On the way up, bubbles encourage excessive investment in the bubble sector. On the way down a bursting bubble can create wealth shocks, liquidity shortages, and balance-sheet death-spirals. For both of these reasons, it would be good to be able to identify and pop bubbles. Identifying bubbles isn't easy, however, because, especially when interest rates are low, prices can increase rapidly with small, rational changes in investor expectations. But the difficulty of identifying bubbles is reasonably well known. What I think may be less appreciated is that bubbles are hard to pop even when you know that they exist.
Sirius XM is probably the best model of what happens when you start
charging for what people are used to getting for free. It fails.
Sirius has invested billions of dollars into amazing technology, but
without a partnership that gives new car buyers a free subscription
for a limited time, they would have failed years earlier. They make
the same argument, that they've got exclusive content, but just like
Times Select, walling off that content just made it less relevant.
Howard Stern was going to be the man who made Sirius a must have for
millions of fans, but when was the last time you heard anybody mention
the man?
How did he go from a must-hear personality who was
constantly in the news for his antics or his outrageousness to a
"whatever happened to?" has been? Simply, he was put behind a pay
wall. Oprah has her own channel,
but I've never heard it mentioned. If the King of All Media and a
woman who has enough influence to swing a national election can't get
people to pay, why on earth does Murdoch think he can?
A reader notes that Sarah and little Trig would never appear before any "Death Panel", because they are entitled to free federal health care. Palin's own record of treatment of the elderly and disabled can be explored here. And you may remember this odd lie:
At one point, trying out a debating point that she believed showed she
could empathize with uninsured Americans, Palin told McCain aides that
she and Todd in the early years of their marriage had been unable to
afford health insurance of any kind, and had gone without it until he
got his union card and went to work for British Petroleum on the North
Slope of Alaska. Checking with Todd Palin himself revealed that, no,
they had had catastrophic coverage all along. She insisted that
catastrophic insurance didn’t really count and need not be revealed.
I just want to share a sad story with you. Tonight I was at my regular Friday night AA meeting in LA that I have been attending for 18 years - I am a 48 year old woman. One of my oldest friends, a male with 30 years sobriety, is a Republican. I am a Democrat. Every week he talks politics with another like-minded friend. Tonight he arrived a bit later than usual, so as I gave him a hug, I said, "Thank goodness you arrived because I am sure Betty* (name changed) did not want to discuss politics with me!"
He then turned around and started screaming at me. I was so taken aback, I didn't even know what he was screaming about at first. When I finally tuned in, he was yelling that Obama "sent the SEIU thugs to beat up the senior citizens" protesting at the health-care town hall meetings and that Obama had instructed the SEIU "if they come at you, you go at them twice as hard."
During this 20-year period under Israeli rule [starting in 1967], some 250,000 Israelis
settled in the Territories. These were the supposedly predatory
settlers. They supplied the infrastructure of power, water, education,
and medical care that attracted nearly ten Arab settlers for every one
Israeli. During this period, the economy in the territories grew some
25 percent per year, nearly the fastest in the world, and far faster
than that of Israel itself, which was still bogged down in socialism.
Arab life expectancy rose from 40 to around 70. Their incomes tripled
while their population soared. Seven universities and 2,500 factories
were established. It was the golden age for Palestinian Arabs.
Ackerman is right to compare this to the contention – occasionally
made by retrograde conservatives/modern-day confederate-sympathizers –
that American slavery wasn’t so bad, as it brought Africans to America,
which is so much more awesome than Africa, or something. In fact, you
can extend this argument to almost any instance of oppression; British
domination of India wasn’t a complete wash, after all,
Indians benefited from British education, British industry and British
culture. Yes, a few million Indians had to die for “civilization,” but
really, higher prices have been paid for less.
Gawker describes the latest marketing strategy from the Super Adventure Club:
Want to work in one of Scientology's fresh new "Ideal Org"
churches? Then get ready to put on your 20-piece uniform, mandatory for
all cult staff. [...] The uniform is intended to unite staff on "six continents" and help them look the part of "emissaries of a new civilization."
Chuck Lane offers some calm thoughts on Medicare and living wills and the extraordinary costs of end-of-life care. What's new in the current proposals in the Congress is encouraging doctors to talk with elderly patients about drawing up powers of attorney and the like to govern end-of-life medical decisions. As long as there is no coercion involved and this is a totally voluntary process - with time for a patient to decide to forgo such measures if he or she wishes - I find this a sensible measure to tackle the huge percentage of medical costs that occur to extend life for a few days. This isn't a death panel, as Chuck concedes. But I disagree with him on whether this measure goes too far - simply because the fiscal crisis is so grave.
Your obvious shock and dismay at the sheer angry ignorance of the health care teabaggers reiterates my largest problem with your rosy immigrant's view of America. You have often underestimated just how poisonously dangerous the American populist right is.
I don't blame you. You came to America after the rise of Reagan. Most of your life in America, you have lived under different Republican presidents who placated these folks with platitudes and campaign rhetoric. The one period when the populist right didn't feel they had a fellow traveler in charge was when Bill Clinton was elected (thanks to the reactionaries splitting their votes). You remember, no doubt, the level of crazy Clinton had to defuse and dodge, and this was a man who had the advantage of being a Southern bubba who has dealt which such people all his life.
For most of your time in America, this insanity has been muted by the success of conservative politics. Since you live in Washington, you probably saw daily the face of the successful conservative political establishment that milked the populist right, and by milking them kept their bitterness at a manageable level. That safety valve was stuffed up by George Bush's failed presidency.
So now, these people are facing their worst fears; actual change.
Between yesterday's two lead stories - the killing of Pakistan's Taliban leader and the report showing decreased unemployment in July - it was a great day for the administration. But Ackerman dials down the former:
[I]nsurgent groups tend to organize themselves precisely for
survivability in the event of decapitation. In Iraq, the U.S. killed
and detained a lot of al-Qaeda in Iraq leaders, including Abu
Musab al-Zarqawi himself, but only when the Sunni Iraqi population
decisively turned against AQI did the terrorist network find itself,
for all strategic purposes, defeated.
I'm not saying that what happened in Iraq is guaranteed to repeat itself in Pakistan. But the New York Timesreports
that already Mehsud's deputies are meeting to see who replaces him and
where the movement goes next. This is an opportunity that the Pakistani
military and its government can seize or can miss. And like Abu Muqawama, my sense is that the Pakistanis are primed to miss it.
That does seem to be the general sentiment among the National Review demographic. A reader reports another irony:
Surely the oddest thing about the town hall protests is the number of
elderly screaming at the top of their lungs about euthanasia,
eugenics--by far the largest contingent. These folks have single-payer
health care paid for by the government, and have had it for decades.
It's called Medicare. Yet somehow, they vehemently want to deny it to
everyone under 65. What's up with that?
They are trying to save the country from the care they receive, I guess. But isn't Medicare popular?
Just lost my job as a proofreader at a graphic arts studio after almost 5 years. I should be feeling bad, but I am not. While I lost a few hundred dollars a week in the process, the ability to see my friends and family kind of negates working in a negative environment. Unemployment benefits have given myself the time to look for a more self satisfying occupation, along with being a human again. I complained so much while working there, but I don't have that feeling anymore. The past is the past and I am ready to move forward. Life's just too short.
Maybe about two years ago, I was visiting my girlfriend in another
part of the state. Our time together those days was precious since we
lived hours away from each other, so it wasn't uncommon for us to be
up late at night into the early morning hours. At about 2 a.m. one
particular night, she begun to feel these horrible, stinging pains in
her lower abdomen. At first we thought - hoped - it was pronounced
indigestion or even food poisoning and nothing serious, like
appendicitis. She took some painkillers, but the pain persisted for
about an hour, to the point where it was so intense that she was
vomiting. I said, "The hell with it, we're going to the emergency
room."
Several patrons were hurt, one rushed to hospital with a blood clot caused by beating. Here's the conclusion:
"There were so many violations that one could
readily assert that they had no business walking through the door."
But they had a good time beating the crap out of some faggots. No results yet of an inquiry into the actual violence. I don't know whether the cops involved have been diciplined.
A new report from the State Department shows that Iran does not have the capability to produce weapons-grade material before 2013. In that light, NIAC's case against sanctions is all the more relevant:
Most in Washington are aware that September will bring with it the
biggest push for Iran sanctions in years. AIPAC has been lobbying for
months on the Iran Refined Petroleum Sanctions Act
(IRPSA), and on September 10 the Conference of Presidents of Major
American Jewish Organizations will kick off a massive nationwide lobbying effort,
which they compare to the “Save Darfur” movement. All of this will
culminate at the end of the month when, conveniently enough, Mahmoud
Ahmadinejad arrives in New York for the UN General Assembly.
Yes, right around the time Ahmadinejad is at the podium in the UN,
Congress is expected to impose what it calls “crippling sanctions” on
Iran’s economy. The plan is to blockade Iran’s foreign supplies of
gasoline, hoping that an increase in the price per gallon at the pump
will cause the Iranian people to rise up and demand a halt to Iran’s
nuclear program.
Actually I don't think you could come up with a workable way to do
what your reader describes. If you used IPs to determine your paywall
they'd get spoofed. If you used usernames and passwords, you'd have
an enormous headache on your hands (somehow I don't see ISP security
guys relishing sharing logon information -- it would almost definitely
be a second account).
There might be SOME people who are interested
in getting a broadband connection that had some guaranteed content,
but I doubt it would be a large number. The effect would be the same
as the paywall over TimesSelect -- whatever is behind a paywall will
not be part of the conversation online.
The business model of getting people to pay for news is dead.
Yes of course these weirdos were carrying swastikas at the town hall
shout fests. But wasn't Pelosi's obvious implication that the righty
town hall crashers were carrying swastikas as a badge of honor, rather
than as a criticism of Obama as a "fascist"? While certainly silly to
paint Obama a fascist, these guys can't be called neo-nazis. That is
what Pelosi was doing. Right out of the Bill Clinton, "It's nazi time"
playbook. I'm surprised to see you come to Pelosi's defense on this one.
Well let's go to the video:
Now, I can see where the misunderstanding might come from.
And now the health insurance debate becomes some gruesome mix of camp and high farce. Sarah Palin contributes her policy ideas for health insurance reform:
The America I know and love is not one in which my parents or my baby
with Down Syndrome will have to stand in front of Obama's "death panel"
so his bureaucrats can decide, based on a subjective judgment of their
"level of productivity in society," whether they are worthy of health
care. Such a system is downright evil.
David Rothkopf thinks that Russia could be a bigger threat than Pakistan:
Russia, has been rattling its rusty sabers
more frequently recently. There was the story
the other day about its submarines off the U.S. coast, the not so comforting
rebuttal today by one of its top generals, its recent naval exercises with the
Iranians, its generally non-constructive attitude toward dealing with the
Iranian nuclear problem, its belligerent rumblings throughout its near
abroad ... the list goes on. And this is a
country that has the ability, as the submarine (and earlier strategic bomber
readiness) stories suggest, to project force anywhere in the world. [...] (For a very
good take on Russia, see today's op-ed by one of our best experts on the
country, Steve Sestanovich, in the Washington Post.)
Russia also has, as Joe Biden impoliticly noted,
some
problems that could be complicating factors. In short, the bear has the
wolf at its door-demographically and economically. Biden interpreted
these as factors that might
weaken Russia. But they are also the
kind of factors that often inspire leaders to dangerous postures and
strategies.
As of this typing (10:02 am), there is a
post laughing at the Obama administration's efforts to "ban" the phrase
"war on terrorism" [...]
Cliff May gets in a non-sequitur joke, that now we should start calling
the two world wars "Overseas Contingency Operation I" and "Overseas
Contingency Operation II". [...] Playing lame word-games to show that
the administration is not serious about terror is more important than
noting, in any form whatsoever, the killing of the man believed to be
behind Benazir Bhutto's assassination and countless terror attacks.
Update: The story was posted to the Corner, without comment, at 11:11, the 24th post of the day.
John Brennan delivered a major address to the Center for Strategic and International Studies yesterday. Ambers distills the speech. He later notes:
During the Q and A session, Brennan, speaking in a knowledgeable staccato, would not say whether he supported a classified annex to the Army Field Manual's interrogation practices, nor would he say how the administration might deal with future preventative detentions. He did say that those cases were "dwindling" because "foreign countries are standing up."
Marcy Wheeler adds that Brennan gave an evasive, "Gonzales-like" response to questions about his role in Bush's illegal surveillance program. Nevertheless, Ackerman was thoroughly impressed with the speech:
[It] was perhaps the
most elegant articulation of a progressive approach to combating
terrorism that I can remember hearing. Here's my wrap for the Washington Independent, which Holly Yeager and I headlined "Obama Aide Declares End To War On Terror," because Brennan did.
Plenty of us in Washington have in fact been having a very sober-minded
discussion about U.S. interests in Afghanistan and the limits of our
new counterinsurgency doctrine.
While sure some people have had this discussion; but to argue that it's
been a key feature of the public discourse on Afghanistan is pretty
hard to swallow. And for [Muqawama] to use Stephen Biddle's tortured logic argument
for staying in Afghanistan that offers a strawman choice between
withdrawal and stay the course is not what I would call a robust debate. [...] And what's more I'll call your Stephen Biddle and raise you Peter Bergen's recent piece in the Washington Monthly.
I like Peter and he is a colleague, but I think it's fair to say that
his article focuses far more on the operational side of the Afghanistan
war and tends to gloss over the larger strategic issues raised by
Bacevich.
I was horrified at the stories your reader's sent you yesterday about their
health care cost nightmares, and thought I'd share the view from the
other side.
I work for a national insurance company and it's my
job to pay hospitals and clinics for services performed. Now when I say
pay, you should think of that in air-quotes. Assume it takes a week for
the bill to be routed to the right person in the right department at my
company. Once the bill reaches the right desk it heads back out.
Because before we pay a bill we send it to a 3rd party company who
reviews it to see how much we "really have to pay" for the services.
This is because every state has different guidelines about what
services should cost. This takes a week. Then the bill comes back to
us, and if there are no issues with the hospital's records in our
systems we pay the bill then.
"Adolf Hitler issued six million end of life orders--he called his program the final solution. I kind of wonder what we're going to call ours," a spokesman for the Patients First bus tour, fighting healthcare reform.
What's fascinating to me is not just the blind fury of the people - it is much more than anger, it is close to explosive - but the bizarre points they are making. One man insists that when the new proposals come into force, his son with cerebral palsy will be denied all care. He is close to murderously adamant about this. But under what interpretation of any of the bills would that be true? Another woman asks heatedly, "Exactly where's the money coming from? Is it coming out of my
paycheck? I wanna know if it's coming out of my paycheck--yes or no!" Well, if she has health insurance from her employer, yes it already is coming out of her pay-check in larger and larger amounts. Is she aware of this? Are the Dems planning to tax her to pay for insuring the uninsured? Unless she's very wealthy, no. And these pretty basic misunderstandings are then converted into a simple slogan: "Liberty or Tyranny!" Mark Levin has indeed had an impact.
Look: if these people were yelling: "End the employer tax break!" or "More Cost-Controls!" or "Malpractice Reform!" I'd be more sympathetic. But this is blind panic and rage.
"I thought that Nancy Pelosi might have made a slip of the tongue when she dishonestly and disingenuously said that townhall-protesters are 'carrying swastikas and symbols like that to a town meeting on healthcare,'" - John McCormack, Weekly Standard.
"They aren’t carrying swastikas, either,” - The DC Examiner.
Krauthammer has a real point here. Why is medical malpractice not in the mix? (We know why: trial lawyers' power opver the Dems). And: why not abolish the tax break for employers? Add these to the mix and we're talking real reform. It's a great column.
In September 2007, I woke up with an unbelievable pain in my back. At
first I thought I had just strained it and took some ibuprofen, but as
the pain got worse and worse I realized I had a kidney stone. My wife drove me to the hospital and they checked me into the emergency
room. I was in so much pain that my wife also handled the paperwork,
handing over my insurance card, and filling out forms. After a short
wait I got an IV drip of painkiller and lunch tray and was able to
settle down. They took an X-ray that revealed two stones. Then they
decided to also do a CT Scan. I was doped up and not paying attention
- and anyway we had great insurance through our grad school - so I
didn't ask whether it was necessary. They wheeled me into the CT Scan
machine, took a couple pictures and found out... yep, kidney stone.
After about 3 hours I passed one of the stones, and with a prescription
for heavy-duty painkillers in tow, we left the hospital. Everything
was fine until I received a bill 3 months later itemized as follows:
Murdoch's view that his content is valuable is completely accurate.
And I think his plan is to try to get cable and telephone companies
that sell internet access to pay for it.
Although the "horse may be out of the barn" on free content, trusted
brands still DO matter...The reality, as so many people point out, is
that consumers may not be willing to pay for these brands anymore. But
free to the consumer does not have to mean subsidized or solely
ad-supported.
So how does a newspaper company make money? By licensing its
journalistic content to other companies that can use the valuable
content to sell its own services. Who are these companies that may be
willing to pay for content? Start with cable and Telcos who sell
internet access to consumers.
What I find intriguing in Romney’s choice of topic for his book, which I imagine will be a more long-winded version of thisspeech,
is that he has absolutely no background in foreign affairs, military
policy or national security issues. Just as he did in the last cycle,
he is intent on identifying himself with hard-line positions on issues
where he has no credibility, and he is also studiously avoiding all
those areas of policy where his business experience and his inner
domestic policy wonk might help him. Of course, as a proponent of
bailouts for Wall Street and Detroit and as the governor who signed off
on MassCare, Romney has less credibility than most other Republican
presidential aspirants in attacking Obama on either front. No doubt he
will transform himself yet again into a hard-charging,
government-slashing radical if he thinks that is what will win him
support, but the man’s lack of any enduring convictions will reveal
itself before long.
Ambers has a great summary of the assassination of the man who murdered Benazir Bhutto, killed 50 with a truck bomb in Islamabad and threatened a massive terror attack on Washington DC this spring. Will this help win back Pakistani public support for the war on terror? I have no idea. I do know that the successful strike against the most wanted Jihadist in the region most lethal to the West does not appear at Instapundit, or the allegedly anti-Jihadist Weekly Standard.
Now that the partisan right cannot use the war as a tool for Republican power, they've lost interest.
The reality of Obama's timid healthcare reform emerges:
The [insurance] industry has already accomplished its main goal of at least
curbing, and maybe blocking altogether, any new publicly administered
insurance program that could grab market share from the corporations
that dominate the business. UnitedHealth has distinguished itself by
more deftly and aggressively feeding sophisticated pricing and
actuarial data to information-starved congressional staff members. With
its rivals, the carrier has also achieved a secondary aim of
constraining the new benefits that will become available to tens of
millions of people who are currently uninsured. That will make the new
customers more lucrative to the industry.
Watching the debate in the U.S. about health care has been a fascinating, if depressing, experience. In particular, the fact that a Canadian woman has played into the hands of the Republican lobby because of her understandable anxiety about her medical condition doesn't make me mad; it just makes me sad. [...] The ad Ms. Holmes appears in says Canadians are denied care because "the government says patients aren't worth it.” So private insurance companies that routinely deny treatment and coverage in the U.S. are Good Samaritans? I think not.
When I was 6 months pregnant with my first child, and on complete
bedrest, I was laid off. I was unable to look for a new job, being so
late into a very difficult pregnancy. My doctors that had worked with
me on this high-risk pregnancy were not covered by my husband's
insurance company. We decided to use COBRA for me so I could continue
to see my doctors of choice.
My severance ran out the day my son was born prematurely, with
complications from having the umbilical cord around his neck during
birth.
The first bill for his expenses came as I was leaving the
hospital without my son. When a claim was denied because they said my son had a preexisting
condition, that was the final straw.
Here's an interesting flashback to the kind of rhetoric we are now hearing in parts of America about Barack Obama. It's a flyer distributed in Texas. Part of its text:
Wanted for TREASON ... He has consistently appointed Anti-Christians to Federal Office. Upholds the Supreme Court in their Anti-Christian rulings.
Plus ca change. It was distributed in Dallas in November 1963.
If gay couples can't be allowed to marry, what should they be able to do? Asked this question, cultural conservatives say, in the words of Tom Lehrer's song about the German rocket scientist Wernher von Braun, "That's not my department." Effectively, conservatives are saying that what Mike and Bill do for each other has no significance outside their own bedroom.
But what happened in that hospital in Philadelphia for those six weeks was not just Mike and Bill's business, a fact that is self-evident to any reasonable human being who hears the story. "Mike was making a medical decision at least once a day that would have serious consequences," Bill told me. Who but a life partner would or could have done that?
Who but a life partner will drop everything to provide constant care? Bill's mother told me that if not for Mike, her son would have died. Faced with this reality, what kind of person, morally, simply turns away and offers silence?
Not the sort of person who populates the United States of America. If Republicans wonder why they find themselves culturally marginalized, particularly by younger Americans, they might consider the fact that when the party looks at couples like Mike and Bill it sees, in effect, nothing.
Read the whole brilliant piece. The question for conservatives is this one: are you ideologues and theologians or pragmatists and politicians? Are you going to keep screaming at the modern world, or are you going to engage it? Are you George Wallace or Abraham Lincoln? And how long will it take you to leave the hate and bitterness and fear behind?
That's what Peggy Noonan calls Obama's healthcare proposals. Where is there an entitlement? There is an effort to subsidize private insurance for the working poor who now increase healthcare costs with emergency room care. The cost of all this is around $1 trillion over ten years and the struggle is finding ways to pay for it. The reason for the price-tag and its future is that healthcare costs keep sky-rocketing - something that is killing US companies as well who have to compete with international rivals who have to pay for no healthcare for their employees. Noonan makes no reference to this, as if the most pressing issue of future fiscal sanity is something we should put off ... because of fiscal conservatism. Excuse me? Now recall the Republicans' last major initiative on healthcare - the prescription drug benefit. That cost $32 trillion over the long run, and there was not even a gesture toward actually financing it. Much of the right was silent - as they were over all the other fiscally reckless policies of the past eight years.
August 2, 2009 - August 8, 2009
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