Tag: news

Obamacare Unites Americans—In Dismay at Government Suckage

Smug ObamaWe liked health care better the
old way, a majority of Americans say when
asked by Reason-Rupe pollsters about Obamacare. Across the
board, Americans disapprove of the president’s handling of health
care issues, have little faith in politicians’ ability to manage
the provision of medicine, and don’t think healthy, younger
Americans should be treated as milking cows to subsidize coverage
for older and sicker people. In fact, Americans generally agree
that the chief executive and Congress alike have amply demonstrated
that government is something of a deadweight hanging from the
country’s neck.

Americans still seem divided on what they wish
government could do for them. When asked whether they believed “the
less government the better” or “there are more things government
should be doing,” exactly 48 percent of respondents pick each one.
But when pushed to say whether “government is primarily a source of
good” or “is generally a burdensome part of society that impedes
the ability of people to improve their lives,” 54 percent said
government is a big friggin’ hurdle that bangs your shins every
time.

GoatThat’s the difference between hoping for a
unicorn, but admitting that you’re only ever going to get a
goat.

And what a goat. The launch of the Affordable Care Act has done
wonders to firm up the public’s opinion of government
(in)competence. Fifty-three percent of respondents have an
unfavorable opinion of the law after its jaw-droppingly flawed
debut, with a 47 percent plurality saying it has decreased their
confidence in government’s ability to solve problems.

Overall, 55 percent say they prefer the system that was in place
prior to passage of the 2010 federal health care law over
Obamacare—you know, the system that everybody used to hate before
they discovered it could get worse.

And it’s not just the general outline; the details of the health
care law turn people off, too. Majorities oppose prohibiting health
insurance companies from denying coverage or charging some
customers higher premiums based on pre-existing conditions, oppose
requiring younger, healthier people to pay more for health
insurance to subsidize care for others, and think low-cost,
bare-bones policies of the sort prohibited by the ACA should be
allowed.

Not surprisingly, after their interesting performances in recent
years, Congress and the president both get lousy marks for their
handling of health issues.

If the president liked high marks for transparency, maybe he
could have kept them by not snowing the public with phony
assurances about his signature policy achievement. As it is, a
majority of Americans think he was pulling their legs when he
claimed to preside over the “most transparent administration in
history.”

Well, if you want to see how something performs, there’s nothing
like a laboratory experiment. Too bad the whole damned country is a
laboratory for government suckage.

If only somebody had some ideas for reforming health care

without treating people like milking cows or idiot
children.

More poll results here
(PDF).

from Hit & Run http://reason.com/blog/2013/12/11/obamacare-unites-americansin-dismay-at-g
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Are We Already At The "End Of Work"?

Submitted by Charles Hugh-Smith of OfTwoMinds blog,

The Python That Ate Your Job

We are already well into the "end of work."

The more accurate title would be "The Python (Script) That Ate Your Job." Python is a computer language whose core philosophy is summarized by "PEP 20 (The Zen of Python)", which includes aphorisms such as:

  • Beautiful is better than ugly.
  • Explicit is better than implicit.
  • Simple is better than complex.
  • Complex is better than complicated.
  • Readability counts.

(source: Wikipedia)

As I understand it (from a non-programmer POV), Python enables rapid development of scripts that may not be optimized by some metrics but which work perfectly well in terms of solving a problem in a cost-effective manner.

(Programmers can be highly partisan, i.e. emotionally attached to their preferred language, so I am trying to be as non-partisan and careful as possible here to avoid arousing the ire of either Pythoneers or Python detractors. I am just an ignorant bystander; please don't shoot the piano player, etc.)

A senior manager at a small tech company recently related a story that illustrates 1) the power of Python (and other scripting languages) and 2) the changing nature of work:

The company had some time-consuming data analysis that needed to get done on a regular basis, and the manager was considering recruiting a (paid) intern to do the work. Instead, he spent four hours writing a Python script which did the work in a few minutes. He named the program "Intern."

This story is repeated thousands of times a day across millions of tasks. Virtually all of my self-employed friends use technology to enable one person to produce output that would have taken three people in the 1980s.

As management guru Peter Drucker noted, enterprises don't have profits, they only have expenses. If you are self-employed or own/manage a business, you will immediately grasp the profound truth of this insight.

If you can replace an expensive worker (and every employee is expensive nowadays, due to the high cost of labor and general overhead) with a Python script that can be crafted in a few hours, financial fact compels you to do so: your business has no profit, it only has expenses.

This dynamic is scale-invariant, meaning it is true of all organizations, from one-person businesses up to global corporations and entire nations. A non-profit group only has expenses, and so do churches, cities and nations. Once expenses exceed income, the organization goes bust.

Could I be replaced with a Python script? In some ways, yes: a script could be written that mined the thousands of entries and essays I've written for repeating words, phrases and themes, and the script would rehash the material into "new" entries.

But since the script isn't logging "experience" in the same way as a human does, the script would not be able to replicate dynamics such as changing one's mind or taking a new direction, although it could randomly generate such behaviors to mimic human development.

Would the script be "good enough" to attract readers? Perhaps; but attracting and keeping readers is not necessarily a problem-state that can be solved with data-mining and pattern matching, as readers seek not just novelty and expressive writing but insight. Any script that rehashed existing material would not be generating new insight; it would simply be repackaging previous insights.

For highly partisan blogs, this might well be "good enough," since partisan readers actually want to read the same rehashed material again and again: in effect, a script that repackaged "it's the Demopublican's fault" with new headlines and slightly different content would closely match the human content generator's output.

I have no doubt some clever programmers have already played around with generating rehashed content and posting it as a blog written by a human being, an artifice masked by an avatar ("Hi, my name is J.Q. Public and I write about politics."). It would almost amount to sport to generate a phony history and cobbled-together quirks to fill out the illusion of personhood.

(Some readers have even wondered if "Charles Hugh Smith" is such an avatar. The answer is no, because the history and quirks of "Charles Hugh Smith" are simply too implausible to be believable. Also, the cost of maintaining such a complicated avatar isn't worth the paltry income generated by the blog. What machine intelligence would be dumb enough to maintain this idiotically complicated enterprise for such a paltry return? Only a human would be compelled to do so.)

Could a robot and standardized scripts replace everything I can do with a Skil 77 wormdrive power saw? It could certainly do a great many repetitive tasks at a work bench, but it would not be able to do non-standardized, on-the-jobsite tasks such as cutting out the rotten sections of a wood window frame. The robot might be able to execute the cuts (presuming it was light enough and mobile enough to stand securely on a scaffold or slope), but it would need a human partner to program the cuts in the real world and in real time.

In other words, "work" is increasingly a partnership of humans and technology. If one's skills and experience (i.e. labor) can be replaced with a Python script, it will be replaced by a Python script. Organizations that fail to replace costly paid human labor with a script will have much higher costs than those organizations that replace paid labor with scripts.

The paid human labor that can't be replaced by a script will increasingly require the knowledge and skills needed to collaborate with technology as an essential work partner.

We are already well into the "end of work." Digital pythons have been eating jobs for some time now, and because organizations only have expenses, they will continue to do so indefinitely until the only paid jobs left are those that cannot be fully replaced by a script or a robot operating on standardized scripts.


    



via Zero Hedge http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/zerohedge/feed/~3/5lhrj3ol6yc/story01.htm Tyler Durden

Are We Already At The “End Of Work”?

Submitted by Charles Hugh-Smith of OfTwoMinds blog,

The Python That Ate Your Job

We are already well into the "end of work."

The more accurate title would be "The Python (Script) That Ate Your Job." Python is a computer language whose core philosophy is summarized by "PEP 20 (The Zen of Python)", which includes aphorisms such as:

  • Beautiful is better than ugly.
  • Explicit is better than implicit.
  • Simple is better than complex.
  • Complex is better than complicated.
  • Readability counts.

(source: Wikipedia)

As I understand it (from a non-programmer POV), Python enables rapid development of scripts that may not be optimized by some metrics but which work perfectly well in terms of solving a problem in a cost-effective manner.

(Programmers can be highly partisan, i.e. emotionally attached to their preferred language, so I am trying to be as non-partisan and careful as possible here to avoid arousing the ire of either Pythoneers or Python detractors. I am just an ignorant bystander; please don't shoot the piano player, etc.)

A senior manager at a small tech company recently related a story that illustrates 1) the power of Python (and other scripting languages) and 2) the changing nature of work:

The company had some time-consuming data analysis that needed to get done on a regular basis, and the manager was considering recruiting a (paid) intern to do the work. Instead, he spent four hours writing a Python script which did the work in a few minutes. He named the program "Intern."

This story is repeated thousands of times a day across millions of tasks. Virtually all of my self-employed friends use technology to enable one person to produce output that would have taken three people in the 1980s.

As management guru Peter Drucker noted, enterprises don't have profits, they only have expenses. If you are self-employed or own/manage a business, you will immediately grasp the profound truth of this insight.

If you can replace an expensive worker (and every employee is expensive nowadays, due to the high cost of labor and general overhead) with a Python script that can be crafted in a few hours, financial fact compels you to do so: your business has no profit, it only has expenses.

This dynamic is scale-invariant, meaning it is true of all organizations, from one-person businesses up to global corporations and entire nations. A non-profit group only has expenses, and so do churches, cities and nations. Once expenses exceed income, the organization goes bust.

Could I be replaced with a Python script? In some ways, yes: a script could be written that mined the thousands of entries and essays I've written for repeating words, phrases and themes, and the script would rehash the material into "new" entries.

But since the script isn't logging "experience" in the same way as a human does, the script would not be able to replicate dynamics such as changing one's mind or taking a new direction, although it could randomly generate such behaviors to mimic human development.

Would the script be "good enough" to attract readers? Perhaps; but attracting and keeping readers is not necessarily a problem-state that can be solved with data-mining and pattern matching, as readers seek not just novelty and expressive writing but insight. Any script that rehashed existing material would not be generating new insight; it would simply be repackaging previous insights.

For highly partisan blogs, this might well be "good enough," since partisan readers actually want to read the same rehashed material again and again: in effect, a script that repackaged "it's the Demopublican's fault" with new headlines and slightly different content would closely match the human content generator's output.

I have no doubt some clever programmers have already played around with generating rehashed content and posting it as a blog written by a human being, an artifice masked by an avatar ("Hi, my name is J.Q. Public and I write about politics."). It would almost amount to sport to generate a phony history and cobbled-together quirks to fill out the illusion of personhood.

(Some readers have even wondered if "Charles Hugh Smith" is such an avatar. The answer is no, because the history and quirks of "Charles Hugh Smith" are simply too implausible to be believable. Also, the cost of maintaining such a complicated avatar isn't worth the paltry income generated by the blog. What machine intelligence would be dumb enough to maintain this idiotically complicated enterprise for such a paltry return? Only a human would be compelled to do so.)

Could a robot and standardized scripts replace everything I can do with a Skil 77 wormdrive power saw? It could certainly do a great many repetitive tasks at a work bench, but it would not be able to do non-standardized, on-the-jobsite tasks such as cutting out the rotten sections of a wood window frame. The robot might be able to execute the cuts (presuming it was light enough and mobile enough to stand securely on a scaffold or slope), but it would need a human partner to program the cuts in the real world and in real time.

In other words, "work" is increasingly a partnership of humans and technology. If one's skills and experience (i.e. labor) can be replaced with a Python script, it will be replaced by a Python script. Organizations that fail to replace costly paid human labor with a script will have much higher costs than those organizations that replace paid labor with scripts.

The paid human labor that can't be replaced by a script will increasingly require the knowledge and skills needed to collaborate with technology as an essential work partner.

We are already well into the "end of work." Digital pythons have been eating jobs for some time now, and because organizations only have expenses, they will continue to do so indefinitely until the only paid jobs left are those that cannot be fully replaced by a script or a robot operating on standardized scripts.


    



via Zero Hedge http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/zerohedge/feed/~3/5lhrj3ol6yc/story01.htm Tyler Durden

John Stossel Says Celebrities Are Economic Hypocrites

Actor/comedian Russell Brand
told the BBC he wants “a socialist, egalitarian system based on the
massive redistribution of wealth.” Director George Lucas got rich
not just from movies but also by selling Star Wars merchandise. Yet
he says he believes in democracy but “not capitalist democracy.”
John Stossel calls out Hollywood celebrities who hate the system
that made them rich. 

View this article.

from Hit & Run http://reason.com/blog/2013/12/11/john-stossel-says-celebrities-are-econom
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Rice From Fukushima Was Served To Japanese Government Officials, And Then Something Odd Happened

Two days ago, supposedly in an attempt to demonstrate how “contained” the radiation fallout from Fukushima was, an event was held in Tokyo to demonstrate the safety of the rice grown in the vicinity of the evacuated area around the exploded nuclear power plant according to the source, NHK. And since officials from Fukushima Prefecture said “no radioactive materials were detected in any of the harvested rice” a whopping 540 kilograms of the non-radioactive rice would be served in a government office complex in Tokyo for 9 days from Monday. We further learned that Senior Vice Environment Minister Shinji Inoue and Parliamentary Vice Environment Minister Tomoko Ukishima tasted rice balls made of the crop on the first day. Inoue said the rice tasted good especially when he thought about the great effort that went into cultivating the crop. A farmer from Kawamata Town said he will continue to cultivate rice now that he knows that it’s possible to grow a tasty product if the paddy fields are properly decontaminated. He said he travelled from his temporary home to the paddy to tend the rice as it grew.

While we will avoid commenting on the “intelligence” behind this action, designed to demonstrate just how under control the Fukushima situation is (when even Tepco admitted it no longer is), especially since it takes years if not decades for radiation-induced illnesses to appear (although we do remind readers that the leader of the Fukushima explosion response team did die from Cancer in July, or just over two years after the disaster), we will note something curious.

A quick search for the original article on NHK, which we read when it came out, reveals a surprising finding: a 404 error.

This is ironic because a cached version of the same URL still exists, all the more so since the original story was picked up and syndicated by others include RT and Voice of Russia.

Which makes one wonder: is this the first instance of the government’s brand new “secrecy” bill being implemented, and if so, why, of all places, in a story which is nothing but propaganda to telegraph that all is well in Fukushima and whose downside is at most the well-being (and life) of two lowly government apparatchiks.

In the meantime, if the US is importing any rice from Japan, it may want to give it the good old Geiger Counter test or two.


    



via Zero Hedge http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/zerohedge/feed/~3/q7d2F_Gp02A/story01.htm Tyler Durden

FBI, Medical Experts Pin Kelly Thomas’ Brutal Death on Police Beating

Has anybody used mugshots to make a "Gang member or arrested police officer?" quiz site yet?Critics of police misbehavior
may be pleased to hear that the trial of the Fullerton, Calif.,
police officers accused of beating homeless schizophrenic Kelly
Thomas to death has not been ignored by the Southern California
media. The Los Angeles Times, the Orange County
Register, OC Weekly and several local news stations
have been covering the case since it opened last week. Two former
officers, Manuel Ramos and Jay Cicinelli, are on trial for killing
him. A third faces separate charges.

Damning testimony came Monday when a retired FBI agent was
called by prosecutors to the stand to analyze the use of force by
officers and declared it excessive. Here’s how the OC
Weekly
described it:

During [Monday]’s testimony in the Kelly Thomas murder trial, a
retired FBI supervising special agent and tactical police training
expert told jurors that the 37-year-old homeless man had a right to
use force to defend himself against two Fullerton police officers
who’d essentially converted themselves into heavily armed thugs
with badges.

John Wilson, who spent 60 hours studying the gruesome, July
2011, police attack on an unarmed Thomas, said that officer Manuel
Ramos began the minor encounter unnecessarily by immediately taking
out his baton, swinging it in both hands and poking it at the
victim, who hadn’t been physically threatening.

But, according to Wilson, the most unprofessional moment prior
to the killing occurred when Ramos mocked the schizophrenia-addled
Thomas as stupid, dramatically put on gloves as he towered over him
and said, “Now, you see my fists? They’re getting ready to fuck you
up.”

District Attorney Tony Rackauckas played related portions of a
surveillance tape of the brutality and, over Ramos defense lawyer
John Barnett’s incessant objections, asked Wilson if he considered
the cop conduct appropriate under the circumstances.

“Clearly, no,” replied the 26-year FBI veteran, who at one point
served on the U.S. Attorney General’s protection detail in
Washington, D.C. “I have problems with everything that happened
after Ramos put the gloves on.”

On cross, defense for the two officers on trial tried to paint
Wilson as a guy who didn’t know what it was like to walk a beat or
what the work of a street cop was actually like, according to the
OC Weekly.

Yesterday, the trauma surgeon who treated Thomas when he was
brought in following the beating testified. He said Thomas’ death
was ultimately caused by oxygen deprivation to the brain, a result
of his inability to breathe properly during the beating. From the

Los Angeles Times:

When he arrived, Thomas was breathing through the tube, which
was attached to an air bag that was squeezed by hand, [Dr. Michael]
Lekawa said. His blood pressure was extremely low and his PH score
indicated that his body was producing so much acid that, the doctor
said, he has never seen a patient with a similar PH score live.

“I’ve never seen a survivor, ever, in my 18 years,” he said.

The cause of Thomas’ death, Lekawa said, was inadequate oxygen
to his brain. During the confrontation with police, “various
persons were on [Thomas] and holding him down … preventing him from
breathing,” Lekawa said.

“He was doing everything he could to breathe but becoming less
and less mentally with it to do what he could to breathe,” he
said.

Ultimately, Thomas stopped breathing, which caused his heart to
stop, leading to “irreversible brain damage,” he said.

Below, a vivid reminder from ReasonTV of the brutality that lead
to this case:

from Hit & Run http://reason.com/blog/2013/12/11/fbi-medical-experts-pin-kelly-thomas-bru
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Peak "Greater Fools"?

The ratio of bulls to bears has never (that is ever) been higher according to (the perhaps ironically names) Investor’s Intelligence. There are now more than 4x more bulls than bears and even more concerning, the only time “bears” have been lower than the current 14.3% was in the spring of 1987…

 

 

h/t @Not_Jim_Cramer


    



via Zero Hedge http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/zerohedge/feed/~3/hYOhrfvWFAY/story01.htm Tyler Durden

Peak “Greater Fools”?

The ratio of bulls to bears has never (that is ever) been higher according to (the perhaps ironically names) Investor’s Intelligence. There are now more than 4x more bulls than bears and even more concerning, the only time “bears” have been lower than the current 14.3% was in the spring of 1987…

 

 

h/t @Not_Jim_Cramer


    



via Zero Hedge http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/zerohedge/feed/~3/hYOhrfvWFAY/story01.htm Tyler Durden

Should Detroit Sell Its High-Value Art Collection to Pay for Its Bankruptcy? Only If it Cares About its Finances – or Art

I’ve got a new column up
at The Daily Beast, in which I argue that Detroit should the
collection at the Detroit Art Insitute (DIA) for up to an estimated
$866 million. Not only would such a move make a serious dent in
Motown’s debt problem, it would also allow the art to be sent to
places where it might actually be seen.

Here’s a snippet:

What sort of message would it send to current and future
residents—not to mention current and future bondholders—if Detroit
refuses to put everything on the table? You can’t eat the DIA’s
“Still
Life With Fruit, Vegatables, and Dead Game,” no matter how
well-rendered, and for most of the past 80 years, the city has been
subsidizing not just the day-to-day running of the museum but also
its acquisitions. Such spendthrift priorities are one small reason
why the burg is in such bad shape to begin with (and also why the
city has relatively clear title to the artworks under
consideration).

Building a future around a
slogan like Detroit: Come for the Bankruptcy but Stay
for the
Bruegel is no way to resurrect a city
whose population
peaked back in 1950. As urban theorist Joel
Kotkin has put it, “We
get it wrong. We think the cultural amenities drives the prosperity
[in cities], when it’s really the prosperity that drives the
cultural amenities.” Artifacts from past periods of
wealth—especially publicly funded museums, sports
stadiums, orchestras,
and the like—are luxury goods that never pay for themselves, either
directly or indirectly. Detroit can rebuild its municipally owned
art collection if and when it can afford to cover expenses related
to activities beyond the core functions of government. Until then,
let the bidding begin!


Read the whole thing.

from Hit & Run http://reason.com/blog/2013/12/11/should-detroit-sell-its-high-value-art-c
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A Plague of Fake Interpreters

The Associated Press describes
what may be the single strangest story to come out of the Mandela
funeral:

A man who appeared to provide sign language
interpretation on stage for Nelson Mandela’s memorial service,
attended by scores of heads of state, was a “fake,” the national
director of the Deaf Federation of South Africa said on
Wednesday….

Four sign language experts, including Druchen, said the man was not
signing in South African or American sign languages and could not
have been signing in any other known sign language because there
was no structure to his arm and hand movements….Ingrid Parkin,
principal of the St. Vincent School for the Deaf in Johannesburg,
said she’s received complaints from the deaf community from Canada
to China about the man on stage and that his movements look “like
he’s signing gibberish.”

A strange story, but evidently not strange enough. File this
under Social Problems That Never Occurred To Me Before:

Bogus sign language interpreters are a problem in South
Africa, because people who know a few signs try to pass themselves
off as interpreters, said Parkin, the principal of the school for
the deaf. And those hiring them usually don’t sign, so they have no
idea that the people they are hiring cannot do the job, she
said.

Bonus video: See the opening sketch here.

from Hit & Run http://reason.com/blog/2013/12/11/a-plague-of-fake-interpreters
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