BTC lost 40% of its value, and I feel fine

It must be a nasty time to be a speculator in bitcoin. with BTC down in the $600 range it's lost a huge chunk of its value the past few days. But for microtransaction players like me, it's meant that the advertisers are coming out of the woodwork and offering slightly better terms. I'm at a bit over 4% of my private goal to earn 1BTC just through microtransactions. No currency speculation, no gambling, just looking at ads and any other small tasks that might come my way. For me, this loss is a partial return to trend. We're still somewhat higher than BTC should be and I anticipate further drops before the whole cycle starts over again with another spectacular runup in value followed by another partial pull back.

More Flit-TM marketing

Technorati still is awaiting final review but I thought that while I was waiting, I'd start another blog directory listing, ontoplist.com. This one requires either payment for listing or including their badge on your front page. Tightwad that I am, the badge can be found below the archive listing on the right. Supposedly it's a 72 hour turnaround but I wouldn't be surprised if that doesn't include weekends. We'll see.

Volunteer fire departments to be forced to provide health insurance?

Healthcare reform could endanger fire protection budgets across the USA. Volunteer firefighters are categorized as employees by the IRS but not employees by other sections of the Federal government. This makes their impact under Obamacare a gray area. A number of fire departments would be pushed into the position of being forced to offer insurance if the volunteers are employees because they would have over 50 employees. Over 1800 fire departments have 50 or more volunteers and would qualify just based on the volunteers they have with hundreds more likely having their employee counts go over 50 due to the addition of volunteers.

The temptation would be strong to cut volunteers or otherwise manipulate head counts in an effort to remove public service organizations who have no way to afford health insurance for people who generally already have insurance from their businesses and employment elsewhere.

Nancy Pelosi said we had to pass the bill to find out what was in it. It seems we're still finding out new consequences. Now fire chiefs all across the country are nervously awaiting a legal ruling from the IRS on whether they are going to have a huge hole blown in their fire protection budgets.

HT: Pajamas Media

Who Dat in the commons

Nobody owns 'Who Dat', which is as it should be. The history of Who Dat starts with it being a minstrel and vaudeville show phrase from the late 19th centuries, with mutations into stage and screen, stop offs as boredom relievers for american soldiers and airmen and most recently team chants for New Orleans sports teams.

Between 2010 and 2012, the NFL tried to claim ownership of the phrase as a trademark of the Saints but was beaten back by a broad coalition. The phrase is now firmly in the commons once more, which means that it's available for all to profit from. This is as it should be. I don't begrudge the NFL making a bit of money off of Saints merchandise. The NFL likewise shouldn't be offended at others who do the same thing. The right to copy is fundamental.

Revolutionary throat clearing

Michael Walsh writes an edgy piece on Obama's presidential abuse. The key line is "Reid & Co. have no intention of ever being in the minority again", a statement which, if true, will either lead to the death of the Democrat party when they nevertheless return to the minority and reap the whirlwind from the wind they have sown or the death of our civil peace when their political unpopularity is met with extra-constitutional efforts to retain power anyway.

The comments picked up the theme and there is a great deal of hemming and hawing going on there now with debate that would sound familiar to a 1740s member of the Sons of Liberty. The feel is of a gathering storm, but one that hasn't quite gathered yet. The doctrinal issue is clear. The US agreement is that nobody uses violence so long as everybody agrees to elections and the rule of law. If the latter two are eroding, restraint in the former is no longer called for.

It's powerful stuff and extremely dangerous. Long periods of warning and throat clearing before that fateful decision are clearly called for and the warnings are going out. I wonder if our friends on the left even understand the danger that they are courting?

HT: Instapundit

Christian Democracy foulup

Christian Democracy is a monthly e-magazine that regularly raises my blood pressure. They are reflexively anti-libertarian and free market. This month they're mocking the Acton Institute and an article from their head researcher responding to Pope Francis' apostolic exhortation Evangelii Gaudium.

Originally I was going to do a long comment there but I went beyond the limits of their commenting system so decided to turn it into a post. If you don't read the article, you might want to pass on the response below.

This article goes downhill from about the second sentence. It assumes an opposition without demonstrating it. Fr. Sirico himself has addressed Evangelii Gaudium in a video that came to me via youtube. It can be found here.

The response is not "inevitably" anything of the sort.

Venezuela sends the army into the biggest national chain's electronic stores and forces prices downwards at the point of a gun. This is not hyperbole, but the reality of mid November
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/nov/15/venezuela-army-occupy-shops-profiteering

This sort of redistribution just guarantees that once the goods are gone nobody will volunteer to lose money buying more and the familiar socialist spectacle of near empty shops will happen one more time. So what forms of redistribution is Pope Francis talking about? What form of redistribution is Samuel Gregg worried about? I'm not convinced that they're on the same page, talking about the same sorts of redistribution.

There are plenty of changes in economic regulation that would help the poor economically that would be perfectly fine with the Acton Institute. I have a feeling that Pope Francis would be happy if these changes would be made too. Reductions in licensing laws that permitted more new company formation and small enterprises done by the poor are not, I think, a matter of disagreement.

But this would not be an increase in economic regulation but a decrease in regulation that hurts the poor. One of the things that my own private interpretation of Francis is detecting is unhappiness with the tilted playing field of capitalists renting government for their private benefit and to the detriment of the poor. Rules that insufficiently take into account adverse possession, impoverish the commons, and unnecessarily make it expensive for the poor to protect their own goods and to access justice are real issues.

These forms of economic playing field rigging have never been part of the official capitalist playbook but they show up often enough in real life that it is a real problem for capitalism as it is actually lived in the world.

This playing field rigging has led to lower and lower rates of company formation as incumbents continually work to rid themselves of the plague of economic insurgents trying to compete with them which both restricts the supply of C level management (and thus raising their compensation) and reduces the supply of jobs, lowering the demand for labor and thus wages.

There is no theoretical difficulty for capitalists. There has always been lip service paid to these issues. The real world where regulations are written and legislation to un tilt the playing field is proposed tells something of a different story. The anti-rigging coalition is very often a minority one. I think that this lack of success at running an honest in reality capitalism as opposed to an honest in theory capitalism is what Pope Francis is aiming at. He is not issuing a theoretical challenge to capitalism but a practical one of ensuring that practice matches theory in a way that is a preferential option for the poor.

The downward pressure on wages is not an immutable feature of capitalism. It is an artifact of the fact that we still do not live in a capitalist world and there is always another supply of subsistence farmers out there that will happily get out of rural poverty to take a crack at the utterly miserable but better than their past sweatshop factory jobs. But this is a mode of economic activity that is entering its end game because India and China are undergoing wage inflation and we shall not see a like flood of new workers onto world markets again. But the cure for this labor supply problem is more capitalism, more company formation, more labor demand to bid up wages.

I disagree that the Pope is looking for structural reform as an end. He is looking for radical, personal involvement of love and solidarity to help solve the economic exclusion of the poor in a way that promotes dignity and justice. That's a major change but not one that is fundamentally a problem the legislature can address.

Jeff Gauch wins the Internet today

Jeff Gauch wins the internet with a comment to Charlie Martin's The End of Poverty In America, an article about the minimum wage:

We need to stop calling it minimum wage and start calling it by its True Name: minimum employable productivity.

It's an awesome formulation and apparently a unique one. Google only has it up for that particular post. Minimum employable productivity just says all that needs saying about the topic of the minimum wage.

So how many people who are unemployed fall below minimum employable productivity?