Forbes says Bill Gates is the richest person in the world. Here’s why they’re wrong.

Forbes says Bill Gates is the richest person in the world. Here’s why they’re wrong.



This is an interesting take on how to evaluate a person's wealth. We hear what may or may not be specious comparisons of wealth all the time, for instance the claim that the poorest person in America is wealthy compared to the nobility of the 10th century. This article attempts to compare them in a reasonable way.

One thing I notice, though, is that on the graph that shows the Forbes list (in terms of nominal assets without adjustment), you could also look at certain family fortunes. Sum the fortunes of the Koch brothers, for instance, and they top the list. Sum the Walton heirs, and they in turn beat the Kochs.

Republican tax overhaul would come at cost of hundreds of credits, deductions - The Washington Post

Republican tax overhaul would come at cost of hundreds of credits, deductions - The Washington Post

Gotta say it, I'm astonished. A Republican proposal that I can get behind.



There are things I'd change, but much or it seems to be a step in the right direction.

Tea Party is Folding on the Debt Limit | New Republic

Tea Party is Folding on the Debt Limit | New Republic

 Prior to the shutdown, it wasn’t clear whether Bachmann et al were irrational (that is, so zealously attached to their ideological goals that they ignored conventional political incentives, like widespread public disapproval), or delusional (meaning they were perfectly capable of responding to political incentives in theory; they just assumed the masses supported them).

IOW, Teapartiers are so embedded in their echo chamber that they truly believe most people think like they do.

But the lesson of the shutdown is that engagement and accommodation is worse than useless—it’s counterproductive. When you’re dealing with delusional people, any gesture in their direction will only be interpreted as confirmation that their delusions are true. When Obama agreed to pare tens of billions from his 2011 spending request shortly after the GOP won control of Congress, House Republicans didn’t see it as a sign of good faith, as the White House believed they would. (David Plouffe: “The trust was increased.”) They interpreted it as an admission by the president that the public supported their radical agenda. 

IOW, letting a delusional person have his way only encourages the delusion.

It’s only through confrontation—doing away with negotiations and inciting voters to communicate which side they support—that you have any chance of breaking through. Going forward, that means there’s no probably difference-splitting approach to, say, getting an immigration bill through the House. If you want immigration reform, let Republicans reject the reasonable-sounding bill that passed the Senate, then force them to pay a brutal price for their unpopular positionin 2016. 

IOW, force them to commit to crazier and crazier ideas  

If I thought Obama was that smart, I might have thought he was doing that. Unfortunately he has failed to grasp the fundamental truth of bipartisanship: When one side says 2+2=5 , and the other side says 2+2=7, compromise between those positions isn't much help. I really can't think of a bipartisan idea in the last century or so that was actually a good idea (WW II a possible exception).

"But they earned it." Oh really?

The usual objection to redistributive economic policies is that the wealthy have earned their wealth, and it is morally wrong to take away what someone has earned.



Well, not so much.



So much for the wealthy having "earned their money."



And the road to shared prosperity is precisely to attack the _unearned_ economic rents of the very wealthy, not the wealth they themselves have actually produced.



The Pay of Corporate Executives and Financial Professionals as Evidence of Rents in Top 1 Percent Incomes | Economic Policy Institute



I have no objection to Bill Gates being wealthy. I have a very strong objection to the Waltons stealing the productivity of their workers, and seeing their inherited super-wealth as somehow morally equivalent to Gates'.

Solving the problem by, well, solving the problem

Want to end poverty? Brazil’s answer: Give people money



I said many years ago that if you want to end airplane crashes it's actually very easy. Take the wings and the wheels off of them. No crashes.



It will be interesting to see if this is done correctly: the government can put money in circulation this way, but it has to remove enough money in taxes to prevent inflation. I'm betting that they'll fall down on that part. If they do, it will cripple any effort to fix problems here, since the press is too dumb to understand what they will have done wrong.



On the other hand, if the program is done right and actually succeeds, we can watch the pseudo-libertarian lackeys of the 0.01% make excuses about why it won't work here.

Science press gets it wrong again.

In other news, water is wet.



Stephen Hawking: 'There are no black holes' : Nature News & Comment



When the headlines, "There are no black holes," simply contradict what the very story under it says, it's time to fire the editors.

A good idea is quickly abandoned...

... while a bad idea lasts forever.



Popular Flood Insurance Law Is Target of Both Political Parties - NYTimes.com



One of the first things I realized about the consequences of climate change is that one of the most immediate dangers is foolishly trying to fight the sea. Beach communities already pay huge amounts of money to fight the littoral current that moves sand up and down the shore. (Remember your parables, folks? Foolish man, houses, and sand?) How do you suppose they'll react when their coastal property is below sea level? And who do you suppose they'll expect to pay for it?



So now sea level is rising, and people are crying. Look, I'm not unsympathetic to people whose homes are being lost. But come on, one of the risks of living close to the water is that the water may get a bit too close. Who should pay for that? Gee, lets see. You get to live near the beach. You get to go fishing and swimming, bird watching in the marshes, enjoy the laid-back atmosphere of coastal living. So of course the people who should pay for that are.... everyone else, right?



The Biggert-Waters flood insurance reform act put more of the burden of insuring flood-prone coastal properties where it belongs-- on the people who choose to build in a flood zone. So naturally the people who now have to pay the true cost of their foolishly located buildings are crying.



It's really not complicated. Don't build on a flood plain. That includes the coastal property likely to flood in severe storms. It would have cost much, much less after Katrina to give displaced homeowners a check for the equity they lost and tell them to build above sea level. Sea level in the Miocene, that is. (See figure 2, page 3) And not on a river flood plain either.

Both sides of their mouths?

Inequality: Why aren’t the poor storming the barricades? | The Economist



So the Cato Institute says that the reason there's no widespread revolt is that the gap in actual consumption isn't all that much.



But wait! Every time someone says that the rich don't consume much as a percent of their income, conservatives call foul.

Can't have it both ways, dudes.

Whose ox is being gored, Administration in power edition

What voters actually care about, in one chart



The whole article is interesting, but look particularly at the graph of who (by party) worries about deficits. It's the party not in the White House. (Admittedly only going back to Clinton in these data)



First, I'm inclined to think that anybody who is worried about budget deficits in a categorical sense doesn't really know what they're talking about.



Second, since budget deficits are a part of life almost all the time, it becomes the convenient whipping boy when you haven't got much else to complain about, or to distract people from your real agenda, or when yo want to distract them from the things you are actively doing wrong.

Of transporters, nostalgia, and the "good old days."

This column will change your life: consistency bias | Life and style | The Guardian



The Star Trek transporter presumably works by scanning a body down to the level of the subatomic, destroying the body at one location, and recreating it elsewhere. One metaphysical question that arises is whether the person stepping out of the transporter is really the same person, or a copy. When I step into the transporter do I just die, and does another body that "thinks it's me" emerge on the other end?

And does that question actually have any meaning? Science fiction is full of stories where a character's personality gets fed into a computer, and they are supposed to achieve some kind of immortality that way. But isn't it "really" just a computer that acts as if it's the person? Didn't the "real" person actually die? Absent any actual contact with the soul of the departed (or the person who stepped into the transporter) how could we tell?

Since I am more than skeptical of the existence of souls in the first place, I see this as a meaningless question. The linked article points to why.

When I remember my childhood, I place myself in those memories.

"Well of course you do. You were there" you say.

But was "I" really there? The "me" that I place in those scenes is not a 57 year old grouchy old home brewer with a decent understanding of a few things, and a superficial understanding of a lot of things. He isn't a person who has been through the joys of being a grandfather; the pain and loss of seeing loved ones slip into entropy; the irritation of loss of visual acuity, muscle strength, effortless recall of words, and fair endurance.

In fact, the "me" that wakes up in the morning isn't really the "me" that went to bed last night. But I have this illusion of consistency, because when I place myself in my own memories of the past (as the saying goes) I'm not much, but I'm all I've got to work with.

When we are nostalgic for the "good old days" we imagine that, because we lived a sheltered, protected, simple life, the world was that way. We see the world as getting more dangerous when it is in fact much, much safer, because in our memories we were safe. Or at least we survived. Witness all those "I grew up without bicycle helmets and I survived" libertarian screeds on Facebook. We hear about all the bad things today, but don't realize that much, much more of the bad stuff happened in the past, we just didn't hear about it. Leave it to Beaver only showed the town on one side of the tracks.

More than Calcium | The Scientist Magazine®

More than Calcium | The Scientist Magazine®



So let me get this right. Serious scientists think that paleolithic humans drank milk to get vitamin D?



Really?

 There is very little vitamin D in milk and in fact only trace amounts and in the UK milk is not fortified with vitamin D.

People think there is vitamin D in milk because it is added artificially. I can understand that misconception from most people, but this article is from a science publication.

Bill Gates: ‘Capitalism did not eradicate smallpox’

Bill Gates: ‘Capitalism did not eradicate smallpox’



Help them get healthier and prosperous, and population growth will fall.

Dog-Wolf Split | The Scientist Magazine®

Dog-Wolf Split | The Scientist Magazine®



Looks like the ancestor of domestic dogs split from a common ancestor before modern wolves developed. I'm not surprised, since several species of wolf, coyotes, and domestic dogs are so closely related that they can still interbreed.



I'm thinking of a scenario like this: a population of wolf ancestors started specializing in scavenging from human garbage. Over time, they were domesticated. Meanwhile, the ancestral species went through a population bottleneck of some kind in which traits of the modern wolf were fixed in that population.



But I'd still like to see the same kind of analysis done on a great many more dog breeds,a s well as mutts from around the world, and more samples from wolves as well, including other gray wolf relatives such as red wolves and coyotes.

The Undeserving Rich - NYTimes.com

The Undeserving Rich - NYTimes.com



The once credible Wall Street Journal shows once again that it is now owned by Rupert Murdoch.

First, an elementary error in reporting nominal increases in wages, then lumping the undeserving plutocracy with the hard working (though perhaps overcompensated) upper middle class.



And as always, it's sadly amazing that such a thing can happen in what is supposed to be a democracy.



Oh look! Those two men are holding hands!!! Cut taxes on investment income quick, before they destroy our culture!



And we are so dumb they're lining up at our door.

A simple test for conservative poverty proposals

A simple test for conservative poverty proposals

Beware the seductive "logic" that government assistance to the poor makes them want to stay poor.

This is a correlation/causation mistake of staggering size and consequence. In effect, [Rand] Paul sees that people who take medicine are more likely to die and concludes that we need to take away their medicine.

Money needs to keep moving. If it doesn't, the economy suffocates. That's what's wrong now. Even notwithstanding the simple humanitarian need to ensure American citizens a decent life, making sure they have money to spend on necessities keeps the people who provide those necessities employed.

And before you proclaim Welfare Reform a resounding success:

Welfare cuts didn’t make the fight against poverty magically more efficient; they simply made it stingier. In 1996, 68 of 100 families living in poverty with children received welfare benefits. In 2010, two years after the worst economic shock since the Great Depression, only 27 of 100 such families were receiving benefits.

It's way past time to get a real liberal in the White house. In economic and social terms, there hasn't been one since Lyndon Johnson. We need Franklin Roosevelt, and we get Reagan Lite.

I really don't give a rat's ass about the "values" of those who want to tell other people how to live their lives, so many of the "conservative" issues like gay marriage and abortion are simply irrelevant to my assessment of whether a person is liberal. And anybody who can look at the depletion of resources that threatens our survival and be opposed to birth control is living in a Bizarro world of denial.

Racism as conservative wedge strategy

This is a long article. It is worth reading very carefully in its entirety.

The racism at the heart of the Reagan presidency - Salon.com

This is an old story. The Atwater quote, in particular, should be well known by now:

You start out in 1954 by saying, “N—, n—, n—.” [Editor's note: The actual word used by Atwater has been replaced with "N—" for the purposes of this article.] By 1968 you can’t say “n—” — that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states’ rights and all that stuff. You’re getting so abstract now, you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is, blacks get hurt worse than whites. And subconsciously maybe that is part of it. I’m not saying that. But I’m saying that if it is getting that abstract, and that coded, that we are doing away with the racial problem one way or the other. You follow me—because obviously sitting around saying, “We want to cut taxes and we want to cut this,” is much more abstract than even the busing thing, and a hell of a lot more abstract than “N—, n—.” So anyway you look at it, race is coming on the back burner.

The idea that was new to me in this article, or at least the enunciation of the idea,  is the idea of "positive liberty" vs. "negative liberty."

Positive liberty is basically freedom to do what you want to do. But negative liberty is freedom to keep other people from doing what you don't want them to do.

So if you want to eat in a restaurant, the principle of positive liberty says that you should be free to use a public accommodation without impediment. If you own the restaurant, the principle of negative liberty says that you should be free to refuse service to anyone for any reason.

There is much, much more to this article. Again, it is worth reading very carefully, every bit of it.

Free is just another word...

... for something not paid for, therefore not valued.
How The Government Could Make Public College Free For All Students | ThinkProgress

First, the article conflates total tuition paid at public colleges and universities with federal expenditures for student aid, much of which is spent at private institutions.

But that's not my beef. My beef is with the very idea that it is a good thing for everyone to attend college.

When everyone is entitled to go to public colleges free, and colleges are rated on how many of them graduate, then colleges will have little choice but to give anybody who shows up a degree.

Think it won't happen? Look at public schools. The kids do nothing at all because they know, with perfect certainty, that someone will find a way to give them a diploma. Don't pass the class? No problem, get the credit anyway. Fail the "must pass" test? No problem, do a project.

And what is that diploma worth? I am reminded of my friend who introduced me to his date. 

He said "She's from Tunisia. You can tell because she has two knees." I looked at my own knees, and at him quizzically, and he said with wide eyes "You too?"

A credential that everyone has is worthless.

And before you say that these days you need a college education to get a decent job, that's simply not true. You need the diploma to get hired, but you don't need the education to do almost any job. The answer to that problem is for workers to join trade unions, organize, and develop the bargaining power to get paid for the value of the work they do instead of for simple minded assumptions about their worth as a human being based on a piece of paper on the wall.

Want to be an engineer? A research scientist? A medical care provider? Yes, you need a college education.

Want to be a journalist? A teacher? Yes, you need a college education.

Want to run a business? Manage a company? Fix machines? Get a job doing those things and learn on the job. Go to a trade school to learn applicable skills. College does not prepare you for any of those things.

I am not saying that a broad education is bad for people. But most people who are forced into college so that they can manage a department store are not temperamentally suited to an academic environment.

Now here's a fascinating question

Passenger Pigeons: Speculation on Humans and Ecological Release | Mike the Mad Biologist

Not what killed them off, but how did there ever come to be so doggone many?

Why it won't wok anymore (I hope)

Robert Reich (Why The Republican's Old Divide-and-Conquer Strategy -- Setting Working Class Against the Poor -- Is Backfiring)

It used to be that working people thought that hard work and thrift would get them ahead in the world. And it used to be that it would. So it was easy to say "They're giving your hard earned money to those lay good-for-nothings." Whether it was true or not, it played into the narrative of getting rich through hard work.

But it's increasingly clear that working hard in not the road to riches. Well, not working hard yourself, anyway. The wealthy today are most likely those who get other people to wok hard for them, and then don't pay them for it.

So there's not much derision (or shouldn't be) for less fortunate people among those who are just barely making it. And since 95% of the US population is worse off as a share of total wealth than they were in 1980, 4% are about the same, and 1% are enormously better off, especially the top 0.01%, it's hard to say it's the poor who are taking our money.

The Zombie Confidence Fairy - NYTimes.com

The Zombie Confidence Fairy - NYTimes.com

If they're talking about confidence, they're full of it. It's just that simple. NPR has joined Faux News in this silly mythology. Why? Because that's what their financial overlords tell them to say.

Businesses don't hire people because they can't sell what they've already got on hand.

Why? Because people are out of work. Because workers don't get paid enough to buy stuff. Because most of what you spend on goods and services over and above the cost of production goes to wealthy shareholders and owners, not to the workers who produced it.

that's so 2013...

Great news for Obamacare: Americans are bored with it

My not too tongue in cheek prediction is that the House will continue to try to repeal the Affordable Care Act longer than the American people will remember what it is.

Gentlemen, choose your statistic!

Good news! Health spending as a share of the economy is shrinking.

Funny how the story I heard on the supposedly "liberal" NPR this morning seemed to say the opposite.

Of course it's all a matter of what statistic you look at: nominal health care costs in terms of inflation, vs. health care expenditures as a percentage of GDP.

Any excuse to believe in BS

ScienceGymnasium: Scientists have found that memories may be passed down through generations in our DNA

Note that on careful reading, the study does not show that "memories" are passed down. What it shows is that experiences in life can result in heritable change in the genome.

But there is a world of difference between a traumatic association with the smell of cherry blossoms being passed on as a fear reaction to that smell, and the completely goofy idea of "racial memory," as in the Science Fiction idea of alien invaders with bat-wings, horns, and barbed tails being responsible for the iconic images of demons.

To paraphrase The Animals:
I'm just an scientist whose research is good,
Oh Lord, please don't let me be misunderstood.

Cui buono?

Which Is More Important: Military Drones Or A Cure For Cancer? - Forbes

Maybe we should just go back to calling it the War Department. I mean seriously, what credible military threat do we face? And what good are expensive weapons systems that don't even work and the Pentagon doesn't want?

Our politicians are much more interested in lining the pockets of the Military Industrial Complex than in ensuring the general welfare of, or in securing the "blessings of liberty" for the people.

The lousy arguments you'll hear on all of Murdoch's "news" outlets.

Disinformation on Inequality - NYTimes.com

It's sad, really. The Wall Street Journal has always had a very strong Plutocrat bias, but now it's just pathetic.

Poor people and emergency rooms

Study: Expanding Medicaid doesn’t reduce ER trips. It increases them.

ISTM that there's a pretty clear reason why suddenly giving people health insurance results in increased visits to the emergency room: That's what poor people have done to get the care they couldn't afford in the past.

There are a number of inappropriate things people do when they don't have money and/or power. When I worked in a grocery store, people thought that complaining to the company about poor service would do no good; they just gave the person at the store Hell. The thing is, the person at store level doesn't decide how much help to schedule, nor when to schedule it. They get numbers from on high, and that's what they've got to deal with. I would love to have been able to give the customers the help to which they were entitled, but middle-management had their quotas and formulas to follow, and if people shop at odd hours in poor neighborhoods, so much the worse for them. After all. it's much more important to have short lines when supervisors are in the store than when customers are.

Similarly, poor people have gone to emergency rooms in the past because they knew they would not be turned away. But if they are now covered by Medicare, an obvious solution presents itself: simply tell them that Medicare will not cover their emergency room visit, but it will cover a visit to the Ambulatory Care Center, or their primary care physician, or whatever. IOW, simply tell them that they are in the wrong place.

They will complain for a while, but eventually they will learn to use their insurance coverage efficiently.