It’s the 21st Century, Stupid!

MSNBC reports on the last Republican candidate debate before Iowa’s caucuses. It is noted that they all basically agreed on at least one big lie.

Republican presidential rivals called for deep cuts in federal spending Wednesday in a debate remarkably free of acrimony and agreed the reductions they seek need not require painful sacrifice by millions of Americans who rely on government services.

“The sacrifice we need from the American people is saying, ‘Let the programs go that don’t work. Don’t lobby for them forever,’ ” said former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, one of nine GOP presidential hopefuls sharing an Iowa stage little more than three weeks before the state’s caucuses provide the first test of the campaign.

Anyone who looks at where the government spends its money and what other promises the Republicans are making knows that this is a lie so big that it might well collapse into a black hole at any moment. Not one of the leading contenders is about to cut military spending and even the anti-war Ron Paul is unlikely to do that, he just doesn’t want our soldiers in Iraq. After all, while they all speak of cutting programs that don’t work have the words V-22 Osprey passed their lips as an example? Of course not.

At least Ron Paul admits that he believes in eliminating every social program and every regulatory agency. The others won’t admit it, but the numbers would only work out if that’s what they did. The tax cuts they want and the military spending they want pretty much leave no alternative but to make up the difference by taking it out of Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security and every other department that isn’t run by the Pentagon. Does anyone think that this truth will pass the lips of Romney, Huckabee, Giuliani, Thompson or Paul? I don’t.

The Washington Post tells us about a truly tragic situation where a soldier in Iraq broke down, threatened fellow soldiers and then attempted suicide. The professional consensus is that she was truly insane at the time of the incident and should receive the treatment she needs. The Army’s response? Court-martial her. Threaten her. Bully her. This drove her to seek an alternative to court martial, offering to resign her commission even though this would result in the loss of her veteran’s benefits. Of three recommendations, the only one from a physician said that this shouldn’t happen because there was no doubt that she had

But…

But then, from her battalion commander in Iraq, Whiteside learned that an investigation there had concluded that there was “insufficient evidence for any criminal action to be taken against” her. Furthermore, it had found a hostile command climate and recommended that the officer who had been her nemesis be removed from his position and “given a letter of reprimand for gender bias in assignments and use of intimidation, manipulation and hostility towards soldiers.”

With this news, Whiteside asked that her letter of resignation be withdrawn. She would fight the charges.

In an e-mail exchange, the prosecutor, Wolfe, told MacLean that even if Whiteside won in court she would probably end up stigmatized and in a mental institution, just like John Hinckley, the man who shot President Ronald Reagan.

Wolfe suggested that the military court might not buy the mental illness defense. “Who doesn’t find psycho-babble unclear . . . how many people out there believe that insanity should never be a defense, that it is just, as he said, an ‘excuse.’ “

 What kind of incompetent physician do the Army personnel who want to prosecute her seek to override? The man who is now the Army’s surgeon general, Major General Eric B. Schoomaker.

To answer the question in the title I propose that the prosecutor and every single officer involved in deciding to bring this prosecution are the ones who deserve dishonorable discharges for failing in their duties to their fellow soldiers in the most callous and incompetent way possible. Failing that, some long and intense courses in the real world of psychiatric medicine before they are ever put near a situation like this one again is certainly called for.

The basis of this blog is in part the idea that things change and in many cases we’re better off adapting than trying to remain stuck in the past. Or to put it in another way if you base your plans and beliefs on the way things were instead of the way things are, odds are the plans aren’t going to work out very well.

But some things really shouldn’t go away completely and instead should at least exist even if some change is necessary. A new show on PBS, Wired Science, did a segment entitled Dangerous Science about how the ability for youngsters and adult amateurs to do hands on science is almost extinct. There’s no longer any such thing as a real chemistry set, many chemicals and materials that amateur scientists and tinkerers need will set off alarms in Homeland Security and even school labs are hesitant to let their students do real hands-on experiments that some timid administrators apparently feel might get them sued if anything goes wrong. Haven’t these people ever heard of a release form?

But if you’re one of those who occasionally feel the stirrings of a desire to find out things for yourself there does exist at least one resource, United Nuclear. Believe me, you owe it to yourself to at least browse around their site.

I don’t think I really need to say a whole lot about this one. Just read this article from Newsweek entitled “Surge of Suicide Bombers” and then follow it with the one from the New York Times entitled “Top G.O.P. Candidates See Signs of Progress in Iraq”. I just have to say I wonder about some people’s ideas of progress and their definition of victory.

No, this is not some evil socialist, pinko, “I hate America.” screed. It’s not about the Bush Administration, Iraq or any of those subjects.

It’s about a New York Times article about how it is entirely possible for a millionaire, someone who is making enough money to propel themselves into the top 2% of American families so far as wealth is concerned, to not even consider themselves as being rich. I know some people who live in the San Francisco area. Frankly, I don’t ask them how much they make but it is always a source of amazement to me that they can make it given the cost of living there. But the article points out that there is more at work in the social dynamics of Silicon Valley. There is not so much a “keeping up with the Joneses” issue as knowing what the Joneses have. This psychological factor in an area of so much wealth makes some feel like they aren’t all that high up the economic food chain even if the raw numbers say different.

One of the people interviewed for this article puts it into perspective this way

David Koblas, a computer programmer with a net worth of $5 million to $10 million, imagines what his life would be like if he left Silicon Valley. He could move to a small town like Elko, Nev., he says, and be a ski bum. Or he could move his family to the middle of the country and live like a prince in a spacious McMansion in the nicest neighborhood in town.

But Mr. Koblas, 39, lives with his wife, Michelle, and their two children in Los Altos, south of Palo Alto, where the schools are highly regarded and the housing prices are inflated accordingly. So instead of a luxury home, the family lives in a relatively modest 2,000-square-foot house — not much bigger than the average American home — and he puts in long hours at Wink, a search engine start-up founded in 2005.

“I’d be rich in Kansas City,” he said. “People would seek me out for boards. But here I’m a dime a dozen.”

And he’s right. When Sprint was a rapidly growing concern and was consolidating operations in the Kansas City metro area they were shutting down IT operations in California and trying to lure their people to Kansas City. They would bring them here and show them what their housing budget could buy. They could purchase a house twice the size with a backyard facing a lake and the development had a golf course as part of the deal for less than they were spending in California. It was a persuasive argument to many.

Why do I title this post “A Slice of American Insanity”? First, what kind of technology company can be taken seriously as doing the best they can for their stockholders when they stay someplace that drives their costs for real estate and employee compensation to these kinds of levels? The standard excuses are that this is where everyone is and that this produces advantages and the educational system producing good tech workers is also here and it just can’t be reproduced anywhere else. Isn’t it nice to have arguments that your board and shareholders buy into that just can’t be quantified? And these folks are some of the staunchest defenders of the free market system and existing structures for all things economic. Also, why do companies whose life blood is technology feel so strongly that e-mail, phone calls and video conferencing just aren’t good enough? They don’t seem to mind it when they outsource jobs to India and China? That distance doesn’t seem to matter but the idea of just maybe placing their company or at least some major components of it somewhere in the United States that could save many millions of dollars terrifies them. Yep, they’re irrational and just maybe certifiable.

Tomorrow the chances that anyone has to simply start up an internet radio station with next to no start up money and be able to take time to build up an audience will end. As written about on DailyTech as well as other sites the new fee increases pushed for by SoundExchange take effect. I’m not going to go into a major rant on this but just think. There are already stations shutting down because these fees are just that, flat amounts that have nothing to do with audience size or revenue stream of the station. According to an official with SoundExchange

“This is just about the artists getting paid fairly. Artists and labels just want a fair share of the pie,” said Richard Ades, a SoundExchange representative.

If that was really their goal wouldn’t they be working with the stations to base the fees on income? But in fact SoundExchange has refused to consider that as an option. So if I started a station and only had about a thousand listeners and only enough ad revenue to cover expenses I would be expected to pay the same as someone who had backing from a large company, many thousands of listeners and an actual net profit in the thousands of dollars. I just don’t see any honesty on the part of the music industry. Again.

(Update)

This is a much more detailed FAQ from CNet. There is in fact a per listener fee and a flat fee. This is still considered unfair by many including myself because it bears no resemblance to what is paid by satellite radio, perhaps the closest to internet radio in terms of where it’s at concerning the general public. Satellite radio pays 7.5% of revenues to SoundExchange.

In the world of technical workers there is on the part of some anxiety about outsourcing, H-1B visa holders and other things that make it seem that American employers don’t want Americans as employees. When these complaints and worries are voiced the chorus of assurances starts.

We are told that outsourcing is being exaggerated. There aren’t really that many jobs being sent overseas. Don’t worry about how all the tech firms want an unlimited number of H-1B visas because after all, don’t the rules make them pay market level salaries? Don’t they have to prove that they need to bring in these hot shot ultra-talented geniuses because there just isn’t any American who can do the job? Well, maybe not.

Frankly, I’m not surprised that the corporations are rigging the game. I think that to a large extent all of those things you hear about how you ought to keep up with your training and technical skills really doesn’t mean a whole lot. If your skillset and experience isn’t exactly what the company needs and you’re willing to work for a fairly low salary then you’d better be just out of school or from another country if you want a job in far too many cases. And as far as the companies paying H-1B workers fair wages is concerned one heavy user of the visas was fined for not doing that just recently and another company was fined for the same offense a couple of years ago. Somehow all those assurance just ring hollow to a lot of people who are either unemployed or underemployed.

The Fray, the comments section of Slate Magazine lets you check other postings by any person you care to. It’s a good way to check if anyone responded to anything you might have written previously. I was looking at things I’d written before when I spotted this comment in one thread by a poster called BenK:

I’d like to look back a bit further, to pre-WWII days. Let’s do the comparisons then, even with the large numbers of WWI vets on the federal dole, etc. Or better yet, go back to the early 19-teens.Now compare the size of government.

It’s a perfect example of why I came up with the name of this blog. Let’s look at some numbers. Since he want to look at the early 19-teens let’s make it 1912.

Population: 95,335,000

This link shows a table displaying the  increase in penetration of technologies such as electricity, cars, electricity and radios from 1900 to 1960. Is there anyone who thinks that this has decreased since 1960? Back in his ideal time to look at the size of government there were no airlines. There wasn’t really a nationwide road system much less something like the interstate highway system. There were no national radio and television networks. The list of things that make the United States so radically different a nation than it was almost a century ago makes any comparison between government size now and then so meaningless it would be more like comparing apples and turnips rather than apples and oranges. The percentage of the populace employed in manufacturing is radically different. The same is true of agriculture. The entire social infrastructure of the country was different. Why in heaven’s name do some people think you can compare government and business now with that long ago and draw any conclusions?

It’s just wish fulfillment. They feel they already know a valid answer and ignore everything that would prove otherwise. Sorry, folks but it’s the 21st Century and it’s very different than most of the 20th much less any further back.

So I’m listening to NPR’s Talk of the Nation Science Friday. They’re discussing how to reduce your carbon footprint. I’ve done a bit and have lots more to do in that area so I’m listening and feeling a bit sheepish. Then a woman comes on and talks about how she moved from an urban area in the Midwest to Alaska and was “trying to live the right kind of life” there. And it pops into my head to wonder what made her think she could do that in Alaska. Because if she wanted to reduce her carbon footprint the only way she could do that in Alaska was to live like the natives, not the typical Alaskan. Because living in Alaska means that unless you’re eating an old style native diet virtually all of your food is being shipped there. A normal modern diet meant you couldn’t “eat locally”. And if you’re going to stay comfortable you’re using a lot of fuel to heat your home for most of the year. Alaska and other places near the Arctic Circle are not places to have a low carbon footprint…and I really really hope we can figure out a way for it to stay that way.