Conservatism in a Nutshell

Shorter Megan McArdle:

New Money
Back in my day we used plain loose leaf with "100 smackers" written on it for cash adn that was good enough. Damn kids today, with their funny money and not wanting of counterfeiters to become rich and all...

Seriously, I like the somber gravity of the old plain green bills, too. I -- like most sentient beings -- can differentiate from nostalgia and practicality, though. Alas, Megan cannot. No, she doesn't like green money because that's all she's ever known. No, she likes green money because it's JUST BETTER.

I'm not linking to her and you can't fucking make me.

Truly Easy

Shorter Megan McArdle:

TBogg Endorses Truthiness

I don't know what either "truthiness" or "concern troll" means.

Just When I Thought I Was Out...

We've been getting complaints about our lack of postings directed along the prevailing winds of this blog's stated purpose. It's true. We've been lazy. Frankly, can you blame us? I mean, Megan's random careening of a blog career is hardly affected by our ineffectual plinking, and how much fun is it to hear us exhaust our supply of "yer dum" jokes on the same person over and over?

Oh, really? You like that sort of thing? Well, alright then. Here, I'll do a nice short easy one then just to make you happy.

Random Thought:

I would find Malcolm Gladwell's responses to Steve Pinker so much more compelling if they didn't rely so heavily on sly, and irrelevant, accusations of racism.

Huh. That's pretty funny. She's ad homineming someone for ad homineming. Good joke there. I'll have to make sure to note the potential humor opportunity. But, first, better do my due diligence and read the link.

Oh, turns out it's a blog post following up on something else. I guess I'd better read that. Wouldn't wanna start in the middle, ya know?

Hey, wait, this is a letter to the editor in response to a New York Times book review. Fuck, well, I guess I'll start at the book review, then. Man, this short post is getting tedious.

OK, read 'em all. What have we got? Well, Malcolm Gladwell wrote a book. Steve Pinker said the book had some good parts and some bad parts and mentioned that Gladwell's claim that IQ is irrelevant doesn't seem to be supported. Gladwell writes to the NYT stating this view is an "ice-flow." Pinker replies with various studies and letters from scientists that say this is a mainstream view. Gladwell then points out that some of these studies aren't so cut and dry and, in fact, present a nuanced view of IQ. He also points out that other sources are openly racist and push IQ inheritablility/racial inferiority agendas. Megan cries "fowl!"

Fuck, that took a while. And this post is getting long. Better go trim it down. That's gonna take a while, too. OK, so what's the pith, here? Well, Megan did a few stupid things. Lemme find my notes. I know I already wrote one of those down... AH YES! Here it is! She used an ad hominem attack to refute an argument for being ad hominem. Oh, man, irony IS a classic.

What else? Oh, yeah, she wrote a single sentence about multiple articles and responses which haven't really been widely discussed. That's pretty funny. I mean, it's quite narcissistic to think everyone would just know what you're talking about in that situation. Yeah, narcissism jokes go over well. I'll stick one of those in.

Am I missing anything? Oh, RIGHT! I forgot that Gladwell didn't really make any "sly accusations of racism" so much as pointed out that one of Pinker's sources was OPENLY RACIST and therefor might be tainted by an agenda. That's pretty important. Rather glaring error on her part. Kind of defeats the whole purpose of her post, really. Oh, we can make a self-defeating joke. Another classic.

Hey, wait, she used the word "irrelevant," too, which is also wrong because, hey, those "sly accusations" only kind of undermine entirely the credibility of one of Pinker's sources. That's fairly relevant. That's definitely gotta go in.

OK, so, she contradicts herself, acts narcissistic, and fails to understand the arguments of the people she's "criticizing" (TWICE in the span of TWO WORDS). Shit, I forgot, I have to explain this whole fucking mess because most likely no one has read the book review, or the response to the book review, or the response to the response to the book review. Yeah, so, I gotta do all that. In a short post.

Oh, hey, look at that. 5pm already. Fuck it. Good enough. I'll just punch out. Wife's gonna kill me if I log in any more overtime.

Update: Heh. I tried to be as thorough as possible here in order to illustrate my point and I STILL forgot to mention explicitly in my round up at the end that she fails to link to two of the three things she is discussing. Indeed.

Her stupidity; It takes a genius to keep track of it all.

A Changing of the Stupid

Megan's right, Apple is being stupid/disingenuous by refusing to repair computers owned by smokers because of health risks. Megan still manages to show what a self-centered idiot she is by talking about it.

Allegedly, Apple is declining to repair Macs owned by smokers on the ground that secondhand smoke is dangerous. This a gross misunderstanding of the science--

Low hanging fruit. Megan is dead on but refuses to quit while she's ahead:

tobacco tar could be hazardous if applied to your skin, but you'd have to really slather it on, leave it there for an extended period, and reapply fairly frequently.

Duh, wha... ohhh...kay. Not done speaking out of her ass, she switches from medical expertise to marketing expertise

But it also seems like a gross misunderstanding of who makes up their customer base on the East Coast.

Megan knows like, SIX, Mac users and like, FOUR of them smoke, so, like Apple costumers always smoke, but only on the East Coast.

Remember when she said they "knew their demographic" because they served coffee? Gee, I wonder what East Coast Mac user smokes and drinks coffee? Megan McArdle? ALL OF THEM!

Mental Health Break: Something Shiny!

Megan has got one of the most developed senses of humor. Check it out, today she links to "Weird Error Messages."

Click the link for such exciting ironies as "Task Manager Not Responding!" Hahahaha! Cuz how do you use Task Manager to kill a not responding program when it's Task Manager that's not responding! Oh! And the Blue Screen of Death is included, cuz, like, heh, how weird is THAT!

Tomorrow, Megan discovers that the song "Ironic" doesn't contain any irony and we all laugh long and hard. The day after that she discovers that this fact is itself ironic! Oh the eternal sunshine of the thoughtless mind.

At least she stopped adding her own stupid commentary.

This Didn't Used to Have a Title

Shorter "Quote of the Day"

I try to pretend that I'm a moderate so I'm going to say something vaguely bad about Rush Limbaugh and Sarah Palin. However, I'm aware that only batshit insane right-wingers give me any credence, so I'm going to drown this baby gerbil of a criticism in backpedaling and coaching. Also, the book I'm talking about now? The one I'm trying to speak of in a nuanced fashion? Haven't actually read it. Oh, wait, lemme go back in and throw in a potshot at Al Gore just to keep my fans happy.

The comments indicate that her gambit worked, as her denizens lap up the Goring.

Drinks With a Friend Are the New Cab Driver

Megan, always the industrious, can't help but mix work with pleasure:

About a week ago, I was having drinks with a friend and discussing John Kenneth Galbraith's dictum that "all financial innovation involves ... the creation of debt secured in greater or lesser adequacy by real assets," wrote the economist John Kenneth Galbraith in 1993. And "all crises have involved debt that, in one fashion or another, has become dangerously out of scale in relation to the underlying means of payment."

I like how she frames the story. Intellectual analysis is ordinarily so boring, but, bby setting the scene in a loud bar with an unknown friend, it adds a bit of levity to an otherwise dry discourse.

I have espoused this theory at various points, and he agreed with it. But we came to a sticking point: what about the stock market bubble?

Uh, which stock market bubble? I mean, granted, I'm not a super financial analyst, but haven't all contractions been preceded by a rise and coincided with a fall in stock market prices? Oh, you mean the LAST bubble. Well, sure, it's convenient cause she can remember it, but I bet that's not the reason she is drawing a comparison with it.

And the bubbliest companies weren't using debt, because they didn't have any cash flow.

Right. The companies weren't using debt 'cause they didn't have any money. They were spending their own money.... that they didn't have. Or.. what? I dunno. I guess venture capital isn't debt cause it's not one person giving another person money for the promise of future returns.

Eventually, we get the part where the post starts to make sense and is written in a semi-coherent manner. That is, the part where she blockquotes someone else.

Asset-price bubbles can be separated into two categories. The first and dangerous category is one I call "a credit boom bubble", in which exuberant expectations about economic prospects or structural changes in financial markets lead to a credit boom. The resulting increased demand for some assets raises their price and, in turn, encourages further lending against these assets, increasing demand, and hence their prices, even more, creating a positive feedback loop.

(...)

The second category of bubble, what I call the "pure irrational exuberance bubble", is far less dangerous because it does not involve the cycle of leveraging against higher asset values. Without a credit boom, the bursting of the bubble does not cause the financial system to seize up and so does much less damage. The second category of bubble, what I call the "pure irrational exuberance bubble", is far less dangerous because it does not involve the cycle of leveraging against higher asset values. Without a credit boom, the bursting of the bubble does not cause the financial system to seize up and so does much less damage. For example, the bubble in technology stocks in the late 1990s was not fuelled by a feedback loop between bank lending and rising equity values; indeed, the bursting of the tech-stock bubble was not accompanied by a marked deterioration in bank balance sheets.

Yeah, what-the-fuck-ever. This is all retarded. The financial bubble collapsed the financial industry because it was a FUCKING FINANCIAL BUBBLE. Likewise, the TECH bubble had adverse effects on the TECH industry. The stock market went down 'cause, duh, that's what it does when the economy gets bad. How the fuck do financial "experts" need ME to explain that to them?

If you want to know the difference between our most recent crash and the next most recent crash (because your dimwit brain doesn't know any fucking history, so just draws comparisons between the convenient rather than the relevant) look at what fueled them. The tech bubble was fueled by the invention of something new. Can't figure out what that is? Hint: It's staring you in the face. As ridiculous as pets.com was, the huge influx of capital into the internet (and computers generally) was somewhat rational. Though many of the dot-coms crashed, one or two little known companies such as Amazon, Netflix and others still exist today, churning out a modest profit. There was OVERexuberance in genuinely exciting new technology which has, in subtle ways, changed the way that we live. It may not seem like it, but the internet actually touches almost every facet of your life in a barely perceptible manner.

The housing market, OTOH, (What did "OTOH" mean in 1991? Oh, that's right, NOTHING.) did not change at all. There was not the invention of some great new bulldozer. We didn't revolutionize the way we create load bearing beams. No. We convinced ourselves that one of the most non-transferable assets people had was an invaluable commodity so unique that it's possession alone was enough to back the generation of more of it. We basically bought a perpetual motion machine.

We convinced ourselves that we didn't need to actually produce anything in order to be wealthy as long as we just sold our own assets back to ourselves using debt hidden in too obscure a way for our creditors to know what the fuck was going on. We had the brilliant back up plan of using underfunded insurance as a hedge against betting on the impossible. In short, we lied to our fucking selves.

The bubble was centered, appropriately, on absolutely nothing. It wasn't OVERexuberance it was completely BULLSHITexuberance. That's why this crash was so bad. We slashed and burned way more forest than we needed to AND found out the land we'd cleared had toxic soil. I don't know how the fuck this is so hard to see. The ever knowing market bet the farm on a fucking unicorn and now it can't even find a horse to glue a traffic cone on. I guess admitting that would just be too much for some people. Perhaps they're sold on something and just can't let go of the notion that it's more valuable than it is. Brings about new meaning to the phrase "over-invested in the market."

America's Least Useful Blogger on America's Least Useful Appliances

I guess it's like the goths picking on the nerds: You've always gotta find someone/thing a rung down, eh?

There are a lot of useless kitchen products out there. I find it hard, for example, to imagine anyone making quesadillas often enough to justify a quesadilla maker. The electric egg poacher also seems like it demands an improbably high, and frequent, desire for poached eggs, as well as a worrying inability to heat water in a saucepan.

Megan doesn't like quesadillas or poached eggs that much, so neither do you.

But this is absolutely the least useful appliance I have ever seen: the electric martini maker, which can provide them shaken, as well as stirred. If you are not strong enough to either shake, or stir, your martinis, you probably already require a home health aide who should do it for you. If you can lift the bottle to the rim of the cocktail shaker to pour in the gin, you can stir it around a little before you guzzle it.

Megan is an expert on martinis.

Dear Megan,

For future reference, when sharing something funny on the internet, less is more. I have provided this handy template to assist.

-----

Hey, check this out! Wild huh?

<optional short description of link>

-----

'Cause the internet is into the whole brevity thing. Also, you're not that funny.

Love
Toast

PS I'm aware of the ridiculousness of my requesting pithiness, so fuck you you stupid asshole for pointing out my fucking flaws. This is a blog about how much Megan sucks ass not about how much I'm not really any better and should just STFU, stop trying and go kill myself. That is another blog entirely.

Oh, Yeah, Weren't We Getting Someone Fired?

No, we really weren't. But let us dream. My thoughts on the week:

1) Megan doesn't know what a link farm is. It continually amazes me that someone whose ostensible job is to write doesn't even bother to get the basic things right. Link farm is a common phrase, yet she can't be bothered to throw it into google before she starts using it thrice weekly to show us stupid articles.

2) Somehow this hasn't gotten mentioned: Megan is reposting Glenn Beck clips again: Only this time, approvingly! Yes! Of course! When a women says something about Mao and Mother Teresea being her favorite philosophers any reasonable person who knew that Mao hated religious people and Teresea was possibly catholic would think she was being literal. Here's Megan in the comments:

Guys, it was a moronic thing to say. That's all. This does not mean Obama is a communist, etc. It just means that his communications director said something moronic. And it was moronic. Beyond calling Chairman Mao one of her favorite political philosophers, her speech is borderline incoherent.

Guys, just cause we say Megan McArdle should be fucking fired doesn't mean she's incompetent, lazy and stupid. It just means we think she should be fired. I don't know how you could possibly think we're saying there's anything wrong with her just by constantly linking to her disapprovingly.

Later she says:

Matt, the problem with this quote is that it is precisely the attribute she is praising--Mao's indifference to the opinions of others, as well as a pig-headed unwillingness to acknowledge the potential downsides of his actions--that caused the millions of deaths. It's one thing to approvingly quote Roman Polanski on film. It's another thing to approvingly quote him on sexual morality.

Which is a major speaking comprehension fail as the speaker was quite obviously talking about perseverance. Which is cool. I mean, I can't understand Hugh Jackman so I guess Mille is allowed to not understand whatever this woman's name was.

3) And finally for my little morning "Oh, yeah, I should do my job sometime this month" we've got another example of Megan just setting 'em up in her own mind so she can knock 'em down on her blog.

I have to admit, I'm kind of shocked by the number of people willing to advance the theory that political speech done by trade associations is not real political speech, or that it's okay to use the threat of regulatory punishment to shut down political speech just as long as you don't actually seize the printing presses.

How many kinds of fail can we count in here? Well, first I'm kind of shocked that she doesn't link to a single person saying that. Maybe there are some people out there. Next to some unicorns and a pot of gold. Second, we've got the absurd proclamation that Obama is threatening to muzzle the insurance companies, which makes sense if time goes backwards and the study to which she is vaguely alluding happened before Obama decided to take on health care. Third, we have this crazy bum-fuck confusion about what freedom of the presses means, or, rather, what it's paired with ie freedom of fucking speech in general. Guess what doesn't matter? WHO THE FUCK SAYS WHAT! The whole "printing press" bullshit or whatever she's talking about just doesn't make any fucking sense. I believe now we're two out of ten for misinterpreting the bill of rights.

The real hilarity comes with her hypocrisy, though. What is Obama doing other than painting his opponents with the evil obstructionist brush? To be sure, that's a legit crit if you happen to be able to find it, but it's not exactly a new thing for McArdle. You don't have to scroll down very far to find notations of her pointing out how bad brown people are. It's not like she wasn't making up violent anti-war protesters in her brain and threatening to bash their heads in.

And we're done.

Keep Going to the Well

hahahahahahahahaahhaahah:

Dow 10,000!!!

We hit it! Amidst all the excitement, it's worth remembering that if we had just two more fingers, we'd still be waiting for it to hit 20,736.

hahahahahahahahahaha

That one never gets old!

The Dow finally surpassed 36,000 today, restoring faith not only in our economy, but in James Glassman and Kevin Hackett, whose Dow 36,000 became an icon of the tech bubble gone wrong. To be sure, they were 12 years early. But what's 12 years between friends?

Can't you just imagine her typing this with a stupid smirk on her face thinking "Damn, I'm so clever. These guys are lucky to have me around."

How Nobel of Her

Mark Kleiman is half right;

So when the usually intelligent Megan McArdle announces loftily that

it’s kind of ludicrous that anyone is even trying to argue that Barack Obama truly deserves this Nobel Peace Prize

she is, to put it bluntly, talking through her hat.

Megan, sensing the respect of someone slipping, goes classy:

Hmm. Well. Call me crazy, but I think that maybe to earn the Nobel prize, a million dollars, and all the associated prestige, you ought to have made efforts somewhat more heroic than chairing a meeting in which you said that you thought we ought to have fewer nuclear arms--even one in which you said that the US also thought we ought to have fewer nuclear arms.

Yeah! Snarking at someone who calls you usually intelligent! That's great!

But the real question; How disingenuous is McArdle being? The answer: She's being about her usual amount of disingenuous. Ignoring that one could argue "committing" is not "chairing a meeting", we have only to look to Kleinman's next paragraph for something "more than heroic than chairing a meeting."

That’s not to mention the importance of killing the “missile shield” that threatened a new arms race with Russia, or the work for “fraternity between nations” done by making it clear that the United States of America was no longer fighting a “crusade” against al-Islam, or putting an end to the torture regime.

Woah, call me crazy, but I think the president has to do more than end torture, reach out to enemies we've been at war with for eight years and end plans that antagonize Russia in order to be called "peaceful."

You should, I don't know, deliver a deal or something.

Yeah, like why not do something substantial such as getting the Iranians to agree to greater oversight of their nuclear program AND to deliver their enriched uranium to Russia. Do something like that, Obama, and THEN WE CAN TALK!

Not content to have wholly inadequately addressed her opponents claims, she moves on to her magical phantom claims:

As for the notion that this strengthens our hand when dealing with Iran and North Korea, I'm really skeptical that this does anything at all.

You all will be shocked to learn that not only do people hold these views, they are also expressed so frequently and fervently that McArdle doesn't even need to link to a single person who's said anything like that at all.

The leaders of Iran and North Korea do not, to put it mildly, look up to us. They don't want us to think that they're nice, moral people. They want us to think that they are terrifying military forces whose desires must be assuaged.

Wow, that doesn't sound racist at all. It's also completely 100% true because McArdle is a fucking expert in psychology of people she's never met from cultures of which she's only dimly aware and about whom is she extremely biased. Just take it from the person who was right about Saddam's love of WMD's and Putin's love of invading Georgia.

The people of North Korea and Iran don't like us either, but even if you thought that this was likely to have a big impact on their opinion, this would be purely hypothetical, because both countries have very tightly controlled media which will report whatever the leaders want them to think.

Yeah, those hating backward ignorant foreigners. How dare they both HATE US IRRATIONALLY and NOT KNOW ANYTHING ABOUT US! Who do they think they are, Megan McArdle?

If the best you can come up with is that he made some impressive-sounding statements at the UN--well, I think a majority of the world's leaders are equally deserving. I don't see any actual foreign policy scholars advancing the theory that this was a landmark achievement on par with say, SALT or the Camp David accords.

If the best you can do is read only the first sentence or two of someone who calls you an idiot, well, maybe you've proven their point. I mean, that's not on par with throwing salt in your own eye, or trying to book a site at Camp David, but it's pretty fucking dumb.

Looking Back Is So Yesterday

Hey guys, remember when Megan got outraged? Well, she did:

Well, I'm outraged. Also, not a fan of a resurgent Russian empire. I think we should do something about it, not that I think we will. But we could certainly do more than we are, which is nothing.

Oh, yeah, about that imperialist push by the Ruskies...

Tbilisi Started '08 War, but Moscow Also at Fault, EU Finds

Those Russians are so good at empire, they make their future subjugants declare war on them!

Oh, Also, Too

Counting is Even Harder

"What Does Olympia Snow Want?" asks our curious analyst. And, really, who hasn't tried to glean the inner workings of the moderate Republican Senator's brain?

I think what Olympia Snowe wants is not to vote for an unpopular health care bill that pisses off her constituents. She's already the Republican who enabled the stimulus. If she does this, she's going to have to leave the party. The electoral history of Lieberman, Jeffords, and Specter does not indicate that leaving your party for the other side is the gateway to an exciting and rewarding electoral career.

Of those three people who "left" their party, only Lieberman has run for reelection. He won. Additionally, he didn't "leave" his party so much as he was forced out by a loss in the primaries, but whatever.

It's true that going zero-for-zero isn't really "exciting" but it also seems to me to not be very "relevant."

If she leaves the party and Republicans regain the Senate, they will take their revenge.

Huh-doy. And if she doesn't leave the party and Dems gain further ground, she will also be marginalized. Captain Obvious called. He wants his fucking job back. He also wants to punch Megan in the fucking face, but we don't endorse violence here so we're not passing that message along.

The problem is that what she wants--a cheap bill that doesn't either force a bunch of people to buy coverage they can't afford, or leave a bunch of people uninsured--is not possible. I assume that she actually knows this. So her public dithering means one of two things: she has decided to break with her party, and she wants to signal how difficult this decision is; or she has decided to torpedo the hope of busting a filibuster, and wants to signal to her Democratic constituents that she was forced to it by a bad plan. Which is it? Only God and Olympia Snowe know.

The idea that a Republican is being naive or willfully obstructionist is, of course, out of the question. Only Democratic Presidents can do that.

The longer this drags out, the more opportunity there is for something to go wrong. Every time the Republicans force them to take some bad-sounding provision out of the bill, public trust erodes. So the longer she dithers, the less helpful she is to the Democrats. She may be hoping that if she holds out long enough, the Democrats will break ranks and she won't have to make a painful choice.

Love the neutral voice here. "She may be forgoing actually governing for her own political expedience, and I see nothing wrong with that!"

IOKIYAR.

Megan Has Invented Exactly 739593572403 Facts

Our lovely commentor, bulbul, finds a nice little pearl:

I suspect a lot of them were watching the season premier of “So You Think You Can Dance.”
Don't you like the wording she chose? What a weasel - no disrespect to actual weasels.
But let's look at the ratings:
"NBC News Special" (7.31 million viewers, #T2; adults 18-49: 1.6, #T6)
"ABC News Special" (6.86 million viewers, #4; adults 18-49: 1.6, #T6)
"CBS News Special" (5.12 million viewers, #9; adults 18-49: 1.1, #13)

That's 19.29 million people watching the speech, versus
"So You Think You Can Dance" (6.46 million viewers, #6; adults 18-49: 2.6, #2).

It must be nice to be able to rely on your gut so much. Too bad Megan hasn't learned that, like George Costanza (sp?), her gut is reliably wrong.

Such fun. We gotta do something about the fact that you guys are stuck in the cheap seats.

The Fool or the Fool Who Follows Her?

Megan pulls off a joke (I'll generously call it intentional) that actually makes me smile by titling her most recent post "Department of Education." A rare feat indeed, though not as rare as the commentors. (If only)

The post itself is short and stupid, but the real fun is in seeing Megan's fans go wild. When "aMouseforallseasons" is the voice of sanity in your comment thread, you know you're preaching to the choir. The Arkham Choir.

Update:
This is awesome. Alsadius informs us of the various faults of some of our most recent presidents:

Yes, Obama has been a pretty awful President so far. But let's compare him to some of the others elected in the last 50 years:

- Kennedy: Drug-addled fool
- Johnson: Unmitigated asshole
- Nixon: Flagrant criminal
- Carter: Bigger socialist than Obama, with none of the backbone
- GW Bush: Abysmal public speaker

Funnily enough, cross out the "drug" and Reagan had the same faults as Kennedy!

The Most Painful Thing Megan Has Ever Done

She admitted she was wrong!

OK, well, not really. She is almost unequivocal... but... then she equivocates.

So it looks like I got taken, at least in the sense that there's probably no way to come up with an estimate that I would find acceptable

Megan was lied to and swallowed it like a dog eating a pill wrapped in baloney but it doesn't matter because it's impossible to know the actual, right answer. Therefor, Megan could, in theory, be correct.

I'm now adding this to my long list of "dark numbers", with the best available proxy being the global sales of New Chemical Entities. Two thirds of those, not more than three quarters, occur in the United States, versus about a quarter in Europe. You can argue about what the fixed costs are in various places, but as my correspondent implies, given how much cross border activity there is, the problem seems to be indeterminate, so I'll stick with a number we know. This doesn't really change my assessment of the problem, since 2/3 is still pretty overwhelming, but statistics matter.

Statistics matter; That is why Megan bases her argument on statistics that she just fucking makes up on the spot. Statistics are so important that -- if real ones aren't around -- one must substitute fake ones and count on the idiocy of one's readers.

On a side note, the reason I said 80% was a hypothetical in the Washington Post chat is that . . . well, I didn't. I forgot that conversation, and thought the commenter was referring to this post.

Um, huh? I think I know what she's trying to say here but I'll be fucked if that has anything to do with her writing. She seems to be saying that she didn't say that pharma makes 80% of its revenue in the US. She claims, instead, that she said pharma makes 80% of its profits. Frankly that doesn't change a damn thing, but it's interesting to note how nonsensical her defense is, regardless. She claims to have stated that something was a hypothetical because she didn't remember saying it, but if she couldn't remember saying it how did she know that she was talking about profit and not revenue? When someone asks me about something I don't remember saying I don't just wing it and say "Well, really I was referring to the letter "u" and not the pronoun "you." Instead, I say "I don't remember saying that."

These are the perils of typing thousands of words a week, and also, of getting old.

Dang, she's getting old. I know, right? All the 37 (or whatever) year olds I know are all leaving their fucking dentures in their fucking car ashtrays by accident, and shit, so, like, how can we blame her?

Hey Megan, maybe it's time to fucking retire.

Equivalent Megan

Tech Talk:

I'm flying to Florida and I had to tell you about it so badly that I wasted 10 bucks on wifi that I can't use because my laptop sucks. OMG, you can get internet on the plane now!

On Counterproductivity

Let's see if Megan can be a condescending moron:

Let me see if I can make this even simpler:

She shoots! She scores! Condescension in the bag!

1. There is more than one meaning of the word rationing. Economics is a young discipline, and hasn't had the opportunity to nail all its terms down as perfectly as philosophy has. There is a fairly rare technical usage, which refers to any allocation of a scarce good: i.e. "price rationing versus fiat rationing". Then there is the common usage of the term, which refers to a fiat system in which the government uses fiat in order to abrogate the price system and impose a different distribution of the aforementioned scarce goods.

Oh, and she nails the moronity on her second attempt! Look at her conflating "meaning of a word" with "what she was actually arguing." Because, when she said the government rations and private insurance doesn't, she meant technically and wasn't arguing the pros and cons of public/private insurance!

But what's this, Megan has the ball again:

2. The former is a fact. The latter is a mistake.

3. It is no more technically incorrect to use both the common usage and the technical usage in discussing an issue than it would be to use "cost" in both the economist's sense--as any price, non-monetary or monetary, attached to an action--and in the common usage, as "price".

Oh she scores again! Notice how she creates two additional bullets which are clearly part of the first one! An amzing display of trying to make herself look smart and coming off retarded! The whole "making lists is a pretentious dodge to create the illusion of having "points"" bit really makes that tally standout in the annals of being a fucking douche bag!

4. My problem with the latter is that abrogating the price system generally results in a distribution and supply of goods that does not enhance the general welfare, or even, in the long run, the welfare of the people it is supposed to be helping. (See, United Soviet Socialist Republics, economic history of). There is substantial reason to believe that rationing in World War II led to sub-optimal material outcomes, whatever its moral or spiritual benefits.

Oh, and she's on another fast break! She uses the word abrogate and... YES! SHE FAILS TO USE IT CORRECTLY! BEAUTIFUL 3-POINT PLAY. THE CROWD IS GOING FUCKING WILD! Wait, the refs are reviewing the play and... THEY HAVE DECIDED TO AWARD MCARDLE QUINTUPLE POINTS FOR A SENSELESS REFERENCE TO THE USSR AS WELL AS THE SLIPPERY SLOPE FALLACY! WHAT A DAY FOR TEAM GLIBERTARIAN!

5. That said, Mr. Holbo is mistaken about the common usage. Rationing does not have to control 100% of a relevant good in order to constitute rationing, and indeed, no government ever succeeded in doing so (or for that matter, tried particularly hard). For example, during World War II, people who ate in restaurants could get around some rationing requirements in the US, and I believe also in Britain. Taxicabs got preferred access to gasoline. Both allowed the wealthy to "opt out" of the system. Yet I hope we can both agree that rationing during World War II was in the common sense, rationing.

Now here's an interesting gambit. McArdle seems to be making an actual argument based on actual facts. Let's see what the refs think of her examples and the call is..... IT'S GOOD! Yes, the refs seem to agree that since eating out and taking a taxi are luxuries that don't constitute the majority of consumption and easily COULD HAVE been rationed at the time if the government felt it necessary, they are stupid examples! The refs all agree that, while a 100% may not be the needed level for true rationing to occur, it is certainly less than the 10% or fewer of people who will be covered under any "public option" that will most likely not be passed due to opposition from right-leaning democrats! Furthermore, the refs are awarding her another bonus for continuing to fail to grasp that providing insurance isn't rationing because it is removed from the actual providers of service!

DO YOU BELIEVE IN MIRACLES? YES!

My New Favorite Comment

From the post on financial regulation:

I think the Colonel should stick to making chicken, as one does not "ask" for mafia protection, by fucking definition.

A bird in the hand... (???)

Pullin' a Goldberg

Shorter Megan:

Correction: Community Rating Turns Out to Be Even Worse Than I Thought:
The fact that I don't know what I'm talking about is central to my point.