Completely Left out All the Fingles

I have been reading economics articles, and noticing how much "wealth" gets invoked. Investment-advice columns talk endlessly about investing your wealth, and wealth-accumulation strategies, and the average wealth of the average American family.

And the thing is, the average American family does not actually have any wealth. There was a recent survey that reported about half of Americans would have a hard time coming up with a thousand dollars on a week's notice (which is more notice than you actually get of the car or the furnace breaking down).

It's all surprisingly reminiscent of women's supermarket magazines, with their endless articles on "beauty" and beauty tips and beauty regimens and beauty products.

In both cases, we're facing a huge tide of propaganda, attempting to convince us that we have what we don't have---or rather, that we can have it if we buy their products.

When I was growing up, we kids liked ramen noodles. But Mom wouldn't let us eat them plain -- she said they weren't nutritious enough. So the way we were allowed to eat them was:

Ramen Noodles with Green Peas, Cheese, and Yogurt

1) Take one package of ramen noodles. Remove the flavor-packet. Put a (small) pot of water on to boil.
2) Chop up one to two ounces of cheese. I prefer cheddar or colby.
3) When the water boils, drop the ramen noodles in. Turn down heat a bit so it won't boil over. Poke the noodles a bit with a fork so they'll all get wet.
4) Get out frozen peas.
5) At the three-minute mark, pour some peas (maybe a quarter-cup? as many as you'd like) into the boiling noodles and water.
6) Immediately drain off all the water.
7) Put pot with noodles and peas back on the stove. Stir to release steam. Immediately dump in the flavor-packet. Also dump in the chopped cheese. Stir cheese in so it starts to melt.
8) Promptly (before the cheese finishes melting) get out the yogurt and dump a couple big spoonfuls into the pot. The idea here is to use unflavored, unsweetened, nonfat yogurt: it adds protein without adding fat. And fruit flavoring just would not go at all.
9) Stir thoroughly.

This produces warm-but-not-hot noodles with some vegetable content, some protein content, and a mellower and less overwhelmingly salty flavor. It's very cheap, only takes fifteen minutes to make, and only uses one pot.

It tastes exactly the same after it's cooled. This may not sound like a selling point, but it meant this was my default food for carrying along with me: safe for several hours without refrigeration, and just as appetizing as when it was new.

Today was a presidential primary. In my state, you can vote in any one party's primary.

I think the Republican candidates are all equally awful, just in slightly different ways. I don't care which of them gets nominated.
I'm not much happier about Obama, but he's running unopposed. Which means he'll be the Democratic candidate no matter what.

A primary election in which your least-disliked candidate is unopposed is the perfect example of a time when your vote will make no difference in the course of government.

So I thought a little about the possibilities, and then I got a Democratic ballot, and wrote in Glass & Steagall.

Happy Birthday, Oursin!

I read this book called Catastrophe in the Making about New Orleans and Hurricane Katrina. It took the long view, tracing New Orleans' history from its start as a very small settlement where piracy was an important part of the local economy to the modern day.

One of the things the author pointed out was that, of the several canals in and around New Orleans, only the first two were built with local money. They were small, short canals that made local shipping more efficient, and local business-owners found it worthwhile to build them.

Every canal after that was a product of the Growth Machine.

The Growth Machine is the author's term for when a group of business-owners and local government officials band together and announce they're going to "boost Smalltown" and "help Smalltown grow" and so forth. They petition the state and national government for grants for large construction projects---it may be a canal, or a highway, or a dam, or 'urban renewal'. They claim it will produce wonderful economic development, new businesses, trade, agriculture, the sky's the limit!

But it doesn't. The real point of these projects is to bring in outside money for the construction. The construction-company owner and his buddy the mayor pass out the grant money to their supporters, thereby entrenching their own power more firmly. The construction does happen, but it never generates any new economic activity. The local economy "grows" by exactly the amount of grant money coming in, for exactly as long as the grant runs, and then it goes back to its old size. The town didn't have the skills and opportunity to make productive use of the construction, or the construction was never capable of being useful. No canal on earth could have turned New Orleans the river town into the seaport it wanted to be, and the river that the grant applications described as narrow, shallow, choked with snags, and plagued by fogs was still deeper and wider than any canal they could have built. The canals built with federal grant money were mostly obsolete before they were finished, or obsolete soon after, but from their boosters' perspective, that wasn't a problem; it had never really been about shipping, only about getting the money. Which was why they had patiently lobbied, for decades, over the Army Corps of Engineers' strong objections, for federal funding: they certainly weren't going to fund useless canals themselves. Just like the pirates of old, they were bringing in outside resources rather than producing anything.

A few days after I read this I watched some early episodes of Leverage that I'd missed the first time around. In the first episode, Sophie pretends to represent the Nigerian government, looking for a contractor to build a fleet of small planes. The airplane-company guy points out that Nigeria has very few airports, with very bad runways, could they really use new planes? And Sophie says that that isn't the point, now is it? The planes will be paid for with foreign aid, so don't worry your pretty little head about it.

And I thought, this is the Growth Machine. Foreign grant money coming in, and someone will get the contract in exchange for supporting the politicians in power, and all the sub-contractors will get their own shares to hand out in exchange for support, and probably there will be bribes at every step. And it won't matter to the lobbyists if the planes are never used.

It's useful to have a term for a phenomenon that comes up so often. Makes it easier to distinguish the Growth Machine from real development.

I was thinking about college education. My career path has been stumbling and undirected, and I think part of where I went wrong was in absorbing all those messages about 'study hard and do well in school, and you'll have a successful and well-paid career'. Along with those were the messages about 'Oh, you're smart? That's wonderful! It will be a huge advantage all through life, because smarts are rare and valuable. You will be successful at whatever you want to do!'

The thing is, smarts aren't that rare. Lots of people have enough intelligence to do smart-people things like accounting or programming. It doesn't look like that many because lots of people don't get the help and opportunity to develop their intellectual potential. And that is because smarts are a low-valued resource. We don't bother developing people's intellectual capacity because we have plenty of thinkers. The powers that be want lots of minions. Think of the job ads: secretary, medical billing and coding, driver, waiter. They don't need any more systems designers or inventors.

A majority of delinquent [home] loans (and loans in foreclosure) are prime loans.

Subprime mortgages are made at extra-high interest rates to borrowers who have bad credit. The worst loans made during the bubble were to people with good credit (meaning they were 'prime' borrowers) but nowhere near enough income to make the payments on bubble-inflated prices. Now that the teaser interest rates are expiring, they can't make payments and their loans are headed for foreclosure.

Today, in honor of Ada Lovelace, world's first computer programmer, I have a book to recommend. It is Druid's Blood, by Esther Friesner, and it may be hard to find; I've only ever seen one copy of it.

It's a mystery novel, but set in an alternate universe where magic works. Queen Victoria rules England by right of her druidic heritage, and Sherlock Holmes applies logical analysis to magical crimes. I highly recommend it.

When I read the Sherlock Holmes canon as a child, Holmes struck me as a man for whom sexuality was almost never an active element of his life: he lived a life of the mind, and practically never met anyone who could meet him on that level. Even his best friend trailed loyally after him going, "Wait, what?" There was a serious lack of anyone he could really fully engage with.

So I was charmed by a minor plot element of Druid's Blood, in which Sherlock Holmes meets Ada Lovelace and is mildly smitten with her. Of course she was the perfect candidate: a woman of his time who was as logically analytical as he was.

If you thought Avatar had some good material but didn't do much with it, you might like these stories better.

1) Code of the Lifemaker, by James P. Hogan: a quite different take on encountering another civilization with Stuff We Want, and choosing sides. Includes a proposal to use the aliens as avatars with which to explore the new world, but rejects it.

2) A much more thoroughly grounded take on nature rising up to repel invasion: Pennterra, by Judith Moffat. I think of this as Quakers in Space. It's very neat, quite reflective, has no violence, but ( cut for sexual squickiness )

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3) Islandia, by Austin Tappan Wright. Our hero journeys to a little-known civilization, decideds to stay and assimilate, but without falling for the Exotic Foreign Women plot-device. If you like long narrative description and world-building, this is for you.

4) Fire in a Faraway Place, by Robert Frezza. Mercenaries sent by a corporation to put down a freedom movement on a corporation-owned planet. The mercenaries took a good look at the situation and switched sides. This is a very grim story about fighting a war of resistance against an opponent who comes from far away but has a lot more total resources.

This isn't about health care. This is a bailout.

The bill as it seems likely to pass forces individuals to pay lots of money to insurance companies. People who don't pay money to insurance companies will be fined. If that still doesn't produce enough money to satisfy the insurance companies, the government will pay extra money directly to the insurance companies.

The financial industry (banks and investment brokers), the real-estate industry, and the insurance industry, are all so closely intertwined that economists treat them as one sector of the economy. In this current economic crash, we've already seen bailouts for the banking industry and the real-estate industry. This is the third part, bailing out the insurance industry.

Health care is just an excuse. You can tell because anything that might have improved actual health care has been systematically stripped out of the bill: no guaranteed publicly funded care, no publicly-run insurance, no option to just pay a doctor directly, no anything that wouldn't allow private insurance companies to rake off tons of money.