comment box revolutionaries

Over at ChicagoBoyz, where I cross post, the commentariat is talking revolution. It's nonsense, of course because we are nowhere near ready. I can tell because the people are heavily armed and we aren't undergoing a spate of assassinations of our political class. This sort of talk is a warning sign, but still a pretty early one on the road to Civil War II.

But we're far enough along on the path that I worry. I worry about someone from either side doing something stupid and being too few degrees separated from the nonsense. I worry about the small but not zero chance that things change in a hurry.

We have deep wells of civic bonds but they are straining and if they ever snap, it will be worse than the Yugoslav wars.

Obamacare Scrooged

People signing up for Obamacare are being robbed by the government. This time it's not metaphorically, like when your perfectly satisfactory insurance plan is made illegal and all the compliant plans are more expensive and have worse terms but literally. People are having their accounts debited improperly during the Christmas season. And because it is being done by the government, there is little recourse to sue due to sovereign immunity and, of course, those most injured haven't the money to hire representation anyway. I think Pope Francis calls it 'despoliation of the poor'.

Double debits, wrong day debits, wrong amount debits, these are all standard hazards with any sort of Electronic Funds Transfer (ETF) system. There's nothing particularly new about these issues. It's all part of the back end errors that those dastardly Republicans have been hyperventilating about and Democrats have been pooh poohing for weeks now.

You never know when Tuttle will turn into Buttle in one of these systems. But what's in a name?

Merry Christmas Cross posted: Chicagoboyz

Uninsured Against Obamacare

Uninsured americans don't like Obamacare. Those who are uninsured and think that the law is a good idea has dropped 11 points to 24% while half think it will have a negative impact. By any reasonable metric, whether the law is a good idea, will it help or hurt the healthcare system, or whether it is of personal benefit to them, survey respondents are turning away from this law. 

Since this reform was supposed to be all about solving the problem of the uninsured, this is a damning indictment and one more layer in (as they say over at Instapundit) "the Obamacare onion of fail."

White Castle doesn't have this much in onions. 

Mike Rowe impresses me more and more

I am more and more impressed by Mike Rowe. I agree with him that there's something wrong with our tastemakers' vision of what a good job is and the consequences for todays students are large and negative.

HT: Reason Magazine

parsing technorati - part I

Task: Download all technorati politics blogs listings, import them into FM pro and parse each blog

First, figure out how many pages actually hold blogs. Not all pages in the listing will have actual blogs. In the politics set, There are 697 pages listed but the last blog is on page 691.

In terminal, create a folder and download the file using wget

wget http://www.technorati.com/blogs/directory/politics/page-{1..691}

Filemaker won't import a folder without the files having certain endings, a little bash work and that's done

for i in *; do mv "$i" "$i.txt"; done

Now off to filemaker. I create a new database and import a folder, choosing text files as the file type and tell it to create a new table. The text content of each file is loaded into the new database along with the name of the file and the location of the import. Once that's done, all that's left is to parse out the individual blogs.

But that's a tale for part II

Technorati approval delay

Technorati has historically had a wide range of final approval times. I started the approval process on this blog on the third of December. At the end of 2013, it is apparently taking 10 days to get through final approval. That's not awesome but it is tolerable. Good job reviewers.

Living Wage

Traditionally, the living wage argument starts and ends with the employer, will he, or won't he, pay enough for a person to live a dignified life on that wage? This strikes me as a bit strange because the chain of events leading up to that point matters tremendously. If the market clearing rate is above the living wage rate, the employer will tend to do so almost all of the time. He hurts his own self interest if he does not.

So who sets the market clearing rate on a particular job? It's a combination of the both supply of demand just like every other free market transaction. So why is the only moral agent on the demand side? Why does there never seem to be discussion on what happens on the supply side.

Mike Rowe, the protagonist of Dirty Jobs has noticed that a lot of these jobs pay very well and are actually in shortage. Salaries are good and there are a lot of open positions that go unfilled. He's actually created a foundation to promote these dirty jobs and a culture that values them because right now the problem of the living wage is exacerbated by a social stigma to getting your hands dirty and learning a trade. This social stigma not only causes those unfilled positions but also has follow on effects. The welding company that is short 10 welders can't take on certain work that goes elsewhere, often outside the country and jobs that do not require those specialized skills exit right along with that work.

So the guidance counselors that steer kids away from the trades, the school boards that killed off vocational training, the chattering class that devalues blue collar work, all of that is part of the living wage discussion but nobody is raising these issues so far as I can tell.

It leaves me with one great puzzle. Why?