People just don’t understand

The only way we can curb oil consumption (and subsequently, carbon emissions) is by increasing the price of consuming oil. Period.

The NYtimes has now reported that Hillary Clinton has sided with John McCain in advocating his terrifyingly stupid idea of removing the federal gasoline tax during the peak-travel summer months.

You can either have cheap gas and make everyone happy until we have a planet suffocated by global warming, or you can incorporate the external costs of consuming oil (through taxation), raising the price of gasoline and making some people less-happy.

Yes, some people will no longer be able to avoid their cross-country car-trips, but that’s kind of the point isn’t it?

Obama and Lincoln

This is an excellent synthesis.

In his prose, Obama of necessity lagged far behind the resplendent Lincoln. But what is of lasting interest is their similar strategy for meeting the charge of extremism. Both argued against the politics of fear. Neither denied the darker aspects of our history, yet they held out hope for what Lincoln called here the better “lights of current experience”—what he would later call the “better angels of our nature.” Each looked for larger patterns under the surface bitternesses of their day. Each forged a moral position that rose above the occasions for their speaking.

Why We Party

I had a conversation with a good friend this week about the legitimacy of going to parties when it seems like there are so many more productive things we could be doing with our time. The question had been raised by her younger brother who is a Stanford-bound engineer and is obviously critical of the hedonistic lifestyle which all of us ASU students doubtlessly lead.

So why do we party? What is it that causes people to want to consume positively unsafe quantities of alcohol which leaves them hopelessly hungover and often regretting things they said/did/ate the night before? And what causes to do this week after week after week?

A lot of people justify week-end partying with tried-and-true excuse of “just blowing off some steam,” and while I think that this is a legitimate aspect of the desire to party, it definitely doesn’t explain away all of the habits we see.

What makes humans human is their capacity for language. Not tools, not walking upright, but the ability to communicate ideas verbally: this is what makes thought possible,  art possible. Everything that we have built around us depends upon our capacity for communication. And, it’s what makes us human. Without language a man is just another animal, so a man apart, a man without language is no man at all. I think most people recognize this; they recognize that our social existence is what makes us who we are and shapes the way we see ourselves and the world around us.

For this reason I believe that one of the most important exercises of our humanity lies in gathering communally to share thoughts, ideas, and to a mutual recognition of coexistence. So that’s the framework the party provides: a common gathering place for people to share their ideas, to define themselves, and to be with other humans embracing the sacred social obligation implied by language. But, many of you may ask, why so much alcohol? It would seem that the presence of alcohol inhibits the sharing of ideas and does everything but facilitate communication.

The presence of alcohol plays an important social role in that it helps to ease the social stigmas, the rules for communicating, and allows people an excuse for breaking out of the shell of “who they are” while “trying-on” other types of action and attitudes. It let’s people say what they think (in vino veritas) with substantially reduced repercussions, and allows people to communicate themselves in a way freed from the constraints which they place on themselves when interacting with sober society.

Without the alcohol, people might as well be at the office. Alcohol gives people the excuse they need to shed their masks, to embrace a part of themselves which they are forced to hide most of the week. So partying is important for people in so far as it provides a social stage in which people can share themselves without the constraints and judgments of polite society. They can try out new ideas, new actions, new personas without being severely critiqued.

As human beings we are obliged to communicate who we are, to share ourselves with others, and to embrace our language as a tool for shaping each others’ worlds: late nights and lot’s of beer allow people to do that in a sense much more real than anything that occurs otherwise.

Sock Puppets.

Anytime someone says something on TV, remember: whoever asked them to speak already knew what they were going to say and why they were going to say it. This is just up at the Times, and it’s probably going to cause a stir.

The Times successfully sued the Defense Department to gain access to 8,000 pages of e-mail messages, transcripts and records describing years of private briefings, trips to Iraq and Guantánamo and an extensive Pentagon talking points operation.

These records reveal a symbiotic relationship where the usual dividing lines between government and journalism have been obliterated.

Internal Pentagon documents repeatedly refer to the military analysts as “message force multipliers” or “surrogates” who could be counted on to deliver administration “themes and messages” to millions of Americans “in the form of their own opinions.”

I’m not going to have time to read this all tonight, but my prediction is that everyone is going to read this and realize that this conflict of interests is exactly what someone should have asked about years ago.

Boycott the Olympics

After a pretty short period of soul-searching, I’ve decided that I am definitely boycotting the Beijing Olympics this summer. China has been a perennial abuser of human rights, and this is probably the best chance anyone has had in a while to make clear their intolerance for China’s violent authoritarianism.

If you care about religious freedom, think about the Dalai Lama in exile from Tibet.

If you care about the Freedom of Speech remember Tiananman Square

If you care about the death penalty, think about all those executions.

If you care about Darfur, Boycott the Olympics.

Semi-Poetic musing for the night

We struggled through infinite night, grasping at the intimate dawn. Nursing drowsy dragging conversations when being exhausted is better than being alone. ( 4/17/08 )

It’s way past my bed time, forgive me. Regular blogging resumes tomorrow.

The Show

You know you’re finally starting to make it as a blogger when other bloggers read and immediately misinterpret what you’ve written in order to insult you. The glory is going to my head.

Long ago I wrote about an article in the Economist discussing Cadbury’s fair-trade policy which works with farmers to develop more profitable farming techniques instead of merely paying a price higher than the market price (equivalent to a subsidy). I lauded Cadbury for this approach because it will help to prevent over-supply (typical of standard fair-trade policies) while concurrently raising standards of living for the farmers.

Perhaps I didn’t make this clear: this is not how typical fair-trade works. Fair-trade as it is generally conceived involves merely purchasing goods at above-market prices which often leads to other farmers entering the industry which subsequently drives prices back down, making everyone worse off. I’m not arguing for the status quo, but I am arguing against artificially subsidizing farmers who should be either leaving the industry or trying to innovate more efficient growing techniques.

Through the looking-glass makes a circuitous argument for buying fair-trade coffee (is it a subsidy or Cadbury style I wonder?) because it tastes better, which, while this may be true, is irrelevant. What happens if you can only make the best coffee by literally grinding up homosexuals and minorities for flavor, should we still choose on taste alone? Just because the fair-trade chocolate he buys tastes better than Hershey’s doesn’t mean there’s anything better about the taste of fair-trade cocoa per se.

I don’t buy standard fair-trade products because they distort the market, and if you’re concerned primarily about the welfare of farmers, taste isn’t the thing you’re most concerned about.

Deadliest Catch and the Deadliest Regulation

I was watching the deadliest catch (a great hang-over show by the way) on Saturday and it was a rerun of the first episode from (I believe) this season. The narrator began by introducing the idea behind the show (it’s crab!) and then began to describe how regulation from the fish and game commission had cut the number of boats allowed to fish for crab by about 2/3, from 250 to 89 (these numbers aren’t exact – my memory is kind of fuzzy).

The reason for the regulation wasn’t given, but it sure wasn’t to protect crab populations because the season’s crab quota went unchanged. It wasn’t to protect to the deckhands, because by extending the season all of the crew faces a higher risk from exposure and extreme weather conditions. So basically all of the captains of the 89 ships who were left in the fleet got a super sweet deal which extends their fishing season and allows them all to bring in nearly twice as much crab at the expense of the deckhands and the all of the other fishing captains who couldn’t get their hands on licenses.

Per the tradition, the season kicks off with a group of the captains at a bar having a send-off before the season starts. Right before the show cuts to commercial the captains have a toast to “fish and game.” I can see no legitimate reason for this kind of arbitrary regulation besides giving a huge boon to the well-connected fishing captains at the expense of their crews.

Healthcare B.S.

Jesus Christ this makes me angry:

What will be the biggest factor pushing the tab so much higher? Innovation. “The healthcare industry will continue developing new stuff for every age group,” Reinhardt explains. Will that “new stuff” — in the form of new drugs, devices, tests and procedures — be worth it? Some of it will be. Some won’t. … In many areas, we seem to have reached a point of diminishing returns. This also is true in the drug industry, where most new entries are “me too drugs” — little different from products already on the market.

“In truth, the aging of the population is not a big problem,” Reinhardt says. … This doesn’t mean that healthcare spending won’t continue to levitate. “But what will drive costs in coming years, will come, not from the demand side of the equation, but from the supply side,”… We can be certain that, without some significant reforms, suppliers will continue to invent new products for every age group, charging us more and selling us more — using whatever methods it takes, from direct-to-consumer advertising to promises of near immortality and perpetual youth… — if we just swallow enough pills and replace enough body parts. …

Holy Shit! You mean to tell me that without reforms medical care will keep getting better and better as we get older? Well then by all means let’s regulate the hell out of the industry. Anything but innovation. If someone comes up with a cure for cancer it’s going to be expensive, so let’s make damn sure that never happens.

Sorry about that, but there’s nothing more frustrating then stupid views on healthcare.

The Politics of Healthcare

At Slate Ezra Klein writes a piece for the “Fixing It” series which gives advice to the incoming president on how to fix the colossal mess they are going to find themselves in, ready or not, on day one. He discusses the politics of health care and he hits upon the most important factor, which everyone (especially Paul Krugman, again, and again, and again), tends to forget.

On health care, the vital question for the next president isn’t merely what to do but how to do it…The problem is not just policy—Washington is stuffed with wonks and idea entrepreneurs eager to explain how to fix the health care system—it’s politics. Without 60 votes in the Senate, you don’t have a policy. You have a position. And nobody is going to get good, affordable medical care from a position paper. [my emphasis]

Your health care policy is only as good as what you can get through congress. People (most notably the leftish blogosphere) gave Barack Obama a lot of flak because his health care reform policy didn’t require a mandate for insurance. But a mandate is completely unviable. IT WILL NOT HAPPEN, at least not in the next 20 years. To say “my health coverage plan will have a universal mandate,” is to say “my health coverage plan will either be laughed off the floor or will be passed with so many changes, exceptions, and prime-pork as to be practically worthless.”

The whole-fixing it series is worth a read, but it will give you a depressing sense of just how bad everything got screwed up in the past few years. On a side note, I want to criticize Mr. Klein for making the classic leftish error of forgetting how far our current health care system has brought us.

about 10 million Americans have joined the ranks of the uninsured, and according to at least one estimate, more than 100,000 Americans have died because they lacked access to quality care.

Ezra is wrong, 100% of Americans have died because they lacked access to quality health care. I’m going to die, at some point, because either I can’t afford the procedures to keep me alive, or those procedures haven’t been invented yet. The problem with arguments like this is, what defines “quality care”? At what point do we say, “look, we’ve spent enough money on keeping your sack of bones of breathing, die already.” 100 years ago no one had access to “quality care,” and, hopefully, 100 years from now they’ll look back at us and say exactly the same thing. The reason people, in general, are living longer is because of general improvements in the standard of medicine, and any health-care-solution which significantly fetters the development of medicine is going to make humanity as-a-whole worse off.

I do think that such expensive health-care is a problem, but any solution which cripples innovation and weakens the industry as a whole might make today’s sick better off, but at the expense of tomorrow’s well-being.