The Government vs Private Industry

Socialized medicine etc. Now here is a tale. I sent a Certified Return receipt letter from my town to the adjoining town. About three miles away. The destination was on the largest highway in the town. Can't miss it. I also sent it by UPS, a private company. UPS got it there in twelve hours with a return receipt.

The USPS did the following with the very same package:

August 29, 2018, 4:22 pm

Unable to deliver item, problem with address

EAST HANOVER, NJ 07936

USPS was unable to deliver your item as of 4:22 pm on August 29, 2018 in EAST HANOVER, NJ 07936. The address may be incorrect, incomplete, or illegible.

August 29, 2018, 6:46 am

Arrived at Unit

EAST HANOVER, NJ 07936

August 27, 2018, 8:31 am

Out for Delivery

EAST HANOVER, NJ 07936

August 27, 2018, 8:21 am

Sorting Complete

EAST HANOVER, NJ 07936

August 26, 2018

In Transit to Next Facility

August 25, 2018, 3:45 pm

Departed USPS Regional Facility

KEARNY NJ DISTRIBUTION CENTER

August 24, 2018, 7:15 pm

Arrived at USPS Regional Facility

KEARNY NJ DISTRIBUTION CENTER

August 24, 2018, 6:04 pm

Departed Post Office

FLORHAM PARK, NJ 07932

August 24, 2018, 10:49 am

USPS in possession of item

FLORHAM PARK, NJ 07932

Yes, same address, but the USPS spent almost a week shuttling the typed address of a well known entity on a major highway to no where. That is our Government. And you want these folks to manage your medical care. The could not find your appendix and would throw you out on the street! What would Benjamin Franklin think! This is our Government workers folks!

Medicare for All?

This seems to be more of a slogan than any well thought out plan, I am reminded of Thomas Paine and his social programs in the Rights of Man. At least Paine thought through the cost and where the money would come from. The current batch of promoters seem oblivious to both.

Back in 2008 I wrote a piece on Medicare and noted that almost a third of the participants get less than what they paid into the plan. But alas that is the basis of any insurance plan. One should be happy no to have to collect. But the existing Medicare plan makes one contribute from the start of your working life to your last breath, namely you still pay 3.5% of everything you make or even on capital gains. Also you pay a monthly amount which can exceed $6,000 per annum per person. Then you pay for another plan to cover the 20% that Medicare does not pay for and then you pay for the drug plan! So we have typically 50 years paid in before penny one comes out and a continuing payment until you are dead!

But the kicker is that Medicare "negotiates" what they will pay for a service. Thus a physician with massive overhead mandated by the Government gets roughly 28% to at best 40% of the actual costs of service. That works because the others not on Medicare are subsidizing the physician, a little bit.

Now assume we allow everyone on Medicare, the millennials and their ilk. Where does the money come from. There is no fifty year upfront commitment. Also a 65 year olds may live 12 to 16 more years. The millennials may go on forever living with mom and dad. So do we have an equity issue, a social justice issue, just to ring the bell of today's socialists.

Then if all patients pay only 40% of the costs, who picks up the rest? This is less than a half baked scheme. It is a method for achieving financial collapse!

Where is Ockham when we need him?

In 1328 William of Ockham escaped Avignon just ahead of the Papal executioners. Off he went to Munich where he managed in the next twenty years to disassemble the legitimacy of the Papacy. His Work of Ninety Days is a classic exposing the limits upon the Papacy and this work has survives some seven hundred years without any significant change.

Now in the Telegraph it is noted :

“Behind these attacks there are dark forces,” said Tommaso Valentinetti, 66, an Italian archbishop. The pope’s enemies were “throwing mud” to try to discredit him, he said. The allegations against Pope Francis were first aired in the middle of his trip to Ireland, where he apologised for the Church’s decades of complicity and cover-up in the sexual abuse of children by Catholic clergy. Archbishop Vigano claims that he told Pope Francis of the allegations about Cardinal McCarrick, whom he described as “a serial predator”, back in 2013.He said that rather than punish McCarrick, the Argentinian pontiff had lifted sanctions imposed on him by his predecessor, Pope Benedict XVI.

Overall the issue is clear.  The Church faces a serious set of problems and it appears that the solution is not simple. The Counciliar Movement may likely be the best option out. Yet a re-examination of the Papacy and its powers needs to be redone as Ockham had done seven hundred years ago. Yet we do not seem to have an Ockham at hand.

Google et al

Google uses algorithms to determine what to present to a user who does a search. That is well known. Now what those algorithms are is the "secret sauce". But one suspects that the algorithms are written to maximize revenue. Thus if I seek a hotel, the listing will often present those which have purchased ad space on Goggle. What else would one expect. If your hotel has not done so your hotel may appear at the bottom of the list if at all. Profit drives the algorithm.

Now politically one would be nuts to seek Google as a presenter of opinions. I use Feedly and I select a few dozen sources from left to right to several languages. Frankly I like Le Monde, the French are very intellectual and compared to the NY Times they are head and shoulders above them. Thus if one seeks to understand world views then one must seek out the primary sources, and don't waste your time on Google.

If it is scientific, I use Semantic Scholar, a fantastic source. But the last thing I would ever use if Facebook or Twitter. One would be better off listening to conversations on the A train. But they no longer occur even there. All the passengers are on smart phones, and most likely sending text messages or commenting on Facebook.

The NY subways are now spotless, no left over newspapers, no one buys them any longer. I have not seen a single person with a news paper, or a book for that matter! Again they are in the echo chamber of their smart phone.

Most likely the worst device ever created is the smart phone. The NY Subway system wants you to use this to pay your fare. Imagine a $1,000 device held by every passenger trying to get through a toll station at rush hour. One might ask what moron thought that one up? Most likely someone who went from 34th Street to Times Square at rush hour. But I digress.

So does the President have a point? Perhaps, but he is a Twitter user.

The Collapse of Things?

The NY Times has an interesting piece on those who commute from Staten Island to Manhattan. They note:

The X17 was an express bus linking Staten Island to Midtown Manhattan. It made 85 stops, 66 of them before even leaving Staten Island. Total distance? Nearly 40 miles. Total drive time? The schedule said two hours and 33 minutes, but closer to three hours was often more like it. “When people’s eyebrows go up, we tell them you could fly to Florida in less time,” said ..., a bus dispatcher. “And you certainly can.”The X17’s leisurely path across Staten Island underscored the inefficient and outdated bus network that crisscrosses New York City, the largest municipal bus system in the nation.

Now in 1962 and 1963 I took a summer course at Manhattan College in the Bronx, at 242nd Street, the end of the Broadway line. I worked at Midland Beach, which was served by the Bay Street Bus. I would take the bus to the Ferry, the Ferry to lower Manhattan and then the subway from South Ferry to 242nd Street. It was about 2 and a half hours, and then repeat it home but then I had to walk a mile from the bus drop off to my house. Then up at 5:30 to get to the Beach by 8:00. 

Staten Island is officially part of New York City, and was when I was born there, Laguardia had signed my birth certificate if I recall.

But Staten Island may just as well be in Kansas. It has narrow streets, heavy traffic, limited train service, and the Express Bus is a misnomer. I tried that when I returned to New York in the early 80s, the buses would break down several times a week. 

There is no reasonable way to get from Staten Island to Manhattan. The toll on the Verazanno is approaching $100 if you are off State Island!

But can this be fixed? The answer is yes, but it is an infrastructure answer. If New York and New Jersey cannot get a tunnel for the near collapsing old one, then how will they solve this problem. The solution is simple, more ferries, at multiple locations. But that means investment and no politician wants to tackle that issue. The example of how this works is Hong Kong. 

Back in the early 1960s Staten Island had a west shore train that went to Hoboken, then a rapid transfer to uptown or down town. I believe it was 1961 that the bridge connecting Staten Island to New Jersey was left open, the train with hundreds went to the water killing most people. They the closed the train line down. The tracks are still there, and that could be an option. 

Otherwise, why not just give Staten Island back to New Jersey who had it originally! But this case is another example of why Government seems unable to do anything.

What Happened to the Old Telephone Company?

The story about Verizon Wireless closing down data access to the California Firefighters as noted in Ars Technica is an example of what happens when a monopoly is no longer considered a monopoly. It also seems in my opinion to be the result of a management team who seem not to be American, mostly Europeans, and have no idea as to the long telecom culture of pitching in during tragedies. Instead they seem to be driven by wringing out ever nickel.

As the article notes:

This is not the first time we have had this issue. In December of 2017 while deployed to the Prado Mobilization Center supporting a series of large wildfires we had the same device with the same sim card also throttled. I was able to work through Eric Prosser at the time to have service to the device restored and Eric communicated that Verizon had properly re-categorized the device as truly "unlimited". In the email below Verizon is stating that they can restore the device for an extra $2/month. I obviously lack the authority to make such an approval. If we could get Verizon [to get] that approval I would appreciate it.

In the old days when I was there we immediately turned to in any tragedy, adding capacity and even sending personnel and equipment. It appears that the new management seem to think they can totally disregard their customers even in times of need.

If this happens to firefighters in California just imagine what the plain old customer has to deal with. There unfortunately is no remedy available. It is a Pity, there was once a culture of support, now the culture is one of draining the last ounce of blood!

A 100,000 feet View?

A just released study on global alcohol usage and morbidity and mortality has just been released by Lancet. The general conclusion seems to be:

Alcohol use is a leading risk factor for global disease burden and causes substantial health loss. We found that the risk of all-cause mortality, and of cancers specifically, rises with increasing levels of consumption, and the level of consumption that minimises health loss is zero. These results suggest that alcohol control policies might need to be revised worldwide, refocusing on efforts to lower overall population-level consumption.

Namely the world should stop drinking. This is a global study and it uses a multiplicity of previous studies and it even acknowledges its own deficiencies. Namely:

First, the available studies have assessed the risk of alcohol use by relying on external meta-analyses, which do not control for confounding in the selection of the reference category within constituent studies. This approach is problematic because of the so-called sick quitter hypothesis, which emphasises the importance of reference category selection in correctly assessing risk among drinkers, along with other confounding study characteristics such as survival bias...Second, previous studies have used sales data to estimate population-level alcohol stock. Researchers have noted the benefit of using sales data instead of survey data for quantifying alcohol stock available within a location.However, sales data still have bias because of consumption by tourists and unrecorded consumption from illicit sales, home brewing, and local beverages  ...Third, previous studies have assumed zero as the counterfactual exposure level that minimises harm. Within a comparative risk assessment approach, a counterfactual level of consumption that minimises harm is required to estimate population attributable fractions.

In many ways this study has in my opinion weaknesses. Namely the simple one of co-morbidity issues. For example in many countries drinking and smoking are typically done together. Thus how does one separate the two effects. Second, as with all such studies the mechanism for the putative disease is missing. As we better understand cancers we better understand causes. Hypermethylation, oxidative stress, etc are but a few. What is alcohol? Then there is the issue that alcohol in the US is not alcohol in third world countries. The list goes on.

Although this is of interest, its generally over-broad presentation delimits its applicability in my opinion. 

Trees and Brains

Now I like trees, really do. But trees are the main cause for power failures. The fall on the power lines, the lines break and then no power! Simple. So what does one do? Cut the tree.

Now NJ Transit, not to mention JCP&L et al seem not to have understood this fact of nature. Thus from today:

M&E Line train service has resumed Summit and Dover and subject to 90 minute delays in both directions following a downed tree in the overhead wires near Summit...

Namely we have another NJ Transit failure!

From the NY Times today we have:

New Jersey’s new governor, Philip D. Murphy, a Democrat, has promised the state’s commuters that train service would improve after years of decline. What he did not warn them was that it would get so much worse before it got better. Seven months after Mr. Murphy took office, many regular riders of New Jersey Transit, the state-run network of trains and buses, have become increasingly irate over a rash of train cancellations this summer that has made the nation’s second busiest commuter rail system even less reliable. “It’s really just a crapshoot on whether the train’s going to run on time,” said ....., who has been riding New Jersey Transit from Princeton Junction to Pennsylvania Station in Manhattan for more than two years. “The past few months has really just been awful.”

 Frankly what would one expect from a person from Goldman Sachs who most likely had never been on NJ Transit! Just a guess mind you. The Governor seems to know how to spend our money on such things as promoting the Press that supports him but not in getting the people whose taxes support him to work! 

Infrastructure of the type as electricity, water, sewer, transport, roads and the like was a major focus on the Socialists a century ago. They felt they were better run by the Government. Look how that has worked out. Now the Socialists want Healthcare and Education, and you should wonder how that will work out.

Yield Curve July 2018

The yield curve is flattening. It may invert. Has not done that in decades. It is worth watching. Remember 80% of US Debt is at these now higher short term rates. Remember also that in an inverted environment the world really looks different.

Hold on to your hats!

An Externality of Obesity

Externalities, those economic factors which a student is introduced to and spends most of their undergraduate days trying to understand. So try this one on.

The Telegraph reports:

But according to new reports emerging from Santorini, this scenery is now coming at a high cost in animal cruelty, with the price being paid by the island's donkey population. The practice of selling donkey rides to visitors is attracting growing criticism from animal welfare groups, who argue that the creatures are being forced to carry excessive numbers of increasingly overweight tourists from the UK, the USA and Russia. Coming in for particular fire is the busy route up the cliffs of the west coast - from the harbour at sea level to the capital Fira, which sits some 400 metres (1,312 feet) above the water, on the ridge.

Yes, those obese tourists from the US, UK and now Russia. Where are the Germans may I ask?

My experience over the years has shown that American style foods and worse American style servings are the cause. They first infiltrated the UK. I saw this about twenty years ago. The Pret a Manger sandwich shops went from small French style servings to Manhattan style colossal sandwiches. Then the Brits added fries and beer! Tie that on at lunch and then try to do anything for the rest of the day.

The poor donkeys.