A lot of the early blogs use Haloscan because Blogger didn't have its own commenting system until late 2004. JS-kit is discontinuing the free Haloscan service in favor of their proprietary/non-free JS-Kit Echo commenting service, and implying that the only way you can keep your comments is to use their for-pay JS-Kit service. But JS-Kit has some serious problems:
It's not free (duh). For those of you maintaining a blog as a hobby, that's a big drawback.
It doesn't allow posting links. If I want to post a link to a web site, the only thing that works is bare links. Maybe.
It doesn't email me when someone adds a comment. I became accustomed to receiving email when someone added a comment to a thread I'd posted a comment on, but JS-Kit won't do that.
Echo often sends blogs into an endless loop. Alternate Brain, for example, keeps being unreadable because it's just refreshing the page over and over and over again in an endless loop and never letting me actually see it.
I high recommend using Disqus if you are currently using Haloscan or Echo for your comments system. It has none of the above problems, and will import comments from Echo or Haloscan. Even if you have already paid for Echo to import your comments from Haloscan, I *highly* recommend trying Disqus. I've pretty much given up commenting on sites running Echo -- it's that terrible for users, especially the lack of email notification thingy.
Just say NO to JS-Kit and their terrible Echo product. Thank you!
Here's one I missed from last month. Brad Delong calculates that the Fed holding interest rates too low for three years should have caused a maximum 6% hike in housing prices compared to leaving interest rates 2% higher (where they were before Alan Greenspan's rate cuts). Krugman nods approvingly, and snarks:
This is actually a very broad problem with all accounts of the crisis that try to exonerate the private sector and place the blame on the government and/or the Fed: none of the proposed evil deeds of policy makers were remotely large enough to cause problems of this magnitude unless markets vastly overreacted. That is, you have to start by assuming wildly dysfunctional financial markets before you can blame the government for the crisis; and if markets are that dysfunctional, who needs the government to create a mess?
The U.S. government's non-defense non-Social-Security related portion of the GDP in 2006 was at around 5% of GDP. The notion that the U.S. government could somehow have managed to run housing prices up by 200% higher than they should have been when the U.S. government accounted for such a small part of the economy is ludicrous on its face. I mean, the housing bubble created over $6 TRILLION in asset values between 2003 and 2006 -- the ENTIRE U.S. budget without defense and Social Security was around $1.5 trillion total during those years. Yet you see people making the argument in all seriousness that somehow the U.S. government could create $6 trillion in bubble assets with their actions, akin to a mouse shoving an elephant across the room, showing that a) they're mathematical illiterates, or b) they're dishonest ideologues. Take your pick.
The band Cat Power (Chan Marshall, Tim Foljahn, Steve Shelley) with Chan's song "Nude as the News". This was off of their third album, What would the Community Think, where Steve and Tim finally figured out how to properly accompany Chan's painful and enigmatic songs rather than just sort of riffing around her in an uneasy dance.
If Chan had not driven Steve and Tim away, she would probably have achieved mainstream success by the end of the 1990's, because with each album her songwriting was getting stronger and the sound they'd come up with to build around her songs was a sound that had great mainstream potential. But Chan was always her own worst enemy. Her behavior had become increasingly bizarre, she was driving Steve crazy with her erratic performance at shows, and finally stabbed Steve in the back by signing to Matador after she'd already verbally committed to his own label (which had published her second album). So she ended up going solo after the guys left, made a brief disastrous drunken solo tour co-headlining with the band Guv'ner of mostly-empty bars where she made drunken passes at every cute guy she came across ("a flame gun for the cute ones" indeed), and then basically retired from music (without telling her label, Matador!) until she got bored silly and went to Australia to make an album (Moon Pix) with a couple of other cute guys.
Chan looks like she's about 12 years old in this video. She was actually 23. And had already made three albums in a two-year timespan (albeit two of them were made in the same session but released at different times) and had a minor college radio hit with "Nude as the News". Success was so close she could smell it... and she ran the other way as fast as she could, because she couldn't cope with it, not at all. In recent interviews Tim just shakes his head and says something along the lines of, "Somebody hurt that girl, bad, when she was a kid." Sadly, very few kids who've gone through that kind of trauma can cope with a life that has a lot of stress in it... like, say, the life of a performing musician. Which presents an irreconcilable conflict when music happens to be the only thing you're really good at, as is the case with Chan...
This is what *always* happens, though, when people are evaluated based on statistics rather than on what's actually happening. This is the kind of thing that led to a principal in one school district I consulted for not expelling a student who came to school with a weapon threatening to kill another student (i.e., *not* a boy scout knife situation) -- he was afraid that it'd make his school look bad to have that weapons statistic on his school's record. In the event, the target of the student with the weapon reported it to his parents, who reported it to the school board, who reported it to the Superintendent who had enough and told his discipline chief, "go out there and interview everybody and get me what I need to fire this asshole, we can't have that kind of thing happening in our district." But that was a Superintendent who had integrity. Unfortunately, integrity is something that you can't count on when the system is set up to give incentives to lie...
Somehow I ended up at this Lady Gaga video after watching this deathcore metal video which somehow I had arrived at while reading a thread at a music forum entitled "Taylor Swift Can't Sing" about Taylor Swift's disastrous Grammy performance and started laughing uncontrollably when Ms. Germanotta spouted that "wanna ride on your disco stick" line, to the point where I had to stop the video because the tears were flowing down my face I was laughing so hard.
Does that make me a bad person? Curious penguins want to know!
-- Badtux the Music Critic Penguin
I think the point was that Taylor Swift was so off-key that she would have sounded better if she'd adopted a deathcore growl, and Lady Gaga sang more on-tune than Taylor Swift... or something like that. I guess it was funnier in context.
One thing I hear often from the Ayn Rand sheep is that they don't want to pay for a real social safety net because people ought to be rugged individualists and stuff. Thing is, they're hurting themselves when they say shit like that.
One thing I’ve repeatedly noted on here is that the lack of a social safety net in this country is what has rendered the current downturn so severe here. I mean, look. Arizona pays $240 per week MAX unemployment compensation, which won't even pay the CORBA bill for health insurance, much less mortgage and car payments. The downturn wasn’t this severe in Germany, or in France, or in Japan, or any other 1st world country. Just here. The biggest reason for the collapse in consumption here in the USA (but not anywhere else) has been that people are stashing money away as fast as they can in case their own job is next on the chopping block, thereby making it a self-fulfilling prophecy. But people are scared that if they lose their job, they’ll lose everything — and are doing what is rational when there is no social safety net to back them up, which is exactly the wrong thing to do if we’re trying to keep people employed.
In other words, even employed people benefit when we have a real unemployment insurance system for the unemployed, one that would pay your health insurance and mortgage and car payments while you look for a new job, instead of the current ridiculous thing where no state pays enough unemployment compensation to keep you from losing everything when you lose your job. They benefit because it increases the chances they'll *keep* their jobs, rather than have to make sure their resume is up-to-the-minute up-to-date for fear their job is going the way of the dodo. This fucked-up "unemployment insurance" mess, if fixed, would benefit *everybody*, even the Randbots. Yet they'd rather shoot themselves in the foot than admit that government has a place in smoothing out the fluctuations of the business cycle. Typical. Just typical. Ideologues. Every single one of'em, more interested in imposing their ideology upon the rest of us than in, like, actual REALITY. No different from the old Soviet commies, in other words. Which is why, like the old Soviet Union, the United States is currently in a slow-motion collapse. Once ideology becomes more important than reality for a nation's leaders, that's pretty much The End. Alas.
This is a damn fine song, but I can't find a good video of it anywhere on YouTube because the crowd loves it so much they applaud and shout and mangle the lyrics themselves and drown out the real singers. This is the Drive-By Truckers doing "Hell No I ain't Happy". That should probably be the new national anthem, given that we're hip-deep in a river of shit and the river's rising fast. This is off of their Decoration Day album. Have I mentioned that you ought to own that album? Hmm?
This is another one that I've posted before. But I've been sitting here playing it in a loop obsessively, trying to get Bill's chord fingerings down on my own guitar.
"River Guard", by Bill Callahan's "band" Smog, off of the album Knock Knock.
Update: A-G-Bm, most easily fingered by capo to second fret, G-F-Am shapes.
Look. I always thought Republicans were sheep. Most Republicans aren't rich. They simply follow a buncha rich fucks like sheep, baaa'ing whatever those rich fucks want them to bleet.
But still, I never thought that a Republican candidate for the U.S. Senate would agree with me. Carly Fiorina. Basically saying that her voters are sheep. With a commercial that has all the production values of a vintage Dr. Who episode, complete with paper cutout demon sheep falling off of pedestal with glowing eyes no less. WTF?!
I notice that the Christian Taliban always talk about that eeeevil "godless atheism". Uhm, isn't "godless atheism" a bit like talking about "wet water" -- i.e., redundant redundancy?
Reading someone else's blog, I came across this gem:
I'm not at all sure what kind of money system would work best, but I prefer gold and silver coins. Deflation is the best thing that can happen to an economy. The cause of this catastrophe and the many others that have preceeded it are gov’t intervention and money printing.
And another gold bug strikes, demonstrating once again that gold bugs have no understanding of money behavior at the zero bounds or, indeed, any understanding of money and its function in the economy. Sadly, they are more influential than people who have an actual understanding of the issues that occur at the zero bounds. It is as if the denizens of the mental asylum have been released and set to making policy.
In the real world, as vs. the bizarro world universe that they live in, we know that a small and predictable amount of inflation is needed in order to drive money out from under mattresses and into the economy where it can contribute to meaningful economic activity. In the real world, as vs. the bizarro world universe that they live, we know that money under mattresses is just lumpy mattress stuffing insofar as its contribution to economic activity is concerned, and gold is just a shiny metal that has no magical properties insofar as its utility is concerned other than its usefulness in making dental fixtures and plating electronic connections (or as I’m fond of saying, “you can’t eat gold”). In the real world we know that the gold standard causes a positive feedback effect upon the natural up and down cycle of money supply caused by fractional reserve lending and its money multiplier effect, where bank lending expands and creates inflation during upturns and contracts and creates deflation in downturns, while the printing press can smooth out those wild inflation-deflation cycles that typified the 19th century economy and thereby actually create a more stable money supply than the gold standard did. In the real world we know that a modern economy cannot function without fractional reserve lending because that is how a modern economy marshalls current assets in order to create future assets in a much more nimble manner to meet demand than is possible in an economy without fractional reserve lending, where you must wait to slowly accumulate capital before you can make the capital investments needed to match supply to demand. But that is not the world that gold bugs live in. They live in a medieval world without fractional reserve lending, without a modern economy, and appear bound and determined to drag the rest of us there.
In the real world, we should not have to deal with delusional people who live in fictional universes of their own making and make unsupported (and unsupportable) statements of “facts” that have no data to support them. Those people should be relegated to the same status as that crazy guy beneath the freeway underpass who is pushing the shopping cart while wearing a bathrobe and fuzzy slippers and muttering to his invisible friend, because they have as much attachment to reality as that guy. Unfortunately, we have to keep explaining how things work in the real world as vs. in the fictional universe they’ve built inside their heads over and over again, because that fictional universe is *pretty* (oooh, gold, shiny shiny!) and has superficial plausibility to people who have never looked at the data and, indeed, lack the statistical expertise to properly evaluate the data. And unfortunately, some of these people appear to be our leaders. SIIIIIIIIIIGH!
Purple Penguin, below, on my post Liquidationist Nonsense, asks "okay, so you point out the problems, now what's the solution?" Well, I've previously mentioned what needs to be done, but here goes:
The core problem is jobs. Thus the only tax policies that matter, from our perspective as Americans, are tax policies that penalize outsourcing and reward in-sourcing in order to bring jobs back home from India and China. Note that this does not increase the number of jobs world-wide, we're just shifting employment between nations, but it does increase the number of Americans employed, and it is the duty of the U.S. government to care about America and Americans, not about India and China.
Simultaneously, we need to increase consumption if we are to create jobs. The first way we can increase consumption is by increasing the consumption of the U.S. government, which is the only entity that has the power to simply print money if necessary in order to cover the costs of these new jobs. Yes, printing money causes inflation, but if the new jobs cause an increase in GDP output equal to the amount of money printed, then there is no net inflation because the supply of money and the supply of goods and services available in the economy remain the same. Given the collapse in asset values, we can print roughly $4 *TRILLION* before we have to start worrying about inflation.
So anyhow, first way the government increases consumption is via infrastructure programs. These produce actual physical goods in the economy and requires employment and physical goods purchases that ripple through the economy and therefore increase GDP. The current modest increases in infrastructure programs created by Obama's "stimulus" are insufficient to add more than 400,000 or so jobs in the economy. Clearly we need to do more. A massive amount more. China's stimulus program, if we'd implemented a similar one here scaled to our much larger economy, would be $2 TRILLION dollars. That might -- maybe -- be enough.
The second way is for government to backstop consumers with social insurance programs. Because of idiocies like Arizona's unemployment insurance program being capped at $240 per week maximum payment, people are having to create their own social insurance by slashing their consumption and expanding their savings, and that is causing a massive decrease in consumer spending. If unemployment insurance would cover mortgage and car payments so that people wouldn't become homeless and car-less if they lost their jobs, people would be able to resume spending. As it is, we're all stashing money away frantically because we expect our job to go away -- thereby causing it to be a self-fulfilling prophecy, since without consumption of goods and services, there are no jobs.
And finally, there is the question of how to finance all of this. I previously noted that Treasuries are at 0%. What I did not note is that even at 0%, they are taking away investment money from the corporate bond market, which is having problems finding buyers for commercial paper even at significantly higher interest rates. There is an easy way to drive down interest rates on commercial paper and thereby decrease interest spending by corporations, allowing them to either lower prices (thereby allowing consumers to consume more for a given dollar) or to make a profit (and thus avoid mass layoffs). That is for the Federal Reserve to start purchasing mass quantities of Treasuries. If investors no longer can buy Treasuries because there are insufficient Treasuries on the market, they are practically forced to buy corporate bonds instead. More buyers for corporate bonds means lower interest rates for corporate bonds, thus both allowing easy "readjustment" (since corporations then have the capital to use to adjust their production to meet new unmet needs) and increasing consumption (or at least preventing the decrease in consumption that would otherwise be caused as corporations lay off).
Those are just a few ideas off the top of my head. But my point is that President Obama's 2010/2011 budgets incorporate *none* of these -- in fact, *slashes* payments for unemployment insurance and Medicaid. The President is doing exactly the opposite of what needs doing, and we are all going to be the poorer for it.
Suzanne Vega has finally entered middle age, after a lengthy youth that stretched well into her 40's. But she's still cool as ice and exudes intelligence the way Rethuglicans exude stupidity. This is a recent video of her singing "Caramel", off her album Nine Objects of Desire.
Time: Somewhere in January 2010. Scene: Editorial offices of a New York book publisher. A young lady wearing a modest dress has entered the door and is standing there in the lobby looking around uncertainly. An older woman walks into the lobby.
E: Ms. Lee?
L (looking uncertain): Yes?
E: I'm Emmy Edwards, your editor. We love your book! We think it has a lot of potential! Only a few minor changes, and it can be a New York Times best seller, we think!
L: That's... good. I guess?
E: Come, come! Let's go to my office, okay?
Cut to: Editor's office. The office consists of an L-shaped desk along a cubicle wall covered with printouts of manuscripts, with an obsolete CRT monitor showing another manuscript. The sound of other people talking or typing on computers wafts over the cubicle walls.
E: Okay, Ms. Lee. Can I call you Harper? You can call me Emmy.
L(looks uncertain): I guess that's fine... Emmy.
E: So first thing, I love your book, love it love it love it! Except we need to have at least two sex scenes in the book, one with the villain, and one with the hero.
L: But... Scout is only six years old!
E: You'll have to fix that, won't you? Make her 18.
L: But then the scene where Scout faces down the lynch mob doesn't work, it's all about the lynch mob running up against her young innocence...
E: So make her a very young-looking 18, okay? Make her gripe that she looks like a 12 year old or something. But she has to have sex, or we'll never be able to auction the book off for a movie!
L: Oh... okay... uhm...
E: The good guy, I guess, would be the neighbor's kid, the one she hangs out with all the time. Except she doesn't know she loves him until the end of the book, when she bones him big-time. Make him 18 too.
L: But... Dill is gay!
E: Whatever. Make him bisexual or something.
L: I guess it's not that important...
E: Also, you need to change the setting. It should be something exotic, like New York City or New Orleans or something like that, not some sleepy town in Alabama. Our market research shows that our books are read mostly by bored housewives in dull suburban tract houses who want a taste of something more... exotic.
L: I guess... maybe New Orleans? I guess there's neighborhoods in New Orleans that could work. But no, the courthouse scene still doesn't work, because Scout won't be able to call out the members of the lynch mob by name then.
E: If it doesn't work, just replace it with a sex scene or something. Okay, next thing, we need some vampires.
L: Vampires?
E: Yes, vampires! Guaranteed to double the sales of the book. Vampires are sexy! The bad guys, the Ewells, make them vampires. And make that Tom Robinson a werewolf who gets wrongly accused of rape after that girl vampire tries to suck his blood and has to spit it out because vampires can't drink werewolf blood. It's all about discrimination against werewolves, that's always a big hit with our focus groups.
L: Werewolves. Vampires. What does that have to do with real life?
E: Look, kid, do you want a best seller or not? We do these edits, and I guarantee you a first pressing of 120,000 books! That's how hot I think this book is. These aren't big changes, just little things. Look, you want to be rich or not?
L: Well... except the book is about prejudice and discrimination in the South. How can I make it about vampires and werewolves?
E: Make the vampires be the bigots and the werewolves the ones discriminated against. And hey, that next door neighbor, Boo? Make him a zombie.
L: A... zombie.
E: Hey, your explanation for why he never comes out of the house sucks! I'm doing you a favor, okay?
L(looking stunned and dazed): A... zombie...
E: Now, your vampires need a special twist to make them interesting compared to all the other vampire novels on the market. Vampires with sun allergies are old school. Maybe make them sparkle in the sun? Wait, no, that other series of vampire novels already did that. Maybe they glow. Yeah, glow, like light bulbs! That explains why they mostly only come out at night.
L: Vampires... glowing... no. No no no no no no no. No glowing vampires. I have a nice little period piece novel set in the South that talks about prejudice and innocence, not a trashy vampire novel!
E: Oh you idealistic kids. Look. Here's the reality. Vampires are hot. There's no market for innocent little period piece novels, it would never sell. And by the way, you have to move it to the present, it'd be too expensive to shoot the movie as a period piece. Won't sell. Never.
L: Well I guess that's how it has to be then. You won't publish it the way it is?
E(stony stare): No. It has to have vampires.
L: Sorry to waste your time then, I'll be going.
Cut away: Harper Lee in a small New York City flat, sitting at her dining room table staring at a fistful of rejection slips who've rejected her novel for various reasons -- "too episodic", "we don't publish period pieces", "too rural", "too much a downer", "no sex." She sighs, wipes them off the table, puts her head down on table and silently sobs. A minute later she sits back up straight and picks up the manuscript for her book, and stares at the title for a second. Then she carries it to the telephone in the kitchen, and picks up the phone.
L: Hello, Manhattan Temps? Hi, Cheryl. This is Harper. Time to go back to work for you guys again, yeah, I wrote the novel, but nobody wants it and my money's run out now. Yeah, sucks. Oh well. So, how's it going with Doug? Great! Maybe we can all do lunch ...
Voice fades away as camera moves in on a trashcan below the telephone. In the trashcan is a manuscript. The title page says, "To Kill A Mockingbird".
What is it about Republicans and failed businessmen (or businesswomen, in the following case)? Republicans are always whining, "we want to run government like a business", then run politicians for office who failed at every business they ever ran. Case in point: The Republican nominees for the Senate and Governorship in California.
Let's look at their gubernatorial candidate first: Meg Whitman, former CEO of eBay. Meggers is most famous for paying $2.5 billion for Skype yet somehow forgot to buy the source code or intellectual property rights, meaning she actually paid for, err, nothing, resulting in a $1.5 billion loss for eBay when they finally managed to get rid of whatever it is of Skype that they actually owned. Indeed, virtually all of her strategic initiatives ended up being disasters, the only parts of eBay that actually work and make money are the parts that existed before she arrived at eBay (that is, the core auction site and associated PayPal payment site). She at least did not run eBay into the ground -- but looking at the record, it is also clear that she is a lousy businesswoman.
Carly Fiorini, the Republican candidate for the Senate, is even worse. She is most infamous for being the most hated CEO in HP history, who spearheaded the disastrous Compaq merger that almost destroyed HP and ended up being run out of town due to her mismanagement, leading to triumphant headlines like "Ding Dong The Witch Is Dead" when she was shown the door. That's just how hated she is here in the Silicon Valley -- she is widely considered to be an imperious fool who is nowhere near as smart as she believes she is, who refuses to listen to anybody and has no patience with actual facts when she has decided to act. She was, in short, an utter disaster as a businesswoman, and there's no indication that she would be anything better as a Senator.
Yet both of these women bafflingly have a good chance of winning this fall. Why is that? Discuss.
One critique I hear from right wing/libertard/Austrian "economists" is that we should not have stimulus to increase demand because it would "interfere with necessary readjustment in the economy". At which point I say... wha?!
Look: the whole concept of "readjustment" is that there are insufficient slack resources in the economy to allow the free market to adjust supply to meet un-met demand. That is, "readjustment" assumes there is a supply crisis, where the economy simply doesn't have the necessary resources to adjust supply to fulfill un-met demands. And yes, it's possible for that to happen. That was the case for most of the 19th century in the United States, where there was a severe shortage of human capital available to do things like, say, build trans-continental railroads, and the supply of monetary capital was hamstrung by adherence to the gold standard. The problem is, that is not what we have right now. We have 10% unemployment, showing no shortage of human capital available to hire, and we have 0% interest rate on short-term Treasuries, showing that there is no shortage of monetary capital available to use for investments (and that there in fact is a *surplus* of investment capital, being parked at 0% interest in Treasuries for lack of any place to actually invest it). What we have right now is a demand crisis, not a supply crisis -- a crisis caused by lack of demand, not by lack of supply.
And what is the Austrian response to this reality? Well... the Austrian critique of the notion that 0% interest rates and 10% unemployment means that there is no shortage of the capital needed to adjust supply to meet demand is to stamp their feet and whine their evidence-free talking point about how the government is somehow, via Magical Force apparently, impeding the market from doing so. The problem is, we have NUMBERS saying that this is not true. I realize that Austrians prefer their magical thinking to numbers (their solution to any time you present them with actual facts and figures is to basically stamp their feet and say "numbers don't mean anything!"), but such a rejection of empirical reality, such a rejection of inconvenient facts that contradict their talking point, is astounding in its delusional nature.
Magical thinkers, bah. On the same scale as the cretins who believe the world is 8,000 years old, a back massage will cure cancer, and crystals have healing power. Magical thinking was all we had for thinking about the economy in the 19th century before the final development needed for modern statistical tools when, in 1901, Russian mathematician Aleksandr Lyapunov defined the Central Limit Theorem and thereby enabled us to, well, actually measure all this stuff and find out whether there really *was* an "adjustment crisis" caused by government intervention. And for this *current* crisis, this may have been the case in 2006 when the government was propping up the real estate bubble by basically endorsing rubber-stamping liar loans to homeless bums off the street, but certainly is not the case now. We have actual *measurements* now. We don't need to rely on magical thinking anymore like the economists of the 19th century who could only hypothesize about things they had no way to measure.
Some people just need to move into the 20th century, methinks. It'd be great if they could move into the 21st century someday, too, but I suppose one must start with the achievable first, sigh!
"I Break Horses", by Smog (Bill Callahan). Appeared on his Accumulation: None collection of rarities. Supposedly this song arose when he was asked by a girlfriend, "how can a man have sex with a woman, then never call her again?" Bill, with his typical blunt self-honestry, set out to answer that question.
A simple song with just Bill and his guitar for the most part. But simple don't mean stupid, if you know what I mean.
The big names in econo-blogging have been weighing in on Obama's 2010 and 2011 budget proposals, and it is not pretty. I cannot find one of the real econo-bloggers (those with a record of being right with their predictions based on the numbers) who think this budget is anything other than an utter disaster. Some highlights they've mentioned about the disaster:
The budgets continue the disastrous Bush tax cuts that gutted the Federal Government's ability to fund its operations out of cash flow, therefore guaranteeing long-term deficits ultimately funded by printing money (because in the end that's what is going to happen) for as many years as the eye can see. Short-term we have no problem -- total U.S. government debt is only half of GDP, or roughly 1/8th of what Japan's government debt is. Long term, we cannot basically exempt over 50% of Americans from paying taxes and have a solvent government. No nation can function when half the nation is a bunch of deadbeat freeloaders. That way lies Somalia territory. Indeed, the primary cause of the deficit is the Bush tax cuts combined with the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan -- without those, the deficit would be eliminated by economic growth within five years. Yet Obama wants to continue both the Bush tax cuts AND the wars. Inexplicable.
The budgets HALVE the amount of money available for unemployment payments and Medicaid. Basically, this means that a huge number of people currently drawing unemployment checks because there are six applicants for every job opening will end up on the streets. We are talking about scenes of utter misery in the next year that will rival anything that we saw during the Great Depression. And Medicaid rolls are going up because of families being unemployed, yet Obama is cutting Medicaid? The public hospital systems, which are dependent upon Medicaid money, are going to utterly collapse because the states are bankrupt and cannot finance Medicaid all by themselves. For large numbers of poor people, health care is going to go from being extremely inconvenient to obtain, to being absolutely impossible to obtain. The U.S. is already looking more like a second-world emerging nation insofar as healthcare stats are concerned. This is going to be an utter disaster, putting us down on the bottom of healthcare stats with nations like Nigeria, Somalia, and Haiti.
The budget has no -- ZERO -- help for ordinary Americans. All it has is tax cuts and credits that predominantly go to the rich, tax cuts and credits that I've previously explained will do nothing -- nada, zilch, zero -- to create jobs because what's stopping job creation is a lack of demand, not taxes.
In short, President Obama is about to kick America in the balls and guarantee that he will go down in history with Jimmy Carter as a failed President. He has done nothing -- NOTHING -- for ordinary Americans during his Presidency, with the exception of a too-small stimulus program that has thus far spent less than $100 billion on real actual stimulus as vs. bullshit tax cuts to the rich or to people who already aren't paying taxes. And by basically adopting Republican policies that are "conventional wisdom" propagated by right-wing cretins who flunked elementary school math, he owns the disaster that is going to unfold during the next two years.
In short, President Obama has disappeared into an alternate universe -- the Washington Bubbleverse, where unicorns are real, cotton candy grows on trees, crowding-out is occurring despite the last Treasury auction being at 0% interest, and the printing press (for monetizing deficits in the face of a $6 TRILLION dollar asset value collapse and resulting deflation) has never been invented. Unfortunately, that alternate universe that he has disappeared into is not the REAL universe, where people are hurting and need help, need jobs, need hope. All Obama has given us is bullshit and a knife in the back.
I am with Brad DeLong: I am fucking scared. Because the Democrats are basically destroying any hope that the American people have... and when that happens, bad shit happens. BAD shit happens. As in, food riots and thousands dead because people simply will not voluntarily starve to death just because right-wing ideology says they're supposed to and Democrats seem to be embracing that same right-wing ideology. Bad shit as in blood in the streets bad shit, the sort of bad shit that happens in Iraq where people with no hope strap bombs to themselves and walk into the middle of crowds and blow themselves up bad shit. BAD BAD BAD shit. Like that housepainter with the funny mustache taking over in Germany back in the 1930's kind of bad shit. Right now, our government has basically ceased to exist as a useful entity, but we don't have a substitute for it, and things are going to crumble, and crumble badly, as public order collapses as unpaid civil servants in the bankrupt states walk off the jobs to try to find food for their families. I might sound apocalyptic as hell right now. But just tell that to President Sarah Palin when she takes office in 2012, which is practically guaranteed now.
I weep for the nation that could have been... but which shall not be. United States of America. It was a good 220 year run. Too bad it's over now.
You'll note that we're currently in an unemployment crisis caused by a collapse of consumption. One of the things that has kept the official unemployment rate under 15% (and real rate under 25%) is Federal stimulus spending. It appears to me that President Obama is proposing an ANTI-stimulus: Basically, whack consumption by 2.5% *more*. Which should have a similar effect upon unemployment rates, except in the opposite direction.
If this goes through in the 2011 budget year, expect 12.5% official unemployment by the end of that fiscal year. This is insane. It is as if these guys learned economics from Libertards spouting Hayek talking points. To say that I am disappointed is an understatement -- the Obama Administration has disappeared from the reality we live in, where 10%+ unemployment is a slow disaster, into some alternate Washington bubble universe where ponies shit rainbows and cutting consumption won't cause unemployment.
Reality. Not just a good idea. Wish our leaders had a clue about it.
One thing I love about hard-core Glibertarians is that they're economic morons who spew the most ridiculous nonsense as if it was Gospel handed down from upon Mount Hayek when it becomes quickly obvious, reading the nonsense they spew, that they would fail miserably if asked to run a lemonade stand much less a real business. Take, for example, Glibertarian Lew Rockwell's recent spew that the reason there's unemployment is because workers refuse to lower their wages to the point where businesses will hire them. That is, ole' Clueless Lew is saying that I, a small businessman, will hire someone just because he's cheap!
My take on this is that a large number of Glibertarians, like a large number of economists, a) have never run a business before, b) have no idea how business works, and c) would be absolutely appalled about the difference between how things work in actual, real life reality, as vs. in their ivory tower constructs. Clueless Lew says I will hire someone if he makes his wage cheap enough. Uhm, no. As a businessman, my job is to make the maximum profit possible. I do that by keeping my overhead costs as low as possible. I hire the minimum number of workers needed to meet my businesses' demand, and not one more, regardless of how cheap my workers are. Whether they are hired on for $1.00 per day or $100 per hour, I still need three workers in my sandwich shop to get the sandwich made and presented to the customer. The only wage that counts to me as a sandwich shop owner is the wage that my competitor pays to his worker, if my wage base is higher than his wage base then my prices will need to be higher than his to maximize profits and I'll thus lose market share to him. But if we're both paying $1.00 per day or $100 per hour, whichever is required or allowed by law, then there isn't going to be any hiring or firing done, just general inflation and deflation in the economy (and redistribution from affluent to service workers in the case of the latter) which does not in general change demand for my sandwiches.
That's the reality of me as a small businessman. But ole' Clueless Lew and 9 out of 10 "Chicago economists" would glare at me, appalled, and say "That can't be! As labor gets cheaper you'll hire more people to make your sandwiches!" At which point I roll my eyes and say, "Why? I'm a business, not a charity, I hire the fewest people needed to meet demand and not one more, otherwise I couldn't compete with the sandwich shop down the block who operates in that manner!" It's funny how people who claim to support capitalism just don't seem to have the foggiest idea how it actually operates down in the trenches!
McMillan wants to force e-book prices to be the same as paper book prices. The only problem is, that's a business model which makes no (zero) economic sense. The only price that makes sense from the consumer’s point of view is the marginal price compared to the currently-available paper copy: I can get 25% of the cover price back when I resell a paper book to a used book store, thus from my perspective, since ebooks do not allow reselling my copy to a used book store, they must have a marginal price that is 25% less than the currently available paper copy, or I simply will not buy the eBook because it does not make financial sense. Yes, there are the issues of book storage and such, but I resell most of the books I buy, I don’t keep them, for exactly that reason — most books are being bought as simple mindless entertainment, not something all serious and stuff. I do like having the *option* of keeping a book — but I don’t keep most of them. Sorry, writers. I know you love your prose and hope we have placed it upon the mantelpiece above the fireplace to bow to your genius every time we enter the living room, but the majority of us are buying them for simple entertainment, not because we are Serious Collectors Of Your Great Literature.
Now, from the publishing end of things, McMillan whines they can't make money on ebooks if they price them at their economic utility price. But I am utterly disinterested in hearing publishers whine about how their business model can’t survive contact with actual real-life capitalism. I am not on this planet to be a charity for publishers who can’t figure out how to operate in a capitalist environment. The market is what the market is. You can’t sell people an eBook for the same $7.95 as the paperback when the consumer’s marginal price for a paperback copy of the book is $5.96 (after they resell the paperback to the used book store). It simply doesn’t work, and can’t work in a capitalist economy because it makes no financial sense from the consumer’s point of view. That’s capitalism. Thus the low uptake of ebooks outside of maybe a couple of million early adopters who flunked high school consumer math and, of course, readers of Baen Books, who have had access to reasonably priced DRM-free ebooks for years.
So does that mean that I agree with Amazon’s actions? Well, not really. The prices they want to impose make no sense either. If the hardback is the only version of the book currently out and is currently $19.95, that implies the ebook should be $14.95 if you wish to actually sell large numbers of ebooks. But Amazon is trying to force that to $9.99. From a standpoint of maximizing income that’s ridiculous. And don’t assume it’s to make a profit selling Kindles — I’ve been involved in the computer manufacturing business for over ten years now, and my estimate is that Amazon is basically at break-even (no profit at all) on the Kindle. Clearly they’re trying for the brute force method of “grab market dominance, and *then* worry about profit” that they used when starting out in order to drive most of the competing book e-tailers out of business. Also clearly, this is not in the best interests of authors attempting to maximize their own income.
Wait, wait... this is Willie Nelson! How can I say he's a guitar god? Surely only people who shred on electric guitars get to be guitar gods!
Well, fuck that shit. Watch this video again if you doubt Willie's guitar skills. Trigger (his guitar) ain't exactly a young pony, and is a nylon-strung classical guitar at that, but he's getting sounds out of that old steed that ain't your run-of-the-mill gitar pickin' by any means.
Okay, I got the album. You've seen the previous video that I posted of the title song. Here is another song, "I.B.D.", that's on the album:
So what's my conclusion?
Emma Louise "Scout" Niblett is one seriously weird chick. Believes in astrology and alchemy and such, talks crazy and her songs are even crazier.
I like it -- perhaps because of, not despite, the fact that these songs are totally whack.
What you have here is Scout torturing her guitar and wailing, and occasionally torturing a drum set to go with it all. She's on a new label, Drag City, after being dropped by her previous label, and appears to have had a recording budget of about $50 and a budget for creating the packaging of about $10. Steve Albini supposedly produced this album, but given the recording budget, his contribution appears to have been to press the record button on the DAW on each track as Scout laid it down then run a quicky mix-down of the three instruments (voice, guitar, drum) at the end of the day.The packaging itself is one of those paper covered thingies with Scout on the front waving while holding her torch, and a rock on the back. You open it up, you see a pocket with a little booklet and say "oh look, a booklet!". You pull it out and... it's just pictures of rocks, one rock per page. Seriously! Is that crazy, or what?
The end result is the opposite of those manufactured pop acts with their pre-fab image and pre-fab sound. Ms. Niblett does whatever she feels like doing, and doesn't give a fuck whether you like it or not. The songs are interesting and unique without being pretentious -- Scout doesn't care whether you think she's a brilliant genius or some such shit like some of those pretentious "arty" types, she just wants to make the music she feels like making. She does know how to sing, can sing in tune when she feels like it (no auto-tune in sight anywhere on this album, I think Scout would probably shoot herself before letting anybody auto-tune her voice) and does know how to play her guitar nicely. But she spends a lot more time wailing and shredding than singing pretty, because pretty is boring. If you want pretty, go listen to Taylor Swift.
Okay, so how are the songs? Most of them are similar in sound to the two songs you've already heard -- i.e., unconventional in structure, mostly guitar-driven with the pedal kicking in and out, minimalist drums banging away on the tracks that aren't guitar-only. Somewhat minimalist-sounding, but Scout would sooner puke than do a boring singer-songwriter album, she isn't afraid of her guitar pedals. Indeed, you get the feeling she's just in there enjoying playing with the drum set and her guitar and her collection of pedals and the fact that an album came out of it in the end is sort of gravy. There's a couple of weak tracks in the middle but by and large the "interesting and unique" label applies to the rest. If you like the two tracks you've already heard you'll probably like most of the rest of the songs on the album. If you don't like those tracks, well. I understand Taylor Swift has an album out.
Well, the new song that I wrote decided it didn't want words, so I added some Irish whistle to the guitar track instead and left it as an instrumental.
Why is it named 13? I have absolutely no idea. It just happened.
