The curious and irregular conception of Obamacare

Read the whole thing by Noemie Emery

 “Current and former administration officials .  .  . have been surprised at how steadfast the opposition has remained,” the Washington Post reported last summer, quoting MIT economist Jonathan Gruber saying, “It used to be you had a fight and it was over, and you moved on.” But few have moved on, for reasons which are not all that hard to tease out: It’s not working out, in fact it’s a disaster; it’s blowing holes in the federal budget; the win-to-lose balance is way out of kilter, as many more people are hurt than helped by it. Obamacare may collapse on its own for practical reasons, but there is a fourth strike against it that adds a dimension of weakness no comparable measure has faced: Much of the country believes it’s a fraud, passed dishonestly, and not deserving of moral authority. In short, they find it nearly illegal, highly immoral, and possibly fattening. And their minds won’t be changed.

Germany, Traditional and Modern

A typical street in Darmstadt.



An artsy apartment building: It was horseshoe shaped with one end at ground level and the other end about six stories tall. All of the top is covered with trees and other plants.



The circular building is one ward of a hospital complex.

Big Mac At Home and in Germany

I just had to know: Are they the same everywhere?

Difference #1 Price: 6.49 Euros comes to $8.87, so that is more but I really do not know how much more since I usually just buy the burger itself--or more usually, just whatever burger is on the value menu. This is not entirely cheapness on my part; I just feel like the fries and soda are much worse for me than the burger.

Sameness #1 The burger was, as far as I could tell, exactly like what I get in the United States. The fries were the same too. The coke tasted perhaps slightly better but this is hard to tell since I usually get Dr. Pepper and I am used to having ICE! please. It is possible that they use sucrose here instead of corn syrup and that would account for the Coke tasting better.

Difference # 2 The ketchup packet was much larger than the ones in the US. It takes three of the US ones at home while this larger one was plenty. Also, they offered me Ketchup OR mayonnaise. Neither was available to take as one pleased. Lately, the McDonald's in the US have pumps available or packets upon demand.

Labor Participation Rate and Bad Cancer Cures

One might be sanguine about our economy if you look at the unemployment rate: It has gone from about 10% back in 2010 steadily downward to 7.5% now. If you look at the labor force participation rate, the story takes on a different hue: We have steadily dropped from around 66% between 2003-2008 to about 63% now. Back in 2006, 66% of the people wanted to work, there was 5% unemployment and so 62.7% were actually working. Now, we have 7.5% unemployment and only 63% participating, so that leaves 58.275% working. If we calculated unemployment using the former participation rate,we would get:

(1-(58.275/66)) X 100 = 11.7%

Some might say that decreased labor participation is good because it gives us a better unemployment rate. I will show why I disagree below.

Unemployment rate: From BLS



Labor force participation rate: From BLS



The recent CBO report on the impact of "Obamacare" says:

CBO estimates that the ACA [Affordable Care Act] will reduce the total number of hours worked, on net, by about 1.5 percent to 2.0 percent during the period from 2017 to 2024, almost entirely because workers will choose to supply less labor—given the new taxes and other incentives they will face and the financial benefits some will receive.

(People like Greg Mankiw (and many others) saw this coming from a long-way off.)

This has been greeted by some as a good thing. Certainly it is possible that some individuals will benefit: Let's say there is a guy who hates his job, doesn't need the money, but did need the health insurance. Let's further assume that now he can get his coverage for free or so cheaply that he could afford it easily. Okay, he is gaining from the new law. But what about society? We lose in two ways: 1. He will no longer provide the valuable work he had been doing. 2. We as a society are now paying for what he had previously provided for himself. Bear in mind that the above was a best-case-scenario. He could have been forced to quit because his employer had cut his pay to provide added benefits due to mandates or because of higher taxes or any number of reasons that leave him worse-off now.

The whole idea of society being better off with fewer people working reminds me of good and bad ways to decrease mortality from cancer.

A good way would be prevention: Get people to stop smoking and lung cancer rates will go down. Another good way is earlier detection and better treatments. But here is a bad way of reducing the rate of cancer deaths to zero: Execute anyone who is diagnosed with cancer. It is a ridiculous idea and yet one cannot deny that it eliminates death from cancer. The problem with it is that it doesn't leave anyone better off than they were before. Similarly, organizing our economy such that fewer people want to work deprives us of productive activities.

All of this leaves aside the non-economic value of work: This was well summed-up in a comment to this post over at MARGINALREVOLUTION: How happy should we be about ACA supply-side responses to work less?

Turkey Vulture February 5, 2014 at 12:06 pm
I really dislike working. I don’t like being tied down, and want to pursue other activities. But at points in my life when I haven’t worked, or have worked minimally, I have tended to just waste time doing nothing of use. And I want to do things, accomplish things, I just don’t. I am lazy, and especially so when I have no immediate need to do anything. This lowers my life satisfaction. But still, even knowing this, if I have a way to get by without having to work, I will be tempted to take it, and probably lose the good habits a regular job can bring.

I think most people are like this, which is why even though I will never pray at the alter of the protestant work ethic, I think that programs that encourage idleness can lead people into a rut from which they won’t have the wherewithal to escape. But hey, maybe everyone else is more of a go-getter than me, and I’m completely off base.

I think Turkey Vulture is correct--and far more honest than most people are about themselves.

Remember When You Didn't Care About Executive Overreach?

You were of course thrilled when president Obama decided to stop defending the Defense Of Marriage Act) DOMA. But now there is a Republican president and she has decided that all campaign finance laws are unconstitutional and will not be enforced. Still happy?

Sow the wind, reap the whirlwind.

Lou Reed, Perfect Day

Flat Land

Todd Zywicki does not exactly review The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion by Jonathan Haidt, but he uses it as a jumping-off point for a number of interesting observations.

Read the whole thing of course--including the comments, some of which are really excellent. What interested me was this:

...he describes five key vectors or values of psychological morality: (1) care/harm, (2) fairness, (3) loyalty, (4) authority, and (5) sanctity. Haidt finds in his research that self-described “conservatives” tend to value all five vectors of morality (as he defines them). Liberals, by contrast, place a high value on “care” and “fairness”...

One might think this is all purely theoretical but some science was added:

...Haidt reports on the following experiment: after determining whether someone is liberal or conservative, he then has each person answer the standard battery of questions as if he were the opposite ideology. So, he would ask a liberal to answer the questions as if he were a “typical conservative” and vice-versa. What he finds is quite striking: “The results were clear and consistent. Moderates and conservatives were most accurate in their predictions, whether they were pretending to be liberals or conservatives. Liberals were the least accurate, especially those who describe themselves as ‘very liberal.’ ...

Conservatives and moderates can predict the kind of answers liberals will make because they have all the same tools, in addition to others which are lacking in liberals.

This explains very well an observed tendency one sees all the time:

In short, Haidt’s research suggests that many liberals really do believe that conservatives are heartless bastards–or as a friend of mine once remarked, “Conservatives think that liberals are good people with bad ideas, whereas liberals think conservatives are bad people”–and very liberal people think that especially strongly. Haidt suggests that there is some truth to this.

In fairness, I've seen the above formulation going in both directions. While I don't want to rule-out the possibility of there being some small number of genuinely evil people in the world, a safe rule is that if you think someone is evil, you are probably thinking about an issue in a simple-minded way.

Secondary observations: The side that can understand their opponent's viewpoint can be persuaded by it. The other side cannot understand the opposition's positions (except by assuming bad faith) and so are never persuaded. This would present a distinct disadvantage to the conservative side. It is an opportunity for a larger game though: If you can show how the other factors (which liberals are currently blind to) matter, then you might just plant a seed. A kind of broader-understanding-of-things seed, which might allow them to grow into a conservative.

It Is A Tool

This is a tool, but for what?

Before I get to that, I want to talk about a goal from when I started lifting weights in June. An initial and realistic goal would be to lift my own weight within one year of taking up the training.

I knew that our bathroom scale weighed light but from the standpoint of monitoring weight this doesn't really matter. It may be systematically light but is consistent and so fine for keeping track of gain or loss, as the case might be. My wife has scientific training and was not happy with that answer, she wants to know what she really weighs. That plus my new need to know what I really weigh, led to this:

The hook on the end of the tool was to connect a rod in the tower to the mechanism in the platform. The screwdriver like slot is to adjust the zero and the hex hole was for bolting on the height measuring rod and the wheels.

The Year In Weight Lifting

It really hasn't been a whole year since I started in June, see my post on that here.

I continued to add 5 lbs per week until about 105 lbs and then hurt my back trying for 110. I worked on my form and on getting my back well again and progress has been slow but steady. I have gotten to the point where I sometimes am able to lift 135 lbs over my head using the clean and jerk.

I have changed my routine a little: I used to just lift whatever weight I was at five repetitions. Now I start at 115 and then either lift 120 then 125, then 130 and then (sometimes 135). Other times I will skip increments in order to be fresher at the highest weight, so 115, 125 then 135.

Am I getting stronger?

The short, or as I like to call it sometimes--the Microsoft answer--is that yes, I must be getting stronger. But does it alone account for the fact that I can lift more weight? No, almost certainly not. When I make a successful top-weight lift, it often feels pretty effortless. The moves in a clean and the moves in the jerk are pretty acrobatic and require a lot of coordination. This difficulty is compounded by the stress and danger of doing it while holding a heavy barbell in your hands.

It is all for the best:

Whether I am purely getting stronger (which is the actual goal) or am getting purely better at the moves, it is fine. If I am becoming more skilled this helps in two ways: Going through the full range of motion which happens in the properly executed lift provides better training. If skill allows more weight on the bar, then eventually the weight will have to be lifted with strength and so my muscles will become stronger.

Learning to let go.

The thing I have to watch out for is hurting my back. As mentioned above, I did hurt myself at 110 lbs. This happened when I failed to make the clean and bent my back while under a load. Now what I do is drop the bar if I need to. The floor is concrete and an unfinished basement, but even if it was the finest teak parquet, my back is less replaceable. Still, my back does ache and it is hard to tell what the reasons are. It was totally fine a month ago and I was lifting 130 back then. I suspect it was other activities like snow removal and hauling around packages and heavy bags of salt. This current snow storm will not clarify matters, but back issues are something to watch out for.

The Year in Running

I did my last run of the year today and it was kind of a pathetic effort but when it gets averaged into a whole year the stink is diluted.

The goal for the year was 30 miles per week at a pace of 8:00/mile or better. 30 X 52 = 1,560, which I cleared by a massive 11.5 miles!

The grand total is 240 workouts covering 1,571.55 miles and taking a total of 208 hours, 42 minutes and 36 seconds. The average is about 6 1/2 miles with a pace of 7:58.

It can be broken further into runs with shoes and barefoot runs:

Shoes: 161 runs in 133:23:53 with 993.78 miles covered. Average pace of 8:03, average distance of a little less than 6.2 miles.

Barefoot: 79 runs in 75:18:43 with 577.77 miles covered. Average pace of 7:49, average distance of 7.3 miles.

I experienced much greater soreness after barefoot runs than with shoes and one can wonder if it is due to more intrinsic wear-and-tear or from running more than a mile further and 14 seconds faster per mile when barefoot as compared to running with shoes on.

No Picture, So It Didn't Happen

Actually a picture wouldn't really have added much, other than, ironically, filler.

We had gone to the 99 (right by where I work) after seeing The Secret Life of Walter Mitty and I ordered a seafood sampler which included one stuffed clam.

The thing about stuffed clams is that I have never eaten one that was home made--most were the ones you get at the grocery, ready-made and frozen. You put them into the oven and like them but feel like they could be a lot better.

I decided to try and make them because I wanted to see how good they could be and the large clams used (quahogs) are a much better deal than the small ones that you might use for linguine sauce.

The ones I made were the best I've ever had, so here is how I made them:

I started with about 10 large hard clams (around 4 lbs total) I soaked them in a bowl, with many water changes for about 6 hours. This was to get rid of any grit that might be contained in them.

While steaming them in a covered pot, I browned a medium yellow onion and a similar volume of finely chopped celery (inner leafy part) along with a couple cloves of garlic in lots of butter and olive oil. The usual clan of herbs were added: Fresh parsley, bay leaf, black pepper, sage, oregano and I could have added paprika but forgot it. Into this I crushed about one sleeve of Ritz crackers.

If the above seems familiar, it should: It is essentially the same stuffing used for any seafood. I minced-up the clam meats, which had finished opening up by then and added that, along with fresh lemon juice to the stuffing and packed all of this into a dozen of the half shells.

These were arranged into the same skillet I had done the browning in and I added a tablespoon of the clam water from steaming to each shell as well as a bit to the pan to avoid scorching. This was put into a 350F oven for about 20 minutes, till the tops started to brown.

They were, as my wife put it, "guest worthy".

Training v. Exercise

I got this picture from an article by the legendary Mark Rippetoe on cross fit.

He makes a great point about the distinction between exercise and training. As good as the writing and points he makes, I was even more taken with the picture.

Double McDouble Day

I felt a little bad afterwards:

I had stopped in at McDonald's on the way back from running errands because:

1. I was hungry, it being around Noon and I had a small breakfast.
2. The McDonald's was one that I would drive right past on the way home.

I didn't feel bad for having a McDouble, I felt bad for succumbing to temptation and having two. Why did I have two?

1. It seemed wasteful to expend the time and effort of stopping and then only purchasing one.
2. They are so cheap (they were a Dollar but I think they jacked it up to $1.19 which is still cheap) one might as well order two.

Later, I felt fine.

1. Later, I had gone for a 13.1 mile run.
2. Later, I calculated that two McDoubles have (combined), 780 calories and my run burned 1,387 calories.

Obama and Mandela

Obama was in Johannesburg today, rightly eulogizing Nelson Mandela. The event brings to mind how opposite they are and were.

I was really apprehensive at the time Mandela took office in South Africa. He had been imprisoned for 27 years and the record of leaders like Mugabe of Zimbabwe was not encouraging. I was surprised and thankful that Mandela turned out to be greater than his personal grievances.

Obama has been the opposite. Yes, a minority but raised by affluent relatives on his mother's side of the family. He wanted for nothing and attended the best private schools. He was elected by a white majority country even as he had minimal accomplishments of his own. And yet he has been a divisive leader who acts like the victim of some grievance rather than one of the luckiest guys in the world.

The Journey...

There is an old saying, supposedly of Chinese origin that goes:

"The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step"

There is a lot of wisdom contained in this and also a couple of unspoken assumptions. First the wisdom: The goal may take a lot of time and effort but it will never happen unless you start. The parts that are not mentioned all fall under the category: Just setting out does not guarantee you will succeed. First, you have to go in the right direction. If I set out for Spokane Washington from my home in the Boston area, I had better head West. If I go North or South, each step gets me a little further from my destination. If my destination is London, I had better build a boat. Walking will not get me there.

I got to thinking of all this in conjunction with the complaints we hear from the left that us mean Republicans are undermining the healthcare law and dooming it to failure. That is not the way we see it. Rather we see it as already doomed. We would just like to avoid walking 500 miles in the wrong direction before having to make the inevitable course correction.

I will stipulate that in the broadest sense, our goals are the same: We would all like for the health and well-being of our people to improve and to do so in an efficient manner. We do have quite different ideas about what an "ideal" system would look like though. In general, I think those on the right would like to see more market based systems which have the natural tendency to improve quality and reduce cost but have the drawback of inequality between the quality of care wealthy people and poor people can obtain. The other side, I think does not acknowledge any trade-off between equality of access and efficiency, but if they had to choose one--they would choose equality of access.

Just a final thought: The new healthcare law is intrusive in many ways and certainly will be expensive too. If we could "spend" the intrusiveness in some other way, could we achieve more positive results in some other hypothetical law? What if instead, we had a law which required everyone who is physically able, to walk 30 minutes/day? It could be nice-n-complex with waivers for people who do more vigorous exercise and documentation requirements, plus of course a tax/penalty if you refuse to participate. Does anyone really doubt that this program wouldn't improve overall health and well-being more than the new law*.

*My view is that the ACA will actually harm overall heath since it will make an already inefficient delivery system even more convoluted and inefficient, with the end result that more will be spent on administrative costs and less on actual healthcare delivery.

Time, Time...

I do a running loop from home that is close to eight miles and the nice thing about it is that I can easily add another four miles at the end. The problem is that I almost never do the extra four.

Time: I don't want to do the extra four if my time for the first eight is bad--I don't want to convert a mere bad run into a disaster.

Time: It seems like whenever I do have a good time going, I have stuff to do and don't have time to add another half hour to my work out.

Well, That Was Different

Remember when this was true?

Now, we have a new standard: Voting in a way that one side doesn't like, should be criminalized.

A petition on the MoveOn.org website is calling for the Department of Justice to arrest some House Republican leaders for their roles in the government shutdown and debt-ceiling debates.

Yeah, it is MoveOn. But they are taken seriously in some quarters and you will notice the sound of silence in place of denunciations from the left.

Link

Broken Sauce

Wednesdays I am usually off from work and do a small mid-week grocery run to get whatever we are out-of or forgot to get on the weekend "big shopping". I had just seen Surenna's cross country meet and she was probably on my mind when deciding what kind of fish to get for dinner. Wednesdays are great for fish since I have time to cook and can get them fresh the same day they will be prepared. Anyway, the girl has long complained about us always having salmon, the monkfish looked good...(it was in fillet form) and variety is the very spice & etc.

I had a vague memory that this was one of the few white-fleshed fish where the meat does not go flaky when cooked. I like to grill and flaky fish doesn't really work but I figured I could look it up when I got home and if I have to bake it or fry it this will not be the end of the world. When I looked it up, the internet tubes all agreed that the fish has the texture of lobster. For this reason, I decided to serve the grilled fish with Hollandaise sauce on the side--it is mostly butter and lemon juice, both of which go great with lobster. It ended up being a big hit with the kids and I liked it. The wife, not so much.

One odd thing was the making of the sauce: I have made Hollandaise many, many times with no problems. I pre-melted the butter and allowed it to cool before adding the lemon juice and egg yolks and only then turned on the double cooker. I whisked continuously and then all at once it broke and became all grainy. I took it off the heat and whisked rapidly; the sauce thickened and became creamy. Whew!

It got me thinking about the seeming randomness of my being sore and injured from sports. I can understand it when it is weights. There are lots of ways to hurt yourself when dealing with free-weights, especially something like the clean and jerk. But I don't think I can run wrong. I ran 13 on Sunday, barefoot and fairly slow. Yet on Monday I powered through a short 3.5 mile run at 7:32 (which is fast for me). Tuesday, again I felt fine and did a 6-miler safely under 8:00, finally on Wednesday an 8-miler under eight, but it was a struggle and was only slightly under. I am still sore now--a couple of days later.

What is the "take-home" here? Just run everyday? I could barely walk on Thursday, let alone run. It would be glib to try and see the parallel between the broken sauce--just keep whisking--and being sore/injured. some things are just different.

It is almost enough to make one shout, "We are Nihilists! We believe in nothing"! Almost, but not quite.

Hat Trick or Troika Monday

There are three things I do which are health-related:

1. Starting on Sunday, I run every day until I have run at least 30 miles. Then I take off from running until the next Sunday. I normally have Saturday off, Friday is fairly common and every once in a while, I have Thursday off too.

2. I fast on Monday and Thursday. This might move around depending on my schedule--If I have to go out to dinner on one of those days or if it is Thanksgiving, then I might skip it or move it up or down a day.

3. I weight-lift every other day.

Being Monday, running is essentially inevitable and fasting is normally scheduled on Monday. The wild-card is lifting, which being every other day should fall on half of Mondays. When it doesn't fall on a Monday it will fall on a Thursday, so the only way of avoiding this triple "fun" every week is to make sure I have 30 miles logged by Wednesday.

First CC Race In 33 Years

I've been to a bunch of races in the last couple of years since Surenna runs on her HS team but finally I got to participate in one:

Thanks to Jimmy S. of GLRR for the picture.

I found out that the Thomas Chamberas 6K XC was being run practically in our back yard at Great Brook Farm in Carlisle.

As for the race:  The start was along a corn field on a tractor path.  There was about 1/4 mile of this before it turned a corner with a meadow on one side and the corn on the other.  This was the first place where one could break-out of the crowd and go to full speed.  I saw Glenn (the president of the GLRR) ahead of me and figured I would just attempt to keep up with him.  He is more than ten years older than I am but I have never beaten him in a race.  There was only about 3/4 mile of wide running area before the course narrowed into a one lane path.  A good mile and a half of mostly being stuck behind other runners but I had done a lot of passing in the earlier part, including Glenn and so was running with people moving at a good clip. The last 3/4 mile was more-or-less constant double path and I found myself catching and passing for the rest of the way.  

The obstructions on the path; roots, boulders loose gravel were a treachery and a saving:  When following close behind another runner, the path ahead would only come into view when it was too late to react.  On the occasional small opening, the uneven ground kept runners slow and so if you were willing to risk a fall, some good passing could be done. I saw frequent, though did not get, turned ankles in this part of the race.

In a road race it seems like essentially a one dimensional competition:  How hard can I push myself at any given moment in the race?  On a course like this, sometimes you were just stuck behind a person and so all you have to concern yourself with is keeping up.  On a path, running at high speed, there is a constant mental effort to choose your footing--do I take a long step here to the top of this boulder, or take a short step to the base of it and then step over it with the other foot?  While racing, I noticed I was having fun in a way that I don't really have so much in road races.

I would normally be happy with my performance:  6:56/mile, except that I suspect that the course was short. I had to have lost at least 30 seconds in the start, due to crowding and I heard somebody's GPS watch chime at the first mile and a glance at my watch showed something like 7:30.  It seems a little hard to believe I made back something like 45 seconds (below a 7:00/mile pace) in the last 2.7 miles, especially when I was stuck behind people for at least half of that distance.  In addition:  I hardly would make that pace on roads and trails really are a lot slower than pavement.  I did the Medical Center 6K a couple of years ago in Nashua and got 26:01 compared to this race a 25:49.  I would like to believe that I've gotten a lot faster in the last two years but I am 50 years old and don't believe in fairy tails.

Wife's picture of the finish--partially photo bombed...