getting a discount?

 It had to be at least partially about lack of control. Or, more accurately, lack of imagined control. This guy thought that, in a tipped environment, his server would perform better in order to get more of his money. That idea is false, as shown both by repeated studies and common sense, but that was irrelevant. His anger could not be redeemed by mere facts.

 Then what was this rage so primal that no exposure to reality could relieve it?

It turns out, rather unsurprisingly, that there is a certain sort of person who demands control in the restaurant relationship.

In postscript 1†, we have a restaurant reviewer who got a wet behind the ears waiter, and decides to call the waiter out by name:

What blew my mind was that she called him out using his real name (which I’ve redacted here), even though she was writing from behind a shield of anonymity. It was, in my opinion, bad enough for the worker to have made a mistake at his job; even worse that he has to find out his mistake was to a reviewer; but now he’s been ridiculed by name in the paper, in an attempt to have his parents, siblings and friends all shame him, as well.

Of course, the server was a really great guy, a college student with minimal serving background, who we were trying to train on the job. He was doing his best, and whatever errors he made were my fault, for putting him a difficult position without giving him the tools for success. I knew that, and I expected that a professional reviewer would have, too.

I emailed the writer.

I wrote something along the lines of, hey, I get that you had a bad experience, but that was out of line to call the server out by his real name. You could have easily made the same point while using a different name for him.

She wrote back along the lines of, I write my experiences; just because you have good intentions I’m not going to hold back my criticism. It’s your fault for not having trained him properly.

I responded, I agree that the bad service is my fault. I’m saying you should have ripped on me and not him. I’ve apologized to him for putting him in that position, but it is still not right of you, writing under a pseudonym, to publicly embarrass him using his actual name.

And she came back with the clincher: Well, with your fixed service charge you didn’t give my any choice. I couldn’t give him a lower tip. How else could I punish him for his mistakes?

That made it all clear. She, like some other patrons, felt the burden of having to reward good behavior and punish bad behavior. Obviously, some people like that role, and some people don’t, but at the very least our culture has trained diners that it is their job. When you go to restaurants, you are responsible for rewarding and punishing your server.

(emphasis original)

From a cultural perspective, it is fascinating, but it also says a lot more about our society and our politics, asaimai at No More Mister Nice Blog observes that this explains Republicans as well:

Why are Federal Workers a special case and a problem for Republicans?  In the case of Federal Workers I’d argue that its not merely that  they are workers (who are always despised) its because they are workers who for the most part don’t conform to Republican ideas of the right boundaries for workers. The right boundaries for workers are that they know their place, that they can be fired capriciously, and that they exist primarily to make the employer feel good about himself  and, further, that like waiters in a restaurant and prostitutes with their johns their job is also to make the employer believe that he is receiving an extra good form of treatment not accorded to others diners or johns.

Federal workers violate those central principles because they can’t be fired directly by “the employer” because the individual Republican tax payer isn’t the direct employer. They also can’t be humiliated and made to feel vulnerable because of civil service protections and unionization. And in the matter of interactions, one on one, the taxpayer can’t command good treatment by offering money (bribes) and thus often feels vulnerable and weak because there is no way to play the “do you know who I am” card which (like tipping) is an attempt to force a generic servant to give non generic attention and service to one class of people. So Federal Employees create an extra level of status anxiety for Republicans when they come in contact with these “employees” who can’t be fired or rewarded and therefore are not obligated to be extra nice to the individual Republican.

Of course there are lots of kinds of Federal Employees, some more obvious than others, and many of whom don’t come into contact with ordinary citizens very often (Scientists at the CDC vs. Park Rangers, for example). I’d argue that the antipathy I’ve described goes for both the kinds of Federal Employees that ordinary citizens encounter–and this is at the root of the really quite bizarre attacks by Republican Congressmen on individual Federal Employees like the now infamous attack on the the Park Ranger by the Texas Congressman. He explicitly challenges her and accuses her of failing to give special consideration to (some) clients (tourists/vets) when she is, of course, contractually obligated to treat all persons identically and has been ordered to shut down the monument. We’ve also seen this hostility directed by individual Republican Congressmen at high level Federal Employees during committee hearings. These attempts to create a hierarchical relationship which puts the “employee” below the “employer” even when the employee has specialized knowledge and skills that the employer does not are too numerous to mention.

I’d even argue that Reince Priebus’s absurd “offer” to pay for a few employees to keep the military site open for the honor flight vets was an example of a perfectly logical extension of the tipping principle: that people with money should get better treatment than ordinary customers. That the government’s attempt to treat everyone uniformly in both the Sequester and the Shut Down is, to the Republican way of thinking, a greater affront than almost anything else. It flies in the face of the “do you know who I am?” principle which underlies Republican thinking about the nature of the world.

So what can we do about this? Nothing, alas. Republicans will continue to see the Government, and experiences of Government work and workers, as a drama in which the employer must punish the employed in order to enjoy his superior status, and the rest of us will have to suffer as they choose to act out their petty desires by shutting down the government and refusing to “tip” our Federal Workers by, you know, actually paying them for work performed. ………

(emphasis original)

This explains a lot.

The only question is how corrosive this is to society as a whole, and how we minimize the impact of these attitudes on the rest of us.

*It’s like 80 years in restaurant years, as most restaurants do not make it 2 years.
†Like I said, not a short read, but well worth it.

An Old Witch Tells the President What to Do

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Read Hecate:

……… I pulled A’s in a lot of law school classes, but the class in which I did my absolute best was Negotiations 101.

 Of course, unlike our President, I didn’t go to Harvard Law School and I was only assistant editor, not editor, of Law Review. I’ve never taught ConLaw and I’ve never held elective office. But I have had cause to wonder, more than once, if Mr. Obama may not have been busy doing something else on the day they taught Negotiating 101 at HLS.

 ………

 So, I’m an old woman who didn’t go to HLS and wouldn’t presume to imagine that I could lead the United States. But I’ll still, as someone who’s actually been in the field, practiced law, and successfully negotiated good outcomes for my clients, presume to give Mr. Obama some advice.

 If I were sitting today where you sit, Mr. Obama, almost at the confluence of the Anacostia River, the Washington Chanel, and the Potomac River, here’s what I’d do:

 I’d announce that, now that the government’s been closed for two days, I’m unwilling to sign anything but a clean bill to fund the government, except that now I also want the Rapeublicans to approve all of my judicial nominees who have been languishing in Congress lo these many years.

 Tomorrow morning, I’d eat breakfast, put on my nice suit, walk out into the Rose Garden (it’s gorgeous in DC this week) and announce that now that I’ve slept on it, I won’t sign anything except a clean bill with approval of all of my judicial nominees and statehood for DC. I’d wave to the reporters, go play golf (include a woman this time, Mr. President), review their homework with my daughters, and get a massage.

 On Friday, after I had lunch at the Palm with my wife (have the crabmeat cocktail and the steak salad, rare), I’d walk up to Dupont Circle and say that I’d been discussing it with Ms. Obama and, now, I’m unwilling to sign anything except a clean bill with approval of all of my judicial appointees, statehood for DC, and a new bill of Elizabeth Warren’s choosing.

 I’d take the weekend off, go to Camp David, let the girls and the dogs run around and enjoy Indian Summer in Maryland, have dinner with some crazy, wild-eyed liberals, and make sure the press knew who they were and what we ate (include arugula and craft beer on the menu).

 On Monday, I’d wait.

 On Tuesday, I’d give a speech and announce that, having thought about it over the weekend, in the calm of Camp David, I also need a new program of really strong controls on financial markets.

 You get the picture.

 Right now, the only people upping the ante are the Rapeublicans. In order to “meet in the middle” and appear “reasonable” Mr. Obama has to move towards their position. That’s no way to negotiate.

 Rapeublicans who are watching the polls go even further down on the notion of shutting down the government (they’ve already crossed that Rubicon — another river reference — so what the heck), need some additional motivation to move towards Mr. Obama. And they need to see that continuing to hold out will cost them even more.

 Maybe, in the end, Mr. Obama shows what a reasonable guy he is by compromising on a new bill of Elizabeth Warren’s choosing and half of his judicial appointees. That’s how negotiations work.

The outcome of any negotiation is an artifact of power, and I do not think that Obama gets that.

Supply Side Economics is a Fraud

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In interesting showing in a very concise form that the data does not support the theory of supply side economics:

The biggest political theory of the last 30 years is supply side economics. It was the basis of the policies of all Republican presidents from Ronald Reagan onward. The idea is that if the rich are given more money, they will use it to invest in business and thus create jobs. According to the theory, if you give money to the poor, they will just spend it. The rich, on the other hand, will help businesses to grow and this will help the poor.

 The idea is nonsense as anyone who has ever run an actual business should be able to explain. Businesses expand when they see a lot of demand for their products. If a computer repair business has to turn away business for lack of resources, it will hire another tech to be able to take the extra work. This is as simple a notion as there is. Now it is also the case that in rare instances, a company may see a market opportunity but not expand to meet it because they simply don’t have the start up capital to do it. Maybe expanding would require buying more property and the cost of a loan is too high. But that is a rare case. In general, businesses are demand constrained.

 But this isn’t a matter of conjecture. If businesses really acted the way that conservatives claim, then businesses should invest a lot more when profits were high compared to when they were low. That’s why I found the following graph from Dean Baker so interesting. It shows corporate profits and investment as a share of GDP since the end of World War II. The thing to notice here is that there is nothing to notice:

While correlation does not imply causation, as the saying goes, a lack of correlation does imply a lack of causation, and in this case, we have what appears to be a slight  negative correlation.

Economics is frequently called dismal science for reasons that are patently obvious, but supply side economics does not even rise to that meager standard.

It is instead a reflection of Calvinist theories of predestination, which, among other things believes that wealth and material success are indications that one is part of the “elect” and hence bound for salvation.

Calvinism believes that wealth is a (though not the only) sign of virtue, and supply side economics is an outgrowth of a philosophy that came over with the Pilgrims at Plymouth Rock.

It’s an article of faith, and as such it should be accorded no more intellectual weight than the precepts of the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster. (Maybe less, because Pastafarians don’t want to screw it up for the rest of us.)

Krugman Nails It

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In accordance with Euro Zone requirements, France is taking steps to reduce its deficit.

The people who most strongly argue for “expansionary austerity”*, are criticizing Frances steps, and Paul Krugman rightly takes them to task:

Simon Wren-Lewis looks at France, and finds that it is engaging in a lot of fiscal austerity — far more than makes sense given the macroeconomic situation. He notes, however, that France has eliminated its structural primary deficit mainly by raising taxes rather than by cutting spending.

And Olli Rehn — who should be praising the French for their fiscal responsibility, their willingness to defy textbook macroeconomics in favor of the austerity gospel — is furious, declaring that fiscal restraint must come through spending cuts.

………

But the larger point here, surely, is that Rehn has let the mask slip. It’s not about fiscal responsibility; it never was. It was always about using hyperbole about the dangers of debt to dismantle the welfare state. How dare the French take the alleged worries about the deficit literally, while declining to remake their society along neoliberal lines?

It should be noted that Robert Mundell, known as the “Father of the Euro”, is also a big figure in supply side economics (aka Raganomics).

The Euro’s academic and intellectual roots are dominated by people who have the dismantling of the social safety net as one of their important goals.

It is therefore no surprise that they are prosecuting their agenda by using austerity as a tool to do this, but the people who have to live in the Euro are their victims.

*Much like sparkle ponies that sh%$ M&Ms, expansionary austerity does not exist.

A Very Good Essay on the Problems with the F-35

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While there are a number of problems, a protracted development process, unrealistic (and constantly changing) requirements, “cost as an independent variable”, and the need for jointness, but this article makes the point that when we look at the performance issues of the airframe, they are almost entirely a function of the STOVL requirements foisted on the airframe by the US Marine Corps:

………

But the chorus of praise is wrong. The F-35 Joint Strike Fighter — a do-it-all strike jet being designed by Lockheed Martin to evade enemy radars, bomb ground targets and shoot down rival fighters — is as troubled as ever. Any recent tidbits of apparent good news can’t alter a fundamental flaw in the plane’s design with roots going back decades.

Owing to heavy design compromises foisted on the plane mostly by the Marine Corps, the F-35 is an inferior combatant, seriously outclassed by even older Russian and Chinese jets that can fly faster and farther and maneuver better. In a fast-moving aerial battle, the JSF “is a dog … overweight and underpowered,” according to Winslow Wheeler, director of the Straus Military Reform Project at the Project on Government Oversight in Washington, D.C.

And future enemy planes, designed strictly with air combat in mind, could prove even deadlier to the compromised JSF.

It doesn’t really matter how smoothly Lockheed and the government’s work on the new warplane proceeds. Even the best-manufactured JSF is a second-rate fighter where it actually matters — in the air, in life-or-death combat against a determined foe. And that could mean a death sentence for American pilots required to fly the vulnerable F-35.

‘Can’t turn, can’t climb, can’t run’

The F-35’s inferiority became glaringly obvious five years ago in a computer simulation run by John Stillion and Harold Scott Perdue, two analysts at RAND, a think tank in Santa Monica, California. Founded in 1948, RAND maintains close ties to the Air Force. The air arm provides classified data, and in return RAND games out possible war scenarios for government planners.

In Stillion and Perdue’s August 2008 war simulation, a massive Chinese air and naval force bore down on Beijing’s longtime rival Taiwan amid rising tensions in the western Pacific. A sudden Chinese missile barrage wiped out the tiny, outdated Taiwanese air force, leaving American jet fighters based in Japan and Guam to do battle with Beijing’s own planes and, hopefully, forestall a bloody invasion.

………

To add insult to strategic injury, one of the most modern Chinese prototype warplanes might actually be an illicit near-copy of the F-35 — albeit a more intelligent copy that wisely omits the most compromising aspects of the U.S. plane. It’s possible that in some future war, America’s JSFs could be shot down by faster, deadlier, Chinese-made JSF clones.
The Chinese J-31 appears to be based on the F-35. Via Chinese Internet
The F-35 that could have been

At least twice since 2007 Chinese hackers have stolen data on the F-35 from the developers’ poorly-guarded computer servers, potentially including detailed design specifications. Some of the Internet thieves “appear to be tied to the Chinese government and military,” Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel claimed.

The September 2012 debut of China’s latest jet fighter prototype, the J-31, seemed to confirm Hagel’s accusation. The new Chinese plane, built by the Shenyang Aircraft Corporation, bears an uncanny external resemblance to the F-35: same twin tail fins, same chiseled nose, same wing shape. “It certainly looks like the Chinese got their hands on some [F-35] airframe data,” said Richard Aboulafia, a vice president at the Teal Group, an arms industry consultancy in Virginia.

But the J-31 lacks many of the features that were included in the F-35 “mainly or entirely because of STOVL,” according to Aviation Week writer and fighter expert Bill Sweetman.

Namely, the J-31 does not have a lift fan or even a space for a lift fan. The omission apparently allowed Chinese engineers to optimize the new plane for speed, acceleration, maneuverability and flying range — and to add good pilot visibility and a second rearward engine — instead of having to build the plane around a pretty much useless vertical-takeoff capability that slows it down, limits it to one motor and blocks the pilot’s view.

………

Jet design like any engineering practice requires disciplined choices. The JSF is the embodiment of ambivalence — a reflection of the government and Lockheed’s inability to say that some things could not or should not be done. “It’s not clear with the F-35 that we had a strong sense of what the top priority was — trying to satisfy the Marines, the Navy or the Air Force,” said Air Force Lt. Col. Dan Ward, an expert in weapons acquisition who has been critical of complex, expensive development efforts.

By contrast, the Chinese J-31 does not appear compromised at all. Surrounded by rivals with powerful air forces — namely India, Russia, Japan and U.S. Pacific Command — and with no grudge-holding Marine Corps to hijack fighter design, it would make sense that China prioritized the air-combat prowess of its new jet over any historical score-settling.

That apparently apolitical approach to (admittedly illicit) warplane design appears to have paid dividends for the Shenyang-made jet. “With no lift fan bay to worry about, the designers have been able to install long weapon bays on the centerline,” Sweetman wrote. The centerline bay helps keep the J-31 skinny and therefore likely fast and maneuverable — in any event, faster and more maneuverable than the F-35, which in a decade’s time could be pretty much the only new U.S. jet the Chinese air force might face in battle.

If Stillion and Perdue’s simulation ever comes true and the U.S. goes to war with China in the air, F-35s dragged down by their lift fans could be knocked out of the sky by Chinese-made F-35 clones that are faster and more maneuverable, because they never had lift fans.

A couple of notes here.

First, much of the baggage of the lift fan occurs even with the non-lift fan variants, the tubby fuselage, the poor aft vision, and an engine that has a thrust to weight ratio of engines from the 1970s.

I would also note that the 20 year long development process did not help.