It's just my opinion, I could be wrong

Most days, the machinations of the malignant imbeciles in Washington as just the backdrop of life in the US: an evil, to be sure, but a somewhat necessary evil to allow the country and society to continue its strained existence. You can usually write off the constant struggle between the people and their would-be rulers as the price of living in a country with some semblance of law and order, and just hope that there are enough people sacrificing their time and energy to keep the government in check to prevent the situation from deteriorating too much. Some days, though, enough abuses pile up that you can't help but feel a sense of profound anger and frustration, even if each individual abuse seems small compared to the sheer magnitude of vileness emanating from Washington, and today is one of those days for me. See, this particular frustration starts (oddly enough) with looking at new cars. Now, I'm not really considering buying a new car, but I wanted to see what was new in t...

Barney Frank is a funny guy... or, at least, I'm sure some people find him amusing. In a joking swipe at the controversy around Obama's concerted efforts to ensure that nobody outside of a couple of public officials in Hawaii can actually verify his citizenship (and hence his qualification to serve as president), Frank suggested that the media should verify the citizenship of new House representative Charles Djou. Notwithstanding the fact that citizenship is not required for membership in the House of Representatives, I'm thinking it provides a potential political opportunity. See, Djou was born in LA, so it would be pretty trivial for him to acquire a certified copy of his actual birth certificate, and post it online or something. You'd have to be careful about the wording, but I'm thinking of a public statement along the lines of: You see, it's not actually difficult at all for an American-born citizen to acquire and produce for verification one's birth c...

I've talked about this before, somewhat, but I'm not sure if I've ever laid-out a specific prediction on the future of medical care in the US, now that it has been partially socialized by the Obama administration. One could argue that these changes were inevitable with or without the latest "reform", and that they stem from the Medicare system in general, but more socialization certainly doesn't help. From Texas: more doctors opting out of Medicare . Now, no big surprise here: Medicare is somewhat unfair to practitioners, underpays for procedures, has horrible inefficiencies, a spotty payment history, and is generally a pain compared to other insurance programs. To some extent providers accept Medicare for the same reason businesses take credit cards: it opens up markets and allows more sales opportunities. However, as the Medicare costs go up and the system continues to degrade, look for more practitioners to drop it as a coverage option, leaving few actual r...

From USA today, via CalculatedRisk : "This is the absolute worst time to lose our residential mobility," says Richard Florida, a professor of U.S. urban theory at the University of Toronto. "It's important for people to move to where the new opportunities are, because that is the cornerstone of our idea-driven economy." CR goes on to note that part of the reason for the lack of mobility is that lots of people are underwater on their homes... which is true, but not the only factor. I'd venture to say that another significant reason why people are reluctant to move is that many people know that there's significant pending price declines in he housing market, and don't want to make a move now because they know prices are going to be lower after the delayed foreclosures work their way through the system in the next few years. This is less likely to be preventing people from moving for employment if they are desperate (after all, you can always rent), but...

This from a Reuter's article about how LA is apparently going to boycott doing future business with Arizona in protest to their attempts to curb their rampant illegal immigration problem: "I cannot go to Arizona today without a passport," Councilman Ed Reyes said before the vote. "If I come across an officer who's had a bad day and feels the picture on my ID is not me, I could be summarily deported -- no questions asked. That is not American." Arizona's new law, which comes into effect at end-July, does not allow police to demand identification from individuals without cause or to summarily deport them. But it does require officers, during a lawful contact, to check the immigration status of anyone who they reasonably suspect is in the country illegally. One has to wonder if resident douche-bag Ed Reyes is just a moron, woefully uninformed and thus making a fool out of himself, or just spewing garbage based on the belief that his constituents and suppor...

Ok, this might be a bit wonky and theoretical, fair warning... I've been thinking some about the problem with long-term government debt, and how to prevent government entities from mortgaging the future to fulfill current spending desires. In essence, this is the #1 long-term problem with government debt: it's not that debt is bad, it's just that the accumulation of debt, combined with compounding interest payments, eventually leads to default or inflation, or both. The same is true for everyone else's debt too, of course, although normal people cannot typically print money to paper over the problems and reduce the debt by devaluing the currency. But I digress. Consider if, instead of being allowed to roll over debt indefinitely, a government (eg: state government) had a strict, carefully-constructed Constitutional limit, which specified that all debt would only be valid for a specific period (eg: 10 years), after which if not paid back it would be automatically void, a...

Kinda off-topic from current events, but I've been thinking somewhat about online privacy, and specifically how it could be protected. Now, being the small-government person that I am, my thoughts naturally shy away from idiotic notions like "we need government regulation" and "more government regulation would help", and toward more practical and potentially effective solutions. It's a hard problem, though, and it's ripe for abuse... already various government organizations are vying for the right to control our privacy. Rather than just rant about how stupid all those "solutions" are, though, I've been trying to come up with some actual good ideas. One idea I've been evaluating is making telecommunications "gateway" providers civilly liable for any divulgence of personal data (which seems pretty straightforward). A step further, though, would be to make them also jointly liable for any illegal data access or activity (eg: con...

Picture this: you have a spouse with a spending problem. You both work, but "he" (imagine a gender-neutral pronoun here) is incapable of controlling his spending, and has run up enormous credit card debt while you have been trying to save money. He claims that he has an expensive lifestyle which must be maintained, and that it's unfair to ask him to make sacrifices when he's always lived extravagantly before. You've even gone out of your way to try to negotiate a debt settlement with your creditors which only requires a small reduction in his spending, but he complains that even that amount is arduous, and vows to continue spending as normal, seeing no problem with your ever-increasing debt, and no scenario where you would "run out" of money. What do you do? Well, apparently if you're the EU, you give him another $110b euros and hope that magically fixes the problem. ...WHAT? It's like giving free booze to an alcoholic while he's complaining ...