4/23/15 Today's Inquiries

Short list today.


Today's Links:

Hillary: not exactly a liberal.

“Even at that early stage I was against all these people who come up with these big government programs that were more supportive of bureaucracies than actually helpful to people,” she told The Washington Post. “You know, I’ve been on this kick for 25 years.” In a 1993 interview with The New York Times, she praised an article by Daniel Patrick Moynihan called “Defining Deviancy Down,” in which the scholar-senator argued that liberals had become too tolerant of anti-social behavior among the poor. Hillary made Mark Penn, among the most centrist of her husband’s political consultants, the architect of her 2000 Senate run and 2008 presidential campaign.

Poverty in Scott Walker's Wisconsin. The republican dream.

Lobbying firms, Super PACs, and corruption? I'm shocked!

Wal-Mart is playing hard ball with workers seeking higher wages by closing stores "for repairs." Yeah, call in the :inkertons to bust some heads.

Interesting thoughts on the labor force participation rate. I'd say it's change is part recession after-effects and part baby boomer retirement surging.

It would appear that those who most want to repeal Obamacare are old people who already have their socialized medicine. Ah yes, the Fuck-you-I-got-Mine generation...

Only a third of the country supports full repeal, and, like the Republican coalition itself, it is a very old third—comprised of the only people in the country with almost no stake in the law’s core costs and benefits.

One-way streets are a plague on Louisville. Based on my experience playing Cities: Skylines, they need more roundabouts to make one-way streets work better.

Gilderbloom and Riggs have also done an analysis of the entire city of Louisville, comparing Census tracts with multi-lane one-way streets to those without them. The basic pattern holds city-wide: They found that the risk of a crash is twice as high for people riding through neighborhoods with these one-way streets. The property values in census tracts there were also about half the value of homes in the rest of the city.

California is failing at sustainability. I also found this to be an interesting swipe at Silicon utopianism. Brown's train is no different from Elon Musk's pipedream except that it's based on existing technology.

 Essentially the state could build enough desalinization facilities, and the energy plants to run them, for less money than Brown wants to spend on his high-speed choo-choo to nowhere.

The economics of E-sports.

The debate about the validity of eSports as sports misses the point. Like it or not, eSports have millions of passionate viewers and their momentum can no longer be ignored. Given its unique economics, a network looking to build a sports empire need look no further.

More on the Common Core-ing of medicine. Patient satisfaction, like standardized tests in education, is an easy measure to obtain but a poor measure of the effectiveness of medical care. If I don't get my painkillers I'll rate you low! I see situations like those described below frequently in the ER.

Patients have complained on the survey, which in previous incarnations included comments sections, about everything from “My roommate was dying all night and his breathing was very noisy” to “The hospital doesn’t have Splenda.” A nurse at the New Jersey hospital lacking Splenda said, “This somehow became the fault of the nurse and ended up being placed in her personnel file.” An Oregon critical-care nurse had to argue with a patient who believed he was being mistreated because he didn’t get enough pastrami on his sandwich (he had recently had quadruple-bypass surgery). “Many patients have unrealistic expectations for their care and their outcomes,” the nurse said. 

In fact, a national study revealed that patients who reported being most satisfied with their doctors actually had higher healthcare and prescription costs and were more likely to be hospitalized than patients who were not as satisfied. Worse, the most satisfied patients were significantly more likely to die in the next four years.

Arguments for broad gun rights would appear to imply we ought to give firearms to prisoners.

The case for gun rights rests primarily on two claims, one about facts, the other about moral principle.  The claim about fact is that members of society as a whole are safer when more of them have guns, since potential aggressors are likelier to be deterred the more reasonable it is for them to believe that their potential victim is armed.  The claim about principle is that each person has a right of self-defense and that this right entails a further right not to be deprived of, or prevented from having, the most effective means of self-defense.  These claims are independent.  Most of those who assert them think the second would be true even if the first were false...

If the logic behind the advocates’ empirical claim were correct, prisoners would be safer if they were allowed to have guns and thus did not have to rely on guards for protection.  Each would be deterred from attacking any other by the knowledge that the other was, or at least might be, armed.  This parallels the advocate’s claim that citizens are safer if they are armed and do not have to rely solely on the police for their protection.  Of course, if prisoners were armed, they might in many instances be able to defend themselves against guards, thereby decreasing the effectiveness of guards as protectors.  But advocates presumably advance their empirical claim in the awareness that police would similarly be more often deterred or forcibly prevented from fulfilling their protective functions if most or all citizens were armed at all times.

The biggest side-effect of a gluten free diet is scientific illiteracy.