JayB

"Look - over there..." Yes. Tell me about credibility. Ha.

Amazing. Like Pertinax after Commodus. Hopefully he lasts longer.

Hahaha. "Lawmakers losing health care? Nation briefs Wednesday, April 14, 2010 Senators, members of Congress and their staffers are probably upset that they didn’t read the health care bill before approving it. The New York Times reported yesterday that under the new law, 535 members of Congress and thousands of their employees on Capitol Hill might lose their gold-plated federal health care benefits and be forced to obtain insurance like ordinary Americans. That means they’ll have to buy private policies using the insurance exchanges that will go into effect in 2014. The Times said the apparent mistake was discovered by the Congressional Research Service and now Congressional Democrats are scrambling to figure out what to do next. They could put through a bill correcting the error, similar to the bill Congress passed immediately after President Obama signed the law three weeks ago. The research service says the new law has numerous contradictions, and it is unclear exactly who will lose their benefits or when they will lose them. Because the bill didn’t give a date for dropping members of Congress from their current benefits, it is assumed that the effective date was the day the president signed the bill. “This omission, whether intentional or inadvertent, raises questions regarding interpretation and implementation that cannot be definitively resolved by the Congressional Research Service,” the service’s report says. “The statute does not appear to be self-executing, but rather seems to require an administrating or implementing authority that is not specifically provided for by the statutory text.”

Yes - keep looking out for the little guy. "One state retiree, 49 years old, paid, over the course of his entire career, a total of $124,000 towards his retirement pension and health benefits. What will we pay him? $3.3 million in pension payments over his life, and nearly $500,000 for health care benefits—a total of $3.8 million on a $120,000 investment."

Feel free to make a voluntary contribution to the underfunded public pension fund of your choosing...

No. You? What is the trust fund composed of, and where will the assets required to fund the redemptions of the said assets come from when the annual cost of paying for SS benefits begins to exceed the value of the SS taxes collected in a given year. The funds will come from the SS trust fund that has accumulated several trillion dollars. Nobody claimed that funds would come from the general fund beside debt fear mongerers like you (or at least those that use debt fear mongering to try privatizing SS) Dude - there's no repository of assets in storage somewhere. The SS trust fund is an accounting ledger that records the value of the money that the government has spent on other stuff for the past 50 years or more. When SS expenditures exceed the value of SS receipts, the SS administration will "redeem" the special-purpose Treasury bonds that were issued when the government borrowed the money from the "trust fund." The government will then have to cough up the money to cover the value of the said special purpose bonds. That'll have to come from: -Tax revenues. -Borrowed money. -Printing more money. The first two constitute "The General Fund." The only option outside of diverting money away from that involves opening the printing presses. Barring any massive reduction in the per-capita value of Social Security and Medicare, the reality will be higher taxes, more debt, and a further erosion of the value of existing savings, earnings, etc via inflation.

No. You? What is the trust fund composed of, and where will the assets required to fund the redemptions of the said assets come from when the annual cost of paying for SS benefits begins to exceed the value of the SS taxes collected in a given year.

Tell this regressive precisely what the SS trust fund is composed of, and where the money will come from to fund the redemptions.

But enough about that - what specific points of Friedman's arguments for the legalization of drugs do you disagree with?

You mean like local, organic produce and microbrews vs Agribusiness and Budweiser? Two examples in two seconds! The bigger the government, the greater the advantages for big business. Be it drugs or rugs. Its sort of like the Mentos of market competition. "The Cartelmaker!"

More Lies! Regressive NeoCon Warmongers Say...California Pension Shortfall = 1/2 Trillion and Counting.

Quick - someone break the news to Hardwicks! Anyhow - being a protectionist through and through I wasn't expecting you to break form when it came to drugs.

So the trust fund doesn't consist of special issue Treasury bonds that will have to be funded with general revenues when SS redeems them at the point when SS expenses exceed SS tax revenues? Great news. Long as I'm here it's worth pointing out - again - that it was much easier for Uncle Sam to appropriate the funds in the SS "lockbox" and use them to pay for wars than it would have been by either raising taxes or borrowing the funds from the market via the normal Treasury auction mechanisms.

[video:youtube]

[video:youtube]

My vote is goes to the (zero percent sold) units at Thornton Place, ("Where it all connects.") the oasis of hip, high-density transit oriented urban vitality...in the Northgate parking lot. Plenty of other candidates here. Hopefully buyers will emerge and bail out the Latvian pension fund that's holding the dodgiest bits of the commerical CDO used to finance this baby and transfer the liabillity to the FHA's rapidly imploding mortgage book. Plenty of other candidates here: http://cheapshitcondos.com/wordpress/ Can't even begin to fathom what would inspire anyone to shackle themselves to thirty-years of debt servitude for the privilege of inhabiting one of these gems.

...flagging poll numbers... Who knew you harbored such affection for die-hard anti-abortion zealots. I have yet to understand why someone who withheld a yes vote on the bill until getting a guarantee that no federal money would be spent on abortions has drawn particular scorn from pro life groups. I'm probably not qualified to speak for them, since I think Clinton struck the right tone on abortion, but my sense is that they don't think that an executive order is much of a guarantee. Particularly if you believe that the collective political instincts of the administrative class that will be interpreting and enforcing the rules runs counter to the order, and it'll only be in force until there's an executive that wants to overturn it. This bill made for many strange bedfellows. I would have thought that pro-choice and feminist groups would have been more vocal opponents of this clause when it became a central component of the bill's passage, but I suspect that they liked most of the bill and concluded they could get the abortion restrictions tossed out later. I suspect that keeping abortions out of the bill and leaving it exempt from all of the expenses, hassle, and price-caps that typically come along with third-party payer schemes might ultimately make life easier for doctors that provide abortions.

Worth asking what set of incentives drives economic activity into the black market. The answer is generally bureaucratic inefficiency/corruption and tax rates high enough to make breaking the law and hiding your income/assets worth the risk and trouble. If by perpetual growth model you mean coupling a pension and benefit scheme based on late 19th century population growth models with Easter-Islandish fertility trends - I'm entirely in agreement with you.

Stocks, pffft. The public sector workers in Greece would like to remind you that they have several billion dollar's worth of bonds available at very attractive yields. If you're right about their financial problems being nothing but propaganda issued by neocon hate/warmonger regressives out to sabotage their unique social model then you'll make a killing.

...flagging poll numbers... Who knew you harbored such affection for die-hard anti-abortion zealots.

Word from my optho was that deposits on the contacts were irritating the cornea, which thickened in response, further distorting my vision. Sounds like Ivan and I had pretty much the same routine with the contacts. Not sure if the optho guy was right, but I haven't had to worry about it since. WRT the "starburst" effect at night - not sure if it went away or I just don't notice it anymore but I can't imagine this being a significant problem for the vast majority of people.

I think it comes down to the difference between inspiration and justification. A new discovery may be inspired by an acid trip, but it'll generally take more than that to justify it in a way that other people will find convincing.

Personally, I would advocate for a more historical approach; big "S" science, especially those disciplines and institutions engaged in production, should always be understood in its larger socio-economic and political context. Any claim for the autonomy of Texas Instruments from these processes or the question whether it could be considered "private" at all during the invention of the integrated circuit would make a simple case in point. The claim that "scientific ``knowledge", far from being objective, reflects and encodes the dominant ideologies and power relations of the culture that produced it" actually proves quite illuminating in this case, don'tcha think? Revealing. Yes. "The Sokal Affair (also Sokal’s Hoax) was a publishing hoax perpetrated by Alan Sokal, a physics professor at New York University. In 1996, Prof. Sokal submitted an article to Social Text, an academic journal dedicated to postmodern cultural studies. The submission was an experiment testing the magazine’s editorial practice of intellectual rigor, to learn if an academic journal would “publish an article liberally salted with nonsense if (a) it sounded good and (b) it flattered the editors’ ideological preconceptions.”[1] The article, “Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity”, proposed that quantum gravity is a social and linguistic construct; it was published in the Social Text Spring/Summer 1996 “Science Wars” issue. At that time, the journal did not practice peer review fact-checking, and did not submit the article for outside expert review by a physicist.[2][3] On its date of publication, in May 1996, in the journal Lingua Franca, Sokal revealed that “Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity” was a hoax, identifying it as “a pastiche of left-wing cant, fawning references, grandiose quotations, and outright nonsense . . . structured around the silliest quotations [by postmodernist academics he] could find about mathematics and physics”."

Eeek. Science! This more your style? "Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity. There are many natural scientists, and especially physicists, who continue to reject the notion that the disciplines concerned with social and cultural criticism can have anything to contribute, except perhaps peripherally, to their research. Still less are they receptive to the idea that the very foundations of their worldview must be revised or rebuilt in the light of such criticism. Rather, they cling to the dogma imposed by the long post-Enlightenment hegemony over the Western intellectual outlook, which can be summarized briefly as follows: that there exists an external world, whose properties are independent of any individual human being and indeed of humanity as a whole; that these properties are encoded in ``eternal'' physical laws; and that human beings can obtain reliable, albeit imperfect and tentative, knowledge of these laws by hewing to the ``objective'' procedures and epistemological strictures prescribed by the (so-called) scientific method. But deep conceptual shifts within twentieth-century science have undermined this Cartesian-Newtonian metaphysics1; revisionist studies in the history and philosophy of science have cast further doubt on its credibility2; and, most recently, feminist and poststructuralist critiques have demystified the substantive content of mainstream Western scientific practice, revealing the ideologyof domination concealed behind the façade of ``objectivity''.3 It has thus become increasingly apparent that physical ``reality'', no less than social ``reality'', is at bottom a social and linguistic construct; that scientific ``knowledge", far from being objective, reflects and encodes the dominant ideologies and power relations of the culture that produced it; that the truth claims of science are inherently theory-laden and self-referential; and consequently, that the discourse of the scientific community, for all its undeniable value, cannot assert a privileged epistemological status with respect to counter-hegemonic narratives emanating from dissident or marginalized communities." http://compbio.chemistry.uq.edu.au/mediawiki/upload/f/f9/Sokal-transgressing-boundaries.pdf

Great links. A quick perusal suggests that the basic issues in play are more subtle than the term "gene patenting" brings to mind for most of us. Sounds like there's a new standard for "prior art" that came into play after the human genome was published that would make it tough to make commercial claims based on primarily on the isolation/identification of specific sequence data after that date? If that's correct that alone would probably address most of the concerns that come to mind when most people see the words "gene" and "patent" adjacent to one another.