Tag Archives: Politics

Essays

$250,000 per Job? Only a little bit too expensive.

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If you’ve been following the news, there are lots of people screaming about how incredibly expensive the stimulus package was, and how it didn’t create enough jobs for the money spent.

I’m not a fan of stimulus, nor big government, but I do know how to do math like a capitalist. An employee costs a lot more than just salary, and I haven’t seen much reporting in this vein.

Let’s say you’ve been given stimulus money to hire somebody. GREAT! Do you start writing them paychecks immediately? No. You find work for them to do. Let’s go on to say that the employee is (as many of them are reported to have been) a construction worker. How much is it going to cost to put that person to work? Well… you have to have land on which they can put a building, materials to put up the building with, and tools for them to use. Some of this you might already have, but with stimulus money you’re going to go buy MORE of it so you can grow your business and (here’s another form of the word) STIMULATE the economy as a result.

Pulling numbers out of my butt: if twenty guys can build a subdivision of 40 homes in a year, and the homes cost $120,000 each to build, you’ve spent just short of five million dollars creating 20 jobs, at a cost of $240,000 per job.

You also created forty homes (in a depressed real-estate market that is saturated with defaults, foreclosures, and short sales, but I digress…)

Also, somebody out there sold you a whole mess of lumber, nails, concrete, PVC, etc.

Sure, if all we wanted to do was feed people tax money we could do it much more efficiently by just dumping the entire stimulus package into the existing welfare system. But that doesn’t stimulate the economy, and it provides incentives for the wrong sort of behavior.

Again, let me say that I’m not a fan of the stimulus package, not as implemented, and not in principle. But the math I use as a good capitalist who wants to be able to create jobs tells me that the critics of the stimulus package are being very loudly dishonest in their criticism.

(Note: If you gave me $240,000 and told me to create as many jobs as I could, I would hire a writer, two line-artists, and a colorist and create graphic novels out the wazoo. If the books sold well, I’d be able to keep my employees. If not, well… they worked for a year, and we all had a good time with taxpayer money. DO NOT SEND ME TAX DOLLARS IT WILL ONLY END IN TEARS.)

Essays

What Will Finally Fix Health Care

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You know what will finally fix health care?

Information.

For centuries good health care has not really been about seeing a doctor or a surgeon. It’s been about getting the right information to the right person at the right time. Okay, sure, often that person WAS a doctor or a surgeon, but often it was not. And the smarter we got as societies, the longer and better we started living. The pattern still holds.

These days we have ready, free (or as close as makes no difference) access to all the information our doctors do. (Except patient records — HIPAA says that would be a violation of privacy, and I agree…)

What we, the patient-class, the uninitiated do NOT have free and ready access to is trusted gatekeepers who will filter the good information from the not-so-good. You know, doctors who will tell us that although our Google search on these symptoms was flawed because we left out “night sweats,” or something like that.

Assuming we haven’t all succumbed to Bird Flu, Swine Flu, Nanocancer, or the Andromeda Strain in the next 200 years, I firmly believe that our descendants are going to look back at our primitive, 21st-century discussions and wonder why we wasted so much time and money when what finally fixed Health Care was information we’d been sitting on for decades.

We will probably always need a select few, skilled practitioners of the dark and arcane arts of medicine, but most of what we need to be healthy is a correct diagnosis, and the alignment of simple treatments with sets of symptoms.

That’s just information.

I’m not belittling what my doctor does. He’s worked hard to throw terabytes of information into his head so that his miraculously synaptic brain can quickly process my complaint and prescribe the treatments I need (and proscribe the things that are hurting me.)

But it’s still just information.

Okay, not when he whips out his scalpel and removes a mass from my forearm (had that done in January. Ouch.) — that’s skill acquired through years of practice. And we’ll always need somebody with that skill set to complete certain treatments. We’ll also always need other things that cost money, like new medications, fancy devices for irradiating tissue, and diagnostic tools. But those things don’t need to cost what they currently do. Not once we fix the flow of information.

I’m not proposing anything radical here. I’m not really proposing anything. I’m arm-chair quarterbacking, only instead of yelling at the television about the choice of plays, I’m yelling about how the game should really be taken into orbit and played in three dimensions by guys in armored EVA suits.

Essays, Faith

We have more in common than you think.

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In following a friend’s blog I happened across an incident in which two people who had been friends IRL and online for years parted ways less than amicably over discussions of politics.

It got me to thinking: how different are the right and the left, really? And the more I thought about it, the more I came to conclude that any two people in the most politically distant “poles” have far more in common than they think. And I’m not talking about stupid stuff like “they breathe air” or “they like the flavor of cumin.” I’m talking about core values.

Who here does NOT value friendship? What about good health? What about peace of mind?

Who doesn’t enjoy (or long for) happy familial relationships? What about long-term sexual partnership?

What about the freedom to choose? The personal agency to make a considered decision for oneself?

The places where we differ seem to be in our beliefs about how to reach those things we value. And oddly enough, once we focus on implementing our values we conclude that anybody who wants a different implementation than we do must not value the same things we do.

That’s simply not true.

The avowed atheist and the devout christian (to pick a set of polar opposites) know that their beliefs differ regarding those things widely considered unknowable. What they forget is that they cherish and uphold the exact same principles. And so do lots of other polar opposites. And in their attacks on each others’ implementations (of the very same sets of values, don’t forget) they create these massive “logical” arguments which prove beyond any doubt that their opponent is somehow evil, or stupid, or both.

The greatest evils in this world are those which cause good people to hate each other.

Essays

Oh no… it’s the INTERNET again!

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Apparently the loner/loser who died after allegedly murdering a fellow student in Montreal had a website profile at “vampirefreaks.com” in which he said all kinds of darkly portentious things.

The CNN article ends with this choice paragraph:

AP reported that vampirefreaks.com came up in a murder investigation earlier this year. A 23-year-old man and a 12-year-old girl accusedin a triple murder in Medicine Hat, Alberta, had profiles on the Website.

Okay, let’s think about this for a second and make sure we’ve got the cart in front of the horse… the Internet has a website that caters to those with dark fantasies about death, cursedness, tragedy, and the goth perspective on the mortal condition, eh? And now we learn that some of these people commit suicide and/or murder?

Boy, howdy. Shut that site down NOW. Because people never killed people before they had websites where they could talk about it… did they?

Oh, wait. In 1989 there was a different shooting in Montreal in which 14 people were killed. That was pre-World-Wide-Web, for those of you keeping score at home.

There is no changing the fact that some people are twisted enough to act upon their mental instabilities in violent ways. Whether these people twisted themselves through substance abuse, or otherwise re-wired their pleasure centers so they can get off on the pain of others, it’s not the internet’s fault. I will concede that some of these people recruit, and they twist each other by goading each other into more and more depraved lines of thought, but don’t go trying to lay all the blame in one place. Had Kimveer Gill not had internet access, we’d probably be blaming his musical choices, the video games he played, or the trashy vampire novels he dogears. None of these things enable mass murder without the help of a sick and twisted person.

You cannot blame the bottom of the barrel for the things that sink to it.

Speaking of “enabled,” kudos to the police officers on the scene. It seems they were there on an unrelated call, observed suspcious behavior (gunman on campus? Shots fired? Hmmmm…) and engaged the suspect effectively and permanently.