Rebane's Ruminations

Why no one invades Switzerland

George Rebane

For generations the Swiss have required that all households with military age males keep a fully automatic assault weapon in their home with a combat load of ammunition.  Shooting and staying qualified with such weapons is a family affair and supported by the government.  Seeing people going to the local range with a weapon slung over their shoulder is a common sight.  The crime rate in the country is miniscule. 

Hat tip to an RR reader.

No Line in the Sand

George Rebane

Paid tax preparers will now have to get certified by the IRS and keep their skills updated with continuing education.  This is yet another layer of government ‘protection’ for the consumer that is designed to raise costs, limit competition, and stifle innovation.

This latest encroachment was announced by IRS Commissioner Douglas Shulman who justified it with, “In most states you need a license to cut someone’s hair.”  Offering this basis for expanding government displays the bureaucrats’ utter contempt for taxpayers in particular and voters in general.  Yes, the haircutters and other trades have always sought to limit competition with the aid of the state’s police powers, and over the years most trades have been successful – look at the poster children in the law and medical industries.

But with such reasoning behind adding the next set of regulations, the thinkers among us immediately see that there is no logical end until every facet of our lives is controlled and taxed (which, of course, has always been the goal).  The citing of licensed haircutters is intended to mollify, and mollify it will.  And a regulatory fait accompli for tax preparers will serve to justify the next incremental step – techies know this process as ‘analytic continuation’ whereby you can stepwise impose the same rule (function) over the whole universe (domain) by taking tiny steps outward.

This kind of metastasis can only be stopped by drawing the proverbial line in the sand as the next regulation is proposed.  The left will then raise their obligatory accusations that the opposition is based on ideology and arbitrariness.  They would be right.  The ideology behind such opposition is the ideology of individual liberty and limited government.  And opposing now and not later is required simply to stop or slow today's gallop toward autocracy, not that this particular new regulation is more or less reprehensible than the last.  If we could go back, we would have stopped the last one.

But regulatory creep (by analytic continuation) is a powerful cancer that draws its support from both long-sighted socialists and short-sighted capitalists.  In this latest case we witness H&R Block’s enthusiastic support so they “won’t be competing against people who aren’t regulated and don’t have the same standards as we do.”  And that’s how you pull up the drawbridge of the next Fortress Oligopoly.  This is then touted as co-operation between government and business.  Now aren’t we all glad.

Another Train Wreck Picture

George Rebane

The coming explosion of entitlements is one of the publicized drivers of socialized medicine and its current embodiment as Obamacare.  The nearby chart from the Heritage Foundation plotting CBO data tells part of the story.  Historical tax revenues for the feds have been close to the underside of 20% of GDP.  If you project such average tax revenues and increase each of the three big entitlements as shown (presumably by the available national demographical data), then there is a point somewhere in mid-century where the entitlement payouts will equal all of the federal tax revenues.

 

We have to be careful here because there are some other factors not shown in this slightly dated but still highly evocative chart (last year's stimulus antics have made things go from bad to worse).  First, since the expenditures are shown as a percentage of GDP over time, there is an implicit GDP growth rate assumed that is not shown, and changing that up/down will greatly affect when the tax revenue (red) line crosses the sum of the entitlements.  Second, the feds collect monies for Social Security and Medicare out of our paychecks which are in addition to the federal taxes we pay into the General Fund.  Those collections are going to be proportional to paychecks which in turn will follow GDP to some degree.  These factors serve to raise the effective red line and push out the crossover date.

Nevertheless, the graphic makes the point that the entitlements business-as-usual will be a train wreck a lot sooner than later, since the government must spend money on other things like defense and dams and foreign aid and interest on the national debt and … .  All this serves to lower the red line thereby making the train wreck come sooner.

Finally, we come to the real train wreck of colliding ideologies that the chart can also help us understand.  The socialists promoting Obamacare are proposing to solve the problem by raising taxes (no matter what lies come out of Washington) and reducing Medicare and Medicaid payments while forcing most people to eventually buy government health insurance.  The cost side will be controlled by draconian rationing measures that will be eased into place over the next decade.  Recall that Obamacare kicks in after three years of tax increases are collected, and then the socialists in Congress promise to “fix” the bill that the President will sign a few weeks from now.

It’s the inevitable rationing that gives rise to the debate about what to call the rationing boards.  You can call them what you wish, but they will tell us all what medical care we will get and when we will get it.  If you die in the interval, so much the better because that will lower the cost curve on the chart.

The other (libertarian/free-market) ideology calls for the government to roll back the obvious medical care cost contributors – e.g. insane law suits and stifled competition within the insurance, care provider, and pharma industries.  The free-marketers also want government revenues to increase through tax reforms and legislative measures which will boost GDP growth thereby raising tax revenues.  For example, defeat bills such as the Waxman-Markey energy tax and ‘green jobs’ job killing measures now being celebrated by the left and corporations eyeing the new federal tit.

All this is of a piece with RR's report 'Planning on a Miracle'.

(Hat tip to Russ Steele for pointing out the graphic.  His NC Media Watch regularly covers climate change developments and their impact on the economy. ) 

Internet in 2020

George Rebane

 

NetworkWorld, one of the respected technical trade rags, has a collection of predictions for the Internet one decade from now.  Their editors characterize these as “foolproof”.  The Association for Computing Machinery summarizes the list below –

1. As computer scientists work to improve the Internet's design, the global network is expected to change dramatically over the next 10 years. The Internet currently has about 1.7 billion users, but the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) expects the Internet will have nearly 5 billion users by 2020.
2. The Internet also will be more geographically dispersed in 10 years, spreading to more developing regions.
3. Ten years from now, the Internet will be a network of things, not computers. Today, the Internet has approximately 575 million host computers, but the NSF expects infrastructure sensors alone to surpass the number of host computers by several orders of magnitude.
4. The Internet also will carry more content. Cisco estimates that global Internet traffic will increase to about 44 exabytes per month by 2012.
5. In 2020, the Internet will be wireless. In the second quarter of 2009, the number of mobile subscribers hit 257 million, representing an 85 percent increase year-over year for high-speed data networking technologies. By 2014, approximately 2.5 billion people will subscribe to some form of mobile broadband, according to Informa.
6. More services will use cloud computing. The NSF is encouraging researchers to develop better ways to map users and information in a cloud-computing infrastructure.
7. Ten years from now, the Internet also will be greener. Future Internet architecture needs to be more energy efficient, as the amount of energy used by the Internet doubled between 2000 and 2006, according to the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.
8. Network management will be more automated in 2020. The NSF is researching new network management tools for the future Internet, including automated reboot systems, self-diagnosis protocols, finer-grained data collection, and better event tracking.
9. The Internet will not rely on constant connectivity. Researchers are studying communication techniques that can handle delays or easily forward information to different users.
10. The Internet will attract more hackers, and computer scientists will work to make it more secure.

The full NetworkWorld article is here.  We shall see.

  

Obamacare on home stretch (Shhh!)

George Rebane

You would think that, after candidate Obama promised unprecedented transparency, the representatives of a free people would make sure that the transformation of one sixth of our economy into socialism would be exposed during its passage to every available instrument of advise and consent?  Check it out here.

Tech Scattershots – 5jan2010

George Rebane

• dedicated ereaders not long for this world
• flexed muscles control computers for the masses
• Top ten scientific breakthroughs for 2009
• Some major technology themes for 2010 

The dedicated ereader’s demise is coming on schedule.  Ray Kurzweil, rich genius and tech inventor extraordinaire, is unveiling his platform independent Blio ebook software at the annual Consumer Electronics Show this week in Las Vegas.  Regular RR readers are aware that I was an early rejector of the dedicated ereaders like Kindle, Nook, etc.  They add to your on-the-road gizmo count and provide considerably less functionality than a modern slim (and getting slimmer) laptop or notebook computer.  I predicted it would just be a matter of time until some entrepreneur would come up with ebook software that would blow these interim ereader gadgets out of the water.  He is come.

To hedge their bets, both Amazon and Barnes&Noble are also providing ereader software that will let you read ebooks on your desktop box or laptop.  But they are simply functional lookalikes of what is offered on their tablet readers.

We’ll see what happens when Blio is introduced later this year.  And meanwhile, we will see Apple throw its iSlate tablet into the already busy ereader market.  In spite of all these dire warnings, my hat is off to these pioneering companies (Amazon, et al) for introducing platforms that have finally launched the ebook format into our lives, a format from which we will not return.

Wired does a nice write-up of Blio (here) from which the following comparison table is lifted.

 

Jobs, jobs, JOBS

George Rebane

Our economy is supposed to be on the mend, having been stimulated from one end to the other, with another insertion on the way.  But jobs are not on the leading edge of these recoveries.  In fact, not only will employment lag, but as most of you know (at least from these pages), it will come back as a different animal.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics projects job recovery will look like a dumbbell – lots of demand for high salaried workers (with smarts), lots of demand for low salaried workers (smarts optional), and low demand for everyone else in the middle.  Unfortunately it’s the middle where most people work and get the paychecks that propel our consumer driven economy.

The middle paying jobs include our ever-shrinking manufacturing sector that has suffered a productivity pandemic for the last three decades – technology and off-shore workers are doing more for less than our unionized manufacturing labor pool.  The BLS says that America’s recovered workforce is going to be 95% in service and information related industries.  And because of educational barriers, it will be more difficult for the lower end workers to develop skills that add enough value to their services to command higher wages.

Hot Flash in from the Cold

[This entry has been making the email rounds, and a RR reader suggested that the message was important enough to post.  I agree.  gjr]

Emergency Weather Bulletin

This text is from a county emergency manager out in the western part of the Upper Peninsula of Michigan after a severe snow storm ...

The Mining Journal, Marquette, MI

WEATHER BULLETIN

Up here in the Northern part of Michigan we just recovered from a Historic event --- may I even say a "Weather Event" of "Biblical Proportions" --- with a historic blizzard of up to 44" inches of snow and winds to 90 MPH that broke trees in half, knocked down utility poles, stranded hundreds of motorists in lethal snow banks, closed ALL roads, isolated scores of communities and cut power to 10's of thousands.

   

The Great Commission

George Rebane

Christians are taught that one of their most important tasks in life is to win people over to Christ and the Gospel; it is called the Great Commission.  The preferred method to accomplish this has been for Christians to proselytize their religion as far and wide as possible.  Islam is among the few religions that also exhort their adherents to extend their belief system.  When expanding territorial hegemony is an added objective, this makes a lot of sense.  Today, most religions are satisfied to perpetuate their beliefs within the cultures and communities in which they arose.

After services today we picked up our church’s monthly bulletin and read about several of the missionary efforts that our church supports around the world.  I have had mixed feelings about sending Christian missionaries to distant lands, especially lands that are poor and hostile to Christianity, and hostile to western civilization in general.  In the bulletin we read about a couple from our church that is preparing to depart for Morocco this summer.  They will preach the Gospel to the Muslims, and attempt to win hearts and minds for Christ.

In preparation for their mission they are practicing (I don’t know another word for it) on local Sacramento area Muslims.  Our church membership is being asked to support their Moroccan sojourn through our wallets and prayers.  It will cost a lot more to save a soul in Morocco than in nearby Sacramento.

Stimulus Stingers

George Rebane

When RR suggested that the American Rehabilitation and Recovery Act of 2009 was a misnomer, and it really stood for the American Redistribution and Re-election Act, many liberal readers took their usual exception to this as just another unfounded libertarian screed.  Now the state legislatures that accepted ARRA monies (California among them) are beginning to realize into which end their stimulus was really inserted.

As predicted, it turns out that states accepting ARRA dollars in 2009-11 will find themselves with monies to fund the start or maintenance of multiple spending programs with no provision to continue their funding in out years.  The states with outstretched hands will have to pony up from their own coffers after the monies from the first federal checks run out.  The idiots in state capitols across the land could not think beyond ‘year one’ and realize that the stimulus is a one-off affair.  These guys definitely could not manage a family’s grocery budget, but instead are in charge of their states’ economies.

A similar fate awaits all those market-ignorant 'green jobs' that will be launched with short-lived mandated funds.

Meanwhile, the House/Senate conference committee, now secretly strapping together Obamacare, is in similar straits if we look at what was in the separate bills they have to work with.  For example the prescription drug benefits mish-mash will create changes that will cost individual taxpayers more AND in the process lower the government’s revenues intended to help defray the costs of Obamacare.  These idiots (someone find me a better word, please) continue to do this sort of thing in whichever direction they turn their sordid talents – make it cost more, and then deliver less (for example here).

Concurrently, we taxpayers are being fed the same lame line that increasing taxes on big business will provide some sort of ‘fiscal justice’ in the land.  This kind of chicanery remains a workable ruse as long as the overwhelming fraction of voters continue to believe that corporations, instead of their customers, actually pay taxes.  Our state-run schools have welded that notion into the noggins of the sheeple.

Business as usual dictates that every plan and practice from a politician is designed only to keep her sorry butt in office through the next election.  And regiments of unionized government employees work hand-in-glove here, counting on the threat of major public services disruptions to keep the taxpayers docile and compliant.  Since it is working, maybe it is we who are the idiots.

More here and here.

'A nation ignorant and free, that never was and never shall be.'  Thomas Jefferson

Welcome 2010!

George Rebane

Dear Readers, I wish you each a happy and fruitful new year.  And I thank you for frequenting this record of thoughts, harangues, laments, celebrations, and conversations about the epochal changes in which we are both witness and participant.  I hope our exchanges continue in the coming year, and that we find from each other something that leaves us to better understand and take strength from the coming whirlwind.  In the interval, from the 17th century Father Baltasar advises -

Have the art of conversation, for it is the hallmark of the man.  No human enterprise demands greater heed, for so large a part of everday life, whence its dangers, or its advantages; if care is necessary to write a letter, which is conversation studied, and committed to paper; how much more is necessary in everyday speech, when the intelligence must at every moment pass examination? ...  (Gracian 148)