It's just my opinion, I could be wrong

I have a few scattered thoughts, in no particular order. Unlike several other topics, I don't really have a clear-cut right/wrong opinion on the organization or what they are trying to do, so anecdotal observations will have to suffice. Observation, the first: if the US is really so concerned about the information being leaked, why don't they use their new-found (or maybe just newly abused) power to take down the entire domain ? I mean, if piracy of music is justification for taking down internet sites, than espionage and exposure of classified material would be grounds for nuking WikiLeaks ' ISP from orbit, much less obliterating their DNS entries, right? I mean, if you're gonna be wielding the gigantic censorship stick anyway, and clubbing anyone who your donors are upset with, you might as well just fix the problem you spend so much time complaining about too... Observation, the second: An acquaintance from school, Patri Freidman, re-tweeted a brilliant observation: ...

The Fed has been pretty busy recently, debating inflation targets, QE2, monetary/fiscal policy, etc. I have suggested before that the easiest way, by far, for the Fed to achieve its inflation target is to just back out the hedonic regression , basket adjustment, and other one-sided transparent manipulations by the BLS to artificially lower the CPI. If you just use the "real" numbers (ie: before/without the intentional distortions), you could have inflation at over 4% immediately (since that's where the real value is), and you wouldn't have to worry about trying to raise it by printing money. Of course, that is all sorta academic, since the economists at the Fed are not total morons, and I assume they know the real numbers, and are just using the fake numbers to justify their de-facto fiscal policy of printing money. However, it does raise an interesting point: if the public is stupid enough to be deceived by the rather blatant BLS distortions to the CPI, wouldn'...

There's been a bit of controversy lately over the new TSA security devices and procedures being put in place to make commercial air travel more obtrusive and dangerous for people. Specifically, I'm referring to the new full body "naked" scanners, and the associated "enhanced" pat-down procedures for people who refuse the scans, designed primarily to be so obtrusive and embarrassing that people will consider the scanner to be the lesser of two undesirable circumstances. The new system are more obtrusive for obvious reasons, but also more dangerous: after all, exposing frequent travelers to repeated bursts of radiation (which may be significantly higher than advertised, according to some rumors/investigations) can have bad long-term effect on the human body. Of course, if everyone requested the new "make it as cumbersome and humiliating as possible" pat-downs, that would also grind security lines to a halt, so there's no real good alternative. As...

I've blogged about the US medical insurance problem before , but as most pundits could attest to, it's much easier to point out flaws in a system than to propose solutions (and, as an aside, only mildly harder to use the flaws and public frustration with the system to advance an unrelated agenda which does nothing to address them and might even make them worse, as the Obama administration has so aptly and repeatedly demonstrated). Part of the reason you don't see people like me proposing 2000+ page legislative "fix all" monstrosities to "reform" broken systems is that reasonable people realize that you don't reform/fix problems with massive legislative fecal-dumps: at best they fix some problems at the expense of more spending and red-tape; at worst they make most problems worse and add more spending and red-tape. The path to actual good reform is to address the actual real problems, one at a time, in a manner which most people can agree makes the ...

Note: This subject is interesting to me, so please bear with any rambling. Over the last couple of years, the government (through various agencies and programs) has been doing something very interesting. First, though, I'll explain some background which will probably be familiar. When a government runs a deficit, they typically finance it through borrowing, either from foreign or domestic participants, with the promise to repay the borrowing with interest over long periods of time. This, of course, is the source of the declared portion of the national debt, about half of which is owed to foreign entities (mainly countries such as China), and about half owed to domestic entities (in the form of government bond funds and such). This doesn't count the unrealized obligations such as Social Security and Medicare, but these are somewhat more flexible, as they are promises which can be changed, unlike bonds which are promises which carry the "full faith and credit" of the US...

The voters of California have successfully defied the national trend toward smaller government and less taxation, voting almost universally in the other direction. If we assume the voters understood what they were voting for (as assumption which is far from certain, but I'll go with it), the majority of voters in California stand against the Tea Party principles, and want more taxation, more big government, more destruction of businesses, and more of the status quo. One could argue, certainly, that the powerful union lobbies purchased the election results in California, but at the end of the day, the voters have spoken, and California will live with the consequences. To recap, here's what the voters decided: - "Moonbeam" Jerry Brown, friend of unions and mortal enemy of taxpayers, for governor - Barbara "rubber stamp" Boxer for Senate - "New taxes with simple majority" Prop 25 passed It remains to be seen exactly what form the new taxes and regulat...