A nice little graph for those who don’t want the massive budget hit of healthcare reform.

(thanks to The Maddow Blog for the graph)

First off, if you’re not reading Overcoming Bias, you’re doing yourself a disservice. I’d say it’s one of the best, if not the best blog on the Internet. Most blogs–my own included–have a relatively low “wow” ratio; they might be solid overall, with lots of stuff to enjoy if you like the creator, but there is often much that falls into the noise category–even if it’s decent noise.

That’s not the case with Overcoming Bias. It’s basically good…all the time. You should read it.

Right then, with that out of the way, here’s a case in point on why you should:

[ Near and Far Thinking (A Tale of Two Tradeoffs) | overcomingbias.com ]

So bloody good.

As many here know, I used to be a Ron Paul fan. I actually still am, but not in the sense that I’d vote for him to lead the country. His strength comes from his convictions. Unfortunately, that’s also where his weakness comes from.

Ultimately, the problem is that he’s not very open to seeing the world in a way other than his own. He doesn’t like regulation, so he wants to abolish the FDA. How will people be protected from big corporations selling them sweet-tasting poison? Grass-roots groups and state and local government.

Yeah, right, and evolution is just a theory.

Anyway, Dr. Paul’s latest crusade is to bring transparency to the Fed. In other words, you’ve heard that they’re super-secret and don’t tell anyone about what they do, right. And that we should be able to audit them and influence their decisions as “the people”, right? Sounds good, right? Yeah, I thought so too. But no, it’s not.

As it turns out, we already have transparency into most every function of the Fed. There’s only one portion of it that’s opaque to Congress, and that’s the money-tweaking part. Ah, proof of a conspiracy no doubt!

Nope.

This was put into place on purpose to keep Congress from influencing monetary policy. It’s a simple concept: politicians do what will help themselves in the short term, not what will help the whole over time.

Basically, this opacity to the monetary policy was put in as a control against the greed of politicians. If they have the ability to shape the interest rates they’ll grandstand and force the rates to help their own constituents (or at least to try and show that they’re helping them) in a way that will upset the economy as a whole. And every politician will be trying to do that at the same time.

Are they economists? Are they experts in monetary policy? No. They’re just schmucks trying to get re-elected.

So, no, Dr. Paul, I don’t want Congress to have influence into that process. Like many things you say, this SOUNDS great (abolishing the FDA and Department of Education), but would in fact be catastrophic if it were to happen.

This isn’t to say that the Fed (or at least people within it) are beyond reproach. They’re not. There’s some shaky stuff going on over there. But the answer is not to do what feels good in the name of principle without thinking through the real-world repercussions.

The overwhelming endorsement of this push is yet another example of people jumping on ideas that resonate with them emotionally when they have very little knowledge of the facts.

I’m sometimes guilty of this as well, and I ask you to resist the temptation. ::

Links

[ Say No to Congressional Oversight of Monetary Policy | reuters.com ]

So here’s talk that the economy might be leveling off, and within a couple of days the price of gas has risen significantly. I’ve seen it rise like 15-20 cents in just a couple of weeks.

I think this price increase is a whole lot less complex than people make it out to be. Forget crude prices. Forget complex supply and demand flows.

At this point I think the price of gas is determined by one thing alone: the maximum amount the oil companies think the public will tolerate without getting violent. ::

An extremely creative, strange, and NSFW ad…about capitalism.

(thanks to Jason Powell for the link)

Just damn.

[ 2009-03-14 : Here's the DailyShow link. ]

Here are some graphs comparing the previous two stock market crashes with our current situation.

Up to this point the trend looks eerily close to our path-let’s just hope we take an ‘87 turn and not a ‘29 turn.

I’m kidding about the ammo thing, by the way. Well, sorta. ::

A friend of mine (I’ll identify him if he so desires) sent me the following email:

Just a quick thought. With Amazon hyping up the new Kindle so much, and with so many quality e-book readers available, why are Kindle edition books more expensive than the dead tree versions? There is no production cost beyond digitizing the media ( no trees to cut, ink to buy, covers to design, etc.) except for hosting and distribution from the server. I don’t see e-books replacing dead trees until the price can be lowered enough to provide an incentive.

An example, I would gladly buy a Kindle (even though I love my library) if I knew that over time, I would break even on my investment. So, if the books were $1.50 cheaper in e-book edition, my break even point would be around 230 books. This can never happen with the prices being higher. Other than the obvious ecological benefits, there is no real incentive to go with e-books. Also, with licensing, there is a good chance that I can’t share my library with friends. Just a random thought. I figured you might have some insight on this and an interesting opinion. Any thoughts?

I think this is an excellent observation. My first thought on this is that the cost of maintaining the infrastructure for the e-content right now is rather high due to the immaturity of the space. I think it’s many times more expensive than it will be relative to the cost of publishing dead-tree versions.

In other words, dead-tree publishing is currently as cheap as it’ll ever be, and e-publishing is currently as expensive as it’ll ever be. And right now e-publishing is currently a bit higher.

Within a short time (perhaps a year or so) I expect this to equalize, and then within another 1-3 years I expect e-publishing to be far more economical.

So, as a short answer: the solution is currently an early-adopter solution, as it does cost more due to being a new model. But as things mature e-books will become far cheaper than dead-tree versions.

What do you guys think?

Credit ratings matter a lot to people, but only if they’re good. As we continue to shed jobs at a rate of half a million a month, and those with previously decent credit no longer have an income, people will simply stop paying their non-essential bills.

They’ll hold on for a month or three, but after they feel enough damage has been done to their credit rating that it no longer matters, they’ll stop paying all their credit card bills and focus any funds they have to the essentials–rent, food, gas.

However bad it is for banks right now, it’s going to get a lot worse. I imagine it’ll be in full force by around June. ::