I Miss Lever Voting Machines

They just felt so much more like flushing than filling in little toilet bowl ovals next to candidate's names. I dunno, something counter-intuitive about the whole thing.

On the eve of the election I can only offer you some sage advice about this year's most important issue; How to Detect Bullshit (By Scott Berkun)

The first rule of BS is to expect it. Fire detectors are designed to expect a fire at any moment: they’re not optimists. They fixate on the possibility of fires and that’s why they save lives. If you want to detect BS you have to swallow some cynicism, and add some internal doubt to everything you hear. Socrates, the father of western wisdom, based his philosophy around the recognition, and expectation, of ignorance. It’s far more dangerous to assume people know what they’re talking about, than it is to assume they don’t and let them prove you wrong. Be like Socrates: assume people are unaware of their own ignorance (including yourself) and politely, warmly, probe to sort out the difference.

And from the Onion;
Poll: Bullshit Is Most Important Issue For 2008 Voters

The Suburban Implosion and Rat Poisoning

I got tired of complaining about Bush years ago. He and Rove and Cheney never fooled me for a second and I wrote with a fair degree of accuracy about what they were doing when they did it. It required no crystal ball or psychic powers, I had lived through Nixon and Kissinger before and anyone who says they didn't know what this gang was up to wasn't paying attention.

Some of the nearest and dearest people in my life are hardcore conservatives and fine people by any measure. The scorched earth of the Bush administration is unrepresentative of a one of them.

Tonight we learn that rat poison imported through Chinese grain and food additives are responsible for the deaths of pets who've been eating it. And furthermore that same stuff may be in human foods. The race to the global supply-chain bottom looks like this. To save money we sacrifice our pets and health. I'm guessing the stock market approves. I suspect Tom Friedman is revising his flat-earth theory yet again.

But the rat poison isn't working because every night on the news the rats hold their press conferences and remind us that they're still in charge and that they will not be held accountable. The race to the bottom we are told is more important than the race into space that resulted in our lunar landings. Our priorities are different.

Alan Greenspan described the enemy the other day, "Allowing more skilled workers into the country would bring down the salaries of top earners in the United States, easing tensions over the mounting wage gap, Greenspan said.

"Our skilled wages are higher than anywhere in the world," he said. "If we open up a significant window for skilled workers, that would suppress the skilled-wage level and end the concentration of income."

Income inequality has risen in the past three decades."

Yes, you read that right. American middle-class workers are the problem and America must economically subjugate them (myself included) as a national priority. In many ways the rat poison imported from China is for us not our pets.

I spent the last few years watching Greenspan's vision play out in my own life. As a computer scientist I am as often unemployed as employed. I am forced to interview with foreigners who I can barely understand and who ooze the same arrogant contempt for us that Greenspan poisons us with. I am a whipping post in this rotten global game and the poison of the Bush administration is working. The free-market American middle-class is dying.

Yesterday The New York Times reported Foreclosures Force Suburbs to Fight Blight by Erik Eckholm.

“It’s a tragedy and it’s just beginning,” Mayor Judith H. Rawson of Shaker Heights, a mostly affluent suburb, said of the evictions and vacancies, a problem fueled by a rapid increase in high-interest, subprime loans.

“All those shaky loans are out there, and the foreclosures are coming,” Ms. Rawson said. “Managing the damage to our communities will take years.”

Cuyahoga County, including Cleveland and 58 suburbs, has one of the country’s highest foreclosure rates, and officials say the worst is yet to come. In 1995, the county had 2,500 foreclosures; last year there were 15,000. Officials blame the weak economy and housing market and a rash of subprime loans for the high numbers, and the unusual prevalence of vacant houses.

Damage to communities? What are these observers thinking? This isn't damage. This is Greenspan's idea of global social engineering.

We are told to sell our communities the kool-aid that promotes the idea that we need mathematicians and scientists while the government prepares us a hearty helping of imported gluton. We can choose to sit back and let their poison work or we can fight back and say enough.

The rats are at our doors.

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The Bullshit Human Capital Story (BHC)

In an opinion piece at TPMCafe called "IT'S WHO YOU KNOW, STUPID" by Max Sawicky, a recent Paul Krugman argument is analyzed.

This fallacy is that income or wage inequality results from an increasing "skill" differential. It's your own damn fault you don't make more money. You should have spent more time drilling calculus and less in all-night games of hearts followed by excursions to Dunkin Donuts. If you're worried about outsourcing, you're a weenie; real men are not afraid to compete in the new world economy.

I would label it the Bullshit Human Capital story (BHC). BHC was big in the Clinton Administration and lives on in the Gospels of Sperling (a.k.a. Gene Gene, Neo-Liberal Machine). The Clintons attributed the suffering we must endure from free trade to lack of investment in training and education, and they had the courage to actually devote several teaspoons of resources to look like they were fixing that problem.

In an important departure, Krugman says it's about Power. It's not that more education is not always better than less; of course it is, and more public support for education and training should be welcome. But BHC does not strike at the root of the problem, nor its solution. It's about who makes the rules of the game, including the labor market game. We are not living under meritocracy. Merit is substantially compromised by privilege.

Privilege derives from wealth, race, and gender. It biases decisions in college admissions, employment, housing, political appointments, and credit allocation. It reduces economic efficiency and growth because a biased decision entails waste of real resources.

The resulting elite is what PK calls an oligarchy.

On a related note, Average family income drops 2.3% by Sue Kirchhoff, USA TODAY

From 2001 to 2004, average family income fell 2.3%, to an inflation-adjusted $70,700 from $72,400 in the 1998-2001 period. By contrast, from 1998 to 2001, average income jumped 17.3%. Median income — the midpoint of the income range — rose 1.6% to $43,200.

Fed economists said the figures were "strongly influenced" by a more-than-6% drop in median real wages during the period. Also, investment income was less than in the stock market boom years of the late 1990s. (Related: Full report)

Real net worth — the difference between family assets and liabilities — rose only slightly from 2001 to 2004. Median net worth rose only 1.5% to $93,100 during the period, vs. a 10.3% gain from 1998 to 2001. And liabilities rose faster than assets, due largely to a big rise in mortgage debt.

As we discuss next year's budget, Certified salaries will jump approximately 4.0% as will benefits.

In the free market world people all over CT are losing their jobs, taking massive pay cuts and both losing and paying larger deductables for their benefit packages.

Just something to think about.