Truly Easy

Shorter Megan McArdle:

TBogg Endorses Truthiness

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

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.

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.

Biting the Hand that Pats You

Short Megan McArdle:

Holy shit, my commentors are such knee jerk conservative sycophants that even I can't take it anymore. Fucking morons with the temerity to disagree with me.

I'm not sure which is more hilarious; that Megan took this long to realize that The Big Fat Idiot is openly racist, or that her following thinks that Limbaugh would actually go after a conservative trope, let alone be sophisticated enough to do so with satire.

Update: New words, all hers:

And yes, I think that the people who are claiming that Rush is inciting a race war or a revolution are also humorless twits.

Huh-Ha! The imaginary liberal response is just as bad as the actual Limbaugh thing that happened! It's a tie!

Update II: I don't know how I missed the genius that is Megan saying "I could not possibly like Rush Limbaugh less" one second and then claiming that accusing him of "inciting a race war" is beyond the pale the next, but there you have it. Once again she is stupid on so many levels that no mere mortal can keep track of them all.

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.

But... But... What About PROCEDURE?!?!?

Did you know that Megan blogs on senate procedural matters? Neither did I!

Jonathan Zasloff's defense of using budget reconciliation for health care?

First, Ezra's assertion that the reconciliation rules ban health care reform is at best unproven and contrary to the plain language of the law. Those rules bar putting things in a reconciliation bill that have only an "incidental" effect on the budget. But, say, prohibiting discrimination against pre-existing conditions would have more than an incidental effect. Such a move, for example, could save billions from Medicaid, because it would allow people to get insurance in the private market who might otherwise have to go to Medicaid.

Hey, Megan, what's reconciliation? 'Cause you might wanna provide a little bit of background on topics you've NEVER FUCKING MENTIONED BEFORE. Oh, wait, but I wrote that with the false premise that Megan wants anyone to understand her rather than hear just herself talk. My bad.

As far as I know, Medicaid eligibility is generally restricted to those who are pretty low income[sic]. And[sic] the waiver-program[sic] premia[sic] (Intellectual fail.) are usually lower than any private entity would charge, even in Europe (Which is not a country.). With community rating (WTF is community rating? Oh, there I go again!), the prices of private insurance[sic] will go up even further. What the heck is Zasloff talking about (NOT the price of private insurance)? How many people does he really think are quiting[sic] their jobs and deliberately impoverishing themselves in order to qualify for Medicaid, rather than earning an income which can support the $350 or so per person that gets charged for an HMO in a community-rated[sic] state like New York (Which is also not a country.) with generous mandatory benefits (Not sure if this deserves a sic, but fuck, I thought I wrote sentences that had too many long clauses)? I'm sure that there are enough for an enterprising New York Times reporter to write a trend piece, but enough to make a noticeable dent in the budget? The best ways to get Medicaid are to go on welfare, or disability. Both of which imply insufficient income to buy insurance. Or substantial fraud. (Welfare and disability imply substantial fraud?)

Italics mine, of course.

Megan doesn't seem to realize that there are, in fact, disabled people with money who simply cannot get insured because of their preexisting disability. What a shock, her failing to realize that some people's problems aren't their own fault. She also mocks the idea of impoverishing oneself to get into Medicaid, which is something many people do when they learn they are terminally ill.

My favorite bit of cognitive dissonance, though, is buried in the middle. Notice how she says that community rating raises prices and then subsequently says that its existence in NY is what allows people to get insurance when they might not be otherwise able. Implicit in how SHE chooses to frame the problem is the worry of what the cost is to the comfortable and NOT what the worry of the cost to the struggling person with the preexisting condition.

Oh, and did I miss any "sic"'s?

Bundles of Stupid

Making a Bundle Out of iTunes:

Well, she's got the capitalization down. Now only if she could make some sense.

I suspected that this was some sort of an elaborate troll, but no, this chap at PC inciter actually wants to break up Apple's monopoly over the iTunes store, the iPhone, and the iPod.

What monopoly, you may ask, and indeed, I did. Apple has a monopoly over these things only in the trivial sense that P&G has a monopoly over Charmin, and I have a monopoly over the chocolate cake I baked last night.

Megan is right, although the concept of her harping on someone else for misusing a word is pretty much the best Allaanniiss Mmoorriisseettee song, ever.

Well, I'd like to get takeout from Ray's Pizza and enjoy it in the stunning ambience of Cafe des Artistes. If the waiter refuses to let me do so, is that a monopoly?

No, that's what we call "bundling". Most people hate bundling. That's because most people are under the impression that they would pay less if things were unbundled. Sometimes this is true. But if you forced Cafe des Artistes to "unbundle" the location from the food, that doesn't mean I'd be able to enjoy a cut rate meal in a beautiful location. They'd just charge me $100 for the seat.

Well, yes, because they don't currently charge you for the seat, only the food. The seat is implied with the purchase. Totally like iTunes, which gives its phones and mp3 players away for free and then charges you only for the music. What an awesome analogy. It only fails almost entirely.

Similarly, people who want their cable unbundled because they only want to pay for a few channels are under the delusion that they could save huge bucks by cutting off the Golf Channel. But cable companies don't save any money when you drop the Golf Channel, because they stream all the channels down the coax at once.

Through a series of pipes and tubes..... O_o ???? ¿que?

I hate it when she gets technical.

Indeed, it may cost them money; the Golf Channel now has fewer potential viewers, and hence falling ad revenues, and they have to hassle around with custom packages for every customer, which is labor intensive, and thus extremely expensive (and also more likely to break).

Potential viewers, the dream of every advertising man. I love that she calls cajoling people into buying shit they don't need "labor."

Like cable, iTunes is mostly fixed cost, which means that unbundling would make their profit fall much faster than their revenue.

This is such utter horseshit and completely contrary to Apple's entire business model, which is to make things user stupid friendly and force brand loyalty down people's throats. Then, when they're scared to even look at a PC, the consumers are fed iLife. Give all your money to Apple. We'll be you for you!

Megan is too stupid to know about the plethora of other mp3 players, online music libraries and internet phones that are much cheaper and don't force you to buy your fucking groceries through the iMart. iPhone will make plenty of fucking money on its own, and iTunes will still be profitable if you can play that song about rain on your wedding day that bought from it on a fucking "Chocolate" (or whatever's the rage these days). See, selling things makes money even if people don't buy other things. iTunes is mostly in business because people like the iPod and it was the first one on the scene with a presence. That doesn't make getting rid of iTunes a catastrophe for Apple and it sure as fuck doesn't make Apple products the fucking pinnacle of consumer satisfaction anymore than Morton's salt really is the fucking salt of earth. It doesn't "just work." It's just fucking there and people don't think that they really have a choice.

Crap. She Got Into the Coke Again.

Two multi-paragraph posts today. This portends a week or two of prolific output. I'm sure brad and M are with me when I say "FUUUUCCKKKKK." I really need to find a new way to screw off at work.

Let's see what Megan's ass has to say about Medicare today. I'm sure it's lovely.

Medicare's Mythical Administrative Cost Savings

The title of this post is going to make some of my readers very angry. Medicare has lots of administrative cost savings, they will say. This may be so. But I mean mythical in another sense: there's ultimately no way to prove or disprove these amazing savings. The problem is indeterminate.

Angry? Not so much. I feel more a sense of pity. This is basically Megan's every-post about something she doesn't like. It's old hat. It's like getting angry over the need to brush your teeth. We're used to her stupid shit by now.

Jon Cohn, who I respect greatly, spends a lot of time on the money and time that insurance companies put into denying claims. This is undoubtedly true. But I have two caveats. First, some of that effort is a good thing: without it, there would be fraud.

I know, right. Whenever I'm in lab I constantly skip doing experiments to avoid having done experiments that didn't work. It's a great, efficient, time saving maneuver.

No, not the automatic denials so many insurers are fond of, and I'm not defending. But Medicare should probably spend a lot more effort rooting out excessive billing. And I don't know what percentage of claims denial consists of refusing to line the pockets of doctors and labs.

Medicare should totally spend more time doing something Megan doesn't know how much time it spends doing. Remember, when presented with the Hobson's choice of catching fraud or making sure sick people get the care they need, it's all about catching the fraudsters. It's far more important to punish the guilty rather than not punish the innocent. That's the opposite of the foundation of our whole legal system!

But the more important point is that I doubt this is the majority of their administrative costs, or even the difference between their administrative costs and Medicare's.

Oh, she doubts something. I'm sure she has a good reason for that.

I'm not trying to justify the bullshit automatic claims denial, but that's not actually a very costly process: a hospital submits a bill, they deny it, you yell at them. Nor is refusing to cover people with pre-existing conditions, or any of the other multifarious complaints of single-payer advocates.

Actually, it is costly to pay someone to answer calls from irate customers whose dialysis claim was rejected despite their lack of functioning kidneys. It also costs the customer and or doctor money to make the call. Finally, it costs the insurance provider money when they finally pay the fucking claim that they improperly rejected in the first palce. Other than those costs, though, it's totally costless.

As to the mention of pre-existing conidtions. Brilliant. See, you can't say that private health insurance costs more and doesn't cover people cause obviously it costs nothing to the people who aren't covered. Nyah!

Rather, private insurers have costs that Medicare doesn't have within the agency. Private insurers bill. Medicare does too, but the IRS has its own budget--hell, its own courts--which don't show up on Medicare's balance sheet.

Anyone who can tell me where the "rather" came from, what the fact that insurance companies "bill" matters, or what the fuck the IRS has to do with anything gets free health insurance that doesn't cover any pre-existing or post-existing conditions.

My guess would be that these explicit costs are still lower than Medicare's. But then there are implicit costs to government fiat that markets don't have. As Tyler Cowen points out, taxation has deadweight losses, and Medicare is a tax on employment, which is something we are particularly anxious not to suppress right now.

Guessing, huh? Well, heh, at least she admits it.

Also, dead weight loss is the argument against everything and it's totally awesome. Unlike medicare savings, it can totally be proven either way.

The final point is that while people commonly think of administrative costs as "wasted", in fact, they are an important part of the market system.

Well, yeah, if your goal is to be an asshole and not pay for people's health insurance, she's right as cancer.

As Alex Tabarrok points out, and I have myself from time to time (o_O ~ed), many of the arguments in favor of national health care are literally socialist. And no, I am not using that term to apply to "anyone who is in favor of redistribution" or "government programs". But consider the following common arguments:

Cover your nose people, here comes a very shitty list.

* National health care will be cheaper because we will reduce administrative overhead
* National health care will reduce wasteful competition in the form of me-too drugs
* National health care will reduce wasteful competition in the form of advertising and other marketing expenses
* National health care will allow us to rationally distribute care to where it does the most good rather than the current messy, wasteful hodge-podge
* National health care will use resources for production instead of profits
* National health care will achieve economies of scale in purchasing and record-keeping
* People will not overuse free goods because there are hard limits to desired consumption

Anyone who can figure out how the first three items are socialist gets a free copy of "Liberal Fascism." Anyone who can figure out why economies of scale at Walmart are capitalism deluxe but economies of scale for health care are evil socialism gets a free lunch with Megan McArdle. Anyone who can explain what the fuck the last point even means gets a free psychiatric evaluation.

Anyone who can explain to Megan that the liberal's goal is much less about "streamlining health care" and much more about "sick people not dying on the street" gets to be fucking president. of the earth. forever.

But why were they discredited? That list looks really, really good on paper, even to my jaded libertarian eyes. A lot of the answer lies in the reason that we don't like monopolies--even though that list is just as true of monopolies as it is of the government.

Right. That's why the liberal idea of having the government pay for health care control all service provision and product development is so silly. God, I'm glad Megan's around.

My critics will want me to explain why, then, Europe can do it cheaper. The answer is threefold. First, most European nations have better governance than we do--the American political system is a Public Choice disaster. Second, they pay people less money in a way that's hard to replicate here (and even if it wasn't, would be a one time savings that wouldn't check the rate of growth). Third, we're still driving quite a bit of product innovation. Our messy, organic, wasteful, unfair, irrational system allows experimentation, and they cherry pick the best results. If we stopped doing this, their system would stop looking so good.

First, maybe if idiots like our muse would stop voting for people like, oh say, George W Bush, to pick a random example, we might get some decent governance. Second, oh, it's hard to replicate. Well, that explains why several countries in Europe have all replicated it. I guess Europe is a country, now. I thought that that kind of thing only happened in Africa. Canada is also apparently in Europe now. Third, there are in fact new products made in Europe, you stupid, American exceptionalist piece of shit.

Wow Indeed

In all of its glory:

Wow. Just . . . wow.

The basic point is that the recession of 2001 wasn't a typical postwar slump, brought on when an inflation-fighting Fed raises interest rates and easily ended by a snapback in housing and consumer spending when the Fed brings rates back down again. This was a prewar-style recession, a morning after brought on by irrational exuberance. To fight this recession the Fed needs more than a snapback; it needs soaring household spending to offset moribund business investment. And to do that, as Paul McCulley of Pimco put it, Alan Greenspan needs to create a housing bubble to replace the Nasdaq bubble.

As Arnold Kling says, there's a paragraph I'm sure glad I didn't write.

Title of her post "Paul Krugman's Prophetic Prescience." The quoted paragraph is from a 2002 Krugman article.

By the way, murder happens in America. I say that because, obviously, I totally endorse murder like all the fucking time.

If only Kruggles had found that recession around here somewhere.

My President Spends Irresponsibly Because He Loves Me so Much!

Austan Goolsbee recently complained on television that they're only embroiled in the auto mess because the Bush administration "kicked the can down the road". Keith Hennessy, who was in the Bush administration, says that's not quite how it happened: the administration proposed a more definitive resolution process, but the Obama transition team, which wanted more control over the process, declined.

I though Bush was a manly man? What did he care for what the sissy Obama thinks? I call shenanigans!

BTW, thanks for the links, Meggles. No links for you, either!

It seems to me that the Bush administration could hardly have resolved things any more quickly than they did; restructuring a company takes time.

Hrmmmm.... ok. I guess that's why Obama took a whole 5 months to start the process. He had a lot of free time.

If only someone could have noticed a year ago that GM was in trouble, maybe Bush II could have sprung into action! All of us were fucking SHOCKED that the car companies had to ask for money in December! NO ONE COULD HAVE PREDICTED!!!

But perhaps my old professor was voicing my secret suspicion: that the Bush administration only gave the automakers loans because they wanted to leave the incoming Democrats with an ugly, expensive, mess on their hands. If Bush had had a few more years in office, he might simply have let the automakers fail.

Ohhhhhh! I see why you said something incredibly stupid, now! It's because the stupid thing you're about to say is going to look smart in comparison! It's also great how she suggests that a real expert agrees with her as long as you read between his lines! Now her argument totally carries the weight of a very important person, if you squint right.

But this way, he kept Michigan competitive(Michigan stayed competitive?!?!?! More like on a fucking lifeboat! -ed.), and forced the Democrats to spend huge, unpopular sums on a fairly naked bailout of a key labor constituent.

OMG! Is she saying that a Republican engaged in dirty politicking without regard for the good of the country? Thanks God she blew the whistle! By implication! Months later! While complaining about something else!

Of course, what really happened is that the auto-bailout was financed by the White House under Bush II who was NOT A FUCKING DEMOCRAT! Megan rolls stupid wheels within stupid wheels!

That would imply, of course, that like me, my former professor thinks GM should have been allowed to fail.

Similarly, my opposition to the Iraq war proves that I was right about universal health care! See, I was against killing people for no reason and it turned out to be a bad idea so naturally the solution was actually to send them to a doctor. QED, BITCHES!

Wait, what? I seriously don't know if anything here makes any sense. Megan is so stupid it blares at you like a neon light. Then you look at it closer and it's even stupider! Then you realize that there's another level of stupid beneath all that and before long it's twisted all around itself in some game of "Stupid Twister" and you have no idea whose stupid foot goes with whose stupid arm and you're like OMG WTF I NEED TO LAY DOWN! So, like, whatever, fuck it. I'm taking a nap.

Random Bit: I finally got around to looking up the actual "rules" for capitalizing titles. Turns out Megan was wrong in many ways, but not all of the ones I've previously noted. Whoops. I may think it looks bad to capitalize "are" but that don't make it wrong!

Up to the Hilt in Missing the Point

"Why is This Bubble Different From All Other Bubbles?" Megan asks. Someone wrote a story about how wealth creation should be centered around making actual wealth instead of cardboard houses hours away from any urban center and Megan goes all "That doesn't make any sense! Let me put on my thinking cap and think a hole through their argument!" Well, there's a hole in something. We do, as usual, marvel at her decision to properly capitalize the title. She does do brief flings with minimal competence.

James Surowiecki has a very interesting column arguing that this bubble was different because unlike the earlier banking booms, there was no point to the wild spending. The bubble didn't bring us railroads and electrification; it brought us . . . houses. Lots and lots and lots of houses.

I'm of two minds on this. On the one hand, I think that this is an interesting point. On the other hand, of course, the bubble in the 1920s was not limited to electric stocks, or even stocks. Lots of money was wasted on railroads, Florida real estate, mining concerns, and many other unrelated phenomena. And if you look at the history of the 1920s, you see the same thing we see in the 1998-2008 era: markets awash in too much money.

This is a stellar fucking point. I'm sure Surowiecki (Whose name can be only cut and pasted, not spelled correctly on a whim) was thinking as he wrote this article that all previous bubbles were based around only one stock. It's like those crazy people that say crack had something to do with the crime rates of the 80's. What they don't realize is that other, non-drug related crimes were also committed in the 80's so crack obviously had nothing to do with anything.

Megan seems to fully fail to comprehend the expression "irrational exuberance" and can not understand why a reasonable increase in one sector might fuel reckless optimism in all sectors. All booms show markets expanding rapidly in many areas. The question is what fucking PRECIPITATES that expansion. When it's the advent of the personal computer, well, it's a bit less retarded than when it's the belief that houses will double in price every 10 years no matter what.

So I wonder if there isn't a sort of post-hoc, ergo propter hoc reasoning to these "explanations" of the previous booms and busts. A market bubbling over wtih too much credit will end up plowing a lot of money into some technology or industry which ends up being really, really important twenty years later. (The electric revolution continued, surprisingly rapidly, in the 1930s). We look back and interpret the bubble as having been "about" that technology. But at the time, when it's not obvious what the big winner is going to be, it just looks like a giant mess.

That last little bit is almost certainly how the people who hired Megan are feeling right about now, assuming they feel things.

The Dickipedia pages for her little foray in the dead language says this:

Post hoc ergo propter hoc, Latin for "after this, therefore because (on account) of this", is a logical fallacy (of the questionable cause variety) which states, "Since that event followed this one, that event must have been caused by this one."

So either she's arguing that it was a coincidence that rapid expansions preceded booms and were concomitant with the introduction of technology that radically increased productivity or she doesn't know what the fuck post hoc blah de blah means or when to properly invoke it. That is, she is not arguing that what goes up must come down, but rather coming down is a naturally occuring phenomenon which happens without warning, regardless of height. Things flat on the ground have been known to come down spontaneously all the fucking time. While there is apparent correlation between being up and then coming back down, this does not imply causation. It is certainly possible to come down without having first attained some height above the ground. Ipso facto QED E pluribus unum, BITCH!

I Vaguely Implied To You So!

Megan wants to know if there's a doctor in the house. She hints (but does not link) to an NYT article (presumably this) about a shortage of doctors. She then modestly states "Gee, where have I heard this before?" Luckily, she didn't forget to link to herself.

The link is to a post "Is there a better way?" which attempts to address this comment:

You're a long way from establishing your critical point, focusing only on the downsides of unionism to productivity. What about the downsides of focusing only on the next quarter's return? Any individual corporation would be best served by a return to servitude (company towns, anyone?). The system as a whole may well be better served by having a systematic counterweight to maximizing short-term profits.

Just curious. Are you paid on a piece-work basis or do you draw a salary? Given what you do here, shouldn't you be paid on a piecework basis?

As you think about that, remember that there are other values in this world than maximizing short-term productivity, like treating people with dignity. Who knows, maybe the people who get paid a little more can actually afford to buy the products that the economy generates.

Strangely, it doesn't mention health care at all.

I think she's patting herself on the back for saying this in reply (amongst a host of other "points."):

On the fourth point, this is a silly canard. On an economy level, we cannot produce more by paying workers more, any more than you can increase the height of your house by calling the basement the first floor. The amount of stuff everyone has is determined (more or less) by the productive capacity of the economy. You can redistribute that stuff between people, and you can change the mix of stuff that gets made. But you cannot make more of it by changing the nominal price of labor. The only way to get more stuff as a society is to improve our productive capacity, mostly by research and capital investment.

Which is, of course, total fucking bullshit. If we pay people who do useless shit like being lawyers a shit-ton and our productive members nothing, then we will produce less. Also, she isn't talking about fucking health care. She's stating a simplistic Econ 101 principle that applies TO THE ENTIRE ECONOMY and not A SPECIFIC PROFESSION. Naturally, it bears only a passing relation to the real world like all simplistic Econ 101 principles.

So, this is Megan's life these days. She finds a current topic vaguely relevant to some bullshit econo-crap she has recited previously in an entirely unrelated context and we're all supposed to be like "ZOMG, how does she predict these things?!?!?!??!"

Gather round all and listen to the great Nutstradamus. When you pay CEOs a shit ton of money to account for only stock holder considerations, then they will do things that may cause great harm to non-stock holders. Next time a large corporation cuts a corner and causes significant harm to random people, be sure to check back here to see me saying "Gee, where have I heard that before?"

On to Megan's "points" about health care.

The core problem is that we don't actually have a ton more doctors and nurses. (...) But when I look at the numbers, I don't see all that much room to believe that getting rid of the AMA would let a thousand flowers bloom. In 2008, 42,000 people applied to medical school, and 18,000 enrolled.

Hm, well, I see about 24,000 people's worth of wiggle room, myself. I also see that the focus of the NYT article is a lack of primary care doctors, not total doctors. It briefly mentions a lack of specialists but only cites examples of people having trouble getting access to them in rural areas -- an entirely different story.

Another problem is that a teaching hospital is a hard thing to construct--given how much training doctors need, we won't do that overnight. Teaching hospitals are very expensive, and receive heavy government subsidies. Obviously, we could increase the number of doctors by some amount, but it wouldn't take care of the supply problem.

No! What will we do?! Not "very" expensive and "heavy" government subsidies! That sounds "really" hard! We can only increase doctors by "some" amount! That clearly won't be enough!

It's more reasonable to note that reimbursement structures are creating an undersupply of primary care physicians, compared to the number of specialists.

Right, which is why the article focuses on that. I like how she destroys a strawbaby and then takes her "opponent's" actual argument as her own.

We reimburse for procedures, not wellness, so surgeons are well paid and GPs aren't.

For someone who is an "economist" you'd think she would understand that we always reimburse for "things" rather than "intangible bullshit."

First of all, thanks to previous generations of these reimbursement policies, the AMA is dominated by specialists. It's a democratic organization, and there are more specialists than GPs, so guess who wins? They will launch an all-out war against any politician who changes the reimbursement policy, and the politician will lose, because they can't fight ads featuring sad, sick, telegenic grannies.

Don't you love how when it comes to things like health care she's so pragmatic, always addressing the political reality rather than any flaws in that reality? I love it almost as much as I love how thoroughly she ignores those same realities when talking about things like invading countries, destroying medicare/social security etc.

Second of all, it's actually really, really hard to pay GPs well, at least in the context of cutting overall costs. Note that private insurers, who are presumably not attempting to ingratiate themselves with the AMA, also reimburse procedures, not wellness.

I must be atypically smart because I can think of a million and one things that might be easy to do and involve paying GPs more money. One of them involves handing them some money. The rest are even more complicated. Also, procedures are given more money because they cost more. Specialists take as profit a certain percentage of that higher cost. Naturally they are paid more. This has fuck all to do with "wellness" or "paying for procedures" or whatever. It's a fucking consequence of everything in capitalism. There is more money to be made per capita in high cost goods. Whoops! I'm getting into advanced economics here which is over our poor woman's head.

Pay for office visits, and you will get a lot of unnecessary office visits. As David Cutler once told me, it's no coincidence that health care and education are the two fields where outcomes are hardest to monitor, and where costs are growing uncontrollably.

No, the first is only true if the doctor's are struggling to fill their schedules. If they can already fill them with legitimate office visits, they won't prescribe extraneous ones.

The second is, again, completely irrelevant to the topic at hand. GPs don't provide "more wellness" than other doctors. They just provide different services which aren't be funded as highly.

Nor can you simply slash specialty reimbursements as a way of herding people into general practice, because med school applications are already declining; they're down 3.5% since 2001. Doctors are not, by and large, altruists who dream of living on a GS-13 wage. Nor can I blame them.

But we're only enrolling 40% of applicants, and there are major opportunities for overhauls such as increasing care from less trained workers such as LPNs. As for wages, my father is a psychiatrist; one of the lowest paid branches of medicine. He probably doesn't know what the fuck GS-13 is, but I'm sure he's making more than it. He's not complaining about his pay. Frankly, I'd rather not have doctors around who are in it for the money. If you only care about money, then you will do what is profitable rather than what produces "wellness." Naturally, Megan doesn't blame them for that.

FMM Wins the Lottery-Megan McArdle Discusses Torture

Update:Just to be clear for anyone who might second guess; yes Megan was not originally anti-torture.

Megan's talking about torture. Read the post or just use your imagination. It's all the same.

I've long said that we shouldn't waste time arguing that torture doesn't work. For one thing, the evidence for those arguments seems empirically shaky, especially since many people employing them insist on arguing that torture basically never works, rather than that it doesn't work very often and therefore has a bad cost-benefit ratio. For another, arguing that something doesn't work isn't necessarily an argument for not doing it--it could just as easily be an argument for improving our technique. And if advances in brain scanning research let us develop a reliable lie detector, as seems possible in the relatively near future, then torture will work very, very well.

If that happens, we're in a nasty spot. Most people who make this argument do not, in fact, care whether torture works. They would still be every bit as much against it if waterboarding worked perfectly. Yet when they argue about whether torture works, they're conceding that torture's effectiveness is relevant to the question of whether or not we should engage in it.

(...)

Thus I think it is much safer to keep arguments about torture on solid moral ground: we shouldn't torture because it's wrong.

Megan's stupidity checklist:

Claim that opponent's arguments are invalidated by evidence she makes no attempt to cite: Check.

Claim that even if opponent's arguments are right, they are still wrong because of something that hasn't ever happened but could conceivably happen in a fantasy world that she periodically visits: Check.

Claim that opponent's response to counter arguments of her side undermines opponent's own arguments because their position is not based around her presumptions: Check.

Statement about her positions which matches none of her arguments and is clearly designed only to make her seem like less of a monster (Fat chance, bean pole): Check.

Oh, and, uh, dear, the people who supported torture don't get to become the "we" who are opposed to it later on. It's like how you don't get to be an Obama supporter when you never say anything positive about him, ever.

She closes with a long blockquote to which she offers no commentary (Check!). You can read it yourself, if you're looking for one of the lamest anti-torture arguments ever. Needless to say, the guy who wrote it is as shallow as you'd expect from someone that gets linked to by Megan.

He claims that the non-torturers won WWII (I guess the Soviets lost?) so torture doesn't work. He doesn't really back that up with any evidence of course, which is hilarious given how easily the argument can be made -- provided one makes even a cursory attempt to learn about spying during WWII. The espionage successes of WWII are almost certainly the best examples of how good intelligence can be without coercion. By the end of the war, German espionage in the UK was completely co-opted. Many historians believe there wasn't a single German spy that wasn't compromised to the point of uselessness, or an outright double agent. A man in Spain actually completely fabricated a network of English spies and convinced the Germans that it was authentic. He then used his imagined network to feed them false information throughout the war. There wasn't a single piece of information the Germans were getting through back channels that wasn't either wrong, or provided intentionally by the English.

This is one of the principle reasons that D-day was successful. Misinformation kept German reserves away from the actual landings because they believed they were only feints for the "real" landings coming at other locations. Naturally, these same double agents made gathering intelligence on the Germans relatively easy. It's pretty much a classic example of how easy it is to attract people to your side when your opponents are complete monsters. But of course, why would we ever want to win the hearts and minds when we've got so many bombs?

The Intelligence Age Gap

Oh, Megan, you're so old and wise. Why, we need only look at your latest insightful piece about what it was like back in your day. From "The capitalist age gap", in response to Matty-Y saying the post office actually does a good job of hand delivering letters door to door for 40 cents:

I suspect that the real problem here is that Matt does not remember what the Post Office was like before FedEx and email--before, in short, the salutary effects of capitalist competition had made it clear that the organization had better shape up if anyone who worked for it wanted to continue enjoying their dizzyingly boring, but steady and lavishly benefitted, jobs. Or what the phone company was like before there were cell phones and long distance competition.

Megan, you're 34 32 47 36. Matt is 27. Matt remembers when there wasn't email. Matt remembers the time before cell phones. FedEx was founded in 1998. UPS has been around since 1907. Email wasn't commonplace until about the turn of the century. WHAT IN GOD'S FUCKING HELL ARE YOU FUCKING TALKING ABOUT YOU FUCKING DIMWIT?

Beyond that, what the fuck does FedEx have to do with anything? Last I checked, zero fucking people put letters in envelopes and have them sent FedEx. Matt was talking about fucking letter service, not packages. His point was that the postal service has been cheaply and reliably picking up and delivering letters door to door for-fucking-ever. That is just TRUE. Fucking TRUE. All the fucking pro-business masturbating about how it was only FedEx's competition that made USPS able to deliver letters is bullshit. And the idea that email, by providing competition, actually improved the post office? Are you retarded? Postage has skyrocketed since email became wide spread because people are sending FAR fewer letters. I know I'm just a lowly 26 year old, but even I remember when a stamp cost a fucking quarter. This of course, has nothing to do with any competence/incompetence on the part of the post office but is just a natural result of technological advancement.

And the phone company... THE FUCKING PHONE COMPANY??!!?!? Yeah, right, cause the entire communications industry is just a streamlined orgasm of reliable products and friendly costumer service. I constantly hear my friends gushing about how wonderful it is to be anally raped by their choice of, what maybe six different cell providers. Some of the nicer cell companies even use LUBE these days for only 80 MILLION DOLLARS A MONTH (plus tax)! WOOO-HOOO! Why, I had a friend whose phone actually went four whole days without breaking one time. He was so thrilled with the wonderful life that capitalism had brought him that he sent Verizon and extra 50 dollars and an offer for a blow-job any time they want, just for being so extra fucking special.

For fuck's sake, the woman, you complain endlessly about every minor inconvenience in your world, and now you're trying to argue that things were even worse 15 years ago? God, you bitch about trivial shit all the fucking time now. I'd hate to think about what spending time with you 15 years ago was like.

8 Reasons to Hope the Megan is Never Really Trying to Procreate, Or: Finally, Some Good News

Megan's got a triple dose of dumb up today, but let's start with the good news. I'd like everyone to know that it is now 100% guar-un-TEED that we will avoid a depression. I know this, obviously, because Megan is convinced that we're in one already.

My reasoning for thinking of this as a depression, rather than a recession: roughly, that we don't understand how to get in or out of it.
(...)
This kind of perfect financial storm is a rarer bird, and no one has plausibly claimed to have mapped the way out yet.

Megan is possibly the only person on earth who claims that we don't know what's going on. I've read at least a dozen articles about the causes of this recession, and most of them are in agreement (except for the crazy bastards blaming the black people). Megan can't be bothered to acknowledge them, however, because that would expose her readers to the idea that overly free markets played a role in this calamity andwecan'thavethatnowcanwe?

Nope, instead it's just some "perfect storm" of three things coming together in an unprecedented fashion. Megan doesn't know what those three things are, but somehow she knows that they're there. I guess that's just the Catholicism in her, that faith in three undefined but all controlling entities. Who cares, though? As I mentioned, Megan thinks we're in a depression which means next quarter will show a rapid turnaround. You're welcome.



Also on the docket today,-because she wants us to.... uh... something? I don't know, maybe just show us that she reads The New Yorker-she links to this piece, an intelligent insight into the minds of a neurotic idiot that I couldn't be bothered to finish. The author trenchantly describes the fact that she's delusional and has spent herself needlessly into huge debt whilst being not very gainfully employed in order to furnish herself a certain lifestyle. A lifestyle that she appears to have never actually evaluated before sitting down to pen this 1000 word ode to her poor life skills. It's a real thinker piece, or I'm sure it gets to be one by the end that I got far too bored to reach.



Megan's most recent post once again makes us all thankful that she never procreated. Actually, maybe I wish she had as it'd have been hard for her to become a shitty hack blogger ruining a perfectly good magazine while serving time for child neglect. On errands:

If you are a towing a child (and his gargantuan supply of diapers), it is much easier to bind him tightly into a car seat than manhandle him onto the bus.

Megan's idea of motherhood; dragging children by their ears while carrying around 50 diapers and strapping them to car seats with knots that make their arms turn blue. What human thinks babies shit "a gargantuan" number of times per day?

And indeed, whenever I write anything at all in praise of city living, I am contemptuously informed that I only like it because I don't have kids.

Hmm, and yet somehow you know all about how hard it is to raise them...?!?!?!!?!?!?!?!?!? And for fuck's sake, Megan actually swallows that bullshit parents say about it being "easier" to raise kids in the suburbs? Um, no, parents do that so their children don't have to sit next to any black kids in school, not because they like forcing their child to be utterly dependent on them until driving age rather than until they're old enough to read a map. She even acknowledges that in her next paragraph:

But this is not, really, a very good argument against city living. Most people spend the majority of their lives these days neither being nor having small children. And small children are the ones that make suburban living preferable. Older children are much easier to deal with in a city, because after age eleven or so, they no longer need to soak up hours of Mom's time being ferried around.

She shoots down her own arguments now... is that progress?

That's not to say that we should force the suburbanites into the city, either. To each his own. But the mere fact that something is not convenient for toddlers, or their guardians, does not ipso facto mean we should discard it in favor of something that better pleases the Playskool set.

Right, civil engineering is so nanny state. I mean, Megan's all for pricing negative externalities into things so long as that means no one has to actually make any of the sacrifices (like moving out of the suburbs) that would be required to actually mitigate those externatlities. And what the fuck is that last sentence supposed to mean? Now she's arguing against the suburbs? Wasn't her introduction in defense of them? What the fuck is this woman blathering about? I swear, she takes a straight jacketed stroll through la-la land and calls it a coherent analysis. She doesn't even know what a fucking thesis is!

I really don't understand the people that think she's any kind of intelligent. I think she basically got her audience by giving a bunch of libertarian dorks a boner over the idea of a "Jane Galt" and has just been coasting on that ever since. In the comments section of the depression post there's oodles of people saying that if the government just sat back, everything would be fine. The post I mocked below about her car has all these morons making tangential declarations about declaring "if Megan the government fucked up registering her car so badly, imagine what socialized medicine would be like!"

Who is she talking to?

Back to the well of redundancy, she again uses a favorite title of hers. I don't even want to know how many hits a search of "Department of" in her archives would give.

Don't worry, there's also schizophrenia in this post.

Department of non-leading indicators:

I won't even quote here. Megan writes two sentences and provides an ~20 sentence quote to show us that Cubans really are poor.

Who the hell is she talking to? I mean, yeah, I live in Berkeley. I know there's more than a few stupid hippies that think Cuba is a swell place to live, but are there really enough of them that Megan needs to waste her breath? Does she think that any of them read her blog? Is she convinced that she might actually persuade them to shower, shave, get a job, and stop fucking all of their friends in weed soaked orgies while singing "Hail pappa Castro?"

I just imagine Megan, sitting at her desk, trembling and muttering to herself "I won't eat meat. Cuba is bad. I won't eat meat. Cuba is bad," occasionally screaming "HEATH LEDGER IS THE DEVIL!" while Ross and Andrew pet her hair soothingly saying "Calm down, Megan. The men in white coats are almost here." and thinking to themselves "I bet we can find her stash of uppers."

I wonder what kind of fit she throws when she finds out they don't make straight jackets in elongated elf sizes.

Today's Recipe

From the daily drivel:

The bigger puzzle is why everyone is treating "natural" as a synonym for "good" or "right". Death in childbirth is natural; so is rape. These are not a good guide for either our behavior or our standards of living.

Do you give up? I certainly do. Unconditional surrender. As in "lie back & enjoy it."

Also:

I'm a little under the weather today, so rather than go out, I whipped up lunch from the rather lean contents of my cabinet:

I'll not reprint the contents of her cabinet (Dr. Caligari? A very small kitchen? Keeps everything in just one cabinet, as further indication of "issues" w/ comestibles?) but I'll share the outro:

Toss Craisins on top and cook for an additional 10-15 minutes. Mix together with a fork and stir. Total prep time: 10 minutes. Not having to leave the house: priceless.

Blah blah blah: Priceless. That is, w/o value or worth.

P. S.: No, I don't know what a "Craisin" is. As Mlle. McA. capitalized it consistently, one might assume (but here's a quote from Megan: "...there you are--when you assume, you make an ass out of you and me both.")* it's a commercial, copywritten, trademarked something or another, probably genetically modified, or maybe just raisins & cranberries smushed together under great pressure & sold as "Craisins." Whatever they are, I hope never to experience them. Let alone eat them.

*Elements of Style©: "When you assume, you make an ass of you & me." Brevity & clarity Megatron, please.

It's like her father was killed by a food stamp...

Seriously, she just can't let it drop despite the fact that she makes no sense at all. Oh it hurts.

Protect them from themselves:

A number of people in my commenters have come out in favor of food stamps not as a political expediency, but as a first best policy option because they force people to spend money on food that might otherwise have gone somewhere else. This comes in two varieties:

1) If I'm giving you my money, I damn well get to determine how you spend it

2) Poor people might make bad decisions with cash, so better force them to use it on food.

Both of these arguments are somewhat undone by the fact that food stamp recipients can always monetize their grants to some extent, by buying food and then exchanging it for cash. It's just that the process is extremely inefficient, and the sale will net much less than the full value of the food stamps

Well, she goes for the trademark and inexplicable move of blockquoting her own statements. First, these arguments may be somewhat undone if by "somewhat" you mean "pretty much not at all." How successful does she thing a bunch of poor people standing outside grocery stores trying to sell their food stamps would be? Oh yes, person of questionable character, I will gladly engage in your attempt to defraud the government for a minute monetary gain! Now be a good crack whore and spend it on drugs! Tah Tah!

More broadly, do I get to attach strings to the money you get from the government? If you have a mortgage, and deduct the mortgage interest, thus getting a hefty government benefit paid by those of us who are not homeowners, does this entitle me to go over to your house and make sure that you're not spending the money on something I disapprove of?

Brilliant analogy! Tax refunds for money spent on living expenses are EXACTLY the same as providing basic necessities to those who can't afford them at all. Why didn't I see this glaring correlation?

As to the second argument, I recognize an obligation to ensure that those who are genuinely incapable of earning a minimally decent living for themselves have the ready needed to secure the basics. I do not recognize an obligation on my part to ensure that they actually do so. Nor do I think that I am the best judge of what people need.

Projecting much, Megan? I think food stamps are a good idea, but not because I think poor people are too stupid to spend their money wisely. See, like you, I recognize that any attempt to give aid by the government will be abused by some people. Unlike you, I have a heart, so I'm willing to allow for this negative because I feel the positive of feeding poor people outweighs it substantially. Ensuring the money is spent on food is the best, albeit imperfect, way of reducing graft.

If people are genuinely so screwed up that when given enough money to buy what they need, they fail to purchase enough food to sustain life, then what they need is not food stamps, but 24 hour supervision. If people will buy alchohol or some other unnecessary instead of feeding their children, then they are probably neglecting their children in other ways requiring a stronger intervention than an EBT card. One could argue that right now, incomes are not high enough to purchase basic necessities (and indeed, I think the EITC should be increased, as I've said numerous times.) But that still doesn't make the case for food stamps for me; if the poor take money out of their food budgets to buy something else, it is presumably because they think they need that something even more than they need their next meal. Who am I to second guess them?

This has nothing to do with the appropriate level of spending on the poor, or even the structure. But assuming a basic basket of cash that we are prepared to spend on improving peoples' lives, it seems clear to me that none of that cash should be handed out in the form of food stamps.

I'll ignore most of this since it's largely based on the patently ridiculous assumption of the previous quote. I will note that I've been reading MM's blog for quite a while and never heard her mention, other than in passing, her desire to see the EITC increased. I have heard her talk about how her taxes are too high, the Jena Six should be jailed, and that it's totally worth it to spend more than $1000 on a fucking coffee maker. I love you Megan.

You know, they say that only men can be colorblind but Megan's inability to see the world in anything other than black and white clearly disproves that.