Rebane's Ruminations

‘Rural Myths’ – don’t worry, be happy (updated 2mar12)

George Rebane

There is no question that governments at all levels have become less efficient from the taxpayers’ viewpoint.  This inefficiency is felt from many quarters and with respect to applied metrics, ranging from ‘bang per buck’, through layers of onerous regulations and mandates, to the ongoing removal of freedoms often through gratuitous criminalizations.

We live in a county that, on the whole, is fiscally well managed.  However, in recent years many of us have started to notice some pretty significant lapses in how our elected officials do business.   As examples, we may consider the string of bad decisions made during the recent AtPac lawsuit (q.v.), the demonstrated and endured lack of competency in the county counsel’s office, and our county’s official discounting/denial of its unfunded pension obligations.  On all of these, the inquiring citizen faces a phalanx of tightly circled wagons, and is ridiculed for bringing up individual issues.

The portent of the county’s unfunded liabilities are undoubtedly the biggest sword hanging over our taxable heads.  The amount that the county will have to pay out in the future (the out-years) is actually a complex calculation, and depends on not only the legal obligation to the public service retireds, but also on how much CalPERS will have in our account.  We have to remember that PERS is just an investment manager for the retirement funds the county remits to it.  PERS has no obligation to do anything except disperse what is in the Nevada County’s account.  (And then we are in a risk pool with a couple of hundred other jurisdictions like the profligate City of Bell, which is a whole other dimension of risk.)

This account may go up or down, depending on the vagaries of the securities markets and how astute the PERS portfolio managers are.  Their obligation as a fiduciary is only to do their best, come what may, and also to tell us their best estimate of what our unfunded part is when payments come due.  And that is where the problems start.  Local jurisdictions all over the country are basically in arrears, and many cities and counties are on the brink of Chapter 9 bankruptcy.

In California, Stockton is our next city that is prepared to file.  The San Francisco Chronicle has a more complete report on the entire situation in the state, and it isn’t pretty.

Added to the above calculations we have at least one “side fund” and yet to be explained amounts of monies due that are not shown on the county’s financial statements.  The situation is murky indeed, and our electeds are not exactly leaning forward to clear up the obligations that are facing us.  What I would like to see is a chart like the one below that shows by year Nevada County’s total known and anticipated obligations with error brackets showing the high-to-low range.

For more a higher level perspective, we recall the 2009 quote by Mr Ron Seeling, Chief Actuary of CalPERS –

"I don't want to sugarcoat anything. We are facing decades without significant turnarounds in assets, decades of …unsustainable pension costs of between 25 percent of pay for a miscellaneous plan and 40 to 50 percent of pay for a safety plan …unsustainable pension costs. We've got to find some other solutions.”

And things have gotten worse since then.

The Value of Stereotyping

George Rebane

Stereotyping is the use of a template of characteristics that are thought to belong to members of a particular class more frequently than members of the general population of which the class is a subset.  The template of characteristics is also known as the stereotypical characteristics like, say, a plastic pocket protector full of writing instruments more often seen in the shirt pockets of male engineers than in the pockets of other men.

Stereotyping has gotten a bad rap in our society, and its use is roundly criticized in the public forum.  However, stereotyping, so as to assign or exclude someone from membership in a given class, is built in to almost every critter that lives on this planet.  Why?  Simply because it is a low cost survival technique that has evolved in all species to simplify quick decisions about the famous ‘Three F’ functions – feed, fight, or mount - important to everyone.

But if you understand the underpinnings of stereotyping, it can be a valuable tool in making all kinds of decisions, and also serve as a mirror for better understanding yourself.  I was motivated to write this piece when recently reading Daniel Kahneman’s monumental Thinking, Fast and Slow which dances around the subject without getting into the nitty-gritty of it because of the little math involved.  Kahneman, recent Nobelist and co-father of behavioral economics with the late Amos Tversky, is also a giant in the field of psychology.  In that field stereotyping comes up under the forbidding label of representativeness (q.v. – which is short for quod vide or ‘which see’, and I’ve concluded that its modern version is simply ‘google it’.)

Now consider seeing a good looking woman, finely coiffed, beautifully dressed, and dripping with expensive jewelry, getting out of a chauffeured limousine in front of a fancy restaurant.  You wonder if she’s a member of the currently notorious ‘1%’.  More particularly, what are the chances (friendly word for ‘probability’) that she is a member of that exclusive class, given she has some of the stereotypical characteristics of that class that you just observed?  If you had been facing the other way and your friend told you that a woman just got out a car behind you; then without seeing her, what would you answer if he mused whether the woman belonged to the '1%'?

Christmas in 1949

George Rebane

[This is the transcript of my regular KVMR commentary which was broadcast on 16 December 2011.]

‘Tis the season for Christmas stories, so I’m going to tell you about my first Christmas in America.  The year was 1949.  Dad, mom, and I had arrived here in May on a troopship packed with east European refugees.  All of us had gone through WW2 on the wrong side, and then spent the last four years in refugee camps in Germany.  We arrived here with three suitcases and the clothes on our backs – no language, penniless, and literally no idea what was going to happen next when we got off the boat.

By December mom, dad, and I had gone through a hectic summer on a Connecticut chicken farm and were now living in a rented room with a shared bathroom.  It was located across the street from a noisy bar in downtown Willimantic, a poor New England ‘threadmill town’ that in 1949 already looked long of tooth.  Dad and mom had found work in the big threadmill as thread machine loaders – mom started working the day shift and dad was on the night shift.

Actually, mom had spent the summer in Essex as a dishwasher in a café, while dad and I worked on the chicken farm near Danielson.  Without going into the gory details, mom had a heart problem, and the extra heavy work in the threadmill did her in.  She spent most of the fall of 1949 in the hospital.

Early after starting fourth grade that fall, I wandered into the Willimantic fire department, drawn by the bright red fire trucks on display every afternoon.  My less than perfect English gave me away, and after the firemen quizzed me, they ‘adopted’ me.  Since my father was asleep during the day, there was little for me to do in our room except wake him up, therefore I was told to report to the firehouse every day after school for a hot meal, do a few light chores around the big fire engines, and play with the duty Dalmatian that was a resident of almost every fire house in those days.  My father approved the arrangement, and the firemen became my extended family to make up for the one I seldom saw during those months.  In spite of everything, that fall was exciting for a nine-year-old, I even got to ride on the fire truck responding to a couple of small fires.

As the weather got colder and the New England snows came, I looked forward to Christmas because, well, I had always looked forward to Christmas.  Even in the refugee camp it had been a festive time of music, hand-made decorations, Christmas tree, special church services, hope for a renewed life, and, of course, the anticipation of my present.  But this Christmas was going to be different because my mom would not be home until after the holidays, and dad would only get off on Christmas Day.  I knew that at dad’s $40 per week, presents were out.  Refugee kids become money savvy at an early age.

But I was also part of the fire department, and there was plenty to do to decorate and prepare the fire house for Christmas.  I was pretty much blown away by all the lights and bright shiny things and wreaths and boughs and the big Christmas tree that were part of an American Christmas.  The local Lutheran church had also taken us under their wing, and going to the Advent services was a real introduction to American Christmas music.  It was amazing how much more went on in an American church, especially during the holidays, than at the Estonian church that we had attended in the camp.

About a week before Christmas we found out that mom would be released from the hospital, and we would all be together in our first real home in America at 38 North Street, Willimantic, Connecticut, second floor.  With mom on the mend and expecting to go back to work soon after the holidays, things were again looking up.  Dad and mom were already talking of better jobs which would let us move into a real apartment with a bathroom.  We all felt that the way to an American future was beginning to take shape.

Then a week before Christmas my teacher told me that I was invited to a special Christmas party with a Santa Claus to be held at school.  I remember walking back to school through the snow in the evening.  The room was full of kids I didn’t know, there was a Santa Claus, and when it was my turn, he handed me a toy filling station with a garage and pump island on it.  It was used, but still in good working order.  I was more than a bit embarrassed by this, and walked home carrying the cumbersome filling station.

What had stunned me was that this was a Christmas party for poor kids, and I had been singled out as a poor kid.  But I knew that they had gotten something terribly wrong.  During and after the war I had seen plenty of kids and families who were really poor.  And I knew, that especially on this Christmas, I was definitely not a poor kid.

My name is Rebane, and I also expand on these and other themes in my Union columns, and on georgerebane.com where the transcript of this commentary appears.  These opinions are not necessarily shared by KVMR.  Merry Christmas.

The Systemic Train Wreck of the American Middle Class

George Rebane

“The truth is that we don’t know how to fix the US labor market – we are in uncharted territory,” says Peter Orszag, Mr Obama’s former budget director, now a vice-chairman of Citi. “It would help to spend more on retraining and on infrastructure and to have a more rational immigration system. But these wouldn’t fundamentally transform the situation for the middle class ... It is not yet clear what, if anything, could.”

This is how Edward Luce concludes ‘Can America regain most dynamic labour market mantle?’ in the 11dec11 Financial Times.  The article itself presents an excellent analysis of the systemic problems in the American workforce which have long been delineated in these pages (to a blizzard of reproach and denial from our Leftwing readers).

While President Obama and his liberal congressional cadres are out there demagogging the decline of the middle class as the fault of capitalism and the Republicans, the inescapable facts point to much deeper and more serious reasons why our middle class workforce is in irreversible decline.  None of it, of course, will make a dent in the herd of voters who are convinced that it is the system that is working against their right to sell for ‘fair wages’ whatever marginal or worthless skills they have left in their kit.  Such is the sum and stuff of populism.  But in a deeper sense they are right – it is ‘the system’ of 21st century Earth that is definitely against them.

And as Orzag eerily echoes the 1939 lament to Congress of FDR’s SecTreas Morgenthau (“… we simply don’t know what to do.”), no one has a plan to reverse this fundamental trend - it is not certain that such a plan even exists.  And by that I mean that neither the Republicans nor Democrats have put anything on the table, or discussed in their vaunted think-tank journals anything that softens the inevitable impact of advancing technology and a competitive global workforce on the expanded panoply of ‘rights’ on which the American worker has come to believe he has a perpetual draw.

Before the developed western countries do stabilize in some new competitive arrangement within the global economy, then to the extent that each of us got into socialized hock there will be hell to pay.  But then you already knew that, didn't you?

Calvin's Econ 101

"The trouble with quotes on the internet is that it's difficult to determine whether or not they are genuine."  Abraham Lincoln

George Rebane

This post is unabashedly lifted from and is composed of content, in whole cloth, from reader emails.  (I am still in mourning over Bill Watterson's decision to retire the strip in 1995; talk about quitting when you're ahead.)

Ruminations - 15jun2012

The experiment that said “the bigger the state, the more just the society” clearly failed. There is no point pretending that it didn’t. - Tony Blair

George Rebane

- It's the Sun, stupid!
- Dems put bad stuff on hold til 2012
- Mexican right of return

Russ Steele at NC Media Watch reports here the latest real news on climate change – ‘it’s the sun, stupid.’  The AGW true believers are having to run around in ever tightening circles as they try to paper over every piece of new data that belies their political theory of manmade global disaster.  Every day it is more apparent that the only misery man is yet able to afflict on fellow man is through bad politics.  It was ever thus.

The perversion of the progressives is nowhere more visible than in the hiatus that the Obama administration is taking from its own agenda.  All those social and stimulus programs that were designed and passed by the Democrats to get the country back on its economic track have proven to do exactly the opposite.  And the social(ist) engineers in Washington know it in spades.  With the election coming up and the economy on its butt (second cheek is hitting the ground now), these hypocritical leftwingers are pulling back the enforcement of literally every piece of damaging legislation they have passed.  The dirtbags aren’t repealing any of it, only putting it on hold until after 2012 (details here).

That there is no public outcry about any of this will hopefully again explain my ongoing use of Bryan Kaplan’s ‘sheeple’ for a large fraction of America’s electorate.  In his Myth of the Rational Voter – Why Democracies Choose Bad Policies Kaplan presented ample evidence of how the democratic process goes awry the more direct democracy we instill at the cost of removing the republican safeguards bequeathed by our Founders.  (See ‘How Elections Really Work’)

As these pages have noted for the last several years, the Great Divide (here and here) is not just an apprehension of conservatives who view as hopeless the reunion with progressives.  A major force promoting the GD is the latino Reconquista movement (here and search RR with ‘Reconquista’).  The lamestream media has successfully subverted any coverage of the progress of Reconquista.  Now it has advanced to where it is openly taught in American public schools.  As reported in the 20jun11 National Review -

“Mexican-American Studies” in Tucson schools now include “Rodolfo Acuna’s Occupied America, which proposes that the US southwest become a “Chicano nation” and quotes without disapproval Hispanic activist Jose Angel Guiterrez saying that “we have to eliminate the gringo, and what I mean by that is if the worst comes to the worst, we have got to kill him.”

Shhhh, the sheeple are sleeping.

‘You Are Not a Gadget’

George Rebane

Thus argues secular humanist author, musician, and self-educated techie Jaron Lanier.  His cleverly titled book came out earlier this year, and I received it as a birthday present from old friends in soCal who are of a similar philosophical vein.  The book is a fascinating cobble of various articles and pieces Lanier has written over the last twenty years or so.  The jacket blurb would have you believe that it is also “controversial”, but only if enough people would read it to create controversy.

The essay itself is a rambling yet engaging collection of historical observations, experiences recounted, and musings philosophical of the current pre-Singularity years as Man collides and couples with machine.  I found it interesting because of my own work in the same vineyards, but in many places I saw different things happening for different reasons than did Lanier.

In the book he shows us the impact on society – ‘technical and cultural problems’ – that “can grow out of poorly considered digital design", although I didn’t find cited examples compelling.  He does seem to be concerned about a genre of computer programs (machine intelligence) and the new celebration of ‘mob wisdom’ that yields various algorithmic cook-ups of what groups of people purport to say and do.  These he sees as beginning to trump “over the intelligence and judgment of individuals” in advanced societies.

Finally, he argues for the advent of a “humanistic technology” that somehow will maintain the primacy of human individualism and creativity in a world facing the onslaught of ever more intelligent machines.  Admiral Hyman Rickover, father of the nuclear navy, introduced the notion of humanistic technology in a 1964 speech at Georgetown University.  He was worried that technology might be developed for its own sake instead of for solving specific human problems.  And high thinking people have been so worried ever since.